Page:The rise and fall of the Emperor Maximilian.djvu/182

166 San Luis, fronting the contingents of Zébéda, Pedro Martinez, and Aureliano Rivera. The French contre guerillas, who were operating on the confines of Matehuala, were preparing to go down into the Terres Chaudes of the State of Vera Cruz. This vast retrograde movement exposed the whole breadth of the states farthest from the centre, such as Tamaulipas, Nuevo-Leon, Cohahuila, Sinaloa, and La Sonora. This concentration would have been a wise step from the very outset, even if it had not been compelled by the orders of Napoleon the Third. Maximilian had dreamt of an impossibility when he desired to keep all these immense solitudes under his sceptre, and our head-quarters authorities would, in my opinion, have acted wisely in resisting still more strongly than they did the impulse of the crown; for our troops traversing Mexico resembled a ship gliding through the water and leaving behind it no traces of its track. This centralising movement was all the more prudent, as information sent to Maximilian himself by the prefect of Zacatecas established the fact that the liberals were on the point of obtaining the guarantee of a loan of fifty millions of piastres from the United States. In order to negotiate this loan, the Juarists offered to sell them Lower California. By means of this American assistance, Gonzalez Ortega, with ten thousand filibusters, a hundred thousand muskets, forty pieces of artillery, and a large quantity of stores, was to enter the territory by Piedras-Negras, so as to attack Zacatecas. Cortina was preparing to assail Monterey and Saltillo. Negrete had undertaken to land in Tamaulipas, and to penetrate into La Huasteca, whilst Corona moved down on Culiacan. To assist this well concerted plan, our consul at San Francisco advised us that General Miller, the collector of customs in this city, had authorised the