So Far From God

by John Harris

  ‘Enough for Huerta to send nothing against Sonora or Coahuila. His troops are all coming up here against you.’

  It startled Consuela to hear what Villa had said about her.

  ‘He said that if he hadn’t just married,’ Slattery smiled, ‘he’d have married you.’

  She didn’t know whether to be flattered or insulted. ‘He didn’t really mean what he said, did he? About the women going off with another man. Are they married? In front of a minister?’

  ‘Mexicans sometimes dispense with that formality.’

  She seemed out of her depth and Slattery wondered why she didn’t have the sense to go home. He bought her dinner but she sat in silence over it for a long time.

  ‘My husband’s here somewhere,’ she said eventually. ‘I met someone who saw him.’

  In Torreón they seemed cut off from the rest of the country. The bare countryside was full of men, swarming everywhere, red-eyed, campaign-worn, dishevelled and riding dust-covered horses. Though their officers held them under some degree of order they were frayed, weary and bored.

  Every train that came north brought a letter from Magdalena. Whatever happened, no matter how often the line was cut, no matter how many bridges were broken, the letters continued to arrive. She was pretending to be simply a woman writing to a man at war but reading between the lines it was clear she was lonely and missing Slattery.

  She was hoping eventually to be near the armies again, because the Stutzmann Company was due to make a trip north, performing at Querétaro, León, Guadalajara, Aguascalientes, Zacatecas and Chihuahua. Mexicans loved music and it was usually possible for theatrical companies to move about. Sometimes the fighting drifted across their routes but battles had been stopped before now to let some group of singers through.

  As Slattery studied the latest missive, Jesús appeared. He had brushed his clothes and looked clean and respectable.

  ‘Mi jefe,’ he said. ‘Don Pancho wants you at headquarters.’

  When Slattery appeared, Villa was just shooing out a group of his officers.

  ‘The little Norteamericana’s not with you?’ he said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’re not sleeping with her?’ Villa looked disbelieving. ‘She’s like a little gatito – a little kitten. I think she’d like you to. You should try.’ He gestured with his head to Slattery to follow and they walked along the track. As they passed, ragged soldiers stood up and grinned and their wives bobbed curtseys. Villa nodded and smiled and patted the heads of their children.

  He gestured at the mass of men, women, horses, vehicles, carriages, cars and ammunition limbers. The air was full of the smell of ammonia and horse manure and the stink of unwashed bodies. Above the babble of voices, the barking of dogs and the neighing of horses, they could hear guitars twanging and the sound of singing.

  ‘These are my boys,’ Villa said proudly. ‘They’re going to take Chihuahua and Juárez for me and when we’ve got them we’ve got the whole of Chihuahua State. I shall leave a brigade here with orders to retreat if they’re threatened. I’ve got all I need except ammunition.’ His big hand slapped his thigh. ‘I have only enough for one quick fight, so it’s to be hoped there’s plenty for the taking in Chihuahua.’

  ‘And me, Don Pancho?’ There was obviously a reason for the summons to headquarters.

  Villa grinned. ‘You stay here, amigo,’ he said. ‘If Carranza can put out stories about me, I’ll put out better ones. You’re going to make sure that the Norteamericano newspapermen get the right angles; what a fine fellow I am, how kind I am, how gentle, how I love children, how I made the schools open, how I enforce the liquor laws. They have a powerful anti-alcohol lobby up there. And tell them that when I control the border I intend to stop drug smuggling. That should convince them I value their friendship.’ Villa paused. ‘No need to mention the shooting of prisoners, of course.’

  ‘And your marriage, mi general? Do I tell them about that?’

  Villa looked up and gave a sheepish grin. ‘No,’ he said. ‘They’re fussy about these things in the north.’

  The great black snake of trains steamed out of Torreón the following morning and headed into the desert towards Chihuahua. Half the town had come to see them off, frock-coated officials surrounded by a mass of dusty people in a sea of sombreros that looked like a field of brown mushrooms. Consuela Lidgett stood with Slattery’s group as the trains clanked past.

  Bouquets were flung to Villa as his headquarters car rolled by. Beyond him in the shadows could be seen the frightened face of his new wife. Behind the red caboose came the hospital train, then the flat cars with his artillery and the boxcars with his supplies. Finally came the freight cars carrying the troops and their families. They travelled in three tiers, the lucky ones inside, others with their families on the roofs or clinging to the sides, and a few – mostly boys and young men – riding in hammocks slung between the wheels. Platforms had been built on the buffers and on the fronts of the engines, where families were preparing to camp out, and shelters of blankets, sarapes and umbrellas were being constructed, while fires of twigs to bake tortillas were burning on shovels, pieces of sheet steel or the lids of oil drums. As they crawled past, high-spirited men loosed off their rifles into the air and shot out windows of nearby houses.

  As the carriages and freight cars rumbled by one after the other, the wheels clack-clacking over the points, grinning brown faces beamed down at them. A group of men were singing the popular ‘Adelita’. Another group were trying to drown them with ‘La Perjura’, then on top of one of the boxcars, Slattery saw Apolinario Gomez García. He had appeared outside Slattery’s room the night before, very drunk but full of vague warnings that were difficult to decipher.

  ‘The last coach, your honour,’ he had said. ‘You will need to watch the last coach.’

  What he was trying to get across had not been clear but he seemed sober again now, wedged against a chimney protruding through the roof from a stove somewhere inside. They heard the first faint squeak of ‘La Cucaracha’ and immediately guitars took up the tune, voices joined in, men’s, women’s, children’s, until the whole string of rolling stock was singing.

  ‘La Cucaracha! La Cucaracha!

  Ya no puede caminar–’

  Men in sombreros, stetsons and képis taken from dead Federals, peóns, vaqueros, shopworkers, engineers, renegade gachupíns, men with Indian faces, Spanish faces, European and North American faces, field-hardened men, toughened mountaineers, dedicated youngsters of good breeding – they all had their heads back, roaring the rollicking words, filling the air with sound as the iron caravan coiled away in its cloud of dust into the desert.

  Then, in the windows of the last coach, just as García had warned, Slattery found himself staring at the faces of four men he had seen before, tall, straight men with stiff collars which made no concessions to the heat. One of them was Fausto Graf and immediately everything that Horrocks had told him rushed into his mind.

  Jesus, he thought, I’m behaving like one of his bloody agents! He tried to push the thought from his mind, endeavouring to convince himself it was Horrocks’ business, not his.

  Atty was watching him. ‘Bloody Germans,’ he said. ‘But they can’t do much harm in the middle of the army, can they?’

  Slattery gestured. ‘Don’t you believe it, Atty,’ he said. ‘When it comes to dirty work, Europe has this side of the Atlantic knocked into a cocked hat. We’ve been at it longer.’ He stared at the tail of the moving train and suddenly, with some force, he remembered more of Horrocks’ words in Mexico City. ‘If it comes to war, it’ll be your war as much as mine,’ and he realised he was involved, despite himself.

  ‘I’m going after them,’ he said. ‘They’ll have Villa attacking Juárez and it only needs a few shells across the border to bring the American army across the Rio Grande.’

  Seven

  The hills outside Chihuahua were full of angry, disappointed men.

  To Slattery’s surpris
e, he met wagons rolling southwards, lurching and swaying over the ruts of the uneven roads, among them stumbling soldiers, their weapons and equipment in no semblance of order, their faces sullen with all the signs of defeat. With them were their women, plodding after them in their black dresses and blue rebozos, their shoulders hunched under their loads of pots and pans and food, their children clinging to their skirts. Groups of horsemen pushed among them, slouched in the saddle, and here and there was a buggy containing the body of an officer, his sombrero over his face, dripping blood at every step of the horse. Then he passed a gun that had burst; men, horses and fragments of wheel were strewn across the ground and a corpse was caught up in a high saguaro cactus, its entrails showing, its clothes blasted off. In the arroyos were more wounded, and dead men staring with sightless eyes, flies gathering on their moustaches, the vultures wheeling in the empty sky above.

  Villa’s headquarters were at a ranch to the south of the city and, arriving dusty, thirsty and tired, Slattery found Vegas, of the Holy Trinity, sitting at a table, and no sign of anyone else.

  ‘What’s been happening?’

  ‘We’ve been beaten,’ Vegas said sourly. ‘We ran out of ammunition.’

  ‘Where is he now?’

  ‘He gave the rearguard to Herrera and disappeared with eight hundred cavalry and five hundred railwaymen on horses with tools for wrecking the track. It’s not like him to abandon his army.’

  Slattery gestured. ‘You’ve got it wrong, Vegas,’ he said. ‘He hasn’t abandoned the army. He’s decided to forget Chihuahua and gone for Juárez instead.’

  He found Villa at a small station further up the line. He was stopped two miles to the south of it by a body of horsemen armed to the teeth, who appeared first as a cloud of dust in the desert and drew to a halt in the usual Mexican fashion, in a tremendous flourish that sat the horses back on their haunches.

  ‘Where’s your general?’

  An arm was flung out. ‘Terrazas. Listening in to the Federals’ messages on the telegraph. He’s going to give those pigs of Federals in Juárez the drubbing we didn’t manage at Chihuahua.’

  Slattery kicked his horse into a trot. ‘Take me to him,’ he said.

  Terrazas was a small town of colonial houses surrounded by the adobe dwellings of the poor. There was the usual high-towered church facing the mayor’s office across a square centred by an ugly purple-and-yellow bandstand of sheet metal and cast iron, and surrounded by clubbed jacarandas in which clouds of magpies chattered. The railway ran along the outskirts and he found Villa in the telegraph office with Rodolfo Fierro, the railway expert Urbina had found, Monserrat, Preto, a few of his telegraphists and the terrified stationmaster. As Slattery appeared, Villa swung round, his face dark.

  ‘What are you doing here, inglés?’ he snapped. ‘I left you in Torreón to look after my interests.’

  ‘I’m looking after your interests here.’

  ‘I don’t need you here. Tómas Urbina picked up two ammunition trains and I’m signalling Herrera now to bring the rest of the army up. We’re going to hit Juárez from the west.’

  ‘Whose idea was that?’

  Villa’s topaz eyes blazed and his erratic temper flared. ‘What does it matter to you, inglés?’

  ‘Whose idea, Don Pancho? Was it your idea? Or did it come from the Germans?’

  Villa’s jaw dropped. ‘How did you know that? They had a plan.’

  ‘I’ll bet they did. If you attack from the west your overs will drop in El Paso.’

  Villa shrugged. ‘Everybody who attacks Juárez has overs that drop in El Paso. It’s well known. Now get out of the way and let me get on with my work.’

  ‘Listen, mi General,’ Slattery pleaded. ‘Those Germans are hoping for trouble. You want advice. I’m giving you advice.’

  ‘I don’t like your advice, inglés.’

  Slattery drew a deep breath, aware that he was doing Horrocks’ job for him and far from happy at the knowledge. ‘Like it or not,’ he said, ‘an attack on Juárez is just what the Germans want. The border’s lined with American soldiers.’

  ‘I can take on the Norteamericanos.’

  ‘Don’t delude yourself, Don Pancho. They have more ammunition than you ever dreamed about and, if you start killing people in El Paso, they’ll cross the border.’

  ‘Mexico will rise.’

  ‘It might have to, because those Germans will stir it up into an invasion. They want to get the United States involved. Carranza wants it, too, so he can point to you as the villain of the piece. You’ve become too popular.’

  The last point clearly struck home and Villa scowled. ‘I don’t understand politics.’ He was scratching his head as though trying to dig his way to the thoughts inside, frowning heavily like a peasant cheated out of his cow. He looked up at Fierro, his railway expert. ‘How long would it take to bring up the army?’

  ‘Five days. Perhaps longer.’

  ‘Very well, we’ll do it with the men we have. What have we in the way of rolling stock?’

  ‘There’s a trainload of coal from Juárez for Chihuahua.’

  Villa whirled round to the frightened stationmaster. ‘Wire Juárez that revolutionary forces are threatening the line to the south and ask if you’re to risk sending the coal train through?’

  A pistol was put at the head of the terrified telegraphist, and a message came back quickly from Juárez that there was no way of guarding the line. Villa’s message in reply, apparently originated by the stationmaster, said that two ammunition trains had arrived in Terrazas from Chihuahua but that a cloud of dust was visible to the south and was thought to be the first sight of the rebel army moving north. This time the message that came back ordered the coal train back to Juárez and gave instructions that the ammunition trains were to follow immediately behind it.

  There was a whoop of delight from the listening men and Villa grinned. ‘The door’s wide open,’ he said.

  ‘What about the Germans?’ Monserrat asked.

  Villa gestured indifferently. ‘We’ll have them shot. But not now. Later. We have things to do.’

  Slattery found the Germans in the only hotel in Terrazas. It was constructed round a patio filled with palms, and they were sitting in the shade with outstretched legs, drinking beer. Fausto Graf was with them and as Slattery appeared, he jumped to his feet. Seeing his alarm, the other Germans also rose.

  One of them, the tall, good-looking authoritative man Slattery had seen in Nogales, stepped forward. ‘I’m Franz von Raschstadt–’

  ‘I know.’ Slattery answered in German.

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Never mind who I am.’ Slattery smiled. ‘I’ve come with a warning. Because I don’t want Villa to make a fool of himself and present your country with an incident that might start trouble.’

  ‘What incident’s this?’

  ‘In about half an hour’s time, he’s going to have you all shot. I think that might make an incident, don’t you?’

  Graf stepped forward. ‘This has nothing to do with you, Englander,’ he snapped.

  ‘It seems to have a lot to do with you, Fausto, so when your friends leave, it might be as well if you leave, too. That pistol of Villa’s has a very fluky trigger.’

  Graf stared at Slattery with hot eyes and for once with no sign of a smile. Then, as the others headed into the hotel to pick up their belongings, he turned on his heel and followed them.

  When Slattery returned to the railway siding, the coal train was being emptied in a hanging cloud of black dust, its load dumped at the side of the track by men using shovels, pieces of wood, even their hands, to do the job quickly. Further along, freight cars from the ammunition trains had been shunted into the siding and were also being emptied. Alongside them ramps were hurriedly built of planks and horses led up, then dusty companies of men began to march in. There was no order in their dress or in their drill, and they were led by boys of eighteen in peón cotton or captains of sixty-five in leggings, spats
, wing-collars, waistcoats and watch-chains.

  ‘See that the telegraph’s cut both ways, Rudolfo,’ Villa ordered and Fierro’s men began to wrench out the telegraphic equipment and other men on horses were sent along the track with reatas to tear down the wires. Firemen sweated over the furnaces of the locomotives and steam began to hiss.

  ‘How far away is it, inglés?’ Villa asked.

  ‘Four hours.’

  ‘We shall arrive just after midnight. Get aboard.’

  Grinning excitedly, dark-faced men waited alongside the solitary line that stretched away into flat infinity through a desert purple with evening light. Its open gondolas now filled with men already black from the residue of its cargo, the coal train jerked into movement. As it clunked its way over the points, the other trains followed, the boxcars lurching, scared-looking drivers leaning from the cabs, armed Villistas behind them holding cocked revolvers. As they jolted into motion, Slattery pulled himself aboard the last wagon.

  Ciudad Juárez appeared earlier than they had expected and the leading train came to a halt on the flat plain just to the south. Men scrambled down to stare at the lights of the city in the distance and the brighter lights of El Paso just across the Rio Grande.

  ‘Is it true, mi Coronel,’ someone asked wistfully, ‘that Americans eat meat every day?’

  Villa called a conference alongside the track, standing in the pale yellow light from the caboose he was using as his headquarters.

  ‘Work back from here,’ he told Fierro. ‘Tear up the rails and destroy all culverts and bridges, I want no reinforcements coming up until we’re ready to meet them.’

  As Fierro disappeared, Villa gestured to the distant lights. ‘We’ll do it quietly,’ he said. ‘The less damage there is, the more El Paso will like us. You’ve all been here before. So you know where the barracks are and where the jail is. I want them taken quickly.’

  As they rolled into the yards in Juárez there were only the yellow lights in the huts of the track workers to be seen. Here and there an occasional figure moved and an occasional voice called out. As the trains drew to a halt, nobody took the slightest notice of them, then, as the brakes squeaked, doors rumbled open and men in full fighting equipment and covered from neck to waist in ammunition slipped to the track. Quiet orders got them moving. The trains had been signalled and nothing was suspected and, picking up the step, the ragged companies began to push through the town.