The funeral march may have been heard about 13 thousand times because of casualties among the invading troops and perhaps twice as much for the deaths of the defeated country: that was the deadly conflict between the United States and Mexico between 1846 and 1848. Fallen in action or victims of hunger, thirst or various diseases, these soldiers were part of various armies in which voluntary fighters coexisted with professionals, elite officers with poor devils who imagined no future other than getting ready to escape misery, and even guerrillas who spontaneously confronted the enemy; As if that were not enough, thousands of Mexican civilians were also killed, sometimes because of the fire of the fighting, or because of the lack of food. Peter Guardino traces in this work the social history and not only politics of a war that marked forever the relationship between these two North Amer...read more