On the evening of April 7 there was a last parade by the troops together, and a speech by General Scott, in which he promised that if the men would follow him he would take them through.
In his gold-buttoned blue frock coat, and his gold-braided blue trousers, with gold epaulets on his broad shoulders and a gold sash around his waist and a plumed cockaded chapeau upon his grizzled head, his tasseled sword in its engraved scabbard hanging at his side, he sat his horse and thundered his words so that almost every ear could hear. He called the troops “My brave boys”—and at the close of the speech they roundly cheered their “Old Fuss and Feathers,” the “Hero of Chippewa”—that battle in the War of 1812 where he showed the enemy that the American infantry was equal to the best.
The march onward was supposed to commence the next day, April 8; but—
“’Peahs laike we Gin’ral Worth men ain’t gwine,” Pompey complained. “I heah Lieutenant Smith sayin’ we ain’t gwine yet. We-all got to stay. Wha’ fo’ we-all called Fust Division, when we ain’t fust?”
Jerry had seen little of Lieutenant Grant lately; the lieutenant had been acting as quartermaster of the Fourth and was kept busy. Now when asked about the march, he replied shortly:
“Yes. The Second Division leads. General Worth is required here; but you can depend upon it we’ll be on hand for the fighting.”
IX
THE HEIGHTS OF CERRO GORDO
“The general’s gone, as I suppose you know, Grant,” Lieutenant Smith remarked to Lieutenant Grant, at dinner this noon.
The day was April 12. The camp was much smaller than it had been throughout the week following the fall of Vera Cruz. Early in the morning of April 8 the Second Division had marched away, with the fifes and drums and the bands playing Yankee Doodle. Preceded by the two horse companies of the Mounted Rifles the long column had wound out over the National Road for the City of Mexico, two hundred and seventy-five or eighty miles westward, as the road ran.