Chapter II The Army at Yermo
At dawn next morning General Torribio Ortega came to the car for breakfast—a lean, dark Mexican, who is called “The Honorable” and “The Most Brave” by the soldiers. He is by far the most simple-hearted and disinterested soldier in Mexico. He never kills his prisoners. He has refused to take a cent from the Revolution beyond his meager salary. Villa respects and trusts him perhaps beyond all his Generals. Ortega was a poor man, a cowboy. He sat there, with his elbows on the table, forgetting his breakfast, his big eyes flashing, smiling his gentle, crooked smile, and told us why he was fighting.
“I am not an educated man,” he said. “But I know that to fight is the last thing for any people. Only when things get too bad to stand, eh? And, if we are going to kill our brothers, something fine must come out of it, eh? You in the United States do not know what we have seen, we Mexicans! We have looked on at the robbing of our people, the simple, poor people, for thirty-five years, eh? We have seen the rurales and the soldiers of Porfirio Diaz shoot down our brothers and our fathers, and justice denied to them. We have seen our little fields taken away from us, and all of us sold into slavery, eh? We have longed for our homes and for schools to teach us, and they have laughed at us. All we have ever wanted was to be let alone to live and to work and make our country great, and we are tired—tired and sick of being cheated....”
Outside in the dust, that whirled along under a sky of driving clouds, long lines of soldiers on horseback stood in the obscurity, while their officers passed along in front, peering closely at cartridge-belts and rifles.
“Geronimo,” said a Captain to one trooper, “go back to the ammunition train and fill up the gaps in your cartouchera. You fool, you’ve been wasting your cartridges shooting coyotes!”
Across the desert westward toward the distant mountains rode strings of cavalry, the first to the front. About a thousand went, in ten different lines, diverging like wheel spokes; the jingle of their spurs ringing, their red-white-and-green flags floating straight out, crossed bandoliers gleaming dully, rifles flopping across their saddles, heavy, high sombreros and many-colored blankets. Behind each company plodded ten or twelve women on foot, carrying cooking utensils on their heads and backs, and perhaps a pack mule loaded with sacks of corn. And as they passed the cars they shouted back to their friends on the trains.
“Poco tiempo California!” cried one.
“Oh! there’s a colorado for you!” yelled another. “I’ll bet you were with Salazar in Orozco’s Revolution. Nobody ever said ‘Poco tiempo California’ except Salazar when he was drunk!”
The other man looked sheepish. “Well, maybe I was,” he admitted. “But wait till I get a shot at my old compañeros. I’ll show you whether I’m a Maderista or not!”
A little Indian in the rear cried: “I know how much of a Maderista you are, Luisito. At the first taking of Torreon, Villa gave you the choice of turning your coat or getting a cabronasso or balasso through the head!” And, joshing and singing, they jogged southwest, became small, and finally faded into the dust.
Villa himself stood leaning against a car, hands in his pockets. He wore an old slouch hat, a dirty shirt without a collar, and a badly frayed and shiny brown suit. All over the dusty plain in front of him men and horses had sprung up like magic. There was an immense confusion of saddling and bridling—a cracked blowing of tin bugles. The Brigada Zaragosa was getting ready to leave camp—a flanking column of two thousand men who were to ride southeast and attack Tlahualilo and Sacramento. Villa, it seemed, had just arrived at Yermo. He had stopped off Monday night at Camargo to attend the wedding of a compadre. His face was drawn into lines of fatigue.
“Carramba!” he was saying with a grin; “we started dancing Monday evening, danced all night, all the next day, and last night, too! What a baile! And what muchachas! The girls of Camargo and Santa Rosalia are the most beautiful in Mexico! I am worn out—rendido! It was harder work than twenty battles....”
Then he listened to the report of some staff officer who dashed up on horseback, gave a concise order without hesitating, and the officer rode off. He told Señor Calzado, General Manager of the Railroad, in what order the trains should proceed south. He indicated to Señor Uro, the Quartermaster-general, what supplies should be distributed from the troop trains. To Señor Munoz, Director of the Telegraph, he gave the name of a Federal captain surrounded by Urbina’s men a week before and killed with all his men in the hills near La Cadena, and ordered him to tap the Federal wire and send a message to General Velasco in Torreon purporting to be a report from this Captain from Conejos, and asking for orders.... He seemed to know and order everything.
We had lunch with General Eugenio Aguirre Benavides, the quiet, cross-eyed little commander of the Zaragosa Brigade, a member of one of the cultivated Mexican families that gathered around Madero in the first Revolution; with Raul Madero, brother of the murdered President, second in command of the Brigade, who is a graduate of an American University, and looks like a Wall Street bond salesman; with Colonel Guerra, who went through Cornell, and Major Leyva, Ortega’s nephew, a historic full-back on the Notre Dame football team....
In a great circle, ready for action, the artillery was parked, with caissons open and mules corralled in the center. Colonel Servin, commander of the guns, sat perched high up on an immense bay horse, a ridiculous tiny figure, not more than five feet tall. He was waving his hand and shouting a greeting across to General Angeles, Carranza’s Secretary of War—a tall, gaunt man, bareheaded, in a brown sweater, with a war map of Mexico hanging from his shoulder; who straddled a small burro. In the thick dust-clouds, sweating men labored. The five American artillery men had squatted down in the lee of a cannon, smoking. They hailed me with a shout:
“Say, bo! What in hell did we ever get into this mess for? Nothing to eat since last night—work twelve hours—say, take our pictures, will you?”
There passed by with a friendly nod the little Cockney soldier that had served with Kitchener, and then the Canadian Captain Treston, bawling for his interpreter, so that he could give his men some orders about the machine guns; and Captain Marinelli, the fat Italian soldier of fortune, pouring an interminable and unintelligible mixture of French, Spanish and Italian into the ear of a bored Mexican officer. Fierro rode by, cruelly roweling his horse with the bloody mouth—Fierro, the handsome, cruel and insolent—The Butcher they called him, because he killed defenseless prisoners with his revolver, and shot down his own men without provocation.
Late in the afternoon the Brigada Zaragosa rode away southeast over the desert, and another night came down.
The wind rose steadily in the darkness, growing colder and colder. Looking up at the sky, which had been ablaze with polished stars, I saw that all was dark with cloud. Through the roaring whirls of dust a thousand thin lines of sparks from the fires streamed southward. The coaling of the engines’ fire boxes made sudden glares along the miles of trains. At first we thought we heard the sound of big guns in the distance. But all at once, unexpectedly, the sky split dazzlingly open from horizon to horizon, thunder fell like a blow, and the rain came level and thick as a flood. For a moment the human hum of the army was silenced. All the fires disappeared at once. And then came a vast shout of anger and laughter and discomfiture from the soldiers out on the plain, and the most amazing wail of misery from the women that I have ever heard. The two sounds only lasted a minute. The men wrapped themselves in their serapes and sank down in the shelter of the chaparral; and the hundreds of women and children exposed to the cold and the rain on the flat-cars and the tops of the box-cars silently and with Indian stoicism settled down to wait for dawn. In General Maclovio Herrera’s car ahead was drunken laughter and singing to a guitar....
Daybreak came with a sound of all the bugles in the world blowing; and looking out of the car door I saw the desert for miles boiling with armed men saddling and mounting. A hot sun popped over the western mountains, burning in a clear sky. For a moment the ground poured up billowing steam, and then there was dust again, and a thirsty land. There might never have been rain. A hundred breakfast fires smoked from the car-tops, and the women stood turning their dresses slowly in the sun, chattering and joking. Hundreds of little naked babies danced around, while their mothers lifted up their little clothes to the heat. A thousand joyous troopers shouted to each other that the advance was beginning; away off to the left some regiment had given away to joy, and was shooting into the air. Six more long trains had come in during the night, and all the engines were whistling signals. I went forward to get on the first train out, and as I passed the car of Trinidad Rodriguez, a harsh, feminine voice cried: “Hey, kid! Come in and get some breakfast.” Leaning out of the door were Beatrice and Carmen, two noted Juarez women that had been brought to the front by the Rodriguez brothers. I went in and sat down at the table with about twelve men, several of them doctors in the hospital train, one French artillery captain, and an assortment of Mexican officers and privates. It was an ordinary freight box-car like all the private cars, with windows cut in the walls, partitions built to shut out the Chinese cook in the kitchen, and bunks arranged across sides and end. Breakfast consisted of heaping platters of red meat with chile, bowls of frijoles, stacks of cold flour tortillas, and six bottles of Monopole Champagne. Carmen’s complexion was bad, and she was a little stupid from the gastronomic combination, but Beatrice’s white, colorless face and red hair cut Buster Brown fashion fairly radiated a sort of malicious glee. She was a Mexican, but talked Tenderloin English without an accent. Jumping up from the table, she danced around it, pulling the men’s hair. “Hello, you damned Gringo,” she laughed at me. “What are you doing here? You’re going to get a bullet in you if you don’t get careful!”
A morose young Mexican, already a little drunk, snapped at her furiously in Spanish: “Don’t you talk to him! Do you understand? I’ll tell Trinidad how you asked the Gringo in to breakfast, and he’ll have you shot!”
Beatrice threw back her head and roared. “Did you hear what he said? He thinks he owns me, because he once stayed with me in Juarez!... My God!” she went on. “How funny it seems to travel on the railroad and not have to buy a ticket!”
“Look here, Beatrice,” I asked her; “we may not have such an easy time of it down there. What will you do if we get licked?”
“Who, me?” she cried. “Why, I guess it won’t take me long to get friends in the Federal army. I’m a good mixer!”
“What is she saying? What do you say?” asked the others in Spanish.
With the most perfect insolence Beatrice translated for them. And in the midst of the uproar that followed I left....