Soledad, 1.15
A blaze of heat, merciless, white. We find Mexican rifles stacked at intervals along the station platforms, and there are groups of young voluntarios looking proudly at their first guns or drawing long, cruel knives from their belts. Some are eating small, green limes, not nourishing at best, slashing at them with their machetes. The lack of a commissariat is what prevents the Mexican army from being in any way efficient. (Think of the full stomachs and comfortably shod feet of our men.) Flatcars with cannon and automobiles are on the sidings. General Gustavo Maass, whom I have not seen since our trip to Vera Cruz in January, is here in command. He will not prove efficient—a blue-eyed Mexican, wearing his sandy-gray hair in a German brush effect, can’t be.