"At length the freshening western blast Aside the shroud of battle cast; And first the ridge of mingled spears Above the brightening cloud appears; And in the smoke the pennons flew, As in the storm the white sea-mew. Then marked they, dashing broad and far, The broken billows of the war, And plumed crests of chieftains brave Floating like foam upon the wave, But nought distinct they see." --SCOTT. The brilliant and heroic combats on the Nive belong to the later stages of the Pyrenean campaign; and here, as on the Bidassoa, Soult had all the advantages of position. He had a fortified camp and a great fortress as his base; excellent roads linked the whole of his positions together; he held the interior lines, and could reach any point in the zone of operations in less time than his great opponent. Wellington, on the other hand, had almost every possible disadvantage. The weather was bitter; incessant rains fell; he had to operate on both sides of a dangerous river; the roads were mere ribbons of tenacious clay, in which the infantry sank to mid-leg, the guns to their axles, the cavalry sometimes to their saddle-girths. Moreover, Wellington's Spanish troops had the sufferings and outrages of a dozen campaigns to avenge, and when they found themselves on French soil the temptations to plunder and murder were irresistible. Wellington would not maintain war by plunder, and, as he found he could not restrain his Spaniards, he despatched the whole body, 25,000 strong, back to Spain. It was a great deed. It violated all military canons, for by it Wellington divided his army in the presence of the enemy. It involved, too, a rare sacrifice of personal ambition. "If I had 20,000 Spaniards, paid and fed," he wrote to Lord Bathurst, "I should have Bayonne. If I had 40,000 I do not know where I should stop. Now I have both the 20,000 and the 40,000, . . . but if they plunder they will ruin all." Wellington was great enough to sacrifice both military rules and personal ambition to humanity. He was wise enough, too, to know that a policy which outrages humanity in the long-run means disaster. Wellington's supreme advantage lay in the fighting quality of his troops. The campaigns of six years had made them an army of veterans. "Danger," says Napier, "was their sport," and victory, it might also be added, was their habit. They fought with a confidence and fierceness which, added to the cool and stubborn courage native to the British character, made the battalions which broke over the French frontier under Wellington perhaps the most formidable fighting force known in the history of war. To quote Napier once more: "What Alexander's Macedonians were at Arbela, Hannibal's Africans at Cannae, Caesar's Romans at Pharsalia, Napoleon's Guards at Austerlitz, such were Wellington's British soldiers at this period."