St. Patrick Battalion

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  That attack did seize control of a number of mills and ironworks within 500 yards of the old Castle of Chapultepec. The castle is deemed to be impregnable. It is said to be Gen. Santa Anna’s summer home though I doubt he is there after today. The Mexican Military College is also within its walls, which I suppose is their West Point. I look at that castle up there, even from this distance, and pray that Gen. Scott is not fool enough to try to attack it! It is beyond cannon range from Mexico City and would not interfere with our invasion of the City. Can’t see any object at all in attacking it.

  I find myself in a bad state of mournfulness and dread. Half a bottle of the tequila liquor standing here by my candle. I suppose it will determine whether I am able to go over to the new gallows tomorrow and witness the executions. Still can’t imagine they won’t hang Mister Riley and reckon I won’t believe anything I don’t see with my own eyes. Probably I should take my sketchbook, maybe one of those famous correspondents would want a picture to send along with his story celebrating the justice inflicted upon these “Traitorous Papist Paddys and Malevolent Micks,” as they so like to describe them in their dispatches. One drink only.

  Yes, that decides it for me. I must be there. Of the events I have been given to witness in this short lifetime, what could be more important than the fate of the best goddamned Irish patriot I ever knew of?

  Sure and what kind of Irishman would I be if I wasn’t there for him at such a time!

  San Angel, Mexico Sept. 10, 1847

  FAITH AND IF I live a hundred years, may I never, ever see again such a show of vicious hatred as that I saw today. I would never have imagined that men who deem themselves civilized could take such delight in their cruelty.

  It was indeed true that General Scott had adjudged under the Articles of War that John Riley, and six others who likewise deserted before the declaration of war, could not be executed like the others by hanging. But Gen. Twiggs and the officers and soldiers in charge of the punishments were determined to punish him to death anyway. They had said so, and sure they made it plain.

  This is a personal diary, in which I put forth my beliefs and my feelings, such as those above. Of this occasion, an historic event witnessed by my own eyes, I’ll try to write as a journalist. I’ve also made pencil sketches of the proceedings. The drawings, and a hand-copied script of the following account, is in the hands of a correspondent of the New Orleans Daily Picayune:

  The sixteen deserters condemned to hang were marched to the town plaza of San Angel soon after sunrise, their hands tied, under guard of American soldiers with bayonets fixed. Another line, of six deserters, marched in separately. John Riley was one of these, who were to be flogged and branded instead of hanged.

  The cobblestones of the square shone with sunlight flashing off puddles left by a nightlong deluge of rain. Hundreds of American soldiers in ranks faced into the plaza, where a long gallows of timbers had been erected, strung with sixteen nooses. Brig. Gen. David Twiggs, the executioner, sat his horse near the gallows, erect and still as a statue.

  Hundreds of Mexican civilians, men and women, filled the margins of the plaza and the park, many of them crying, and displaying their rosaries. Some held crucifixes high overhead. This demonstration of Catholic religious pity appeared to annoy many of the soldiers, but discipline held them rigid. The soldiers’ greater attention was upon the prisoners, and naked hatred was intense in their expressions.

  John Riley and his six fellow prisoners were taken to a row of trees in front of the church. Their hands were untied, their filthy uniform coats and shirts were stripped off, several of the shirts bloodstained, and then the seven were tied up by their hands, facing the trees, their backs to the gallows. Their bodies were pale and thin in the harsh daylight, and many were marked with cuts and great expanses of bruising, testimony to the violence of their capture in the monastery at Churubusco. A sort of moaning arose in the crowd of Mexicans, at the sight of their condition. The prisoners had been chained hand and foot since their capture, unable to wash, shave, or groom themselves for three weeks, and they could hardly have looked worse for this public spectacle. That would seem to have been the Army’s intent, for by contrast the Americans were clean and shaven, although their pale blue uniforms are still dingy and stained from the recent battles.

  While the seven were being tied to the trees, the other sixteen were lifted onto the beds of eight mule-drawn wagons parked under the gallows, two prisoners in each wagon, thus elevated to stand where the nooses could be put around their necks. The hangman on each wagon held two cloth hoods. The prisoners were turned to face rearward, and their hoods left off in order that they would observe the flogging of the others. They were quite stolid, some even appearing haughty. To a well-placed observer, it seemed that they were looking into the faces of the Mexicans. Surely those would have been the only kindly faces they could see. A few times, these men with slipknots around their necks turned to look at one another, to say something. Their words could not be heard over the murmur of weeping and praying Mexicans, the rattle of trapdrums, and the orders being given by Gen. Twiggs in his barely comprehensible Georgian dialect, but whenever they did speak, they were answered by sneering and growling from the American soldiers, who seemed to want them in utter abjection.

  I, the writer of this account, not being tall enough to see over the heads of civilians and soldiers, and having no license to pass within the guard lines, made myself a perch in the fork of an oak at the edge of the park, where I sat in the company of several Mexican boys who were already in the tree and who, seeing my handicap, moved up out of my way. Their attention then was to be divided between my one-handed penmanship and the events I was recording as they occurred, all too vividly, close below me.

  At a little distance from the tree a wood fire was burning, attended by several soldiers, and its smoke rose up, a very fragrant wood. The smoke now and then veiled the scene, but mostly the view from the tree was very advantageous and clear.

  My attention was mostly upon John Riley. He was not singled out by name from the others, as their leader. But most of the spectators and soldiers knew which was he. He passed his gaze everywhere he could see. In his eyes was a look betraying no fear, nor shame. Now and then he would pause at a face, and nod. It’s likely that any Mexican who was thus acknowledged felt honored. Mister Riley even nodded to several soldiers, who flushed or grew pale but probably dared not respond. Many of the soldiers in the detail were indeed Irishmen, I realized, really looking at them for the first time. Probably this spectacle was intended to be partly a discouragement of any American soldiers who might be contemplating desertion. It was becoming apparent that Gen. Twiggs had planned all aspects of the event with that kind of theatrical attention to dramatic detail that prevails at military ceremonies.

  When Gen. Twiggs called forth seven men with whips, they were not noncommissioned officers, as is the custom, but Mexicans! They were muledrivers. The cunning general executioner had chosen them, it was explained, to deny the deserters the distinction of being whipped by American soldiers. The Mexicans were not merely a lower form, but being muleteers they could apply the whips expertly and tirelessly. Their whips were the muledriver’s usual long whip, not the Army’s customary cat-o’-nine-tails. As the muleteers took their stance, and measured the length of their strokes by flicking the long whips over the prisoners’ bare backs, Mister John Riley took a final look about, and this time his eyes came to the Mexican boys up in the tree above me, and he nodded at them with a slight smile on his lips! And then his gaze, I am certain, stopped upon me, and he gave another smile and a nod. All of us, this tree full of boys, looked at each other and nodded also, most gravely.

  One of the soldiers tending the fire below said, loudly enough that I heard him over the dreadful murmur of the crowd, he said to another, “There’s to be extra pesos for the Mex if Riley dies under his whip!” When I looked down at the soldiers, I noticed what the fire was for. The long handles of branding irons stuck
out from the fire.

  General Twiggs bellowed out, “There shall be fifty lashes. I begin my count—one!”

  A translator called, “Ahora mismo . . . uno!”

  Nothing ever done with a razor strop—even one with Tecumseh’s skin on it!—could be as bad as what those whips do. You can get welts from a strop. But a cat-o’-nine or a bullwhip cuts up flesh. I’ve seen those bloody floggings enough in the Army that I can hear that sound in my memory. It’s a hiss and a slap and a grunt all in one, and usually a scream. In this incident at San Angel there was another sound that I’ll never forget. It was a woeful cry from the Mexican civilians in the crowd. It just squeezed my heart. I don’t pretend to say Mexicans are strangers to cruelty. They have it in their bullfights. The discipline of soldiers in the Mexican Army is brutal, from what I’ve heard. And there’s that Spanish thing about bleeding and pain that you see in their church paintings and statues. But as the count of Gen. Twiggs started, what I saw in the Mexicans’ faces was pity. That I guess is what’s in all their gory crucifixes, is pity, like the feeling that cruelty should not be, it just is. What I saw in the faces of most of the soldiers was not pity, but satisfaction. They hate the deserters, and what they were seeing was right and just.

  At the moment of the first stroke I was watching Mister Riley in particular, as I reckon most of us were. He lurched, but made no sound. One woman up on the church steps gave the most heartrending scream I ever heard. Mister Riley shuddered, opened his eyes, and I do believe looked right at that woman, as if he knew her to be there. He sort of shook his head, then squinted his eyes shut to brace for the second lash. The woman was in black with a shawl and a veil, as most of the women there were, a tall woman, and her hands were over her mouth. I don’t think it was my imagination that something passed between them.

  I will say it’s merciful that he was facing her so she couldn’t see his back. Even before the shout of dos, his back was welling with blood from the first cut. The second lash made a red spray of that blood, and another deep cut. The whip itself was already red.

  A flogging of fifty lashes just leaves such a bloody mess, it’s a wonder it can ever heal. For the whipped, the pain gets worse with every stroke. I have heard soldiers say that. They say it’s not like most kinds of pain, that go numb. The only way past it, they say, is when God takes mercy and makes you pass out. And they say you can’t count on that.

  So it went on and on. There were the numbers being shouted, and people sobbing, the whipped men screaming and groaning, the priests chanting prayers. It was sickening. The deserters on the wagons with nooses around their necks, some of them were growing pale, but others were getting red-faced with anger, watching their comrades suffer. Now and then one of them cursed Gen. Twiggs, which would result in a blow to his face by the hangman.

  Mister Riley still didn’t cry out. I guess some of us there were praying he wouldn’t. But I’d guess that many of the American soldiers, on the contrary, really wanted to hear him scream. But he didn’t. As it went on and on, the muleteers’ sleeves and smocks turned red from all the spraying and splattering blood. Two or three of the men sagged on their ropes, having fainted. The general counted slowly, making the punishment draw out. And after about twenty-five lashes, he stopped calling out numbers. The muleteers paused, waiting for him to go on. He told the translator to tell them to keep on. He said he had forgotten the count and they should continue until he remembered. It was about nine or ten strokes later when he grinned and shouted, Twenty-five! and then went on from there. The Mexicans in the crowd realized what he had done and their murmurings rose up to an outcry. One could see that Mister Riley even in his agony understood what was happening and it was plain he tensed himself to keep bearing it. Only he & two others were still conscious when that old general reached the end of his count & the muleteers let down their bloody whips.

  Then Gen. Twiggs called for the branding irons. Those seven soldiers near my tree pulled the irons out of the fire, so hot they were a-glowing yellow, and I could smell that hot iron smell like in a blacksmith’s. The brands were a big letter D, meaning Deserter. The American Army keeps itself in such equipment. I knew several soldiers with the HD scar on their hip, the brand for Habitual Drunkard. If an officer is especially vicious, he’ll apply that brand on a man’s face instead of his hip. I’ve seen that done. But one seldom sees a branded Deserter because they’re mostly gone out of the Army.

  The soldiers hurried over to the trees, and as Gen. Twiggs announced the process, they each held a man by the hair of his head and shoved the left side of his face tight against the tree, and pressed the hot iron against his right cheek and burned that letter D in deep. It was awful. There were screams from the victims. Two that had passed out were brought awake by the burning, and there was more crying from the crowd of Mexicans, who held up their rosaries and crucifixes as if to protect themselves. Some people were getting sick on the ground, some just turning away and hurrying off. I watched the smoke curl off Mister Riley’s face and his whole body writhed. But even then he didn’t make a sound. I was crying, and I sure was not the only one. If I’d had a pistol I guess I would have just discharged it into Gen. Twiggs without a thought for the consequence. One of those correspondents was actually laughing, and if I’d had another pistol I’d have shot him, too. Maybe this shouldn’t be in a journalism story, but I mean it.

  When they took the brands off I could smell burnt hair and seared flesh and was about to throw up myself. When the soldier let loose of Mister Riley’s hair, he turned his head to look up where that tall woman was. I looked over there and some people were holding her up. Her head was lolling as if she had maybe fainted. There was just a full uproar of voices, but still the ranks around the plaza hadn’t moved. The Mexicans with the whips had left. The mules were nervous under the gallows, but their drivers held them quiet. Priests were chanting like crazy. Then Gen. Twiggs finally got down off his horse and started coming up the line inspecting the branded faces, being careful not to get blood on his fancy uniform from those poor sufferers. He stopped last at Mister Riley, probably real disappointed that he was still alive, and not only alive but awake. He looked at his cheek and said to the soldier, “Damn it, that letter is upside down! This man is sentenced to be branded with a D! That’s not a D! Turn him around! Put a D on him, a good plain D if you have to burn his damned head off to get it right!”

  So again that hot iron sizzled, on his left cheek this time, and I guess Mister Riley wasn’t ready enough, for he gave a deep noise like a cough, and fainted. The whole crowd moaned.

  The general nodded and smirked at the soldier with the branding iron. I know I saw that. Whatever the pain and turmoil in me at that time, that was not of my imagination.

  Now that the men in nooses had been forced to watch their comrades be whipped and branded, it was time for those to watch the others hang. Cold water was dashed on them to bring them awake. They were cut away from the trees, shaking and groaning with pain, and their hands tied again. The blood on their shredded backs was drying, flies were swarming on them. The big letter D on every man’s cheek was blistered and seeping. Soldiers with bayonets marched them in line, knocked them down close behind the wagons. Several priests with a large crucifix had followed from the church. They went from one wagon to the next, giving last rites. I had climbed out of my tree, almost too weak and shaky to walk, and went as close to the gallows as I could. As I arrived, hoods were being pulled over the doomed men’s heads. A drumroll started up. One fine-looking prisoner, still wearing his dark blue shortcoat and insignia of a Mexican army captain, just before the hood was slipped over him, looked down and said:

  “Farewell, gentlemen. Farewell, my friend John.”

  And Mister Riley, raising himself up on an elbow, replied,

  “Godspeed, Cap’n Dalton. My good men all, Erin go Bragh . . .Viva Mexico!” His voice was a whispery croak, but I heard those words, and I pray those sixteen men on the wagons heard them, too, for the wagon
s were all driven forward out from under them then, leaving them dangling and twirling and strangling, and those were the last words they heard on this earth.

  One would think the most barbaric mind could think of no further humiliation or torment beyond that morning’s spectacle.

  But when the dead men were cut down from the gallows, those who had asked to be buried in consecrated ground were loaded into a wagon and taken away by the clerics. The remaining nine were to be buried under the gallows. I could not believe my own hearing when Gen. Twiggs ordered, pointing at Mister Riley and his mutilated comrades, “Those six will be the gravediggers. Give them the shovels.”

  I cannot describe in words the agony of that burial detail. The sweat and the work broke open the drying wounds and they seeped blood until their trousers were crimson. Black flies were all over them. The branding had swelled their eyes shut and they were nearly blind. But they dug the nine graves without a word or a whimper. They laid their comrades in and covered them while the hundreds of American soldiers held back the Mexicans who were asking to finish the task. It took a long time. I stayed and made a drawing, from a little distance. I overheard a correspondent and an officer, who were talking of the mishap of the inverted brand, which had made the second necessary. The officer laughed. He said, “Mishap, you think so? Why, General Twiggs had this entertainment arranged down to the last jot! I wager that soldier had instruction to make that misprint!” The correspondent joked, “Ah! Like in Scripture, Turn the other cheek!”