But at this very moment a deafening roar is heard in the direction of the tete 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 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,