Page:The War with Mexico, Vol 2.djvu/66

48 seen. This was Plan del Rio. Views of superb heights delighted the eye, but the hot breath of the coast could be felt in the valley. Even the hollows between the sand-hills of Vera Cruz were thought less pestilential. But the men lay down, and, as a soldier wrote, covered themselves with the sky.

In the midst of scenery like this, "Old Davy" Twiggs appeared like a perfectly natural feature. His robust and capacious body, powerful shoulders, bull-neck, heavy, cherry-red face, and nearly six feet of erect stature represented physical energy at its maximum. With bristling white hair and, when the regulations did not interfere, a thick white beard, he seemed like a kind of snow-clad volcano, a human Ætna, pouring forth a red-hot flood of orders and objurgations from his crater of a mouth; and he was vastly enjoyed by the rough soldiers even when, as they said, he "cursed them right out of their boots." In a more strictly human aspect he made an excellent disciplinarian, and he could get more work out of the men than anybody else in the army; but as a warrior, while he always looked thirsty for a fight, he was thought over-anxious to fight another day — to be, in short, a hero of the future instead of the past; and as a general, Scott had already said that he was not qualified "to command an army — either in the presence, or in the absence of an enemy." His brains were, in fact, merely what happened to be left over from the making of his spinal cord, and the soldiers' names for him — the "Horse" and the Bengal "Tiger" — classed him fairly as regarded intellect.

Twiggs had been warned by Scott that a substantial army, commanded by Santa Anna, lay in his front; lancers were encountered on April 11; and a reconnaissance of that afternoon, made because the enemy were said to be in force just ahead, proved that guns commanded the pass of Cerro Gordo; yet the next morning he advanced in the usual marching order. Nothing saved his division but the eagerness of the Mexicans. They opened fire before he was entirely within the jaws of death, and he managed to retreat — extricating his train with difficulty, however. The enemy have given up and withdrawn, boasted Santa Anna, while the Americans felt ashamed. Further reconnoitring on that day gave a still more impressive idea of