Garza knocked on the equerry’s door, and when that officer saw the soi-disant priest he was delighted: ‘Just what we need!’ And he hurried both Garza and the priest down Soledad Street to the Veramendi house, where, in the old courtyard with the fountain playing, a wedding party had assembled.
Benito met the bride, a lively, attractive girl of nineteen whose mother had succeeded in protecting her from half a dozen officers who had tried to capture her: ‘She marries, this one, and that’s the only way.’ Refusing even colonels any access to her daughter, she had proclaimed repeatedly that she and her mother before her were ladies of high quality and rigorous morals, and that she intended keeping her daughter that way. In the end, apparently, some officer had surrendered and proposed marriage, but it was clear to Garza and to the equerry at least, that the wedding was to be a cynical charade performed by a fake priest.
Benito was indignant at this, for the woman and her daughter were respectable mexicanas, and here the mexicano army was treating them with the same contempt the Texicans did. He had expected better from Santa Anna’s men. The general himself had repeatedly expressed to Garza his respect for the locals, assuring him that once the norteamericanos were evicted, men like Garza would assume command and make Tejas a rich and leading province within the mexicano system. Benito thought it a good thing that Santa Anna did not know of this burlesque, for he was sure the general would have halted it.
But at this moment cheers erupted and all heads turned admiringly to greet the lucky bridegroom, who marched sedately from the interior of the palace, bestowing nods and smiles on all. It was Santa Anna himself, solidly married in Xalapa, with numerous children and with at least seven mistresses in the capital. As the tedious siege had worn on, day after day, he felt he needed amusement and had found it in the person of this lively lass who seemed to reciprocate his feelings, but her mother had imposed such a rigorous regime, never allowing her daughter a moment to herself, that in disgust Santa Anna had proposed marriage, an honorable gesture which threw the mother into paroxysms of joy.
‘I could tell you were a perfect gentleman,’ she assured him, and he indulged her when she wanted to make the wedding a gala affair, but he had put his foot down when she proposed to invite the entire mexicano population of Béjar to the ceremony—‘To relieve the boredom of the fighting,’ she had said—because he feared that some civilian would be aware that he was already married and would condemn this mock wedding as a fake.
As he stepped into the center of the crowd he bowed low before the fatuous mother, kissed her hand reverently, and said: ‘This is the happiest day of my life,’ and she responded: ‘With me the same.’
And so the preposterous wedding party formed, there in the lovely Veramendi gardens where Jim Bowie had often sat with his beloved Ursula, and the bogus priest was moved forward, mumbling some lines and fumbling with a Bible, and the fat fellow, who really did look the part, pronounced the handsome couple man and wife. When he added: ‘You may now kiss the bride,’ Santa Anna swept the willing young lady into his arms and carried her into the adobe palace, where the marriage was consummated within minutes.
For many tumultuous hours the newlyweds stayed in their room, uttering squeals and chuckles that seeped out into the hallways, where the adoring mother relished each echo, and then late in the afternoon of Tuesday, i March, the general appeared in the garden, his uniform pressed by his new mother-in-law, to issue a rapid chain of commands.
Protected by a convoy of soldiers who could be spared from the siege, his bride was to be taken immediately south to San Luis Potosí, where she was to be given every consideration; he had reason to hope that she was pregnant, and if so, he wanted the child to be treated at least as generously as his other bastards. His mother-in-law was to be given the best house in Béjar and a pension, and to be kept as far removed from him as possible.
Now he plunged vigorously into preparations for bringing the siege to a rousing conclusion. Summoning his aides, he learned from them the gratifying news that through late arrivals his army had now grown to twenty-four hundred effectives: ‘Excellent. They have a hundred and fifty. Our superiority, sixteen-to-one.’
‘Excuse me, Excellency. While you were’—the colonel hesitated—‘resting, about thirty additional rebels slipped into the mission. We believe they now have about a hundred and eighty.’
‘Fools,’ Santa Anna muttered. ‘Fighting to commit suicide.’ Recalculating his figures, he came up with the accurate discrepancy: ‘Thirteen of us to every rebel.’ It was obvious that he could charge the walls head-on if he was willing to waste the manpower.
When it became evident that the siege was not going to force the rebels to surrender in the near future, since they had all the beef they needed and more than enough water from their two wells, Santa Anna summoned General Ripperdá and said graciously: ‘You were right. We’ll have to storm the walls.’ But before issuing the final order, which could entail the loss of perhaps a thousand of his men, he wanted to see for himself the exact state of preparation at the Alamo, so on March fourth he asked his brother-in-law General Cós and three scouts including Garza to take a long ride with him around the former mission. As they crossed the little bridge leading to the east side of the river, Benito cautioned the dictator: ‘Excellency, do not ride carelessly. Remember, those men in there have what they call Kentucky rifles.’
‘Every army thinks it has superior weapons.’
‘But these are superior.’
‘Son, I fought these rebels at Medina in 1813. They possessed nothing to fear, not even personal bravery. We fired at them and they ran.’
‘Excellency, have you ever seen a Kentucky rifle in action?’ When Santa Anna said ‘No,’ Benito told him: ‘This is one. I bought it from a Kentucky man himself. How far do you think it can fire with accuracy?’
Santa Anna, always interested in firearms, said authoritatively: ‘Our muskets, in good condition, ninety yards, maybe a hundred.’
‘More like sixty,’ Cós said.
‘See that tree?’ Garza asked. ‘With the paper under it. Maybe some bottles. How far?’
The officers agreed that it might be as much as two hundred and fifty yards. ‘Watch,’ Benito said, and with careful aim he sped a bullet right into the collection of trash, throwing paper and bits of glass high in the air.
‘Incredible,’ Santa Anna said, drawing away from the still-distant Alamo.
‘And remember, Excellency. The norteamericanos established a rule in their two wars against the British: “Always fire for the gold.” ’
‘And what does that mean?’
‘My frontier friends told me: “Never fire aimlessly. Never fire at the common soldier. Always aim at the gold decoration of the officer.” Today you are wearing your gold medals, Excellency.’
Prudently, the little party moved to a distance of about three hundred yards, where, with a map, they circled the huge grounds of the Alamo, and as they rode from south to north the three scouts relayed to Santa Anna the information they had accumulated:
‘The fortified main gate at the south will be impossible to breach. This long west wall is only adobe, but it’s very thick. Rooms inside. You can see the patrol already on the roof. This north wall slopes at an angle and is not very stout. Difficult to climb, but our cannon could breach it, for certain.
‘Here on the east, a very stout wall, don’t try to force it. Those big square things are cattle pens, and the garden with one of the wells. Barracks there for the soldiers. If you try to break in here, you have to penetrate two sets of walls.
‘And now the chapel of the old mission. No roof, but extremely thick walls. I doubt they will waste much time defending this, because even if we did break through, we wouldn’t be anywhere. But that stretch which connects the chapel to the main south wall could prove to be their weak spot and our big opportunity.
‘Look! It has no wall of any kind. Only a ditch in front, wooden palisades of a sort, mostly brush I think
. It will be defended, of course, and they may put their best rifles there, but it can be breached.’
At the conclusion of this tour, which took nearly an hour, Santa Anna told Cós: ‘We will attack with great force from the north and knock a hole in that exposed wall with no houses behind it. But we will also attack with maximum clamor the palisade and hope to divert their forces.’
‘The church?’ an officer asked, referring to the roofless chapel. ‘What of that, Excellency?’
‘Attack it in force, but not seriously. Just enough to keep the defenders pinned down at a meaningless spot.’
Now the deployments were made: ‘Well attack from all sides at four o’clock Sunday morning. We should have the place by sunrise.’ He wheeled his beautiful horse, turned back to take one last look at the Alamo, and said: ‘Remember, no prisoners.’
From the church tower the red flag of death underscored that decision.
When the Macnabs arrived at Goliad toward dusk on Saturday, 20 February, they found affairs in much greater confusion than even Finlay had anticipated. He had assumed that Colonel Fannin, in response to Lieutenant Bonham’s plea, would have his men preparing to make a dash into the Alamo; instead, he learned that the two other supreme commanders, Grant the malodorous Scotsman and Johnson the wild-eyed Illinois greengrocer, had marched off on their own in the fatuous belief that with only sixty-odd untrained volunteers they could capture the important Mexican port of Matamoros near the mouth of the Rio Grande. Even their own scouts reported that General Urrea, one of the ablest Mexican leaders, had assembled more than a thousand well-armed veterans there.
‘What kind of madness is that?’ Finlay asked after he and his son had been assigned places to sleep inside the presidio walls.
‘It gets worse,’ an embittered member of the Georgia Battalion groused. ‘We should be on our way to the Alamo right now. But look at him.’
And for the first time Finlay Macnab, a man whose frontier experiences had converted a somewhat aimless character into one of surprising fortitude, witnessed at close quarters the confusion and lack of decisiveness which characterized Colonel Fannin. Thirty-two years old and disappointed because of his failure to graduate from West Point with a commission in the regular United States Army, he had become a slave trader for a while, then an eager drifter looking for something to turn up. He was an adventurer, inordinately ambitious, now in Texas looking for promotion to general, and reluctant to throw his forces into the Alamo, not because of cowardice or fear of death, but rather because if he were to do so, he would lose his command and be forced to serve under the despised amateur Colonel Travis.
On his visit to Goliad, Lieutenant Bonham had pleaded with all the considerable moral force he could muster for Fannin to march to the relief of the Alamo. Fannin had given an equivocal answer: he would go, he would not go, he would consider it. Six days later, on the twenty-third, he was still weighing alternatives after Santa Anna had surrounded the Alamo, so that reinforcements would now encounter serious trouble if they tried to enter.
Macnab wondered if valiant troops, ready for battle, had ever been led by an officer so pusillanimous: I wish we could light a fire under him, to see if he’d jump. Otto, listening to the complaints of the Georgia and Irish units, decided: If either Father or Uncle Zave was leading, we’d be on our way to San Antonio now. Then, eyes blazing, he thought: And if Lieutenant Bonham had anything to do with it, we’d already be there.
Fannin allowed the most contradictory rumors to agitate his men: ‘We’re marching to Gonzales!’ ‘No, it’s to Victoria to unite with reinforcements coming by sea.’ ‘No, that would be a retreat, and I heard Colonel Fannin swear on a stack of Bibles “I will never retreat!” ’ ‘We march to San Antonio tomorrow to do what we can!’
The ridiculous truth was that Fannin had given each of these orders, within the space of days, and had then countermanded each one. However, on 25 February he finally made up his mind: ‘Tomorrow at dawn we march to help defend the Alamo.’
On the morning of Friday the twenty-sixth, Finlay and Otto joined the three hundred and twenty soldiers from the Goliad presidio, and the hearts of all beat a little quicker at the realization that they were at last marching to the Alamo. Colonel Fannin, astride a chestnut stallion, rode to the head of his troops, raised his sword and cried: ‘On to destiny!’
But his expedition had progressed only two hundred yards when one of the major supply wagons broke down, and by the time it was repaired, other wagons that had taken the lead failed to negotiate a river crossing, so that total confusion resulted. Noon found the column stalled, and the afternoon wasted away without any significant movement. As day faded into night Macnab realized that in these fourteen hours the expeditionary force had covered less than a quarter of a mile.
At dawn on the twenty-seventh Colonel Fannin awakened to the ugly fact that he faced a seventy-mile march to the next replenishment depot, without sufficient food to sustain his troops. Having relied upon a swift dash to the first depot, he had not bothered to bring along emergency supplies. When Macnab heard that Fannin was going to ask his men to vote as to whether they wanted to move ahead to the Alamo or return to the safety of the presidio and regroup, he was outraged. ‘A commander doesn’t ask for a vote,’ he told the Georgians and Irishmen near him. ‘He senses in his gut what must be done and he does it.’ But then an Irishman with a wizened, knowing face said: ‘He’s taking the loss of that first wagon as an omen. “Don’t go on!” a little voice is surely whispering to him.’
‘My God!’ a Georgia man asked in disgust. ‘Are we bein’ led by omens?’
‘In this army we are,’ the Irishman said, but he was wrong, for Fannin was collecting his commissioned officers to ascertain how they interpreted not the omens but the hard facts:
‘Gentlemen, we face a most serious situation. We have, as you well know, inadequate provisions for a long march and no reasonable means of increasing them. We have faulty transport and no way of finding better. Our artillery pieces seem too heavy to drag over riverbeds. And what seems most important to me … by leaving the presidio without proper garrison, we tempt the enemy to sneak in and take it. What do you recommend that we do?’
In the face of such a pessimistic review, the vote was unanimous: Return to Goliad, bolster the fortifications, and defy the enemy from inside the walls: ‘The Alamo? Nothing can be done from this end to support it.’
So the expedition stumbled back to its launching spot, retreated within the safety of its walls, and began a crash program with two objectives: Build the walls so strong that they would be impregnable. Slaughter so many oxen and dry the meat so carefully that the men would never again be short of rations.
Finlay Macnab warned his son: ‘When a commander loses his nerve, disasters can happen.’
‘What shall we do?’ Otto asked.
‘Nothing.’ Then, afraid that his son might be as disoriented as Fannin, he asked: ‘Why? Did you want to leave?’
Otto could not explain in words, but the more he witnessed the ineptitude inside the presidio, the more he longed to serve with someone of honorable purpose like James Bonham. He was sure that Bonham would have quickly handled the perplexities that immobilized Fannin, and in the meantime he, Otto, would keep his rifle clean and await the battle he knew to be inevitable.
Just about this time an event occurred inside the Alamo which would have given Otto reassurance. James Bonham, surveying the situation with Colonel Travis and Davy Crockett, concluded that he must ride once again through the countryside in a last appeal to Fannin at Goliad and to the scattered farmers in the east for aid. Crockett, hearing his decision, said: ‘You were lucky last time, threading your way out and back in. This time?’
As if he knew no care in the world, the Carolina gentleman half saluted Travis, smiled at Davy, and mounted the mare that had served him so well before. Darting suddenly from the north wall of the Alamo, he spurred his mount and galloped directly through the Mexican lines. Bef
ore the startled besiegers could prevent it, he had broken free and was on his way back to Goliad to make one final, desperate plea for help.
Like the demon rider in an ancient ballad, Bonham rode through the night, and on the twenty-eighth, reined in at the Goliad presidio, where the men cheered him lustily, for they knew what heroism his mere appearance at that spot so distant from the Alamo entailed.
Bonham’s arrival did not impress Colonel Fannin, for it reopened questions long since resolved. There would be no rescue operation conducted from Goliad, and patiently he explained why: ‘Distance too great, transport too chancy, cannon too heavy, food and water too uncertain.’ On and on he went, reciting the best arguments in the world against any desperate lunge to the northwest, and as Bonham listened he had to concede that everything Fannin said was true, and relevant. Any cautious commander would hold back, as he was doing, but any brave commander would correct the disadvantages and forge ahead.
By the middle of the next afternoon Bonham had argued so persuasively that he was within minutes of persuading Fannin to act, when one of those freak accidents which so often determine history occurred. Bumptious Colonel Johnson, who had been trying to invade Mexico with a handful of heroes, stumbled into the presidio with a harrowing story: ‘We were surrounded by Mexicans. Chopped to pieces. Only four others survived.’
‘From your entire force?’ Fannin asked, his hands shaking.
‘And Dr. Grant, he seems to be lost.’
‘My God!’ Fannin cried, for this meant that the two inept leaders had lost a large part of his total force, and Bonham saw that it was futile to pressure this confused man any further. His will was gone and he had best be left alone, but when he looked at Johnson he had to think: His army lost. All but five killed. Yet he comes back alive to report. How?
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