A Sinister Splendor

by Mike Blakely

  “I suppose we should continue to pursue the enemy unless we receive orders to the contrary,” he said to Dent.

  “I suppose so. Right down to the Rio Grande.”

  Then what? Grant wondered. If they drove the entire Mexican Army of the North out of Texas, would that satisfy General Taylor? President Polk? Congress? The American people? Today was Saturday, May 9. It was possible that the news of the Thornton debacle at Rancho de Carricitos had reached Washington, DC, by now via steamship. By Monday or Tuesday, Congress could be debating full-fledged war against Mexico.

  He spat on the ground to clear his mouth of grit and his mind of politics. Forget all of that, he thought to himself. It is not within your purview. Tomorrow is Sunday. The day of the Lord. A day for worship. Thank God I am still alive.

  “I’m going to write to Julia tomorrow,” he said to Lieutenant Dent.

  “That’s good, Sam.”

  SARAH BORGINNES

  Fort Texas

  May 9, 1846

  Sarah poured the last of her coffee into Captain Loud’s tin cup and looked north over the parapets toward Resaca de la Palma.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Borginnes,” the captain said.

  “I wish it could be stronger, Captain, but—”

  Before she could finish her statement, an enemy cannonball announced its arrival with a hissing scream as it slammed into the earthen wall just below Loud’s battery. Sarah threw herself to the dirt, which had been packed hard by wheels of guns and boots of men for so many days now that she had lost count. Loose dirt and dust rained down on her from the impact.

  “Range that goddamned gun!” Loud yelled. He looked down on Sarah. “Are you injured?”

  “Hell no, Captain!” she said, springing to her feet. “Just another near miss from those damned Irish deserters.”

  He smiled, his teeth looking like pearls next to the soot-blackened flesh of his face. He had remained on his feet. He held his hand over his cup to prevent dirt from falling into his coffee.

  “Can you tell what’s going on up the road?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “My ears are ringing too loud to hear much. But I trust General Taylor will fight his way through with our supplies. Tell me, Mrs. Borginnes, how is Major Brown today?”

  She frowned. “One step from heaven’s fold, I’m afraid.” She sprang aside to make way for two men lugging a crate of ammunition up the embankment. “I’d best tend to my boys,” she said to Loud.

  He bowed slightly and touched the grimy brim of his campaign hat.

  From the ramparts of Fort Texas she had listened, when she could steal a moment, to the battle raging up the Point Isabel road. She had seen the clouds of dust and smoke rise from the chaparral. Yet it was impossible to know what was going on in that bramble-choked thicket. She had too much to do inside the walls of the garrison to stand for very long and watch the road for signs of one army or another.

  Most of the Mexican soldiers surrounding the fort had left two days ago to meet General Taylor’s army on the wagon road, but a regiment had been left behind to carry on the siege. A number of enemy batteries had also remained on the Rio Grande del Norte to harass the besieged defenders of Fort Texas. The past two days, however, had brought about a sharp decline in the artillery fire directed at the fort. Everything now depended upon what was happening in the chaparral up the road to the north.

  As she hiked to her cook fires, she prayed silently, Please, God Almighty, get General Taylor through them Mexicans with them supplies.

  She threw some more lumber from broken ammunition boxes under a cauldron and stirred its contents—gruel made of weevil-infested oats. Throwing a handful of roasted coffee beans into the only grinder in the fort, she cranked the handle furiously, anxious to return to the parapets. Having refilled the coffeepot, she hung it over the fire to heat. The next pot was now boiling over the embers, so she wrapped a dirty rag around its handle and marched away with it toward the gunners manning the east walls of the garrison.

  Climbing the embankment on weary legs, she greeted Lieutenant Braxton Bragg, who was overseeing the battery of twelve-pounders on the east point of the star-shaped fort.

  “Hot coffee, sir!” she sang. “Sorry it ain’t stronger, but I’m having to ration the coffee beans. Supply’s running low.”

  Bragg nodded without smiling. “Do not apologize, ma’am. It is you, not the coffee, that has kept the boys’ spirits up these past few days.”

  She felt a bit stunned at his statement. Braxton Bragg was not usually one to hand out compliments. “Just doin’ my part, sir.” She poured his cup half full.

  She had almost finished divvying up the coffee among the artillerymen when a nearby private on watch with a telescope shouted, “Lieutenant Bragg! Something’s happening downstream.” He pointed.

  Sarah followed the soldier’s gaze and saw, a quarter mile away, men streaming and stumbling from the timber, toward the river.

  “Give me the glass!” Bragg ordered. Steadying the optics on a sandbag, he took a moment to find the action.

  Sarah saw more and more men pour from the chaparral to the banks of the Rio Grande. Dozens, scores. What did it mean?

  “By God, they’re Mexicans!” Bragg announced. “They’re retreating! Running for their goddamned lives!”

  A cheer rose among the men and spread along the ramparts of the beleaguered garrison. Sarah raised her coffeepot and added her voice to the victory cry. All the worry that the bombardment had twisted up in her came out in a tooth-rattling ululation. She watched now as fleeing Mexican soldiers rushed to the river by the hundreds. They began to descend the riverbanks and flounder into the swift current. They were clawing at one another, overcrowding the few boats to be found at the water’s edge.

  God bless General Taylor, that rough-and-ready old warhorse! He’s coming to save us! Thank you, God!

  “Fire!” a lieutenant shouted.

  A volley from two guns sent exploding shells into the mass retreat.

  “Cease firing, men!” Bragg ordered. “No need to waste powder and shot. The river will kill them now.”

  Lieutenant

  JOHN RILEY

  Fort Texas

  May 9, 1846

  Lieutenant John Riley sighted along the tube of the ancient brass cannon, eyeballing the trajectory for his next shot. His last attempt had fallen just short of Captain Loud’s emplacement of eighteen-pounders. He would risk a bit more powder behind the next ball. His little battery of Irish gunners had been issued the most antiquated artillery in the Mexican Army of the North, yet he was determined to prove the mettle of his men. The touchhole to this brass six-pounder had been blown out to the diameter of his thumb from decades of firing. He wasn’t sure how much more powder the tube could take, but he was willing to risk another fistful to lift the next round into the muzzle of one of those big eighteens.

  His preferred target would have been Lieutenant Bragg, but Bragg was on the far side of the star fort and out of his range. For now, he would settle for Captain Loud’s battery as his target, but he hoped to find that nativist bastard, Bragg, within range before this war was over.

  Through the ringing in his ears, a peculiar sound caught his attention. It resembled a gust in the treetops, then the distant bellowing of beasts such as geese, jackasses, or cattle. When he saw the flailing of men’s arms on the top of the earthen star fort, however, he knew he was hearing the rise of a battle cry from the enemy.

  “John!” cried a private named Barney Hogan. “Look!”

  Riley grabbed the private by the ear and twisted it. In the U.S. Army they had shared the same rank. “You’ll refer to me as Lieutenant Riley, Private!”

  “Yes, sir! But, Lieutenant … look!” He pointed up the Matamoras Road that ran between his battery and fort.

  Riley lifted his eyes to see hundreds of Mexican soldiers running toward him. He released Private Hogan’s ear. Far away, up the road to Point Isabel, he saw an American flag in the distance. “Faith and
begorra,” he grumbled. “It’s a rout, to be sure.”

  “What’ll we do?” Hogan asked, rubbing his ear.

  “Get off one more shot, then join the retreat,” Riley replied.

  “Should we not stand and fight the bastards?”

  “It’s hard to fight, dangling from the end of a rope.”

  “What, then?” asked Private August Geary. “Do we run like cowards?”

  “Better to be a coward for a minute than dead the rest of your life. Now get to the river and prepare yourselves to cross it. I won’t have the whole of our company hanged or drowned on this day.”

  The men stared at him.

  “Retreat! That’s an order! Hurry, before your fellow soldiers come and pull you under. Take anything wooden that will hold you afloat.”

  The men emptied crates and gathered the pine poles of ramrods and bore sponges to use for flotation. They slipped down the riverbank toward the Rio Grande as Riley loaded the cannon with a double dose of powder. He kissed a six-pound brass cannonball before shoving it into the muzzle of the gun.

  “Say hello to the bloody heretic nativist Protestants.” He patted his cannon like a favored old horse.

  “Are you coming, Lieutenant?” asked Private Barney Hogan.

  “I’ll be along after this parting shot. Go, now. This gun may blow itself to bits.”

  Private Hogan disappeared below the brink of the riverbank as Lieutenant Riley picked up a coil of fuse material. With a knife placed beside the coil, he hacked off a ten-inch section of the fuse known as “black match,” a cotton string covered with a dried slurry of glue and black powder. It was old technology compared to the primers and lanyards the Americans used, but it was what he had been issued by the Mexican Army.

  He jammed the black match into the touchhole of the old piece and found a squib with a burning ember on the end. He blew on the ember to enliven it and touched it to the end of the fuse. He watched a second or two, to make sure it would burn, then calmly turned away to take cover under the brink of the riverbank in case the little gun really did explode.

  Sliding down the well-used trail, he threw himself down to bury his face in the dirt. The explosion jarred the ground; its recoil sent the cannon rolling backwards down the riverbank, right past him, and crashing through what was left of the timber in this war-torn valley. He sprang quickly to his feet and looked over the brink to watch the path of his shot. It sailed over Loud’s eighteen-pounders and fell into the interior of Fort Texas, probably harming no one.

  “You lucky bastards,” he said, disappointed.

  Now the first of the fleeing Mexicans began to trot and stumble past him to the riverbank. Before joining them, he emptied an ammunition crate that looked like it would float. He paused to watch the crazed men tumble down the riverbank, already exhausted from running for miles. He stayed put for a while, instinctively feeling uneasy about joining the mob. From his perch atop the bank, he could see that his own men had made their way across the river, the current having carried them downstream. The retreating Mexicans were not so lucky.

  The first men found a small boat hidden along the bank. They clambered aboard, crawling atop one another like ants. As the boat drifted from the bank, others came splashing into the water to ride along, until the weight of exhausted men swamped the boat. Men disappeared underwater and did not return. Only two still held fast to the boat as it bobbed up.

  By now men at the river’s edge were being pushed into the water by many others behind them, and none seemed fit to swim. They trampled and clawed one another down into the muddy water, creating a raft of dead men floating, sinking, spinning in the current.

  “By God, they’re all going to die,” he said under his breath. He knew he had to distance himself from this throng to survive his own crossing.

  Carrying his crate upstream, he tried to get some of the men to follow him, but he only knew a few words of Spanish.

  “Alla!” he said, pointing upstream. “Venga!”

  Finally he grabbed a couple of soldiers much smaller than himself and made them come along. “No bueno aqui,” he said, pointing down to the river. Then he pointed upstream. “Bueno alla!”

  A few other followers began to tag along, recognizing his insignia as an officer. Riley led them away from the retreating mob to a safer place along the bank. Finding a trail, they filed down to the water. Here, Riley gathered up an armload of driftwood and handed it to the nearest man. The others saw his reasoning and found their own makeshift rafts. Satisfied that he had given a few men a shot at survival, he took off his hat, his tunic, and his boots and latched them inside his handy crate. He waded into the water, feeling the muddy riverbed quickly drop away under his feet.

  Now he was floating, the crate just buoyant enough to keep his mouth above the surface as he kicked for the opposite shore. The current caught him and he started moving swiftly downstream. He looked toward the Texas bank to watch hundreds of soldiers, who had survived whatever Taylor’s army did to them at Resaca de la Palma only to trample one another into the Rio Grande mud. It felt like poison to his soul to see so many fellow Catholics die needlessly in one final baptism.

  He turned his face away, sickened and demoralized. Downstream, he saw a boat crossing the river. Exhausted soldiers floundered toward it. So many desperate men clawed at the gunwales that the skiff began to take on water. From the middle of the vessel, a priest stood up and held his crucifix to the sky. Then everything went under—men, oars, the boat, and the cross.

  President

  JAMES K. POLK

  Washington, DC

  May 13, 1846

  The president realized that he was no longer listening to the ramblings of the general-in-chief of the army, Winfield Scott. He was staring at Scott’s jowly face as he spoke, but he had ceased to absorb the general’s words. All around Scott, Polk’s office on the second floor of the presidential mansion hummed with the excited conversations of cabinet members, though no cabinet meeting had been called.

  Four days of unending anxiety and utter turmoil had robbed the president of many hours of sleep and more than a few meals. Last Saturday, the express mail had arrived from the Texas coast aboard a navy steamer. With the dispatches came General Taylor’s latest missive, stating that “hostilities may now be considered as commenced.”

  A scouting party consisting of two companies of dragoons led by a Captain Seth Thornton had been attacked on the U.S. side of the Del Norte by an overwhelming force of Mexican cavalry. Eleven American soldiers had died. Captain Thornton had been rendered unconscious and his second-in-command, a Captain Hardee, had been forced to surrender. The survivors of the attack had been taken prisoner. American blood had been shed on American soil.

  Even before this, Polk had been outraged that his envoy to Mexico, John Slidell, had been curtly rejected by the new president of Mexico, Mariano Paredes, who had overthrown the duly-elected president, José Joaquin de Herrera. Negotiations with Herrera had been promising, to the point that Polk thought a war might be avoided and much territory purchased from Mexico. But the new head of state, Paredes, hated everything American and had refused to even recognize Ambassador Slidell.

  A diplomat rejected! The newspapers and much of the citizenry had been rightfully angered by the affront. And now the Mexican military assault Polk had long expected had finally occurred. Yes, he had expected, even hoped for, the Mexican attack. And yet he felt embarrassingly unprepared to react.

  Since receiving the news, the President’s Mansion had seethed with activity. An emergency cabinet meeting had been called Saturday evening. An address to Congress had been prepared and delivered, urging a declaration of war and executive authority to prosecute the conflict. On Monday, the House of Representatives had passed a bill to that effect by a vote of 173 for, 14 against. The next day, Tuesday, the Senate passed the same bill 42 to 2.

  Now it was Wednesday, and preparations for war with Mexico were still developing. How many volunteers should be called up
on and from which states? How many new regular army regiments should be formed? Who would lead them? How many millions must Congress allocate to fund it all?

  Polk’s office in the President’s Mansion served as the hub of the chaos. For four days, visitors had come and gone in an unending procession of bombastic egos spewing wild opinions. Military leaders, senators, representatives, foreign ambassadors, cabinet members—all felt the need to weigh in, no matter how uninformed. Many of the politicians sought commands in the new regiments that would soon be created by Congress. To Polk’s gratification, his cabinet had been united from the onset of the war news. Not even Secretary of State James Buchanan had proven truculent, as was often his nature.

  Polk caught himself staring at one of Scott’s war medals on the ostentatious uniform the general had chosen to wear. They didn’t call him “Old Fuss and Feathers” for nothing. Scott was much taller than Polk, and the medals came to eye level on the president. He tried to concentrate on Scott’s rambling diatribe.

  “… some time to sort out the logistical challenges … munitions and provisions … congressional funding…”

  Polk looked past the braided silk epaulet on Scott’s shoulder to see his secretary of state, James Buchanan, enter his office, a document of some kind in his hand. Weary of listening to the general, he was more anxious to see what Buchanan had up his sleeve, for that familiar, belligerent glint was back in Buchanan’s eye.

  “Very well, General,” he said to Scott, interrupting whatever it was that he was saying, “you may return later today with a more complete report of a formal nature.”

  “I understand, Mr. President. I have just one other issue to discuss with you.”

  Someone in the office laughed at something, which annoyed Polk. Daylight streamed pleasantly in through the window, as if nothing were the matter. General Scott stood silent before Polk.

  “Yes, General,” Polk said, guessing what the issue might be, “I am prepared to tender to you the field command of the army to be raised. You are entitled to it, according to your rank as general-in-chief of the army.”