TOM MIX AND PANCHO VILLA: A Novel of Mexico and the Texas border

by Clifford Irving

  Villa pinched the last flea between thumbnail and finger. Von Papen pulled his tortoiseshell comb from the pocket of his herringbone jacket and began to curry his mustache.

  “General Villa, I don’t know what more to say to you. You have nothing, and I offer you everything. But mostly, I offer you irrefutable logic. We Germans are your friends. The Americans have proved that they are your enemies.”

  I translated, as I had been doing all day.

  “Captain.” Villa said, sighing, “there’s just one thing I don’t understand. Well, no, there are many, but this one comes most readily to my mind. If you Germans are our friends, then why did your Colonel Kloss teach Obregón to flood the trenches at Celaya? Why does Obregón use German cannon? And why did your Major von Hesse advise the Carranzistas to plant a minefield in front of Agua Prieta, which killed so many of my men?”

  “Who told you this, sir?”

  “General Scott. Last week in Nogales.”

  “And you believe him?”

  “Scott has never lied to me.”

  “There’s a first time for everything, General Villa. And even if it’s true, you must realize that there are good Germans and bad Germans. There are factions in our country, just as there are in yours.”

  “I’m hungry,” Villa said. “Let’s eat dinner. Would you like some tacos?”

  “With pleasure. But without chile, please.”

  “Without chile? Señor, in Mexico you might as well ask for a desert without rocks, a summer without rain, and a general without fleas.”

  After lunch and a short siesta, the discussion resumed in the shade of the ash trees. Hens cackled in the huts, and a few soldiers, taking advantage of the same shade, snored like trombones. Von Papen repeated all his arguments, even to the point of a discourse about the monkey men of Japan who were slavering at the mouth when they thought of invading the United States from Mexico.

  “Well, I don’t like them, either,” Villa said. “I can’t tell them from Chinamen, for whom I have no use at all. In fact, when I think of it. I don’t like any foreigners who come so far to stir up trouble. Mexico is a pot with too many spoons.”

  I translated this faithfully, and Von Papen frowned. “General Villa, an attack on Columbus would cost you little. It could win you everything. And you need to win something, I think. May I ask how many men you now have under your command?”

  “I have five hundred loyal soldiers in this camp,” the chief replied. “Throughout Mexico, a hundred thousand. They only wait to hear my bugle, and they will rise.”

  “But you have no arms. No money.”

  “I have gold.”

  “Your men wear rags.”

  “That doesn’t stop them from shooting straight.”

  “Then shoot, señor. Shoot your enemies.”

  “I’ve half a mind to shoot you,” Villa said, “and send your head to Colonel Kloss as a Christmas present.”

  Von Papen’s gentle smile seemed to ascribe the threat to a quaint Mexican sense of humor. I was more pleased than disturbed—it meant the chief was feeling more like his old self.

  Just then he sprang from his crouch and tossed away his cigarette. “Captain,” he said, “I’m going to confer for a few minutes with your old friend, Colonel Mix. Then I’ll give you my decision.”

  Von Papen saluted. Villa and I withdrew to the shade of another tree. A mangy dog was sleeping there, but a hard nudge from Villa’s boot sent it slinking away.

  “Tomás, what do you think?”

  “Chief, I’m a gringo. The last thing I want is for you to go pumping bullets into Columbus or any town in the U.S. of A. Aside from my personal feelings, Pershing would come after your scalp and hang it from the flagpole at Fort Bliss.”

  Villa chuckled. “He’d try, although he’d never catch me. Do you think I’d shoot Americans? I’d rob them, yes. I’ve already sent the Lopez brothers into Chihuahua to stop a mining train that’s coming south from El Paso. But attack them? Why? Wilson, yes. I’d gladly hang him side by side with Carranza. No, I’m asking your opinion about this pantywaist German. Should I shoot him or not?”

  “You were serious?”

  “Didn’t you hear him insult me? He said my men wore rags. He meant me too.”

  “But it’s true. Look at us.”

  “Truth isn’t at issue. It was an insult.”

  “If you shoot him, it will give the Germans an excuse to invade Mexico, or they’ll get Wilson to do it for them.”

  “All right. I’ll just kick his ass back to Nogales. Or I would, if my corns didn’t hurt.”

  We walked leisurely back to where Von Papen waited in the shade of the ash tree, standing in the formal at-ease position, but the forward hunch of his shoulders betrayed his eagerness.

  “Captain, I’ve made up my mind,” Villa said. “I’m not going to shoot you—a decision I may regret, but I’ll stick to it. For that you can thank Colonel Mix, as others have had reason to do in the past … or as they would have had reason,” he sighed, remembering Benton, “if I’d listened to him. As far as this other business goes, you’re right. Except for Scott, the Americans are no longer my friends. But the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t know, and I’ll be damned if I’ll let even one more ass-kissing, heel-clicking German into my Mexico.”

  Greatly relieved, I translated into English, although I left out the last part.

  Von Papen frowned. “This decision is final, Colonel Mix?”

  “Nothing in life is final, Captain, except the end of it. But if I were you, I wouldn’t debate it anymore now. General Villa’s corns are bothering him.”

  Von Papen saluted, clicked his heels and strode off through the dust to his waiting escort, a trio of Germans in civilian clothes and a pair of Yaqui guides. They mounted their horses and rode off at a trot toward the border.

  A few days after my arrival a roaming company of our men under Ignacio Garcia charged across the line at Nogales, shouted insults at the gringo troops, then let off a few exuberant shots well wide of the mark. Taking aim, the cavalry’s sharpshooters dropped three men from their horses at five hundred yards.

  Ignacio, with awe in his voice, reported to the chief, “Señor, their bullets had eyes.”

  Then on January 19, in Chihuahua, the Lopez brothers fell upon a train full of gringo engineers heading south to one of the American-owned mines that Obregón had allowed to reopen. The Villistas barricaded the track at a place called Santa Ysabel. Seventy men swooped through the coaches, grabbing not only the $25,000 payroll but all the baggage and even the passengers’ lunches. When the mining engineers protested, Pablo Lopez became angry and herded them outside.

  “Let’s have some sport,” he said to his men. “Let’s kill gringos.”

  The eighteen engineers were lined up at ten paces. One of them, a man named Holmes, made a break for it. As bullets whistled round his head, he fell into the bushes near a dried-up riverbed, where he feigned death. Pablo gave a mercy shot in the head to the seventeen men lying by the tracks, and Holmes made his way back to El Paso and told the grisly tale.

  Villa protested his innocence.

  “It’s a tragedy,” he said, in a message to Scott in Nogales. “Lopez and his brother exceeded their orders. If I find them, I’ll shoot them.”

  But in El Paso a mob heading for Little Chihuahua had to be turned back by Pershing’s troops, and martial law was declared along the border. By then we had moved across the Sonora desert to the pueblo of San Rafael, not far from a pass that led through the low sierra into Chihuahua. We were a hunted band of outlaws, a meandering heap of broad sombreros, dirty khaki, faded blankets and underfed horses. We certainly weren’t an army that was going to retake Mexico, and I saw no sign yet of those hundred thousand men who were going to rise at the blast of a bugle. We had more desertions every day, and the chief finally told his officers they were free to leave if they wished. He announced that he would give Carranza six months to make good on his promises to th
e people.

  I wondered what that meant. Had he given up? Was it an admission that Obregón had licked him for good? He didn’t say. As for me, I kept thinking of Rosa and Elisa waiting for me in Parral at the Hacienda de Los Flores. Why was I wandering here when I should be headed there? I had been granted freedom of choice as well as the next man.

  I bearded Villa one afternoon in a little adobe hut on the outskirts of San Rafael, which he had decided to call Divisional Headquarters. He was scribbling letters to the American generals on the border, still pleading his innocence and vowing death to the Lopez brothers. Outside the hut two Yaqui women were shelling corn, and some dark clouds had massed on the horizon.

  “Chief,” I said, “I think you should give up. Get some guarantees from Obregón and quit fighting. Hell, we’re not even fighting. We’re just hanging around.”

  A white flash of lightning ripped across the sky, and the roosters stopped crowing. Villa glowered. “I’ve given Carranza six months to get something done. When that time is up, if he’s succeeded, we can think about guarantees.”

  “He’s started land reform.”

  “A start is not a finish.”

  “The Chinese say that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”

  “Since when do you quote to me from Chinamen? I don’t like the way you talk, Tomás. Every day you sound more like a gringo.”

  He wasn’t friendly. He had been cankered and irascible ever since we had found him in the desert. It suited him even less than me to hang around doing nothing. It sapped the will and made a man feel useless. He was used to power, and he had none; he got that power from attacking his enemies and building schools, and now all he did was issue denials.

  He folded his arms across his cartridge belts, and his yellow eyes, even in the shadows, glittered waspishly. More lightning crackled toward the horizon. The green lances of young corn rustled in the wind, fighting for life, and a dove wept far away in the dry riverbed.

  “You’re bored, Tomás. That’s what’s unsettled your mind. It’s the same with me. Do you want to fight? Is that it?”

  “I want to make a decent peace and get on with my life. So should you.”

  He ignored that. “We have only five hundred men, but we had less when we took Casas Grandes. We’ve got to make a start. Felipe’s still in Washington. Once we fish our gold out of that lake and get it to him, he’ll buy bullets and arms. What is it that Chinaman said? ‘A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.’ That’s not bad”

  “Our men are half-starved. And even if we had the bullets, who is there around here that we could fight?”

  Villa took the cigarette I had built for him and slid it between his lips, then lit it from mine and puffed thoughtfully. “We’ll find someone,” he said.

  Chapter 30

  “Be bloody,

  bold, and resolute.”

  from THE SCHOOLTEACHER’S JOURNAL

  Culberson’s Ranch, New Mexico

  March 15, 1916

  Early one morning I was having coffee with Lieutenant Patton in his office, prior to his drilling the troops and my going to work in the stables, where I help groom and feed the new Arabians that have come down from Oklahoma. The lieutenant was in one of his talkative moods, busily telling me how his father, after graduating military school in Virginia, almost joined Hicks Pasha’s expedition to Egypt in 1877.

  “Which was a damn good thing,” he said. “I mean that he didn’t do it. Because the expedition was wiped out. To the last man, Miguel. If he’d gone, hell, I wouldn’t be alive today, sitting on my fat ass in this desert, hunting quail.”

  He went on then with his usual complaints about Mr. Wilson, and then to the subject of the weather, which grows hotter every day—and then his hay fever, which knows no season—and finally, for about the third time, the incident that happened last week with one of the men from the machine-gun platoon he had helped to train. I listened patiently, although now I knew most of the story by heart.

  The lieutenant had been walking back from the polo field when he found a loose horse wandering across the parade ground, where a Curtiss Jenny was soon due to land, there being no other field. He marched down to the stables and discovered the name of the man responsible. After he found the culprit asleep on his bunk, he dressed him down in front of the men and told him to run down to the stable, tie the horse and then run back.

  “Well, either he didn’t understand or else he was just dead beat, and he started to walk. I got mad, and I yelled, ‘Run, you lazy bastard! Goddam you, run!’ Which he did, bet your boots. But then later in the day I got to thinking that it was an insult I’d put on him—everyone listening and all that—so I called him up before the other men who’d heard me swear, and I apologized. The thing is, I know now why I blew up at him that way.” He slammed his riding crop into his palm. “Because I’m stagnating here. Stagnating!” His voice rose in a squeal. “Down here on the border, godammit, you drift. And if a man like me starts to drift, he busies himself with all kinds of chickenshit details which may seem of moment, but they’re not. And he’s lost.”

  In such a mood, which is common with him, he veers back and forth between soliloquies about both present and past. He began castigating Mr. Wilson again—a man, he claims, who represents an ideal rather than a personality—and he compared the President to his grandfather.

  “He was a brigadier general. He commanded the advance guard in Earlie’s raid on Washington, D.C., and his command was the only Southern force which ever camped within the city limits. He was killed at the battle of Opequon in 1864, but before that he could have taken Washington with just the Twenty-second Virginia Infantry … but he hesitated. Worried too much. Didn’t do it. And he could have!”

  The lieutenant’s conclusion was that his grandfather didn’t have the military mind in its highest form of development, because he was swayed by ideas of right or wrong rather than those of necessary strategic policy. A revealing statement, which he seemed about to amplify … when a bugle sounded. Not a clear call, but a strident, thrilling blast, as if the bugler didn’t know what to blow but knew that some noise was necessary. An alarm, perhaps.

  Lieutenant Patton dropped his pipe and snatched his gun belt, buckling it round his waist as he ran out the door. I peered after him into the hot sunlight, but the lieutenant was already out of sight, headed no doubt in the direction of the bugler. A motor ambulance stood by the post gate, its engine idling. A few mule-drawn escort wagons were pulled up behind it, and with them a troop of sweaty horses just back from branding at the remount depot. Officers and men were shouting and kicking up dust.

  I waited nearly an hour for the lieutenant to return. When he did, his face was flushed a deep salmon-pink. His eyes were shining. He rubbed his hands together gleefully, like a man about to carve an exceptionally fine roast.

  “He did it, Miguel! That damned fool did it! Attacked Columbus last night! Killed five soldiers and a dozen civilians!”

  “Who attacked Columbus?”

  “Pancho Villa! Slocum beat him off at first light! Thirteenth Cav’s going after him! Ya—hoo!”

  It hardly seemed joyous news that nearly a score of people had been shot dead, but of course I understand Lieutenant Patton’s jubilation. It heralded combat, and combat was his dream. Pipe in hand, pacing the office, he told me what he knew.

  At four o’clock in the morning, after knifing the sentries on the border, Villa bad struck at Columbus. The cavalry’s rifles were under lock and key, the officer with the key nowhere to be found, so the men had to smash open the weapons locker with axes. One soldier in the stables killed a raider with a baseball bat, and the kitchen cooks defended themselves with pots of boiling water and cleavers. A dozen Mexicans were burned alive when the Commercial Hotel caught fire. The telephone operator in the Hoover Hotel, although her baby was clasped to her breast and she was struck in the face by flying glass, got through to Deming and summoned aid.

  Th
e cavalry rallied and struck back. At dawn the Villistas fled, leaving a gutted town. Pablo Lopez and his brother, who had massacred the train at Santa Ysabel, had been recognized among them. Why had they done it? On Villa’s part it seemed madness.

  Major Tompkins, with a troop of horses, set out in pursuit and penetrated fifteen miles into Mexico before he ran out of bullets.

  “Tompkins claimed they killed a hundred of them. Probably exaggerating. But, do you realize—this is war! The big question is, will the Eighth Cav go?” Patton grew a shade paler.

  The rumor is that the army will send a force consisting of nine cavalry regiments, infantry, trucks, one regiment of mounted artillery and a troop of Apache scouts, and the First Aero Squadron. But some units will have to stay behind to guard the border.

  If that is the fate of his own Eighth Cavalry, Lieutenant Patton says he will resign his commission and raise polo ponies in Pasadena.

  The following day he was Officer of the Day. He was smoking his pipe on the porch of the headquarters building after lunch when he learned that the Eighth Cavalry would definitely not go to Mexico.

  Despite the midday heat he rushed immediately to the regimental adjutant and asked to be recommended to General Pershing as an aide. Then, in a sweat, he flew across the compound to the major who has been appointed adjutant general of the expedition and repeated his request. Finally he buttonholed Lieutenant Shallenberger, his friend and one of Pershing’s two regular aides-de-camp, begging him to put in a good word.

  In the late afternoon, while he sat around sneezing and biting his nails, he was summoned to the general’s office. Pershing was busy dealing with logistics and newspaper releases. He had no time for pleasantries.

  “What’s all this about, Lieutenant? I’m being hit from all sides about you.”

  “I want to go to Mexico, sir.”

  “So does every officer worth his salt.” Pershing’s bony face revealed no sympathy. He was a Missourian, and you had to show him. He was one of three officers in the history of the U. S. Army who had been promoted directly from captain to brigadier general—in his case by President Roosevelt. It wasn’t favoritism; it was merit.