_Combats of Echallar and Ivantelly._—The light division held the road running from the bridge of Yanzi to Echallar until relieved by the fourth division, and then marched by Lesaca to Santa Barbara, thus turning Clauzel’s right. The fourth division marched from Yanzi upon Echallar to attack his front, and the seventh moved from Sumbilla against his left; but Barnes’s brigade, contrary to lord Wellington’s intention, arrived unsupported before the fourth and light divisions were either seen or felt, and without awaiting the arrival of more troops assailed Clauzel’s strong position. The fire became vehement, but neither the steepness of the mountain nor the overshadowing multitude of the enemy clustering above in support of their skirmishers could arrest the assailants, and then was seen the astonishing spectacle of fifteen hundred men driving, by sheer valour and force of arms, six thousand good troops from a position, so rugged that there would have been little to boast of if the numbers had been reversed and the defence made good. It is true that the fourth division arrived towards the end of the action, that the French had fulfilled their mission as a rear-guard, that they were worn with fatigue and ill-provided with ammunition, having exhausted all their reserve stores during the retreat, but the real cause of their inferiority belongs to the highest part of war. The British soldiers, their natural fierceness stimulated by the remarkable personal daring of their general, Barnes, were excited by the pride of success; and the French divisions were those which had failed in the attack on the 28th, which had been utterly defeated on the 30th, and which had suffered so severely the day before about Sumbilla. Such then is the preponderance of moral power. The men who had assailed the terrible rocks above Sauroren, with a force and energy that all the valour of the hardiest British veterans scarcely sufficed to repel, were now, only five days afterwards, although posted so strongly, unable to sustain the shock of one-fourth of their own numbers. And at this very time eighty British soldiers, the comrades and equals of those who achieved this wonderful exploit, having wandered to plunder surrendered to some French peasants, who lord Wellington truly observed, “_they would under other circumstances have eat up!_” What gross ignorance of human nature then do those writers display who assert, that the employing of brute force is the highest qualification of a general!