over a single road on the same day with their artillery and necessary
trains. Later I found the fallacy of this belief. The rebellion, which
followed as a sequence to the Mexican war, never could have been
suppressed if larger bodies of men could not have been moved at the same
time than was the custom under Scott and Taylor.

The victories in Mexico were, in every instance, over vastly superior
numbers. There were two reasons for this. Both General Scott and
General Taylor had such armies as are not often got together. At the
battles of Palo Alto and Resaca-de-la-Palma, General Taylor had a small
army, but it was composed exclusively of regular troops, under the best
of drill and discipline. Every officer, from the highest to the lowest,
was educated in his profession, not at West Point necessarily, but in
the camp, in garrison, and many of them in Indian wars. The rank and
file were probably inferior, as material out of which to make an army,
to the volunteers that participated in all the later battles of the war;
but they were brave men, and then drill and discipline brought out all
there was in them. A better army, man for man, probably never faced an
enemy than the one commanded by General Taylor in the earliest two
engagements of the Mexican war. The volunteers who followed were of
better material, but without drill or discipline at the start. They
were associated with so many disciplined men and professionally educated
officers, that when they went into engagements it was with a confidence
they would not have felt otherwise. They became soldiers themselves
almost at once. All these conditions we would enjoy again in case of
war.

The Mexican army of that day was hardly an organization. The private
soldier was picked up from the lower class of the inhabitants when
wanted; his consent was not asked; he was poorly clothed, worse fed, and