There go our cannons! Off to our right, on the road. Raking the Mexicans coming on the road. What noise, I’d near forgot how I hate such noise! And the murmur of countless voices talking is now the roar of thousands of voices yelling.
Must quit writing. Indiana regt. starting to move. Must see what I can and draw if I can. Holy Mary Mother of God pray for us.
CHAPTER XVI
PADRAIC QUINN’S DIARY
Saltillo, Mexico in hospital March ? 1847
WASN’T SURE I would ever try to write in this diary again. After what happened to me on the battlefield, I didn’t care to write, to think, barely cared to live. I was in too much pain, then fever, to think.
Sure and I’ll not be going to soldier when I come of age. No one needs a one-armed soldier.
Really shouldn’t be trying to write even now. Words make me feel like I’ll scream.
In hospital, Saltillo March I suppose. 1847
ON THE OTHER hand, what else can I do but write? And draw?
“On the other hand.”
What other hand?
I may try again another day. Damn it all!
Camargo, Mexico, on Rio Grande April 4, 1847
WAITING HERE FOR a steamer to take us down to the Gulf coast. I’m picking up the pen and pencil again. I might as well. Need something against the tedium and misery.
Some of the wounded from the Battle at Buena Vista are still dying, from festering, flux, bad lungs. Now and then one kills himself.
I can’t bear to write about the battle. Seems better to forget it. If you saw several thousand people funneled through a sausage grinder, why would you want to preserve the memory of it?
Gen. Taylor claims we won the battle. I’d call it a draw. Near a third of our soldiers casualties.
Mexicans likely lost more, but a smaller proportion of their Army.
Full battle went on all the day of Feb. 23. Expected to resume next day but by morning Gen. Santa Anna’s Army was gone. Probably left for to defend Mexico City from Gen. Scott’s invasion.
Lieutenant Wallace of the Indiana Volunteers talks to me when he comes to visit wounded soldiers from his company. He will be mustered out. He says he’s composing an account of the battle. He urges me to finish the one drawing I had started before I was hit. He hopes it could perhaps go with his battle story to that journal in Indiana. Lt. Wallace came two days after the battle, so he didn’t see it. But the Indiana Infantry is faulted in Gen. Taylor’s battle report for failing and falling back, almost losing the whole battle. The Indiana officers say the General’s report is unfair, that it doesn’t tell how they rallied. Lt. Wallace is mad at the Gen. and is interviewing everybody to write a more glorious account. Mainly, trying to defend the reputation of his Indianans. He believes them, not the general. Mister Wallace has faith in his own writing power. He thinks Gen. Taylor is out of favor back in the United States and won’t be believed once the account is told true. That could be, seeing as how Pres. Polk gave most of Taylor’s Army to Gen. Scott. And Gen. Taylor’s own pluck is being questioned. Some officers wonder why he didn’t go chase after Gen. Santa Anna when he retreated.
Well, I’m damned if I quite understand this, when you have to bury several hundred soldiers in blankets because there’s not enough wood for coffins, when several hundred more soldiers lie here in pain, eaten up by fleas & festerations, getting amputations, dying of fevers, puking to death, when all this wretchedness is here, why is it important that some officer or another gets hurt feelings, or a stain on his reputation, or a better account in the newspapers?
Wears me out to write. I am already worn near to death with pain, and all the misery in this dismal place. One doc leaves some infections undressed, open to flies. Says it’s because their maggots eat the infection away from the good flesh. Maybe so, I think I’d rather have the infection. Thank God I don’t.
From reading the newspapers you’d think all this slaughter and misery was just for seeing whether a Whig or a Democrat is the next President. Pres. Polk undercut Gen. Taylor to deny him political glory. I hope the President of the United States feels a great burden of remorse, as this was all his doing. I fancy myself and a score of these veterans here all raising a salute under his nose with the stumps of our limbs.
John Doherty has found me here & he smuggled in a quart of decent rye for me, may Saint Patrick bless his soul! This ought to dull the ache a mite.
Camargo Mexico April 6, 1847
BEYOND THE SORE stump, I often still feel my hand, although it’s not there anymore. In my mind I imagine grasping with my fingers, and feel myself doing so, though there’s no fingers.
I’ve heard of this, by being around soldiers so much. They call it Phantom Limb. There are tales of fellows getting drunk enough they forget they haven’t a leg to stand on, and fall over.
(That also happens to some drunks who still have both legs, too. I’ve seen it often enough.)
Camargo, on the Rio Grande, Mex. Apr. 7, 1847
WHAT I HEAR told is, more of us got killed and hurt by the Irishmen’s cannons up on that hill than by the rest of the Mexican Army together. Their 24-pounders and 16-pounders could reach just about anyplace on the battlefield, and their smaller guns just deluged our infantry with grapeshot. Sure I remember, there was never a moment when there wasn’t smoke and fire and iron coming off that place, up there where the green flag was. It’s said that Gen. Taylor was so furious it was the deserters’ battery chewing up our Army, he sent a troop of dragoons against it. Sure he remembered letting those very gunners march out of Monterrey last fall! Those dragoons didn’t quite get there.
After the battle our officers found 22 of Mr. Riley’s gunners lying dead up there. All were recognized as deserters. If any had been left behind wounded it’s sure they’d have been hanged. Whatever wounded they had they carried off with them, and I don’t doubt it was many. Our own artillery officers were astonished that so many big guns and so much shot and shell could have even been toted and hauled up onto that height, in that short time they had to do it before the battle started.
I hear that Lt. Braxton Bragg did fine gunnery for our side. That’s well and good. But think of all the good Irishmen he drove over to the Mexicans by his meanness, and them up there manning Mexican cannons instead of ours, well, it might overweigh whatever good he did with his own battery.
Now and then I thank God for sparing my writing hand.
The surgeon who took off my left hand said that it was not ball, grapeshot, or shell fragment that smashed the hand, that it might rather have been some part of a soldier, likely a chunk of skullbone. He said he took other pieces of bone out of several wounds in my side. He reckoned about half of bombshell wounds aren’t from metal, but pieces of other soldiers.
What hit me I never saw coming. I recall little from that chaos. The Indiana Volunteers were protecting one of our artillery batteries. An awful number of Mexican infantry came out of a gully in front of us, like a thicket of bayonets coming closer. An awful storm of cannonfire was coming down on us from the elevated place where the Irishmen’s green flag flew. Smoke and dust were so dense that one couldn’t really see. In some places the bodies of dead horses and writhing soldiers lay so deep they had to be climbed over in order to advance. I quit attempting to sketch anything, just shaking too hard. I was deaf from shell-bursts and was wet with blood and gore from dead and wounded soldiers being hurled upon me by explosions. Frankly, I had given up and was kneeling in a low place in hopes that the action would move away. I was looking to see if the enemy bayonets were closer when a shell burst nearby and things hit me and knocked me over. If I believe the surgeon, it was pieces of some poor Indiana bastard that trimmed me up like this. I can write it down here, but sure I don’t care to think on it.
I believe it was then that the Indianans turned and ran. As for me, I reckon I just lost my senses.
CHAPTER XVII
PADRAIC QUINN’S DIARY
Port Isabel, Mexico April 10, 1847
HERE I AM back down the Rio Grande to the Gulf coast. A year since I arrived here in Mexico a picksnot urchin following an army. Now I am still the same, though now five fingers less, and a few lessons learned. I’ve been walking the shore in the wind, waiting for berth on one of the steamers. The wind keeps shifting the sands, and thus the bones of last year’s soldiers (all who died of sicknesses, before the war started), those bones keep rising from the sand. And as they come up, others are buried, for some are still dying after the Buena Vista battle, all these weeks since. They’ll never get home. And many more won’t, either, many of those that have gone on down in Gen. Scott’s Army for that campaign. I should like to believe that Our Good Lord has some reason for events the like of this. Perhaps at some great age I’ll get an understanding of it all. But I doubt I’ll ever feel older than I do now.
I have a bottle set in the sand beside me. I’ll try to draw a picture of one of these rising dead. But with the shore wind it would be difficult even with two hands to manage a sketchbook.
Now there’s a task for me: engineer a means to secure a writing portfolio or drawing board onto my stump. To hold it steady when I write or draw. Buckled straps might do.
Port Isabel, Mexico April 11, 1847
NOW A NEW matter at hand, changing my course:
A letter arrived here from Col. Harney’s staff. It directs that I not sail back to New Orleans, but be put aboard a vessel for Vera Cruz; that my good Ma has somehow made her way to that place, and that if I am found I should be sent to meet her there.
By the Harp of Erin, how has she got herself on the road of the old Conquistador! As Lt. Wallace calls it. While he is himself being mustered out and returned to Indiana, never to see that fabled road.
Mister Wallace took with him several of my drawings. Among them was a well-finished illustration based on the one shaky sketch I did on the Buena Vista battleground. He hopes to have it as a pictorial enhancement of his account of the battle, for it does depict the Indiana Volunteers in honorable action. Saving their reputation seems to be his prime purpose, in the offing.
He promised that if the picture earns anything by publication, he will bank it in a trust to be held for me, there in Indiana. He took also the three portraits I sketched, of himself and two company officers.
So! If I survive the rest of this war, as I surely shall under the protection of my doughty Mum, I shall be able to travel to the State of Indiana, a land of duly honored regiments, and there find in a trust fund perhaps enough money to buy me a fine bottle of whiskey! And while there of course I won’t neglect to call on Mister Lewis Wallace, to inquire into the progress of his great novel concerning an earlier conquest of Mexico.
Perhaps I’ll even take to him some descriptions and drawings of the Road of Cortez, which I shall have seen, and he not!
How I enjoy to sit here with this diary and my bottle, and write my thoughts, while I may. For I expect the rest of this war will interrupt such pleasures. And what will it be like, I wonder, to have a parent trying to preside over me again, after all this eventful time on my own?
Sure and she’ll be proud of my progress in writing and drawing. But she’ll not be so proud to see how well I love the bottle at this age.
I do dread to see her face as she finds me short a limb.
I’ll love to see her dear face however. Sure she’ll be a bit changed, too, from what I remember. Nothing is easy for us the Irish poor folk. She will look old, I reckon. She’s past thirty years by now.
BOOK II
The Southern Campaign
AGUSTIN JUVERO
SPEAKS WITH THE JOURNALIST
ON THE ROAD TO OUR LADY OF GUADALUPE
IN SPRING OF THE YEAR 1861
IT IS A new experience in my life, Señor. I have never made this pilgrimage with another pilgrim alongside me. Certainly I have never gone along day by day relating my narrative of that war, to a Yanqui who crawls on his knees in agony and humility!
Oh, it is good to see a Yanqui crawling on his knees in agony and humility! You people should do it now and then. It would alleviate your national disease—overweening pride.
And it is good to see a Yanqui asking instead of telling! That is another thing you should do now and then. Your United States is such a young country, a child among nations. Less than a century in age. But like a willful child who will not listen to the wisdom of your elders.
I am not happy to be deaf, Señor Periodista. Before your bombshells deafened me, I loved music, the sounds of birds, and voices speaking, and fountains in the courtyards, and mountain rivers dashing through the rocks. And of course the bells and the choirs and cantors of our holy religion. But it is appropriate that I cannot hear you, that you hear me. Now I am like the grandfather, who cannot hear the cries and silly questions of the children, and thus tells them what he knows, instead of the things they would like to hear.
You and I have now shared food and drink, shelter and the lack of shelter, the pain of penitence, and the pleasures of resting together in the niches and sanctuaries along this beautiful and tragic road. We have come about half the way. This has been a more tolerable sharing than I expected. You listen well and pay attention. You write and draw by candlelight where there is candlelight in the evenings. You are hardy, and not a complainer. If your Yanqui nation had more like you, it would perhaps be a better country than it is.
Now, Señor, in this year of 1861, your ignorant young nation is beginning to attack itself from within. You will feel the great sadness familiar to Mexico, of your own citizens killing each other. This is happening because your nation became too proud, and would not listen to the wisdom of those who were older and more wise.
As we have come along this hard road together, Señor, I have been telling you how we felt, losing our pride as your nation grew more and more proud by winning.
My people are brave and patient. We have seen tragedy and defeat for so long that we are not very susceptible to being astonished. However, in that last war, Señor, the one that hurt us in so many ways, we were astonished by the madness of your president, and by the recklessness of your generals. Your General Taylor had victories in northern Mexico because he was courageous and steadfast, not because he was a brilliant tactician. And as a hero, when he went home from Mexico he became your president for a little while, until he died in the office. You know all that, of course.
If General Taylor had remained in command of the war in Mexico, it is certain that Mexico would have defeated and humbled you. Zachary Taylor would have marched southward down the long, long road, five hundred miles through our uplands and mountains from Saltillo, and his supply line would have been eight hundred miles long by then. But your army would have perished long before then. I am speaking as a scholar of war, you see.
Your General Winfield Scott, though, was a genius. The world’s greatest general, the duke of Wellington who had defeated Napoleon, said that General Scott was the greatest living general of his time. Alas for Mexico, it was General Scott who conducted the rest of the war for you. Because it was he, Mexico was doomed. For as you know, he chose the road by which the first invader had conquered Mexico.
The road of Cortéz.
PADRAIC QUINN’S DIARY
Aboard Steamship Naiad Port Vera Cruz, Mexico April 17, 1847
VERA CRUZ. MEANING, the True Cross.
Again I see the real bigness of a war, now I see ships in a port. So many big sailing ships are anchored here and at the docks, their masts look like a forest, as it does in winter when there are no leaves on. And the steamships, with their coalsmoke billowing up. Some ships are both: sail ships with paddle wheels on the sides. The ships are so huge! And they just keep bringing soldiers and supplies for General Winfield Scott.
This place is just docks and a sort of rough jetty, not a good harbor. Most of the ships stay at anchor offshore, waiting for dock space. North of the city there is a fort on a rock, which covers the port with cannons. A sailor told me that Gen. S
cott had to land his army by rowboats farther down the beach out of range of that fort’s big guns. All the men and supplies had to be put ashore in rowboats. Even their big cannons! Imagine rowing a boat with a cannon in it!
CHAPTER XVIII
PADRAIC QUINN’S DIARY
Vera Cruz, Mexico April 18, 1847
I AM GLAD to be off that ship but this is an unhealthful hot and low place. Almost everybody here sick with El Vomito. Town hundreds of years old, and not too ugly when you get away from the dock area. Somewhere around here is where that conquistador Cortez landed his ships. What breeze there might be is blocked by dunes and the town walls. Parts of the wall have been all battered down by Gen. Scott’s cannons during the siege. They say the American artillery even borrowed big cannons off the battleships and put them up in the dunes. It was a scheme thought up by an Engineer Captain from Virginia, named R. E. Lee. He’s famous for it here. Forced the town to surrender pretty quick. I never heard of him before, but hear of little else now.
St. Patrick Battalion Page 20