by John Harris
As they headed away from Juárez towards a village called San Pedro Solitario where Villa was making his headquarters, Magdalena was watching from the crowd and saw the big Studebaker go by. She was elegant in purple with a magnificent hat and veil that were completely out of place in the dusty barbarism of the plain. Hermann Stutzmann was with her and, without turning, she spoke over her shoulder to him.
‘He’s gone, Hermann. I dressed up for him and he didn’t even see me.’
‘He’s a soldier, Magdalena.’ Stutzmann was a kind man and was always concerned for the members of his company. He had cared for them through a variety of crises and Magdalena had always been a favourite.
‘He sent a letter,’ he added.
As the motor car vanished, she stared after it for a while then her eyes misted over and she blew her nose.
‘You can’t hold a letter in your arms,’ she whispered.
During the drive south, Slattery learned that Villa had come up with the Federals at Tierra Blanca as he had planned, just in time to deny them the water tanks, and the following morning news arrived that the battle had started. As the information spread, San Pedro became a hotbed of excitement, the newspapermen already on the move, clambering into automobiles and swinging away in a cloud of dust.
By the following day they learned that the Federals, desperate for water, had tried to attack on the opposite end of the front but had been forced back a second time by an army that was well supplied with food and ammunition from Juárez and possessed water in abundance. Already Americans were crossing the international bridge from El Paso with loads of blankets, medicine and money, and private cars were arriving in streams with supplies and volunteer nurses.
There were uneasy rumours, however, that twelve troop trains had been sent up from Chihuahua with reserves for a tremendous final push to take Tierra Blanca. The telegraphist at the station had information that the trains had already left.
A group of Villista officers were crouched over the key in the telegraph office watching the operator’s pencil as he demanded news, and at headquarters men arrived on horses and in cars to consult with others bent over maps. Then Villa arrived, dusty from the battle, his clothes splashed with blood. Even as his horse, ridden to the point of collapse, its flanks smeared with froth, was led away in a stumbling walk, he was issuing orders, gathering up reserves and despatching them to the fighting. Seeing Slattery, he made an angry movement with his hand.
‘Fierro,’ he said. ‘He needs help.’
It took only a few minutes to find Atty and raise a troop of reliable men, then the whole lot roared out of town, lashing at their mounts with reins, whips, hats, anything they possessed. Despite the fact that they were supposed to know and respect horseflesh, the Mexicans always drove their animals to the limit, indifferent if they dropped dead at the end of a heart-straining gallop.
Swinging to the west, they found Fierro’s train with its wrecking equipment behind a rise in the ground. Ahead of it, in a long narrow bowl of land surrounded by low hills, the track had been torn up for half a mile and all the telegraph wires pulled down. Fierro’s men were waiting, the horses and pack mules they had transported by train behind them as they watched the plain.
Below them, beyond the gap in the track, eleven of the twelve troop trains that had been reported were standing one behind the other, their locomotives dribbling smoke and steam. Alongside them, men had already started to work among the displaced rails and torn-up ties with crowbars and sledge hammers. The engine of the leading train had been disconnected and was moving backwards and forwards, steam jetting in noisy blasts as it dragged the heavy rails into place.
Fierro was frowning deeply and Atty spoke in that flat, disinterested way he had. ‘Orozco once stopped a trainload of reinforcements with one locomotive,’ he said.
Fierro’s head jerked round and his eyes glittered as his railwayman’s mind understood at once. He was a dangerous brute who took a delight in killing, but he was also a railwayman and knew everything there was to know about locomotives, rolling stock and track.
‘Go south, inglés,’ he said to Slattery. ‘The telegraphist at Tierra Blanca said the last train had been held up with hot axle boxes. Let us know when it appears. We might just have time.’
Circling the stalled trains, from the summit of a small hill to the south Slattery’s group saw the smoke of the twelfth train appear over a rise in the contour of the land. Riding back, they found the railwaymen had also bypassed the halted Federals and were swarming across the track at a point where it ran through a narrow gulley in the hills. They were blocking the rails with logs and rocks and, even as Slattery and his men arrived, Fierro gestured and the railwaymen began to withdraw beyond the lips of the gulley.
As the train came in sight, the railwaymen gripped their weapons, their teeth bared in anticipation. It drew nearer, the driver’s head visible, then there was a shout and the screech of brakes being applied. As the locomotive halted at the barrier, men jumped to the track to investigate and the crash of Fierro’s volley dropped every one of them.
The Federal conscripts immediately began to throw down their weapons and fling up their hands. A few officers tried to organise a defence but the soldiers ignored them and within a quarter of an hour the train was in Fierro’s hands and he had the officers, hatless, weaponless, with blood on their clothes, lined up alongside the track.
‘Shoot them,’ he ordered.
One of them started forward. ‘You can’t shoot me,’ he said. ‘I’m German.’
He was only young and Slattery had seen him more than once with Fausto Graf. ‘He’s German all right,’ he agreed.
Fierro was indifferent. ‘In that case,’ he said, ‘he shouldn’t be here. Shoot him twice.’
As the protesting man was dragged away, squads of men were already sweating to remove the barricade and shift boxes and sacks from the pack mules to the tender of the big locomotive. The remaining men were split into two parties and sent off in a swirl of dust behind the slopes to east and west. As Fierro climbed into the cab with the driver, the train began to move.
Halting the train again at a point where they could see the trains on the track below, Fierro set his men to unloading the boxes and sacks from the tender and lashing them to the cowcatcher of the locomotive.
‘Dynamite,’ he grinned.
In a long snake, the eleven trains on the plain were still stationary, engineers and trackworkers swarming across the rails. The troops were keeping out of sight in the coaches to avoid the sun, and the noise of the skirmish beyond the hill had been drowned beneath the shouting, the clang of hammers, the whistling of the locomotives and the roaring of steam.
As Fierro gestured with his pistol, the driver climbed back into his cab with his fireman. Fierro climbed up with him.
‘Vamonos!’
Steam screeched, wheels spun and the train jerked forward, Fierro’s men cantering alongside to the top of the rise. As Fierro shouted for full throttle, the train began to gather speed and the crew jumped from the cab. Fierro was the last to leave. Picking himself up, he mounted a horse led forward by one of his men.
‘Now, inglés,’ he said. ‘Watch. That last coach down there contains explosives.’
The troop trains were still motionless, engine to caboose, engine to caboose, for nearly a mile along the track. The captured train was still moving behind a curve of the land out of sight, gathering speed all the time so that when it finally burst into view, smoke rolling backwards in a coiling grey ribbon, it was rocking wildly in a mad charge down the slope.
As it appeared, figures began to boil out of the coaches in the plain. They heard the clank of couplings and the shriek of steam as the rearmost locomotive jolted forward. But it could go no more than fifty yards before it came up against the rear coach of the train immediately in front. Men began to gesture wildly and the train ahead moved forward in a frantic attempt to make room, only to run into the rear end of the train ahead. The whe
els of the caboose lifted from the track and they saw dust and stones flung up as the rails twisted. By now, men were starting to run, scattering into the desert among the cactus and mesquite. As the oncoming engine smashed into the last coach of the last stationary train, locomotive and coach reared up in a thunder of crashing iron and roaring steam, then the whole desert split apart in a sheet of flame. A terrific jolt shook the earth, sending a gale of hot air across the plain, and the running men were felled by the blast as a huge coil of dense black smoke filled with flashes of orange leapt skywards and began to spread outwards in a vast mushroom. The explosions blended into one long howl and flames flew along the wrecked trains like the gush of a blow lamp. Their nostrils caught by the peppery smell of explosives, the watching men round Fierro were caught by a vast hot breath as if they were staring into a furnace.
Huge steel wheels hurtled through the air with fragments of wood and human flesh and showered down among the running men, thudding to the earth in puffs of dust. Planks from the shattered boxcars were coming down like leaves, sliding through the air as they fell.
‘María, Madre de Dios,’ someone breathed. ‘Holy Mother of God!’
It was a sight Slattery knew he would remember all his life.
For a long time nobody moved, as if the shock of explosion had paralysed them, then the men who had bolted for the safety of the desert began to turn back to drag their injured comrades from the wreckage.
Fierro laughed. ‘It’s time to go,’ he said.
The whole desert below seemed to be filled with panic-stricken voices as the swarm of armed railwaymen swung down, yelling and whooping. More horsemen appeared in a rush from behind the slopes to right and left, waving rifles, swords and machetes, and the Federals began to tear at the debris in a frantic search for dropped weapons. But the explosion had shattered every scrap of order and the Villistas were among them immediately. As they scattered, another wave of men from Villa’s army at Tierra Blanca, alerted by Fierro’s messenger, swept out of the hills in that direction.
Unable to advance or retreat, caught on every side, the Federals were flung aside like chaff, only the officers managing to move backwards in an orderly fashion. Within moments, however, they were scattered too and the Villistas were galloping among the running men at full speed as if they had gone raving mad, screaming, shooting, slicing with their weapons at anyone within reach. A young officer, trapped at the side of the wreckage, was caught by Fierro who swung his horse in a cloud of red dust and put his revolver close to the boy’s head and pulled the trigger. The headless corpse was flung back against the side of a tilted coach.
Men were charging through the trains now, flinging things out – mattresses, quilts, blankets, clothes, equipment, uniforms, bodies. A group of hysterical women who, confident of the outcome, had been accompanying the officers to watch the battle, were trying to flee and the Villistas were snatching at them, tearing at their clothes and hair as they shrieked for mercy. One of them, no more than a girl, was being heaved towards the scrub by a huge man in a ragged uniform, his face twisted in a great grin.
The only real resistance came from a group in one of the carriages in the centre of the line of trains who fought back bravely until one of the railwaymen, crawling along the track between the wheels, planted a charge and the whole carriage went up in a shower of splinters, shattered planks, torn metal and flying glass.
The slaughter went on until the desert was splashed with blood, the scrub and sand marked with bright red blotches, with pools where men huddled in the grotesque attitudes of death. Scraps of uniform fluttered from the spikes of cactus where they had been flung and the gritty earth was covered with abandoned equipment, weapons and corpses beneath a cloud of vultures which wheeled in the empty sky.
Only slowly did the massacre subside and the shouting and screaming die, to leave a few bewildered prisoners and a few sobbing half-clothed women sitting alongside the twisted iron and splintered wood of the wreckage, their whimpers dulled by the hissing of steam, their shapes blurred by the rolling smoke from the burning carnages.
Slattery hadn’t moved from the hill and for a long time he remained where he was, watching the rout. His face was grim and his mind was full of Magdalena, full of a bleak knowledge that he had broken his promise to her in exchange for this horror going on below him in the plain. He had broken promises to her all along the way, too many promises, too many trusts. And uneasily, through his feeling that he had betrayed her, came the feeling that his involvement as a soldier of fortune owing allegiance to Villa and the revolution ran counter to the interests of his own country. In serving Villa, was he failing to serve Britain? Horrocks seemed to think so.
By his side, Atty watched, his face as blank as ever, suffering none of Slattery’s doubts. The idea of using the train as a moving bomb was not new, but Mexican vengefulness, Mexican indifference to death, Mexican thoroughness when it came to murder, had carried it far beyond his original conception.
The roadbed had been turned into a blackened smoking hole for fifty yards, scattered with torn rails, scorched sleepers and the twisted wreckage of locomotives and coaches. For fifty yards on either side there were bodies and fragments of bodies, some with their clothing and hair burned away, the few survivors holding their heads and weeping in the middle of a charred wasteland. The few trees had been stripped of their foliage, the brush was scorched, and the track was contorted as if a giant hand had wrenched it up.
For a long time, Slattery stared at the scene. His behaviour, he knew, always gave the impression of enormous self-confidence, but he had often been unsure of himself in the maelstrom of Mexican politics and their impact on Europe. Throughout his life he had always acted on impulse and he suddenly began to suspect that his self-assertiveness was not sureness but sprang from an uncertainty that made him an easy victim of circumstances.
Desperately aware of his limitations, he shifted restlessly in the saddle. Atty was studying him now, willing always to go along with him with a courage and a loyalty he sometimes felt he couldn’t match. Drawing a deep breath, he straightened his back and kicked his horse to a walk, then together he and Atty rode slowly towards the plain, moving in silence through the grinning victors and their wretched victims.
Part Three
One
San Pedro Solitario was full of wounded men, every house crammed with them out of the sweeping dust, the lightly-hurt propped up in doorways away from the wind, the village women forming a procession of black-clad figures to carry water for them from the stream. The Villistas were still celebrating the victory with dancing in the streets when a horseman came tearing into the town in a cloud of dust. As he drew to a stop, his exhausted animal collapsed with a crash, its nostrils blowing out pink froth. Scrambling to his feet, the rider ran in a stumbling gait towards Villa who had driven in to savour his success.
‘They’ve abandoned Chihuahua City!’ he yelled.
For a long time Villa was silent, staring at his feet, then, as he looked up at Slattery, he drew a deep breath. His face was expressionless, devoid of triumph. ‘They’ll not come back,’ he said.
While the newspapermen were still fighting in a frantic mob to get their despatches away from Tierra Blanca where the sole telegraphist was wilting under the pressure, Atty Purkiss brought a letter to Slattery.
‘Found it on one of the bodies,’ he said. ‘Fair chap. Not a Mexican.’
It was in German and, addressed to Reserve Lieutenant Erhardt Odebrett, welcomed him to Mexico City.
‘I wonder if there was one on every train,’ Atty said.
When Villa returned to Juárez, Slattery and Atty travelled with him, the Studebaker lashed to a flat car. There was no sign of Magdalena or the Stutzmann company. Only Stutzmann himself remained, pale and nervous.
‘They’ve crossed the border,’ he said. ‘We’re doing El Balcon de Palacio in Houston. It’s Magdalena they listen to. Not me. Not the chorus. They become rowdy when the men appear and shout,
“Go away, it’s the girls we want.”’
‘Where’s Magdalena now?’
‘In El Paso.’ The fat tenor, older than he looked fished in his pocket and produced an envelope. ‘She left you a letter.’
It was a chilly little epistle, offering no solace, no comfort, but also demanding no explanations, simply stating where she was going and no more. It ended with a cold comment ‘War seems more to you than civilisation’.
‘Nothing else?’
‘Nothing, my friend.’
Slattery’s face was blank as he screwed up the note. He was disillusioned by the butchery he had witnessed. Magdalena had been right. Though Villa was neither the hearty Robin Hood the newspapermen made him out to be nor the evil sadist of the staider journals, there were too many ruthless killers among his lieutenants, too many men noted for their indifference to the sanctity of human life. Civil war, Slattery decided, wasn’t for him. The cruelty he’d seen had been appalling, the dishonesty and corruption shocking. His venture into mercenary soldiering had been short and he had reached the conclusion that it wasn’t to his taste.
When they reached Chihuahua City the Villistas were already running the telephone exchange, the flour mills and the waterworks. Big-hatted, leather-legginged men hung about with weapons were keeping the slaughterhouses open, and others, equally well armed, were sweeping the streets. The charro cavalry, more used to leaping into one of Villa’s golpes terrificos, those tremendous mounted charges which had so often swept the enemy from the field, had been sent to the confiscated ranchos in the countryside around, with orders to see the city stockyards were kept supplied with meat.
Political prisoners had been freed, schools were being established and the unemployed were being given free passes for the railway to help them find work. To pay for everything Villa had imposed a tax on foreign industry. Foreign industry didn’t like it but foreign industry was always pointedly ignored by the revolutionary leaders.
