Adams, Moragne, and nearly half the gallant band are prostrate. A very few minutes more and there will be no one left to bear the glorious flag.
But at this very moment a deafening roar is heard in the direction of the _tête de pont_. Round shot and grape, rifle-balls and canister, come crashing down the causeway into the Mexican ranks from their own battery. Worth is there, the gallant fellow, just in time. Down the road and over the ditch, through the field and hedge and swamp, in tumult and panic the Mexicans are flying from the bayonets of the Sixth and Garland's brigade. A shout, louder than the cannon's peal; Worth is on their heels with his men. Before Shields reaches the causeway he is by his side driving the Mexican horse into their infantry, and Ayres is galloping up with a captured Mexican gun. Captain Kearny, with a few dragoons, dashes past, rides straight into the flying host, scatters them right and left, sabres all he can reach, and halts before the gate of Mexico. Not till then does he perceive that he 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 _tête 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.