A Sinister Splendor

by Mike Blakely

  “General Taylor, sir. Looks like rain coming from the northwest.”

  Taylor nodded. “The artillery shakes it from the sky.”

  Never in his military career had he imagined such a dreadful day. More than 120 brave men slaughtered like quail before the scatterguns of bird hunters. Almost four hundred wounded or missing. A peculiar and burdensome thought struck him. He was in the habit of writing letters to the families of men killed in action. But after this day … how could he? There was so much to think about. So much to worry over. When would he find time to write to 120 parents and widows?

  He took some solace in the knowledge that La Teneria had been captured. The reports said that the volunteers under his former son-in-law, Jeff Davis, had taken down the Mexican banner and hoisted the American flag up the pole. But the hold on La Teneria was tenuous, and the Black Fort remained unconquered.

  The Ohioans had assaulted the Purisima Bridge—gateway to the north side of Monterrey—only to be repulsed by entrenched Mexican defenders. They had veered east to join Jeff Davis’s attack on El Diablo. They fell under the command of Major General William O. Butler, leader of all the volunteer regiments. And there the Mexicans opened an enfilading fire from Purisima Bridge, wounding the old poet warrior, Butler, Taylor’s second-in-command. His troops had been forced to retreat.

  He looked away to the east, only to see some three hundred men digging a mass grave for soldiers who woke up alive this morning.

  He shifted his gaze to the far-off western end of the city. There, under General William Worth, things had gone as planned, if not better. The missives carried by hard-riding couriers glowed with accounts of the Texas mounted rifles—Hay’s Rangers—and their fantastic exploits. After securing the Saltillo road, the Rangers and the Fifth Infantry had mounted a bold attack on Federation Hill, which rose to the south of the road and the Santa Catarina River. While wading the swift stream, they had taken heavy cannon and musket fire from the two small forts atop the hill. And yet they refused to falter in their advance.

  From that point, Taylor had been able to watch the attack through his spyglass as five hundred U.S. soldiers bravely scaled the steep, barren slopes of Federation Hill. So far away was the hill that the men themselves could not be seen, even through the glass. But the puffs of smoke from their muskets revealed their line of assault as they climbed with remarkable rapidity to the summit. They captured both artillery emplacements and chased the surviving enemy soldiers from the hill.

  Yet there was another prominence that had to be taken, west of town and north of the Saltillo road: Independence Hill. On the slope that faced the town stood the Bishop’s Palace—a veritable castle that looked as if it had been built long ago. Taylor feared that it would not be as easily conquered as the little redoubts on Federation Hill. He knew from the reports of the couriers that General Worth planned to assault Independence Hill at dawn.

  As he fretted over all of this, he realized that Bliss had begun to speak.

  “… so I’ve come up with a solution if you’d like to hear it.”

  Taylor blinked as a large raindrop hit the back of his hand, which rested on the pommel. “I’m sorry, Bill. Solution to what?”

  “The letters. All of the letters that must be written to the families of the men killed today.”

  “Yes, I’d like to hear your solution. I’ve been dreading it.”

  “I’ll write an appropriate letter and submit it to you for your approval. Then I’ll recruit a dozen lieutenants to pen ten copies each. All you will need to do is to sign each letter.”

  Taylor nodded. “I suppose you will have your scribes leave a blank space for the name of each man killed?”

  “Exactly, sir. I will fill in those names myself.”

  He frowned. “I don’t like the impersonal nature of it, but we have no alternative. We must not dwell on death when the battle has yet to be won by the living.”

  Just then a lonely bugle began to play taps at the mass grave for the men slain on this bloody day. Taylor reined his mount to the east. He touched his fingers to his hat brim in a salute that he held to the end of the familiar dirge.

  Raindrops peppered the riders now.

  “Sir, you should retire to your tent before the deluge begins.”

  Taylor spurred Old Whitey toward Walnut Springs. “Nonsense, Major. I will visit the hospital tents and all of my wounded officers before I retire.”

  “As you wish, General.”

  “Bill,” the commander said, softening his voice, “do you know the nature of General Butler’s injury?”

  “No, sir, but I gather from the reports that it was not deadly.”

  Taylor grunted, thankful. “Did you know he’s a poet?”

  “Yes, I had heard that, sir.”

  “He gave me his book once. The Boatman’s Horn. The poem of the same name is not bad. Not bad at all.”

  “Do you remember it, sir?”

  “It’s a long poem. I only remember one part. The part about the music of the horn. That bugle back there reminded me.” Taylor coughed and prepared to recite from memory.

  “Music, the master-spirit that can move

  Its waves to war, or lull them into love—

  Can cheer the dying sailor on the wave

  And shed bright halos round the soldier’s grave.”

  Major

  LUTHER GIDDINGS

  Walnut Springs

  September 21, 1846

  He woke from an unintended nap, aching and hungry. All was dark. The events of the bloody day flooded his thoughts like an explosion of canister. My men, he thought. Major Luther Giddings crawled out of his tent, his muscles racked with cramps from the exertions of the battle.

  Outside, a cold drizzle caused rainwater to stream down a wrinkle in his tent canvas and patter upon the sodden ground. He could not see it in the dark, but he could hear it. It laughed at him and mocked his thirst. He felt for it, found it gushing cold on his palm, then fell to his knees and drank from the little cascade, opening his mouth like a baby bird in a nest.

  Struggling to rise to his feet, he thought once again of his men and his hunger. He might have trudged to the officers’ mess but decided instead to take his meal with the enlisted troops. He felt he owed them. They had followed his orders and performed bravely under heavy fire. His Ohio Volunteers had lost fifteen dead and forty wounded.

  Dragging along through the camp at Walnut Springs, he spotted a fire among the rows of tents. A cook served soldiers standing in line. As he approached, one of the enlisted men waiting for a meal saluted.

  “Good evening, Major Giddings.”

  Others turned to salute.

  “At ease, men.” Giddings returned the salutes. He stood there for an awkward moment.

  “Would you like a plate, sir?” the cook asked.

  “If there’s any left after the men eat,” Giddings replied.

  “There’s plenty, sir.”

  The soldier at the head of the line handed his plate and cup to Giddings.

  “Well, if you’re sure there’s enough. Thank you, Private.” He stepped up to the warmth of the fire. The cook ladled out chunks of boiled beef from a cauldron suspended over the fire as another soldier placed a hard biscuit on his plate. A third took his tin cup and filled it with coffee from a nearby pot.

  “I want to thank you, gentlemen. Not just for the food, but for your composure and bravery under fire today.”

  “It was a hot little skirmish, wasn’t it, sir?”

  “You might say so.”

  “This way, sir,” said a man who had already filled his plate. “We’ve a table of sorts under that canvas, yonder.”

  Giddings followed the men a short distance to a wide board, ten or twelve feet long, propped up on sawhorses at either end.

  “Pull up a chair, sir, and set your plate down.”

  In the dim light, Giddings could barely see the table, but he did as the soldier suggested.

  “Major, them lancer
s,” a rifleman began, pausing to chew, “did you ever think you’d see such a thing?”

  The memory cut like his own knife stabbing the chunk of beef that he raised to his mouth. Lancers, one hundred strong, had ridden out of Monterrey to harass his regiment as it withdrew from El Diablo. His Ohio Volunteers didn’t know how to form a hollow square—the traditional defensive formation against a cavalry attack—but Giddings had ordered them to form up behind a chaparral fence and level their muskets and rifles on the attackers.

  “It was lucky for us you noticed that brush fence, Major. But I wish to God them lancers would’ve rode closer.”

  Giddings said nothing, but he remembered the Mexicans viciously spearing helpless American soldiers wounded by the artillery barrage earlier in the day.

  “Yes, they were brave enough to attack the wounded men, but lacking in moral courage to get within range of our sights.”

  “That one did,” a corporal recalled. “Brave man. An officer. Rode right up to us and was shot dead.”

  “Which one of our boys was it that went out and fetched his boots?”

  Giddings stabbed another piece of the tough beef. “That was Lieutenant Hughes, of Company A,” he said. “Hughes had lost his shoes crossing the canal ditch at El Diablo and was left barefooted as the day he was born. It was he who pulled the dead lancer’s boots off and said there was never a better fit.”

  Some men chuckled, briefly.

  “Say, who was that boy climbing that tree during all the shelling?”

  “Oh, that was some kid from Company D.”

  “What the hell was he doing?”

  “It was an orange tree. He climbed up there to pick an orange.”

  “With all that lead and shrapnel flying around?”

  “It was for his pal. A boy named Joe Lombeck. Shot clean through and dying. Begging for water, but all the canteens were empty. So that kid brought his pal Lombeck an orange.”

  Utensils clacked against tin plates for a while.

  Giddings swallowed and reached for his cup. “The damnedest thing I saw was Private Myers, of the rifle company, getting shot in the mouth.” He slurped at the strong coffee.

  “In the mouth?” a soldier said. “Did it kill him?”

  “The musket ball that hit him must have flown a long way, or was fired with a poor powder charge. It shattered some teeth and then lodged in the back of his throat, but he was able to cough it up. Then, spitting out his broken teeth and some blood, he said, ‘That was a pill too bitter to swallow, but damned if it hasn’t salivated me for revenge!’”

  The men laughed as the light from an approaching lantern began to illuminate the table. Giddings looked up to see the regimental surgeon lumbering toward the table with his plate and the lantern. Blood covered the surgeon’s apron.

  As the surgeon placed the lantern on the table, one of the soldiers leaped back from the board, knocking his chair over backwards.

  “That’s a finger! That’s somebody’s cut-off finger on the table!”

  Now Giddings focused on the board between the plates and cups. To his disgust, he saw thin strips of human flesh and globs of clotted blood. He, too, pulled his chair back and stepped away, as the surgeon began to laugh.

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake, boys!” cried the doctor. “We had to borrow your table in the surgery tent for a while when business was booming. We only cut off some legs and arms upon it. And that finger.” He resumed laughing.

  Giddings realized that his men were looking at him for a solution. So this was war. He decided it was time to toughen up.

  “Lift your plates and flip the board over,” he ordered. “Is it not better to dine around this table now than to have lain upon it today?”

  The men solemnly followed his order. One by one they reclaimed their places around the grisly plank. They ate in silence, for the surgeon had ceased to chuckle.

  Lieutenant Colonel

  SAM WALKER

  Independence Hill

  September 22, 1846

  He jammed the cold, wet toe of his boot into a crevice and stuck his skinned knuckles into another crack in the rocks above his head. He knew that if he slipped, he would fall twenty feet from the sheer cliff, then tumble hundreds more down the muddy slope of Independence Hill. Pulling himself laboriously upward, he hooked an elbow over the rim rock, then a knee. He dragged himself up and over the stony ledge and rolled over onto his back to catch his breath and rest his aching muscles.

  Staring upward, Lieutenant Colonel Sam Walker noticed that the cloudy sky had turned from charcoal to slate. He could now see it silhouetting the sandbags atop the hill that he had been climbing for the past three hours in the rain and dark. Mexican defenders would be waiting behind the sandbagged walls of the little redoubt they called Fort Libertad, still some one hundred yards up a steep slope, on the summit of Independence Hill. Dawn was fast approaching, and with it mortal combat would commence.

  Walker had eaten nothing but a couple of roasted ears of corn for the past day and a half. In the same time, he had caught only a few fleeting minutes of sleep in the mud and rain, without a blanket. But when he touched the grip of his Colt revolver, he knew he would rally for the imminent attack.

  A few hours had passed since Colonel Jack Hays had wakened Walker by touching his shoulder—from a distance, with a stick. Walker tended to wake up fighting.

  “We’re going to collect some Mexican sentries,” Hays had said.

  Walker had risen willingly. His old wounds ached when he slept in the mud. He much preferred sneaking behind enemy lines in the dark. He and Hays, with a few picked Rangers, had found the first sentry asleep—an easy catch. Prodding the surprised soldier with the tip of a bowie knife, they had forced him to lead them to the next sentry along the base of Independence Hill. Then to the next, and the next. Within two hours, all the sentries on the west side of the hill had been captured and sent back to General Worth’s camp as prisoners of war.

  It was all part of Hays’s plan, which General Worth had approved. Storming Federation Hill in the daylight yesterday was one thing. But Independence Hill was higher, steeper, and fortified with a castle—the Bishop’s Palace, or El Obispado. So Hays had proposed a nighttime ascent of the steepest slope for a surprise attack at dawn. He and Walker had led some three hundred Rangers, U.S. regulars, and volunteers in the three-hour climb.

  Now, as he rested atop the rim rock, he felt a pebble hit him in the face. He looked back toward the precipice in time to see a grimy hand tossing a second pebble at him. He recognized Captain Ad Gillespie reaching out to him for assistance. Yesterday, the same Captain Gillespie had distinguished himself by being the first U.S. soldier to breach the walls of the gun emplacement atop Federation Hill. Walker rolled toward him, grabbed his wrist, and helped his fellow Ranger scramble atop the cliff. Soon, Colonel Jack Hays appeared on the brink nearby as other Rangers and soldiers came up from below. Walker and Gillespie helped pull some of them up, and he signaled to them to spread silently along the slope for the final ascent.

  The sky continued to brighten as they moved among boulders large enough to provide some cover. Walker, in the lead, had climbed to within thirty yards of Fort Libertad. As he paused to look back on the progress of the men, he heard the crack of a musket from above and the hum of a bullet careering off of rock. Shouts and more shots followed.

  “Save your loads and charge that wall!” he ordered.

  He felt his legs churning up the slope as the few Mexican defenders at the sandbag parapets reloaded. The assault had obviously surprised them. They had never dreamed the Americans would scale the steepest flank of Independence Hill on such a cold, wet night. But he knew reinforcements would be coming fast from the palace if he didn’t rout the enemy at the sandbags of Fort Libertad.

  “Charge, boys!”

  The reloaded Mexican muskets began to pepper his ranks again, but his men ducked and darted behind rocks as they ascended. Walker grabbed the branch of some sort of low-growing sc
rub to aid in his mad scramble upward.

  He heard Hays’s voice far to the right. “Give them hell, boys!”

  Closer, to his left, Walker heard the infantry leader, Major Vinton. “Fire!”

  Walker drew his Colt revolver as he took his first look over the sandbags. He shot the nearest Mexican soldier dead. The man next to him charged with a bayonet, probably thinking Walker held a single-shot horse pistol. He shot this defender in the face as he felt his fighting spirit lifting him over the rampart. He shot a third Mexican infantryman caught reloading at the wrong time.

  Ad Gillespie leaped over the battlements near him. Walker heard the familiar slap of a bullet against human flesh and saw Gillespie stagger back a step. Doing his best to ignore his obvious wound, Gillespie waved his men onward over the battlement. A pair of Rangers from Gillespie’s company stopped to render aid to their commander.

  “Boys, stand me up behind that ledge,” Gillespie said. “I will do some execution on them yet before I die.”

  Walker clearly heard the words, then saw Ad cough a spray of blood. His ire flared as he wished to hell he had seen which Mexican had shot his friend. He fired his last two shots from his Colt, clearing the way for more Rangers and soldiers from Major Vinton’s “Red-Legged Infantry” to vault over the sandbagged wall. A young U.S. Army private fell dead at Gillespie’s feet, but Gillespie was still standing, leaning against the sandbags, using a boulder for cover, firing his Colt methodically.

  The stunned Mexicans were now on the run down the gentle eastern slope of Independence Hill, back to the fortified Bishop’s Palace five hundred yards away. With them, they took three pieces of artillery that Walker wished he could have captured.

  Now he rushed to Ad Gillespie and reached his friend about the time the Ranger slid down the wall to sit on the rocky summit, leaving a trail of his blood on the sandbags.

  “That’s naught but a scratch,” Walker said, taking a knee beside Gillespie.