During this action two bridges were thrown, partly on trestles partly on boats, below the fords, and the head of Villatte’s reserve crossing ascended the ridge and renewed the fight more vigorously; one brigade even reached the chapel of San Marcial and the left of the Spanish line was shaken, but the eighty-fifth regiment belonging to lord Aylmer’s brigade advanced a little way to support it, and at that moment lord Wellington rode up with his staff. Then the Spaniards who cared so little for their own officers, with that noble instinct which never abandons the poor people of any country acknowledged real greatness without reference to nation, and shouting aloud dashed their adversaries down with so much violence that many were driven into the river, and some of the French pontoon boats coming to their succour were overloaded and sunk. It was several hours before the broken and confused masses could be rallied and the bridges, which had been broken up to let the boats save the drowning men, repaired. When this was effected, Soult who overlooked the action from the summit of the mountain Louis XIV., sent the remainder of Villatte’s reserve over the river, and calling up Foy’s division prepared a more formidable and better arranged attack; and he expected greater success, inasmuch as the operation from the side of Vera, of which it is time to treat, was now making considerable progress up the Pena de Haya on the allies’ right. _Combat of Vera._ General Clauzel had descended the Bayonette and Commissari mountains immediately after day-break, under cover of a thick fog, but at seven o’clock the weather cleared, and three divisions formed in heavy columns were seen, by the troops on Santa Barbara, making for the fords below Vera in the direction of two hamlets called the Salinas and the Bario de Lesaca. A fourth division and the guns remained stationary on the slopes of the mountain, and the artillery opened now and then upon the little town of Vera, from which the picquets of the light division were recalled with exception of one post in a fortified house commanding the bridge. [Sidenote: Soult’s Correspondence, MSS.] [Sidenote: Manuscript Memoir by general Inglis.]