Sir William had the reputation of being the bravest man in the army. He could be very testy upon occasion, but no one had ever seen him moved from his calm upon the battlefield. ‘Damn the old ruffian!’ said one shaken officer, wiping the sweat from his brow. ‘A shell fell right between us when I was speaking to him just now, frightening me out of my wits! Would you believe it, all the old fire-eater said was, “A shell, sir! Very animating!”’ Harry’s brigade remained at Gée for several days. He had taken a large house for Barnard, Digby, himself, and Juana, and they all thought themselves on clover, until the housekeeper, finding Juana alone one day, suddenly seized her with the grip of a mad-woman, and swore she would put her to death for being an accursed Spaniard. Juana, for all her wiriness, was helpless in the woman’s grasp, and, seeing a hideously sharp carving-knife brandished before her eyes, nearly swooned with terror. Fortunately,-Joe Kitchen walked in at that moment, with a message from Harry, and promptly closed with the madwoman. She soon grew quiet, and a few inquiries elicited the information that such fits were only temporary. But Juana was not in the least comforted by this news, and would never afterwards stay in the house without Jenny Bates to protect her. Jenny, hearing of the adventure, folded her massive arms, and, looking the Frenchwoman up and down, delivered herself of one scathing monosyllable. ‘Ho!’ said Jenny awfully.

After the combat of Aire, the army halted again for twelve days, while his lordship rested his troops, and observed the progress of Beresford and Dalhousie at Bordeaux. Jean-Baptiste Lynch had been as good as his word, and the English, marching into the town without the least opposition, had found the White Banner flying in place of the Tricolour.’ ‘A bas les aigles! Vivent les Bourbons.’ shouted the populace, waving little white flags. That was all very well, but his lordship was anything but pleased when the Duc d’Angouleme, collecting a few noted Royalists, abruptly left his headquarters, and appeared in Bordeaux, announcing that he had the support of the Allies. He actually had the effrontery to write to Wellington, desiring him to instruct Marshal Beresford to place himself at his Royal orders. All he got by that was one of his lordship’s coldest letters. His lordship sent for Beresford to rejoin the army with the 4th division, and left only Dalhousie, with the 7th, to keep a watch over Bordeaux.

When the army moved again, there was a good deal of skirmishing, but the Light division was not engaged until Soult, drawing Wellington ever southwards, reached Tarbes at the foot of the Pyrenees. Here the division experienced what many of its officers considered to be its hardest day’s fighting. All three Rifle battalions were engaged in a bitter, up-hill struggle, and the loss of life was very heavy. No less than twelve officers were killed and wounded, and great was the distress of his many friends when it was discovered that George Simmons was one of the casualties. Poor George was wounded in the knee-pan, and had only been saved from having another shot put into him by his servant’s standing over him until Colonel Barnard himself rode up, and had him carried off the field. So George had to be left behind at Tarbes, suffering a great deal of pain from his fractured knee, while the army pursued Soult on his retreat to Toulouse. Those of his friends who could spare the time visited him before they left the town. They found him invincibly cheerful, and apparently deriving much consolation from the fact that a part of his brother’s regiment was being left to guard the wounded. Maud had been appointed Town-Major, and had found George a good billet. He was sharing it with him, drinking George’s allowance of wine as well as his own, and enjoying himself very much. He did not think that George would see any more fighting, but George, subjecting his own knee to a keen examination, said that he felt sure he would soon be well enough to rejoin his regiment. He was delighted to hear how Barnard, on the day after the battle, had persuaded Lord Wellington to ride over the hill and see the ground the Rifles had fought over. No one, Barnard swore, could ever have seen the dead lie more thickly. Lord Wellington went with him in the end, saying: ‘Well, Barnard, to please you I will go, but I require no new proof of the destructive fire of your Rifles.’ ‘Oh, did he say that?’ exclaimed George, rather faintly, but with a beaming smile of gratification. ‘Why, that makes everything worth while!’

5

If the truth were told, Lord Wellington was by no means satisfied with the result of the action at Tarbes. Having driven Soult from every position during the three days of the Allied advance, with the intention of forcing him back against the barrier of the Pyrenees, it was exasperating to find that one road of retreat had been left open. Soult, keeping his army intact, escaped by the St Gaudens road, which, running along the line of the Pyrenees for some fifty miles, took a northward turn towards Toulouse at St Martory. His lordship, deciding that it was of more importance to strike at Toulouse than to pursue Soult in force, detached Hill to follow him, and himself led the main body of his army to Toulouse by the direct road running through Trie, Castelnau, and Lombex. Weather conditions were appalling. The whole of the surrounding countryside was waterlogged, and the road was worse than a Spanish mule-track. The artillery stuck fast in mud; the wagons foundered in deep pits and ruts; even his lordship’s barouche, with General Alava in it, had to be man-hauled out of clinging slime. The army’s progress was slow, partly owing to the state of the roads, partly owing to his lordship’s mistrust of the French population. This was soon discovered to be unfounded. Although Morillo’s Spaniards left a trail of rapine in their wake, the Allied army was welcomed with open arms. Every kind of foodstuff was offered for sale, from bales of corn to cackling geese. The army, in spite of having outdistanced its supplies, had never fared so well. It behaved well, too: there was really very little unpleasantness, although at Castelnau a vociferous female loudly and insistently demanded vengeance on a handsome young Rifleman, who, she said, had seduced her daughter. No evidence was forthcoming, and it was generally felt that fat Johnny Castles had summed the matter up very justly when he remarked, slicing a hunk of bacon on to his bread, that if the mother had never been in the oven, she would not have looked for her daughter there.

But this was an isolated incident, the behaviour of the French people as a whole being so enthusiastic that an indignant sous-prefet wrote to inform Marshal Soult that the whole population had ceased to have any national spirit.

Soult, leaving five thousand stragglers along the route of his march, reached Toulouse two days ahead of Lord Wellington: a remarkable feat, considering the deplorable condition of his troops, and the fifty extra miles he was forced to cover. The country people reported that the French soldiers had worn out their boots, but as Toulouse was the main depot of military stores for southern France, this, and every other deficiency of equipment, could very soon be made good.

Toulouse, a medieval fortress, lay, from Lord Wellington’s point of view, on the wrong side of the Garonne; and was protected, in addition to its bastioned walls, by a very wide ditch, like a moat. On the northern and eastern sides, the Royal Canal made any approach next door to impossible; on the west the Garonne presented an even more difficult problem; and the only feasible way into the city, to the south, was guarded by the well-fortified bridgehead of St Cyprien. Between the canal, and the Ers river, on the east, the commanding heights of Mont Rave dominated the city, and had already been extensively entrenched. The heads of Lord Wellington’s columns appeared before Toulouse on the 26th March, and for the next fortnight his lordship’s temper was worn thin by a series of unsuccessful attempts to get his army across the Garonne. The fact that a certain measure of this unsuccess was due to his own refusal, at St Jean de Luz, to listen to the advice of his senior Engineer, did nothing to improve his temper.

His first plan, rather a risky one, was to force a passage at Portet, south of the city. He succeeded, by some clever demonstrations, in convincing Soult that he meant to cross downstream, north of Toulouse, but when the Marshal had obligingly drawn off four of the seven cavalry regiments patrolling the Garonne to watch the banks to the north, leaving the southern reaches almost wholly unguarded, the plan failed owing to there not being sufficient pontoons to span the swollen river. After they had been laboriously laid down on the bank, and launched, it was found that the bridge fell short by as much as eighty yards: a contingency long foreseen by Elphinstone, the Engineer. In a black rage, his lordship, clinging to his plan of crossing south of the city, had the pontoons moved three miles upstream, just above the junction of the Ariege with the Garonne. The bridge was thrown over during the night of the 30th March, at Pinsaguel; and in the morning Hill’s corps crossed without encountering any opposition.

Soult, busy strengthening his fortifications, did not discover the move for a whole day; but Hill, finding the ground sodden with rain, and the Ariege impassable, was forced to abandon his position, and to countermarch on Pinsaguel.


Up came the pontoons again, back on to their travelling-carriages. ‘Lummy, who’d be an Engineer?’ said the rest of the army.

By the and April, his lordship had made up his mind that he must cross, after all, below Toulouse. By the 4th April, the cursing Engineers had succeeded in transporting the pontoons to a point eleven miles to the north of the city, and there, at last, they threw a bridge over the river by which the army could pass. There was still no opposition from Soult; and by the afternoon, Beresford was across with three divisions of infantry, three brigades of cavalry, and some artillery.