Page:The War with Mexico, Vol 2.djvu/190

172 two 6-pounders and sixty-four wagons. He lost no merchandise, but his four fights cost him nearly 100 men killed, wounded and missing; and Captain Wells, who followed Lally with some 200 recruits and additional ammunition, lost forty and had to retreat. These and other affairs proved that irregulars, favored by the geography of the region, were capable of doing substantial harm.

But in Vera Cruz, as in every other quarter where they operated, though perhaps nowhere else in so marked a degree, the lack of morale, which enabled the guerilla system to exist, proved the cause of its failure. Poor arms, poor ammunition, poor marksmanship, and the want of artillery might have been remedied, or at least might have been offset by the counterbalancing advantages; but this defect was fatal. The Mexican guerillas were very different from what the guerillas of Spain had been. They fought like savages without the excuse of savages, for they knew better. Infuriated by their treacheries and cruelties, the Americans were persistent and unsparing in severity. Patrols who seemed never to sleep hunted out their nests in the mountains. On the march, flanking parties would force their way through the woods five miles or more from the road to catch them between two fires. The torch was applied with much liberality on suspicion, and sometimes on general principles, to huts and villages; and in the end a black swath of devastation, leagues in width, marked the route.

Scott ordered that in every case of outrage the nearest alcalde, if he failed to deliver up the guilty, should be fined at least $300 for a murder or the value of the stolen property for a robbery, and that any robber or murderer and any person belonging to a known party of such miscreants might, when caught, be summarily tried by three officers, and either flogged or executed. This plan, however, did not quite satisfy those on the ground especially the Texas troops. Captain Walker, on his cream-colored horse, and Colonel Hays, in his blue roundabout, black trousers and black leather cap, impressed themselves on the Mexican imagination as the agents of diabolical wrath; and in general it was a tale of merciless atrocities followed by merciless reprisals.

At the same time this lack of morale deprived the guerillas