They were professional performers. One tune meant as much, and as little, to them as another.
They had not the faintest notion that they were playing a national air of their nation’s conquerors. The pained looks on their simian little faces and the sad havoc they wrought upon a noble melody were due solely to the fact that the tune was new to them, unlike anything they had ever before heard; and that they had had insufficient time to rehearse it.
But the effect was there.
At the first halting notes, a grin of wondering delight twisted the faces of the marching regiment. The episode appealed to their Yankee humor. The grin was reflected on the visages of the crowd of officers and civilians who filled the dais at the plaza’s northern end.
The onlooking Mexicans—from peon to hidalgo—who fringed the square’s edges, listened in stark apathy. Most of them were ignorant of the air’s import. To them it was but a gringo melody; far inferior to “La Paloma.”
The few who recognized it showed no resentment. To their Spanish-Indian minds it was but natural that the victors should thus crow.
They themselves were beaten; hopelessly beaten. They and their country. They were glad enough to get off as easily as they seemed like to.
A little vaunting—the playing of their new masters’ national song—was nothing to what they would have done had the conditions been reversed.
General Scott sat at the center of the dais-front. Portly, his round, red face framed by white chin-whiskers and thin white hair, he was decked out in all the blue-and-gold glory of a United States major-general’s dress uniform.
This was perhaps the crowning day of his career. At all events he was celebrating it in accord with that idea.