There, in the pine woods on the opposite side, is the Boucault, where
our besieging army lay. Across the reach below stretched Sir John
Hope's famous bridge; and as you leave Bayonne by rail, you run
beneath the English cemetery, where lie the soldiers (officers of the
Coldstream Guards among them) who fell in the Frenchman's last
struggle to defend his native land.
But enough of this. I should not have recalled to mind one of these
battles, had they not, one and all, been as glorious for the French
and their great captain--wearied with long marches, disheartened by
the apathy of their own countrymen, and, as they went on, overpowered
by mere numbers--as they were for our veterans, and Wellington
himself.
And now, once through Bayonne, we are in the Pignadas and the Landes.
To form a conception of these famous Landes, it is only necessary to
run down by the South-Western Railway, through the moors of Woking or
Ascot; spread them out flat, and multiply them to seeming infinity.
The same sea of brown heather, broken only by the same dark pignadas,
or fir plantations, extends for nigh a hundred miles; and when the
traveller northward has lost sight, first of the Spanish mountains,
and then of the Pyrenean snows, he seems to be rushing along a brown
ocean, without wave or shore.
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