XI
IN THE WAKE OF THE FLEEING ENEMY
General Scott had lost three officers and sixty rank and file killed, thirty officers and three hundred and thirty-six men wounded, with one private missing. The Mexican killed and wounded were over one thousand; five generals and three thousand other officers and men had been taken, together with four or five thousand stands of small arms and forty-three pieces of artillery.
The surgeons thought that General Shields might get well; he had a fighting chance. Major Sumner of the dragoons was going to travel in the Santa Anna coach until he was strong enough to ride a horse again.
The First Division was to push right onward, following up the retreat of the eight thousand Mexicans who had escaped. The main part of the Second Division and the ill General Patterson, with a portion of the Volunteers, were camped farther along, up the road, but it was understood that the First would soon have the honor of the advance, because its men were fresh. And that was what the First desired: to get ahead. It was tough to have missed out in the battle of Cerro Gordo. Still, nothing could have stopped old Colonel Harney, once he was started up that hill.
Reveille had been ordered for four-thirty; and when Musicians’ Call sounded for all the regimental field music to assemble at the guard tent for roll-call, Jerry boldly appeared to answer the drum-major’s inspection. Not much of a figure he cut, either, in his rags, and he had no little fun poked at him; but he stuck and kept his place when the drums and fifes formed at the head of the regiment for the march.
It was a fine morning. General Scott had ridden on, with an escort, to make his headquarters at Jalapa, sixteen miles beyond the pass. The road was all littered with the spoils of war. The fleeing Mexicans had thrown away everything: guns and overcoats and cartridge boxes, knapsacks and haversacks. And soon worse signs of battle were to be noted. Bodies of Mexican soldiers, cold and bloody, became thicker and thicker. The dragoons had spurred along here, hot in pursuit of the enemy. The skulls of most of the dead men had been split asunder by sabers. The bodies were mainly those of Mexican lancers who had tried to cover the retreat; but evidently the lancers had been no match for the Second Dragoons led by Major Ben Beall, and Captain Phil Kearny’s one company of the First.
The bodies lay in the road and upon both sides all the way to Encerro, eight miles. The majority of the dragoon horses had given out here; but from Encerro (which was General Santa Anna’s country-place—or one of several such places) to Jalapa there were still a few bodies, for some of the dragoons had kept on through the whole sixteen miles.
The road climbed. It was a paved road, broken into holes by the rains. Beyond Encerro the country grew much better. More mountains loomed before, huge and blue. As the road wound upward, there were green trees and lively streams that emptied into an irrigating ditch skirting the road; and corn, coffee, plantain and banana plantations with neat white houses, instead of the cactus and brush and bare ground and huts of the tierra caliente—the warm land of the lower yellow-fever district. It all looked pretty good.
“We’ll not starve hereabouts, that’s sure,” remarked the drummer who was plying his sticks on Jerry’s left.
By the time, early evening, that Jalapa was in sight the men were tired again, and Jerry’s fingers were blistered with the drumsticks. Now the road was lined on both sides with flowering shrubs and vines, and the birds were singing loudly.