Page:Viscount Hardinge and the Advance of the British Dominions into the Punjab.djvu/26

22 explain his motives for this action, he simply replies that 'the only motive in moving the Division was to attack the enemy and defeat that enemy. I would add this to the reasons subsequently given, that I thought the battle desperate, and that nothing but an offensive flank movement could retrieve it.'  With regard to the decisive movement of the day, he states: — 'The instant Cole's Division was in movement, and his left brigade approached the right of Houghton, I went to Abercrombie's brigade and authorized him to deploy and move past Houghton's left. While Houghton's brigade held the hill, Myers and Abercrombie passed the flanks on the right and left, and made a simultaneous attack on the enemy, who began to waver and then went off to the rear. Myers and Abercrombie, in my opinion, decided the fate of the day.'

Sir B. D'Urban, the Quarter-Master-General of the Portuguese army, published in the same year an account of the battle of Albuera, in which he maintains that Colonel Hardinge had simply anticipated Beresford's order. But there is no evidence that any such order was contemplated by Beresford, who, in his official account of the battle, merely records the fact that Cole's Division advanced at this particular crisis.

I have inserted the above extracts from Hardinge's MS. notes, because they show that he alone was responsible for Cole's advance, and that Napier was justified in attributing to him the credit of being the sole originator of the movement. I believe I am correct in stating that the advance of these