On the 8th of September, 1824, La Serna's army, numbering eight thousand five hundred men--of whom only five hundred were Spaniards--encamped on the high grounds overlooking the little plain of Ayacucho, which sloped gently eastward to the little village of Quinua. To the left the level ground was bounded by a deep and precipitate ravine, and on the right by a valley which, though less difficult, was impracticable for fighting. Sucre's army lay at the eastern extremity of the plain, at the edge of the slope which rises from Quinua. Behind was no cover to re-form in if defeated. His forces were a little less than six thousand, and he had only one cannon against the enemy's eleven, but three-fourths of his men were the pick of the Colombian veterans and the rest Peruvians of the highest spirit. Tired of interminable marching through the mountains, isolated in a hostile region, starvation staring them in the face, confident of their superiority, man for man, to the royalists, and led by fiery young generals,--Sucre was only thirty-one and his chief lieutenant twenty-five,--they welcomed the opportunity to fight it out once for all, face to face and man to man. The morning sun of the 9th rose radiant behind the mountains where the Spaniards lay encamped. Sucre deployed his army in the open plain, riding down the line exclaiming, "Soldiers, on your deeds this day depends the fate of South America," while the Spanish columns descended in perfect order from the heights. La Serna realised that his men would not fight with the same spirit as the patriots and that defeat might be followed by wholesale desertion, but he counted on his artillery and the reserve he had left on the high ground as a sure refuge in case of a reverse.