It is idle to attempt the tale of this wild mountain fighting. Soult at last fell back, and Wellington followed, swift and vehement, on his track, and moved Alten's column to intercept the French retreat. The story of Alten's march is a marvellous record of soldierly endurance. His men pressed on with speed for nineteen consecutive hours, and covered forty miles of mountain tracks, wilder than the Otway Ranges, or the paths of the Australian Alps between Bright and Omeo. The weather was close; many men fell and died, convulsed and frothing at the mouth. Still, their officers leading, the regiment kept up its quick step, till, as evening fell, the head of the column reached the edge of the precipice overlooking the bridge across which, in all the confusion of a hurried retreat, the French troops were crowding. "We overlooked the enemy," says Cook in his "Memoirs," "at stone's-throw. The river separated us; but the French were wedged in a narrow road, with inaccessible rocks on one side, and the river on the other." Who can describe the scene that followed! Some of the French fired vertically up at the British; others ran; others shouted for quarter; some pointed with eager gestures to the wounded, whom they carried on branches of trees, as if entreating the British not to fire. In nine days of continual marching, ten desperate actions had been fought, at what cost of life can hardly be reckoned. Napier, after roughly calculating the losses, says: "Let this suffice. It is not needful to sound the stream of blood in all its horrid depths." But the fighting sowed the wild passes of the Pyrenees thick with the graves of brave men. Soult actually fought his way to within sight of the walls of Pampeluna, and its beleaguered garrison waved frantic welcomes to his columns as, from the flanks of the overshadowing hills, they looked down on the city. Then broken as by the stroke of a thunderbolt, and driven like wild birds caught in a tempest, the French poured back through the passes to French soil again. "I never saw such fighting," was Wellington's comment on the struggle.