December 16th
Last night, after dinner, Burnside and Dr. Ryan took the map to see what route the unfortunate Spaniards of Chihuahua could have followed. It seems scarcely credible, with the frontier and hospitality nearly one-half nearer, that they should have chosen the terrible march through the desert and over the mountains to Torreon, which, at any time, may again fall into Villa’s hands. He would be in a rage to find he had to bother a second time with the same set of unfortunates! They say their route is strewn with valuables that they started out with and little by little were obliged to abandon. Isn’t the picture appalling?
Von Hintze has just spent an hour here; he is always, like the others, advocating the mediation of The Hague, saying it would be a way out of our dilemma, and an issue out for Huerta. Is he on the track of something that may be of service to both sides? In Washington a couple of weeks ago it was suggested from some source (probably Brussels) that the matter should be so submitted—both sides, however, resenting it. Von Hintze brought me a dainty, gold-headed cane to replace his handsome Chinese stick that was supposed, unjustly, to have disappeared under the protection of the Stars and Stripes, on Thanksgiving Day. I made up my mind to get that cane, and I subsequently found it, accidentally, standing near the unused umbrella-stand at the Norwegian Legation, where he had left it himself that same day. The innocent was, for once, rewarded. Von Hintze is always very fair-minded and impersonal in political matters, and doesn’t lose his head when the political compass veers as wildly as it does here. He is a good friend, too, I think, and there may be something in the Hague suggestion. We may, at any day, see another faction start up; the victor of Torreon, Juarez, and Chihuahua will not care to lay his victories at Carranza’s feet. One man after another outshines his chief, commits treason, comes to power, and falls to make way for some one else, generally a one-time friend. As the clever editor of the Mexican Herald dryly remarked, “A traitor in Mexico seems to be any one that doesn’t hold office.”
The Zapatistas are getting very active again, fighting hard at Milpa Alta, in the Ajusco hills near here. Some were seen at Tlalpam and Xochimilco (Tlalpam is where we often go on Sundays). Sometimes on the road to the Country Club or Tlalpam one hears the shooting.
All is quiet again at Tampico, though the dead are yet lying about unburied. The rebels got far into the town, but did very little damage to property. They wanted, people think, to get hold of a lot of the rolling stock of the railway. Tampico is a horrible, flat, mosquito-infested, malarial place, but it can give to the navies of the world the motive power that they want. It is the focus of the guerre des pétroles. Is it really true that oil is at the back of all these tragedies?
At the dinner at the British Legation on Saturday there was an Englishman, a Mr. Graham, who has a place near Durango. He told, as an eye-witness, the story I had heard before, of one of the rebel chiefs seizing the aged and saintly archbishop Mendoza while at the altar, forcing him to walk two miles over stubble fields, in the heat of the day, then putting him in a damp and filthy cell, two feet by six. Mr. Graham gave a bond for $15,000, and he was got out. This is but one of a thousand stories to the shame of the rebels.