Villa’s smile turned to a big grin as he walked back to his wagon. “No, Queentin. It’s only a fantasy. I can and will fight Carranza and the gringos if I must, but only one major enemy at a time, por favor.”
Calles had fired his first shot around two p.m., and the duel between the big guns lasted a couple of hours. None of Villa’s artillery was damaged, but the steady stream of people leaving Agua Prieta for the tents in the Douglas stockyards increased.
CHAPTER 27
BATTLE OF AGUA PRIETA
Punctured by points of light from stars without number, the cold night sky lay blacker than Satan’s soul. I stared into the abyss with Yellow Boy, Quent, and Villa and trembled from a mixture of cold, excitement, and a growing sense of dread. Agua Prieta spread out before us in the black notch outlined against the stars by the San Jose Mountains to the south and the Huachuca Mountains to the north. División del Norte infantry moved toward the edge of the minefield for the eight p.m. attack on the eastern side of Agua Prieta.
Torches on tall poles along the trench around Agua Prieta cast flickering yellows and oranges across the barren strip beyond the barbed wire. I listened with my head cocked to one side, trying to pick up any sounds from the squads of men crawling through the creosotes and around the mesquite, inching as close as possible to the barbed wire and trench before they ran into the hailstorm of bullets waiting to fall. Only the wind gently sweeping through the mesquite and creosote made any sound.
A shout, a muzzle flash, and the snapping crack of a rifle sounded from near the northeast corner of the Agua Prieta east trench. There were a few scattered shots up and down the eastern trench line, but nothing from the surrounding desert. Yellow Boy smiled. “Bueno. Soldiers know to stay quiet and move closer.”
A minute passed. Two. Three. Another shout and a shot cracking from near the center of the trench. A cacophony of screams and yells filled the void as bright orange and yellow streaks of fire and sharp snapping thunder from hundreds of rifles and machine guns rolled like a wave across the barren space toward the barbed wire. The light under the torches grew soft and fuzzy as thousands of bullets struck the trench edge, throwing dust into the air.
The eastern trench sparkled with its own streaks of bright orange and yellow fire, points of almost continuous light that swung back and forth from swiveling machine guns up and down the length of the trench. The air was filled with the mottled roar of thousands of rifles mixed with the sharp, staccato rumble of machine guns. Squads advanced on their bellies, hugging the ground under the fire from the trenches, two hundred yards, one-fifty. A flash of light and a dull, thudding explosion, a successful land mine, brought screams, and bodies twisted in agony and death.
A hundred yards from the barbed wire, the wave of orange and yellow fire thinned and slowed. The smell of cordite mixed with the iron smell of blood and the stench of death drifted back to us.
Seventy-five yards. Firing from the trench increased, bringing a downpour of lead and death and the cries resulting from instant mutilation and shock.
Sixty yards. Growing thinner, the wave of orange and yellow flames advancing toward the wire paused, seemed to gain strength, increased again, advanced a few more yards, and paused.
Fifty yards. The wave became a breaker, stationary, hung in time for seconds, ragged, the firing steady. Places in the line advanced, some all the way into the torchlight from the trenches, but none reached the gleaming jagged edges of the barbed wire before falling back into the dark. The wave crest of fire thinned and began washing backwards into the desert weeds, creosotes, and mesquites.
Villa ground his teeth and pounded his thigh with his fist. He bellowed into the void, “It’s all right, muchachos. I’ll send you some help. Goddamn you, Calles. Goddamn the gringos. They’re the reason these muchachos are being killed.”
I ran down the rise toward the medico wagons, waved at Jesús, and jumped in the back of his wagon when he slowed for me. The team plunged into the darkness on a trail cut through the brush to a place where the squads were to re-form and bring the wounded.
It was so dark, Jesús nearly drove into a large group of men staggering back from the bare ground where bullets still whined and ricocheted. Seeing the wagon, the men ran for it, croaking, “Water, water. For the mother of God, please, water.”
Jesús roared past them, yelling back, “No water! Doctor wagon!” He slapped the reins across the backs of the mules and, whistling and yelling at them, charged on toward the trench. We were nearly to the edge of the minefield when we found the wounded and dying scattered like seedpods in the desert brush.
Jesús brought the mules to a sliding stop, and I jumped off the wagon. Other medicos were hopping out of wagons that followed ours. I saw a dark lump stretched out by a yucca and ran forward. It was a boy not more than fourteen or fifteen. The bottom of his shirt was shiny and black. I whispered, “Easy, muchacho,” pulled his trembling hands off his belly, and saw a wound leaking blood. His breathing gurgled in his throat. With his last bit of strength, he grabbed my arm and leaning toward my ear, whispered, “My mother, tell her I am no more . . .” His head dropped to one side, and he was gone. I stared at him in sorrow. I didn’t even know his name, and I had to wrench his death grip off my wrist before I could crab over to an old man in shock, his leg nearly shot off a few inches below his knee. I tied it off with a tourniquet and yelled for Jesús to help me get him to a wagon.
For a few minutes, we ran hunched over through the brush, dodging stray bullets, picking up men smeared with blood who might live at least until we returned to the medico wagon circle. We began fast, deliberate work. Shivering from shock, begging for water, many of those we brought back died, shot to pieces, their blood loss unstoppable. But there were some we were able to save who were grazed or lucky enough to have a bullet pass through without hitting vital organs or blood vessels. We even managed to save some who, for reasons I’ve never understood, didn’t bleed to death before we could help them after they had an arm or leg shot away. There were so many wounded that our supplies began to run low with the first round of men treated at the medico wagons.
In the light from a coal-oil lamp, I was extracting a bullet from a boy’s calf muscles when Yellow Boy appeared at my wagon and yelled, “Hombrecito! To Villa! Pronto! Bring Shoots-Today-Kills-Tomorrow. Pronto, pronto!”
Doctor Oñate had just finished work on a patient next to mine. He washed his hands off in black smelter water and said, “Go, Doctor Grace. I’ll finish for you.”
I rinsed my hands, tore off my blood-smeared doctor’s apron, ran to my saddle, and snatched up Little David and a bag of cartridges. Running for the rise where Villa paced, I caught up with Yellow Boy and asked, “What’s going on?”
He snorted and said through clenched teeth, “Gringos!” I didn’t understand. The United States was neutral, or so said General Funston. Before I could ask Yellow Boy to explain, we were on top of the rise and standing next to Villa. I looked toward Agua Prieta and understood Yellow Boy’s anger. Three long fingers of bright white light swept over the minefield and dry plains beyond.
Villa yelled, “Those bastard gringos have given Calles electricity for those damned lights. He’ll slaughter mis hombres crossing that minefield.”
Villa was right. The lights were bright enough to show the lumps of dozens of bodies scattered around the minefield on the east side of the trench. The infantry had already started a second attack across the minefield, and I saw the men hitting the dirt and playing dead as the fingers of light swept by. Machine guns on the trench occasionally sputtered slashing flame when the operators thought they saw movement, men crawling forward, in the penumbra of the beams. Villa growled, “Hombrecito, from the bushes at the edge of the minefield, can you kill those lights?”
“Sí, General.”
“Bueno. Por favor, stay low and don’t get yourself killed, eh?”
“I’ll be careful.”
He paused a moment and said, “You do that, mi ami
go. Listen. Shoot the operators first, and then the lights. We attack from all sides this time, but mostly on the east side. Comprende?”
“Sí, General.”
It appeared Calles put the searchlights on the tops of specially built platforms. The first one was about a hundred yards inside the eastern trench and about two hundred yards from the southern trench. The next two were on a line about a hundred yards apart from the first one and also about two hundred yards inside the southern trench.
I caught another ride with Jesús, who was driving his wagon back to pick up more wounded. When the wagon stopped, I jumped out and ran toward a couple of big creosote bushes on the edge of the minefield, past more dead and shot-to-pieces men. Limbs snapped off the creosotes and mesquite as stray bullets whined through the brush. Instinctively, I lowered myself into a crouching run, holding Little David across my chest. In the glare of the searchlights, I could see the little plumes of dust sprouting from impacting bullets. The haze from the dust made it hard to tell where anything was except when the searchlights swept the area. Three men in front of me ran with their rifles across their chests. The man ahead and to my right pointed toward the clearing and yelled at the others. A long finger of light was sweeping for us. They dove to the ground. I was right behind them as the finger of death swept over us.
Instantly, we were up again and running. The man to my left collapsed, staggering forward as if he’d tripped over something. He fell facedown in the dirt, unmoving. When I reached him, I saw a large dark spot in the middle of his back and turned him over. He was center-shot straight through his heart. Not three feet from where I knelt, a passing bullet, sounding like an angry bee, whacked a limb from a creosote bush. We weren’t more than ten yards from the edge of the clearing. I crawled forward on my knees and elbows until I found a shallow depression between two big creosotes and had a clear view of the eastern trench and the searchlights.
The closest searchlight was no more than three or four hundred yards away. It was easy to see the operator swinging the beam back and forth in the glare of the reflector. The near misses made me hug the ground, my heart pounding in my ears. I wanted to dig a hiding place with my bare hands in the blood-soaked sand.
I started to sit up and rest my elbows on my knees for the shots, but a round of machine-gun fire whined through the top of the creosotes, raining branches and leaves into my hair, leaving the same smell the creosotes make after a hard rain. Because I’d enjoyed the smell of creosotes after a hard rain since I was a little boy sitting with Rufus Pike on his shack porch, the smell had a strong calming effect on me. The thunder from the guns at the trench dimmed to a distant rumble. I decided to shoot from a prone position, even if the angle for Little David was awkward.
There was no wind. I rolled on my side and flipped up the adjustable sight on Little David. I set the vertical vernier sight to four hundred fifty yards and dialed the smallest pinhole I had. I looked through it, trying to find the light operator. It was too small, not giving my eye enough light to see much of anything. I dialed it open a click and retried it—still too small. One more click did it. I dropped the breech, slid in a cartridge, and snapped the breech closed while holding the four extra cartridges in my trigger hand.
I rolled over on my belly and sighted on the small black outline of the operator moving the first searchlight back and forth. I pulled the set trigger and waited for maximum operator exposure as he swung the light to my left. Through the vernier pinhole, I watched him swing the light through a couple of cycles of back-and-forth across the eastern side minefield.
As I concentrated on the searchlight operator, the yells and gunfire around me faded into silence. I took a deep breath and let it half out on his third swing across the minefield. His outline was clear and sharp when the hammer on Little David fell. The old buffalo gun roared and kicked against my shoulder. Its thunder, standing out clearly from the snap and crack of Mauser and Winchester rifles, made my ears ring. The operator disappeared, and the long finger of light stopped its swing toward the south. I crabbed to a yucca, its stalk shot to pieces, ten yards to my left.
I dropped the breech and slid in another cartridge intended for the bright spot above the center of the reflector of the first light. The set trigger came back, and the old buffalo gun roared once more. The finger of light streaking across the eastern minefield in front of the trench disappeared. Men all around me, ecstatic, bellowed, “Viva Villa, viva Villa!” The general had turned out the light looking to kill them all.
The second searchlight suddenly swung in my direction and paused in the puff of smoke from Little David. Shots from rifles peppered the ground around the creosote, and then the light moved on. I crabbed another ten yards to the right, reloaded, waited until the operator outline was its maximum size, and fired. That operator, too, disappeared.
Rifle shots churned up dust in the area where I’d been. It took two quick shots to get the second light. The third light stopped sweeping the minefield, its operator gone, its beam pointing straight up, like a silver saber stabbing the black sky. I guessed again on the range and on how high to shoot above the center of the light for the bullet to drop in the right place to hit the arc lamp. It was on a very shallow slant and hard to hit. It took me three tries. I thought, Hombrecito, you need to do some serious target practice.
The second attack, which excluded the border side of the trench, its main thrust again on the eastern side, started at ten p.m. After I knocked out the searchlights, fewer men died, but none made it across the barbed wire and into hand-to-hand combat with the Carrancistas. The men began pulling back around midnight, no more successful than before.
A new wave of wounded and dying flooded the medico circle of wagons. We did what we could for the men and boys, but our supplies were nearly gone. The worst times in the medico wagons occurred when the wounded begged for water, and all we could give them was the stinking black stuff from the smelter drainage ditches.
Quent appeared at the wagon where I worked sewing up a grazing wound in a boy’s scalp. “Are you all right, Henry?”
“Yeah, I’ll be fine if I can get this kid’s scalp sewn back together. They’re not going to take Agua Prieta, are they?”
He puffed his cheeks and shook his head. “Nope. Villa’s in a rage, saying it’s all the gringos’ fault.”
“What do you think he’ll do now?”
“Pound the hell out of Agua Prieta with his big guns and then leave. What else can he do?”
I shrugged, feeling empty and disoriented. “Has he said where he’s going?”
Quent shook his head. “He’s mentioned trying to take Hermosillo several times, but nothing firm. I’m not sure if he knows.”
There was a sound of sharp, hard thunder followed a few seconds later by another boom echoing across the hills, and then another, and another, all followed by exploding pops in the distance. Quent smiled when he saw my frown.
“It’s Villa’s artillery. He’s going to shoot the hell out of that little village, but he knows Calles will just hunker down, wait him out, and won’t break. It’s just a waste of shells.”
The artillery poured it on. I was told there were more than three thousand shells fired between one and two a.m., which tapered off to a few hundred in the next hour before finally stopping. In the freezing night air, men huddled beside fires and tried to drink the awful coffee made with smelter ditch water.
We were out of medical supplies, and still there were men who desperately needed attention. Early on, we had divided the wounded into three groups: those we knew would die, those severely wounded who would live if we could stop the bleeding and prevent infection, and those who could wait until we got more supplies. The second group received the lion’s share of the supplies and attention. The third group lay by fires, smoking, and drinking what tequila and whiskey could be found for them.
CHAPTER 28
ON THE PRECIPICE
At daybreak, I led medico supply wagons, flying blue-and-white medi
co flags, racing along the dusty trail around Agua Prieta to the north-south road leading into Douglas. I hoped the soldiers in Agua Prieta didn’t think my wagons and others flying the same flags driving into the minefield for the wounded made good targets. Bodies were scattered all over the cleared desert.
Calles’s men had already crossed the trench and taken in men still alive near the wire. I learned later that Calles offered amnesty to any soldier who deserted, and at least forty-five were unaccounted for that day. Many men disappeared on the trek up the San Bernardino. No one, not even their immediate officers, reported them missing, and after Agua Prieta, many more disappeared.
American soldiers at the border crossing waved us through. I directed the empty supply wagons to pick up the undershirts, underpants, shirts, and hay order at the rail station while I headed for the pharmacy Doctor Thigpen had recommended.
The pharmacy owner was just raising his shades and opening his doors when I pulled up. I moved through the pharmacy quickly, buying cotton, gauze, peroxide, iodine, painkillers, quinine caps, carbolic soap, alcohol, chloroform, zinc oxide, and syringes.
Doctor Thigpen and another man walked through the door as I paid the clerk, using the now dirty, creased letter of credit Texas John had given Villa. Thigpen smiled as he extended his hand.
“Doctor Grace, this is Doctor Miller, the other doctor I mentioned when you were here last.”
I shook Doctor Thigpen’s hand and Doctor Miller’s. “Gentlemen, it’s always a pleasure to meet a colleague.”
Doctor Miller said, “Last night, we watched the battle from the roof of the Gadsden Hotel. The death and misery must have been horrific on both sides of the trenches.”
Doctor Thigpen nodded and said, “Why, there were even casualties here in Douglas. We know stray bullets or shrapnel wounded several people, and I understand a soldier was killed when a bullet hit his exposed cartridge belt. I guess it’s impossible for bullets and shrapnel not to come to this side with Agua Prieta so close to the border. The only way you might avoid it is if you stayed inside, and even then there are no guarantees.”
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