“I can’t spare a man. We may need them all, and more.”
“I shall go alone.”
I was half mad. The glory that might have been so easily won was placed beyond my reach by this overcautious imbecile.
I was almost foolish enough to have flung myself over the cliff, or rushed alone into the midst of the retreating foes.
I left the battery and walked slowly away out of sight of my superior. I continued along the counterscarp of the cliff, until I had reached the edge of the lateral ravine leading out from the river valley. I crouched behind the thick tussocks of the zamias. I saw the retreating tyrant, mounted on his mule, ride past, almost within range of my rifle bullet! I saw a thousand men crowding closely after, so utterly routed and demoralised that nothing could have induced them to stand another shot. I was convinced that my original idea was in perfect correspondence with the truth, and that with the help of a score of determined men I could have made prisoners of the whole “ruck.”
Instead of this triumph, my only achievement in the battle of Cerro Gordo was to call my colonel a coward, for which I was afterwards confined to close quarters, and only recovered the right to range abroad on the eve of a subsequent battle, when it was thought that my sword might be of more service than my condemnation by court-martial.
Of such a nature were my thoughts as I lay under canvas on the field of Cerro Gordo on the night succeeding the battle.
“Agua! por amor Dios, agua—aguita!”
These words reaching my ear, and now a second time pronounced, broke in upon the train of my reflections.
They were not the only sounds disturbing the tranquillity of that calm tropic night. From other parts of the field, though in a different direction and more distant, I could hear many voices speaking in a similar strain, in tones of agonised appeal, low mutterings, mingled with moanings, where some mutilated foeman was struggling in the throes of death, and vainly calling for help that came not.