About eight o’clock the enemy’s columns began to pass the fords covered by the fire of their artillery, but the first shells thrown fell into the midst of their own ranks and the British troops on Santa Barbara cheered the French battery with a derisive shout. Their march was however sure, and a battalion of chosen light troops, without knapsacks, quickly commenced the battle on the left bank of the river, with the Portuguese brigade, and by their extreme activity and rapid fire forced the latter to retire up the slopes of the mountain. General Inglis then reinforced the line of skirmishers and the whole of his brigade was soon afterwards engaged, but Clauzel menaced his left flank from the lower ford, and the French troops still forced their way upwards in front without a check, until the whole mass disappeared fighting amidst the asperities of the Pena de la Haya. Inglis lost two hundred and seventy men and twenty-two officers, but he finally halted on a ridge commanding the intersection of the roads leading from Vera and Lesaca to Irun and Oyarzun. That is to say somewhat below the foundry of Antonio, where the fourth division, having now recovered its Portuguese brigade, was, in conjunction with Longa’s Spaniards, so placed as to support and protect equally the left of Inglis and the right of Freyre on San Marcial. These operations, from the great height and asperity of the mountain, occupied many hours, and it was past two o’clock before even the head of Clauzel’s columns reached this point. Meanwhile as the French troops left in front of Santa Barbara made no movement, and lord Wellington had before directed the light division to aid general Inglis, a wing of the forty-third and three companies of the riflemen from general Kempt’s brigade, with three weak Spanish battalions drawn from O’Donnel’s Andalusians at Echallar, crossed the Bidassoa by the Lesaca bridge, and marched towards some lower slopes on the right of Inglis where they covered another knot of minor communications coming from Lesaca and Vera. They were followed by the remainder of Kempt’s brigade which occupied Lesaca itself, and thus the chain of connection and defence between Santa Barbara and the positions of the fourth division on the Pena de la Haya was completed. [Sidenote: Clauzel’s Official Report, MSS.]