Page:Into Mexico with General Scott (1920).djvu/272

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.

celebrated battery, which accompanied the Second Brigade.

At San Antonio the First Division had numbered twenty-six hundred officers and men; now it was down to nineteen hundred, or two thousand, when one included the Colonel C. F. Smith battalion of Light Infantry attached to the Second Brigade. General Cadwalader had brought about seven hundred and fifty in his three regiments; Major Sumner's dragoons and Mounted Rifles numbered two hundred and ninety, the three batteries one hundred; so that General Worth was attacking the Mill and the Casa-Mata with some thirty-one hundred and fifty men.

After a march forward of about a mile down the hill slope from Tacubaya, the First Brigade was halted in line of battle.

"Lie down, men. Silence in the ranks."

While they lay, the east brightened slowly over the City of Mexico and the citadel of Chapultepec. The towers and steeples of the city began to be outlined against the sky; Chapultepec caught the glow; all the east became gold and pink, with the mountain ranges black along the high horizon. Down here it was still chill and dusky. Colonel Garland, dimly seen from his horse, addressed the line.

"My men," he said, "the First Division is going into battle as soon as there is light enough. General Scott has appointed us to brush the enemy from those buildings yonder. The First Brigade is to handle the mill, where the enemy's left rests. The Second Brigade will assault the enemy's right at the Casa-Mata. The general assault will be opened after the