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three battalions 632 out of Division of Ruffin, which had

2000,

The figures are enough to chasten our latter-day complaisance. When we remember some of our South African reverses and retreats, we may think it almost miraculous, as Mr Oman says, that a smaller force should hold its own and repel its assailants with onethird of its number killed or wounded. Albuera itself was scarcely a more amazing exhibition of stubborn endurance than Talavera; and at Talavera Wellesley's men were not the veterans of many campaigns, like some of those who filled the French cadres, but for the most part young soldiers and drafts from the militia who had never seen active service till they moved out from Coimbra some three months earlier. To the majority of these troops Talavera was their first battle, as for too many it was their last.

It was the combat on the right and centre and the hardbought success of the British and German infantry which decided the day. With the failure of the main attack Victor gave up the attempt to storm the keystone hill, the Cerro de Medellin. He tried, however, to turn it by an advance along the narrow valley which separated it from the higher ridge of the Sierra. Wellesley had expected the movement, and had guarded his left flank by posting there most of his own and Albuquerque's cavalry, and Bassecourt's Spanish infantry. The Marshal sent up the valley the brave but much battered

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already been twice badly beaten at this part of the field. It says much for the spirit of these French regiments that they could be got to advance at all after two such disastrous experiences within a few hours. Anson's and Fane's brigades of dragoons were sent against them. It was the only opportunity given to the English cavalry at Talavera, and they were not able to make much use of it. As the dragoons charged down upon the French infantry, which had formed square to receive them, they came unexpectedly upon deep ditch or ravine concealed by the long grass. obstacle threw them into confusion; whole squadrons tumbled headlong into the trap, and men and horses were crushed by the rear rank falling upon them; some of the troops managed to scramble up the farther bank; others reined back just in time and halted under the full fire of the French musketry. The cavalry attack had clearly failed; but Arentschildt, who commanded a German light horse regiment, and Seymour, of the 23rd Light Dragoons, contrived to rally their men, and very imprudently led them on against the enemy. Germans were repulsed, and rode back up the valley. The 23rd lost heavily in charging a French square, and then found themselves encompassed by a much larger force of hostile cavalry sent up in support of the infantry, and two of the four squadrons were annihil

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ated. The regiment had lost over two hundred sabres out of four hundred and fifty.

It was an unfortunate episode; but it made no difference to the result of the battle, which was practically decided by the great French repulse at the centre. The attack on the left flank was not pressed, and Ruffin's Division was withdrawn. There were some hours of daylight left, and in spite of the losses of the French they were still far superior in numbers to the British. But King Joseph had no unbeaten troops except his cavalry and his reserve of 5000; there was the whole of Cuesta's army intact on his left flank; and news had just been received that the dilatory Venegas was at last moving upon Madrid. So the order was given to retire, and the last rays of the westering sun showed the English that their enemy was in leisurely retreat over the hills.

The retiring host was not molested by its adversaries. Wellesley's depleted and hunger-stricken army, wearied by a terrible day, was in no condition to pursue; and the Spaniards, though the few detachments of them who had been engaged had behaved well enough, could not be trusted to manœuvre or advance into the open. If they had been able to strike in upon the French left flank after the great repulse of Sebastiani and Laval, or even later in the afternoon, they might have converted the retreat into a rout. As it was the French returned in good order, and with all their train and artillery, except the 17

captured guns of Laval's Division, to their former position behind the Alberche. Four days later Wellesley's whole army was in full march down the Tagus towards the Portuguese frontier. For by this time the General knew that Soult and Ney, having reorganised their armies and extricated themselves from the northern mountains, were sweeping in upon his flank with 50,000 men. If he had waited longer he would have had this great force behind him with his Talavera opponents in front, and he could hardly have escaped destruction.

Besides, his army was starving, and if he did not speedily take it into a region where food was to be had, it would perish even without the aid of French bullets and bayonets.

Considering the numbers actually engaged, Talavera was a very sanguinary battle. On the two days, the 27th and the 28th of July, the British had 5365 men killed, wounded, and missing, out of less than 20,000 on the field. The French losses were higher, though the percentage to their force was less. The total was 7268, out of an army of 46,000 men. Cuesta claimed to have lost 1200 men ; but if so, most of these must have been "missing" in the stampede of the evening of the 27th, for the portion of the Spanish army that was under fire was too small for any large number of casualties to have been sustained.

Such was the Battle of Talavera a victory which gave no strategic advantage to the one

combatant and inflicted no

material damage upon damage upon the other. The victors lost almost as heavily as the vanquished, and the latter within a few days were again in possession of the field of battle. It has often been contended by French and Spanish writers, as it was by Wellington's hostile critics in England, that nothing whatever was achieved by the Talavera campaign; since in the end it left the relative positions of the French and English unaltered, so that the British commander might as well have remained quietly in Portugal for all the good that was done by the march and counter - march that cost so much in human life and suffering. But this is wisdom after the event. Wellesley could not know beforehand that the two Spanish armies with which he was to co-operate would be useless to him, and one of them worse than useless. If the 70,000 troops of Cuesta and Venegas had been led with reasonable competence, and if they had been of any real fighting value in the field, the enterprise might have had a very different issue. Even as it was, if Cuesta had joined with Wellesley in attacking Victor on July 22 or 23, before that Marshal had been reinforced, or if Venegas had obeyed orders and kept Sebastiani occupied, one French army corps might have been annihilated and the other compelled to leave Madrid undefended. Nor perhaps could Wellesley be expected to assume that the army of Soult, which he had seen disappearing

before him in utter demoralisation in May, would be able to advance into Central Spain in July.

Yet the battle of Talavera was not fought in vain. If its actual and immediate result was small, its moral effect was prodigious: and in war, in the conflict of races and peoples, the moral effect is everything. Talavera did what neither Vimiera nor Corunna had accomplished. It broke the tradition of French victory; it showed that the Napoleonic military system was not invincible; it proved that there was at least one army in Europe against which which the legions that fought under the eagles could not contend on equal terms. For three hours 30,000 of the best infantry of France had striven fruitlessly to force 16,000 British from their position and had been hurled back in confusion. Talavera was the beginning of the end. It was the first step in the sequence of events which terminated in the ruin of the great conqueror and the destruction of the tremendous military engine he had framed for the enslavement of Europe. And it revealed on a conspicuous stage the talent of a leader of the foremost rank who was destined to baffle Napoleon's ablest lieutenants and to strike the final blow in the discomfiture of the Emperor himself. Talavera was the forerunner of Waterloo; and as an exhibition of the sheer fighting quality of British soldiers it was not less glorious.

SIDNEY LOW.

A MAN'S MAN.

BY IAN HAY, AUTHOR OF 'THE RIGHT STUFF.'

CHAPTER TEN.-THE END OF AN ODYSSEY.

HUGHIE reckoned that they might have to steam eastwards for quite three or four days before they sighted land.

This was an underestimate. The history of the Orinoco's last voyage will never be written. In the first place, those who took part in it were none of them men who were addicted to the composition of traveller's tales; and in the second, their recollections of the course of events, when all was over, were hopelessly and rather mercifully blurred. Not that they minded. One derives no pleasure or profit from reconstructing a nightmare especially when it has lasted for sixteen days and nights.

Some events, of course, were focussed more sharply in their memories than others. There was that eternity of thirty-six hours during which the Orinoco, with every vulnerable orifice sealed up or battened down, her asthmatic engines pulsing just vigorously enough to keep her head before the wind, rode out a north-easterly gale which blew her many miles out of her reckoning. ("Not that that matters much," said her philosophic commander. "We don't know where we are now, it's true; but then we didn't know where we were before, so what's the odds? We'll keep on steering

away about north-east, and as we are aiming at a target eight hundred miles wide we ought to hit it somewhere.") Then there was a palpitating night when the faithful engines, having wheezily but unceasingly performed their allotted task for a period long enough to lull all who depended upon them into an optimistic frame of mind, broke down utterly and absolutely; and the fires had to be banked and the Orinoco allowed to wallow unrestrainedly in the trough of the sea while the entire ship's company, with cracking muscles and heart-breaking gasps, released a jammed cross-head from the guides and took down a cylinder to replace a split piston-ring.

They were evidently out of the ordinary sea-lanes, for they sighted only one steamer in ten days, and her they allowed to go by.

"None of us understand proper signalling," said Hughie, "so we can't attract her attention without doing something absurdly theatrical, like running up the ensign upside down; and I'm hanged if we'll do that-yet.

After all, we

only want to know where we are. We may be just off the coast of Ireland for all I can say, and it does seem feeble to bring a liner out of her course to ask her footling questions.

It would be like stopping the Flying Scotsman to get a light for one's pipe.”

"Or asking a policeman in Piccadilly Circus the nearest way to the Criterion Bar," added Allerton. "I'm with you all the way, captain."

And so these four mendicants allowed a potential Good Samaritan to pass by and sink behind the horizon. It was an action typical of their race: they had no particular objection to death, but they drew the line at being smiled at. Still, there were moments during the next ten days when they rather regretted their diffidence.

But events like these were mere excrescences in a plane of dead monotony. The day's work was made up of endless hours in a Gehenna-like stokehold, where with aching backs and bleeding hands they laboured to feed the insatiable fires, or crawled along tunnel-like bunkers in search of the gradually receding coal; spells at the wheel-sometimes lashed to it -in biting wind or blinding fog; the whole sustained on a diet of ship's biscuit, salt pork, and lukewarm coffee, tempered by brief but merciful intervals of the slumber of utter exhaustion.

Still, one can get used to anything: they even enjoyed themselves after a fashion. High endeavour counts for something, whether you have a wife and family dependent upon you, like Walsh, or can extract la joie de vivre out of an eighteen-hour day and a workhouse diet, like Hughie.

And they got to know each other, thoroughly-a privilege denied to most in these days of restless activity and multifarious acquaintance.

It was a lasting wonder to Hughie how Allerton could ever have fallen to his present estate; for he displayed an amount of energy, endurance, and initiative during this manhood-testing voyage that was amazing. He himself ascribed his virtue to want of opportunity to practise anything else, but this was obviously too modest an explanation. Perhaps blood always tells. At any rate, Allerton took unquestioned rank as second in command over the heads of two men whose technical knowledge and physical strength far exceeded his own. But in his hours of ease-few enough now he was as easy-going and flippant and casual as ever.

Walsh in a sense was the weakest of the quartet. He was a capable engineer and an honest man, but he lacked the devil-may-care nonchalance of the other three; for he had a wife and eight children waiting for him in distant Limehouse, and a fact like that gives a man a distaste for adventure. He was a disappointed man, too. He had held a chief engineer's "ticket " for seven years, but he had never held a chief engineer's billet. He could never afford to knock off work and wait until the right berth should come his way: he must always take the first that offered, for fear that the tale of boots and bread in Limehouse should

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