The Battle of Tomochic_The Battle of Tomochic Memoirs of a Second Lieutenant

by Heriberto Frías

  Against all odds, Cruz persisted, his will unbroken. Stalwart in his faith, he persevered alongside the decaying corpses of the latest victims.

  CHAPTER 35

  Chabolé from Sonora

  Sporting a felt hat, twill jacket, and gray kerchief, the general paced back and forth beneath a small wooden archway in the Medrano dwelling. Pensive and restless, he beat the ground nervously with his staff.

  Sometimes he chatted with Dr. Arellano and Lieutenant Méndez, while the Hotchkiss cannon, placed behind an adobe wall, aimed at Cruz Chávez.

  It was necessary to take possession of the house once and for all. Otherwise they would have to wait until the last defender died of exhaustion or starvation to wind up this bloody expedition.

  The general, speaking privately with several officers, admitted that he had never come up against such formidable foes in his long life waging campaigns. By way of comparison, a regiment of Zouave Indians had more than proved their mettle during the French invasion, and then there were the Indians from Juchitán, Oaxaca. In fact, both compared to the Tomochic fighters, now a force of no more than twenty-five.

  Compassion for the remaining families inspired the general to attempt once more to force those haughty men to surrender; he would convince them that their obstinacy was not only cruel but blasphemous as well. Soon enough, he found that it was useless. He knew only too well that inside the Cruz barracks lives would not be spared. Whoever entered with that in mind would pay dearly. “Let Chabolé try to reason with them,” he decided.

  Chabolé was an old Indian chief from the Sonoran mountains, a fearless hunter of men and beasts. Give him a bit of pinole, a bottle of bacanora,1 a loaded rifle, and he could do sixty miles a day at a fast clip through the mountains. Indeed, he and Cruz were well acquainted, having led mule teams to the U.S. border in amicable smuggling operations.

  “Chabolé, would you try to talk to Cruz?” asked General Rangel as soon as the Indian appeared.

  “Of course, general. On the double!”

  Without further ado, the general imparted his instructions and Chabolé propped his rifle against the wall, along with the proffered bottle of sotol, and asked the first soldier he encountered to guard it for him. Then, to the astonishment of the entire camp, he serenely set off in the direction of enemy headquarters.

  The Tomochic fighters permitted Chabolé to approach their half-destroyed fence. With a leap worthy of an acrobat, the old Indian jumped it and disappeared from view. After twenty minutes, fraught with high anxiety for those who had witnessed him disappear, Chabolé reappeared as calmly as he set out. Whistling a tune from his homeland as he approached the general, the old Indian shook his head and said, “They won’t give in until God takes their last breath away.”

  Here is an account of that meeting.

  When Chabolé reached the “little barracks,” they shouted from within, “In the name of the great power of God, what do you want?”

  Without a moment’s hesitation, Chabolé retorted, “Listen, Cruz! Cruz! Do you hear me in there? It’s Chabolé! I’ve come to embrace you, offer you a drink, and tell you to surrender!”

  “Come on in, then!” came the response.

  Chabolé waited for the door to be pushed open a crack. He entered, but the place was so dark he could hardly see a thing.

  “Embrace me then, and give me the drink!” He heard Cruz say without losing a beat. While the two embraced in the dim light, the brave emissary noted that the openings in the wall had been covered. In that reeking purgatory there was no air and no light; corpses and wounded men lay in piles, and he heard women moaning and praying.

  Chabolé felt Cruz take the bottle from him and heard him drink from it. Then, pushing Chabolé gently toward the door where the two comrades stood, Cruz said, “Okay, get out of here. Tell them we’re not surrendering! First our Father in heaven will have to take our souls, and only then will the sons of Lucifer be able to take our bodies.”

  That afternoon an unexpected event caused a stir in camp. Among the prisoners who had emerged from Cruz’s that morning was a public security forces soldier who had fallen into their hands on October 2. He had betrayed his own to go over to the enemy side. Traitor! Along with the others, the unfortunate man had put up a desperate fight in Cruz’s home.

  Using the pretext of looking in on some comrades, he had managed to get to the prisoners shed. Pleading with them not to rat on him, he waited along with the Tomochic prisoners for help to arrive. But the prisoners were indignant and informed on him. After a brief war council he was summarily sentenced to death.

  At 4:30 in the afternoon the cowardly traitor faced the firing squad. After the military salute rang out, he was executed. Nobody pitied him. The women did not pray for his soul or invoke the Virgin of Guadalupe, and Cruz of Tomochic did not offer him a place in heaven.

  CHAPTER 36

  The Last Blaze

  The posts of the previous night were occupied again, and Miguel was sent to a wing of the ruined church that had once served as a convent.

  That day a damp, cold wind blew from the north on clouds billowing in a sky that was growing darker by the moment, an infinitely sad afternoon. A light rain began to fall on the gray, deserted valley. Thick smoke escaped through the broken beams of the church roof to mix with the clouds. The desolation rivaled the silence of death.

  Miguel found decaying corpses on the path between the Medrano dwelling and the church. The hogs had torn them from limb to limb. A fetid stench filled the air. Flesh and clothing were completely covered with mud, and at first sight it was impossible to tell which band the corpses belonged to.

  The section posted to guard the “little barracks” from behind the old convent walls came to a halt in the church courtyard while the rain poured down heavily. The lieutenant who commanded Mercado’s section divided up his forces and ordered Miguel to lead several men toward the areas to the far left, which had already been destroyed. There, smoke no longer emanated from the roofless walls, whereas the dwellings adjacent to the church still smoldered in the rain.

  The intense odor of rotting flesh led the second lieutenant to a pile of half-burned bodies that obstructed a doorway his troops had to pass through. First they hauled the corpses over a kind of bridge created with a section of beam, which the men then used to reach their destination and pass through the old rooms of the ancient cloisters. In a bygone era when mining thrived in these mountains, the Jesuits had constructed the convent in their efforts to colonize the Tarahumara Indians.

  To the eyes of the hypersensitive officer, the ruins under the dull gray sky were cold and closed as a mausoleum. Although sometimes drawn to suicide, the second lieutenant was horrified by the senseless slaughter. What a grotesque afternoon: the freezing rain pelting down on the piles of rotting corpses and the smoldering remains of buildings that had been razed to the ground.

  Violent gusts of glacial wind cut into the livid faces of the mute, despondent soldiers like knives. Wrapped in their blue greatcoats with their hoods pulled tight around their heads, they advanced slowly as monks in a doomed procession onto the grounds of the devastated, smoldering church. They meant to relieve a small detachment composed of men from the Eleventh who had been stacking corpses and then burning them with beams and rotten boards. However, this dark task turned out to be horribly ineffectual. They had also punched openings in the remaining standing walls and positioned soldiers behind each chink.

  Now it was dark and Miguel was overcome with fatigue. He felt nauseated. He had a terrible taste in his mouth and a pain in his heart, and he was numb with cold. Soaked through and through, he sat down on a rock and observed the structure in front of him with increasing terror. Through sheer force of will, he managed to tame his fear.

  The darkness was thick as paste. In the distance the faint aura of red eruptions and constellations of sparks were visible. Sometimes faint sounds could be discerned too: a piece of roof falling to earth, a wall collapsing, a beam giving w
ay.

  At eight o’clock the bugles broke the silence of that dark, rainy night, and the call echoed back and forth twenty times through the valley’s invisible contours. Huddling next to the bugler in a corner, Miguel couldn’t help nodding off. Then he would startle awake nervously, afraid of being caught dozing or being attacked by the enemy.

  It rained and rained. It was still raining at two o’clock in the morning, the hour when the cold became unendurable. A few of those wretched boys began to whimper piteously as though their feet had already gone numb with gangrene.

  Finally, at dawn, strong winds swept away the clouds and the rain let up, allowing the troops to light raging bonfires. After drying and warming themselves, the men took out their rations of meat to roast in the flames.

  Soon the general’s adjutant arrived with orders for the troops to seize the “little barracks” at ten o’clock that morning. The men occupying the church were to stay put and remain alert. Their only role was to make sure that the enemy didn’t slip through the line of fire as they tried to flee.

  Miguel prepared to witness the assault through the openings carved into the old convent walls. He felt himself becoming accustomed to every excess of horror, inured to all of it. Dispassionately he observed the smoldering ruins and even the pile of corpses. It was awe-inspiring yet familiar, like an impressive mountain range, a waterfall, or the rhythmic beating of the waves against the shore.

  In Cruz’s house the mortal silence that had reigned for the past few days continued. The young second lieutenant observed groups of soldiers lugging barrels of fuel, kindling, and dry branches. It reminded him of the assault on the church. Then the cannon in the Medrano dwelling fired three times. The assault! When the signal to attack was sounded, the soldiers rushed forward crying, “Long live the 11th Battalion.” Carrying fuel and torches, they made a run for the “little barracks,” where the openings in the walls filled with gunpowder. A few shots were fired in return.

  Creeping along the fence that surrounded the “little barracks,” the assailants crouched behind a pile of rocks to answer the gunfire, aiming at the openings in the wall in an attempt to quell the resistance. Then they charged, yelling slogans to arouse the soldiers. “Long live the 11th Battalion. Viva Mexico!”

  As usual, from behind walls pockmarked with bullets, came the retorts, which promised death and retribution, sowing terror among the troops. “Long live the great power of God! Long live Holy Mary. Let the Eleventh come forward!”

  While the troops’ heavy gunfire bombarded the adobe bricks, three soldiers charged the corner of the house and began to climb to the roof. One on top of the other they grabbed at the loose bricks, lodging their knees in the crevices. When the first man hoisted himself up to the twenty-foot-high rooftop with his bloody hands, the men below broke out in wild bravos and vivas though it remained eerily quiet inside Cruz’s house. Occasionally a few shots and shouts broke the silence.

  Still, the assailants were apprehensive and momentarily vacillated. Then the first man to reach the rooftop held a hand out to the others, then those to still others. Steel pickaxes were handed up that the men used to open holes in the roof. Then the officers hefted themselves up, and a corporal tore down the flag waving on a pole along the edge of a wall. Soldiers on the ground threw torches, sticks and weeds, dry kindling, and fuel to their comrades above. The men lit them and then flung the burning bundles through the gaping hole in the roof, creating cascades of fire inside Cruz’s dwelling.

  Inside, the besieged were mute, hardly responding to the attack at all. Every now and again they fired a few rounds up the chimney. But the assailants redoubled their fire, spewing their blind bullets down the chimney chute and creating a horrific dull crackle.

  Fetid black smoke wafted up out of the perforated roof. All gunfire ceased. Feeling the rooftop creak beneath their weight, the soldiers on top jumped to the ground. This time the Tomochic fighters had missed their mark.

  Hunger and fire vanquished that impenetrable fortress. It was understood by all that anyone left inside the inferno was taking his last breath. At that point, the reveille sounded at general headquarters, reiterated by the different tones of the bugles that signaled the end of the campaign. In the midst of ruins, sadness, and ashes, in a valley rotting with smoldering graves and unburied dead, the bugles’ vigorous martial notes rang out dismally.

  The campaign was over. The last stronghold burned, engulfed in whistling flames fanned by the morning winds. The bugles’ disorderly reveilles vibrated convulsively one after the other in the cold air, their thunderous martial joy contrasting darkly with the devastated landscape. Divisions of soldiers with improvised stretchers arrived at Cruz’s house, where the flames were rising higher. The soldiers smashed the door with pickaxes, and a few Pima Indians made it inside that furnace. When they reemerged, blackened by smoke and ash, they carried the wounded Tomochic fighters in their arms like slabs of meat: semiconscious, bloody, half-charred human meat.

  In the distance, a few soldiers from the Eleventh, the Twenty-fourth, and the corps of irregulars from Chihuahua mutely observed the tragic progress of the flames as they engulfed Tomochic’s last bastion. As the wounded were brought out of the flaming house, a number of the men helped accommodate them on stretchers.

  An officer arrived on horseback with a communiqué from General Rangel for the captain of the Eleventh (who had commanded the attack on the “little barracks”): as many lives as possible, especially among the women, were to be saved.

  Once again the courageous soldiers shone brilliantly, displaying great compassion and heroism as they rescued the wounded in the most desperate of circumstances. While most of the Tomochic fighters died on contact with the cold air of the valley, others, breathing their last, gazed at their conquerors out of glassy, unseeing eyes. The strongest among them used their last strength to defy; sitting up, their arms held high, they waved their clenched fists menacingly at the soldiers. Some even managed to yell feebly, “Long live the power of God! Death to the soldiers!”

  The corpses were tossed onto a pile and set afire with flaming beams. The wounded were transported on stretchers to the intact porch of a nearby dwelling. Not a single Tomochic fighter managed to walk on his own two feet. The four or five among them who weren’t wounded were so weakened by hunger, fever, and thirst that they soon fainted, falling heavily to the earth.

  The general refused to witness the terrifying spectacle. He sent the chief of the field hospital to take official notes on the disaster—to record why sending medics would be unnecessary. To take the last redoubt of the chief of Tomochic, they had waited until the death throes of its last defenders.

  CHAPTER 37

  Long Live Death!

  Their faces ashen, the remaining seven Tomochic fighters lay face up under the porch, twisting and turning, drawing their final breaths. They had been placed perpendicular to the blackened wall, as though lined up for the dissecting room or displayed in a morgue. With their sightless, glazed expressions they seemed to be contemplating the grandeur of their beloved, sacred valley extending gloomily beyond them.

  One woman lay wrapped in charred, stinking tatters that left her partially exposed. So, a woman had fought as well! With her thin, knobby arms outstretched, her hands scorched from gunpowder, the woman was taking her last breath. A bloody rosary could be seen beneath the empty black cartridge belt that crossed her naked breast.

  A long tangle of frizzy curls framing his exposed head, the great chieftain, the heroic pontiff, lay at her side, his lanky body inert, one leg in the shape of a twisted rag, one arm bound in a large, blood-stained blue dressing. His black beard covered a thin, haughty face, making his aquiline nose seem even more imposing. Even among the thick skinned, this spectacle would have inspired profound pity, immense admiration.

  There he was. Sublimely, in the tragic attitude of a heroic gladiator, Cruz languished between his wife and a brother who had died of nothing more heroic than starvation. Well, that
’s what Miguel saw as he passed by with his troops.

  Then the officer averted his gaze to avoid seeing living men in their death throes. How he wished they were already dead! Having thought himself inured to any and all horror, even Miguel had to look away.

  “Oh, those pathetic men, second lieutenant, sir. How pitiful!” said a sergeant, his voice full of emotion.

  “Yes, truly pathetic!” answered the second lieutenant.

  As soon as the “little barracks” began to burn, the camp erupted in an outpouring of enthusiasm, shouting, and peals of laughter. It was the end of Tomochic! No more fear, no more exhaustion. There would be no more fighting. It was over! And they would be able to proudly tell their stories in the days to come: I fought at Tomochic!

  The sotol was passed from hand to hand. High on their triumph, the troops—officers, locals, and soldiers—toasted their units and their commanders, their divisions, the Sonoran nationals, General Rangel, General Porfirio Díaz, and the government. They also drank to their dead and wounded … and to the souls of the Tomochic fighters.

  With a stunned expression on his face, a somber Second Lieutenant Mercado contemplated the far horizon and the surrounding mountains, the dazzling blue sky stained here and there by smoke from the fires below. The Cruz dwelling was burning, and the surrounding houses were in ruins; in the distance, the indifferent river gurgled. At camp, Mercado was surrounded on all sides by the tumultuous sounds of the officers, Indians, and soldiers celebrating victory.

  Then a gunshot sounded nearby, then another and another. The din ceased and was followed by a leaden silence. Coming back to reality as though from a long, confused dream, Miguel stood up. “What’s happening?” he asked an officer who was whistling the tune to a lively zarzuela under his breath.