Page:Mexico, Aztec, Spanish and Republican, Vol 1.djvu/447

Rh, striking down eleven out of the fourteen officers who composed the command, and, for the time, staggering the staunch assailants. But this paralysis continued for an instant only. A light battalion which had been held to cover Huger's battery, commanded by Captain E. Kirby Smith, rushed forward to support, and executing its bloody task amid horrible carnage, finally succeeded in carrying the line and occupying it with our troops. In the meanwhile Garland's brigade, sustained by Drum's artillery assaulted the enemy's left near the Molino, and after an obstinate contest drove him from his position under the protecting guns of Chapultepec. Drum's section and Huger's battering guns advanced to the enemy's position, and his captured pieces were now opened on the retreating force. While these efforts were successfully making on the Mexican centre and left, Duncan's battery blazed on the right, and Colonel Mackintosh was ordered to assault that point. The advance of his brigade soon brought it between the enemy and Duncan's guns, and their fire was of course discontinued. Onwards sternly and steadily moved the troops towards the Casa Mata, which, as it was approached, proved to be a massive stone work surrounded with bastioned entrenchments and deep ditches, whence a deadly fire was delivered and kept up without intermission upon our advancing troops until they reached the very slope of the parapet surrounding the citadel. The havoc was dreadful. A large proportion of the command was either killed or wounded; but still the ceaseless fire from the Casta Mata continued its deadly work, until the maimed and broken band of gallant assailants was withdrawn to the left of Duncan's battery where its remnants rallied. Duncan and Sumner had meanwhile been hotly engaged in repelling a charge of Mexican cavalry on the left, and having just completed the work, the brave Colonel found his countrymen retired from before the Casa Mata and the field again open for his terrible weapons. Directing them at once upon the fatal fort he battered the Mexicans from its walls, and as they fled from its protecting enclosure he continued to play upon the fugitives as relentlessly as they had recently done upon Mackintosh and his doomed brigade.

The Mexicans were now driven from the field at every point. La Casa Mata was blown up by the conquerors. Captured ammunition and cannon moulds in El Molino were destroyed. And the Americans, according to Scott's order previous to the battle, returned to Tacubaya, with three of the enemy's guns, (a fourth being spiked and useless,) eight hundred prisoners including fifty-two commissioned officers, and a large quantity of small arms, with gun and