So Far From God

by John Harris

  ‘Por Dios,’ he raged, as he stood alongside the pink-painted bandstand under the jacarandas in the square at La Cruz. ‘If we had ammunition, I could drive into the capital itself.’

  It was as he caught up with Villa again that Slattery discovered Amaryllis’ letter in his pocket. It had lain there ever since Nogales and was crumpled but, written on pale blue paper as expensive and thick as a board, it made clear her intentions.

  ‘I’m coming to Mexico,’ she wrote. ‘You’ve been too long among the savages and need to be taken in hand and taught how to live like a gentleman again. It won’t be yet, of course, because I can hardly miss the London season. They tell me April’s a good time so perhaps next year would be suitable for a visit to New York and a trip to Latin America to see what it is that holds you.’

  She obviously thought Mexico was south of Panama but that it was possible to reach it by a day trip on a train.

  Scenting the coming battle, Atty Purkiss turned up a few days later from his workshop, his clothes smeared with grease, his fingers scarred with work. He had got most of Villa’s motor transport moving and he arrived driving the Studebaker, sitting up in the high front seat like a millionaire arriving for a horse show. He brought letters and a bundle of newspapers, both Mexican and American. Though the censored Mexican press had little to say, the American journals had it all. When Huerta had been denounced from the floor of the Chamber of Deputies in Mexico City and the speech privately printed and circulated as a pamphlet, the Senator responsible had been found shot. The American newsmen had reported it widely and President Wilson had followed their denouncement with a furious accusation of his own.

  ‘It don’t seem to have worried Huerta much, me dear,’ Atty said dryly. ‘He dissolved Congress and carted off a hundred and ten congressmen to jail.’ He gave a hoot of laughter. ‘In tramcars,’ he ended. ‘Because his transport’s all up here in use against Villa.’

  The final move to Torreón began, the ragged army like the exodus from a stricken city after a disaster.

  Here and there groups of well-equipped, well-mounted men rode together, some of them even in old American khaki with Stetson hats, but for the rest it was the same raggle-taggle mob of coloured shirts, Indio scarves, sarapes and sombreros. They were a primitive-looking horde, some of them still bearing the scars of recent fighting, and all smelling of sweat, grease, horses and gun oil, all moving eastwards in a snake-like coil across the desert, surrounded by a vast cloud of red dust.

  Among them were rickety carriages, spiders, buggies, carts, even old stage-coaches dating back to the war against Maximilian in the 1860s, which had been dug out of dusty stables to provide the wheels Villa so desperately needed. There were Atty’s motor cars and trucks, ox wagons, pack trains, mules and donkeys, their drivers illiterate villagers determined to get something for themselves out of the vast upheaval that was taking place. For the third time in two years armies were on the march and everybody had decided to be with them, noisy, boastful, drunk, the apathy of their poverty discarded as they saw a new attempt to provide that ideal of dignity – freedom to own land – that their rulers had always failed to produce.

  Moving ahead with Preto, the former Carranza aide, who had so taken to Slattery he tried to dress like him, they picked up information at Dolores Satero that enemy forces were taking advantage of Villa’s presence near Torreón to move into his base in the San Andres valley.

  The news set Villa whirling in his tracks with a picked column that included Slattery, to begin an incredible forced march. Jaded by thirst and galled by flying dust, they headed for days across the desert. Horses failed and men were left on foot to find their own salvation. As they halted, exhausted, their lips chapped, their skin worn by the flaying wind, to allow the stragglers to catch up, it was Slattery, pushing forward, who learned there were eighteen hundred men in and around San Andres and that a military train full of supplies was expected.

  Villa was on his feet at once, reaching for his weapons. ‘Vamonos ya! Let’s go! Un golpo terrifico. A tremendous blow. That should do it.’ He grinned at Slattery. ‘And because you found it, inglés, you can be part of it. Try not to get shot.’

  The chances of failure were high because they were hungry and their horses were worn out, but in the heavy darkness just before dawn the regiments were drawn up, ragged untidy lines of dusty soldiers in large hats, swathed to the eyes in as much weaponry and ammunition as they could carry. Officers waved swords they didn’t know how to use and a cheer went up as they moved off in a cloud of dust.

  Flags were unfurled and the few guns Villa possessed opened the attack. A company of men trotted away from the main body, clattering off in commandeered country carts with ancient French machine guns that looked like rifles mounted on tripods. They bounced over the ground at top speed, flinging up stones and dust, the men clinging to them for dear life. A crackle of musketry broke out, a few men were hit and a horse crashed down, overturning a cart and flinging its passengers sprawling. A little mountain gun went away ahead of them, bounding over the ruts in approved Royal Horse Artillery style, and within minutes sharp cracking explosions showed that it was in action.

  Coming on a raised road leading to the town, Slattery saw men pouring forward in a swarm and, heading after them with Monserrat and Preto, found himself riding between the houses surrounded by wild-looking horsemen triumphantly discharging rifles into the air. Federal soldiers were fleeing ahead of them to disappear round the backs of buildings, and a saddle emptied as its owner disappeared backwards over the horse’s rump to land flat on his back with a crash of equipment.

  For a moment the attack seemed to be out of control but Slattery managed to get it moving again and eventually they began to hear the unmistakable sounds of success – bugle calls and cheers and the wild sound of horses’ hooves. Skirmishing was still going on ahead and there were corpses lying like dead rats in the streets with the carcases of horses still in the shafts of halted supply wagons. One of them had been overturned and the driver lay in the road, his blood congealing among the scattered flour from the burst sacks he had been carrying.

  At the sound of the bugles, the civilians had come out of their houses and were clapping, cheering, and offering cigarettes and money. Looking for Villa, Slattery found him near a crackling fire in the middle of the square where orderlies held steaming horses. A man was cooking and a second was up-ending a bottle of beer. A sombreroed cavalryman was honing a vast captured sabre to the sharpness of a carving knife and it glittered redly in the firelight as he bent over it with a dedicated expression on his face. The smell of horses filled the air with the smoke and the smell of coffee. The unexpectedness of the attack had driven the Huertistas from their trenches, and as the horsemen began to round them up they found they had wiped out a force outnumbering them nearly three to one.

  As the excited Villistas surged through the town, Slattery headed for the station with Preto. Every station was connected to the next by telegraph wires and the operator’s log book was always a sure source of information. The windows of the houses around had been broken and the floors fouled by horses ridden up steps and through front doors. Here and there a body was propped against a wall.

  Inside the telegraph office, a Federal officer was trying to get off a warning, and before Slattery could intervene Preto’s men had beaten him across the face and head until they were a smother of blood.

  ‘You don’t understand, mi Coronel,’ Preto said indignantly when Slattery protested.

  It was pointless arguing that the officer was only doing his duty, and he was lumped together with all the other prisoners and swept outside to his death. At the door he halted, removed his shoes and handed them to one of the bare-footed peón soldiers. ‘I shan’t need them any more,’ he said.

  The telegraph operator’s log book indicated that the military train they had expected was still due, so they smashed the set and headed towards the outskirts of the town. The body of the officer was already suspe
nded from the crossbar of a telegraph pole near the station forecourt; a vendor of sticky sweets and candied fruits was setting up a portable stand alongside and, with a fly-whisk working overtime, was looking for trade among the gaping townspeople.

  Near the edge of the town, they stumbled on a pilot engine and tender standing with steam up, half-hidden by trees. As they were examining it, Monserrat arrived with more men on horses. With Preto’s troop clinging like flies to the engine, they steamed to a small halt a mile outside the town and, as they backed the engine into a siding, Monserrat caught up again. Sending him along the track to attack the train from behind, Slattery got Preto’s men placing logs across the rails to stop it.

  Eventually a pilot engine steamed slowly into view, pulling a flat car on which a machine gun was mounted. As it stopped for the barricade, there were nervous shouts between the driver and the officer with the gun, then, as the driver tried to put it into reverse, Preto’s men appeared from cover and swarmed over it. As they brought it to a halt again, Villa appeared.

  He slapped Slattery’s back. ‘Well done, inglés,’ he said. ‘Now we wait for the supply train.’

  There wasn’t one train but four, and they steamed up quite unaware of what had happened. Within minutes they were surrounded by yelling Villistas and the Huertista defenders threw down their weapons and changed sides at once. The trains were crammed with ammunition and military supplies, as well as a complete battery of field guns.

  ‘Artillery!’ Villa crowed. ‘Now we can start for Torreón.’

  Two

  Torreón was protected to the north by the river and beyond that by tumbled hills and deep ravines and the garrisoned towns of Gomez Palacio and Lerdo, with the hill towns of La Loma and Aviles blocking the route from the west.

  As they waited for the final orders to move, Villa summoned his leaders to elect a man whom everybody would follow without question. Most of those present had enough sense to realise that Villa himself was the only one with the personality to command, and preferred not to provoke his fluky pistol by disputing it, but there were a few who considered themselves more fitted for the job. Inevitably it was Villa who was voted into the position and Urbina went off sulking.

  Villa shrugged. ‘Tómas is brave and clever,’ he admitted. ‘But sometimes he can’t walk for rheumatism. Then he drinks too much aguardiente and pretends to shoot his mother. He always pretends to shoot his mother. He never hits her, of course, because he has a great regard for her. But he doesn’t think of the revolution as the fight of the poor against the rich but as a means of filling his own coffers.’

  As the meeting broke up, the ragged host gathered round its fires for the last night before the attack. They were singing the new marching song introduced by Gomez García, the old troubadour. It started as a whisper over the flames and in the shadows, then it grew until half the army was roaring it.

  ‘La cucaracha, la cucaracha,

  Ya no puede caminar;

  Porque le falta, porque no tiene

  Marijuana que fumar…’

  It was a typical army song, jibing at the singers themselves, big-hatted, bandoliered and surrounded by the rattle of wheels and the thump of hooves. It spoke of soldiers and their women, and everybody took it up, pale-faced city men, brown-skinned peóns, white-clad Yaqui Indians and Tarahumaras who could run like stags. Guitars picked up the catchy melody, mouth-organs whined and fiddles squealed.

  Strutting between the fires with his fiddle, invariably accompanied by Jesús, the boy who had been given to Slattery as his body servant, old Gomez García had become familiar to everybody. The butt of the camp, he was known as the Captain General or the Picador’s Horse Boy, but he was cleverer than he seemed and in his element as the man who had brought a new song to the north.

  ‘Soon,’ he told Slattery, ‘the whole of Mexico will be singing it.’

  As the army roared its delight, Carranza himself arrived, surrounded by his staff, all immaculately dressed and showing only the wear and tear of the debating chamber. He was clearly irritated by the way Villa did what he thought best without consulting headquarters, and was anxious to stamp his personality on the coming battle so that when victory came he would be able to claim some of the credit. As he talked he produced a parchment. ‘Your commission as general and commander-in-chief of the Revolutionary Forces of the North,’ he announced.

  Villa stared at it, unimpressed. ‘I’ve never asked for anything from the revolution,’ he said slowly, crumpling the parchment indifferently. ‘It’s for educated men like you, First Chief, to handle the official part of things; and so long as you give back to my men and their families the land the hacendados took, I’m with you all the way. But–’ he paused, gesturing with the parchment, his yellow eyes glittering with ill-disguised contempt ‘–I don’t need this. I already command my army.’

  It was a scorchingly hot day as the final move began, but a low roll of thunder came across the plains, and during the afternoon heavy clouds started to bank up on the surrounding high ground. The long serpent of animals, vehicles and human beings struggled on in the oppressive heat, sweating under their equipment, the weary horses plodding on with lowered heads. As the weather grew more threatening, the colour of the day seemed to fade, the sky changing from blue to steel and from steel to bronze, so that the hills looked pale and washed out. Then nervous flurries of wind began to raise the dust in whirls, and the atmosphere became hot and brooding and made the tramping men and beasts irritable. Finally a breathlessness seemed to make the lungs struggle for air as the sky darkened further.

  The wind began to come in squalls, short frenzied gales that roared in from every direction at once to lift an opaque wall of red dust. Then the stillness came again, ominous and frightening, while new clouds, yellow and muddy-looking, marched over the mountains. The sky became as black as pitch, and an electric storm started with an ear-splitting clap of thunder that battered at the shuddering earth in drumrolls of noise, while violent forks of purple lightning played along the horizon in an incessant flashing of unearthly light.

  The first heavy drops of rain spattered the earth, then it came in a drenching downpour that almost hammered the trudging column into the earth. A vast shout of anger and discomfort rose – even here and there a little laughter – backgrounded by a shrill wail of despair from the women. But it didn’t last long and Jesús sullenly wrapped himself in his sarape while the women and children about them hunched against the discomfort in a stubborn Indian stoicism.

  For three hours a solid wall of water descended, so thick, so heavy, you could almost stare at yourself in it as if in a mirror. Then it stopped dead, leaving the air like that of a Turkish bath and everybody drenched and wretched. Mexicans never took kindly to rain but Villa rode up and down the long column, cursing and slapping at his men with his riding switch, encouraging them as they dragged their feet through the mud which an hour or two before had been thick dust.

  ‘Keep going, compadres,’ he kept saying. ‘Por Dios, don’t stop for a drop of rain!’

  Coming up behind the army, Slattery found it fighting in a growing morass to drag wagonloads of ammunition through knee-deep quagmires where the water had gathered. The ground was churned up by feet and hooves and wheels, and everybody seemed to be covered with wet red mud. Nearby, Atty was struggling under a stalled truck, with a dripping Jesús standing alongside, holding his tools and an oil can.

  But there was no stopping. Villa had set a time limit for the arrival at Torreón and the army fought on against the swamp the rain had made, cursing, panting, exhausted and despairing.

  The whole world looked pale and rubbed out now, and over the plain a wet haze drifted like a ghost. For a while a weak sun came out again, thin and casting no shadows, but it started a steam bath that increased the mist to cotton wool. Eventually it lifted and the sun poured down again, but almost immediately the clouds came together once more and another downpour burst on them, shutting out the horizon with its weight a
nd fury.

  When they halted for the night they were all soaked and more than willing to concede the victory – any victory – to Huerta. There were no fires because it was impossible to light them and they had to eat what was left of their last meal, cold tortillas and beans and, for those who had it, meat out of tins. More rain came in the night so that when the column dragged itself to its feet again the following morning to tramp the stiffness out of their bones, the gulleys which had been full of dust the day before were now swirling rivers. Carts had to be dragged across by sweating men and wild-eyed horses and mules. What couldn’t be heaved forward had to be left behind. Their wet skirts clinging to their legs, women carried children across, then their equipment and cooking pots, and finally tramped off again after their men.

  La Loma fell after a two-day attack then, after confused fighting in the foothills, the Federals were driven back on Aviles, and again to the gates of Torreón. Villa was cock-a-hoop at the booty. ‘Two cannons, five hundred rifles, three hundred shells and a hundred and fifty thousand rounds of ammunition,’ he grinned.

  His armoury replenished, he set his men against Torreón itself. Bringing forward his artillery, he flung in his force in a mass assault at night against three sides of the city at once. Knowing their fate if they lost, the Federal officers put up a stubborn defence.

  Slattery found Villa outside a small house he had made his headquarters. Cooking fires were burning nearby and, though his staff were eating, Villa himself, showing his usual indifference to food, simply moved among them, helping himself to a few beans from one plate, a little meat from another. Nearby was a group of men totally different from Villa’s ragtag soldiers. In Norfolk jackets, breeches and leggings, they were smart and clean and clung closely together. Slattery recognised them at once as the Germans from Nogales. There were four of them and three of them stood aside whispering together while the fourth moved up and down just behind Villa. It was Fausto Graf and he was wearing a revolver, leggings and a military-style cap and was trying to make Villa listen to him. Villa seemed disinclined to pay attention but Slattery knew he was taking in everything that was being said. Occasionally, he flung a word over his shoulder and Graf leaned forward to explain something, earnest, urgent and anxious to be understood. As he finally moved away with a frustrated expression to confer with his friends, he came face-to-face with Slattery.