Arenales headed the pursuit in person with so little caution that he was attacked by a group of fugitives, who left him for dead with fourteen wounds, three of them in the face. His men rushed in and saved him, carrying him on their shoulders back to the camp.
Two flags, two guns, two hundred muskets, one hundred killed, and ninety-nine prisoners, were the trophies of this victory, while the Patriots lost only one man killed and twenty-one wounded, including their leader.
Such was the action of La Florida, which saved Santa Cruz de la Sierra and compelled the retreat of the Royalist army from Salta. It gives the name to one of the principal streets of Buenos Ayres. For it Arenales was raised to the rank of general, and a badge of honour was decreed to the troops engaged.
Arenales was no sooner well of his wounds than he marched with his division and reoccupied the Valle Grande, routing a Royalist force of two hundred men at Postrer Valle on the 4th July, but was on the 5th August himself defeated at Sumapaita. Afterwards reinforced by Padilla with a body of Indian slingers, he forced Benavente to retreat from Tomina, and again reoccupied the Valle Grande.
Eighteen months he maintained this extraordinary war at a cost to the enemy of 1,300 men in killed, wounded, and missing, entering Cochabamba at last in triumph, and joining the Argentine army with 1,200 men.
Over the vast plains of La Plata the revolutionary spirit had spread almost unopposed, but where mountain ranges marked out the limits of Upper Peru the movement could only advance by force of arms. The map of the old Viceroyalty did not coincide with that of the social revolution of the United Provinces. Upper Peru had been the high road from Buenos Ayres to Lima in time of peace; it now remained for San Martin to decide whether the same road was strategically the proper road to Lima or not, in time of war.
