in the fight was most welcome. It gave him an
opportunity to enlist recruits and to organize his men for the better
accomplishment of what was the real object of his going to Nicaragua. He
now had under him a remarkable force, one of the most effective known
to military history. For although six months had not yet passed,
the organization he now commanded was as unlike the Phalanx of
the fifty-eight adventurers who were driven back at Rivas, as were
Falstaff's followers from the regiment of picked men commanded by
Colonel Roosevelt. Instead of the undisciplined and lawless now being
in the majority, the ranks were filled with the pick of the California
mining camps, with veterans of the Mexican War, with young Southerners
of birth and spirit, and with soldiers of fortune from all of the great
armies of Europe.

In the Civil War, which so soon followed, and later in the service of
the Khedive of Egypt, were several of Walker's officers, and for years
after his death there was no war in which one of the men trained by him
in the jungles of Nicaragua did not distinguish himself. In his memoirs,
the Englishman, General Charles Frederic Henningsen, writes that though
he had taken part in some of the greatest battles of the Civil War he
would pit a thousand men of Walker's command against any five thousand
Confederate or Union soldiers. And General Henningsen was one who spoke
with authority. Before he joined Walker he had served in Spain under Don
Carlos, in Hungary under Kossuth, and in Bulgaria.

Of Walker's men, a regiment of which he commanded, he writes: "I often
have seen them march with a broken or compound fractured arm in
splints, and using the other to fire the rifle or revolver. Those with a
fractured thigh or wounds which rendered them incapable of removal, shot
themselves. Such men do not turn up in the average of everyday life, nor
do I ever expect to see their like again. All military science failed
on a suddenly given field before such assailants, who came at a run
to close with their revolvers and who thought little of charging a gun
battery, pistol in hand."

Another graduate of Walker's army was Captain Fred Townsend Ward, a
native of Salem, Mass., who after the death of Walker organized and
led the ever victorious army that put down the Tai-Ping rebellion,
and performed the many feats of martial glory for which Chinese Gordon
received the credit. In Shanghai, to the memory of the filibuster, there
are