St. Patrick Battalion

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  It was what I had suspected myself, such a skeptic this Army has made of me already.

  The day was nearly done, but the entertainment not quite over. Mister Riley and his five gravediggers, by some unbelievable fortitude, some Irishness I suppose, still standing tall, were forced to kneel by the graves. There, soldiers who had been supplied with razors were ordered by the General to shave their heads, and be quick about it. While the regimental fifers tweetled that ugly little song The Rogue’s March, the deserters’ heads were shaved down to their bloody scalps. Their hair was thrown on the graves.

  And thus, General Twiggs’s day of righteous theater and morality play was over at last. He’d only smiled once: at the branding. The parade back to the prison cell was to that same song, on fifes and drums. There was left a kind of feeling on that plaza that was so evil, that I reckon it will linger there like a demon ghost for a hundred years after every witness is dead and gone. I looked toward the church, and several stately figures in black were mounting the steps toward the church door. They were not priests. Several were women, and in the midst of them, I thought, was that tall woman whose eyes Mister Riley had met. Their backs were to me, and I couldn’t be sure at that distance, but I’m sure it was the one.

  I have taken almost all night here, to write down as best I can, the worst day I have ever had.

  Likewise I am sure it’s the worst day my good friend John Riley ever had. Even if they devise a way to kill him yet, as they’d sure love to do, that wouldn’t be as bad a day for him as this was.

  Now to finish that bottle of agave liquor. Sure I’ll not get to sleep without it. A toast. One boy with one hand to raise a toast, in solitude. Viva Riley!

  And goddamn all of those who think they’re his betters!

  CHAPTER XXII

  AGUSTIN JUVERO

  SPEAKING TO THE JOURNALIST

  ON THE PILGRIMAGE ROAD

  TODO ESTABA A REVUELTO. Everything we knew was in disorder.

  Your country’s invasion of my country had come so close now, Señor Periodista, that we could hear your army even when the attacks were over. I have already mentioned to you that all sounds would rise up on the warm air, to our height on the Citadel of Chapultepec. Where we had used to hear church bells, music, laughter, dogs barking, wheels and hooves on cobblestones, the cries of vendors and the noises of workmen’s tools, now we could hear all the sounds of your army drifting up to us from less than half a mile away, in the buildings of the Molina del Rey. We could hear your shouts and commands, your ambulancia drivers, the cries of your wounded. We could hear gravedigging, and on the hot breeze that came up the slope of the Hill of Grasshoppers, we smelled the dead flesh of your soldiers and ours. We were high enough that we looked down upon the backs of drifting vultures, ¡allá abajo! The truce had failed, as we had known it would, and your soldiers had thrown themselves against an army you thought you had already defeated.

  You won again, eventually; somehow you always won. But your army was decimated further, and still you faced the fortress of Chapultepec and the walls of the Ciudad de Mexico itself. We were beginning to believe our commandante, that you could afford to come no farther.

  Two days after your attack on the Molina del Rey, a letter came to me from my mother. I hardly recognized her handwriting, and I knew before I read a word that she was distressed greatly.

  Her letter said that our friend the Irishman Juan Riley had been captured at Churubusco, with eighty of his battalion, a fact that I had already known, that he had been tried for desertion in a military court and sentenced with most of them to execution upon the gallows. Then, something like a miracle: por una cuestión formal under their military law, their commanding general had commuted that sentence, adjudging that those few who deserted before the war was declared could not be executed. That judgment so infuriated your army that there might have been a mutiny, in an army less disciplined. She wrote that the journalists of many countries spread the news quickly, and that foreign diplomats in Mexico City began pressing your general to pardon all the San Patricios, and return them to the Mexican people who loved and admired them. Much of the society of the towns in the district also went to the headquarters to plead the same. But the punishments had been set. The general himself wanted the severest punishment, to discourage more desertions. Thus the punishments were set, to be done, one at San Angel, the next at Mixcoac a few days later.

  In the letter, she said that she went to San Angel with relatives and friends from the city. Among them Tío Rodrigo. He had advised her not to go. That she should not see such things, which are worse than the corrida de toros. But they went, early in the morning. She said she had to be there, and that Señor Riley should see that she was there. She said that he had become most dear, a greater affection even than before, while he was in Mexico City between the battles of the war. While I was in my studies at the academy. As if I had not known.

  So she went to San Angel and she believes that he saw her, that he knew her even with the veil. And of course he would have seen Rodrigo, to know she was with her brother even if he could not see her face.

  Thereby, she was glad that he knew she was there. But then she worried afterward that he might have been ashamed for her to see the humiliations done to him, the mutilation by the whip and the hierro. She worried that Don Juan Riley would think himself too ruined. That even if they let him live, she might not want to associate with a branded rogue. In the letter she told me that she would try to find ways to visit him in the military prison. She was desperate to have him know that she would not abandon him. She said there were associations of women in the neighborhoods and the towns who would go and take delicacies to the San Patricios in their prison, so that they would know how Mexico loved them for their brave and patriotic defense. And the women would also use all their influence to make the officials and the diplomats press General Scott to release them. They had already taken their punishment. They were not even citizens of the United States, and should be released into the care of a grateful people. Those were the causes of the women. Their husbands and relatives in the meantime would be working in their own ways to influence the American commander. And they all did those things. It became a cause for the people of those classes, those who were aware.

  As you surely know, in Mexico there are those who have education and know what is going on. There is a larger class of those who farm and labor, who are not aware, those who do not understand why an army comes through. There have been so many armies going through Mexico, and often nothing changes, so those people just endure and keep working. Unless a war comes through that requires their sons to be taken away and put in uniforms, to carry muskets in the infantry, to come home maimed, or not come home at all. Unless that happens to them, or a battle takes place nearby and destroys their homes and fields, or their livestock are taken from them to feed an army, they have little to hope for or to fear from a war. The people who are aware, those who have something to lose, those who have been educated in Mexican history and the ways of the world, those are the ones who grow impassioned at the progress of events. They are the ones who support this leader or that one, who become army officers, who become patriotic. They find causes, and talk about them with passion, and take sides. A distinct part of that class is the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. They listen, and talk, and they can influence the great movements in this country, whether they are wars or revolutions or reforms. Conversely, they can resist change. That is often their role.

  ¡Perdón! Señor, I have gone on about how we Mexicans are, when I meant to be telling you what we did. My mother and the people who took up Señor Riley’s cause were patriots, who love the country and the beautiful and tragic myth of it. And they loved Don Juan Riley and his soldiers as they would have loved the knights of Europe, in those chivalric stories, who come to serve bravely and nobly only for ideals. They believed in Santa Anna sometimes, but they knew too well his ambitions to love him simply, as they loved these San Patricios.
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  They could not stop the invasion, but perhaps they could stop the punishment of those paladins.

  I was left to imagine just what had been done to our friend Señor Riley, for my mother, being of such hidalgo breeding, would not specifically describe brutal acts. But within hours of her letter there came my uncle, up from the city in a rush of some military business, and he had me called from my duties, to speak to me in private.

  I smile when I say “private” because the Citadel was teeming with soldiers and officers and clerics, consuls, village alcaldes, and officials of the city. Rodrigo was in a most earnest state, and we stood in a corridor trying to keep from being trampled by workmen carrying desks and crates up and down. He told me in brief manner the abominations done to our noble friend and the other San Patricios, there at San Angel, and of my mother’s anguish. My heart was sick with grief and hatred and pity, of course. He told me of the other thirty San Patricios, whose trials had been conducted at Tacubaya, and who were yet to be executed by hanging, at the village of Mixcoac. Mixcoac lay so close below, to the southwest, that one could see people there, without a telescope.

  Tío Rodrigo put his hands on my shoulders and looked into my eyes with such an intensity that I felt for a moment he was seeing me through my mother’s eyes instead of his own, and he said, “Querido sobrino, it is believed that the Yanquis are preparing to attack this place. I can get leave to take you from here. Your mother wants the choice to be yours. Tell me now.”

  I chose to stay. My uncle left, sad but proud. For he, too, had been a soldier. Oh, I was so afraid, Señor! But also I was fiercely eager to take up my musket and shoot at the foreigners who were invading the heart of Mexico, those who had tormented and mocked a noble man, and hanged his comrades. Often already, we cadets had stood on the ramparts of that fortress and foreseen ourselves defending it. In our hearts we deemed ourselves soldiers, even though we were just boys. For months we had yearned to be within musket range of those herejes. We were always anticipating, and dreading. Because your army had attacked east from San Angel to Churubusco, instead of coming on northward toward Chapultepec, we presumed that your plan was to bypass this stronghold and proceed straight up the road to the south gates of Mexico City. El General Santa Anna thus concentrated our defenses there. We saw no cause for you to waste more American soldiers on this fortress, when Mexico City was what you wanted, and lay open before you.

  But then your General Scott, true to his ways, chose to make a feint toward Mexico City, and catch Chapultepec off guard. Taking Chapultepec would be a symbolic victory for you.

  But our general had grown wily. He sent General Bravo with a thousand soldiers to defend our Citadel. Soon our castle became crowded with our veterans. Almost all of our soldiers were veterans by that time. We the cadets were proud to be among them. We helped them as they set up defenses. We carried water and powder and shot to the ramparts. We helped them place the cannons. Alas, we no longer had the gunners of the San Patricio battalion. But there were many cannoneers whom Señor Riley had trained, and they were worthy of confidence.

  Much of our defense we concentrated on the western ramparts. You know the Citadel, Señor, how it stands. It is too steep on the east to be assaulted there. Your infantry could only attack by way of the long slope from the west, up from the Molina del Rey that you had captured those few days before. We placed defenders all the way from the cypress woods on the Hill of Grasshoppers to the high battlements. We felt that the Yanquis would storm the Citadel only if they thought it was weakly defended, and so we made our defenses very much under cover, so that if they did attack the castle they would be met by more fire than they expected. Chapultepec is a sacred place to my people, Señor, once the seat of Montezuma the ancient king. We would make you pay for the sacrilege of attacking it. Between the castle and the city lay a well-defended road. El General could send reinforcements from either place to the other very quickly. We knew that your army had been too much reduced to assault both places at once. En realidad, we thought that you must be mad to assault either.

  But, on the other hand, we knew you Yanquis were indeed mad. Otherwise you would not have come to Mexico and charged to her center, as you had done. We felt that whatever the outcome of these battles, you were already in the belly of Mexico, and she would digest your little army. Mexico is very old, and has a patience your country does not understand. Anything or anyplace you might have taken by conquest, or were yet to take, eventually it would be ours again. How did we know that? Why, we had already swallowed and digested those conquistadors of old. And they had been even more mad and more ruthless than you!

  And so we the cadets of the Colegio Militar de Mexico, with patriotismo surging in our veins, we found ourselves alongside those solid paisanos of our infantry for whom, though they were of a lower class, we felt a deep love at that time. I let some of their officers know that I was a friend of Major Riley, and I was awarded respect.

  We listened to their talk and their singing, and waited to see what you madmen would do next.

  I will never forget the date of September 12, the year 1847. It was my thirteenth birthday, but it seemed also to be the day I was destined to die.

  Your first shell came shrieking up soon after daylight when we were marching from the chapel after our maitines, and burst on a wall above the parade ground. Bits of stone showered down on us just as the sound of the cannon shot reached our ears. Before we could do more than cringe, we heard several more rounds slam into the walls below, making the flagstones shake under our feet. Our soldiers were grabbing up their muskets and shouting. Stone dust rose and drifted in the morning sunlight. All was deafening.

  That battering kind of fire, we knew, was meant to break down walls. It meant that a charge of infantry would be coming, when the walls were sufficiently reduced. Knowing the massiveness of our Citadel, we believed it would be futile for the Americans to try to breach the walls with cannonballs. We were excited and frightened of course. But we were ready to endure, and we hoped the Yanquis would soon cease their cannonade and come marching in the flesh so that we could begin shooting them. Cannon bombardment very quickly crushes one’s courage. It is too massive, like a volcano, and one feels helpless. A human being grows smaller and smaller.

  Then the howitzer and mortar shells began coming down from the sky. The first one exploded among the infantrymen. Particles of something sang past me too fast to see and cracked against a stone wall. I looked and saw dust and stone chips in the air and specks and blots of crimson. I heard soldiers screaming. We were ordered to run toward a door, and as we started to run, another shell exploded. If you have heard a mortar shell explode nearby, Señor—ah, you have, yes? Of course—remember the noise, that trueno de arma? Yes, as you say, like a clang and a boom at once in your ear, but also a jolt of concussion? There are more kinds of explosions in a war than kinds of thunder in the sky, no?

  But I was saying, Señor: At the explosion of that second bomba the boy running just in front of me became instantly a fountain of blood and began falling sideways toward the wall. Then as I leaped to avoid stumbling over him, two other cadets ahead of me also staggered and fell. The wall was spattered with blood in many places. The door was not far ahead, and perhaps there would be safety inside it from the fragments of broken iron that those bombshells threw in every direction. But the cadets who had fallen were compatriotas, even two of them whom I had never liked very much. And so I stopped running and turned to stoop near the first who had fallen. He was still tumbling, and when he stopped he was lying on his side with his back against the wall, and blood was spurting from his throat in jets so high they hit my face. ¡Dios mio!

  Blood sprayed on me, at each of his heartbeats. I threw myself back away from him. Perhaps I screamed. Or perhaps the scream was that of another bombshell coming in. More explosions, more iron bits shrieking and hissing through the air and smacking the walls and whining off the flagstones. I remember a soldier’s shako tumbling by. I remember a
musket whirling through the air, to shatter against the stone and fall clattering. Many such things I can recall with supreme clarity, but what I did in those moments I recall only vaguely, as when one is waking and remembers only parts of a dream. I do remember looking out and seeing soldiers in smoke close by, some lying, some sitting, some falling, some still standing, and a terrible din of yelling and screaming. I remember one who had fallen dead within reach of me, and that, by the look of his face, he was little older than we the cadets were. He was brown and round-faced, un indio. So many thousands of his kind you killed in that war, Señor! They who did not even understand why you had come down to kill them! The older ones, who had been in the army since the preceding conflict, presumed that you must all be Texans!

  Oh, Señor, the ignorance of soldiers about why they must die and kill—how pathetic that is! It always has been, and surely it always will be so. They are told something, then they are told that their honor lies in their willingness to die for that something, even if, in their ignorance, they had never thought of it before. The one true reason why they must die and kill is that some other army has been given a cause to go against them. The making of those causes is the constant work of ambitious men. It has been so since the pharaohs, Caesars, khans, and the conquistadors, to the European kings, to Napoleon, to your President Polk.