is alone with his
little party, nearly all of whom are wounded; but, despite the hundreds
of _escopetas_ that are levelled at him, he gallops back in safety to
headquarters.

The sun, which rose that morning on a proud army and a defiant
metropolis, set at even on a shattered, haggard band, and a city full of
woe-stricken wretches who did nothing all night but quake with terror,
and cry, at every noise, "_Aqui viene los Yanquies_!" ("Here come the
Yankees!") All along the causeway, and in the fields and swamps on
either side, heaps of dead men and cattle intermingled with broken
ammunition-carts, marked where the American shot had told. A gory track
leading to the _tete de pont_, groups of dead in the fields on the west
of Churubusco, over whose pale faces some stalks of tattered corn still
waved; red blotches in the marsh next the causeway, where the rich blood
of Carolina and New York soaked the earth, showed where the fire of the
heavy Mexican guns and the countless _escopetas_ of the infantry had
been most murderous. Scott had lost, in that day's work, more than a
thousand men in killed and wounded, seventy-nine of whom were officers.
The Mexican loss, according to Santa Anna, was one-third of his army,
equal probably to ten thousand men, one-fourth of whom were prisoners,
the rest killed and wounded. As the sun went down the troops were
recalled to headquarters; but all night long the battlefield swarmed
with straggling parties seeking some lost comrade in the cold and rain,
and surgeons hurrying from place to place and offering succor to the
wounded.

It would have been easy for Scott to march on the city that night, or
next morning, and seize it before the Mexicans recovered from the shock
of their defeat. Anxious to shorten the war, and assured that Santa Anna
was desirous of negotiating; warned, moreover, by neutrals and others,
that the hostile occupation of the capital would destroy the last chance
of peaceable accommodation and rouse the Mexican spirit to resistance
all over the country, the American general consented, too generously
perhaps, to offer an armistice to his vanquished foe. It was eagerly
accepted, and negotiations were commenced which lasted over a fortnight.
In the mean time General Scott had the satisfaction of hanging several
of the Irishmen who had deserted to the Mexicans, and, serving as the
battalion of San Patricio, had shot down so many of their old comrades
at Buena Vista and Churub