But it was too late for Marshal Soult to correct the inveterate habits of men who, during all their campaigns in the Peninsula, had been supported by a predatory system; and though most of the people, and especially the villagers, forsook their houses at the approach of the allies, yet, when proclamations were issued in French and in Basque (which is the language of these parts), assuring them that their persons and property should be respected, and when they understood that British discipline would afford them a security which it was in vain to hope for amid their own armies, they returned. The French authorities endeavoured in vain to dissuade them; the general wish was expressed so strongly, that at length no farther impediment was opposed to it than that of forbidding them to carry back anything with them. Above 3000 persons came back to St. Jean de Luz and the neighbouring places before the end of November, and as many more passed through the line of the allied outposts, in one day early in December, on their return; ... among them were several young men, escaping in women’s clothes from the conscription. The weather had prevented Lord Wellington from passing the Nive, as he intended to have done, immediately after having forced the French position, and the army in consequence occupied only the confined space on the left of that river; while the enemy profited by all the resources of the country on its right, and had a free communication between Bayonne and St. Jean de Pied-de-Port. They occupied an intrenched camp in front of Bayonne, about twelve miles from S. Jean de Luz, and this position they had been fortifying with provident care from the time of their defeat at Vittoria. Bayonne ♦BAYONNE.♦ obtained its present name in the twelfth century, till when it was called Lapurdum, as when the cohort of Novempopulania had its head-quarters there. This ancient city, which during three centuries belonged to our Plantagenet kings, is memorable in military history for the invention of the bayonet, a weapon that in its name indicates the place of its origin, and that, in British hands, has proved more destructive than any other to the nation by which it was invented. In the war of the French revolution this city would not have been tenable against a single division of an enemy’s army: the war of the intrusion made it immediately a place of great importance, as a depôt for the French; and therefore it was well fortified, to secure it against a sudden attack from the English, before the possibility of any more serious danger had been contemplated. It stands at the junction of the Nive with the Adour; the latter a great river, and the former not fordable for several miles up: the city is on the left of the Adour, the citadel on the other side. The position which Marshal Soult occupied was under the fire of the fortress; the right resting on the Adour, and covered in front by a morass, formed by a rivulet which falls into that river.