D’Armagnac’s men pushed forwards at once in several columns, and forced the picquet back with great loss upon the light companies, who sustained his vehement assault with infinite difficulty. The alarm guns were now heard from the Maya pass, and general Pringle hastened to the front, but his regiments moving hurriedly from different camps were necessarily brought into action one after the other. The thirty-fourth came up first at a running pace, yet by companies not in mass and breathless from the length and ruggedness of the ascent; the thirty-ninth and twenty-eighth followed, but not immediately nor together, and meanwhile D’Armagnac, closely supported by Abbé, with domineering numbers and valour combined, maugre the desperate fighting of the picquet of the light companies and of the thirty-fourth, had established his columns on the broad ridge of the position. [Sidenote: Appendix, No. 3.] Colonel Cameron then sent the fiftieth from the left to the assistance of the overmatched troops, and that fierce and formidable old regiment charging the head of an advancing column drove it clear out of the pass of Lessessa in the centre. Yet the French were so many that, checked at one point, they assembled with increased force at another; nor could general Pringle restore the battle with the thirty-ninth and twenty-eighth regiments, which, cut off from the others were though fighting desperately forced back to a second and lower ridge crossing the main road to Elizondo. They were followed by D’Armagnac, but Abbé continued to press the fiftieth and thirty-fourth whose natural line of retreat was towards the Atchiola road on the left, because the position trended backward from Aretesque towards that point, and because Cameron’s brigade was there. And that officer, still holding the pass of Maya with the left wings of the seventy-first and ninety-second regiments, brought their right wings and the Portuguese guns into action and thus maintained the fight; but so dreadful was the slaughter, especially of the ninety-second, that it is said the advancing enemy was actually stopped by the heaped mass of dead and dying; and then the left wing of that noble regiment coming down from the higher ground smote wounded friends and exulting foes alike, as mingled together they stood or crawled before its fire.