They Came To Cordura

by Swarthout, Glendon

  No one moved. There were no questions. Sergeant Chawk stared at the ground. Major Thorn feared they had not understood.

  “I have already told Lieutenant Fowler and Private Renziehausen,” he said. “Now you all know. Between here and base I will talk to each one of you and after that write your citations. When we hear that Congress has approved, General Pershing will probably make the presentations himself. You will then be returned to regiment.”

  Bottle in hand, the Geary woman listened. Tethered beside her, yellow-clawed, the toucan clicked back and forth upon the leather of her saddle. It glowed in firelight as though its very feathers were aflame. Major Thorn cleared his throat.

  “It is—it is not only my duty to write these citations for you. I consider it a high privilege. You are very brave men. Not one man in ten thousand receives the Congressional Medal of Honor. What it will mean to you I do not know. I hope more than the extra two dollars a month in pay. It is the highest honor your country can give to any man. It means, among other things, that for a few minutes, there at Ojos the other morning, and in the case of Hetherington, at Guerrero, each one of you did more than duty required. For a few minutes you acted—you lived—beyond what are normally understood to be—you lived beyond the limits of human conduct.”

  They were like men of wood. Their faces were concealed by the frost of their breathing. He shivered. Silence and cold penetrated him. Outside, in darkness, there were only horse sounds: shuffles and stamps, short neighs, the profane breaking of wind.

  “That will be all,” he said. “Lieutenant Fowler, have them finish cleaning weapons before they turn in.”

  They went, still as before, back to their own fire. Major Thorn returned to his. So that he would not look at them he made more coffee in his tin cup and while it heated wrote further in his notebook.

  The cause of many sore backs is the see-sawing of the blanket over the withers. As the horse loses flesh in the field, the saddle cants downward at the pommel, throwing the weight of the soldier forward, and the forward end of the saddle blanket saws at the flesh. If his can be cured by inserting a small strap through a hole in the forward end of the blanket, under the pommel arch, so as to hold the fold up into the arch without touching the withers. This stops the seesawing and permits a current of cool air to reach the withers.

  I won with Chawk this time. Not by authority but by bargaining. Something I wanted him to do for something he wanted to know. The wrong way. What will you do next time, when you have nothing else to offer?

  I will fight him if I have to but having to protect his head I could not beat him.

  Reminding himself that he must separate the notes, personal and those to go to the Journal, when they reached Cordura, he had his coffee and, calling Lieutenant Fowler to him, posted guard for the night. Had they not had the responsibility of a prisoner, there would have been no need for guard. It was 21.00 hours. He would take the first two hours, then Renziehausen, Chawk and Trubee in that order. The Lieutenant’s face was blank and his ‘yes-sir’ mechanical.

  The men were bedding down for the night, the two youngsters together, Chawk and Trubee, the veterans, the junior officer by himself. Drinking the lukewarm coffee, spitting out the grounds, Major Thorn observed them until they were all under blankets and shelter-halves. In a few moments he heard the first snore. The fires sank. He noticed tiny points of light converge in the darkness, coyotes’ eyes, then vanish as the animals trotted restless to another place and grouping, gleam again. There was life, then, even up here. Having put on a serape the Geary woman sat cross-legged at her fire. Now and then she drank from the tequila bottle. He heaped more granjeno on the big fire and his own, removed his cartridge belt and pistol, sat down and turned to a clean page in his notebook.

  William Clenning Fowler, U.S.A., 09981, Second Lieutenant, A Troop, 12th Cavalry, for conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at risk of life, above and beyond the call of duty, in action involving actual conflict. On 16 April 1916 at 05.54 hours, during an attack by Provisional Squadron, 12th Cavalry, upon Villista forces holding a ranch called Ojos Azules near Cusihuiriachic, Mexico, A Troop, commanded by Lieutenant Fowler, was pinned down below a steep bank on a hillside south of the ranch by enemy fire from a position behind a stone fence sixty yards above them. The hillside was too steep for horses to climb, and supporting fire from machine-guns was too long-range, at 1,500 yards, to destroy the position. Rather than ordering a dismounted assault by the twenty men left in A Troop, an order which might have resulted in many additional casualties, Lieutenant Fowler of his own volition climbed the steep bank and in full view of the Villistas rushed them. His shirt slit by rifle-fire, Lieutenant Fowler continued his rush to the fence, two of the Mexicans fleeing as he approached. Leaping on to the fence at point-blank range, Lieutenant Fowler killed the four remaining enemy with his pistol. This was the final Villista strongpoint about the ranch to be wiped out, and with its single-handed destruction by Lieutenant Fowler the last enemy resistance was broken, the remnants of the force, originally numbering between 300 and 400, scattering in full retreat. Signed and sworn to, 17 April 1916, Thomas Thorn, Major, Cavalry, Awards Officer, Punitive Expedition, U.S. Army.

  He re-read the citation, signed it and put it into the oilskin envelope. In the end it did not matter if the five recognized what they had done: their citations, which he had written and which would live after them in Army records, would speak for themselves. He rose and slung a blanket about his shoulders. As he did so he saw that the Geary woman had freed the toucan. With one hand she warmed it at her breast. The other held the bottle upright on her knee. While he watched she got unsteadily to her feet and after several attempts, her hat and serape falling to the ground, re-tethered the toucan to her saddle. She stumbled up and faced in his direction. She was very drunk. ‘The night is her home now, the fire is her hearth, the bird and bottle are her children,’ he thought, ‘and I have no pity for her. She knows these sleeping men at last. Their honor dishonors her. Their courage cheapens her. Her whole life, if put on scales, will not weight out their little finger. And her apology to them is drunkenness. She does penance in tequila.’

  What have I learned?

  Hetherington: brought up to but unable to believe in God. Equated God with father. Loss of faith in one simultaneous with hatred of the other. But confessed to me that at Guerrero “the Lord took hold of him”. Contradiction.

  Fowler: claims sense of duty, obligation to troop, the only factor. But he is self-seeking and might be, under right circumstances, treacherous. Contradiction.

  Renziehausen: Huck Finn on a horse. Similarity between situation at Ojos and slingshot fights at home as a boy. Insists no fear but bit chinstrap nearly through. Contradiction.

  There is no single answer yet, not even pattern. Only Chawk and Trubee left to ask, and may already be too late to expect truth from them.

  I do not think it can be hereditary. Too much difference in backgrounds. Ben Ticknor also right. It is not physical.

  Then what?

  If I am the one chosen to find out, then, my God, let me.

  If I am not, then let me for my own sake.

  Be sure alternate guard tomorrow night so Hetherington and Fowler serve.

  Does Fowler know?

  I have never been as lonely in my life.

  He put the notebook away, and rising listened for the horses. Stepping softly Thomas Thorn went among the men, peering down at them. The expression on Lieutenant Fowler’s face was troubled, as though his mind worked ceaselessly on a problem. The youngsters lay close together for warmth, breathing in each other’s face. A swath of flaxen hair covered Hetherington’s high forehead. He looked old, not young. It was Trubee, the small veteran, who snored, a dry adenoidal rattle issuing from his nose. Thorn wondered what dreams buzzed within the hive of bandage that was Chawk’s head. On his moustached face, surprisingly, was a look of peace, almost of innocence. He stood still among the soldiers, and the odors of their unwashed bodies
came to him, together with a feeling, strong and sweet and new to him, one of tenderness. The Geary woman at the far fire slept with her head against her saddle like a range hand, while over her the bird watched. ‘Let her have her children,’ he thought, ‘whatever they may be. I have mine.’

  Bringing granjeno, he built up the three fires and roused Renziehausen. The boy came out of sleep smiling. Removing his boots, pistol and ammunition-belt, the officer spread his blankets and shelter-half and rolled himself up in them. The air seemed less cold. He looked up. It seemed to him the starless night was so close that if a man were to raise his hand and lower it his hand would be black.

  Sometime during the night the sky shattered and thunder cannoned over them. Rain, the first rain of spring, was let down in a flood. Major Thorn lifted himself on one elbow. In spite of lightning, whoever was on guard huddled under a shelter-half beside what had been the big fire. Water streamed over the officer’s face. The earth beneath him throbbed with thunder.

  The terrible wail of the woman waked him in the weak light of dawn. He left his roll, and putting on his boots went stiffly towards her. As her grief changed to rage she commenced to curse the rising troopers in Spanish. That they could not understand her was fortunate. Major Thorn had never heard such language from the mouth of a woman. She had heard the night before that they were heroes; they were not; they were cowards; they would urinate in the milk of their mothers; they would spread the legs of their sisters for other men; they were not soldiers, but killers of birds. Thorn stopped. The toucan lay, a wet feathered lump, at her feet. Its head had been wrung off and stamped upon until the hooked beak of pure white was splintered. So brutally had the bird been ripped from its tether that one claw still stuck in the ring. It had been an act of the most senseless savagery.

  Shocked awake, Thorn demanded to know who had done it. Holding dripping shelter-halves, the men were silent as the night before. He demanded of each in turn, staring into their grey faces, especially those who had been on guard, Renziehausen, Chawk and Trubee. It had been the boy’s duty during the storm. He had seen no one. Chawk and Trubee were sullen. All were miserable with damp. Lieutenant Fowler observed that the storm had been vicious enough to make it easy for anyone, himself included, to get to the bird undiscovered, especially if it were a toucan, not a parrot, and could make no sound. The junior officer’s demurral, registered probably to make points with the men, irritated Thorn. He said it was inconceivable that anyone, particularly of this party, could do such a cowardly, damn-fool thing. His words beat against brick. He thought of appealing to them in the name of what they were, but this might be taken for weakness, and his margin of authority was scant enough. Recognizing this angered him the more. Aware he was losing his temper, he barked orders at Fowler to get them ready. The granjeno would be too wet to heat coffee, he said, and they could pull out with only hard bread in their bellies and see how they liked it.

  Leadenly they rolled blankets and saddled up the animals. The Geary woman saw to her own horse. As they mounted the sun broke hotly in the east, and with its instant warmth the cold ground billowed steam and the detail rode out hidden from one another by steam.

  Chapter Eight

  SUN soon boiled the ground dry. They commenced to come down off the back of the world. The air fattened and men and animals gulped it gratefully. The heartbeat slowed. To recover ground lost the preceding day Thorn ordered the alternate walk and trot, and in the same formation, Chawk on point, main body, the woman, himself at rear, the detail moved north towards a new land where noble mountains, laboring upward, forced earth and sky apart and gave men space to breathe.

  Thorn brooded over the killing of the bird. It was either an act of vengeance or one entirely without motive, a maniac deed. He suspected Chawk or Trubee or both. He was baffled and sickened. He could not reconcile the thing with what the men represented. It was sacrilege against the status he had given them, or rather, the status their gallantry had earned and he had recognized. He gnawed away at it. He would find out who was guilty. And he would push them hard all day. There would be no breaks.

  He was mistaken. Within an hour the main body halted, and when he came up Lieutenant Fowler motioned at Trubee.

  “I got so much pain in my ass I can’t ride, Majer, sir,” Trubee volunteered. “It’s that boil I was complaining of yestiddy.”

  Thorn scowled at him. Over forty, the oldest man of the party, runty and shifty-eyed, several front teeth browned and decayed, his khaki sweater greasy, Trubee was more than unprepossessing. What made him actually unpleasant to look at were the small fiery eruptions which covered his face and chickeny neck, which never came to heads, but reduced after a time to be replaced by others. It was as though his system were constantly at war with itself in the same way he warred with the world about him. Thorn had not allowed himself to reflect upon Trubee, for a more improbable candidate for an award for valor could not have been found. Since he had been in the cavalry over twenty years, his knowledge of soldiering must have been considerable, yet he had been broken from sergeant to private once and from corporal twice. His service record could not indicate that he was habitually at sick call, that Selah Rogers had used him as his striker or orderly and let him go on suspicion of petty theft, and that at Columbus he lived in a shack in the mesquite with a Mexican woman whom the officer of the guard had regularly to rescue from his beatings and the surgeons as regularly to deliver of the products of his loins. Still scowling, Thorn dismounted and said he would have a look. While the others waited he went behind Trubee’s horse, had him dismount, lower his breeches and turn around. The man was not malingering. In the center of one buttock was a huge saddle boil, the skin of the cone so swollen as to be blue, the yellow core at least an eighth of an inch across. It would have to be drawn. Enjoying the spectacle, the men remarked on the resemblance between Trubee’s rear and his face until the officer cut them short with orders. He sent Chawk and Renziehausen for granjeno, there being no other fuel handy, and told them to build a small fire. He was annoyed intensely at the delay. Ordering Hetherington to accompany him, he started in the direction of the woman and, catching sight of the private’s bare, dirty toe between loose shoe sole and upper, snapped at him to change his socks and look like a trooper instead of a tramp. The youth’s sheep face lengthened with hurt as he managed to say he did not have any others. The Major said to get some. Coming up to Adelaide Geary, he asked for the tequila bottle.

  “So your heroes can suck?”

  “I need to draw a boil.”

  She rested a forearm on her saddlehorn. “Major, when I listened to you last night, I started to believe you. I was even a little ashamed of myself. Now I wouldn’t give them my sweat if they were dying of thirst.”

  “If you don’t give me the bottle I will take it.”

  She calculated, then slowly brought it from a bag. “Watch her,” he ordered Hetherington. When he went to the fire, blazing now, he brought his own canteen and tin cup and, pouring the little tequila left into his cup, he filled the bottle half full of water from the canteen and placed it as close to the fire as the heat permitted. All waited in silence until the water began to boil. Trubee’s lips worked constantly.

  “You goin’ to draw ‘er, Majer, sir?”

  Thorn nodded.

  “It’ll hurt like sin—I’d ruther. . . ”

  “Bring your horses and form a screen between us and the woman,” the officer said to the others. When this was done he told Trubee to lower breeches and lie down on his stomach. Using his handkerchief, he took the bottle from the fire, poured the boiling water back into his canteen, and had Lieutenant Fowler and Renziehausen take hold of Trubee’s arms and legs. Squatting, with a quick movement he clapped the mouth of the hot bottle over the core of the boil. Trubee twisted. The boy, Renziehausen, closed his eyes. As the vacuum within the heated glass built up, Trubee kicked dust in agony until, simultaneous with his groan, the core of the boil spewed upward, smearing the neck of the bottl
e with pus. Nauseated, his hand shaking, Thorn tossed the bottle aside, and opening the first-aid packet on his ammunition belt applied cotton to the bloody hole and unrolled and spread over the cotton a strip of adhesive. Letting Trubee lie, he took the empty bottle and the tin cup of tequila and strode with them to the Geary woman. Without a word he poured the liquor carefully into the befouled neck of the bottle and handed it to her. As he returned to the men the bottle whirred dangerously close to his head and shattered upon a boulder. Trubee was on his feet and Thorn ordered the detail to mount and move out.

  But in another hour the country changed still more. They came into land like a green garden walled in by high sierra. Between the mountains were long valleys and canyons and deeper canyons called barrancas, and they rode through glades of grass up to their stirrups and groves of juniper and cedar and manzanita and wild walnut and stands of oak and many pines, the jeffery and bull and others. The mountains here had majesty. The sky was virgin. The air turned to tonic. They did not suffer from sun. They entered a small canyon and stopped to study the first Indian sign. Thirteen poles had long before been set up in a medicine circle twenty feet in diameter, twelve spaced evenly on its circumference, one placed in the center, while rocks of uniform size and shape, hidden in grass, were laid in radii from the center pole to those on the periphery. In the old day’s this had been Apache country. Here their wounded captives might have been brought to be tortured with rocks in the hands of Apache women and children, that pleasant custom from which the tribal name had derived through the Spanish apachureros de huesos, crushers of bones. Now the circle was two hundred miles from El Paso, Texas, where men, captives all, rode Wintons and Reos and tortured each other and made medicine to other gods in other ways. They passed on through beauty. They trotted more than they walked, and smartly. Spirits lifted. Trubee reported his butt much better. From the point Sergeant Chawk sent back to them a rousing revolutionary song.