During this battle on the mountain-top, the British brigades of the sixth division strengthened by a battery of guns, gained ground in the valley of Lanz and arrived on the same front with the left of the victorious troops about the chapel. Lord Wellington then seeing the momentary disorder of the enemy ordered Madden’s Portuguese brigade, which had never ceased its fire against the right flank of the French column, to assail the village of Sauroren in the rear, but the state of the action in other parts and the exhaustion of the troops soon induced him to countermand this movement. Meanwhile Reille’s brigades, connecting their right with the left of Clauzel’s third division, had environed the Spanish hill, ascended it unchecked, and at the moment when the fourth division was so hardly pressed made the regiment of El Pravia give way on the left of the fortieth. A Portuguese battalion rushing forward covered the flank of that invincible regiment, which waited in stern silence until the French set their feet upon the broad summit; but when their glittering arms appeared over the brow of the mountain the charging cry was heard, the crowded mass was broken to pieces and a tempest of bullets followed its flight. Four times this assault was renewed, and the French officers were seen to pull up their tired men by the belts, so fierce and resolute they were to win. It was however the labour of Sysiphus. The vehement shout and shock of the British soldier always prevailed, and at last, with thinned ranks, tired limbs, hearts fainting, and hopeless from repeated failures, they were so abashed that three British companies sufficed to bear down a whole brigade. While the battle was thus being fought on the height the French cavalry beyond the Guy river, passed a rivulet, and with a fire of carbines forced the tenth hussars to yield some rocky ground on Picton’s right, but the eighteenth hussars having better firearms than the tenth renewed the combat, killed two officers, and finally drove the French over the rivulet again. Such were the leading events of this sanguinary struggle, which lord Wellington fresh from the fight with homely emphasis called “_bludgeon work_.” Two generals and eighteen hundred men had been killed or wounded on the French side, following their official reports, a number far below the estimate made at the time by the allies whose loss amounted to two thousand six hundred. These discrepancies between hostile calculations ever occur, and there is little wisdom in disputing where proof is unattainable; but the numbers actually engaged were, of French, twenty-five thousand, of the allies twelve thousand, and if the strength of the latter’s position did not save them from the greater loss their stedfast courage is to be the more admired. The 29th the armies rested in position without firing a shot, but the wandering divisions on both sides were now entering the line.