The troops to the right of the French were not quite so quick or so fortunate, and about 100 of the British--riflemen and men of the 43rd--were intercepted. The French never doubted that they would surrender, for they were but a handful of men cut off by a whole column. An ensign of the 43rd named Campbell, a lad not eighteen years of age, was in the front files of the British when the call to surrender was heard. With a shout the boy-ensign leaped at the French column. Where an officer leads, British soldiers will always follow, and the men followed him with a courage as high as his own. With a rush the column was rent, and though fifty of the British were killed or taken, fifty, including the gallant boy who led them, escaped. The fighting at other points was of the sharpest, and was strangely entangled and confused. It was a fight of infantry against infantry, and the whole field of the combat was interlaced by almost impassable hedges. At one point, so strangely broken was the ground, and so obscured the fight with smoke and mist, that a French regiment passed unseen betwixt the British and Portuguese, and was rapidly filing into line on the rear of the 9th, fiercely occupied at that moment against a strong force in front. Cameron, its colonel, left fifty men of his regiment to answer the fire in his front, faced about, and went at a run against the French regiment, which by this time had commenced volley-firing. Cameron's men fell fast--eighty men and officers, in fact, dropped in little more than five minutes--but the rush of the 9th was irresistible. The Frenchmen wavered, broke, and swept, a disorganised mass, past the flank of the Royals, actually carrying off one of its officers in the rush, and disappeared. The sternest and most bewildering fighting took place round a building known as the "mayor's house," surrounded by a coppice-wood. Coppice and outbuildings were filled with men of all regiments and all nations, swearing, shooting, and charging with the bayonet. The 84th was caught in a hollow road by the French, who lined the banks above, and lost its colonel and a great proportion of its rank and file. Gronow tells an amusing incident of the fight at this stage. An isolated British battalion stationed near the mayor's house was suddenly surrounded by a flood of French. The French general galloped up to the British officer in command and demanded his sword. "Upon this," says Gronow, "without the least hesitation the British officer shouted out, 'This fellow wants us to surrender! Charge! my boys, and show them what stuff we are made of.'" The men answered with a shout, sudden, scornful, and stern, and went with a run at the French. "In a few minutes," adds Gronow, "they had taken prisoners or killed the whole of the infantry regiment opposed to them!"