I got off the ship with my letter from Col. Harney, to look for him & my mother. Now I find the whole Army’s already marched off up the Mexican national road toward Mexico City. The Army clerks are arranging now for me to ride up with a supply convoy.
From up on the dunes you can look west and there’s a volcano mountain with snow on it even in this weather. Called Orizaba. Said to be more than fifty miles but it’s clear to see in morning light. Looks like silver.
Had a good supper of fresh fish and rice, in a shop. The cook spoke English and was good to me, wondered about a fellow my age being alone. I explained. He said he was happy to have a Catholic American in his place, was sorry about my hand, and all that. He told me about a whaling ship harpooner who had been here before the war, while his ship was being repaired, a harpooner whose hand had been torn off in a kink of rope pulled by a whale!
I bought a liquor he had there, made from the agave plant, and we talked about whales and whale oil. The light of the world, he said, pointing at the lamp in the shop. He said the one-handed harpooner had been at sea two years, while his family waited for him in their home on an island not far from Boston. He seemed to love saying “Boston.” Wondered how a man could stay away from a wife for two years. I told him that soldiers had to do that, too. He said Yanqui soldiers who came here complained that he had rice instead of potatoes. I told him that my Irish forebears hadn’t had anything to eat but potatoes, so we tend to like them. Then he told me there never was a potato in Ireland until they were sent over from South America. I was surprised. He said, yes, and maiz. He meant corn. No corn anywhere until they found it here, he said. He was proud to tell me that Mexico had fed the world.
I paid him for the meal, and then drew his portrait and gave it to him. He was so grateful he poured me another glass of the liquor. So then I drew a picture of his wife and he gave me another glass.
When I woke up I was on a pallet on the floor of his place, and he served me a free breakfast before I went back to the Army headquarters. I checked in my wallet and every penny was still in it. The last thing he told me when I left the shop was that if I couldn’t catch up to find my mother, come back to Vera Cruz and he and his wife would take care of me. Good that they spoke some English. I still don’t hardly know Spanish well enough to be traveling in their country. Shame on me for that, as I’ve been in their country a year now.
Vera Cruz, Mexico April 20, 1847
ANOTHER VICTORY! Gen. Scott got into a battle up toward the mountains, against Gen. Santa Anna, and won it. Santa Anna was forted up on a mountain covering the national road to Mexico City. But our Army flanked him and drove him off. Col. Bill Harney led the flanking charge, I hear. I will want to find out more about that. That vicious bastard’s a hero again.
To my mind, what’s most remarkable about all this is that Gen. Santa Anna could even have been there for that battle! It’s less than two months since his Army fought Gen. Taylor in northern Mexico, way up there at Buena Vista, where I lost my hand. That is seven or eight hundred miles of deserts and mountains to move a whole Army through, by the maps I’ve seen. And in no longer than it took me to heal and come down to Vera Cruz by boat! But no one can march like Mexican soldiers. That we know.
Rumor is, it was a real slaughter, and a rout. More than a thousand Mexican soldiers dead. Three thousand made prisoners. Such a rout, they say, Gen. Santa Anna himself left a cork leg in his camp. Don’t know if that’s true yet. It’s the kind of a yarn soldiers hoot about, for it ridicules their enemy. Whether it’s true or not, it’s raising the spirits of all the soldiers here at Vera Cruz. Hear soldiers laughing, and that’s likely what they’re talking about, that false leg.
They need something to make them laugh, for they’re dropping sick by hundreds here, down with El Vomito. For every Mexican soldier we kill, we lose one of ours to sickness. They say it’s from being down here on the coast with the hot weather setting in. Most soldiers say they’d rather be up in the high country with Gen. Scott than down here. I had rather die by bullet than by puking, a soldier told me.
There is a convoy going up that way tomorrow, and I get to go with it. An Army clerk confirmed that my mother has already gone up, with the civilians following the Army.
I heard the Death March today, funerals out at the Army camp. Sure if there are mockingbirds in this part of Mexico, they’ll be for learning to sing it soon.
On National Road, Mexico April 21, 1847
OUR SUPPLY WAGON convoy made maybe 15 miles on the national road today. Gradual uphill. Up away from that coast, but still hot scrubby country. We were slowed by meeting Army wagons taking wounded soldiers down to Vera Cruz. There’s said to be near four hundred hurt bad. Around seventy killed.
Awful to see those poor soldiers all filthy and wrapped in bloody bandages, swarming with flies. One wagon load stopped by us. Such as could, got off the wagons to piss by the road. One all pale in the face stayed aboard, stood up and pissed over the side of the wagon. He had a big bloody wad of bandage on his left arm and then I saw it was just a stump of arm, looked like he had lost about as much arm as I did. He was white as chalk and slick with sweat and all pained in the face, but he saw me watching him. I sort of saluted him with my own stump, and he looked right surprised. “What happened to you, boy?” he called over. I called back and answered, it just came into my head to say it, “John Riley’s cannons!” Which I reckon was true.
Said he, “I’ll be damned! Me too! Saw his goddamn green flag! Goddamn traitors! But we got them, by God! Killed a mess of them. Took their heavy cannons. Hey, I got to sit down.” He kind of crumpled down inside the wagon, breathing shallow through his mouth with his eyes shut. My heart was a-pounding. I went across the road to his wagon and stood up on the wheel hub so I could see in. There were four or five soldiers on the wagon floor who looked dead, or near to it. I said, “Sir, did they kill Mister Riley?” He blinked his eyes open, saw me, said, “Sorry, I think not. They was seen hightailing out, with their goddamned green mick flag. Hey, lad, it’s a bother unbuttoning the breeches for a pee, ain’t it, with just one hand?” Then he shut his eyes and said, “God, I think I’m about to faint.”
Many of the wounded soldiers had keepsakes from the battlefield, Mexican shakos, bayonets, epaulets, canteens, cartridge boxes, peso coins, gold crucifixes, banners, fifes, just to name things I saw. Some had cut off an ear or a finger of someone they had killed, or said they had killed. One man had a scalp of black hair. He bragged that he had other scalps, from the war on the Seminoles. It all reminded me again of all those yarns about Chief Tecumseh’s skin on razor strops and all that. The wounded soldiers were wretched, but they would most of them roust their spirits when the subject of Santa Anna’s leg came up. It did, often. A few soldiers said they had seen it themselves, in the possession of some officer.
Another thing they laughed and jeered about was Colonel Harney’s new whore. They said who but old Horny Harney could find himself a big brass-plated bawd right in the middle of a campaign? That one of his dragoon supply wagons had been fixed up fancy for her to ride and abide in, and another to carry her baggage.
That was no surprise to me, for it was likewise when I was with his troop in Florida. Elsewhere in this journal I made account of his lechery as I saw it with my own eyes, and his long reputation for goatishness.
Those rumors make me uneasy. My phantom hand is bothering me tonight, maybe because of that soldier on the road with his new amputation, for, O how well I remember how that felt for so many days after it happened!
Sure and it turns me thinking about John Riley pretty strongly. As, shouldn’t I be for justly hating a man who shot off my arm? And countless others’ arms, and legs, and heads?
The wagoneer captain expects we will pass the battlefield tomorrow. At sundown today we gazed on a dark mountain far ahead, which is said to be the one where Gen. Santa Anna dug his Army in to stop Gen. Scott.
In vain, it was for Santa Anna. Now with his Army route
d, it is but a bit over 200 miles on to his capital at Mexico City. Here I am upon the very road old Cortez took to the same place! Someday I might go to Indiana and sit with a good bottle and tell Lt. Lew Wallace about this road to Montezuma, as he calls it! God willing, I’ll get back there for that. And maybe I can help him describe Cortez’s road, for his romantic Christian novel.
Begorrah, I’ll drink to that!
Cerro Gordo, Mexico April 22, 1847
CERRO GORDO MEANS fat hill, or big hill. General Santa Anna’s Army fled through this little town after our forces broke their defenses. North of the Rio del Plan are two mountains, called El Telegrafo and Atalaya. Road runs between Telegrafo & the river.
You see the shambles of the rout. Everything an Army uses is scattered along the road, broken. Cannon wheels, wagons, kettles, crates. Parts of blue uniforms all over the ground. Our soldiers are digging shallow graves and dragging Mexican corpses to them. Dead horses lie all about, rotting in the sun. Enough buzzards to give shade, not to exaggerate by much.
Some soldiers paused from their burial detail to point out to us the lay of the battle. Plainly, Telegrafo dominated the road, and the Mexican general expected our Army to come up the road and be trapped under him. But that Engineer Captain, Lee, scouted a route between the two mountains, and sappers cleared a path through its thickets. The path skirted Santa Anna’s weakest defense, and Gen. Scott’s Army attacked through it. The gravediggers pointed at the steep and distant Atalaya mountain. Americans took that peak and put cannons up there. Santa Anna was outflanked and enfiladed. Even so, said the soldier, it was a bloody awful fight and all steep uphill, and if we hadn’t outfoxed old Santy Anny we’d all be dead.
I am sketching a map to send to Lt. Wallace, though I’m sure there will be better ones in the battle accounts in the periodicals, long before I can post mine to him. War news gets home so fast, the whole United States should soon be laughing about the Mexican commander’s captured leg!
I asked Mister Wallace, before he went home, how the news does go so fast. He said it goes by fast boat to New Orleans. Newspapers there, like the Picayune, support express riders, who gallop off day and night to relay the print. Somewhere they get to the telegraph line that’s being extended out of Baltimore, and then it’s all up east in those periodicals in just hours.
I sure do find that interesting. Somebody sees a battle in one country, and in days people in another country can read what he saw. Mister Wallace gave me an instance of how important that hastiness can be. He told me the famous Battle of New Orleans was fought fifteen days after the treaty that ended the War of 1812, because neither side knew about the peace treaty. Two thousand casualties because news was so slow! That wire telegraph thing, that could do good. Lt. Wallace had some cards with the telegraph code printed on them and gave me one so I could learn it. I haven’t yet, but ought to. Might be a good skill to have someday.
They don’t have any wire telegraph anywhere in Mexico yet. This mountain is called Telegrafo because it was a signaling place so high it could be seen for many miles, and helped relay flashing signals between the coast and Mexico City.
Morse is the name of the wire telegraph inventor. Lt. Wallace said Morse was an artist before he invented it. An artist, like me. Probably better. But I’ll wager he wasn’t better than me at my age. I practice at it as much as I can. My Ma will be impressed, sure enough.
Lt. Wallace told me an odd thing about that Morse: that he is one of the worst of the “hatemongers” against Catholic immigrants. Started when Mr. Morse was in a crowd at the Vatican and didn’t take his hat off for the Pope, so a Vatican guard knocked his hat off. So then Mr. Morse wrote some really vicious anti-Pope books, about ten years ago. Well, that really started something. After Mister Morse’s books there came hundreds of such books and periodicals about the Papists trying to take over America, and Irish Catholic criminal elements corrupting American cities, and suchlike. Mister Wallace said most of the officers have read this “flood of vitriol” and believe it, and he said it’s a major cause of their contempt and cruelty toward the Irish soldiers. Also a reason why an Irish soldier’s got little chance to rise in rank. I remember when I was little, other children would say they hated me because Catholic priests and nuns ate babies and drank human blood. They had drawings they would show of nuns being mounted by goats, and priests mounting sheep, and demons dancing with nuns who didn’t have anything on but their cowls. Really strange and awful drawings. I remember the one time I tried to tell my mother about them, she said she already knew about such things, that they weren’t true at all and I shouldn’t mind them. She said people were getting hurt and killed in big cities where mobs attacked and burned down Catholic neighborhoods and churches, and it was all caused by the kind of lies and pictures those children were showing. She said don’t hate them, just ignore them, and not hit anybody first.
But she said, “Don’t ever let anybody hit you a second time.”
I went by her advice, and after a while it came to be that hardly anybody would try to hit me anymore. One bigger boy kept at me, a sergeant’s son, but then my mother caught him by his topknot when he was after me. He was bigger than she was, but she spun him around and punched him on his snot horn, & he was polite to me from that day on.
I expect we’ll catch up with the Army tomorrow, and I’ll see her. Soldiers here say the army is encamping up the road at a goodly-size town called Xalapa. It is well up out of the fever country, saints be praised.
And I couldn’t bear to camp one more night so close to this battlefield. Stink of death. Dogs and buzzards feeding on dead horses. There are dead horses by hundreds, and sure nobody bothers to give a horse a funeral, even a burial.
Xalapa, Mexico in camp Apr. 24, 1847
MAY THE GIANT holy fist of Saint Patrick close around Col. Harney and squeeze the gleet out of him, for the ass-pimple he is! Damn damn damn him!
What could be worse than this I sure don’t know! I am near too ashamed to put it on paper here, though it’s no fault of mine.
Or maybe it is. I might have warned her when I wrote to her: Ma, keep a distance from the colonel for he’s nought but a two-legged cock-stand and will smirch your reputation just by looking at you. And cruel besides!
Yes, sure and she’s the one those soldiers called the brass-plated bawd that Harney’s taken into his wagons. Horny Harney’s whore, they said. I’d never guessed it was her. If I’d foreseen this, I’d not have come up from Vera Cruz. If I’d known this I might have just followed the Mexicans and thrown in with John Riley, as his errand boy or something.
No. That would leave her at Harney’s mercy. She must be warned what a lethal brute he is.
How I found it out is when the wagons came up, there was that old corporal, Barton, from Col. Harney’s Seminole War regiment. He saw me and yelled, “B’God, it’s our catamite! The Quinn lad, him who don’t know his Pa’s name! How ye been farin’, boy? And might the Colonel’s lady Quinn be a relative to ye?”
Of course he knew she’s my Ma. They all know. When they directed me toward the regiment camp, they greeted me, but they all had a leer on. I was in a fit of rage and shame by the time I reached her wagon, & there she stood awaiting for me, her mouth open.
I guess she saw my empty sleeve instead of whatever was showing in my face. Sure and she didn’t know I’d heard her called Harney’s whore. So she seized me in the first hug I’d had since I was eight or nine, near smothered me and was quaking with sobs. I was affected, I admit, and guess I sniffled at her bosom even as I was smothering in it. It probably was a good thing we got through the first minute or two of our reunion that way, instead of seeing each other’s faces, for it was such a comfort, I felt it weighed more than the shame. And I will say it was a damned blessing that Col. Harney was away at his headquarters instead of present at our greeting. I don’t know what I’d have done if that son of a bitch had been standing about. Before that hug mollified me, I might have gone a berserker and gelded
him with my rattlesnake knife.
As it was, the first thing I told her when we sat down was that I would be camping separate and didn’t want to see the colonel or talk to him. I didn’t even give her time to inquire about my arm. I implored her to gather up her mere necessities and we would get away from Harney’s dragoons, and set up amongst the camp followers in Little America. Or find passage back to New Orleans. She wanted instead to learn what had happened to me. She kept reaching toward my arm, with tears welling. But I drew back and kept urging her to get away from Harney. After a bit of that, her temper started to rise up, those signs I knew, her nose and cheeks reddening, eyes getting narrow. She said, “Padraic, this is a good situation. Colonel Harney treats me well and sees that I want for nothing. I won’t be for having you meddle. You and I only just found each other after years of hardship, and rather than let me rejoice, you scold me! If you don’t like Bill Harney, then get to know him better. He’ll treat you well. He remembers you from Florida and has said only good about you.”
St. Patrick Battalion Page 21