The Sun.
London, England, 1851-09-19 00:00:00

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LONDON, FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 1851,

The French official journal, the Patrie, in its im-
pression of Wednesday, publishes the following an-
nouncement :

"The following news has been received in Paris:—
" Washington, Sept. 2.
" The electric telegraph this moment communicates
to us the intelligence of the defeat and death of Lopes
and his companions. They have not been shot, like the
detachment previously taken, but perished fighting to
the last.' "

This news, we are informed by another journal,
was communicated from the Spanish Embassy at
Paris, and we may therefore assume that it is correct.
Thus has terminated, in the death of all who em-
barked from New Orleans, the much vaunted expedi-
tion which was to drive the Spaniards out of Cuba,
and to permanently annex the queen of the Antilles
to the United States. Sixteen days has sufficed for
the entire annihilation of the expedition. Not
one of the promises of its projectors
was realized; not one of their statements
that has not proved false. The inhabitants of Cuba,
we were told, detested the Spanish yoke, and would
rise in insurrection the instant Lorxz approached
their shores; the military were disaffected, and would
join him by battalions, and in one week Cuba would
be in possession of the adventurers; such were the
tales with which the disbanded soldiers of the Ameri-
can army of Mexico were gulled, and to which they
greedily lent ear. Accustomed to habits of idleness
and rapine during the two years of the Mexican war,
having also from their experience in that war acquired
a thorough contempt for Spanish prowess and Spanish
generalship, these men disliking a return to the pursuits
of honest industry, were readily persuaded that
the Spaniards would be defeated as easily as had been
the Mexicans, and therefore, trusting to their own bull-
dog Anglo-Saxon courage, they did not take any
pains to inquire into the qualifications of LOPEZ as a
general, nor do they appear to have made any provision
for the eonduct of the campaign. The first act of
LOPEZ proved how utterly ignorant he was of mili-
tary matters t he commenced his campaign without
guides, without commissariat; his first act was to so
divide his forces as to permit the enemy to cut off his
communications with his artillery under CRITTEN-
DEN and with the coast, which should have formed
the basis of his operations, and with which
he should have maintained his communications
at all hazards, so as to secure the regular arrival of
reinforcements wherewith to follow up bis success,
should he be successful, or a safe retreat should he be
defeated. Instead, however, of acting on any mili-
tary plan, LOPEZ appears to have adopted the tactics
of a bandit of the Appenines rather than those of a
man having any pretensions to military science, and
to have contented himself with wandering about the
country marauding, leaving his unfortunate followers
to be picked up in groups by the Spaniards and shot.
These unfortunate men also soon discovered that they
had made much too light of their enemy ; the veteran
troops of
Spain, who bad been drilled to discipline and
hard-fighting during the Carlist and Christino contest,
were very different soldiers to the Mexican raw levies,
and General CONCHA, the Governor-Generalpf Cuba,
one of the most accomplished tacticians of the age,

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