text:  What! four thousand five hundred regular troops officered by Englishmen--a number which in the last eighty years had shown itself repeatedly able to beat armies of sixty thousand men armies having all the appurtenances and equipments of regular warfare--was this strong column actually unable to fight its way with bayonet and field artillery to a fortress distant only eighty miles through a tumultuary rabble never mustering twenty thousand heads?[1] Times are altered with us if this was inevitable