ourselves out of Spain!" Yet even this undertaking was not observed. Ferdinand was interned in France.
The stretch of country from Bayonne to the frontier is full of interest to the Englishman as the scene of the contest between Wellington and Soult, after the former had driven the French over the frontier and out of Spain.
The autumn of 1813 had been passed by the greater part of the allied army of English, Portuguese, and Spaniards under canvas on the cold and cloudy summits of the Western Pyrenees. They endured great privations. Their picket and night duties were incessant and harassing; the weather, moreover, was stormy. The tedium of these camps, and the sufferings from frost and sleet, exhausted the patience and shook the constancy of the soldiers of weakest fibre.
But the fall of Pampeluna released the army on the Pyrenees from its inactivity. It was known that Marshal Soult had prepared a defensive position on the Nivelle stretching from ten to twelve miles from the sea at S. Jean de Luz to the Petite Rhune before the village of Sare.
Soon after midnight, on the morning of 10 November, the columns of the allies under Wellington wound down the passes of the mountains in silence, lighted by the moon. At earliest dawn the attack was made on the lines of the enemy, and by sunset, in a succession of brilliant charges, the allies had broken the line. Soult had been out-manœuvred and outfought on his own long-prepared ground, and beaten at every point. The French, numbering seventy thousand men, had been placed in carefully selected positions. Strongly entrenched, they knew the roads, and were fighting to protect their native land from invasion; yet they suffered themselves to be dislodged from every point assailed with a lack of spirit that surprised the allies.
