“It was five o’clock when Pakenham fell on Thomieres.... From the chief to the lowest soldier, all of the French felt that they were lost, and in an instant Pakenham, the most frank and gallant of men, commenced the battle. The British columns formed lines as they marched, and the French gunners, standing up manfully for their country, sent showers of grape into the advancing masses, while a crowd of light troops poured in a fire of musketry, under cover of which the main body endeavored to display a front. But bearing onward through the skirmishes, with the weight of a giant, Pakenham broke the half-formed lines into fragments and sent the whole in confusion upon the advancing support, spreading terror and disorder upon the enemy’s left.” Pakenham, and the army under him at New Orleans, were the pick of Wellington’s troops, who had driven Bonaparte’s greatest general across the Pyrenees. They had conquered at Rodrigo, Badajos, San Sebastian, Toulouse, Salamanca. They laughed at raw backwoods militia, with not even a bayonet to their long, uncouth rifles. And what were they in victory? Was there any real ground for fear that they would carry out their threats of Beauty and Booty in New Orleans? When Jackson rode along in the afternoon of December 23 to the front to meet the British, women and children surrounded him in consternation. “Say to them,” he said to Livingston, “that no British soldier shall enter the city unless over my dead body. I will smash them, so help me God!” But that night many of the women of New Orleans slept with small daggers in their bosoms. And well may the handsome Creole women of New Orleans have been afraid. Badajos, San Sebastian, Toulouse, all were friendly towns, only the garrisons being hostile to the English. And yet, General Napier, who was an eye witness to what he describes, tells how these same soldiers did at Badajos: Jackson reached New Orleans December 2d, as stated, more fit for the hospital than the camp, and with only three weeks in which (as it proved) to prepare the defenseless city. But under the magic of that strange, positive, fiery man, the quick tempers of the impulsive inhabitants were welded to the white heat of desperate determination. And what a motley lot of defenders he found—About 800 new troops, regulars, raw and undrilled; Planches’ City Battalion, five hundred; two regiments of State militia, armed with fowling pieces, muskets, old rifles; a regiment of free negroes, or, as Jackson called them, “free men of colour,” and right well did they quit themselves in the fight—in all, about 2,000 men. Two little men-of-war-armed schooners, the Carolina and the Louisiana, lay in the river.