And this would have been fatal. In broad daylight Keane would have whipped them. He would have whipped Jackson’s troops that night but for the darkness, but for the darkness and the grizzled, homespun clothed men, who had cat-eyes for night fighting, who had stalked deer and panther and Indians in the shadows of it, who could steal in and steal out and use their knives in close places. This was December 23, but that night he won the greater battle of January 8. He fell on them like a panther from the darkness of the swamp. He gave them a jolt that Soult, nor Ney, nor Napoleon had ever given. He taught them a warfare they had never dreamed of before. He took the sand out of their craws and the conceit out of their boasting mouths. When he finished with them, at midnight, they decided they had gone far enough toward New Orleans for that day, and several others. They threw up entrenchments and waited for more troops. They were hacked, demoralized, beaten! And this is the way that Jackson did it. For my part I think it a far prettier fight than he made two weeks later, when he finished the blow. Jackson put his troops in motion about three o’clock, amid alarm guns and beating of drums. But he himself galloped to the river bank and signalled to the little Carolina to drop down. Then he put spurs to his horse and galloped after the dust cloud going down the road to the Rodriguez Canal. I could see it all so plainly as I stood on the banks of the river and saw the same landscape before me. The lean, sallow, booted man, his long legs dangling underneath his horse’s belly, galloping seemingly to defeat. This man of destiny, this man who believed in himself, this man who knew that God Almighty had sent him to whip the British, just as he knew he would kill Dickinson. And the troops went down so merrily to death in that cloud of dust—what pathos, what patriotism, what sublime ignorance of what they were up against, what blind faith in Jackson and God went forth that day to fight the conquering, red English, who knew no such word as defeat, no such tactics as retreat. Marines, raw troops who hardly knew how to drill, and one little battery, in all, 884; flashy Creoles, gaudily equipped and making much noise, the battalion of St. Domingo, “men of color,” 210; Choctaw Indians, 18; Coffee’s Tennessee Volunteers, mounted riflemen, 563; Beall’s Orleans Rifle Company, 62; Mississippi Dragoons, 107, in all 2,131. And this crowd were going to drive the victors of Toulouse, San Sebastian, Salamanca and Badajos into the river, and do it at night, and not a hundred bayonets on their guns and only two little six-pound cannon!