The Freebooters by Gustave Aimard — Read

Europeans, accustomed to the gigantic wars of the Old World, in which enormous masses of two to three hundred thousand men on both sides come into collision on the battle field, where armies have divisions of thirty or forty thousand men, a cavalry often of sixty to eighty thousand sabres, and in which the guns are counted by hundreds, have a difficulty in forming an idea of the way in which war is waged in certain parts of America, as well as the component strength of the armies of the New World.

In Mexico, a population of several millions can hardly collect ten thousand men under arms, an enormous number in those countries. The various republics which were formed on the dismemberment of the Spanish colonies, such as Peru, Chile, New Granada, Bolivia, Paraguay, &c., cannot succeed in assembling more than two or three thousand men under their banners, and that, too, with immense sacrifices; for these countries, which, territorially speaking, are each far larger than England, are nearly deserted, being incessantly decimated by civil war, which gnaws at them like a hideous leprosy, and left almost uninhabitable by the neglect of the various governments, which succeed each other with a giddy and almost fabulous rapidity.