by Blake, J
The order from Santa Ana, Moreno told his battalion, was that the convent must be held at any cost. “If the Yankees should break through our southern positions and advance this far, only the téte du pont and this convent will stand between the barbarians and the capital. We cannot fall, compadres. We cannot.”
“You aint lying,” Lucas Malone murmured.
5
Not an hour after they’d settled into their assigned positions the booming of artillery came to them from the far south side of the Pedregal, some three or four miles away. The convent defenders gathered at the south walls and gazed out to the Pedregal as the big guns resounded in the distance beyond. General Rincón and Colonel Moreno joined Riley’s Saint Patricks in the steeple but even from that vantage point all they could see of the faraway battle were vague billows of dust and smoke. The lookouts at Coyoacán were gathered on the crest of the rise and all of them peering to southward.
“General Valencia ya emprendió la lucha,” Rincón said. Moreno told Riley and John that General Valencia had been charged with blocking any Yankee attempt to go around the south end of the Pedregal and then advance on the convent by way of the San Angel Road.
The distant artillery battle continued through the afternoon and seemed to be advancing slowly toward San Angel. Now the sun set in a crimson riot behind a swelling rise of thunderheads dark as slate. Sheet lightning flashed ghostly pale in the mountains. The camp women prepared a supper of spicy kid stew, beans and tortillas, and the San Patricios fell to it. They had just done eating when the sounds of artillery abruptly ceased. The army band had earlier let off its blaring and now a soft strumming of guitars began to carry through the convent. Many of the Mexican soldiers were accompanied by their women and huddled close with them in the shadows.
And now the night rose fully. The sky was densely dark with rushing clouds and the wind picked up and smelled heavily of a coming storm. Thunder rolled over the valley in long rippling cracks and every clap came louder than the one before. The wind gusted and shook the trees and shrubs. The convent was suddenly illuminated in pale blue light followed on the instant by a shuddering blast of thunder that made John flinch and Lucas whoop and then the sky broke open and the rain came slashing down.
6
Past midnight the wind at last fell off and the rain eased to a drizzle but did not quit altogether until just before sunrise. The morning was wet and cool, ripe with the fecund smells of the marshland. The sky reddened over the eastern mountains. As the sun broke above the peaks the sounds of battle renewed in the southwest distance.
John and Lucas stood at the stone rail of the steeple walkway and sipped coffee as they scanned the far rise of the Coyoacán Road where the Mexican lookouts were posted. The lookouts were tiny figures once again bunched on the road and looking south. Now several of them began to gesticulate excitedly. The sounds of artillery and small arms grew more distinct. Riley came up beside John and trained his field scope on the Coyoacán rise. The lookouts mounted up hurriedly and reined their horses about and spurred them toward the convent. A moment later Moreno came running up the steeple steps and out to the walkway and peered out on the dozen horsemen galloping up to the gates and clattering into the courtyard yelling, “Hay vienen! Hay vienen!”
They were indeed coming but they were not Yankees, not yet. The men riding hard over the rise and followed by soldiers afoot and running headlong were Valencia’s troops retreating from San Angel. As they passed by on the road they did not even look toward the comrades calling to them from the walls and the open gates of the convent but pressed on all the way to the bridgehead and there took their refuge.
The crackling of American rifles grew louder. Still more soldiers came up the road at a gallop and on the run. And now there were cries of “Mira! Mira!” from the east wall of the convent and the Patricios on the walkway dashed to that side and saw that the San Antonio Road too was now athrong with Mexican troops in full flight for the bridge.
John and Lucas looked at each other and John thought he saw in the old man’s eyes a tiredness he had never seen before. His own mouth had gone dry. He could not have said how much of his excitement was fear, how much anticipation.
Mexican soldiers continued retreating north along both roads for nearly an hour more, the last of them shooting behind them as they came. As these rear-guard infantry made it to the bridgehead, the first Yankee soldiers hove into view, a company of dragoons. They rode onto the causeway and there they halted. They were reconnoitering the road ahead when all three guns at the bridgehead opened fire on them.
The Yankees reined hastily about on the narrow causeway and all started galloping back the way they came and some were forced off either side of the road and into the watery muck and two of the cannonballs were solid rounds and landed with high splashes in the marshwater off the road but the other round was explosive and blasted against the causeway embankment and cut down two horses and their riders. A great cheer went up from the téte du pont and the walls of the watching convent. One of the fallen Yankees jumped to his feet and limped to a comrade who pulled him up to ride double but the other downed trooper was pinned under his dying and weakly kicking horse in the shallow water off the road. The men at the convent could see him beckoning frantically for his comrades to help him, could hear dimly his shrill cries as the last of the dragoons spurred away before the big guns could fire on them again.
“Lookit em leave him,” Lucas Malone said. “Sorry sons a bitches.”
“Finish him, Johnny,” Riley said.
John looked at him. “Hell, Jack, he is finished.”
Riley scowled. “He gets loose of that horse and gets back in the fight and he might be the very one to shoot you an hour from now. Worse than that, he might be the one to shoot mei Now do it!”
“I got a dollar says Johnny’11 do for him with one shot in the head,” Lucas Malone quickly called out. “No matter the fella’s wiggling like a snake and it’s two hundred yards if it’s a damn foot.”
“You’re covered, Malone!” somebody said. “The lad’s a deadeye, sure enough, but he aint that good!” Immediately there was a clamor of bets. As money changed hands Lucas gave John a broad wink.
John braced his rifle on the walkway wall and cocked the piece and took careful aim. The trooper was sitting up in the water with pistol in hand and had almost managed to free his leg from under the horse. John squeezed off the shot and in that instant thought he could see the ball flying out of the muzzle in a flare of smoke and cutting through the still noon air and traversing the distance to its target in less time than a heartbeat and in John’s inner eye the Yankee’s head loomed from hardly more than a speck to its full size as the ball crunched into it just above the left ear and bore through bone and brain and burst out the other side of the skull and took the right ear with it in a red spray. The man’s head abruptly tilted to the right and he fell over dead with his face in the water.
The Mexicans raised another great cheer and Lucas Malone laughed and collected bets and clapped John on the shoulder.
John felt no joy in the shot. The man had been no more threat to him than a bottle on a fence. Lucas caught a look at his face and leaned close and said, “Jack was right, what he said. And the son of a bitch was anyway one a theirs, goddamnit, and it aint never nothin but right to shoot one a theirs no matter he’s standin or sittin or sleepin or takin a shit or gettin laid or sayin his goddamn prayers. You hear me, boy? You done right. And you done it cause you the best of us at it.”
John shrugged. And thought that whoever it was that said a man was no more than what he did best was right for damn sure.
A half-hour later American troops hove in view once again, this time on both the Coyoacán and the San Antonio causeways—and this time in numbers. The bridgehead guns opened fire and took down another horse. And now the wall guns at the convent fired—and mingled with the round shot was a high explosive shell whose blast put down a pair of dragoons and several foot soldiers
and the Mexican cheers overwhelmed the screams of the animals and the fallen men.
And then, along both causeways, the Americans attacked.
7
The Spy Company did not engage in the initial assault. General Twiggs, directing the attack on the convent via the Coyoacán Road, held them in reserve in a willow copse a half-mile south of San Angel. They sat on the ground smoking and talking, their saddled horses close by, their rifles at hand. The day had dawned cool after a night of pouring rain but had warmed quickly as the sun rose, and now in the late forenoon the air was hot and thick. They could hear the battle raging, the steady blasting of Mexican artillery and the continuous clatter of small arms, the war cries and the screams of men, the shrieking of downed horses.
They’d heard rumor that Twiggs did not trust the Spy Company to fight its best against their own countrymen, and now old Lázaro said it looked like it was true. “I hope to hell it be true,” Spooner said in English and grinned at Edward.
But Dominguez was insulted. “This Tweegs, he don’t think I fight hard against Mexicanos?” he said. “Bermejillo, he is not Mexicano? Torrejón? Miñón? My good amigo, Lucero, I kill him. He is not Mexicano?”
“Hey Manuel,” Spooner said, “just listen to what’s going on out yonder. You hear that shit? You want to get into thai? I sure’s hell don’t. Twiggs can leave us out of it till hell freezes over, be fine by me.”
But two hours into the battle Twiggs sent orders for them to mount up immediately and join the attack. They stepped up onto their saddles and rode hard up the Coyoacán Road toward the hellish din and crested a small rise just as an artillery shell struck the causeway not forty feet in front of them and the first six riders in the column, including Dominguez, went down with their shrieking horses.
Edward’s mount was struck by shrapnel and it trumpeted and veered wildly off the causeway and into the adjoining cornfield and its legs buckled and Edward was unseated. He scrambled to his feet, his hands thick with mud but still grasping his rifle. The horse was gone. He knocked the rifle barrel against his bootsole to clear the muzzle of mud. The cornstalks were almost as tall as he was and the field was hazed with gunsmoke. The earth shook with cannon rounds. The convent looked ghostly in the distance ahead. He scrabbled up the causeway embankment and peered over it and saw the battered San Antonio Road a furlong or so to the east. Saw the small vague shapes of bodies sprawled over the road and bobbing in the shallow marshwater. General Worth’s infantry was slogging through the marsh toward the bridgehead as artillery shells continued to blast in their midst. He looked to the convent and saw a cannon flare orange on the wall and he rolled down the embankment as the roundshot whined overhead and struck the ground with a shudder a bare fifteen yards behind him.
Now a shell exploded on the other side of the causeway and flung up body parts in a shower of blood and black water. Dominguez came tumbling down the embankment and sprawled beside Edward and sat up wildeyed and muddy. He was bareheaded and blood ran out of his hair and over his face and mustache. He wiped his chin with his fingers and stared at the blood on them and looked at Edward in outrage. “Esos chingados casi me mataron!” He glared all about as if those who would kill him might be fast closing in on him, then snatched up his hat and put it on and looked at Edward fiercely. “Pues, vamos a ver quien mata quien! Andale, Eduardito, sigúeme!”
He followed Dominguez into the cornstalks and toward the convent looming a hundred yards away. Just ahead of them a regiment of Twigg’s infantry was pushing forward through the cornfield too. The causeway was littered with dead and dying men and horses and continued to receive heavy artillery fire. Edward was sure that if he stopped moving he would be killed on the instant. He sensed that the only tactic of the moment was the same as in any fight—keep going toward whoever was trying to kill you and get to him and kill him first. Other compañeros converged about them as they advanced. The greater portion of the company was yet alive. Spooner materialized from the smoke like some malevolent spectre bent on annihilation. His sleeve gleamed bright with blood. “Kill em!” he demanded of Edward as if the idea had only just come to him. “Kill em all!” They went forward at a crouch through the corn, moving past corpses, past wounded men begging for help, for water, cursing, praying aloud for an end to their agony. The compañeros pressed on. The ground quivered under them with every blast of artillery. Rifle balls hummed over their heads. The screaming of the world was incessant.
As Twiggs’ forces closed in on the convent the cannons on the walls and steeple began firing canister and grape and dozens of Yankees fell shrieking at each blast. The compañeros dropped to the ground and grasped tightly to the muddy earth. Edward heard himself cursing at he knew not what. Grapeshot ripped through the stalks. He smelled blood through the muck in his nose. Then came a blast of different timbre—an explosion not against earth but against stone, and there followed a chorus of cheers from the Americans in the corn ahead. He got to his feet and peered over the stalks as another blast resounded from the convent and he saw a great spray of broken stone rising high on the far side of the church and come raining down again.
“It’s Worth’s boys!” Spooner shouted. “They musta took the bridge! They using the Mexes’ own guns on that damn church is what they doing!”
A round struck the steeple above its walkway and gouged out a great chunk of it and set the church bells tolling madly. The infantrymen in the corn let another lusty cheer. A shell blasted on a monastery roof and flung up a scattering of riflemen like rag dolls. Now a section of the wall before them blew apart—an explosion of such force it could only have been a powder store struck by a shell or set off by a spark. At the sight of the sudden breach directly ahead, the lead wave of infantry rose up in the cornfield with a huge and quavering war cry and led by their captains with sabers raised high surged toward the convent.
“Adelante!” Dominguez yelled. “Adelantef” He was on his feet and brandishing a bayoneted Hall and running for the broken wall and the compañeros rose and charged behind him.
Edward’s field of vision now narrowed to that small segment of the world immediately before him. He was but dimly aware of the riflefire storming down on them, of the men before him and alongside him whose hands flew up as they fell and over whom he leaped or on whom he stepped as he kept running for the wall and the gaping rift in it where the first Americans were now plunging through to the interior. He glanced up at the top of the wall as it loomed closer and saw there the dark white-eyed faces of Mexican riflemen and saw a gun crew clustered about a cannon but now they too were shooting with rifles and he knew they had run out of artillery rounds. As he arrived at the breach he looked up again and saw that the gun crew was of white men.
And then he was in the courtyard and shooting a little Mexican soldier who came rushing at him with poised bayonet and looked about fourteen years old and the boy fell at his feet with blood gushing from his mouth and his eyes rolled up. Mexicans were everywhere shooting and stabbing at the first rush of Yankees and at their sides their women with bared teeth flailed with knives and now the courtyard was aflood with American troops pouring through the broken walls and scaling over the others and dropping down into the rose bushes with high tremulous howls.
He was knocked down from behind and rolled quickly against the base of the fountain and saw high on the steeple walkway a pair of Mexican riflemen with white flags tied to their rifle barrels. But the men were grabbed from behind and the white flags ripped away and one of them who would surrender was shot in the head by a big hatless redhaired man and the other was lifted bodily by a graybearded man and pitched into space and he came wheeling down screaming but barely audible over the din and struck the rim of the stone fountain and his head burst open and he flopped to the cobblestones as if his bones were turned to sand.
Cisco fell beside Edward with a face masked in blood, slashing up with his saber at a pair of Mexican soldiers trying to bayonet him. Edward jumped to his feet and thrust his bayonet
through one soldier’s throat and as the other turned to him Cisco skewered him through the thigh and the Mexican screamed and fell with blood jetting from the wound.
The courtyard was a pandemonium of outcries, screams, curses, the crack and pop and ricochet whines of gunfire, the ringing clash of bayonets and sabers. The air was thick with dust and smoke and the smells of shit and blood. Edward wielded his rifle with both hands like a club and felt every strike break bone. He stumbled on a body and went down again and saw the hazy sky for a moment before it was blocked from view by a crush of bodies slashing over him with rifles and bayonets and someone in a Spy Company uniform rent the belly of a Mexican soldier with a bowie and the Mexican’s guts poured down beside Edward like a tangle of bloody blue snakes. The bowie-wielder was Fredo Ruiz who yanked him to his feet and pulled him away toward the stone steps of the church where a dozen compañeros were already rushing inside. The cobbles were slippery with blood, the whitewashed walls spattered and smeared with it.
Edward had a Colt in his hand and took the steps two at a time. But now Fredo fell and Edward nearly tripped over him and he bent to help him to his feet and saw that he had a large red hole just behind his ear and was dead. He holstered his pistol and took Fredo’s two Colts and raced up the steps and into the dimness of the church where the compañeros were shooting and clubbing and stabbing at a horde of Mexicans slashing with bayonets. Edward fired the Colts till both were empty and he put down five Mexicans. He threw aside Fredo’s empty pistols and drew his own but the compañeros now had the rest of the Mexicans backed against a wall and in quick order shot or bayoneted them every one.