Page:Tupper family records - 1835.djvu/121

 yet so faithfully, descriptive of a similar last effort, that we cannot avoid transcribing them :

"One effort — one — to break the circling host! They form — unite — charge — waver — all is lost!"

The loss in Freire's army fell chiefly on the devoted infantry, and appears to have exceeded considerably one third of the original number, including eighteen officers among the killed. The only officers mentioned as slain in Prieto's hurried dispatch of the 17th of April, are Colonel Elizalde, chief of the staff, Colo- nel Tupper, and his gallant Major Varela, a young man of five or six and twenty. Colonel Tupper is said to have exhibited the most reckless valour du- ring the day, and to have rallied his little battalion several times. Thrice he led it to the charge, and in the last charge he was slightly wounded in the foot by a spent cannon ball. Having previously dismounted to encourage his men, he was unable, in the mMee which succeeded, to find his horse ; and the accounts of the manner in which he got away, when all was lost, are so contradictory, that it is impossible to reconcile them. All agree, however, in stating that he was particularly sought after, and that a Major Baquedano* gave orders to his dragoons to show him no quarter. A party of these dragoons and some Indians overtook him, and find- ing that they would not spare his life, he reproached them with their brutality, and drew his sword to

Colonel Tupper, who had probably treated him with the contempt he de- served. His worthy chief, Prieto, promoted him after the battle for this acceptable service. Baquedano had been a domestic servant in the family of General Carrera, and boasted that he had killed a Spanish officer, a prisoner and defenceless, in the battle of Maipu. Long shunned by every man of honor, he was a disgrace even to the cause in which he served, and in 183L he was brought to a court martial by his own officers, for embezzling money from the regimental chest, but was of course acquitted.
 * This miscreant par excellence, it seems, had some private pique against

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