Miguel left the general’s tent for his meat ration, which he devoured ravenously though it was unsalted and almost raw. He held the piece of meat with both hands and chewed noisily like a savage, while the blood oozed from the sides of his mouth. He would have been capable of biting anyone who tried to take it away.
Then an acute thirst overcame him again, but there was nothing to drink. Next he went to check on the forces that would protect the guard post. With Lieutenant José Soberanes at the head of the advance squad, they marched down the main road until they came to a place where the road descended abruptly.
Off to one side stood a wooden cross on a pile of rocks. Here three sentinels stood guard over the wide road. It was already getting dark and bitterly cold after a sad afternoon, which had skipped dusk and turned into night. There, high on the mountaintop in the clearing where the camp lay, the fires burning in general headquarters were visible. They blazed like rose-tinted stars while in front of him rose the hills, like stationary clouds, covered with rocks and pine trees.
They crossed the rocky escarpment, passing by the cross erected on its pedestal of stone. There, in the half-light of the dying day, they looked down into the vast depths of the Tomochic valley. Not one light, not one sound—not even the barking of a dog—could be made out in the evil town that lay barely visible at the bottom of the valley. Nothing indicated there was any life in that hole, that colossal eagle’s nest in the middle of the Sierra Madre mountains.
Exhausted by the day’s terrible labors, the melancholy lieutenant sat down next to a tree and, despite all efforts to keep his eyes open, was soon nodding sleepily. Miguel leaned his head against the trunk of an enormous pine and let his rifle fall between his aching legs. He unbuckled his cartridge belt and, crossing his arms, reflected on what he had learned, his eyes very wide in the darkness.
After suffering a bloody defeat, they would now confront the enemy lost in the mountains, far from home. As usual, his grand schemes had reaped bitter rewards. All his lofty ideals had vanished. He couldn’t say he had any faith left in the grand poetry of war! War as he had once understood it, as he had read about it—great, ennobling, heroic, epic.
What had occurred wasn’t even a shadow of the great classic combats of an earlier day—Europe’s legendary battles—that had once inspired him. Not even a parody of them—indeed, not even comparable to the recent revolutionary struggles that had bloodied the country. Yet something about the tragic barbarism of this catastrophe seemed all too familiar. The horror of the massacre had been just as vile as the defeat.
Vile, just like defeat.
Defeat. The dark essence of that word, full of shame, sullied by mud … it didn’t even glimmer in the inferno of his mind. His meditations skirted the shore of that sea of darkness, the town of nightmare, Tomochic.
Defeat. No, it wasn’t shame that he felt. Not for himself, nor for his comrades. He didn’t even feel shame on behalf of his beloved 9th Battalion or the Mexican army. Others were responsible for the defeat. The military academy’s crème de la crème, its youthful officers, had shown their mettle, leaving petals of their own blood to stain the rocky road to Tomochic.
Those green officers defended their honor in the thick underbrush amid the dense red and white cloud of combat. They had been shoved into the fray with no clear objectives in mind. No one had shown them the way. And the troops, even more than the officers, were the tragic victims of chance.
The number of dead and wounded was enormous. He thought of the soldiers who had been shamelessly abandoned to their fate out in the silent wilds: their thrashing, screams, curses in the half-light, insane thirst, and dying eyes contemplating the stars that sparkled in the cold sky. Fear clutched him as he tried to clear his consciousness of the vision of all those unhappy souls. Overwrought from weakness and fatigue, his fevered brain conjured up bloody scenes horrific as nightmares—only he was awake.
With his mind on fire, a lump in his throat, and an ache in his stomach, he experienced a morbid fear. Fear of shadows, nightfall, the odd sounds that drifted down from the camp, even his own thoughts, his consciousness; fear of his very being! Fear of everything! It was the beginning of dementia. An invincible fear gripped his weakened organism, like a delirium tremens.
It was an hour of crushing grief. In the end, his fatigue won out. Despite the danger, he slept a few moments. He was awakened by the sounds of indistinct voices: a lieutenant and a corporal on watch were speaking excitedly.
“Are you absolutely sure? It may be your nerves.”
“No, listen carefully, lieutenant, sir. Don’t you hear that?”
The lieutenant fell silent. Then, pricking up his ears to make out a vague sound in the distance, he heard something and said to Miguel, “Look here, Mercado, accompany the corporal. Right over there next to the guard … See if you can make anything out … You know what to do, right? Shoot on the spot. No ‘who goes there?’!”
The officer followed the corporal, tripping over rocks all the way. He couldn’t see farther than the shadows of the rocks and trees just ahead of him. When he came to where the guard was posted, he attempted to survey the terrain by sight. He held his breath in order to hear better. With a shudder of terror, he thought he heard the mingled sounds of voices and footsteps.
For nearly ten minutes, he stood there, his eyes peering blindly into the darkness. He began to tremble when he realized the sounds were getting louder and more distinct. There was no doubt about it; people were moving in—the enemy.
He went to report his findings and his chief immediately woke the sleeping soldiers and ordered them to load their weapons and form a line across the road. He situated himself on the right flank and ordered Miguel to take the left; then he told the three advance guards that at the first sight of the enemy they should rejoin the company.
Everybody was upright now, trembling, waiting anxiously for the enemy to attack boldly in the pitch-black night. Still, all eyes were cast behind as though to keep the road of retreat in full view.
Suddenly the noise of the approaching party became recognizable: coughing, laughing and talking. This was unheard of! They didn’t even do them the honor of making a silent approach. They were so sure of their triumph that they could laugh and chat as though they were out for a jaunt. “Aim carefully! Here they come! Here they come!” the lieutenant mouthed silently.
The men were on edge. They aimed nervously, unable to see a thing. Then a few shadows appeared on the lower part of the road. The lieutenant yelled “Fire!” and the squad group opened fire. The thunderous clap of bullets echoed ominously through the night’s deep silence.
A clamor of frightened voices rose up from the advancing group, who immediately began to retreat: “Don’t shoot … don’t shoot! We’re from Guaymas! We’re with Colonel Torres.” they yelled.
“Let Colonel Torres come forward or we’ll open fire again!” the lieutenant shouted back.
“Sir, he’s way back at the rear of the column,” a voice replied.
At that moment all heard the column’s password, and the newly arrived troops were allowed to advance.
CHAPTER 24
Lyricism: The Virgin and the Hero
With his forces decimated following the bungled attack on Tomochic, Colonel Torres decided to put his troops under the command of Colonel Rangel. There was little sense in maintaining his position on the other side of the valley.
That very night he undertook a dangerous enterprise that involved possibly exposing himself to enemy fire in the surrounding hills. And this would mean risking all-out slaughter in the Sierra foothills.
As fate would have it, either the general’s communiqué, which had been sent that afternoon, hadn’t arrived or the general had failed to inform the advance guard of their proximity. But as the battered troops from Sonora advanced, they were received with gunfire from the advance post guarding the road.
In the ensuing panic everyone shot upright and yelled back and forth in a confusion bo
rdering on pandemonium. “Come to order! Order! In formation! Put out the fires!” The fires were extinguished instantly.
With ashen faces, the wounded lifted themselves upright. An officer of the Eleventh—the one with the imposing mustache who had boasted that the battle would be over in a couple of hours—was trembling so fiercely he could barely get on his feet. Still, he cocked his pistol, ready for anything. “It’s a dawn raid, comrades, prepare your weapons! Tomochic sons of pigs!” he hissed.
Castorena grabbed a bottle of maguey liquor and took a generous swig. As he started to prepare his rifle, however, a captain arrived with the following orders: “Everyone back to your posts. It’s Colonel Torres’s column.”
Fortunately no blood was shed, and the Sonoran troops advanced into camp. There were only a couple of hundred men, since the Twenty-fourth and the Eleventh had suffered devastating losses in the combat against Tomochic.
When calm was restored, Miguel returned to his thoughts. Reclining against a tree, the lieutenant had exhausted all means of keeping himself awake, so he had decided to take guard duty half the night and leave Colonel Torres with the other half. While his chief slept, Miguel walked and his mind returned to its dark brooding.
Why was I spared? Miguel asked himself, as he pondered the heroic death of the young Captain Servín. “This was an indispensable man, a worthy son of the military academy, who would have become a worthy leader of the Mexican military’s next generation. Yet here I am, alive but good for nothing, a pathetic, vacillating creature, with a brain made less for thought than for anxiety, oversensitive and useless. Yes, I’m capable of suffering, of showing strength, but to no effect. My soul is prematurely old from grief and bad living. It’s a rudderless soul … no, an honorable, proud soul, generous and sad, but solitary and given to wavering. Why go on living like this? Alone, alone!”
Tears of woe surged in Miguel’s dry, burning eyes. Then suddenly the image of Julia appeared. She smiled at him sadly from the depths of his desolation. Julia! And he thought of the kind, melancholy girl from Tomochic, that sweet, intelligent, and oh so unfortunate girl of the mountains. And Julia’s clear voice, as she halfheartedly resisted him, resonated again in the bottomless night, the night of Tomochic and the dark night of his soul. “Oh, you are bad, so bad!”
He was bad? Poor creature! Giving in to his instincts, he was irresistibly drawn to the fresh, almost virginal body of the girl from Tomochic. But Miguel didn’t feel he was “bad.” After their encounter he felt an even greater love for his sad, lovely betrothed, whom he had vanquished using her own innocent phrase “God wills it!”
Then a delightful fantasy opened in Miguel’s mind: how she filled his existence with her strange love at once wild and proud, sweet, pious, rare, and mystical. That flower of the Tomochic mountains! The daughter of St. Joseph of the Sierras, prey for an old ogre, a sylvan mountain lily prematurely plucked. A cloud of gunpowder, a puddle of blood revealed in the conflagration’s blinding light. How ennobling was his exotic love affair! How his ordinary second lieutenant’s life had been transformed by the profound and lyrical passion of the girl who had given herself to him at the threshold of the sacred mountains, on the eve of the catastrophe, murmuring all the while in her plaintive martyr’s voice: “Have me, take your pleasure. It is God’s will.”
The officer caught his breath at the intimate nature of this memory, and a smile passed over his emaciated face. In his imagination, Miguel combined past and future events, composing one long, luxurious poem of love, incense, and blood, in which the nuptials of the Virgin of Tomochic and the Hero Miguel shone resplendent and victorious.
CHAPTER 25
In Pursuit
The wounded were ready to be transported to Guerrero on the morning of October 21 along with a small entourage from the 5th Regiment and two day’s worth of provisions. Miguel bade an emotional farewell to his friends. He witnessed Captain Molina and Lieutenant Colonel Villedas silently shaking hands. Molina had given Villedas his gold watch and a packet of bank notes to be delivered to his wife in the event of his death.
Afterward they conversed for a few moments. They lamented the fate of the battalion, ill prepared for battle and decimated in the chaos of the unforeseen defeat. After graduating from the military academy, Captain Molina had made his humble career in this battalion. A soldier by vocation, he was deeply pained by the unexpected disaster. “Sir, what worries me is how desperate the colonel will feel when he finds out … he’s going to find out one way or the other.”
“No,” Villedas answered him. “This is all I’m putting in the telegram: ‘Engaged on the twentieth with the enemy, many dead, many wounded,’ and nothing more.”
A wave of tenderness came over the second lieutenant as he considered the love the 9th Battalion’s officer corps had for the old colonel. He came from a tradition of ancient austerity and honorable nobility. His chivalrous customs had originated with the Spanish Guard, whose sabers were always clean and elegant.
What’s more, underneath the rigid frown, beyond his harsh expression and his brittle, commanding voice, what sweet, warm affection he had for the young officers he hoped to transform into the flower of martial nobility! How dear to him were the “boys” in the troops!
Colonel Miguel Vela was a conservative through and through, and not only in name. He was naively true to the mystical chivalry of Religion and Right. The commander of the 9th Battalion was a patriarch of war, not due to his hard implacability but because of his sweetness.
He selected his officers from the young military academy graduates who hoped to move directly into the ranks of the army. He poured into those young souls something of the ancient and chivalric military tradition that had shaped his own. And so it was that in the garrison of the Plaza de Mexico the soldiers of the Ninth provided a rare example of the infantry officer whose conduct is as clean as his uniform.
How would that veteran feel when he learned the fate of his own battalion? This thought, added to the sight of the miserable wounded and the presence of Captain Molina, the sad “Little Napoleon of the Ninth,” made Miguel’s vibrant spirit swell with a wave of tenderness that brought tears to his melancholy eyes and a lump to the back of his throat.
The general had modified his plan of attack. He decided to bivouac his troops on Cerro de Medrano hill, which rose almost straight up into the sky to the right of the town. From the very top of the hill he could harass the enemy with impunity. Besides, this was the perfect place for the little Hotchkiss cannon.
The only problem was that Cerro de Medrano hill was set apart from the other hills, which circled the valley. The only way to get to it was by going down, crossing the plain, then going up again. If the Tomochic fighters noticed their movements, they could easily defeat the plan.
The various groups lined up with their respective officers. Because they had suffered severe attrition, the two companies of the Ninth were combined. The Pimas and Navojoas made up the front guard. Then came the Ninth and the Eleventh, then what was left of the Twelfth, and finally the Twenty-fourth. The National Guard of Chihuahua, more nuisance than anything else, brought up the rear, along with a few horsemen from the Fifth regiment and the Chihuahua irregulars. As usual, the glorious cannon traveled in the center escorted by members of the Ninth. The food and ammunition traveling with another escort from the same division closed the column, which set off by way of the hills on the right until Tomochic was no longer visible from behind Cerro de Medrano hill. Then they descended toward flat ground with marksmen guarding the front lines and flanks.
Fortunately the enemy ranks, barricaded in their houses, could not or did not wish to mount an opposition. The soldiers continued up the far side of Medrano hill, and they set up camp at the summit. Here they were safe from attack and completely invisible to the Tomochic fighters.
It was like an unassailable fortress where all of Tomochic could be observed from less than two thousand feet away. The soldiers lay face down or stood behind tree
s and boulders, taking careful aim at any Tomochicans who dared to come out of the houses or show themselves in the church tower.
This system reaped better results than an outright attack. All day long, without letup, a slow but unnerving gunfire pinned the Tomochic fighters down in their houses. So steely was their resolve that they would convert those houses into their own tombs. Over by the church tower, Cruz’s guerrilla forces answered the fire from time to time, trying to conserve ammunition.
A number of projectiles were launched from Cerro de Cueva hill half a mile away on the other side of the valley, in front and to the left of Medrano hill. The missiles whistled and described a great arc in the sky before descending on the camp.
The cannon had been set up advantageously at the highest point of the hill behind a natural parapet that protected the artillerymen. It saluted the enemy politely before sending them a few mortar shells, which exploded outside the houses and raised flurries of dust.
A few cows belonging to the people of Tomochic wandered the plain and lower hills of the mountainside. The irregulars chased a few of them down and then distributed generous portions of meat to the troops. Flour and raw, unsalted meat were the rations given out that day. The officers ordered the soldiers’ women to make tortillas. In fact, the soldaderas had never been so valuable for they brought them firewood and water.
Water continued to be rare and precious. Selflessly, the hapless women made their way down the right side of the hill. No peak or escarpment was too sheer for them. Their feet bled through the worn soles of their huaraches as they grabbed on to the shrubs in order not to fall, chattering incessantly, mixing crude obscenities with devout invocations to the saints.
The Battle of Tomochic Page 16