“We’ve licked that number before. Odds don’t make any difference to Scott men.”
“Not much they don’t,” Hannibal agreed. “One more of these little ‘brushes’ and we’ll be in the Halls of Montezuma.”
All the able-bodied troops were paraded at nine o’clock the next morning, September 9, to witness burial. A long trench had been dug just outside the village of Tacubaya. The wagons, covered with United States flags and bearing the bodies of the killed in the battle of the eighth, were escorted by funeral squads from each of the regiments. The fifes and drums and a band, playing the funeral march, accompanied; the troops followed with muskets at a support. The tattered battle flags had been draped with crape. The cannon fired minute guns in solemn fashion.
General Scott and staff, and all the general and field officers, stood with heads bared; the troops, in a half square, presented arms, while the Episcopal church burial service was read by Chaplain “Holy Joe” Morrison. Then the sappers and miners filled in the trench.
It was a bright day. The high parapets of Chapultepec, to the north, were thronged with Mexican soldiers looking down upon the ceremony.
“B’gorry, you’d better be attindin’ your own funerals,” old Sergeant Mulligan growled at them, when the parade had been dismissed.
Following the battle of Molino del Rey, General Scott seemed to be in no hurry to take Chapultepec. Rather, he acted as though he might side-step Chapultepec. The First Division and the Cadwalader brigade rested at Tacubaya. The other Third Division brigade—that of General Pierce, who was still in the hospital with his crippled knee—under General Pillow himself had been moved about two miles east, where with the Riley brigade of the Twiggs Second Division it was covering the city’s southern gates.
The engineers of Captain Lee were down there, also reconnoitring.
“Dar’s gwine to be anodder big battle,” Pompey kept insisting. “Gin’ral Scott, he got somepin’ up his sleeve.”
Before daylight of September 12, Jerry, in the camp of the First Brigade, was half-awakened by the tread of marching feet in the dusky outskirts of Tacubaya. At reveille they all might see that there were two camps between Tacubaya and the city. The Pillow camp had been transferred nearer and was established down toward the King’s Mill in front of the town; while a second bivouac appeared not far on the east or right of it under Chapultepec.