There is a saying in Mexico that it is much easier to be a successful
general than a successful president. Inasmuch as almost all Mexican
presidents during the hundred years since Mexico became a Republic,
owed their presidency to successful generalship, this saying is
significant. At all events, no Mexican general who won his way into the
National Palace by his military prowess ever won his way out with
credit to himself or to his country.
General Victoriano Huerta, Mexico's latest Interim-President, during
the first few months that followed his overthrow of the Madero
Government found out to his own cost how much harder it is to rule a
people than an army.
As a matter of fact, General Huerta was pushed into his
interim-presidency before he really had a fair opportunity to learn how
to command an army. At the time he was so suddenly made Chief
Magistrate of Mexico he was not commanding the Mexican army, but was
merely a recently appointed major-general who happened to command that
small fraction of the regular army at the capital which was supposed to
have remained loyal to President Madero and his constitutional
government. Huerta had been appointed by President Madero to the
supreme command of the loyal forces at the capital, numbering barely
three thousand soldiers, only a few days before Madero's fall. Even if
he had not turned traitor to his commander-in-chief, as he did in the
end, Huerta's command of the loyal troops during the ten days' struggle
at the capital preceding the fall of the constitutional government
could not be described as anything but a dismal failure.
Before considering General Huerta's qualifications as a President, one
should know something of his career as a soldier. During the last few
years it has repeatedly fallen to my lot to follow General Huerta in
the field, so that I have had a fair chance to view some of his
soldierly qualities at close hand. I accompanied General Huerta during
his campaign through Chihuahua, in 1912, and was present at his famous
Battle of Bachimba, near Chihuahua City, on July 3, 1912--the one
decisive victory won by General Huerta against the rebel forces of
Pascual Orozco. Before this campaign I was in Cuernavaca, in the State
of Morelos, during the time when General Huerta had his headquarters
there in his campaign against Zapata's bandit hordes in that State
after the fall of General Diaz's government.
General Huerta then took charge of the last military escort which
accompanied General Porfirio Diaz on his midnight flight from Mexico
City to the port of Vera Cruz. During the ten hours' run down to the
coast, it may be recalled, the train on which President Diaz and his
family rode was held up by rebels in the gray of dawn, and the soldiers
of the military escort had to deploy in skirmish order, led by Generals
Diaz and Huerta in person; but the affair was over after a few minutes'
firing, with no casualties on either side.
Before this eventful year General Huerta had but few opportunities of
winning laurels on the field of battle. Having entered the Military
Academy of Chapultepec in the early 'seventies under Lerdo de Tejada's
presidency, Victoriano Huerta was graduated in 1875, at the age of
twenty-one, and was commissioned a second lieutenant of engineers.
While still a cadet at Chapultepec he distinguished himself by his
predilection for scientific subjects, particularly mathematics and
astronomy. During the military rebellion of Oaxaca, when General Diaz
rose against President Lerdo, Lieutenant Huerta was engaged in garrison
duty, and got no opportunity to enter this campaign.
After General Diaz had come into power and had begun his reorganization
of the Mexican army, young Huerta, lately promoted to a captaincy of
engineers, came forward with a plan for organizing a General Staff.
General Diaz approved of his plans, and Captain Huerta, accordingly, in
1879, became the founder of Mexico's present General Staff Corps. The
first work of the new General Staff was to undertake the drawing up of
a military map of Mexico on a large scale. The earliest sections of
this immense map, on which the Mexican General Staff is still hard at
work, were surveyed and drawn up in the State of Vera Cruz, where the
Mexican Military Map Commission still has its headquarters. Captain
Huerta accompanied the Commission to Jalapa, the capital of the State
of Vera Cruz, and served there through a period of eight years,
receiving his promotion to major in 1880 and to lieutenant-colonel in
1884. During this time he had charge of all the astronomical work of
the Commission, and he also led surveying and exploring parties over
the rough mountainous region that extends between the cities of Jalapa
and Orizaba. While at Jalapa he married Emilia Aguila, of Mexico City,
who bore him three sons and a daughter.
In 1890 Huerta was promoted to a colonelcy and was recalled to Mexico
City. As a reward for Indian campaign services Huerta was promoted to
the rank of brigadier-general. In Mexico's centennial year of 1910,
when Francisco Madero rose in the north, and other parts of the
Republic gave signs of disaffection, General Huerta was ordered south
to take charge of all the detached Government force in the mountainous
State of Guerrero. Almost simultaneously with his arrival in
Chilpancingo, the capital of the State of Guerrero, almost the whole
south of Mexico rose in rebellion. The military situation there was
soon found to be so hopeless that Huerta was recalled to Mexico City.
After General Huerta saw General Porfirio Diaz off to Europe at Vera
Cruz, he returned to the capital and placed himself at the disposition
of Don Francisco L. de la Barra, Mexico's new President _ad interim_.
President de la Barra dispatched him with a column of soldiers to
Cuernavaca to restore peace.
Huerta placed himself at Señor Madero's complete disposition when the
latter was elected and inaugurated as President at Mexico. Madero, for
reasons that are self-evident, was anxious to propitiate the military
element, and to secure the cooperation of the more experienced officers
in the regular army for the better pacification of the country.
Accordingly, when Zapata and his bandit hordes gave signs of returning
to their old ways, refusing to "stay bought," President Madero sent
General Huerta back into Morelos, at the head of a strong force of
cavalry, mountain artillery, and machine guns, numbering altogether
3,500 men, with orders to put down Zapata's new rebellion "at any
cost." At the same time President Madero induced his former fellow
rebel, Ambrosio Figueroa, now Commander-in-Chief of Mexico's rural
guards, to cooperate with General Huerta by bringing a mounted force of
three thousand rurales from Guerrero into Morelos from the south so as
to hem in the Zapatistas between himself and Huerta at Cuernavaca.
Figueroa's men, though they had to cover three times the distance,
struck the main body of the rebels first and got badly mussed up in the
battle that followed. General Huerta's column did not get away from
Cuernavaca until the second day of the fight, and did not reach the
battlefield in the extinct crater of Mount Herradura until Figueroa's
rurales had been all but routed. In the battle that followed, General
Huerta succeeded in driving the rebels out of their strong position,
but the losses of the federals, owing to their belated arrival and
hastily taken positions, were disproportionately heavy.
This affair caused much ill-feeling between the rurales and regulars,
and Figueroa sent word to Madero that he could not afford to sacrifice
his men by trying to cooperate with such a poor general as Huerta. The
much-heralded joint campaign accordingly fell to the ground.
President Madero thereupon recalled General Huerta, and sent General
Robles, of the regular army, to replace him in command. This furnished
Huerta with another grievance against Madero.
Some time afterward I heard General Huerta explain in private
conversation to some of his old army comrades that he had been recalled
from Morelos because of his sharp military measures against the
Zapatistas, owing to President Madero's sentimental preference for
dealing leniently with his old Zapatista friends. At the time when
General Huerta made this private complaint, however, it was a notorious
fact that his successor in Morelos, General Robles, had received public
instructions from Madero to deal more severely with the Morelos rebels.
General Robles did, as a matter of fact, handle the Morelos rebels far
more ruthlessly than Huerta, leading to his own subsequent recall on
charges of excessive cruelty.
Meanwhile the Orozco rebellion had arisen in the north, and became so
threatening that General Gonzalez Salas, Madero's War Minister, felt
called upon to resign his portfolio to take the field against Orozco.
General Salas, after organizing a fairly formidable-looking force of
3,500 regulars and three batteries of field artillery at Torreon,
rushed into the fray, only to suffer a disgraceful defeat in his first
battle at Rellano, in Chihuahua, not far from Torreon. General Salas
took his defeat so much to heart that he committed suicide on his way
back to Torreon. This, together with the panic-stricken return of his
army to Torreon, caused the greatest dismay at the Capital, the
inhabitants of which already believed themselves threatened by an
irresistible advance of Orozco's rebel followers. None of the federal
generals at the front were considered strong enough to stem the tide.
The only available federal general of high rank, who had any experience
in commanding large forces in the field, was Victoriano Huerta.
President Madero, in his extremity, called upon Huerta to reorganize
the badly disordered forces at Torreon, and to take the field against
Orozco, "cost what it may." This was toward the end of March, 1912.
General Huerta, whom the army had come to regard as "shelved," lost no
time in getting to Torreon. There he soon found that the situation was
by no means so black as it had been painted--General Trucy Aubert, who
had been cut off with one of the columns of the army, having cleverly
extricated his force from its dangerous predicament so as to bring it
safely back to the base at Torreon without undue loss of men or
prestige.
Thenceforth no expense was saved by General Huerta in bringing the army
to better fighting efficiency. Heavy reenforcements of regulars,
especially of field artillery, were rushed to Torreon from the Capital,
and large bodies of volunteers and irregulars were sent after them from
all parts of the Republic.
President Madero had said: "Let it cost what it may"; so all the
preparation went forward regardless of cost. "Hang the expense!" became
the blithe motto of the army.
When General Huerta at last took the field against Orozco, early in
May, his federal army, now swelled to more than six thousand men and
twenty pieces of field artillery, moved to the front in a column of
eleven long railway trains, each numbering from forty to sixty cars,
loaded down with army supplies and munitions of all kinds, besides a
horde of several thousand camp followers, women, sutlers, and other
non-combatants. The entire column stretched over a distance of more
than four miles. The transportation and sustenance of this unwieldy
column, which had to carry its own supply of drinking water, it was
estimated, cost the Mexican Government nearly 350,000 pesos per day.
Its progress was exasperatingly slow, owing to the fact that the
Mexican Central Railway, which was Huerta's only chosen line of
advance, had to be repaired almost rail by rail.
After more than a fortnight's slow progress, General Huerta struck
Orozco's forces at Conejos, in Chihuahua, near the branch line running
out to the American mines at Mapimi. Orozco's forces, finding
themselves heavily outnumbered and overmatched in artillery, hastily
evacuated Conejos, retreating northward up the railway line by means of
some half-dozen railway trains. Several weeks more passed before Huerta
again struck Orozco's forces at Rellano, in Chihuahua, close to the
former battlefield, along the railway, where his predecessor, General
Gonzalez Salas, had come to grief. This was in June.
Huerta, with nearly twice as many men and three times as much
artillery, drove Orozco back along the line of the railway after a two
days' long-range artillery bombardment, against which the rebels were
powerless. This battle, in which the combined losses in dead and
wounded on both sides were less than 200, was described in General
Huerta's official report as "more terrific than any battle that had
been fought in the Western Hemisphere during the last fifty years." In
his last triumphant bulletin from the field, General Huerta telegraphed
to President Madero that his brave men had driven the enemy from the
heights with a final fierce bayonet charge, and that their bugle blasts
of victory could be heard even then on the crest.
Pascual Orozco, on the other hand, reported to the revolutionary Junta
in El Paso that he had ordered his men to retire before the superior
force of the federals, and that they had accomplished this without
disorder by the simple process of boarding their waiting trains and
steaming slowly off to the north, destroying the bridges and culverts
behind him as they went along. One of my fellow war correspondents, who
served on the rebel side during this battle, afterward told me that the
federals, whose bugle calls Huerta heard on the heights, did not get up
to this position until two days after the rebels had abandoned their
trenches along the crest.
The subsequent advance of the federals from Rellano to the town of
Jimenez, Orozco's old headquarters, which had been evacuated by him
without firing a shot, lasted another week.
Here Huerta's army camped for another week. At Jimenez the long-brewing
unpleasantness between Huerta's regular officers and some of Madero's
bandit friends, commanding forces of irregular cavalry, came to a head.
The most noted of these former guerrilla chieftains was Francisco
Villa, an old-time bandit, who now rejoiced in the honorary rank of a
Colonel. Villa had appropriated a splendid Arab stallion, originally
imported by a Spanish horse-breeder with a ranch near Chihuahua City.
General Huerta coveted this horse, and one day, after an unusually
lively carouse at general headquarters, he sent a squad of soldiers to
bring the horse out of Villa's corral to his own stable. The old bandit
took offense at this, and came stalking into headquarters to make a
personal remonstrance. He was put under arrest, and Huerta forthwith
sentenced him to be shot. That same day the sentence was to be put into
execution. Villa was already facing the firing squad, and the officer
in charge had given the command to load, when President Madero's
brother, Emilio, who was serving on Huerta's staff in an advisory
capacity, put a stop to the execution by taking Villa under his
personal protection. President Madero was telegraphed to, and
immediately replied, reprieving Villa's sentence, and ordering him to
be sent to Mexico City pending further official investigation.
This act of interference infuriated Huerta. For the moment he had to
content himself with formulating a long string of serious charges
against Villa, ranging from military insubordination to burglary,
highway robbery, and rape. It was even given out at headquarters that
Villa had struck his commanding general.
Huerta never forgave the Madero brothers for their part in this affair,
and his resentment was fanned to white heat, subsequently, when
Francisco Villa was allowed to escape scot-free from his prison in
Mexico City.
Meanwhile Huerta kept telegraphing to President Madero for more
reenforcements of men, munitions, and supplies, more engines, more
railway trains and tank cars, and, above all, for more artillery.
Madero kept sending them, though it cost his Government a new loan of
forty million dollars. Every other day or so a new train, with fresh
supplies, arrived at the front.
At the end of several more weeks, when Orozco had slowly retreated
half-way through the State of Chihuahua, and when he found that the
destruction of the big seven-span bridge over the Conchos River at
Santa Rosalia did not permanently stop Huerta's advance, he reluctantly
decided to make another stand at the deep cut of Bachimba, just south
of Chihuahua City. This was in July.
By this time General Huerta's Federal column had swelled to 7,500
fighting men, 20 pieces of field artillery, 30 machine guns, and some
7,500 camp-followers and women, making a total of more than 15,000
persons of all sexes and ages, who were being carried along on more
than twenty railroad trains, stretching over a dozen miles of single
track. The column was so long that some of my companions and I, when we
climbed a high hill near the front end of the column at Bachimba, found
it impossible to discern the tail end through our field-glasses. All
the hungry people that were being carried on all those twenty railroad
trains had to be fed, of course, so that none of us were surprised to
read in the Mexican newspapers that the Chihuahua campaign was now
costing Madero's Government nearly 500,000 pesos per day.
The battle at Bachimba must have swelled this budget. During this one
day's fight nearly two million rifle cartridges and more than 10,000
artillery projectiles were fired away by the Federals. Huerta's twenty
pieces of field artillery, neatly posted in a straight line on the open
plain, barely half a mile away from his ammunition railway train, kept
firing at the supposed rebel positions all day long without any
appreciable interruption, and all day long the artillery caissons and
limbers kept trotting to and fro between the batteries and ammunition
cars. Orozco had but 3,000 men with two pieces of so-called artillery,
with gun barrels improvised from railroad axles, so he once more
ordered a general retreat by way of his railroad trains, waiting at a
convenient distance on a bend of the road behind the intervening hills.
As at Rellano, at Conejos, and at other places in the campaign where
the railroad swept in big bends around the hills, no attempt was made
on the Federal side to cut off the rebels' retreat by short-cut
flanking movements of cavalry, of which Huerta had more than he could
conveniently use, or chose to use. The whole ten hours' bombardment and
rifle fire resulted in but fourteen dead rebels; but it won the
campaign for the Government, and earned for Huerta his promotion to
Major-General besides the proud title of "Hero of Bachimba."
President Madero and his anxious Government associates were more than
glad to receive the tidings of this "decisive victory." The only
trouble was that it did not decide anything in particular. Orozco and
his followers, while evacuating the capital of Chihuahua, kept on
wrecking railway property between Chihuahua City and Juarez, and the
campaign kept growing more expensive every day.
It took Huerta from July until August to work his slow way from the
center of Chihuahua to Ciudad Juarez on the northern frontier. Before
he reached this goal, though, the rebels had split into many smaller
detachments, some of which cut his communications in the rear, while
others harried his flanks with guerrilla tactics and threatened to
carry the "war" into the neighboring State of Sonora. So far as the
trouble and expense to the Federal Government was concerned this
guerrilla warfare was far worse than the preceding slow but sure
railway campaign. General Huerta himself, who was threatened with the
loss of his eyesight from cataract, gave up trying to pursue the
fleeing rebel detachments in person, but kept close to his comfortable
headquarters in Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua City. This unsatisfactory
condition of affairs gave promise of enduring indefinitely, until
President Madero in Mexico City, whose Government had to bear the
financial brunt of it all, suddenly lost his patience and recalled
Huerta to the capital, leaving the command in General Rabago's hands.
For reasons that were never quite fathomed by Madero's Government,
Huerta took his time about obeying these orders. Thus, he lingered
first at Ciudad Juarez, then at Chihuahua City, then at Santa Rosalía,
next at Jimenez, and presently at Torreon, where he remained for over a
week, apparently sulking in his tent like Achilles. This gave rise to
grave suspicions, and rumors flew all over Mexico that Huerta was about
to make common cause with Orozco. President Madero himself, at this
time, told a friend of mine that he was afraid Huerta was going to turn
traitor. About the same time, at a diplomatic reception, President
Madero stated openly to Ambassador Wilson that he had reasons to
suspect Huerta's loyalty. At length, however, General Huerta appeared
at the capital, and after a somewhat chilly interview with the
President, obtained a suspension from duty so that he might have his
eyes treated by a specialist.
Thus it happened that Huerta, who was nearly blind then, escaped being
drawn into the sudden military movements that grew out of General Felix
Diaz's unexpected revolt and temporary capture of the port of Vera Cruz
last October.
General Huerta's part in Felix Diaz's second revolution, four months
later, is almost too recent to have been forgotten. He was the senior
ranking general at the capital when the rebellion broke out, and was
summoned to his post of duty by President Madero from the very first.
He accompanied Madero in his celebrated ride from Chapultepec Castle to
the National Palace on the morning of the first day of the famous "Ten
Days," and was put in supreme command of the forces of the Government
after the first hurried council of war. President Madero, totally
lacking in military professional knowledge as he was, confided the
entire conduct of the necessary war measures to General Huerta; but it
soon became apparent that the old General either could not or would not
direct any energetic offensive movement against the rebels. From the
very first the Government committed the fatal blunder of letting the
rebels slowly proceed to the Citadel--a fortified military arsenal--the
retention of which was of paramount importance, without even attempting
to intercept their roundabout march or to frustrate their belated entry
into the poorly guarded Citadel. Later, when it became clear that the
rebels could not be dislodged from this stronghold by street rushes, no
attempt was made to shell them out of their strong position by a
high-angle bombardment of plunging explosive shells.
After it was all over General Huerta explained the ill-success of his
military measures during the ten days' street-fighting by saying that
President Madero was a madman who had spoiled all Huerta's military
plans and measures by utterly impracticable counter-orders. At the
time, though, it was given out officially that Huerta had been placed
in absolute, unrestricted command. When the American Ambassador, toward
the close of the long bombardment, appealed to President Madero to
remove some Federal batteries, the fire from which threatened the
foreign quarter of Mexico City, President Madero replied that he had
nothing to do with the military dispositions, and referred the
Ambassador to General Huerta, who promptly acceded to the request. On
another occasion, later in the bombardment, when Madero insisted that
the Federal artillery should use explosive shells against the Citadel,
General Huerta did not hesitate to take it upon himself to countermand
the President's suggestions to Colonel Navarrete, the Federal chief of
artillery. Afterward General Navarrete admitted in a speech at a
military banquet that his Federal artillery "could have reduced the
Citadel in short order had this really been desired."
Whether General Huerta was really able to win or not is beside the
issue, since the final turn of events plainly revealed that his heart
was not in the fight, and that he was only waiting for a favorable
moment to turn against Madero. Before General Blanquet with his
supposed relief column was allowed to enter the city, General Huerta
had a private conference with Blanquet. This conference sealed Madero's
doom. Later, after Blanquet's forces had been admitted to the Palace,
on Huerta's assurances to the President that Blanquet was loyal to the
Government, it was agreed between the two generals that Blanquet should
make sure of the person of the President, while Huerta would personally
capture the President's brother, Gustavo, with whom he was to dine that
day. The plot was carried out to the letter.
When Huerta put Gustavo Madero under arrest, still sitting at the table
where Huerta had been his guest, Huerta sought to palliate his action
by claiming that Gustavo Madero had tried to poison him by putting
"knock-out" drops into Huerta's after-dinner brandy. At the same time
Huerta claimed that President Madero had tried to have him
assassinated, on the day before, by leading Huerta to a window in the
Palace, which an instant afterward was shattered by a rifle bullet from
outside.
Neither of the two prisoners ever had a chance to defend themselves
against these charges, for Gustavo Madero on the night following his
arrest was shot to death by a squad of soldiers in the garden of the
Citadel, and President Madero met a similar fate a few nights
afterward. General Huerta, who by this time had got himself officially
recognized as President, gave out an official statement from the Palace
pretending that Gustavo Madero had lost his life while attempting to
escape, and that his brother, the President, had been accidentally shot
by some of his own friends who were trying to rescue him from his
guard.
Few people in Mexico were inclined to believe this official version.
Yet the murder of the two Maderos, and of Vice-President Pino Suarez,
as well as the subsequent killing of other prisoners, like Governor
Abraham Gonzalez, of Chihuahua, was condoned by many in Mexico on the
ground that these men, if allowed to remain alive, were bound to make
serious trouble for the new Government. It was generally hoped, at the
same time, even by those who condemned these murders as barbarous, that
General Huerta might still prove himself a wise and able ruler, no
matter how severe.
These fond hopes were changed to gloomy foreboding only a few weeks
after Huerta's assumption of the presidency, when he was seen to
surround himself with notorious wasters of all kinds, and when he was
seen to fall into Madero's old error of extending the "glad hand" to
unrepentant rebels and bandits like Orozco, Cheche Campos, Tuerto
Morales, and Salgado.
Victoriano Huerta, whether he be considered as a general or as a
president, can be expressed in one phrase: He is an Indian.
Huerta himself proudly says that he is a pure-blooded Aztec. His
friends claim for him that he has the virtues of an Indian--courage,
patience, endurance, and dignified reserve. His enemies, on the other
hand, profess to see in him some of the vices of Indian blood.
From what I have seen of General Huerta in the field, in private life,
and as a President, I would say that he combines in himself both the
virtues and the faults of his race. In battle I have seen him expose
himself with a courage worthy of the best Indian traditions; nor have I
ever heard it intimated by any one that he was a coward. One of his
strong points as a commander was that he was a man of few words. On the
other hand, his own soldiers at the front hailed him as a stern and
cruel leader; and some of the things that were done to his prisoners of
war at the front were enough to curdle any one's blood.
It was during a moment of conviviality that General Huerta once
revealed his true sentiments toward the United States and ourselves.
This was during a banquet given in his honor at Mexico City on the eve
of his departure to the front in Chihuahua. On this occasion an
Englishman, who had long been on terms of intimacy with Huerta, asked
the General what he would do if northern Mexico should secede to the
United States and the Americans should take a hand in the fray. This
question aroused General Huerta to the following extemporary speech:
"I am not afraid of the _gringoes_. Why should I be? No good Mexican
need be afraid of the _gringoes_. If it had not been for the treachery
of President Santa Anna, who sold himself to the United States in 1847,
we should have beaten the Yankees then, as we surely shall beat them
the next time. Let them cross the Rio Bravo! We will send them back
with bloody heads.
"We Mexicans need not be afraid of any foreign nation. Did we not beat
the Spaniards? Did we not also beat the French, and the Austrians, and
the Belgians, and all the other foreign adventurers who came with
Maximilian? In the same way we would have beaten the _gringoes_ had we
had a fair chance at them. The Texans, who beat Santa Anna, at San
Jacinto, you must know, were not _gringoes_, but brother Mexicans, of
whom we have reason to be proud.
"To my mind, there are only two real nations in the world, besides our
old Aztec nation. Those nations are England and Japan.
"All the others can not properly be called nations; least of all the
United States, which is a mere hodge-podge of other nations. One of
these days England and Japan and Mexico will get together, and after
that there will be an end to the United States."