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We spurred our horses up the bank on the left; the foot-soldiers rushed behind the adobe; and this time the shot passed harmlessly down the road. Before another, General Henningsen had ordered us all to move forward and get to cover. The foot stopped in the right branch of a by-lane which crossed the road a little way ahead.
General Henningsen, with the greater part of the force, was cooped up and half starved in Granada, by three or four thousand Costa Ricans and Chamorristas; General Walker, with the remainder, lay lower down on the Isthmus, watched by a second division of the enemy, and too weak to give him any assistance.
But enough of him, strange dog, or devil. The withdrawal from Obraja was opposed, so rumor said, by Henningsen and other officers; and it certainly had a most depressing effect upon the men, whilst it elated the enemy correspondingly, giving them a degree of confidence which they had never attained to before.
However, no call for volunteers was ventured by General Walker, he, probably, thinking it too unreasonable to ask his men to do anything for him unforced. There were some others who thought affairs might be retrieved, if General Walker were displaced, at least from his military command, and Henningsen, or some other, put in his stead.
It proved a great source of annoyance throughout the day. Their number was not certainly known, at least among the ranks, but was rumored as high as two thousand men, Costa-Ricans, Guatemalans, and Chamorristas. General Henningsen moved up by a straggling street, with an adobe here and there, and the intervals filled up with fruit-trees, bushes, and cactus-hedges.
The town had been threatened by the enemy during our absence, and General Henningsen was busy putting it into a state better suited to repel any sudden attack. Pieces of artillery looked down all the principal approaches, from behind short walls of adobe blocks, raised in the middle of the street with open passage-ways on either side.
The men, without other hope, fought their way over three successive barricades to General Henningsen, brought him out, setting fire to the city, reembarked on the steamer, and finally landed again at the fort of San Jorge, two miles east of Rivas. After that, General Walker gathered all his force at Rivas, and the enemy drew off to Granada, with some thirty or forty miles between.
Grape-shot, which may be the saddest thing, touching the body, on earth, made miserable noise above us and miserable work among us; and we couriers had leave to dismount and crawl nearer the ground. General Henningsen gained respect from us by sitting his horse alone.
In his memoirs, the Englishman, General Charles Frederic Henningsen, writes that though he had taken part in some of the greatest battles of the Civil War he would pit a thousand men of Walker's command against any five thousand Confederate or Union soldiers. And General Henningsen was one who spoke with authority.
In the course of the afternoon, General Henningsen arrived, bringing a fine brass howitzer, and a small reinforcement of infantry as those armed with rifled muskets and bayonets were called and artillerymen; and, after some hours' rest, he ordered a fresh attempt with the howitzer, supported by somewhere near two hundred men.
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