Page:Mexico, picturesque, political, progressive.djvu/151

Rh victory at last from the very jaws of death. Like eagles who build their nests upon inaccessible peaks, "the apostles of liberty fled to the mountain tops, to fight and to wait; and too often upon the summits these martyrs found their Calvary." Sometimes, impelled by a sudden fury of passion, a band of devoted men crept down from their fastnesses, cut their way through the midst of the enemy, and perished to a man, joyful in the destruction they dealt in dying. Without money, without clothes, without other arms than the guns in their hands, they fell by the roadside in forced marches, tortured by fatigue and famine, "and were left unburied, for beasts of the field and birds of the air. ... If a laurel or a palm had been planted to commemorate the memory of each of these, the land would be one impenetrable jungle from end to end." Still they continued on, "a new man stepping into the place of the comrade who had dropped before him, hurrying to new strife, to new sacrifice, in order to convince Napoleon and Maximilian, France and the world, that a people who could so struggle for independence was a people invincible and worthy of being free."