At last the section opened fire in the direction of all the noise, but still there was nothing to be seen. “So this is where the battle begins—in the middle of the woods, halfway up a hill!” thought Miguel, terrified, as he grasped the difficulty of their position, perhaps the imminence of extreme peril.
From down below the first enemy bullets began to whistle up through the trees. The fight had begun.
Trembling, the officer prepared his rifle and waited for a glimpse of the enemy. While they redoubled their firepower, the Tomochic fighters remained hidden from view. But their savage cries grew louder, sowing terror in the hearts of the men, who still couldn’t see their adversaries. Forced to fight under the most unfavorable conditions, they could neither advance nor retreat.
Gradually the underbrush grew dense with white smoke and an acrid, bitter smell. The reports of fire penetrated the viscous fog of gunpowder with reddish bursts. With each passing moment, the yelling grew louder and enemy bullets whistled menacingly as they passed close to the tops of the men’s heads.
“For Almighty God! For the Holy Trinity!” came the war cries—all too clearly at times—over the hail of bullets. Mortally wounded, a soldier fell to the ground, face down, his arms spread wide. He dropped his Remington and called out plaintively, “O Jesus.” Then he fell forward, vomiting blood. He was the first victim.
A young corporal leaned over to pick him up and suddenly screamed in pain. Wounded in the knee, he too rolled to one side. The soldiers nearby stared aghast, but Lieutenant Torrea roused them with a sudden roar. Their courage restored, if furious and exasperated, they fired indiscriminately downward.
Through the thick air in the impenetrable brush Miguel made out the figure of a tall man with a long beard dressed in dark pants, a white shirt, and a straw hat from which floated a long white kerchief. The mountaineer lifted his rifle and cried out in a thick voice, and blindly opened fire. “Long live the Almighty. Death to the sons of Lucifer!”
“That one, over there, get him,” a sergeant yelled.
To the second lieutenant’s right, another soldier, who had been wounded in the hand, began to moan.
The entire section lost control; the soldiers couldn’t even identify their own. Many took aim at the clearing where the Tomochic fighter, on his knees in senseless heroism, fired away. His shots hit a soldier’s bugle, which bounced away over the rocks. A moment later the brave mountain fighter collapsed; he fell to one side, head resting on arm, the arm laid over his rifle, as though he might only be sleeping.
A heavy white cloud of gunpowder hung over everything. The smell was harsh but stimulating, like cheap liquor. Scattered gunfire, enemy war cries descending the hill, and snatches of the officers’ commands could be heard. “Long live the Santa de Cabora! Death to Lucifer!” And a hearty round of shots accompanied these strange words.
Captain Molina rushed to and fro, attempting to rouse everyone, yelling hoarsely in an attempt to make a worthy response to the enemy’s vivas: “Long live the federal government! Long live the Mexican Republic!”
“Onward, men! Onward! Long live the 9th Battalion!” the captains joined in.
A new wave of inspiration moved the sections steadfastly forward. Now they felt exhilarated, excited. “Yes, yes, onward—they’ll see that the 9th Battalion can’t lose! Long live General Díaz!”
Then a moment of calm descended. After the initial stupor had worn off, the men recovered their natural courage. Sweaty, breathless, crouching low, they started downhill again, stopping instinctively wherever there were clusters of trees or high boulders.
One soldier, just as he was about to fire from behind some tall shrubs, suddenly let his weapon drop and rolled away covered with blood. An enemy bullet had hit the granite edge of a boulder, sending flying fragments of rock into his skull. The section continued its descent.
The gunfire from the mountain fighters let up, and the men found their first Tomochic corpse, deep wounds in head and stomach, and a gaping mouth that revealed strong white teeth.
“Long live the Ninth! Long live the government!” yelled a sergeant, exhilarated at the sight of the corpse. As he spoke, however, more soldiers fell to the ground wounded.
Enemy bullets took a terrible toll. The sections lost all semblance of order the farther down the craggy path they went. Now wildly dispersed, the marksmen lost sight of each other and operated in isolation. Officers tried to regroup for another advance, but they had no idea where they were going or which paths to follow. Consequently their efforts only led to further disorder.
Worse still, shots were heard from behind. This was enough to sow cold terror in every heart. What was happening? They were being overtaken from behind! But how? The government soldiers were surrounded, caught in a crossfire. Just then a soldier caught a bullet in the chest and fell dead.
There was a terrible moment of hesitation in the smoke-darkened thicket, before they tried to retreat. But the enemy was behind them! Which way should they fire?
The lieutenants at first managed to contain the pandemonium, but the panic eventually got to them too. Meanwhile, a few soldiers began to throw off their gear.
“Don’t run! Don’t run! Cowards, where do you think you’re going!” they yelled to the first retreating soldiers, who had begun to run back up the mountain. Behind them, the gunfire intensified and the bravest men turned to answer fire with fire. Suddenly Castorena came hurtling down the mountainface and yelled, “Don’t shoot to the rear! Hold your fire! They’re our men! It’s 2nd Company, and they don’t know where we are. I tell you, don’t fire!”
In the helter-skelter of gunfire and clamoring voices only a handful of men actually heard Castorena, and none paid the least attention. As though gripped by a sudden madness, they began to fire every which way, battling an invisible enemy in a jungle of ghosts.
What was most frightening about this terrible situation—even more so than the uncertainty over the enemy’s whereabouts, firepower, and numbers—was their disorientation and the lack of orders from above.
Stunned and abandoned to their fate, the lower-ranking officers were paralyzed by indecision at that treacherous juncture. When they heard the shots at their back again, what little morale they had managed to retain soon dissipated. Now panic reigned.
The smoke from the gunpowder, the thunderous reports, the whistling bullets, and the enemy’s fierce cries surrounded them, turning their area of the mountainside into a disaster zone.
In a moment of lucidity, Second Lieutenant Mercado thought, The first column is going down to defeat!
CHAPTER 19
Worse Than Defeat
Miguel was astounded by the bizarre turn of events. In fact, he felt he had lost his reason altogether. As comrade after comrade was cut down, the soldiers, bullets whistling by their heads, began to fire indiscriminately thinking that the enemy could be anywhere, everywhere. Since they were helplessly lost in the labyrinthine mountains, there was no place to run.
Then the enemy resurfaced in front of them, raising their eerie, hair-raising war cries to the heavens: “Long live the almighty power of God. The power of God is with us!”
Crouching low in the bush, a recruit—just eighteen—suddenly shot out from his hiding place and matched the incantation with furious heroism: “Long live the 9th Battalion. Our Lady of Guadalupe protects us!”
Hidden in the pine groves, the Tomochic fighters advanced slowly, with superhuman litheness, bounding from rock to rock, tree to tree. Then suddenly they sprang like tigers into the very midst of the hail of bullets that toppled branches and splintered rocks.
When they caught a glimpse of them, the soldiers saw that their adversaries were tall and shaggy haired, wearing rolled-up pants and white shirts. Cartridge belts crisscrossed their chests, and strips of white linen adorned with red crosses dangled from their hats.
They flew from place to place. Sometimes only the steel barrels of their guns were visible as they poked out between the branches and
enveloped the trees in billows of gunpowder.
The intrepid young soldier who had invoked the Virgin of the Republic fired at a man only eight paces away, but the Tomochic fighter landed right in front of him in a single bound and fired his rifle point-blank into the soldier’s chest.
The fierce youth fell backward. Meanwhile, a bullet struck his adversary’s knee, and he fell at the young soldier’s side. Pulling himself up to a seated position, the enemy relaxed his hold on his rifle. But when the Tomochic fighter realized the dying boy was pointing his rifle at him—although he was too weak to fire—the Tomochic fighter shot him again just as the boy managed to squeeze the trigger.
The two shots rang out as one, and a single plume of smoke rose to the heavens. The two heroes were cut down at the same instant and now lay side by side. Similar scenes were played out behind every boulder and tree, in every crack and fissure of the mountain.
If the federal troops had continued their advance, they would have held the advantage in hand-to-hand combat due to their numbers, but it was too late: chaos reigned. The three muddled sections of the first column had no front or flanks, and they were spread willy-nilly over a wide area. Only a few of the coolest heads even heard the orders when they were shouted out.
Even though the outnumbered enemy could have been obliterated in a single all-out attack, it was impossible for the soldiers to go forward amid the chaos. The men’s spirits and energy were dangerously low, but most demoralizing of all were the whistling bullets raining down on the rearguard sections.
Just as a breathless, red-faced Captain Molina took charge and began shouting orders—his voice so full of rage it was barely intelligible—a tearful sergeant informed him that Commander Pablo Yépés of the first section had been mortally wounded.
As luck would have it, at that moment Lieutenant Delgadillo was retreating from the fray when a bullet passed through his right leg. At the site where he lay wounded, the corpse of his second sergeant at his side, the courageous officer heroically continued to command his section.
Meanwhile, a rabid Castorena ran this way and that amid the havoc, seeming to be everywhere at once, trying to force the soldiers back to their posts. The nobility of his rage had transformed him. “Damn those louts, why don’t they stop shooting us!”
“We’re shooting at ourselves! How can this be happening?” Miguel replied, admiring Castorena’s surprising bravery.
From one calamity to the next, the terror and panic had become even more pronounced, and clearly a catastrophe was imminent. The gunfire from the rear increased, the wounded and the dead kept falling, and no one was following orders anymore.
The soldiers had dispersed now that all hope of order was lost, and they continued to retreat, scattering their gear as they went. The retreat turned into a wild rout. It was every man for himself!
The loss of morale infected the hardiest fighters, causing even the bravest to take off running in no particular direction. Shaken and trembling, many huddled together, as far away as from the crossfire as they could get.
CHAPTER 20
Defeat of the Second Column
Miguel felt a surge of indignation and wrath deep in his soul at the spectacle of such out and out chaos. So this was the way battles were lost and slaughter prevailed! This wasn’t the war he had imagined when he read about the great campaigns in his history books.
Yet the contagion of fear had infected him too, and he was forced to retreat along with the others. The section that had been shooting at them from above was also making a muddled retreat and had finally stopped firing.
Standing on top of a boulder like a madman, bareheaded, his hundred cartridges recklessly spent, Castorena was brandishing his rifle and promising to break the neck of anyone who fled. No one paid the slightest attention. Morale and discipline had been cast to the winds in the delirium of defeat.
“Don’t run! Don’t run! About face, assault them, men! Long live the Ninth!”
Huddled behind the big rock that served as Castorena’s pedestal, an emotional, deflated Miguel called out to his demented comrade and tried to convince him that audacity was useless now. But Castorena refused to listen, weeping with rage: “Come out! Come out into the open, you cowards! Cowards!” he cried again and again, his voice hoarse with impotent fury.
What a sight that indomitable boy was, drawn up to his full height on the boulder, dust covered and heartbroken! With his head exposed, cape in shreds, red hair bristling and tears in his eyes, he was swinging his rifle around by the barrel like a windmill in the dense cloud of gunpowder. A sight indeed!
Captain Molina gathered a few brave men from the retreating masses, and behind a copse of thick bushes they formed a nucleus of defense, a fortress for those who had the heroic will to keep fighting. “Hey, Castorena, Mercado, over here! Get down, take cover!” he yelled.
One behind the other, rifles in their right hands, the pair ran from bush to bush back up the hill, the savage calls of “Long live our Lord Jesus Christ!” and “Long live the Blessed Virgin!” ringing in their ears. From their dugout, this handful of men put up a strong resistance. Nearby lay three Tomochic corpses.
The men’s kepis and rifle barrels could be glimpsed between the rocks and boulders or clustered around the trunks of the pine trees. The rifles gleamed in the filtered light as the sun’s rays penetrated the high branches and leaves floated down in pieces, blown to bits in the hail of metal.
The two officers reached the spot and Miguel, on his last legs, threw himself to the ground. They could kill him where he lay, but he had to rest. The heat was hellish and sweat streamed from his body. He would have given his life for one sip of water. It was eleven o’clock in the morning.
There on their knees or face down on the ground, some twenty soldiers—four officers and the captain—continued to fire at the enemy. But either their adversaries had retreated or they were attacking the second column on another flank of the mountain, because heavy gunfire could be heard coming from that direction.
A group of these men passed by in the distance, running for cover between the trees as an officer at their head yelled out vivas that managed to penetrate the din. “Where are you going, soldier?” the captain asked Miguel, running over to cut off his passage.
“To take up a better position in the rear, sir, because …”
“Go to your post immediately!”
Shamed into silence, the officer slowly turned back, crouching down between the trees until he reached the others. This was the same officer who in the morning had lamented not “getting his share” of the fighting.
So the second column moved out, leaving ample space between itself and the first; then both veered left. The second column received orders for its first section to fan out; the other two sections remained on the mountaintop while the first section spread out to guard against an attack from the side. Indeed, while the first column was attacked from the front, the second was beset from the left. Clearly these Tomochic fighters knew something about strategy.
On the same precipitous terrain, the combat looked exactly like what was taking place to the right. The brave men of the mountains uttered their terrible cries and delivered mortal blows with prodigious accuracy. “Death to the soldiers! Long live the Virgin Mary!” they yelled.
The first two columns intended to make their way down the mountainside into Tomochic side by side and take possession of the first houses in the town while the third column remained on alert. All would be protected by cannon fire.
The lieutenant colonel of each column issued orders from the rear guard after receiving orders from the commander in chief through the federal troops.
But the space between the first two columns was so wide that a handful of bold Tomochic fighters wedged in between them and opened fire on both sides. They captured the rear guard of the first section, which responded by attacking desperately on three fronts. In their hopeless situation in the middle of the forest, they could only answer fire with fire
.
Then, as a storm of bullets broke over them through the fog, the rear sections broke ranks in total disorder and began firing downhill indiscriminately, devastating their own forward sections. It was mortal chaos in a valley of despair. Not a single voice from the high command could be heard; no one could be understood. The soldiers fired like madmen. It was a moment in hell.
As the Tomochic bullets crossed those from federal rifles, they wove a web of death beneath the dense fog of gunpowder. There were men wounded in the back, dead men shot straight through the temples, corpses with their heads crushed to nothing.
The confusion was terrible as the men rolled between the rocks, blinded by the gunpowder. And all the while their invisible mountain adversaries fired again and again, not even raising their rifles to their shoulders but simply gripping them under their arms.
Heading the first section of the second column was Emilio Servín, a slim, gaunt-faced young man with a chestnut-colored mustache and small, brilliant eyes. He was literally crazed with rage. Seeing his men running in all directions with no notion of where the enemy was, he began to howl and curse, striking those who dared to flee with his rifle. “Get back, you cowards! Long live the government! Don’t run away, you swine,” he shouted, red with rage, his eyes starting out of their sockets. “Follow me, don’t be cowards!”
Rashly, impelled by unspeakable despair, he rushed forward into the brush where not a single man dared to follow. He reached a wide clearing on the mountainside and fired at an enemy fighter who was headed up the mountain.
The shot went astray. Barely taking aim, his adversary felled him with a single bullet through the chest. It was said that when the Tomochic fighters walked past the dying young man and heard him curse, they shot him again from point-blank range.
From their hiding place behind the rocks and trees, a few men saw the young captain raise his rifle and try to lift himself up to fire. But he collapsed face down, his gaping, foam-flecked mouth biting the pebbles of the Sierra beneath him, which he seemed to embrace with arms spread wide.
The Battle of Tomochic Page 13