ousand royalists under General Osorio, in the preliminary
fight which took place at the end of September. They were guilty of
like treachery during the great battle of the 1st of October. On that
day the royalists entered Rancagua, the town in which O'Higgins and
his little band had taken shelter. They were fiercely resisted, and
the fighting lasted through thirty-six hours. So brave was the conduct
of the patriots that the Spanish general was, after some hours'
contest, on the point of retreating. He saw that he would have no
chance of success, had the Carreras brought up their troops, as
was expected by both sides of the combatants. But the Carreras,
short-sighted in their selfishness, and nothing loth that O'Higgins
should be defeated, still held aloof. Thereupon the Spaniards took
heart, and made one more desperate effort. With hatchets and swords
they forced their way, inch by inch and hour by hour, into the centre
of the town. There, in an open square, O'Higgins, with two hundred
men--all the remnant of his little army--made a last resistance. When
only a few dozen of his soldiers were left alive, and when he himself
was seriously wounded, he determined, not to surrender, but to end the
battle. The residue of the patriots dashed through the town, cutting
a road through the astonished crowd of their opponents, and effected
a retreat in which those opponents, though more than twenty times as
numerous, durst not pursue them.

That memorable battle of Rancagua caused throughout the American
continent, and, across the Atlantic, through Europe, a thrill of
sympathy for the Chilian war of independence. But its immediate
effects were most disastrous. The Carreras, too selfish to fight
before, were now too cowardly. They and their followers fled.
O'Higgins had barely soldiers enough left to serve as a weak escort
to the fourteen hundred old men, women, and children who crossed the
Andes with him on foot, to pass two years and a half in voluntary
exile at Mendoza.

During those two years and a half the Spaniards were masters in
Santiago, and Chili was once more a Spanish province, in which the
inhabitants were punished terribly in confiscations, imprisonments,
and executions for their recent defection. Deliverance, however,
was at hand. General San Martin, through whom chiefly La Plata had
achieved its freedom, gave assistance to O'Higgins and the Chilian
patriots. The main body of the Spanish army, numbering about five