by Frank McLynn
Militarily, the situation was not much better, and here the fabled superiority of the moral over the material came to the fore: the rebels were fighting enthusiastically for core values and ideals, but the federal troops were there simply because they had been sent. Most of the federals were recent recruits, ill-trained and reluctant fighters. Most of the poorly equipped and badly fed battalions had a purely nominal strength, since corrupt Army officials had practised `payroll padding', or simply pocketed the money earmarked for the soldiers' upkeep. When federal officers became frustrated at being unable to catch a highly mobile guerrilla force and requested more horses and pack animals for hot pursuit of hit-and-run groups, they found themselves snarled up in an Army bureaucracy intent on penny-pinching, querying all supplementary estimates and requiring officers to fill in huge, mindless questionnaires.
Besides, although the federals still had a firm grip on Chihuahua's towns and cities, they could not control the countryside, which was abandoned to the guerrillas. Even 5,000 extra troops could make no impression, since they needed the know-how only local militias could supply - and there were no local militias; the woodcutters, ranchers and hacienda foremen who had previously manned them had almost all joined Villa and Orozco. His advisers pointed out to an aghast Diaz that to control Chihuahua he would need the same population ratio as the British had enjoyed in the Boer War of i8gq-1902; ten troops for every rebel. The arithmetic was simple: if rebel strength went up to 3,000, this would entail having 30,000 regulars in Chihuahua - an impossible number, not only because it was the entire strength of the Mexican Army but because the rest of Mexico would explode in revolution if Diaz sent all his troops to one state.
Diaz's advisers wrestled with this conundrum. In theory it should have been possible to increase the size of the Army, but there were no recruits to be had: no one wanted to serve outside the territory of his own state, and nobody wanted to fight for Diaz. To use the leva to press-gang men would only compound the likelihood of rebellion elsewhere, and on the few occasions it was tried, either the localities rose in revolt or the population melted away in a mass exodus to the jungle or mountains. Increasingly despondent, General Hernandez, the military commander in Chihuahua, advised Diaz to ditch the universally hated Terrazases. He also urged a machiavellian pseudo-political solution, in which Diaz would appear to compromise, then, when the rebels had disarmed, he would enforce draconian repression and mass executions.
Diaz underrated the rebellion in Chihuahua at both the political and military level, seeing it one-dimensionally as just a gang of desperadoes on the rampage, encouraged and whipped up by Madero. He failed to see the long-term advantages accruing to the rebels from the terrain, which were principally threefold: Orozco and Villa could smuggle arms across the US border; they could raid and loot the state's haciendas for horses, money and supplies, making the hacendados the unintentional arsenal of the Revolution; and, if too hard-pressed in the plains, they could retreat into the mountains. No longer the master of his brief, Diaz decided to take Hernandez's advice. He put in another phantom governor, this time of `doveish' camouflage, and even released the editor Silvestre Terrazas from jail, hoping to use him as an intermediary.
Pancho Villa meanwhile was turning himself into the military hero of the Revolution. While still officially number two in the hierarchy behind Orozco, he was more and more building up a personal power base. After the defeat at Cerro Prieto he detached himself from Orozco and operated on his own, garnering more and more laurels in a whirlwind campaign from January to March 19 11. He withdrew to San Andres and decided to ambush a federal ammunition convoy. Successful in this, he foolishly allowed his men to disperse to their homes, but was then hit by a surprise federal counterattack. He and his bodyguards barricaded themselves in a railway station and held the federals at bay until evening, when they made their escape to the mountains, having lost most of their horses and supplies.
In spite of the freezing weather, Villa's scattered men rallied to him and there was even an influx of new recruits. To equip his army he raided hacienda after hacienda, scooping up 40o horses in one and arms, money and supplies in another. After a successful raid on the mining town of Naila had provided him with all the materiel he needed, Villa felt strong enough to attack the large town of Ciudad Camargo. A ferocious firefight took place as the villistas stormed it. They were just flushing out the last federal residues when government reinforcements arrived and they in turn were driven out. Believing in constant momentum, Villa barely broke stride but led his men on an attack, again abortive, on the town of Valle de Zaragoza.
Noting some slight signs of demoralisation in his men, Villa decided it was time for another of his great feats of daring. Taking just one comrade, Albino Frias, with him, Villa sauntered into Parral, undisguised in broad daylight - into a city where he was well known. The two men were soon recognised and challenged and had to shoot their way out, Hollywood-style. Separated from Frias in the melee, Villa returned to his camp to find it deserted. It turned out that Frias had reached it before him and told the men their leader was certainly dead; but no sooner did they hear of his miraculous survival than they all flocked back, convinced that `don Pancho' really was Fortune's darling. Riding the crest of the wave, Villa then led his men on a successful assault on a 15o-strong force of federals, gathering up further precious supplies of arms and equipment after the federals had cut and run.
Although the national press and the federal army still spoke largely of Orozco as the fount of opposition, with Villa relegated to a footnote as `the bandit Villa', he was already making his mark in local lore and corrido as a great charismatic leader. His leadership qualities and the magnetic appeal he had for his adherents were a function both of his great personal courage and his exceptional ability to read men. His followers were bowled over by his coolness, audacity and poker-faced acceptance of risk, by his skill as a gunfighter and by the gallery touches such as the `raid' on Parral with a single comrade. He knew human psychology, kept casualties low, allowed looting, and always paid his men in advance, if necessary by raiding haciendas before giving battle to get the necessary funds. He mixed tough discipline - shooting anyone who broke his rules - with affability, showing up without notice at the campfire of a unit, and asking to share its food. He had the Napoleonic trick of either knowing, or appearing to know, everything about every man in his army, where he came from, whether he was married, how many children he had, and so on. In sum, he achieved the difficult feat of making his men fear, admire and respect him at once.
So far, however, Orozco, operating separately, had kept pace with him in terms of prestige. In a great double-headed feat, he managed to lure a federal troop train into an ambush in the Canon Mal Paso, while one of his lieutenants sprang a trap in another canyon and massacred 200 troopers. Reporters covering the federal campaign against Orozco said it was the Boer War all over again - ponderous regulars trying to swat fastriding sharpshooters. Faced with repeated guerrilla ambushes, the federals abandoned all attempt to reconquer the sierras, with the result that Chihuahua City became choked with fleeing hacendados and their families. Civilian life became increasingly parlous: mines could not operate because of the government ban on dynamite, food prices were rising, unemployment increasing, and the presence of 7,000 federal troops racked up civilian-military friction. Tensions heightened when thirteen people were killed during a mass jailbreak in Chihuahua City in February 1911.
For Diaz the problem about the success of the revolt in the sierras was that more and more malcontents in the villages of the plain were encouraged to have a go. There were instances of trans-class movements in the pueblos - small ranchers, migrant labourers and the villagers themselves combining to throw the federal authorities out. A domino effect was created, whereby the more the rebels succeeded in different locales, the more other disparate groups emerged to take revenge for local grievances; managers of haciendas, administrators of cotton plantations and jefes politicos all joined the ranks
of death. More and more the federal authorities were being driven out of the smaller towns by concentration of force, to be replaced by revolutionary officials. Some mines reopened, with the owners paying protection money to the new authorities. As a rule of thumb, revolutionary bureaucrats would throw open the jails, release all prisoners and destroy all tax records and official archives.
Until April 1911 Diaz's response to the crisis in the north was still amazingly complacent. He and his minions continued to denounce the rebels as `bandits', `desperadoes', or even `communists', while trying to alternate repression with conciliation. Repression merely alienated the crypto-maderista middle class even further, while conciliation was either perceived as too little, too late, or taken as an admission of weakness. The most worrying long-term sign for Diaz was the serious level of desertion in the federal army. The riff-raff of Mexico City could be dragooned into the ranks but, once in the open country of Chihuahua, they immediately deserted or joined the rebels. Finally the chickens seemed to be coming home to roost after thirty-four years of the Porfiriato. Even before Madero returned to Mexico to take charge, the rebels controlled a huge swathe of land from the US border down to the states of Nayarit and Zacatecas.
On 14 February 1911 Madero, with just 130 men, crossed into Mexico at a frontier point near El Paso. The action was forced on him, as he had broken anti-neutrality laws in the USA and had to go south of the border to avoid the arrest warrant that had been issued on him. Madero had hoped to enter Mexico via his home state of Coahuila, where he had a vast extended family and a huge network of friends and sympathisers; instead he had been forced into Chihuahua to make common cause with the sierra revolutionaries. From this one circumstance would arise a host of misunderstandings. Madero both appeared to be, and was portrayed by Diaz propaganda as, a far more revolutionary figure than he really was. He had hoped to come to power via a political coup in Mexico City or with support from the Army, and now he found himself dependent on Pascual Orozco and Pancho Villa. The seeds of future disaster were sown: the revolutionaries thought Madero more radical than he was and thus hoped for more from him, only to be disappointed; in Mexico City meanwhile, the Army took his revolutionary rhetoric seriously, hated him for it and would never be loyal to him.
Madero rode across the desert to San Buenaventura, gathering recruits as he went. A grand conference and mustering of revolutionary forces was called, where Madero first realised the political maelstrom he was caught up in. It was the men of Chihuahua who had rescued the maderista movement from extinction, and the educated middle-class followers of Madero, who had failed to ignite urban revolution, were now playing second fiddle to rural warlords, who fought under the Madero banner purely as a flag of convenience and to legitimate local and sometimes personal grievances. The result was doubly unsatisfactory: in his heart Madero had no real sympathy for the revolutionaries of Chihuahua, but he was dependent on them, as he could not control events in the north.
Madero had expected to be received with enthusiasm as president-inwaiting, but found the local revolutionaries cool. He had expected that the magonista faction would not take orders from him, but was alarmed to find that he cut no great figure in the eyes of local leaders, especially as he could not supply them with the weapons they needed. Most disappointing of all was the arm's-length treatment from Orozco. His envoys had asked Orozco to converge on Ciudad Juarez and stop federal reinforcements reaching there, but the guerrilla replied that he accepted no authority in Chihuahua save his own, and ignored the request. Orozco was particularly offended by well-authenticated rumours that Madero intended to appoint someone else as military commander in Chihuahua; as far as he was concerned, there could be only one commander-in-chief in the state: himself. Madero thus found the revolutionary opposition to Diaz split three ways: between maderistas, magonistas and orozquistas.
Taking a leaf out of Orozco's book - Orozco had said he would fight on against Diaz, but independently and in his own way - Madero concluded that what he needed was a military victory that would give him the local prestige Orozco and Villa enjoyed. In March he decided to attack Casas Grandes on the North-western Railroad, where he thought his 6oo men would face roughly equal numbers; he was unaware that the federals were even then reinforcing the town. As a further refinement, Madero decided to stage the assault at night, to cause maximum confusion. The attack, on 6 March, was a fiasco, though Madero's raw recruits showed great courage. The federals at first pinned the rebels down in ditches outside the town and dealt out terrible slaughter with machine-guns; armed only with Winchester and Springfield rifles from the 186os, Madero's followers were outclassed. Even so, by dawn they were on the point of victory, when federal reinforcements suddenly arrived. To firepower went the victory as, outgunned and outmanoeuvred, the maderista vanguard, dug in within an adobe building, were surrounded and forced to surrender. Any chance that the rest of his raw levies could mount a counterattack was shattered when Madero found himself attacked in the rear. The rebels broke and fled, leaving behind more than ioo casualties (fifty-one dead) and most of their equipment and materiel; Madero himself was wounded in the arm and came within an ace of being captured.
The lesson of Casas Grandes was that the federals' monopoly of machine-guns and heavy artillery fire gave them a decisive advantage in open country; it was only through caution, defensive strategy, low morale among the troops and uncertainty about the political future that they failed to follow up: when Madero retreated in confusion to the hacienda of Bustillos, the federals, fearing ambush, did not pursue them.
Diaz hoped that Madero would be discredited by the rout at Casas Grandes but the reverse happened. In the eyes of the revolutionaries, Madero's courage and his very presence counted for more than his defeat, and more recruits, hearing stories of the incredible bravery of the Indian infantry at Casas Grandes, flocked in to Bustillos. There were political gains too. Having rejected Madero earlier, Orozco now acknowledged him as chief of the Revolution, but he still adamantly refused to accept Madero's choice, Giuseppe Garibaldi, grandson of the Italian liberator, as commander-in-chief.
Such was the confused situation when Villa arrived at Bustillos with 700 crack troops. Villa at once set about melding Madero's men with his own veterans and creating a unified, disciplined army; but for his fortunate advent at this juncture, Madero's force might have dwindled away. Madero was shrewd enough to see that Villa was just the man needed: his courage and daring appealed to Chihuahuans, his tight discipline impressed Madero, and everyone thought it unlikely that this man of the masses, from an impoverished background, would ever do deals with the hated oligarchs. Orozco's decision to keep Madero at arm's length now looked like a bad mistake, for it was Villa who had the ear of the would-be president. In gratitude and enthusiasm Madero wrote a letter, printed in the El Paso Morning Times, lauding Villa to the skies as a Robin Hood. This was probably the first time a US readership had heard of Pancho Villa.
Madero confided to Villa his worries about the armed magonistas who would not obey his orders, and Villa immediately thought of one of his artful tricks. He pretended to leave Bustillos and took his men down to the nearest railway station, inveigling the unarmed and curious magonistas to troop down with them and watch the departure. At a given signal, Villa's men jumped off the train, overpowered the onlookers and bore them back in triumph to Madero, having spilled not one drop of blood. Madero was delighted and promoted Villa, first to major, then to colonel, taking care to promote Orozco pari passu, always one rank ahead, so as not to alienate him. Diaz's propaganda organs made great play of Madero's promotion of `bandits', but Madero, though not in so many words, declared Villa to be a `social bandit' - a man forced into crime and later the armed struggle purely by Diaz's tyranny.
The entente between Madero and Villa has puzzled some historians. The diminutive man getting on so well with the man of iron, the spiritualist with the arch-materialist, the oligarchic intellectual with the semi-literate ruffian - none of this suggests na
tural synergy. However, Madero was increasingly aware that in Chihuahua he was an isolated figure. Most of those who opposed Diaz and the Terrazas were either magonistas or orozquistas. The one man with a large following who was prepared to accept his orders was Villa, and in such circumstances Madero was willing to lay on the flattery with a trowel. For his part, Villa, though occasionally exasperated by Madero, especially later, never really recovered from the confession he had made to Madero when Abraham Gonzalez introduced them in igro. Being already disposed to idolise Madero, he was further bowled over at Bustillos by the way the little man spoke to him as an equal. Here was a man with an intellect - a quality Villa admired - who used his brain idealistically to help others and with a complete absence of arrogance. For Villa, always in search of intellectual mentors, this was a powerful brew.
By April, revolution had spread to eighteen states in Mexico and new leaders had emerged in every state north of the isthmus. Some of these leaders were bizarrely untypical: in Sinaloa the historian Alan Knight has identified a species of landlord rebel - what he calls Mexico's Jacobites (in contrast to the maderista `Whigs') - whose objective was to restore traditional prerogatives which Diaz had curtailed. Increasingly, an enduring truth about the Mexican Revolution was revealed, that it was always a revolutionary mosaic, made up of disparate, often contradictory, elements. The line between banditry and revolution was especially blurred, with local heroes seizing arms caches and military equipment through sheer bluff. Typically a bandit leader with a handful of men would threaten a hacienda and gain possession of its armoury by pretending to have ten times the apparent number hidden just out of sight; so psychologically wrong-footed were the hacendados by true tales of the exploits of such as Villa, Orozco and Tomas Urbina that they would invariably believe the bluff and surrender.