Orthez

The battle of Orthez is the last (chronologically) battle of the Peninsular War that we’re going to visit. The very last battle was at Toulouse, but we’re not going there, because the city has grown so much that there’s nothing left to see, and anyway we don’t want to go into another big city.

Orthez is out of the foothills and in lovely slightly hilly countryside, very well wooded. It was more interesting than we thought, as it turns out to be a centre of Protestantism, and the home of Jeanne D’Albret, mother of Henri IV,  Henri of Navarre, he of “Paris is worth a mass.”

Jeanne d'Albret's house

We crossed the Gave de Pau. Wellington kept pushing Soult back, crossing rivers quickly, so that Soult was never quite ready, and his flank was turned. He wasn’t helped by Napoleon taking troops to defend the east of France. (Wellington had to wait to invade France until he was sure that Prussia and Austria were not going to make peace, and release all the French Armies to descend on him.) In addition, some of Soult’s  German troops defected after hearing of Napoleon’s defeat at Leipzig.

The bridges over the rivers were usually destroyed, but the British crossed on pontoon bridges, or more often, by fording them. This was much quicker, and speed was of the essence, but a very dangerous procedure, and many men were drowned. The strongest men would form a line across, just upstream of the crossing point, because if a man carrying a sixty pound pack fell over on the rocky, uneven bottom, in the swirling waters, he would never be able to get back up.

The Gave de Pau - you can see the rocky banks, but not the whirlpools.

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After the river, it got hard to make out the main points of the battle. It’s really heavily wooded, so it’s hard to make out the features. It might not have been so wooded in 1814, and the battle was in February so at least the trees were bare. Wellington had 2000 more men than Soult, and Soult had almost twice the number of casualties – more than 4,000 men.

We did find the village of St Boes, but it was completely destroyed during the battle, so it’s not even in quite the same place. We also found the Roman Camp, which turned out not to be a Roman camp at all,

The "Roman Camp"

but an Iron Age fort. We were hopeful that we might get a better view from it, but the grass was up to my shoulders!

But we did find the monument to the French dead, and one to Foy, in the place where he was injured by shrapnel (as invented by Major Shrapnel of the Royal Artillery.) According to the monument he was a hero citizen, and this was the fourteenth time he had been wounded.

A bit of a lie - by this time, they were definitely dying for Napoleon only.

The Foy monument.

Wellington received his third slight wound towards the end of the battle. A bullet drove his sword hilt into his hip. He managed to stay on his horse, though he was still limping a week later.  As Wellington was never far from the thick of the battle it’s surprising he was never seriously wounded or killed. Even he said that he thought “the finger of God was upon him.”

The drive back to St Jean Pieds de Ports was lovely. The sun had come out and we could appreciate the rolling foothills, with massive peaks in the distance, all as green as can be, and decorated with wild roses, honeysuckle, elderflower and yarrow. It is very beautiful here.