Lord Wellington’s situation had not during the whole war been so critical as at this time. He had two blockades to maintain, and two points to cover, sixty miles distant from each other, in a mountainous country, where the heights were so impassable that there could be no lateral communication between his divisions. His force was necessarily divided in order that none of the passes might be left undefended, but the enemy could choose their point of attack, and bring their main force to bear upon it; thus they would have the advantage of numbers; and they had the farther advantage, that a considerable proportion of their troops, all who had belonged to the army of the north, had been accustomed to mountain warfare, in which the British and Portugueze had had no experience.
♦SOULT’S MOVEMENTS FOR THE RELIEF OF PAMPLONA.♦
Soult’s first object was to relieve Pamplona, which could only be relieved by some such great effort as he intended; whereas S. Sebastian’s, as long as the garrison could maintain themselves there, had always the possibility of receiving supplies along the coast. With this view he collected a convoy of provisions and stores at St. Jean de Pied-de-Port. Meantime the hostile forces, though each within their own frontier, were encamped in some places upon opposite heights, within half cannon-shot; and their sentries within 150 yards of each other. Hitherto with the Spaniards and Portugueze it had been, in the ever-memorable phrase of Palafox, war at the knife’s edge; but that national contest, in which the aggressors had treated courtesy and humanity with as much contempt as justice, was at an end; it was a military contest now, and the two armies offered no molestation to each other in the intervals of the game of war. The French, gay and alert as usual, were drumming and trumpeting all day long; the more thoughtful English enjoying the season and the country, looking down with delight upon the sea and the enemy’s territory, and Bayonne in the distance, and sketching in the leisure which their duties might allow the beautiful scenery of the Pyrenees. The right of the allied army was at Roncesvalles, the sacred ground of romance, where in the seventeenth century a spot was shown as still reddened with the blood of the Paladins; and where Our Lady, under some one of her thousand and one appellations, may perhaps still continue to work miracles in the chapel wherein they were interred. From that pass, and from the pass of Maya, the roads converge on Pamplona; and Soult made his arrangements for attacking both on the same day in force, ... for doing which he had the great advantage that Lord Wellington was at the opposite extremity of the line, near S. Sebastian’s.