military chief of average capacity must have seen that the whole Mexican
population was not rising to "greet the French army as liberators," and
that the popular enthusiasm that was to open to them the doors of every
town, turning their progress to the capital into a triumphal march
marked at every point by ovations, showers of flowers, and the
spontaneous vivas of a hitherto oppressed and now grateful multitude,
was but a fast disappearing mirage luring them on to destruction.

Instead of the promised enthusiastic welcome a sullen acquiescence in
the inevitable everywhere greeted the foreign invaders. This, whenever
compatible with personal safety, turned into active enmity on the part
of the nation, and often into open and revengeful cruelty. Instead of
the great reactionary army, numbering at least ten thousand men, which,
rallying under General Marquez, was to hurry to his support on his march
upon the capital, a few stray guerrillas had joined his forces,
ill-armed, ill-fed, undisciplined bands, upon which small reliance could
be placed, and whose presence under the French flag only helped to
irritate the feelings of the people. And far from the Liberal party
losing its partizans upon the landing of the French, some of the
reactionary leaders,--as, for instance, General Zuloaga,--forgetting
their former feuds at the first sound of a foreign invasion of their
native land, had rallied around the Mexican government, whose cause now
seemed linked with that of the national honor.

When reverses and difficulties of all kinds assailed the army, it was
remembered that General de Lorencez's violation of the sacredness of a
treaty had taken place on Good Friday at half-past three o'clock, and I
was told that this coincidence had been looked upon by many among the
soldiers as a bad omen.