Posting the third division on the right of Huarte he prolonged his line to the left with Morillo’s Spaniards, called upon O’Donnel to support him, and directed Cole to occupy some heights between Oricain and Arletta. But that general having with a surer eye observed a salient hill near Zabaldica, one mile in advance and commanding the road to Huarte, demanded and obtained permission to occupy it instead of the heights first appointed. Two Spanish regiments belonging to the blockading troops were still posted there, and towards them Cole directed his course. Soult had also marked this hill, a French detachment issuing from the mouth of the Val de Zubiri was in full career to seize it, and the hostile masses were rapidly approaching the summit on either side when the Spaniards, seeing the British so close, vindicated their own post by a sudden charge. This was for Soult the stroke of fate. His double columns just then emerging, exultant, from the narrow valley, were arrested at the sight of ten thousand men which under Cole crowned the summit of the mountain in opposition; and two miles further back stood Picton with a greater number, for O’Donnel had now taken post on Morillo’s left. To advance by the Huarte road was impossible, and to stand still was dangerous, because the French army contracted to a span in front was cleft in its whole length by the river Guy, and compressed on each side by the mountains which in that part narrowed the valley to a quarter of a mile. Soult however, like a great and ready commander, at once shot the head of Clauzel’s columns to his right across the mountain which separated the Val de Zubiri from the Val de Lanz, and at the same time threw one of Reille’s divisions of infantry and a body of cavalry across the mountains on his left, beyond the Guy river, as far as the village of Elcano, to menace the front and right flank of Picton’s position at Huarte. The other two divisions of infantry he established at the village of Zabaldica in the Val de Zubiri, close under Cole’s right, and meanwhile Clauzel seized the village of Sauroren close under that general’s left. [Sidenote: Notes by Lord Wellington, MSS.]