The Isle of Devils

by Craig Janacek

  “Commandant,” said a voice softly. “Are you ready to move out?” From the soft Spanish accent, Iain Harrier recognized the approach of his second-in-command.

  He looked up and saw a man dressed in an identical fashion as him, albeit with one less bar on his shoulder insignia. Despite the similarity in dress, the two men otherwise differed greatly. The second man was tall and lithe, with immaculately- flowing black hair and a perfectly waxed moustache. In another world, outside of a soldier’s uniform, the man might have been mistaken for a Latin dandy. But standing warily in the dappled shade of the forest, his rifle cradled in his arms, his dark eyes gleamed with a dangerous intelligence.

  “Tell me, Diego, do you ever question your decision?”

  Capitaine Diego Garcia Ramirez brows knitted in response to this query. “To what decision do you refer, Commandant?”

  “The Legion, Capitaine, the Légion étrangère. Do you ever think that you should not be here, sweltering in the mountains of Mexico, fighting the war of a country not your own? You are a Marquis, born and bred to command your own countrymen, and yet here you stand, taking orders directly from an unlettered American, and ultimately from unseen men in the gilded salons of Paris.”

  The Capitaine smiled grimly. “You are not so unlettered as you imagine, sir. Not everything can be taught in l‘ecole, some things can only be learned through experience. And your experience is far greater than most men with whom I am familiar. The men and I trust your judgment implicitly.”

  Harrier looked down at the camp, where his men were slowly stirring. The rising sun’s rays filtered through the trees sufficiently to illuminate the scene. A few of the men were breaking down the tents, while others prepared a simple gruel over a low fire. He nodded slowly. “Have I ever spoken of that morning, Capitaine?”

  Garcia Ramirez’s manicured eyebrows rose appreciably. “Antietam? Never,” said he, shaking his head. “I did not want to pry…”

  “It was a September morn, the corn in the fields high and the weather temperate. Even the humidity seemed tolerable when we emerged from our tents before the dawn even broke. Though, of course, all of that was to change. Twelve hours later, we knew the fields near Dunkers Church as simply a ‘hot place.’” His gaze turned distant as he remembered the events of five years earlier. “The night before, it seemed like we were invincible. General McClellan discovered that Lee had secretly divided his army and driven north. Our forces, eighty thousand men strong, had intercepted a force less than half our size at a place that none of us from the west had ever heard of… Antietam Creek. Of course, that name is forever seared in our memories now, at least in those of us fortunate enough to walk away with our life and limbs. I was stationed atop a gentle crest, across from the center of Lee’s thin grey line. My bayonet was fixed, but little good it would do me when the rebels were entrenched in an ancient farm trail, sunken beneath the ground around it by years of horse carts. As we charged down that crest and across the field, two thousand riflemen poured lead into us furiously. It seemed as if with every step that I took a man beside me fell. But there were too many of us and we fell upon them in wave after wave. For every unlucky soul, there was another like myself that made it across the field of death miraculously unscathed. And when we reached the end of their line, we found that we could fire along the length of the sunken road into a mass of closely-packed Confederates. You cannot imagine the intimate terror on their faces. There was nowhere for them to hide in that ‘Bloody Lane,’ except perhaps under the bodies of their fallen brothers and comrades. There lay so many dead rebels that they formed a line which one might have walked upon as far as a man could see.

  “Elsewhere, the Federal army was not so successful. Late in the day, when men could barely hold their rifles, Rebel reinforcements arrived from Harper’s Ferry and drove us back from where we had advanced. By nightfall, it was over. To many it must have seemed like a stalemate. Both sides held much the same ground that we had when we awoke that morn. But to those of us that could see past the carnage of the bloodied bodies and imagine the larger picture, we knew that this vast slaughterhouse tolled the beginning of the end for the Rebels. The losses on both sides were unimaginable. Some say over seven thousand fell and were pitched into mass graves over the next few days. We could absorb those losses, but to the undermanned Rebels, it was staggering. From there, the march to Appomattox was inevitable.” He paused for a moment to remove his hat and run his fingers through his hair. “I’ve never been back to Antietam. I think that, even should I be fortunate enough to die an old man in my bed, I never will have the courage to face those fields again. But they were verdant even then. I suspect that they produce an absolute abundance of crops now, as long as one does not mind tilling up a bone every once in a while.”

  “Sir,” said the Capitaine gently. “Let us move on. Once we take ship, we can complete this mission, and then you are free to do what you will. You can return to that home of which you speak so fondly, nestled in the hills overlooking the city of San Francisco rising through the fog. You will feel the arms of your wife around you and raise your daughter up onto your shoulders.”

  “It was a morning much like this one. Not the weather or the environs, of course,” said Harrier, waving his arm around the camp. “But the smell in the air. If you take careful note, you can taste it on the breeze. It is the smell of iron. It is as if the earth itself knows that blood is about to be spilt.” He seemed to return to the present and fixed his gaze on the Spaniard. “Diego, I want you to do me a favor. If I don’t make it out of Mexico, I want you to deliver a letter for me to Julianne and Lucy.”

  Capitaine Garcia Ramirez smiled grimly. “Better you ask Hector, sir. He will take your letter to your wife and daughter. If you fall, I will be at your side.”

  Harrier nodded slowly. “Perhaps you are right, Diego. Come, let us finish this mad mission.” He rose from his perch upon the rocks and made his way down to the camp, with the Capitaine following closely behind. As he entered the circle of men, they all rose. There were no salutes, as Harrier ran a battalion too relaxed for such formalities, especially here in the mountain forests of Mexico. Most of his battalion had been sent onto Veracruz by the direct route and only this elite section commanded by Lieutenant Ralph Foster was ordered to proceed by a more obtuse track. The Bermudian was the only other officer present, though in Harrier’s opinion every man present was worth two normal officers. Of their sixteen men, only eight were presently in the camp, the others were off standing picquet duty. The gigantic Australian Sergent Chef nodded his respects as Harrier passed.

  “Sims, are the men ready to move out?” asked Harrier of the Sergent.

  “Yes, sir, they are. If I may sir…” Sims waited for a confirmatory nod from Harrier before continuing. He spat out a wad of the coca leaves that he had taken up chewing during his time in South America. “We are all wondering why we are moving through this god-forsaken forest, rather than making a direct line towards Veracruz?” observed Sims thoughtfully.

  Harrier had wondered the same thing himself. He reflected back seven days the day when this mad mission had begun.

  §

  Harrier was sitting in the shade of some elaborate Mudéjar arches in the courtyard of the opulent residence that had been commandeered as the headquarters for his battalion while encamped in Santiago de Querétaro. He was studying maps of both the city and its surrounding environs in hopes of visualizing how the Republican forces might try to attack. Harrier had spoken to numerous local residents, so he was well aware of the history of the town. It dated back over two hundred years to the Conquistador era, when they were battling the local tribes for control of the region. During one critical battle, the numerically-superior local tribes were on the verge of annihilating the Spaniards when suddenly a total eclipse of the sun occurred. The Spaniards went on to claim that they also saw an image in the sky of Saint James Matamoros riding a white horse carrying a rose-colored cross, and this vision caused the natives t
o surrender. Harrier valued his first officer too highly to ever insult the Spaniard’s patron saint, but after the horrors he saw committed on both sides during the American Civil War, he privately held grave doubts whether any army could truly claim to possess divine favor. He suspected that the natives were simply stricken dumb in awe of the eclipse. The current inhabitants of Santiago’s city seemed divided in their predictions for the future. The landed gentry appeared to take strength from the fanciful legend. Although the Republican forces of Benito Juárez, the elected president of Mexico, appeared to possess greater numbers, the more wealthy locals seemed to believe that Santiago was on the side of the Emperor and he would turn the upcoming battle in Maximilian’s favor. The poorer classes, on the other hand, appeared to believe that Juarez was a manifestation of Santiago himself.

  Officially, Harrier’s battalion had been left behind in an advisory capacity, though he knew that unofficially it was intended that he would directly support the loyalist Mexican Army in any engagements with Juárez’s forces. Thus, Harrier continued to attempt to envision how Juarez would attempt to attack. However, his attention was soon distracted by the arrival of a horse outside the villa. Within seconds, a dusty Sous-Lieutenant appeared. Harrier recognized the man as one that was attached to the staff of General Bazaine, currently headquartered in Veracruz. Despite his significantly inferior rank, the Sous-Lieutenant barely saluted Harrier, who idly wondered if this arrogance was born of the man’s proximity to General Bazaine, or if it was the typical disdain of the officers seconded from the French Army for those rare foreigners who were promoted from the ranks, as Harrier had been. He handed Harrier a sealed note, and then turned to depart, again with a lack of acknowledgment bordering upon insolence. Once the man had left, Harrier opened the note and, as he read it, his eyebrows quickly rose in surprise. As an American, born in a land free of heredity nobility, despite commanding an entire battalion of the French Foreign Legion he was one of the few officers who had never been summoned to appear before the Emperor. Until now.

  Harrier rapidly rose and strode to his room in order to change from his daily uniform to his finest dress regalia. As he checked his appearance in a tarnished silver mirror, his thoughts turned to the history of the Emperor Maximilian. He was the younger brother of Francis Joseph, who had ascended to the throne of Austria-Hungary in 1848. As the second son, Ferdinand Maximilian Joseph had spent his childhood knowing that he was not meant for a throne, and his inherent curiosity had led him to study the natural sciences, especially botany. Of course, he spent the required time in the Austrian Navy, but after he married Carlota, daughter of King Leopold of Belgium in 1857, the happy couple retired to a life of leisure and study. But in 1863, their lives were forever altered when Napoleon III of France begged Maximilian to take the throne of Mexico, recently conquered from its democratically elected leader Benito Juárez under the pretext of safeguarding foreign investments. Maximilian was hesitant, but after both the Mexican exiles in Europe and the Vatican also interceded, Maximilian and Carlota acquiesced. Unfortunately, the idealistic young nobles were not aware of the ulterior motives of all three groups, who planned to use them as pawns to further their status in the great game of international power.

  Not long after Maximilian was installed as Emperor, it became clear that his honesty and integrity would prevent him from acceding to the unjust demands of the landed proprietors and clergy. He even refused to make the state of Mexico fund the upkeep of his palace, rather paying for it from his own personal income. As his support began to dwindle, the forces of Juarez began to regroup. Shortly thereafter, the War Between the States drew to an end in May 1865. Once the United States had caught its breath from four years of brutal conflict, it suddenly realized that French troops were encamped in the country directly below its borders. The government immediately protested that the French presence contravened the Monroe Doctrine, which in 1823 stated that further efforts by European nations to colonize land or interfere with states in North or South America would be viewed as acts of aggression requiring intervention by the armed forces of the United States. Federal troops began to amass at the Texan border.

  Harrier was personally conflicted by where his choices had led him. After Antietam, he had continued to serve in the Union Army, and took part in Sherman’s March to the Sea. After Lee’s surrender at Appomattox in April 1865, Harrier had found himself a skilled soldier with no other appreciable skills. Harrier considered attempting to settle into a peacetime appointment, but whenever he lay down at night, faces of the men that he had slain upon the battlefield visited him in the darkness. Only when he was exhausted from a day full of military exercises did the faces fail to appear. And so he took ship to the one country where they freely accepted soldiers from other countries.

  Before he knew what had happened, he found his battalion back on a ship across the Atlantic. If Harrier had ever heard of the Monroe Doctrine, he had long since forgotten it, so that he was unconcerned that the Legion would ever come into conflict with the forces of his native land. Harrier arrived too late to participate in the Legion’s defense of Hacienda Camarón, already legendary throughout the globe. But he distinguished himself in innumerable other skirmishes with the Republican forces and soon found himself being rapidly promoted through the ranks.

  §

  Harrier was expected at the Casas Reales y Cárceles, the combination palace and jail that served as the Emperor’s headquarters, and he was rapidly escorted though a series of passageways into an ornate room. The thick walls kept out the afternoon heat, but also cast the room in perpetual gloom. Most of the light emanated from an extravagant candelabrum.

  When Harrier entered the room, his gaze was immediately drawn to the man behind the desk. He was about Harrier’s age, but the cares of ruling a country had erased most of the hair from the top of his pate, with only some brown tufts persisted above his ears and running into an enormous splayed beard topped by an elaborate handlebar moustache. His eyes were a soft blue and his mouth possessed a sensitive character. All in all, it was an unusual face to rise out of the Imperial uniform that he wore, his shoulders draped with worked golden chains.

  Harrier was not surprised to find Maximilian flanked by the white-haired and bearded Generals Miguel Miramon and Tomás Mejía, both legendarily loyal to the Emperor. Two other men made up the remainder of Maximilian’s entourage. The first Harrier knew to be the suave Colonel Miguel Lopez. The Colonel had a pleasant cultured smooth face, high-nosed and pale, with something perhaps of petulance about the mouth. He had a steady eye and a brisk manner. His hair was grizzled round the edges, and thin upon the top. All three men were part of the loyalist Mexican Army. The final man was unfamiliar to Harrier, despite the fact that he was the only man to share his French uniform. The man had a sallow face, scored with deep lines and eyes that bordered on bilious, making it difficult to place his age, but nearer to fifty than forty. He had thinning black hair that receded from his high forehead, and his little pointed beard was touched with a hint of grey. He was rail-thin, but his bowed shoulders suggested weakness rather than lithe strength. His nose was thin and projecting, reminding Harrier of one of the buzzards that circled the skies of this land. His eyes were brown, and the candlelight reflected a calculated look. The shoulder insignia near his epaulets made clear that he was a Lieutenant-Colonel, one rank higher than Harrier.

  Harrier saluted the five men and remained at attention, in deference to the Emperor. Colonel Lopez opened the introduction. “Commandant Harrier. At ease. Do you know, Colonel Moreau?”

  Once he heard the name, Harrier realized that he did know the Frenchman by reputation. The man was descended from an honorable stock, but rumors had circulated about some questionable actions. However, Harrier’s silence was taken as a negative by Colonel Lopez, who continued. “No? Well, he brings grim tidings from General Bazaine at Veracruz.”

  The Frenchman stepped forward, “As you know, Commandant, the French Army is withdrawing from Me
xico. That now includes your battalion of the Legion, Commandant.” He fell silent, clearly awaiting a response from Harrier.

  A great wave of relief washed over Harrier, and the expression clearly must have showed on his face.

  General Mejía spoke up sharply. “You look pleased, Commandant.” His tone made clear that his fury was barely contained.

  “I am most sorry about this news, General, for it plainly means that the Emperor must now withdraw as well. But personally, I would not be telling the truth if I did not admit that I am glad that I do not have to face my countrymen on the field of battle. I killed my fellow Americans for almost four years, more of them than I care to remember. I would prefer to never do so again.”

  “I am not abdicating, Commandant,” the voice was pleasant, the words precise despite the Germanic accent. It was the voice of a scholar, not an Emperor. “I may not have been born in Mexico, but I have come to love this land and its people. I have served them to the best of my abilities, and this is my adopted country now. Despite what Napoleon III urges, I will not abandon them. I have asked them if they want me to abdicate and the answer was clear. They want me here, and I will stay.”