St. Patrick Battalion

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  And so, we stayed. And as I said before, most of us spent the night awake, standing sentry and doing chores to prepare for the morning when you would attack.

  In a time like that, all of one’s soul is intensely in the moment. One expects to die, but cannot believe that one’s death can really happen. Beneath the dread and the hurry, there remains a sweet center, a haven, made of the most cherished memories and sentiments. In my case, what was there, other than my country, but my mother? She was always in my center of being. I wanted her to have pride in me, but wanted to cause her no fear. By choosing to stay at the Citadel, in harm’s way, I abandoned her to her fears. And in fact made them manifest.

  How often that terrible night, I wished I could see her and explain why I had chosen my country.

  I saw her in my memory, every few moments. But I also had another image of her. Many times that night, by fireglow or candlelight, I looked at this. Look at this:

  In this gold locket is a retrato miniatura of my mother, God rest her stricken soul. This little painting is the one my father had always carried. After he was killed by Texans, his comrade-in-arms Francesco Moreno retrieved this locket and brought it back to her. Eventually she gave it to me to wear, as my father had. I shall carry it with me to my death.

  It was painted before I was born. She was very young. As for her, she did not care for this as a likeness of herself. She said it was too pretty, that the painter had flattered her. As I remember her, I agree: It is perhaps too pretty. But it is not beautiful enough.

  If you wish to make a drawing from this, of this woman at the heart of these stories, try to limn the beauty, not the prettiness.

  She wrote to me every day in that tragic time. She tried to express to me the horror of the punishment of Señor Riley, which she had witnessed. She was afraid that his captors would go ahead and kill him, or simply let him die, when they took him back to their prison. That even though the punishment sentenced upon him had been fulfilled, they would not be satisfied until he was dead. Women of her society were visiting the Yanqui headquarters and clamoring for the release of the San Patricios who had already taken their punishment.

  She was despairing. She did not believe she would ever see him come out alive. Her one remaining hope was for my safety. In one letter, she lamented so fervently that I could almost hear her voice coming from the paper: “I yearn to have you near me, my son. I have lost too much to those bárbaros from the north and I cannot bear to see another dear life thrown to them.” She told me that Tío Rodrigo would come for me and that I should come away with him. As I have already told you, I didn’t. I am forever in atonement for disappointing her. For letting this happen to me. It further wrung out her fragile spirit, when I stayed at Chapultepec for the defense.

  For that reason among others, you find me on this pilgrimage. On my knees, of course, Señor.

  But again I have digressed from the history I was telling you. You have been patient with my digressions. And with my unflattering opinions of your countrymen. You have been patient and respectful. You are uncommon for a Yanqui Gringo.

  I assume that you know, the defending force on the Citadel was a mere thousand. It was not enough, against your numbers. Until the last hours, el Commandante believed that your shelling of the castle was only a feint, that General Scott would go up the road from Churubusco to the south gate of Mexico City, and so his main force he kept there. Another thousand Mexican soldiers on Chapultepec, no, even another five hundred, and more gunpowder and ball, and you would have failed to take Chapultepec. To storm such a fortress as that, one must have a great superiority in numbers. And you did have. ¡Ay de mi! ¡Desgraciadamente! If you had failed at Chapultepec, you could not have stormed on into the western gates of the city, where the defense was less prepared. And you would not have gotten into the city, and you would have been defeated, your whole war a failure. You had to win then, or not at all. Your supply line was too long, your army dwindling by deaths and wounds, by sickness, and, of course, by more desertions. So very many of your soldiers saw the heart of Mexico and did not want to leave. If we had had enough men to hold Chapultepec, your General Scott might have struck about here and there for a little while, but then Mexico would have digested much of your army, and driven the rest out. Your Southwest would still be Mexico’s north.

  Your General Scott took such a perilous gamble, attacking Chapultepec. You Yanquis so believe in your invincibility that you forget how desperate you were. I read your histories of that war, and they make me roll my eyes! Your students will never learn the important lesson. The lesson is that you will not always win. You will be a great country only by learning that. I am sorry to say this, but that was General Santa Anna’s weakness: He was too much like your country. He thought he could not fail. Even when he did so often fail, he always said others failed him. He was deluded. To use one of your Yanqui terms, he was his own Manifest Destiny. Ha ha! I love that phrase, Señor, it is one of your country’s funniest things. A delusion. No, it is not funny, because it kills and hurts too many.

  ¡Que rollo! My preachings are a bore! Instead, on with the history.

  Before your cannons resumed in the morning, we saw the campfire smoke that showed us where your regiments had moved in, down beyond the cypress grove. Also we saw the gallows, down in Mixcoac, the San Patricios already standing in the wagons, ready to die for defending Mexico. We saluted them, but of course they could not see that. We expected to see the hanging begin, but nobody moved. They were waiting for something. Then we saw smoke from your cannons, and the bombas came in upon us again. Our cannons below the walls waited in silence for your infantry to come through the grove. What a brilliant morning it was, and the sierras off to our right shone white. Your soldiers would be coming with the morning sun in their eyes. Good, for us. A lieutenant reminded his snipers on the parapets to aim low, at the enemy’s waists, because they would be shooting downhill. We in the academy had never been taught that, and as I stood waiting, I had to work out in my mind, by the physics of trajectory, why that would be so, and then I was grateful for having heard it, and heartened. To learn just in time how not to overshoot seemed a good omen. I passed the lesson to the other cadets.

  For a long time our infantry and cannon down below held your regiments back. So long that we began to doubt they would ever get close enough for us to shoot them. Your artillery stopped, but the grove was a din of shooting and yelling, a roar of fury. We could see very little because of the foliage, but our soldiers in the ditch below the walls we could see, and they were falling dead or crawling away wounded. When we looked toward Mixcoac, the irlandeses were still standing in the wagons under the gallows. That mystified us. We did not know that the watching was part of their punishment. We did not understand it was also for the correspondents, to make their accounts more dramatic in their newspapers. To show their readers that deserters, that Irish Catholic traitors, were being punished in very satisfying ways. We learned that later, by reading. We did not know it at the time.

  By the late morning your brave soldiers had fought their way to the walls. They raised their long ladders as we shot down at them. But your infantry and snipers were fast and accurate, and any Mexican soldier who leaned over the wall to shoot down was almost certain to die. When your soldiers began to appear at the top of the wall and come over, oh, Señor, I cannot describe our fury and our terror! Our fallen paisanos lay in heaps on the parapet. We could not load our muskets fast enough to shoot the Yanquis as they mounted the wall. Most of our soldiers had expended all their cartridges and were fighting with their bayonets, and we could not shoot then because they were in the way. Our cadet leader Melgar cried out for us to fix on our bayonets, too. We were forced back, toward the doors. Señor, I have never seen anything so ugly as the snarling red faces of your soldiers, sooty with gunpowder, their eyes crazed, coming at us like devils climbing out of the infierno! In the years since, I have seen them often in nightmares. They are mad with hatred. Killing us is m
ore important to them than staying alive. Nothing can resist such manic force. Irishmen fight that way, too. I suppose that is why the San Patricios were so outstanding in their service to Mexico. They glory in fighting. And the defense of Mexico was sacred to them! To die for Mexico was to die for Irish freedom!

  A moment, please, to compose myself. Forgive my agitation. When one has such things inside his memory, and tries to speak of them, it is as if it is happening again. It is a reason why I was reluctant in the beginning to grant you this interview. Now I am glad you have been hearing the story. But telling it is not easy. Now, to go on:

  The Yanquis drove us into the building. They forced us down the long, stinking corridor that was the hospital for those wounded by your artillery the day before. We fought stepping and falling on the bodies of our own casualties. Most of it was with bayonets, with muskets swung like clubs, even with fists. Beside me I saw one of your soldiers use his thumb to pluck out the eye of a cadet who was thirteen years old. Even in that crowded mêlée, some were still shooting muskets and pistols. We were suffocating in heat and smoke. Some of our veterans were still among us, trying to protect us, los niños. They kept falling, pierced by bayonets. Cadet Melgar also stayed in front of us, holding our flag. Then he died on a bayonet. One of the cadets grabbed it up, a young boy, even younger than I. We were being pushed back, bayoneted and shot. More than thirty cadets were overpowered and captured. Six were killed. The boy with the flag leaped, or was thrown, from an embrasure and died on the rocks far below. It is the legend that he jumped to keep the flag from the Yanquis’ hands. I did not see what happened to him, because of the struggle in the smoke. Some of your soldiers shouted about Goliad and the Alamo, their vengeance cry against our General Santa Anna. Perhaps you understand now how I could say I knew the feeling of Señor Riley’s last fight, in the monastery.

  We were entrapped, but a few of our soldiers and cadets were fleeing by a narrow passageway. So many of your soldiers had come up the ladders by then that they were a swarm. One of your officers had raised your flag over the castle, though we inside did not know that. The officer’s name was Pickett, the histories say. I remember that name because it is an appropriate soldier name. Is not a “picket” in your language a sentry?

  One of your officers was close in front of me with a pistol. He aimed it at my face, but I hit the pistol with the tip of my bayonet and when it discharged it went low. My legs gave way and I fell onto a pile of carcasses. His pistol ball had shattered both of my shanks, though I did not know that yet. I remember that a thin and dirty Yanqui soldier rose over me and lunged at me with his bayonet. I tried to roll away but felt it go into my side, toward my back. It was not awfully painful, but it was as if I were pinned. Like a lepidopterist’s moth. Something exploded near my face. And then all went formless and all the terrible noise went silent.

  I returned from that merciful brief death a few days later into a purgatory of pain and fever. A ceaseless shriek was in my ears. I had nearly drowned from the blood and fluid in my lung. My legs both were gone. I was in a long building that had been made a hospital. It was full of wounded and dying soldiers, hundreds of them, and nuns moved among them with pans and white cloth. Doctors and priests were always somewhere in the room. Through the ringing in my ears I couldn’t hear any voices.

  I did not know yet that Mexico City, as well as Chapultepec, had fallen to your army. Elders of the gobierno local had persuaded General Santa Anna to take his army and leave the city while they made a truce with General Scott and the American diplomat, in order to prevent the destruction of the Ciudad de Mexico. I knew that I was ruined.

  To keep my heart from breaking, I instead practiced to hate your nation. To avert self-pity, I burned like a volcán within. I lay in delirium and dreamed of assassinating your president in the United States—I who could not even get off my cot!—your president who had sent your army to invade my country.

  Eventually my good uncle, Rodrigo, found me. Then my mother came. They had thought I was dead. The expression in her face when she saw how I was, that expression made me wish I was dead. But she came every day and stayed, showed me newspapers, talked to me by pencil notes. Soon she told me something that gave me enough resolve to stay alive. She told of visiting, with a society of humanitarians from the vicinity, the Acordada Prison, where our friend Don Juan Riley and his fellow prisoners were kept in chains. She said that those poor men were chained up, their lash marks and brands still raw. That they had around their necks iron collars with sharp prongs. That they were hardly fed. She believed that if not for the attention of the Mexican society and the newspapers, the American army would have had them die of neglect. She said that the women of the society took food delicacies and sweets in to them, and salves, and clean dressings. And that every sort of persuasion was being pressed upon the authorities to ease their suffering, to pardon them, to release them to their adopted country.

  Señor, that gave me the heart I needed. If the Mexican people and the Irishmen, both beaten, could still love each other enough to keep helping each other, then not all the good was gone. Though Mexico had lost the war, and I had lost my legs, and I had become deaf as a result of battle explosions, we were still alive and we loved each other, my mother and I, and nuestro querido patriota, Don Juan Riley.

  Upon those blessings, little by little, I was able to build a dream that he would sometime, if there was a peace treaty, be freed as a prisoner of war. Then perhaps we could be together and begin to heal ourselves of those afflictions your country had heaped upon us.

  But had we forgotten that ancient joke, that if you make plans, you might expect to hear God’s laughter?

  ¡Por fin!

  We have arrived, Señor Quinn. Here is Our Lady of Guadalupe, the destination. I complete the pilgrimage again.

  Look at those beautiful penitentes, the viejas! How beautiful one can become, with enough age and sorrow! What pecados can they imagine they have done, to inflict such punishment upon themselves? What power have such pobres ever had to do harm? Maybe when they were young, they had the power of youthful beauty, which can be used for mischief. But the beauty of age is only of itself, and has no power.

  We, the hidalgos, had the power of privilege. When General Santa Anna yielded Mexico City to the Yanquis and marched the rest of his army out, he emptied the prisons, to let the rabble assault your invaders with stones and clubs. At that time, there could have been the people’s uprising that would have reformed Mexico.

  But we the privileged classes wanted to hold our privileges. And so we collaborated with the invaders, to keep everything. That is one thing for which I now do penance, hobbling on these stumps to this holy place.

  Of course, I was not responsible myself for that. What had I to do with it, being a boy unconscious in a hospital with wounds? But I do penance for what my kind of people did or did not do then. And later, when I was well and had become an adult, I did the same as they, and in my own small measure kept the people down. Like most in my class, I do it still, even though I deplore it and do this penance for it. I atone not just for the past, but for what I do now and probably will continue to do. You look perplexed, Señor. You do not understand time in the way we in Mexico understand time.

  Now, before we go in: You have been so kind to accompany me, to interview me under these tedious circumstances. I think it is time to tell you this:

  When you joined me, and started with your questions, Señor, I disliked you for being Yanqui. My intent was to let your curiosity draw you into this ridiculous interview. That you should creep along with me day after day, listening to my stories, writing on that absurd contraption you have on your arm. I was making a mockery of the famed Yanqui journalist, and bringing an American down to a very humble level.

  But I was also making a mockery of this penitencia. For one should not enjoy this, or divert oneself from it, as I have been doing with you. Thus this is an imperfect pilgrimage, not done in pure faith of spirit. I shall have to
do another to atone for this one. In this way, I can keep doing these forever! Haha!

  Since you have been with me, I have come to admire you in a way I did not expect to admire a Yanqui. Especially a reportero. I have watched your eyes when I talked of the San Patricios. Especially when I praised Don Juan Riley. I have seen that although you are a journalist of the American press, you do not scorn the memory of that Irishman. You admire him. Indeed, Señor, you love him, as I do.

  And so, you see, I have caused you to do the penitencia with me. All you Yanquis have much to atone for, oh, yes.

  I have more to do penance for than what I have told you. I have been thinking this morning, that if I confess to you the worst I have done to deserve this, then this penitencia will be less of a mockery than I have made it. It might compensate, to a certain extent, though only a priest could tell me whether that is so.