unresisting Guatemozin, and shouted victory.
INDIAN WARFARE.
It requires a familiarity with Spanish character, and the Moorish, Oriental origin of their literature, in order to read Spanish-American military annals understandingly, as much so as it does a knowledge of Indian character in order to sift out the truth from accounts of Indian wars.
The superstitious dread which the Aztecs at all times evinced for the Spanish horses and horsemen is common to all savages. The appearance of two or three horses, kept ready for that purpose, was sufficient to restore the battle after the Spaniards had taken to their heels.
And while the facts of the siege amount to little more than keeping possession of the narrow causeways, by aid of superior implements of war, until famine and thirst had done their work, yet the Spanish histories of the Conquest make it to surpass in interest, and in the magnitude of forces engaged, almost any siege on record.
And so plausibly is the narrative written, that the reader drinks it in with breathless anxiety, without once stopping to ask himself how so many hundreds of thousands of Indians could be fed in a salt valley, inclosed by high mountains, without the aid of a regularly organized commissariat department, or how such masses of undisciplined Indians could be manœuvred upon a narrow causeway, where numbers add no strength, but only tend to augment the confusion—where, as in this case, there had to be a daily advance and retreat in presence of an active enemy.