By 6 p.m. Villa’s infantry and artillery were in action–the latter wasting ammunition, as it was too dark to correct the fire. Seeing a stalemate developing and his casualties mounting, Villa ordered a stand-down to prepare for a pre-dawn, coordinated general assault. However his men’s blood was still up from the wild train chase and swirling horseback fights at Guaje and Crespo, and they kept charging, thrown back each time with yet more losses.

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At about 8 p.m. Obregon assessed the situation. He estimated his total losses in what would be merely the prelude to the battles of Celaya at fifteen hundred to two thousand. Three miles to the west, pillars of smoke marked Villista troop trains unloading reinforcements. Carranza had ordered the 1st Division of the East to reinforce Obregon, but its troops were scattered and not quickly available. Staff officers suggested retreating to Queretaro, but Obregon believed that Villa’s cavalry would rapidly move cross-country, cut off their retreat, and finish them off in the open. Their chances were better where they were.

Later that night Villa issued his attack orders. His troops would be reorganized into four assault groups, each composed of an infantry and a cavalry brigade, with two artillery batteries in direct support. All twenty-two guns would open fire at 4 a.m., then the four groups would make a frontal assault, infantry leading, cavalryfollowing to exploit breakthroughs. According to Mexican military historian Francisco Grajales, Villa’s plan ‘implicitly carries the germ of his defeat. In his distribution of forces no idea of maneuver, no intent to obtain superiority in one sector or direction, not even the desire to form a general reserve is evident. The action will be uniform and simultaneous across the entire front.’

Even after his cavalry’s failure to break Obregon’s line that afternoon, Villa continued to underestimate his opponent. When Villa’s generals expressed concern about running short of ammunition, he responded that a supply train two and a half miles behind their line had ammunition (probably .30-30 caliber for the cavalry’s Winchester and Remington carbines). Besides, Villa added: ‘The ammunition expended tomorrow won’t be much, because the city will fall under the fury of our first assault, and if not, the second. Our boldness will provide most of the ammunition [we need] tomorrow.’

Obregon, assuming he would be surrounded during the night and the telegraph line cut, sent Carranza a last message: ‘Combat continuing. The cavalry has been finished. As of this hour, 11 p.m., we must have taken two thousand casualties. Enemy assaults extremely harsh. Be assured that, as long as one soldier and one cartridge remain, I will know how to do my duty and will count myself fortunate if death overtakes me striking the criminals.’ As most of the cavalrymen scattered in the morning’s wild fighting straggled in, his depression lightened. It evaporated completely when the northern screening column rode in at dawn with fifteen hundred men.

By then, the battle had begun. At 4 a.m. on April 7, Villa’s artillery opened fire along a front nearly four miles long. When Obregon’s thirteen artillery pieces returned fire, the Villistas’ more numerous guns tried to suppress them. But many of the shells made in Villa’s Chihuahua workshops were duds or fell short of their targets. Because of shorts, Villa recalled, his guns had to move’so close that during the first hours of the morning the enemy machine-gun bullets rang on our gun shields.’ As the sky lightened, Villista infantry moved forward in skirmish lines, but ‘those hundred machine guns of Alvaro Obregon and those Yaqui Indians were firing on them from the cover of their holes,’ Villa remembered, ‘and…my men could hardly advance….I ordered that the lines of infantry advance…only when the fire of our cannons was great, and that the cavalry…let them ride double to…where they could be effective, because it was sad to see how those men would fall as they took their first steps out of their positions.’

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