Page:The War with Mexico, Vol 1.djvu/135

106 operations in a war between Mexico and the United States would be "contemptible and indecisive," said the London Times. As for our navy, it was undoubtedly small; the Mexican consul at New Orleans reported that it lacked the discipline commonly attributed to it; and, however efficient it might really be, Mexico had no commerce to attack.

The Mexicans, on the other hand, were deemed by many observers decidedly formidable. "There are no better troops in the world, nor better drilled and armed, than the Mexicans," asserted Calderón de la Barca, the Spanish minister at Washington; and some of the generals were thought, even by foreigners, equal to the most renowned in Europe. The Americans would be at a vast disadvantage, was Captain Elliot's opinion, "in rapidity of movement" and ability to endure "continued fatigue on the hardest food." The soldiers of the tri-color "are superior to those of the United States," declared the Mexico correspondent of the London Times flatly in 1845.

If the military power of Mexico was rated in this way by outside observers of such competence, one can imagine how it was rated at home. The Mexicans regarded themselves as (martial by instinct, and viewed their troops, inured to war by an almost unceasing course of revolutions, as remarkably good. Santa Anna once boasted that, if necessary, he would plant his flag upon the capitol at Washington; and the results of the wars with Spain and France had tended powerfully to encourage the self — confidence of his fellow-citizens. "We have numerous and veteran forces burning with a desire to gain immortal renown," said the Boletín Oficial of San Luis Potosí "Not to speak of our approved infantry," it was argued, "our artillery is excellent, and our cavalry so superior in men and horses that it would be an injustice not to recognize the fact;" besides which "our army can be rapidly augmented." Indeed an officer of reputation told Waddy Thompson that the cavalry could break infantry squares with the lasso. In November, 1845, the Mexican minister of war solemnly predicted that his countrymen would gain the victory, even if one third less numerous than their American adversaries. To clinch this matter, the feeling of superior power, which it was known that we entertained, was regarded as an ignorant over-confidence