JOURNAL OF THE MOVEMENTS OF THE BRITISH LEGION.
THE object of these rough not is to defend the British Auxi- liaries from the charges brought against them by Tories at home, and by gentlemen who—according to a Iroad hint of General EVANS, in an address to the officers of a regiment whose men were caught plundering—having, probably, " come out to spend a year or two agreeably in the capacity of military tourists," were dismissed for incompetency, or resigned to avoid dismissal. The line t f defence adopted by the advocate, is to give a plain unvar- nished narrative of the movements and behaviour of the army, from the day he joined at San Sebastian until the time he tempo. rarily quitted it at the same place, after having endured the winter and the typhus at Vittoria. The case made out by our author amounts to this. Except in a few instances of plunder on a march, always promptly punished, the auxiliaries have conducted themselves with a discipline worthy of regular troops. They have borne the necessary hardships of war with cheerfulness, and the unnecessary privations and sickness which the bad faith or ill-disposition of their allies caused,with patient submission. When- ever the soldiers have bad the opportunity, they have displayed a steadiness and bravery in action worthy of veteran troops; the " Isle of Dogians"—the shirtless and the shoeless—being particularly distinguished. Their commander, when free to act independently, has always been successful,—as well in his late successful attack upon the lines at St. Sebastian, as in his counter- march from Bilboa to Vittoria, by which he avoided the superior Carlist forces posted in their passes to intercept his raw troops, and effected a junction with CORDOVA. The causes why the Legion has accomplished so little, are more easily told than remedied. The Queen s troops are too few to carry on a war of occupation and active pursuit. Her commander is, at least, incompetent, and more anxious to maintain his post by intrigues at Madrid than by acting against the enemy. If there be not treachery in the army, there is plenty of it in the places where its divisions are quartered ; so that the Carlists are always acquainted with the forces and movements of the Christinos, and have every facility forlampering with the troops; whilst, either from supineness, stupidity, family influence, or some other causes, this correspondence is nut sufficiently sought after, nor always punished when detected. But the main cause of all is in the backward state of the people. They cannot combine for a com- mon purpse. It is much as it was in the French war of inva- sion : " No one leader, military or political, could act in concert with another; no one would sacrifice one iota of his consequence, his authority., or his opinion, to the most obvious demands of the common cause ; neither generals nor soldiers could observe the simplest rules of the military art."* And if ever the Carlists are strong enough to abandon their mountain guerilla warfare, and descend into the plains, they will doubtless exhibit similar incom- petency. Our author suggests, on plausible but purely military reasons, a war of devastation. But this was tried at the outset, and found—so it was asserted—only to increase the partisans of CARLOS by the indignation it caused. We suspect, too, that at present the force of the Christinos is insufficient for the purpose.
In a literary point of view, the subjects which our Officer pre- sents to the reader are deficient either in importance or breadth. His account of military operations is limited to detached affairs, except in the two cases already mentioned; and his personal nar- rative is chiefly confined to rather bald descriptions of places, the manner in which the Auxiliaries were received by the inhabitants of the towns where they were billeted, and the kind of quarters they procured. The book, however, is real and readable. It pre- sents some good sketches of Spanish scenery, some pictures of Spanish manners and character, and some glimpses of a soldier's life upon the march, divested alike of the glitter of home service and the excitement of battle. The following is an example of winter-quarters at Brivieska, on the road to Vittoria.
The Plaza was covered with a deep snow; mountains in the far distance
and the tops of the houses were clothed in te same cheerless garb ; and when I //looked around my wretched room, and beheld nothing but a brick floor, without carpet of any description, the naked square of its walls unbroken by a fire- place, I confess I shuddered at the prospect that awaited me. Had it been the close of December, one would not have cared so much, as each succeeding day would have brought with it the certainty of a proximate and enlivening spring. But the 13th of November only, and in Spain, to find one's self regularly embedded in snow, and half congealed with cold, with the probability of something worse was more than the anticipation had been pre- pared for. From the melancholy contemplation of my apartment I turned my gaze again upon the Plaza, and had already begun to derive some shadow of comfort and hope from the snug appearance of our soldiers as they issued forth to parade in their warm greatcoats, apparently regardless of the weather, when
that trifling consolation was taken from me by the picture presented by the natives themselves.
Shrinking, trembling, with chattering teeth, and in a half torpid state, these latter moved through the Plaza to their several avocations, either in their shops or in the market-place, with an air of inertness that gave to the scene around an aspect even more dreary than it was. Nay, what heightened the misery still more, were the very cloaks in which all—inhabitants and peasants without ex- ception—were inducted, to preserve them from the effects of that coldold, tattered, threadbare, and mostly resembling in colour the "sere and yellow leaf," • London and Westminster Review, which tells, in language not to be misunderstood, of the unpromising advent of blear• eyed winter : these were drawn around the faces of the drooping crowd in a manner to conceal every thing but the eyes ; while, as an additional pro- tection, across their mouths and noses were tied handkerchiefs remarkable for any thing but their purity of colour ; the very sight of these was sufficient to petrify one.
With such a prospect before me, it is not likely that I should fail to look with some degree of despair upon my return to my miserable billet at night, after performing the duties required of me during the day. Nor was that apprehen- sion ill founded. After finishing a sad apology fur a dinner, I am now warming both my toes and my nose over a brazier°, which I have managed to procure, yet in which there arc infinitely more ashes than coals. The window of my room is hermetically closed, to keep out as much of the cold air as possible; and
horse.cloth is placed under my chair to receive my heel% the toes resting upon the brazieto; my servant's regimental greatcoat is on my back ; and yet, de'pite all this luxury, all this comfort, I can scarcely hold the pencil that traces my
note. We are allowed wood, it is true; but, alas! where are the chimniu in which to consume it'?
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