The next day I met him at Valiente Adiana's store in the town. We sat

amicably in the back room drinking native _aguardiente_, while

Lieutenant Montoya, my best friend in the entire Constitutionalist army,

told me of the hardships and perils of the campaign. For three weeks

now Maclovio Herrera's brigade had lain at Jimenez under arms, waiting

the emergency call for the advance on Torreon.

"This morning," said Antonio, "the Constitutionalist spies intercepted a

telegram from the Federal commander in Zacatecas City to General Velasco

in Torreon. He said that upon mature judgment he had decided that

Zacatecas was an easier place to attack than to defend. Therefore he

reported that his plan of campaign was this. Upon the approach of the

Constitutionalist forces he intended to evacuate the city and then take

it again."

"Antonio," I said, "I am going a long journey across the desert

to-morrow. I am going to drive to Magistral. I need a _mozo_. I will

pay three dollars a week."

"_'Sta bueno!_" cried Lieutenant Montoya. "Whatever you wish, so that I

can go with my _amigo_!"

"But you are on active service," said I. "How can you leave your

regiment?"

"Oh, that's all right," answered Antonio. "I won't say anything about

it to my colonel. They don't need me. Why, they've got five thousand

other men here."

*CHAPTER IV*

*SYMBOLS OF MEXICO*

In the early dawn, when yet the low gray houses and the dusty trees were

stiff with cold, we laid a bull-whip on the backs of our two mules and

rattled down the uneven streets of Jimenez and out into the open

country. A few soldiers, wrapped to the eyes in their serapes, dozed

beside their lanterns. There was a drunken officer sleeping in the

gutter.

We drove an ancient buggy, whose broken pole was mended with wire. The

harness was made of bits of old iron, rawhide and rope. Antonio and I

sat side by side upon the seat, and at our feet dozed a dark,

serious-minded youth named Primitivo Aguilar. Primitivo had been hired

to open and shut gates, to tie up the harness when it broke, and to keep

watch over wagon and mules at night, because bandits were reported to

infest the roads.

The country became a vast fertile plain, cut up by irrigating ditches

which were overshadowed by long lines of great alamo trees, leafless and

gray as ashes. Like a furnace door, the white-hot sun blazed upon us,

and the far-stretched barren fields reeked a thin mist. A cloud of white

dust moved with us and around us. By the church of the Hacienda San

Pedro we stopped and dickered with an aged peon for a sack of corn and

straw for the mules. Farther along was an exquisite low building of

pink plaster, set back from the road in a grove of green willows.

"That?" said Antonio. "Oh, that is nothing but a flour mill." We had

lunch in the long whitewashed, dirt-floored room of a peon's house at

another great hacienda, whose name I forget, but which I know had once

belonged to Luis Terrazzas and was now the confiscated property of the

Constitutionalist government. And that night we made camp beside an

irrigation ditch miles from any house, in the middle of the bandit

territory.

After a dinner of chopped-up meat and peppers, _tortillas_, beans and

black coffee, Antonio and I gave Primitivo his instructions. He was to

keep watch beside the fire with Antonio's revolver and, if he heard

anything, was to wake us. But on no account was he to go to sleep. If

he did we would kill him. Primitivo said, "_Si, senor_," very gravely,

opened his eyes wide, and gripped the pistol. Antonio and I rolled up

in our blankets by the fire.

I must have gone to sleep at once, because when I was wakened by

Antonio's rising, my watch showed only half an hour later. From the

place where Primitivo had been placed on guard came a series of hearty

snores. The lieutenant walked over to him.

"Primitivo!" he said.

No answer.

"Primitivo, you fool!" Our sentinel stirred in his sleep and turned

over with noises indicative of comfort.

"Primitivo!" shouted Antonio, violently kicking him.

He gave absolutely no response.

Antonio drew back and launched a kick at his back that lifted him

several feet into the air. With a start Primitivo woke. He started up

alertly, waving the revolver.

"_Quien vive?_" cried Primitivo.

The next day took us out of the lowlands. We entered the desert,

winding over a series of rolling plains, sandy and covered with black

mesquite and here and there an occasional cactus. Now we began to see

beside the road those sinister little wooden crosses that the country

people erect on the spot where some man died a violent death. Around

the horizon barren purple mountains hemmed us in. To the right, across

a vast dry valley, a white and green and gray hacienda stood like a

city. An hour later we passed the first of those great fortified square

ranchos that one comes across once a day lost in the folds of this

tremendous country. Night gathered straight above in the cloudless

zenith, while all the skyline still was luminous with clear light, and

then the day snuffed out, and stars burst out in the dome of heaven like

a rocket. Antonio and Primitivo, in that queer harsh Mexican harmony

which sounds like nothing so much as a fiddle with frazzled strings,

sang "_Esperanza_" as we jogged along. It grew cold. For leagues and

leagues around was a blasted land, a country of death. It was hours

since we had passed a house.

Antonio claimed to know of a water-hole somewhere vaguely ahead. But

toward midnight, which was black and without moon, we discovered that

the road upon which we were traveling suddenly petered out in a dense

mesquite thicket. Somewhere we had turned off the _Camino Real_. It

was late and the mules were worn out. There seemed nothing for it but a

"dry camp," for so far as we knew there was no water anywhere near.

Now we had unharnessed the mules and fed them, and were lighting our

fire, when somewhere in the dense thicket of chaparral stealthy

footsteps sounded. They moved a space and then were still. Our little

blaze of greasewood crackled fiercely, lighting up a leaping, glowing

radius of about ten feet. Beyond that all was black. Primitivo made

one backward leap into the shelter of the wagon; Antonio drew his

revolver, and we froze beside the fire. The sound came again.

"Who lives?" said Antonio. There was a little shuffling noise out in

the brush, and then a voice.

"What party are you?" it asked hesitantly.

"Maderistas," answered Antonio. "Pass!"

"It is safe for _pacificos_?" queried the invisible one.

"On my word," I cried. "Come out that we may see you."

At that very moment two vague shapes materialized on the edge of the

firelight glow, almost without a sound--two peons, we saw as soon as

they came close, wrapped tightly in their torn blankets. One was an

old, wrinkled, bent man wearing homemade sandals, his trousers hanging

in rags upon his shrunken legs; the other a very tall, barefooted youth,

with a face so pure and so simple as to almost verge upon idiocy.

Friendly, warm as sunlight, eagerly curious as children, they came

forward, holding out their hands. We shook hands with each of them in

turn, greeting them with elaborate Mexican courtesy.

"Good evening, friend. How are you?"

"Very well, _gracias_. And you?"

"Well, _gracias_. And how are all your people?"

"Well, thanks. And yours?"

"Well, thanks. What have you of new here?"

"Nada. Nothing. And you?"

"Nothing. Sit down."

"Oh, thanks, but I am well standing."

"Sit down. Sit down."

"A thousand thanks. Excuse us for a moment."

They smiled and faded away once more into the thicket. In a minute they

reappeared, with great armfuls of dried mesquite branches for our fire.

"We are _rancheros_," said the elder, bowing. "We keep a few goats, and

our houses are at your orders, and our corrals for your mules, and our

small stock of corn. Our _ranchitos_ are very near here in the

mesquite. We are very poor men, but we hope you will do us the honor of

accepting our hospitality." It was an occasion for tact.

"A thousand times many thanks," said Antonio politely, "but we are,

unfortunately, in great haste and must leave early. We would not like

to disturb your household at that hour."

They protested that their families and their houses were entirely ours,

to be used as we saw fit with the greatest delight on their part. I do

not remember how we finally managed to evade the invitation without

wounding them, but I do recall that it took half an hour of courteous

talking. For we knew, in the first place, that we would be unable to

leave for hours in the morning if we accepted, because Mexican manners

are that haste to leave a house signifies dissatisfaction with the

entertainment; and then, too, one could not pay for one's lodging, but

would have to bestow a handsome present upon the hosts--which we could

none of us afford.

At first they politely refused our invitation to dine, but after much

urging we finally persuaded them to accept a few _tortillas_ and

_chile_. It was ludicrous and pitiful to see how wretchedly hungry they

were, and how they attempted to conceal it from us.

After dinner, when they had brought us a bucket of water out of sheer

kindly thoughtfulness, they stood for a while by our fire, smoking our

cigarettes and holding out their hands to the blaze. I remember how

their serapes hung from their shoulders, open in front so the grateful

warmth could reach their thin bodies--and how gnarled and ancient were

the old man's outstretched hands, and how the ruddy light glowed upon

the other's throat, and kindled fires in his big eyes. Around them

stretched the desert, held off only by our fire, ready to spring in upon

us when it should die. Above the great stars would not dim. Coyotes

wailed somewhere out beyond the firelight like demons in pain. I

suddenly conceived these two human beings as symbols of

Mexico--courteous, loving, patient, poor, so long slaves, so full of

dreams, so soon to be free.

"When we saw your wagon coming here," said the old man, smiling, "our

hearts sank within us. We thought you were soldiers, come, perhaps, to

take away our last few goats. So many soldiers have come in the last

few years--so many. It is mostly the Federals--the Maderistas do not

come unless they are hungry themselves. Poor Maderistas!"

"Ay," said the young man, "my brother that I loved very much died in the

eleven days' fighting around Torreon. Thousands have died in Mexico,

and still more thousands shall fall. Three years--it is long for war in

a land. Too long!" The old man murmured, "_Valgame Dios!_" and shook

his head. "But, there shall come a day----"

"It is said," remarked the old man quaveringly, "that the United States

of the North covets our country--that Gringo soldiers will come and take

away my goats in the end...."

"That is a lie," exclaimed the other, animated. "It is the rich

Americanos who want to rob us, just as the rich Mexicans want to rob us.

It is the rich all over the world who want to rob the poor."

The old man shivered and drew his wasted body nearer to the fire. "I

have often wondered," said he mildly, "why the rich, having so much,

want so much. The poor, who have nothing, want so very little. Just a

few goats...."

His _compadre_ lifted his chin like a noble, smiling gently. "I have

never been out of this little country here--not even to Jimenez," he

said. "But they tell me that there are many rich lands to the north and

south and east. But this is my land and I love it. For the years of me,

and my father and my grandfather, the rich men have gathered the corn

and held it in their clenched fists before our mouths. And only blood

will make them open their hands to their brothers."

The fire died down. At his post slept the alert Primitivo. Antonio

stared into the embers, a faint glorified smile upon his mouth, his eyes

shining like stars.

"_Adio!_" he said suddenly, as one who sees a vision. "When we get into

Mexico City what a _baile_ shall be held! How drunk I shall get!..."

*PART FOUR*

*A PEOPLE IN ARMS*

*CHAPTER I*

*"ON TO TORREON!"*

At Yermo there is nothing but leagues and leagues of sandy desert,

sparsely covered with scrubby mesquite and dwarf cactus, stretching away

on the west to jagged, tawny mountains, and on the east to a quivering

skyline of plain. A battered water-tank, with too little dirty alkali

water, a demolished railway station shot to pieces by Orozco's cannon

two years before, and a switch track compose the town. There is no

water to speak of for forty miles. There is no grass for animals. For

three months in the spring bitter, parching winds drive the yellow dust

across it.

Along the single track in the middle of the desert lay ten enormous

trains, pillars of fire by night and of black smoke by day, stretching

back northward farther than the eye could reach. Around them, in the

chaparral, camped nine thousand men without shelter, each man's horse

tied to the mesquite beside him, where hung his one serape and red

strips of drying meat. From fifty cars horses and mules were being

unloaded. Covered with sweat and dust, a ragged trooper plunged into a

cattle-car among the flying hoofs, swung himself upon a horse's back,

and jabbed his spurs deep in, with a yell. Then came a terrific

drumming of frightened animals, and suddenly a horse shot violently from

the open door, usually backward, and the car belched flying masses of

horses and mules. Picking themselves up, they fled in terror, snorting

through wide nostrils at the smell of the open. Then the wide, watchful

circle of troopers turned _vaqueros_ lifted the great coils of their

lassoes through the choking dust, and the running animals swirled round

and round upon one another in a panic. Officers, orderlies, generals

with their staffs, soldiers with halters, hunting for their mounts,

galloped and ran past in inextricable confusion. Bucking mules were

being harnessed to the caissons. Troopers who had arrived on the last

trains wandered about looking for their brigades. Way ahead some men

were shooting at a rabbit. From the tops of the box-cars and the

flat-cars, where they were camped by hundreds, the _soldaderas_ and

their half-naked swarms of children looked down, screaming shrill advice

and asking everybody in general if they had happened to see Juan

Moneros, or Jesus Hernandez, or whatever the name of their man happened

to be.... One man trailing a rifle wandered along shouting that he had

had nothing to eat for two days and he couldn't find his woman who made

his _tortillas_ for him, and he opined that she had deserted him to go

with some ---- of another brigade.... The women on the roofs of the

cars said, "_Valgame Dios!_" and shrugged their shoulders; then they

dropped him down some three-days-old _tortillas_, and asked him, for the

love he bore Our Lady of Guadelupe, to lend them a cigarette. A

clamorous, dirty throng stormed the engine of our train, screaming for

water. When the engineer stood them off with a revolver, telling them

there was plenty of water in the water-train, they broke away and

aimlessly scattered, while a fresh throng took their places. Around the

twelve immense tank-cars, a fighting mass of men and animals struggled

for a place at the little faucets ceaselessly pouring. Above the place

a mighty cloud of dust, seven miles long and a mile wide, towered up

into the still, hot air, and, with the black smoke of the engines,

struck wonder and terror into the Federal outposts fifty miles away on

the mountains back of Mapimi.

When Villa left Chihuahua for Torreon, he closed the telegraph wires to

the north, stopped train service to Juarez, and forbade on pain of death

that anyone should carry or send news of his departure to the United

States. His object was to take the Federals by surprise, and it worked

beautifully. No one, not even Villa's staff, knew when he would leave

Chihuahua; the army had delayed there so long that we all believed it

would delay another two weeks. And then Saturday morning we woke to

find the telegraph and railway cut, and three huge trains, carrying the

Brigada Gonzalez-Ortega, already gone. The Zaragosa left the next day,

and Villa's own troops the following morning. Moving with the swiftness

that always characterizes him, Villa had his entire army concentrated at

Yermo the day afterward, without the Federals knowing that he had left

Chihuahua.

There was a mob around the portable field telegraph that had been rigged

up in the ruined station. Inside, the instrument was clicking.

Soldiers and officers indiscriminately choked up the windows and the

door, and every once in a while the operator would shout something in

Spanish and a perfect roar of laughter would go up. It seemed that the

telegraph had accidentally tapped a wire that had not been destroyed by

the Federals--a wire that connected with the Federal military wire from

Mapimi to Torreon.

"Listen!" cried the operator. "Colonel Argumedo in command of the

_cabecillos colorados_ in Mapimi is telegraphing to General Velasco in

Torreon. He says that he sees smoke and a big dust cloud to the north,

and thinks that some rebel troops are moving south from Escalon!"

Night came, with a cloudy sky and a rising wind that began to lift the

dust. Along the miles and miles of trains, the fires of the

_soldaderas_ flared from the tops of the freight-cars. Out into the

desert so far that finally they were mere pin-points of flame stretched

the innumerable camp-fires of the army, half obscured by the thick,

billowing dust. The storm completely concealed us from Federal

watchers. "Even God," remarked Major Leyva, "even God is on the side of

Francisco Villa!" We sat at dinner in our converted box-car, with

young, great-limbed, expressionless General Maximo Garcia and his

brother, the even huger red-faced Benito Garcia, and little Major Manuel

Acosta, with the beautiful manners of his race. Garcia had long been

holding the advance at Escalon. He and his brothers--one of whom, Jose

Garcia, the idol of the army, had been killed in battle--but a short

four years ago were wealthy _hacendados_, owners of immense tracts of

land. They had come out with Madero.... I remember that he brought us

a jug of whisky, and refused to discuss the Revolution, declaring that

he was fighting for better whisky! As I write this comes a report that

he is dead from a bullet wound received in the battle of Sacramento....

Out in the dust storm, on a flat-car immediately ahead of ours, some

soldiers lay around their fire with their heads in their women's laps,

singing "The Cockroach," which tells in hundreds of satirical verses

what the Constitutionalists would do when they captured Juarez and

Chihuahua from Mercado and Orozco.

Above the wind one was aware of the immense sullen murmur of the host,

and occasionally some sentry challenged in a falsetto howl: "_Quien

vive?_" And the answer: "_Chiapas!_" "_Que gente?_" "_Chao!_" ...

Through the night sounded the eerie whistle of the ten locomotives at

intervals as they signaled back and forth to one another.

*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 _companeros_. 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 Senor Calzado, General Manager of the Railroad, in what

order the trains should proceed south. He indicated to Senor Uro, the

Quartermaster-general, what supplies should be distributed from the

troop trains. To Senor 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....

*CHAPTER III*

*FIRST BLOOD*

The water train pulled out first. I rode on the cow-catcher of the

engine, which was already occupied by the permanent home of two women

and five children. They had built a little fire of mesquite twigs on

the narrow iron platform, and were baking _tortillas_ there; over their

heads, against the windy roar of the boiler, fluttered a little line of

wash....

It was a brilliant day, hot sunshine alternating with big white clouds.

In two thick columns, one on each side of the train, the army was

already moving south. As far as the eye could reach, a mighty double

cloud of dust floated over them; and little straggling groups of mounted

men jogged along, with every now and then a big Mexican flag. Between

slowly moved the trains; the pillars of black smoke from their engines,

at regular intervals, growing smaller, until over the northern horizon

only a dirty mist appeared.

I went down into the caboose to get a drink of water, and there I found

the conductor of the train lying in his bunk reading the Bible. He was

so interested and amused that he didn't notice me for a minute. When he

did he cried delightedly: "_Oiga_, I have found a great story about a

chap called Samson who was _muy hombre_--a good deal of a man---and his

woman. She was a Spaniard, I guess, from the mean trick she played on

him. He started out being a good Revolutionist, a Maderista, and she

made him a _pelon_!"

_Pelon_ means literally "cropped head," and is the slang term for a

Federal soldier, because the Federal army is largely recruited from the

prisons.

Our advance guard, with a telegraph field operator, had gone on to

Conejos the night before, and they met the train in great excitement.

The first blood of the campaign had been spilt; a few _colorados_

scouting northward from Bermejillo had been surprised and killed just

behind the shoulder of the big mountain which lies to the east. The

telegrapher also had news. He had again tapped the Federal wire, and

sent to the Federal commander in Torreon, signing the dead Captain's

name and asking for orders, since a large force of rebels seemed to be

approaching from the north. General Velasco replied that the Captain

should hold Conejos and throw out outposts to the north, to try and

discover how large the force was. At the same time the telegrapher had

heard a message from Argumedo, in command at Mapimi, saying that the

entire north of Mexico was coming down on Torreon, together with the

Gringo army!

Conejos was just like Yermo, except that there was no water tank. A

thousand men, with white-bearded old General Rosalio Hernandez riding

ahead, went out almost at once, and the repair train followed them a few

miles to a place where the Federals had burned two railroad bridges a

few months before. Out beyond the last little bivouac of the immense

army spread around us, the desert slept silently in the heat waves.

There was no wind. The men gathered with their women on the flat-cars,

guitars came out, and all night hundreds of singing voices came from the

trains.

The next morning I went to see Villa in his car. This was a red caboose

with chintz curtains on the windows, the famous little caboose which

Villa has used in all his journeys since the fall of Juarez. It was

divided by partitions into two rooms--the kitchen and the General's

bedroom. This tiny room, ten by twenty feet, was the heart of the

Constitutionalist army. There were held all the councils of war, and

there was scarcely room enough for the fifteen Generals who met there.

In these councils the vital immediate questions of the campaign were

discussed, the Generals decided what was to be done,--and then Villa

gave his orders to suit himself. It was painted a dirty gray. On the

walls were tacked photographs of showy ladies in theatrical poses, a

large picture of Carranza, one of Fierro, and a picture of Villa

himself. Two double-width wooden bunks folded up against the wall, in

one of which Villa and General Angeles slept, and in the other Jose

Rodriguez and Doctor Raschbaum, Villa's personal physician. That was

all....

"_Que desea, amigo_? What do you want?" said Villa, sitting on the end

of the bunk in blue underclothes. The troopers who lounged around the

place lazily made way for me.

"I want a horse, _mi General_."

"_Ca-r-r-r-ai-i_, our friend here wants a horse!" grinned Villa

sarcastically amid a burst of laughter from the others. "Why, you

correspondents will be wanting an automobile next! _Oiga_, senor

reporter, do you know that about a thousand men in my army have no

horses? Here's the train. What do you want a horse for?"

"So I can ride with the advance."

"No," he smiled. "There are too many _ballasos_--too many bullets

flying in the advance...."

He was hurrying into his clothes as he talked, and gulping coffee from

the side of a dirty tin coffee-pot. Somebody handed him his gold-handled

sword.

"No!" he said contemptuously. "This is to be a fight, not a parade.

Give me my rifle!"

He stood at the door of his caboose for a moment, thoughtfully looking

at the long lines of mounted men, picturesque in their crossed

cartridge-belts and varied equipment. Then he gave a few quick orders

and mounted his big stallion.

"_Vamonos!_" cried Villa. The bugles brayed and a subdued silver

clicking ringing sounded as the companies wheeled and trotted southward

in the dust....

And so the army disappeared. During the day we thought we heard

cannonading from the southwest, where Urbina was reported to be coming

down from the mountains to attack Mapimi. And late in the afternoon

news came of the capture of Bermejillo, and a courier from Benavides

said that he had taken Tlahualilo.

We were in a fever of impatience to be off. About sundown Senor Calzado

remarked that the repair train would leave in an hour, so I grabbed a

blanket and walked a mile up the line of trains to it.

*CHAPTER IV*

*ON THE CANNON-CAR*

The first car of the repair train was a steel-encased flat-car, upon

which was mounted the famous Constitutionalist cannon "El Nino," with an

open caisson full of shells behind it. Behind that was an armored car

full of soldiers, then a car of steel rails, and four loaded with

railroad ties. The engine came next, the engineer and fireman hung with

cartridge-belts, their rifles handy. Then followed two or three

box-cars full of soldiers and their women. It was a dangerous business.

A large force of Federals were known to be in Mapimi, and the country

swarmed with their outposts. Our army was already far ahead, except for

five hundred men who guarded the trains at Conejos. If the enemy could

capture or wreck the repair train the army would be cut off without

water, food or ammunition. In the darkness we moved out. I sat upon

the breech of "El Nino," chatting with Captain Diaz, the commander of

the gun, as he oiled the breech lock of his beloved cannon and curled

his vertical mustachios. In the armored recess behind the gun, where

the Captain slept, I heard a curious, subdued rustling noise.

"What's that?"

"Eh?" cried he nervously. "Oh, nothing, nothing!"

Just then there emerged a young Indian girl with a bottle in her hand.

She couldn't have been more than seventeen, very lovely. The Captain

shot a glance at me, and suddenly whirled around.

"What are you doing here?" he cried furiously to her. "Why are you

coming out here?"

"I thought you said you wanted a drink," she began.

I perceived that I was one too many, and excused myself. They hardly

noticed me. But as I was climbing over the back of the car I couldn't

help stopping and listening. They had gone back to the recess, and she

was weeping.

"Didn't I tell you," stormed the Captain, "not to show yourself when

there are strangers here? I will not have every man in Mexico looking

at you...."

I stood on the roof of the rocking steel car as we nosed slowly along.

Lying on their bellies on the extreme front platform, two men with

lanterns examined each foot of the track for wires that might mean mines

planted under us. Beneath my feet the soldiers and their women were

having dinner around fires built on the floor. Smoke and laughter

poured out of the loopholes.... There were other fires aft,

brown-faced, ragged people squatting at them, on the car-tops. Overhead

the sky blazed stars, without a cloud. It was cold. After an hour of

riding we came to a piece of broken track. The train stopped with a

jar, the engine whistled, and a score of torches and lanterns jerked

past. Men came running. The flares clustered bobbing together as the

foremen examined the damage. A fire sprang up in the brush, and then

another. Soldiers of the train guard straggled by, dragging their

rifles, and formed impenetrable walls around the fires. Iron tools

clanged, and the "Wai-hoy!" of men shoving rails off the flat-car. A

Chinese dragon of workmen passed with a rail on their shoulders, then

others with ties. Four hundred men swarmed upon the broken spot,

working with extraordinary energy and good humor, until the shouts of

gangs setting rails and ties, and the rattle of sledges on spikes, made

a continuous roar. It was an old destruction, probably a year old, made

when these same Constitutionalists were retreating north in the face of

Mercado's Federal army, and we had it all fixed in an hour. Then on

again. Sometimes it was a bridge burned out, sometimes a hundred yards

of track twisted into grape vines by a chain and a backing engine. We

advanced slowly. At one big bridge that it would take two hours to

prepare, I built by myself a little fire in order to get warm. Calzado

came past, and hailed me. "We've got a hand-car up ahead," he said,

"and we're going along down and see the dead men. Want to come?"

"What dead men?"

"Why, this morning an outpost of eighty _rurales_ was sent scouting

north from Bermejillo. We heard about it over the wire and informed

Benavides on the left. He sent a troop to take them in the rear, and

drove them north in a running fight for fifteen miles until they smashed

up against our main body and not one got out alive. They're scattered

along the whole way just where they fell."

In a moment we were speeding south on the hand-car. At our right hand

and our left rode two silent, shadowy figures on horseback--cavalry

guards, with rifles ready under their arms. Soon the flares and fires

of the train were left behind, and we were enveloped and smothered in

the vast silence of the desert.

"Yes," said Calzado, "the _rurales_ are brave. They are _muy hombres_.

_Rurales_ are the best fighters Diaz and Huerta ever had. They never

desert to the Revolution. They always remain loyal to the established

government. Because they are police."

It was bitter cold. None of us talked much.

"We go ahead of the train at night," said the soldier at my left, "so

that if there are any dynamite bombs underneath----"

"We could discover them and dig them out and put water in them,

_carramba_!" said another sarcastically. The rest laughed. I began to

think of that, and it made me shiver. The dead silence of the desert

seemed an expectant hush. One couldn't see ten feet from the track.

"_Oiga_!" shouted one of the horsemen. "It was just here that one lay."

The brakes ground and we tumbled off and down the steep embankment, our

lanterns jerking ahead. Something lay huddled around the foot of a

telegraph pole--something infinitely small and shabby, like a pile of

old clothes. The _rurale_ was upon his back, twisted sideways from his

hips. He had been stripped of everything of value by the thrifty

rebels--shoes, hat, underclothing. They had left him his ragged jacket

with the tarnished silver braid, because there were seven bullet holes

in it; and his trousers, soaked with blood. He had evidently been much

bigger when alive--the dead shrink so. A wild red beard made the pallor

of his face grotesque, until you noticed that under it and the dirt, and

the long lines of sweat of his terrible fight and hard riding, his mouth

was gently and serenely open as if he slept. His brains had been blown

out.

"_Corrai!_" said one guard. "There was a shot for the dirty goat!

Right through the head!"

The others laughed. "Why, you don't think they shot him there in the

fight, do you, _pendeco_?" cried his companion. "No, they _always_ go

around and make sure afterward----"

"Hurry up! I've found the other," shouted a voice off in the darkness.

We could reconstruct this man's last struggle. He had dropped off his

horse, wounded--for there was blood on the ground--into a little dry

arroyo. We could even see where his horse had stood while he pumped

shells into his Mauser with feverish hands, and blazed away, first to

the rear, where the pursuers came running with Indian yells, and then at

the hundreds and hundreds of bloodthirsty horsemen pouring down from the

north, with the Demon Pancho Villa at their head. He must have fought a

long time, perhaps until they ringed him round with living flame--for we

found hundreds of empty cartridges. And then, when the last shot was

spent, he made a dash eastward, hit at every step; hid for a moment

under the little railroad bridge, and ran out upon the open desert,

where he fell. There were twenty bullet holes in him. They had

stripped him of all save his underclothes. He lay sprawled in an

attitude of desperate action, muscles tense, one fist clenched and

spread across the dust as if he were dealing a blow; the fiercest

exultant grin on his face. Strong, savage, until one looked closer and

saw the subtle touch of weakness that death stamps on life--the delicate

expression of idiocy over it all. They had shot him through the head

three times--how exasperated they must have been!

Crawling south through the cold night once more.... A few miles and then

a bridge dynamited, or a strip of track wrecked. The stop, the dancing

torches, the great bonfires leaping up from the desert, and the four

hundred wild men pouring furiously out and falling upon their work....

Villa had given orders to hurry....

About two o'clock in the morning I came upon two _soldaderas_ squatting

around a fire, and asked them if they could give me _tortillas_ and

coffee. One was an old, gray-haired Indian woman with a perpetual grin,

the other a slight girl not more than twenty years old, who was nursing

a four-months baby at her breast. They were perched at the extreme tip

of a flat-car, their fire built upon a pile of sand, as the train jolted

and swayed along. Around them, backed against them, feet sticking out

between them, was a great, inconglomerate mass of sleeping, snoring

humans. The rest of the train was by this time dark; this was the only

patch of light and warmth in the night. As I munched my _tortilla_ and

the old woman lifted a burning coal in her fingers to light her

corn-husk cigarette, wondering where her Pablo's brigade was this night;

and the girl nursed her child, crooning to it, her blue-enameled

ear-rings twinkling,--we talked.

"Ah! it is a life for us _viejas_," said the girl. "_Adio_, but we

follow our men out in the campaign, and then do not know from hour to

hour whether they live or die. I remember well when Filadelfo called to

me one morning in the little morning before it was light--we lived in

Pachuca--and said: 'Come! we are going out to fight because the good

Pancho Madero has been murdered this day!' We had only been loving each

other eight months, too, and the first baby was not born.... We had all

believed that peace was in Mexico for good. Filadelfo saddled the burro,

and we rode out through the streets just as light was coming, and into

the fields where the farmers were not yet at work. And I said: 'Why

must I come?' And he answered: 'Shall I starve, then? Who shall make

my _tortillas_ for me but my woman?' It took us three months to get

north, and I was sick and the baby was born in a desert just like this

place, and died there because we could not get water. That was when

Villa was going north after he had taken Torreon."

The old woman broke in: "Yes, and all that is true. When we go so far

and suffer so much for our men, we are cruelly treated by the stupid

animals of Generals. I am from San Luis Potosi, and my man was in the

artillery of the Federacion when Mercado came north. All the way to

Chihuahua we traveled, the old fool of a Mercado grumbling about

transporting the _viejas_. And then he ordered his army to go north and

attack Villa in Juarez, and he forbade the women to go. Is that the way

you are going to do, _desgraciado_? I said to myself. And when he

evacuated Chihuahua and ran away with my man to Ojinaga, I just stayed

right in Chihuahua and got a man in the Maderista army when it came in.

A nice handsome young fellow, too,--much better than Juan. I'm not a

woman to stand being put upon."

"How much are the _tortillas_ and coffee?" I asked.

They looked at each other, startled. Evidently they had thought me one

of the penniless soldiers crowded on the train.

"What you would like," said the young woman faintly. I gave them a

peso.

The old woman exploded in a torrent of prayer. "God, his sainted Mother,

the Blessed Nino and Our Lady of Guadelupe have sent this stranger to us

tonight! Here we had not a centavo to buy coffee and flour with...."

I suddenly noticed that the light of our fire had paled, and looked up

in amazement to find it was dawn. Just then a man came running along the

train from up front, shouting something unintelligible, while laughter

and shouts burst out in his wake. The sleepers raised their curious

heads and wanted to know what was the matter. In a moment our inanimate

car was alive. The man passed, still yelling something about "_padre_,"

his face exultant with some tremendous joke.

"What is it?" I asked.

"Oh!" cried the old woman. "His woman on the car ahead has just had a

baby!"

Just in front of us lay Bermejillo, its pink and blue and white

plastered adobe houses as delicate and ethereal as a village of

porcelain. To the east, across a still, dustless desert, a little file

of sharp-cut horsemen, with a red-white-and-green flag over them, were

riding into town....

*CHAPTER V*

*AT THE GATES OF GOMEZ*

We had taken Bermejillo the afternoon before,--the army breaking into a

furious gallop five kilometers north of the town and pouring through it

at top speed, driving the unprepared garrison in a rout southward,--a

running fight that lasted five miles, as far as the Hacienda of Santa

Clara,--and killing a hundred and six _colorados_. Within a few hours

afterward Urbina came in sight above Mapimi, and the eight hundred

_colorados_ there, informed of the astonishing news that the entire

Constitutionalist army was flanking them on their right, evacuated the

place, and fled hotly to Torreon. All over the country the astounded

Federals were falling back in a panic upon the city.

Late in the afternoon a dumpy little train came down the narrow-gauge

track from the direction of Mapimi, and from it proceeded the loud

strains of a string orchestra of ten pieces playing "_Recuerdos_ of

Durango,"--to which I had so often _baile_'d with the Tropa. The roofs,

doors and windows were packed with Mexicans, singing and beating time

with their heels, as they fired their rifles in a sort of salute upon

entering the town. At the station this curious equipage drew up, and

from it proceeded--who but Patricio, General Urbina's fighting

stage-driver at whose side I had so often ridden and danced! He threw

his arms around me, yelling: "Juanito! Here is Juanito, _mi General_!"

In a minute we were asking and answering each other a million questions.

Did I have the photographs I took of him? Was I going to the battle of

Torreon? Did he know where Don Petronilo was? And Pablo Seanes? And

Raphaelito? And right in the midst of it somebody shouted "Viva

Urbina!" and the old General himself stood at the top of the steps,--the

lion-hearted hero of Durango. He was lame, and leaned upon two

soldiers. He held a rifle in his hand,--an old, discarded Springfield,

with the sights filed down,--and wore a double cartridge-belt around his

waist. For a moment he remained there, absolutely expressionless, his

small, hard eyes boring into me. I thought he did not recognize me,

when all at once his harsh, sudden voice shot out: "That's not the

camera you had! Where's the other one?"

I was about to reply when he interrupted: "I know. You left it behind

you in La Cadena. Did you run very fast?"

"Yes, _mi General_."

"And you've come down to Torreon to run again?"

"When I began to run from La Cadena," I remarked, nettled, "Don

Petronilo and the troops were already a mile away."

He didn't answer, but came haltingly down the steps of the car, while a

roar of laughter went up from the soldiers. Coming up to me he put a

hand over my shoulder and gave me a little tap on the back. "I'm glad

to see you, _companero_," he said....

Across the desert the wounded had begun to straggle in from the battle

of Tlahualilo to the hospital train, which lay far up near the front of

the line of trains. On the flat barren plain, as far as I could see,

there were only three living things in sight: a limping, hatless man,

with his head tied up in a bloody cloth; another staggering beside his

staggering horse; and a mule mounted by two bandaged figures far behind

them. And in the still hot night we could hear from our car groans and

screams....

Late Sunday morning we were again on "El Nino" at the head of the repair

train, moving slowly down the track abreast of the army. "El

Chavalito," another cannon mounted on a flat-car, was coupled behind,

then came two armored cars, and the work-cars. This time there were no

women. The army wore a different air, winding along in two immense

serpents each side of us--there was little laughter or shouting. We

were close now, only eighteen miles from Gomez Palacio, and no one knew

what the Federals planned to do. It seemed incredible that they would

let us get so close without making one stand. Immediately south of

Bermejillo we entered a new land. To the desert succeeded fields

bordered with irrigation ditches, along which grew immense green alamos,

towering pillars of freshness after the baked desolation we had just

passed through. Here were cotton-fields, the white tufts unpicked and

rotting on their stalks; corn-fields with sparse green blades just

showing. Along the big ditches flowed swift, deep water in the shade.

Birds sang, and the barren western mountains marched steadily nearer as

we went south. It was summer--hot, moist summer, such as we have at

home. A deserted cotton-gin lay on our left, hundreds of white bales

tumbled in the sun, and dazzling heaps of cotton-seed left just as the

workmen had piled it months before....

At Santa Clara the massed columns of the army halted and began to defile

to left and right, thin lines of troops jogging out under the checkered

sun and shade of the great trees, until six thousand men were spread in

one long single front, to the right over fields and through ditches,

beyond the last cultivated field, across the desert to the very base of

the mountains; to the left over the roll of the flat world. The bugles

blared faintly and near, and the army moved forward in a mighty line

across the whole country. Above them lifted a five-mile-wide golden

dust-glory. Flags flapped. In the center, level with them, came the

cannon-car, and beside that Villa rode with his staff. At the little

villages along the way the big-hatted, white-bloused _pacificos_ stood

in silent wonder, watching this strange host pass. An old man drove his

goats homeward. The foaming wave of troopers broke upon him, yelling

with pure mischief, and all the goats ran in different directions. A

mile of army shouted with laughter,--the dust rolled up from their

thousand hoofs, and they passed. At the village of Brittingham the

great line halted, while Villa and his staff galloped up to the peons

watching from their little mound.

"_Oyez!_" said Villa. "Have any troops passed through here lately?"

"_Si_, senor!" answered several men at once. "Some of Don Carlo

Argumedo's _gente_ went by yesterday pretty fast."

"Hum," Villa meditated. "Have you seen that bandit Pancho Villa around

here?"

"No, senor!" they chorused.

"Well, he's the fellow I'm looking for. If I catch that _diablo_ it

will go hard with him!"

"We wish you all success!" cried the _pacificos_, politely.

"You never saw him, did you?"

"No, God forbid!" they said fervently.

"Well!" grinned Villa. "In the future when people ask if you know him

you will have to admit the shameful fact! I am Pancho Villa!" And with

that he spurred away, and all the army followed....

*CHAPTER VI*

*THE COMPANEROS REAPPEAR*

Such had been the surprise of the Federals, and they had fled in such a

hurry, that for many miles the railroad was intact. But toward

afternoon we began to find little bridges burned and still smoking, and

telegraph poles cut down with an axe--badly and hastily done bits of

destruction that were easily repaired. But the army had got far ahead,

and by nightfall, about eight miles from Gomez Palacio, we reached the

place where eight solid miles of torn-up track began. There was no food

on our train. We had only a blanket apiece; and it was cold. In the

flare of torches and fires, the repair gang fell upon their work.

Shouts and hammering steel, and the thud of falling ties.... It was a

black night, with a few dim stars. We had settled down around one fire,

talking and drowsing, when suddenly a new sound smote the air--a sound

heavier than hammers, and deeper than the wind. It shocked--and was

still. Then came a steady roll, as of distant drums, and then shock!

shock! The hammers fell, voices were silent, we were frozen. Somewhere

ahead, out of sight, in the darkness--so still it was that the air

carried every sound--Villa and the army had flung themselves upon Gomez

Palacio, and the battle had begun. It deepened steadily and slowly,

until the booffs of cannon fell echoing upon each other, and the rifle

fire rippled like steel rain.

"_Andale!_" screamed a hoarse voice from the roof of the cannon-car.

"What are you doing? Get at that track! Pancho Villa is waiting for

the trains!"

And, with a yell, four hundred raging maniacs flung themselves upon the

break....

I remember how we besought the Colonel in command to let us go to the

front. He would not. Orders were strict that no one should leave the

trains. We pled with him, offered him money, almost got on our knees to

him. Finally he relented a little.

"At three o'clock," he said, "I'll give you the sign and countersign and

let you go."

We curled miserably about a little fire of our own, trying to sleep,

trying at least to get warm. Around us and ahead the flares and the men

danced along the ruined track; and every hour or so the train would

creep forward a hundred feet and stop again. It was not hard to

repair--the rails were intact. A wrecker had been hitched to the

right-hand rail and the ties twisted, splintered, torn from their bed.

Always the monotonous and disturbing furious sound of battle filtered

out of the blackness ahead. It was so tiresome, so much the _same_,

that sound; and yet I could not sleep....

About midnight one of our outposts galloped from the rear of the trains

to report that a large body of horsemen had been challenged coming from

the north, who said they were Urbina's _gente_ from Mapimi. The Colonel

didn't know of any body of troops that were to pass at that time of

night. In a minute everything was a fury of preparation. Twenty-five

armed and mounted men galloped like mad to the rear, with orders to stop

the newcomers for fifteen minutes,--if they were Constitutionalists, by

order of the Colonel; if not, by holding them off as long as possible.

The workmen were hurried back to the train and given their rifles. The

fires were put out, the flares,--all but ten,--extinguished. Our guard

of two hundred slipped silently into the thick brush, loading their

rifles as they went. On either side of the track the Colonel and five

of his men took up their posts, unarmed, with torches held high over

their heads. And then, out of the thick blackness, the head of the

column appeared. It was made up of different men from the well-clothed,

well-equipped, well-fed soldiers of Villa's army. These were ragged,

gaunt people, wrapped in faded, tattered serapes, without shoes on their

feet, crowned with the heavy, picturesque sombreros of the back-country.

Lasso ropes hung coiled at their saddles. Their mounts were the lean,

hard, half-savage ponies of the Durango mountains. They rode sullenly,

contemptuous of us. They neither knew the countersign nor cared to know

it. And as they rode, whole files sang the monotonous, extemporaneous

ballads that the peons compose and sing to themselves as they guard the

cattle at night on the great upland plains of the north.

And, suddenly, as I stood at the head of the line of flares, a passing

horse was jerked to his haunches, and a voice I knew cried: "Hey!

Meester!" The enfolding serape was cast high in the air, the man fell

from his horse, and in a moment I was clasped in the arms of Isidro

Amaya. Behind him burst forth a chorus of shouts: "_Que tal!_ Meester!

O Juanito, how glad we are to see you! Where have you been? They said

you were killed in La Cadena! Did you run fast from the _colorados_?

_Mucha susto_, eh?" They threw themselves to the ground, clustering

around, fifty men reaching at once to pat me on the back; all my dearest

friends in Mexico--the _companeros_ of La Tropa and the Cadena!

The long file of men, blocked in the darkness, raised a chorus of

shouts: "Move on! _Vamonos_! What's the matter? Hurry up! We can't

stay here all night!" And the others yelled back: "Here's meester!

Here's the Gringo we were telling you about who danced the _jota_ in La

Zarca! Who was in La Cadena!" And then the others crowded forward too.

There were twelve hundred of them. Silently, sullenly, eagerly,

sniffing the battle ahead, they defiled between the double line of

high-held torches. And every tenth man I had known before. As they

passed the Colonel shouted to them: "What is the countersign? Turn your

hats up in front! Do you know the countersign?" Hoarsely,

exasperatedly, he bawled at them. Serenely and insolently they rode by,

without paying the least attention to him. "To hell with the

countersign!" they hooted, laughing at him. "We don't need any

countersign! They'll know well enough which side we're on when we begin

to fight!"

For hours, it seemed, they jogged past, fading into the darkness, their

horses with nervous heads turned to catch the sound of the guns, the men

with glowing eyes fixed on the darkness ahead--rode into battle with

their ancient Springfield rifles that had seen service for three years,

with their meager ten rounds of ammunition. And when they had all gone

the battle seemed to brighten and quicken with new life....

*CHAPTER VII*

*THE BLOODY DAWN*

The steady noise of battle filled all the night. Ahead torches danced,

rails clanged, sledges drummed on the spikes, the men of the repair gang

shouted in the frenzy of their toil. It was after twelve. Since the

trains had reached the beginning of the torn track we had made half a

mile. Now and then a straggler from the main body came down the line of

trains, shuffled into the light with his heavy Mauser awry across his

shoulders, and faded into the darkness toward the debauch of sound in

the direction of Gomez Palacio. The soldiers of our guard, squatting

about their little fires in the fields, relaxed their tense expectancy;

three of them were singing a little marching song, which began:

_I don't want to be a Porfirista,_

_I don't want to be an Orozquista,_

_But I want to be a volunteer in the army Maderista!_

Curious and excited, we hurried up and down the trains, asking people

what they knew, what they thought. I had never heard a real

killing-sound before, and it made me frantic with curiosity and

nervousness. We were like dogs in a yard when a dog-fight is going on

outside. Finally the spell snapped and I found myself desperately

tired. I fell into a dead sleep on a little ledge under the lip of the

cannon, where the laborers tossed their wrenches and sledge-hammers and

crowbars when the train moved forward a hundred feet, and piled on

themselves with shouts and horseplay.

In the coldness of before dawn I woke with the Colonel's hand on my

shoulder.

"You can go now," he said. "The sign is 'Zaragosa' and the countersign

'Guerrero.' Our soldiers will be recognized by their hats pinned up in

front. May you go well!"

It was bitter cold. We threw our blankets around us, serape fashion,

and trudged down past the fury of the repair gang as they hammered at it

under the leaping flares--past the five armed men slouching around their

fire on the frontier of the dark.

"Are you off to the battle, _companeros_?" cried one of the gang. "Look

out for the bullets!" At that they all laughed. The sentries cried,

"_Adios_! Don't kill them all! Leave a few _pelones_ for us!"

Beyond the last torch, where the torn track was wrenched and tumbled

about on the uprooted roadbed, a shadowy figure waited for us.

"_Vamonos_ together," he said, peering at us. "In the dark three are an

army." We stumbled along over the broken track, silently, just able to

make him out with our eyes. He was a little dumpy soldier with a rifle

and a half-empty cartridge-belt over his breast. He said that he had

just brought a wounded man from the front to the hospital train and was

on his way back.

"Feel this," he said, holding out his arm. It was drenched. We could

see nothing.

"Blood," he continued unemotionally. "His blood. He was my _compadre_

in the Brigada Gonzales-Ortega. We went in this night down there and so

many, so many---- We were cut in half."

It was the first we had heard, or thought, of wounded men. All of a

sudden we heard the battle. It had been going on steadily all the time,

but we had forgotten--the sound was so monstrous, so monotonous. Far

rifle fire came like the ripping of strong canvas, the cannon shocked

like pile-drivers. We were only six miles away now.

Out of the darkness loomed a little knot of men--four of them--carrying

something heavy and inert in a blanket slung between. Our guide threw

up his rifle and challenged, and his answer was a retching groan from

the blanket.

"_Oiga compadre_," lisped one of the bearers huskily. "Where, for the

love of the Virgin, is the hospital train?"

"About a league----"

"_Valgame Dios_! How can we...."

"Water! Have you any water?"

They stood with the blanket taut between them, and something fell from

it, drip, drip, drip, on the ties.

That awful voice within screamed once, "To drink!" and fell away to a

shuddering moan. We handed our canteens to the bearers--and silently,

bestially, they drained them. The wounded man they forgot. Then,

sullen, they pitched on....

Others appeared, singly, or in little groups. They were simply vague

shapes staggering in the night, like drunkards, like men incredibly

tired. One dragged between two walkers, his arms around their

shoulders. A mere boy reeled along with the limp body of his father on

his back. A horse passed with his nose to the ground, two bodies

flopping sideways across the saddle, and a man walking behind and

beating the horse on the rump, cursing shrilly. He passed, and we could

hear his falsetto fading dissonantly in the distance. Some groaned, with

the ugly, deadened groan of uttermost pain; one man, slouched in the

saddle of a mule, screamed mechanically every time the mule took a step.

Under two tall cotton-wood trees beside an irrigation ditch a little

fire glowed. Three sleepers with empty cartridge-belts sprawled snoring

on the uneven ground; beside the fire sat a man holding with both hands

his leg straight out to the warmth. It was a perfectly good leg as far

as the ankle--there it ended in a ragged, oozing mess of trousers and

shattered flesh. The man simply sat looking at it. He didn't even stir

as we came near, and yet his chest rose and fell with calm breathing,

and his mouth was slightly open as if he were day-dreaming. By the side

of the ditch knelt another. A soft lead bullet had entered his hand

between the two middle fingers and then spread until it hollowed out a

bloody cave inside. He had wrapped a rag around a little piece of stick

and was unconcernedly dipping it in the water and gouging out the wound.

Soon we were near the battle. In the east, across the vast level

country, a faint gray light appeared. The noble alamo trees, towering

thickly in massy lines along the ditches to the west, burst into showers

of bird-song. It was getting warm, and there came the tranquil smell of

earth and grass and growing corn--a calm summer dawn. Into this the

noise of battle broke like something insane. The hysterical chatter of

rifle fire, that seemed to carry a continuous undertone of

screaming--although when you listened for it it was gone. The nervous,

deadly stab--stab--stab--stab of the machine guns, like some gigantic

woodpecker. The cannon booming like great bells, and the whistle of

their shells. Boom--Pi-i-i-e-e-a-uuu! And that most terrible of all

the sounds of war, shrapnel exploding. Crash--Whee-e-eaaa!!

The great hot sun swam up in the east through a faint smoke from the

fertile land, and over the eastern barrens the heat-waves began to

wiggle. It caught the startlingly green tops of the lofty alamos

fringing the ditch that paralleled the railroad on our right. The trees

ended there, and beyond, the whole rampart of bare mountains, piled

range on range, grew rosy. We were now in scorched desert again,

thickly covered with dusty mesquite. Except for another line of alamos

straggling across from east to west, close to the city, there were no

trees in all the plain but two or three scattered ones to the right. So

close we were, barely two miles from Gomez Falacio, that we could look

down the torn track right into the town. We could see the black round

water-tank, and back of that the roundhouse, and across the track from

them both the low adobe walls of the Brittingham Corra. The smokestacks

and buildings and trees of La Esperanza soap factory rose clear and

still, like a little city, to the left. Almost directly to the right of

the railroad track, it seemed, the stark, stony peak of the Cerro de la

Pila mounted steeply to the stone reservoir that crowned it, and sloped

off westward in a series of smaller peaks, a spiny ridge a mile long.

Most of Gomez lay behind the shoulder of the Cerro, and at its western

end the villas and gardens of Lerdo made a vivid patch of green in the

desert. The great brown mountains on the west made a mighty sweep

around behind the two cities, and then fell away south again in folds on

folds of gaunt desolation. And directly south from Gomez, stretched

along the base of this range, lay Torreon, the richest city of northern

Mexico.

The shooting never ceased, but it seemed to be subdued to a subordinate

place in a fantastic and disordered world. Up the track in the hot

morning light straggled a river of wounded men, shattered, bleeding,

bound up in rotting and bloody bandages, inconceivably weary. They

passed us, and one even fell and lay motionless nearby in the dust--and

we didn't care. Soldiers with their cartridges gone wandered aimlessly

out of the chaparral, dragging their rifles, and plunged into the brush

again on the other side of the railroad, black with powder, streaked

with sweat, their eyes vacantly on the ground. The thin, subtle dust

rose in lazy clouds at every footstep, and hung there, parching throat

and eyes. A little company of horsemen jogged out of the thicket and

drew up on the track, looking toward town. One man got down from his

saddle and squatted beside us.

"It was terrible," he said suddenly. "_Carramba_! We went in there last

night on foot. They were inside the water-tank, with holes cut in the

iron for rifles. We had to walk up and poke our guns through the holes

and we killed them all--a death trap! And then the Corral! They had

two sets of loopholes, one for the men kneeling down and the other for

the men standing up. Three thousand _rurales_ in there--and they had

five machine guns to sweep the road. And the roundhouse, with three

rows of trenches outside and subterranean passages so they could crawl

under and shoot us in the back.... Our bombs wouldn't work, and what

could we do with rifles? _Madre de Dios_! But we were so quick--we

took them by surprise. We captured the roundhouse and the water-tank.

And then this morning thousands came--thousands--reinforcements from

Torreon--and their artillery--and they drove us back again. They walked

up to the water-tank and poked their rifles through the holes and killed

all of us--the sons of the devils!"

We could see the place as he spoke and hear the hellish roar and shriek,

and yet no one moved, and there wasn't a sign of the shooting--not even

smoke, except when a shrapnel shell burst yelling down in the first row

of trees a mile ahead and vomited a puff of white. The cracking rip of

rifle fire and the staccato machine guns and even the hammering cannon

didn't reveal themselves at all. The flat, dusty plain, the trees and

chimneys of Gomez, and the stony hill, lay quietly in the heat. From

the alamos off to the right came the careless song of birds. One had

the impression that his senses were lying. It was an incredible dream,

through which the grotesque procession of wounded filtered like ghosts

in the dust.

*CHAPTER VIII*

*THE ARTILLERY COMES UP*

Over to the right, along the base of the line of trees, heavy dust

billowed up, men shouted, whips snapped, and there was a rumble and a

jangling of chains. We plunged into a little path that wound among the

chaparral and emerged upon a tiny village, lost in the brush near the

ditch. It was strikingly like a Chinese or Central American village:

five or six adobe huts thatched with mud and twigs. It was called San

Ramon, and there a little struggling knot of men swayed about every

door, clamoring for coffee and _tortillas_, and waving fiat money. The

_pacificos_ squatted in their tiny corrals, selling _macuche_ at

exorbitant prices; their women sweated over the fire, hammering

_tortillas_ and pouring villainous black coffee. All around, in the

open spaces, lay sleepers like the dead, and men with bloody arms and

heads, tossing and groaning. Presently an officer galloped up, streaked

with sweat, and screamed, "Get up, you fools! _Pendecos_! Wake up and

get back to your companies! We're going to attack!" A few stirred and

stumbled, cursing, to their weary feet--the others still slept. "_Hijos

de la----_!" snapped the officer, and spurred his horse upon them,

trampling, kicking.... The ground boiled men scrambling out of the way

and yelling. They yawned, stretched, still half asleep, and sifted off

slowly toward the front in an aimless way.... The wounded only dragged

themselves listlessly to the shade of the brush.

Along the side of the ditch went a sort of wagon track, and up this the

Constitutionalist artillery were arriving. One could see the gray heads

of the straining mules, and the big hats of their drivers, and the

circling whips--the rest was masked in dust. Slower than the army, they

had been marching all night. Past us rumbled the carriages and

caissons, the long, heavy guns yellow with dust. The drivers and

gunners were in fine good humor. One, an American, whose features were

absolutely indistinguishable in the all-mantling mud of sweat and earth,

shouted to know if they were in time, or if the town had fallen.

I answered in Spanish that there were lots of _colorados_ yet to kill,

and a cheer ran along the line.

"Now we'll show them something," cried a big Indian on a mule. "If we

could get into their cursed town without guns, what can we do with

them?"

The alamos ended just beyond San Ramon, and under the last trees Villa,

General Angeles, and the staff sat on horseback at the bank of the

ditch. Beyond that the ditch ran naked across the naked plain into the

town, where it took water from the river. Villa was dressed in an old

brown suit, without a collar, and an ancient felt hat. He was covered

with dirt, and had been riding up and down the lines all night; but he

bore no trace of fatigue.

When he saw us he called out, "Hello, _muchachos_! Well, how do you like

it?"

"Fine, _mi General_!"

We were worn out and very dirty. The sight of us amused him profoundly;

he never could take the correspondents seriously, anyway, and it seemed

to him very droll that an American periodical would be willing to spend

so much money just to get the news.

"Good," he said with a grin. "I'm glad you like it, because you're

going to get all you want."

The first gun had now come opposite the staff and unlimbered, the

gunners ripping off the canvas covers and tilting up the heavy caisson.

The captain of the battery screwed on the telescopic sight and the crank

of the raising-lever spun. The brass butts of heavy shells shone in

gleaming rows; two men staggered under the weight of one, and rested it

on the ground while the captain regulated the shrapnel timer. The

breech-lock crashed shut, and we ran far back. Cra-boom-shock! A

soaring whistling Pi-i-i-e-e-eeuu! flew high after the shell, and then a

tiny white smoke flowered at the foot of the Cerro de la Fila--and,

minutes after, a far detonation. About a hundred yards apart, all along

in front of the gun, picturesque ragged men stared motionless through

their field-glasses. They burst into a chorus of yells, "Too low! Too

far to the right! Their guns are all along the ridge! Time it about

fifteen seconds later!" Down front the rifle fire had frittered away to

ragged sputtering and the machine guns were silent. Everybody was

watching the artillery duel. It was about five-thirty in the morning,

and already very hot. In the fields behind sounded the parched chirp of

crickets; the lofty fresh tops of the alamos rustled in a high languid

breeze; birds began to sing again.

Another gun wheeled into line, and the breech-block of the first clacked

again. There came the snap of the trigger, but no roar. The gunners

wrenched open the breech and hurled the smoking brass projectile on the

grass. Bad shell. I saw General Angeles in his faded brown sweater,

hatless, peering through the sight and cranking up the range. Villa was

spurring his reluctant horse up to the caisson. Cra--boom--shock!

Pi-i-i-e-e-eeuu! The other gun this time. We saw the shell burst

higher up the stony hill this time. And then four booms floated to us,

and, simultaneously, the enemy's shells, which had been exploding

desultorily over the line of trees nearest the city, marched out into

the open desert and leaped toward us in four tremendous explosions, each

nearer. More guns had wheeled into line; others filed off to the right

along a diagonal of trees, and a long line of heavy trucks, plunging

mules, and cursing, shouting men choked up the dusty road to the rear.

The unlimbered mules jingled back and the drivers threw themselves,

exhausted, under the nearest chaparral.

The Federal shrapnel, well fired and excellently timed, was bursting now

only a few hundred yards in front of our line, and the minute boom of

their guns was almost incessant. Crash--Wheeeeaa! Over our heads,

snapping viciously in the leafy trees, sang the rain of lead. Our guns

replied spasmodically. The home-made shells, fashioned on converted

mining machinery in Chihuahua, were not reliable. Galloped past stout

Captain Marinelli, the Italian soldier of fortune, steering as near the

newspapermen as possible, with a serious, Napoleonic look on his face.

He glanced once or twice at the camera man, smiling graciously, but the

latter coldly looked away. With a workmanlike flourish he ordered the

wheeling of his gun into position and sighted it himself. Just then a

shell burst deafeningly about a hundred yards in front. The Federals

were getting the range. Marinelli bounded away from his cannon, mounted

his horse, limbered up and came galloping dramatically back with his gun

rumbling along at a dead run behind. None of the other guns had

retreated. Puffing up his foaming charger in front of the camera man,

he flung himself to the ground and took a position.

"Now," he said, "you can take my picture!"

"Go to hell," said the camera man, and a great shout of laughter went up

along the line.

The high cracked note of a bugle thrilled through the racking roar.

Immediately mules dragging their jangling limbers appeared, and shouting

men. The caissons snapped shut.

"Going down front," shouted Colonel Servin. "Not hitting. Too far away

here...."

And the long-halted line snapped taut and wound out into the open

desert, under the bursting shells.

*CHAPTER IX*

*BATTLE*

We returned along the winding path through the mesquite, crossed the

torn-up track, and struck out across the dusty plain southeastward.

Looking back along the railroad I could see smoke and the round front of

the first train miles away; and in front of it throngs of active little

dots swarming on the right of way, distorted like things seen in a wavy

mirror. We strode along in a haze of thin dust. The giant mesquite

dwindled until it scarcely reached to our knees. To the right the tall

hill and the chimneys of the town swam tranquilly in the hot sun; rifle

fire had almost ceased for the moment, and only dazzling bursts of thick

white smoke marked our occasional shells along the ridge. We could see

our drab guns rocking down the plain, spreading along the first line of

alamos, where the searching fingers of the enemy's shrapnel probed

continually. Little bodies of horsemen moved here and there over the

desert, and stragglers on foot, trailing their rifles.

An old peon, stooped with age and dressed in rags, crouched in the low

shrub gathering mesquite twigs.

"Say, friend," we asked him, "is there any way we can get in close to

see the fighting?"

He straightened up and stared at us.

"If you had been here as long as I have," said he, "you wouldn't care

about seeing the fighting. _Carramba_! I have seen them take Torreon

seven times in three years. Sometimes they attack from Gomez Palacio

and sometimes from the mountains. But it is always the same--war.

There is something interesting in it for the young, but for us old

people, we are tired of war." He paused and stared out over the plain.

"Do you see this dry ditch? Well, if you will get down in it and follow

along it will lead you into the town." And then, as an afterthought, he

added incuriously, "What party do you belong to?"

"The Constitutionalists."

"So. First it was the Maderistas, and then the Orozquistas, and now

the--what did you call them? I am very old, and I have not long to live;

but this war--it teems to me that all it accomplishes is to let us go

hungry. Go with God, senores." And he bent again to his slow task,

while we descended into the arroyo. It was a disused irrigation ditch

running a little south of west, its bottom covered with dusty weeds, and

the end of its straight length hidden from us by a sort of mirage that

looked like a glaring pool of water. Stooped a little, so as to be

hidden from the outside, we walked along, it seemed, for hours, the

cracked bottom and dusty sides of the ditch reflecting the fierce heat

upon us until we were faint with it. Once horsemen passed quite near on

our right, their big iron spurs ringing; we crouched down until they

passed, for we didn't want to take any chances. Down in the ditch the

artillery fire sounded very faint and far away, but once I cautiously

lifted my head above the bank and discovered that we were very near the

first line of trees. Shells were bursting along it, and I could even

see the belch of furious haze hurling out from the mouths of our cannon,

and feel the surf of sound-waves hit me like a blow when they fired. We

were a good quarter of a mile in front of our artillery, and evidently

making for the water-tank on the very edge of the town. As we stooped

again the shells passing overhead whined sharply and suddenly across the

arc of sky and were cut off abruptly until the sullen echoless booff! of

their explosion. There ahead, where the railroad trestle of the main

line crossed the arroyo, huddled a little pile of bodies--evidently left

from the first attack. Hardly one was bloody; their heads and hearts

were pierced with the clean, tiny holes of steel Mauser bullets. They

lay limply, with the unearthly calm, lean faces of the dead. Someone,

perhaps their own thrifty _companeros_, had stripped them of arms,

shoes, hats and serviceable clothing. One sleeping soldier, squatting

on the edge of the heap with his rifle across his knees, snored deeply.

Flies covered him--the dead hummed with them. But the sun had not yet

affected them. Another soldier leaned against the townward bank of the

ditch, his feet resting on a corpse, banging methodically away at

something he saw. Under the shadow of the trestle four men sat playing

cards. They played listlessly, without talking, their eyes red with

lack of sleep. The heat was frightful. Occasionally a stray bullet

came by screaming, "Where--is-s-s-z--ye!" This strange company took our

appearance as a matter of course. The sharpshooter doubled up out of

range and carefully put another cartridge-clip in his rifle.

"You haven't got another drop of water in that canteen, have you?" he

asked. "_Adio!_ we haven't eaten or drunk since yesterday!" He guzzled

the water, furtively watching the card players lest they, too, should be

thirsty. "They say that we are to attack the water-tank and the Corral

again when the artillery is in position to support us. Chi-_hua*hua

*hombre_! but it was _duro_ in the night! They slaughtered us in the

streets there...." He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand and began

firing again. We lay beside him and looked over. We were about two

hundred yards from the deadly water-tank. Across the track and the wide

street beyond lay the brown mud-walls of the Brittingham Corral,

innocent looking enough now, with only black dots to show the double

line of loop-holes.

"There are the machine guns," said our friend. "See them, those slim

barrels peeping over the edge?" We couldn't make them out. Water-tank,

Corral and town lay sleeping in the beat. Dust hovered still in the

air, making a thin haze. About fifty yards in front of us was a shallow

exposed ditch, evidently once a Federal trench, for the dirt had been

piled on our side. Two hundred drab, dusty soldiers lay in it now,

facing townward--the Constitutionalist infantry. They were sprawled on

the ground, in all attitudes of weariness; some sleeping on their backs,

facing up to the hot sun; others wearily transferring the dirt with

their scooped hands from rear to front. Before them they had piled up

irregular heaps of rocks. Now infantry, in the Constitutionalist army,

is simply cavalry without horses; all Villa's soldiers are mounted

except the artillery, and those for whom horses cannot be procured.

Of a sudden the artillery in our rear boomed all together, and over our

heads a dozen shells screamed toward the Cerro.

"That is the signal," said the man at our side. He clambered down into

the ditch and kicked the sleeper. "Come on," he yelled. "Wake up.

We're going to attack the _pelones_." The snorer groaned and opened his

eyes slowly. He yawned and picked up his rifle without a word. The

card players began to squabble about their winnings. A violent dispute

broke out as to who owned the pack of cards. Grumbling and still

arguing, they stumbled out and followed the sharpshooter up over the

edge of the ditch.

Rifle fire rang along the edge of the trench in front. The sleepers

flopped over on their stomachs behind their little shelters--their

elbows worked vigorously pumping the guns. The hollow steel water-tank

resounded to the rain of thumping bullets; chips of adobe flew from the

wall of the Corral. Instantly the wall bristled with shining barrels

and the two awoke crackling with hidden vicious firing. Bullets roofed

the heavens with whistling steel--drummed the smoking dust up until a

yellow curtain of whirling cloud veiled us from the houses and the tank.

We could see our friend running low along the ground, the sleepy man

following, standing erect, still rubbing his eyes. Behind strung out the

gamblers, squabbling yet. Somewhere in the rear a bugle blew. The

sharpshooter running in front stopped suddenly, swaying, as if he had

run against a solid wall. His left leg doubled under him and he sank

crazily to one knee in the exposed flat, whipping up his rifle with a

yell.

"---- ---- the dirty monkeys!" he screamed, firing rapidly into the

dust. "I'll show the ------! The cropped heads! The jail-birds!" He

shook his head impatiently, like a dog with a hurt ear. Blood drops

flew from it. Bellowing with rage, he shot the rest of his clip, and

then slumped to the ground and thrashed to and fro for a minute. The

others passed him with scarcely a look. Now the trench was boiling with

men scrambling to their feet, like worms when you turn over a log. The

rifle fire rattled shrilly. From behind us came running feet, and men

in sandals, with blankets over their shoulders, came falling and

slipping down the ditch, and scrambling up the other side--hundreds of

them, it seemed....

They almost hid from us the front, but through the dust and the spaces

between running logs we could see the soldiers in the trench leap their

barricade like a breaking wave. And then the impenetrable dust shut

down and the fierce stabbing needle of the machine guns sewed the mighty

jumble of sounds together. A glimpse through a rift in the cloud torn

by a sudden hot gust of wind--we could see the first brown line of men

reeling altogether like drunkards, and the machine guns over the wall

spitting sharp, dull red in the sunshine. Then a man came running back

out of it, the sweat streaming down his face, without a gun. He ran

fast, half sliding, half falling, down into our ditch and up the other

side. Other dim forms loomed up in the dust ahead.

"What is it? How is it going?" I cried.

He answered nothing, but ran on. Suddenly and terribly the monstrous

crash and scream of shrapnel burst from the turmoil ahead. The enemy's

artillery! Mechanically I listened for our guns. Except for an

occasional boom they were silent. Our home-made shells were failing

again. Two more shrapnel shells. Out of the dust-cloud men came running

back--singly, in pairs, in groups, a stampeding mob. They fell over us,

around us--drowned us in a human flood, shouting "To the alamos! To the

trains! The Federation is coming!" We struggled up among them and ran,

too, straight up the railroad track.... Behind us roared the shells

searching in the dust, and the tearing musketry. And then we noticed

that all the wide roadway ahead was filled with galloping horsemen,

yelling shrill Indian cries and waving their rifles--the main column! We

stood to one side as they whirled past, about five hundred of

them--watched them stoop in their saddles and begin to shoot. The

drumming of their horses' hoofs was like thunder.

"Better not go in there! It's too hot!" cried one of the infantry with

a grin.

"Well, I'll bet I'm hotter," answered a horseman, and we all laughed.

We walked tranquilly back along the railroad track, while the firing

behind wound up to a continuous roar. A group of peons--_pacificos_--in

tall sombreros, blankets and white cotton blouses, stood along here with

folded arms, looking down the track toward town.

"Look out there, friends," joshed a soldier. "Don't stand there.

You'll get hit."

The peons looked at each other and grinned feebly. "But, senor," said

one, "this is where we always stand when there is a battle."

A little farther along I came upon an officer--a German--wandering

along, leading his horse by the bridle. "I cannot ride him any more," he

said to me earnestly. "He is quite too tired. I am afraid he will die

if he does not sleep." The horse, a big chestnut stallion, stumbled and

swayed as he walked. Enormous tears trickled from his half-shut eyes

and rolled down his nose....

I was dead tired, reeling from lack of sleep and food and the terrible

heat of the sun. About half a mile out I looked back and saw the

enemy's shrapnel poking into the line of trees more frequently than

ever. They seemed to have thoroughly got the range. And just then I

saw the gray line of guns, limbered to their mules, begin to crawl out

from the trees toward the rear at four or five different points. Our

artillery had been shelled out of their positions.... I threw myself

down to rest in the shade of a big mesquite bush.

Almost immediately a change seemed to come in the sound of the rifle

fire, as if half of it had been suddenly cut off. At the same time

twenty bugles shrilled. Rising, I noticed a line of running horsemen

fleeing up the track, shouting something. More followed, galloping, at

the place where the railroad passed beyond the trees on its way into

town. The cavalry had been repulsed. All at once the whole plain

squirmed with men, mounted and on foot, all running rearward. One man

threw away his blanket, another his rifle. They thickened over the hot

desert, stamping up the dust, until the flat was crowded with them.

Right in front of me a horseman burst out of the brush, shouting, "The

Federals are coming! To the trains! They are right behind!" The

entire Constitutionalist army was routed! I caught up my blanket and

took to my heels. A little way farther on I came upon a cannon

abandoned in the desert, traces cut, mules gone. Underfoot were guns,

cartridge-belts and dozens of serapes. It was a rout. Coming to an

open space, I saw ahead a large crowd of fleeing soldiers, without

rifles. Suddenly three men on horseback swept across in front of them,

waving their arms and yelling. "Go back!" they cried. "They aren't

coming out! Go back for the love of God!" Two I didn't recognize. The

other was Villa.

*CHAPTER X*

*BETWEEN ATTACKS*

About a mile back the flight was stopped. I met the soldiers coming

back, with the relieved expression of men who have feared an unknown

danger and been suddenly set free from it. That was always Villa's

power--he could explain things to the great mass of ordinary people in a

way that they immediately understood. The Federals, as usual, had

failed to take advantage of their opportunity to inflict a lasting

defeat upon the Constitutionalists. Perhaps they feared an ambush like

the one Villa had arranged at Mapula, when the victorious Federals

sallied out to pursue Villa's fleeing army after the first attack on

Chihuahua, and were repulsed with heavy slaughter. Anyway, they did not

come out. The men came straggling back, hunting in the mesquite for

their guns and blankets, and for other people's guns and blankets. You

could hear them shouting and joking all over the plain. "_Oija_! Where

are you going with that rifle? That's my water-bag! I dropped my serape

right here by this bush, and now it's gone!"

"O Juan," cried one man to another, "I always told you I could beat you

running!"

"But you didn't, _compadre_. I was a hundred meters ahead, flying

through the air like a cannon ball!..."

The truth was that after riding twelve hours the day before, fighting

all night, and all morning in the blazing sun, under the frightful

strain of charging an intrenched force in the face of artillery and

machine guns, without food, water or sleep, the army's nerve had

suddenly given way. But from the time that they returned after the

flight the ultimate result was never in doubt. The psychological crisis

was past....

Now the rifle fire had altogether ceased, and even cannon shots from the

enemy were few and far between. At the ditch under the first line of

trees our men entrenched themselves; the artillery had withdrawn to the

second line of trees--a mile back; and under the grateful shade the men

threw themselves heavily down and slept. The strain had snapped. As

the sun rose toward noon the desert, hill and town throbbed silently in

the intense heat. Sometimes an exchange of shots far to the right or

left told where the outposts were exchanging compliments. But even that

soon stopped. In the cotton and cornfields to the north, among the

sprouting green things, insects chirped. The birds sang no more because

of the heat. It was breathless. The leaves stirred in no wind.

Here and there little fires smoked, where the soldiers rolled

_tortillas_ from the scanty flour they had brought in their

saddle-bags--and those who didn't have any swarmed around, begging a

crumb. Everybody simply and generously divided the food. I was hailed

from a dozen fires with "Hey, _companero_, have you breakfasted? Here is

a piece of my _tortilla_. Come and eat!" Rows of men lay flat on their

stomachs along the irrigation ditch, scooping up the dirty water in

their palms. Three or four miles back we could see the cannon-car and

the first two trains, opposite the big ranch of El Verjel, with the

tireless repair gang hard at it in the hot sun. The provision train had

not come up yet....

Little Colonel Servin came by, perched on an immense bay horse, still

dapper and fresh after the terrible work of the night.

"I don't know what we shall do yet," he said. "Only the General knows

that, and he never tells. But we shall not assault again until the

Brigada Zaragosa returns. Benavides has had a hard battle over there at

Sacramento--two hundred and fifty of ours killed, they say. And the

General has sent for General Robles and General Contreras, who have been

attacking from the south, to bring up all their men and join him

here.... They say, though, that we are going to deliver a night attack

next, so that their artillery won't be effective...." He galloped on.

About midday thin columns of sluggish, dirty smoke began to rise from

several points in the town, and toward afternoon a slow, hot wind

brought to us the faintly sickening smell of crude oil mingled with

scorched human flesh. The Federals were burning piles of the dead....

We walked back to the trains and stormed General Benavides' private car

in the Brigada Zaragosa train. The major in charge had them cook us

something to eat in the General's kitchen. We ate ravenously, and

afterward went over along the line of trees and slept for hours. Late

in the afternoon we started once more for the front. Hundreds of

soldiers and peons of the neighborhood, ravenously hungry, prowled

around the trains, hoping to pick up discarded food, or slops, or

anything at all to eat. They were ashamed of themselves, however, and

affected a sauntering indolence when we passed. I remember that we sat

for a while talking with some soldiers on the top of a box-car, when a

boy, criss-crossed with cartridge-belts and lugging a huge rifle, came

past beneath, his eyes searching the ground. A stale _tortilla_, half

rotting, crunched into the dirt by many passing feet, caught his

attention. He pounced upon it and bit a piece out. Then he looked up

and saw us. "As if I were dying of hunger!" he said scornfully and

tossed it away with contempt....

Down in the shade of the alamos, across the ditch from San Ramon, the

Canadian Captain Treston was bivouacked with his machine gun battery.

The guns and their heavy tripods were unloaded from the mules, and all

around lay the unlimbered field-pieces, their animals grazing in the

rich green fields, the men squatted around their fires or lying

stretched out on the bank of the ditch. Treston waved an ashy

_tortilla_ he was munching and bawled, "Say, Reed! Please come here and

interpret for me! I can't find my interpreters, and if we go into

action I'll be in a hell of a fix! You see I don't know the damn

language, and when I came down here Villa hired two interpreters to go

around with me all the time. And I can't ever find the sons-of-guns;

they always go off and leave me in a hole!"

I took part of the proffered delicacy and asked him if he thought there

was any chance of going into action.

"I think we'll go in to-night as soon as it's dark," he answered. "Do

you want to go along with the machine guns and interpret?" I said I

did.

A ragged man near the fire, whom I had never seen before, rose and came

across smiling.

"I thought when I looked at you that you seemed to be an hombre who

hadn't tasted tobacco for a while. Will you take half my cigarette?"

Before I could protest he produced a lop-sided brown cigarette and tore

it across in two pieces....

The sun went gloriously down behind the notched purple mountains in

front of us, and for a minute a clear fan of quivering light poured up

the high arc of stainless sky. The birds awoke in the trees; leaves

rustled. The fertile land exhaled a pearly mist. A dozen ragged

soldiers, lying close together, began to improvise the air and words of

a song about the battle of Torreon--a new ballad was being born....

Other singing came to us through the still, cool dusk. I felt my whole

feeling going out to these gentle, simple people--so lovable they

were....

It was just after I had been to the ditch for a drink that Treston said

casually: "By the way, one of our men found this floating in the ditch a

little while ago. I can't read Spanish, so I didn't know what the word

meant. You see the water from these ditches all comes from the river

inside the town, so I thought it might be a Federal paper." I took it

from his hand. It was a little folded white piece of wet paper, like

the corner and front of a package. In large black letters was printed

on the front, "_ARSENICO_," and in smaller type, "_Cuidado_! _Veneno_!"

"Arsenic. Beware! Poison!"

"Look here," I demanded, sitting up suddenly. "Have there been any sick

people around here this evening?"

"That's funny you're asking," he said. "A good many of the men have had

bad cramps in the stomach, and I don't feel altogether well. Just

before you came a mule suddenly keeled over and died in that next field,

and a horse across the ditch. Fatigue or sunstroke, probably...."

Fortunately the ditch carried a large body of swiftly running water, so

the danger was not great. I explained to him that the Federals had

poisoned the ditch.

"My God," said Treston. "Perhaps that is what they were trying to tell

me. About twenty people have come up to me and said something about

_envenenado_. What does that mean?"

"That's what it means," I answered. "Where can we get about a quart of

strong coffee?" We found a great can of it at the nearest fire and felt

better.

"O yes, we knew," said the men. "That is why we watered the animals at

the other ditch. We heard long ago. They say that ten horses are dead

down in front, and that many men are rolling very sick on the ground."

An officer on horseback rode by, shouting that we were all to go back to

El Verjel and camp there beside the trains for the night; that the

general had said that everyone but the advance guards were to get a good

night's sleep out of the zone of fire, and that the commissary train had

come up and was just behind the hospital train. Bugles sounded, and the

men struggled up off the ground, catching mules, fastening their harness

on amid shouting and braying and jingling, saddling horses and limbering

guns. Treston got on his pony and I walked along beside him. So there

was to be no night attack then. It was now almost dark. Across the

ditch we fell in with the shadowy forms of a company of soldiers

trotting northward, all muffling blankets and big hats and ringing

spurs. They hailed me. "Hey, _companero_, where's your horse?" I

admitted I had none. "Jump up behind me then," chimed in five or six

altogether. One pulled up right beside me and I mounted with him. We

jogged on through the mesquite and across a dim, lovely field. Someone

began to sing and two more joined in. A round, full moon bubbled up in

the clear night.

"_Oiga_, how do you say '_mula_' in English?" asked my horseman.

"G---- d---- stubborn-fathead-mule," I told him. And for days after

entire strangers would stop me and ask me, with roars of laughter, how

the Americans said "_mula_."...

Around the ranch of El Verjel the army was encamped. We rode into a

field dotted with fires, where aimless soldiers wandered around in the

dark, shouting to know where the Brigada Gonzales-Ortega was, or Jose

Rodriguez's _gente_, or the _amitrailladoras_. Townward the artillery

was unlimbering in a wide, alert half-circle, guns pointing south. To

the east, the camp of Benavides' Brigada Zaragosa, just arrived from

Sacramento, made an immense glow in the sky. From the direction of the

provision train a long ant-like file of men bore sacks of flour, coffee,

and packages of cigarettes.... A hundred different singing choruses

swelled up into the night....

It comes to my mind with particular vividness how I saw a poor poisoned

horse suddenly double up and fall, thrashing; how we passed a man bent

to the ground in the darkness, vomiting violently; how, after I had

rolled up on the ground in my blankets, terrible cramps suddenly

wrenched me, and I crawled out a way into the brush and didn't have the

strength to crawl back. In fact, until gray dawn, I "rolled very sick on

the ground."

*CHAPTER XI*

*AN OUTPOST IN ACTION*

Tuesday, early in the morning, the army was in motion again toward the

front, straggling down the track and across the field. Four hundred

raging demons sweated and hammered at the ruined track; the foremost

train had made half a mile in the night. Horses were plenty that

morning, and I bought one, saddle and all, for seventy-five pesos--about

fifteen dollars in gold. Trotting down by San Ramon, I fell in with two

wild-looking horsemen, in high sombreros, with little printed pictures

of Our Lady of Guadelupe sewed on the crowns. They said they were going

out to an outpost upon the extreme right wing, near the mountains above

Lerdo, where their company was posted to hold a hill. Why should I want

to come with them? Who was I, anyway? I showed them my pass, signed by

Francisco Villa. They were still hostile. "Francisco Villa is nothing

to us,", they said. "And how do we know whether this is his name,

written by him? We are of the Brigada Juarez, Calixto Contreras'

_gente_." But after a short consultation the taller grunted, "Come."

We left the protection of the trees, striking out diagonally across the

ramparted cotton-fields, due west, straight for a steep, high hill that

already quivered in the heat. Between us and the suburbs of Gomez

Palacio stretched a barren, flat plain, covered with low mesquite and

cut by dry irrigation ditches. The Cerro de la Pila, with its murderous

concealed artillery, lay perfectly quiet, except that up one side of it,

so clear was the air, we could make out a little knot of figures

dragging what looked like a cannon. Just outside of the nearest houses

some horsemen were riding around; we immediately struck north, making a

wide detour, carefully on the watch, for this intermediate ground was

overrun by pickets and scouting parties. About a mile beyond, almost

along the foot of the hill, ran the high road from the north to Lerdo.

We reconnoitered this carefully from the brush. A peasant passed

whistling, driving a flock of goats. On the very edge of this road,

under a bush, was an earthen jar full of milk. Without the least

hesitation the first soldier drew his revolver and shot. The jar split

into a hundred pieces--milk spurting everywhere.

"Poisoned," he said briefly. "The first company stationed over here

drank some of that stuff. Four died." We rode on.

Up on the hill crest a few black figures squatted, their rifles tilted

against their knees. My companions waved to them, and we turned north

along the bank of a little river that unrolled a narrow strip of green

grass in the midst of desolation. The outpost was camped on both sides

of the water, in a sort of meadow. I asked where the colonel was, and

finally found him stretched out in the shade of a tent that he had made

by hanging his serape over a bush.

"Get down from your horse, friend," he said. "I am glad to welcome you

here. My house" (pointing quizzically to the roof of his tent) "is at

your disposal. Here are cigarettes. There is meat cooking on the fire."

Upon the meadow, fully saddled, grazed the horses of the troop, about

fifty of them. The men sprawled on the grass in the shade of the

mesquite, chatting and playing cards. This was a different breed of men

from the well-armed, well-mounted, comparatively disciplined troops of

Villa's army. They were simply peons who had risen in arms, like my

friends of La Tropa--a tough, happy race of mountaineers and cowboys,

among whom were many who had been bandits in the old days. Unpaid,

ill-clad, undisciplined--their officers merely the bravest among

them--armed only with aged Springfields and a handful of cartridges

apiece, they had fought almost continuously for three years. For four

months they, and the irregular troops of such guerrilla chiefs as Urbina

and Robles, had held the advance around Torreon, fighting almost daily

with Federal outposts and suffering all the hardships of the campaign,

while the main army garrisoned Chihuahua, and Juarez. These ragged men

were the bravest soldiers in Villa's army.

I had lain there about fifteen minutes, watching the beef sizzle in the

flames and satisfying the eager curiosity of a crowd as to my curious

profession, when there was a sound of galloping, and a voice, "They're

coming out of Lerdo! To horse!"

Half a hundred men reluctantly, and in a leisurely manner, made for

their horses. The colonel rose, yawning. He stretched.

"---- ---- the animals of Federals!" he growled. "They stay on our minds

all the time. You never have time to think of more pleasant things.

It's a shame they won't let us even eat our dinner!"

We were mounted soon, trotting down the bank of the stream. Far in

front sounded the pin-pricking rifles. Instinctively, without order, we

broke into a gallop; through the streets of a little village, where the

_pacificos_ stood on the roofs of their houses, looking off to the

south, little bundles of their belongings beside them so they could flee

if the battle went against us, for the Federals cruelly punish villages

which have harbored the enemy. Beyond lay the stony little hill. We got

off our horses, and throwing the reins over their heads, climbed on

foot. About a dozen men already lay there, shooting spasmodically in

the direction of the green bank of trees behind which lay Lerdo. Unseen

scattering shots ripped from the blank desert between. About half a mile

away small brown figures dodged around in the brush. A thin dust-cloud

showed where another detachment was marching slowly north in their rear.

"We already got one sure, and another one in the leg," said a soldier,

spitting.

"How many do you make them out?" asked the colonel.

"About two hundred."

The Colonel stood bolt upright, carelessly looking out over the sunny

plain. Immediately a roll of shots swept along their front. A bullet

chirped overhead. Already the men had gone to work, unordered. Each

soldier picked out a smooth place to lie and piled up a little heap of

stones in front to shield him. They lay down grunting, loosening their

belts and taking off their coats to be perfectly comfortable; then they

began slowly and methodically to shoot.

"There goes another," announced the Colonel. "Yours, Pedro."

"Not Pedro's at all," interrupted another man fretfully. "I got him."

"O the devil you did," snapped Pedro. They quarreled....

The firing from the desert was now pretty general, and we could see the

Federals slipping toward us under the protection of every bush and

arroyo. Our men fired slowly and carefully, aiming a long time before

they pulled the trigger, for the months with scanty ammunition around

Torreon had made them economical. But now every hill and bush along our

line held a little knot of sharpshooters, and looking back on the wide

flats and fields between the hill and the railroad, I saw innumerable

single horsemen and squads of them spurring through the brush. In ten

minutes we would have five hundred men with us.

The rifle fire along the line swelled and deepened until there was a

solid mile of it. The Federals had stopped; now the dust-clouds began

slowly to move backward in the direction of Lerdo. The fire from the

desert slackened. And then, from nowhere, we suddenly saw the

broad-winged vultures sailing, serene and motionless, in the blue....

The Colonel, his men and I democratically ate lunch in the shade of the

village houses. Our meat was, of course, scorched, so we had to do the

best we could with jerked beef and _pinole_, which seems to be cinnamon

and bran, ground fine. I never enjoyed a meal so.... And when I left

the men made up a double handful of cigarettes as a present.

Said the Colonel: "_Amigo_, I am sorry that we had not time for a talk

together. There are many things I want to ask you about your

country--whether it is true, for example, that in your cities men have

entirely lost the use of their legs and don't ride horseback in the

streets, but are borne about in automobiles. I had a brother once who

worked on the railroad track near Kansas City, and he told me wonderful

things. But a man called him 'greaser' one day and shot him without that

my brother did anything to him. Why is it your people don't like

Mexicans? I like many Americans. I like you. Here is a gift for you."

He unbuckled one of his huge iron spurs, inlaid with silver, and gave it

to me. "But we never had any time here for talk. These ---- always

annoy us, and then we have to get up and kill a few of them before we

can have a moment's peace...."

Under the alamo trees I found one of the photographers and a

moving-picture man. They were lying flat on their backs near a fire,

around which squatted twenty soldiers, gorging ravenously flour

_tortillas_, meat and coffee. One proudly displayed a silver

wrist-watch.

"That used to be my watch," explained the photographer. "You see we

hadn't had anything to eat for two days, and when we came past here

these boys called us and gave us the most magnificent feed I have ever

tasted. After that I just couldn't help giving them a present!"

The soldiers had accepted the gift communally and were agreeing that

each should wear it for two hours; from then on until the end of

life....

*CHAPTER XII*

*CONTRERAS' MEN ASSAULT*

Wednesday my friend the photographer and I were wandering across a field

when Villa came by on his horse. He looked tired, dirty, but happy.

Reining up in front of us, the motions of his body as easy and graceful

as a wolf's, he grinned and said, "Well, boys, how is it going now?"

We answered that we were perfectly contented.

"I haven't time to worry about you, so you must be careful not to go

into danger. It is bad--the wounded. Hundreds. They are brave, those

_muchachos_; the bravest people in the world. But," he continued

delightedly, "you must go and see the hospital train. There is something

fine for you to write your papers about...."

And truly it was a magnificent thing to see. The hospital train lay

right behind the work train now. Forty box-cars, enameled inside,

stenciled on the side with a big blue cross and the legend, "Servicio

Sanitario," handled the wounded as they came from the front. They were

fitted inside with the latest surgical appliances and manned by sixty

competent American and Mexican doctors. Every night shuttle trains

carried the seriously hurt back to the base hospitals at Chihuahua and

Parral.

We went down through San Ramon and beyond the end of the line of trees

out across the desert. It was already stinging hot. In front a snake

of rifle fire unfolded along the line, and then a machine gun,

"spat--spat--spat!" As we emerged into the open a lone Mauser began

cracking down to the right somewhere. We paid no attention to it at

first, but pretty soon we noticed that there was a little plumping sound

on the ground around us--puffs of dust flew up every few minutes.

"By God," said the photographer. "Some beggar's sniping at us."

Instinctively we both sprinted. The rifle shots came faster. It was a

long distance across the plain. After a little we reduced it to a

jog-trot. Finally we walked along, with the dust spurting up as before,

and a feeling that, after all, it wouldn't do any good to run. Then we

forgot it....

Half an hour later we crept through the brush a quarter of a mile from

the outskirts of Gomez and came upon a tiny ranch of six or eight adobe

huts, with a street running between. In the lee of one of the houses

lounged and sprawled about sixty of Contreras' ragged fighters. They

were playing cards and talking lazily. Down the street, just around the

corner, which pointed straight as a die toward the Federal positions, a

storm of bullets swept continually, whipping up the dust. These men had

been on duty at the front all night. The countersign had been "no

hats," and they were bare-headed in the broiling sun. They had had no

sleep and no food, and there wasn't any water for half a mile.