Walker was made commander-in-chief of an army of
twelve hundred men with salary of six thousand dollars a year. A
man named Rivas was appointed temporary president.
To Walker this pause in the fight was most welcome. It gave him
an opportunity to enlist recruits and to organize his men for the
better accomplishment of what was the real object of his going to
Nicaragua. He now had under him a remarkable force, one of the
most effective known to military history. For although six months
had not yet passed, the organization he now commanded was as
unlike the Phalanx of the fifty-eight adventurers who were driven
back at Rivas, as were Falstaff's followers from the regiment of
picked men commanded by Colonel Roosevelt. Instead of the
undisciplined and lawless now being in the majority, the ranks
were filled with the pick of the California mining camps, with
veterans of the Mexican War, with young Southerners of birth and
spirit, and with soldiers of fortune from all of the great armies of
Europe.
In the Civil War, which so soon followed, and later in the service
of the Khedive of Egypt, were several of Walker's officers, and for
years after his death there was no war in which one of the men
trained by him in the jungles of Nicaragua did not distinguish
himself. 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.
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