CHAPTER XXIV. "THE MISSION TO THE NORTH." I have never yet been able to discover whether General Humbert really did feel the confidence that he assumed at this period, or that he merely affected it, the better to sustain the spirits of those around him. If our success at Castlebar was undeniable, our loss was also great, and far more than proportionate to all the advantages we had acquired. Six officers and two hundred and forty men were either killed or badly wounded, and as our small force had really acquired no reinforcement worth the name, it was evident that another such costly victory would be our ruin. Not one gentleman of rank or influence had yet joined us, few of the priesthood, and, even among the farmers and peasantry, it was easy to see that our recruits comprised those whose accession could never have conferred honor or profit on any cause. Our situation was any thing but promising. The rumors that reached us, and we had no other or more accurate information than rumors, told that an army of thirty thousand men under the command of Lord Cornwallis, was in march against us; that all the insurrectionary movements of the south were completely repressed; that the spirit of the rebels was crushed, and their confidence broken, either by defeat or internal treachery. In a word that the expedition had already failed, and the sooner we had the means of leaving the land of our disasters the better. Such were the universal feelings of all my comrades; but Humbert, who often had told us that we were only here to "éclairer la route" for another and more formidable mission, now pretended to think that we were progressing most favorably toward a perfect success. Perhaps he firmly believed all this, or perhaps he thought that the pretense would give more dignity to the finale of an exploit, which he already saw was nearly played out! I know not which is the true explanation, and am half disposed to think that he was actuated as much by one impulse as the other. "The army of the North" was the talisman, which we now heard of for the first time, to repair all our disasters, and insure complete victory. "The Army of the North," whose strength varied from twenty to twenty-five, and sometimes reached even thirty thousand men, and was commanded by a distinguished Irish general, was now the centre to which all our hopes turned. Whether it had already landed, and where, of what it consisted, and how officered, not one of us knew any thing; but by dint of daily repetition and discussion we had come to believe in its existence as certainly as though we had seen it under arms. The credulous lent their convictions without any trouble to themselves whatever; the more skeptical studied the map, and fancied twenty different places in which they might have disembarked; and thus the "Army of the North" grew to be a substance and reality, as undoubted as the scenes before our eyes.