This Way Slaughter

by Bruce Olds

  The Plea

  To: Major-General Sam Houston, whereabouts unknown

  From: The Commandancy,

  H.Q. of the Fort of the Alamo, Bejar

  Sir,

  At present I have 200 men here más o menos. The enemy has between three & six thousand who presently encircle us on all sides. It is critical therefore that all aid be hastened to me with due presteza, AHORA! even as I am determined come what may to hold out to the last extremity, hasta el ultimo extremo. I have held out, am holding out still, will, god willing, continue to hold out so long as there remains a breath in my body, but, Sir, I cannot hold out much longer.

  If I am overpowered, if this place is overrun, those of us who fall a sacrifice at the shrine of our country, el santuario de nuestro país, demand—nay, cry out in reproach from our graves—that our memory be afforded justice.

  I have fortified this place & will continue to fortify it as I am able to which efforts may rightly be ascribed our having thus far lost not a single man & this despite by last count there having fallen inside our works no less than 217 shells. The enemy’s bombardment continues night & day without let-up or lull.

  I wish I could report, Sir, that the spirits of my men remain doughty & high but despite my most animated efforts they are in fact plunged in the infernal depths of such melancholy as I seldom have witnessed. The mood here surpasses mere gloom. It now is devilish dark & hourly only deepens.

  I rely, Sir, upon you alone for aid & unless it arrives soon I shall be left no alternative but to fight the enemy upon his own terms. But while I will not shrink from doing so with the determined valor, dauntless vigor & desperate courage exemplified by our forefathers at Lexington & Concord, at Valley Forge, upon the fields of Chalmette Plantation & while I am confident that my men however dispirited at present will when the moment of the Last Struggle ensues acquit themselves honorably though they be sacrificed upon the vengeful altar of a most gothic enemy whose victory I vow to render so dear that much as General Pyrrhus’s at Asculum it will augur worse for him than defeat, still it is impossible to overstate the necessity of your flying to our defence upon the instant.

  Should this be effected with right dispatch this neighborhood may yet be cleansed of an enemy who would sooner murder en masse its inhabitants & render of mi Tejas querido, un desierto residuos perfecto, than cede them their earned & rightful place in this the adopted land of their heartsong’s choosing. How much better you must agree to meet the enemy here & now than to suffer later his savaging unto the smoke of the burning dwellings & keening of the famished children of our settlements in the colonies where abideth our most precious mothers, wives, sisters, daughters & innocent babes.

  Presently a blood-red banner waves ominously from the church of Bejar betokening the enemy’s resolve to put to the sword all “rebels & pirates”—for such is how it pleases him to slander us—should we fail to surrender at discretion. I will not surrender. His threats have no influence on me save to further steel my own resolve to fight with the high-souled courage of the patriot willing to die like a warrior in defense of his own honor & that of his country & if it should fall to my lot to be abandoned here, left a bloody martyr to the indifference of my fellowman, I shall accept it as my fate however unmerited.

  For the past 24 hours despite a cramping of my hand so disabling that I am scarce able to grip my quill I have been engaged muy furioso in writing to the people of Gonzales, of San Felipe, of Goliad, of Refugio, of Washington-on-the-Brazos, as well as a la Gente de Tejas y Todos los Americanos en el Mundo. Meanwhile the enemy continues to approximate his works to ours. Each hour he inches closer & I have every reason to apprehend an attack in force at any moment. Therefore, Sir, I implore you by happy home & altar free to heed our plea & hasten on all assistance—as your duty no less than simple humanity demands—in the name of La Sagrada Causa so dear to us all.

  Rally to our relief boys! Give me help, O my country! Or let the deaths of those friends & neighbors you deemed fit to forsake in their hour of direst need haunt you for what remains of your días disminuyó even as my words & the ash of the bones with which they were written rebuke you & my country for your cruel neglect & the callous indifference that murdered us all.

  I have instructed the bearer of this appeal should he succeed in escaping through the enemy’s lines to provide more detail inclusive of the prostration of Col.

  Bowie, latterly my co-commander here.

  We remain as one body united a band of brothers, a single crew bound heart & hand to resist until our bodies & properties lie coffered in one common ruin.

  Should you fail us, we are lost.

  God and Tejas! Victory or Death!!

  Here the North Wall

  and there the Near Wall

  and here the South Wall

  and there the Far Wall

  and here the East Wall

  and there the Opposite Wall

  and here the West Wall

  reading what is written in tears upon each in their turn:

  No way out, a thousand ways in, Abandon hope, all ye who enter here

  That which in inclining distress we witnessed day after day in every direction was their incrementally:

  Boxing the Compass

  Cinching the Circle

  Barring the Door

  Tuesday, February 23: arrival in Bejar of Santa Anna and the Mexican Army; excavation of an artillery battery site west across the river to the rear of the Veramendi palacio; cavalry units are deployed to the north and east

  Wednesday, February 24: a river battery is established (two 5-inch howitzers, two 8 lb. cannon, one mortar) 300 yards southwest of our West Wall; excavation of a second artillery battery south in La Villita, a suburb of Bejar

  Thursday, February 25: a La Villita battery (two cannon) is established 600 yards south of our South Wall; cavalry units are posted along all eastwardroads

  Saturday, February 27: the La Villita battery is moved up, 300 yards from our South Wall; excavation of a third battery site along the acequia, the aqueduct to the northeast

  Sunday, February 28: the acequia battery is established (two cannon) 500 yards northeast of our North Wall

  Monday, February 29: two infantry battalions join with the cavalry sealing off all roads eastward; S.A. declares a three-day armistice during which he offers “life to all defenders who surrender their arms and retire paroled under oath not to take them up again against Mexico.”

  Tuesday, March 1: trenches are excavated beyond the North Wall

  Wednesday, March 2: our hidden courier route to the east is discovered and blockaded

  Thursday, March 3: the acequia battery is moved nearer the North Wall “within musketshot”; trenches are dug nearer the North Wall; another 1,000 soldados arrive in Bejar; artillery is consolidated on three sides, north, south and west

  Friday, March 4: the northern artillery batteries, augmented by two additional howitzers, are moved within 200 yards of the North Wall; a third cannon is added to the western battery; (I do not draw a line in the sand)

  Saturday, March 5: Mexican assault troops deploy to assigned field positions; the cavalry deploys in force along all potential escape routes; (I again decline to draw a line, declaring myself opposed in principle to, “publicity stunts.”)

  Earlier that evening, while out strolling amongst the men, I eavesdropped on an exchange along the walls:

  A: “Do this mean what I think it do?’

  B: “I’m a-feared it do. It means they aim to run weaponized rings around us, counting on us to be too lame literal-brained to imagine what’s in store.”

  A: “That being?”

  B: “That being that time is all on their side. That being that they’ll just keep on a-coming, jockeying closer for position. That being we’re powerless to stop ’em ’til they send in their damn clowns armed to their damn greasepaint eyes.”

  B: “I hate clowns. They’re not funny, they’re creepy. They give me the galloping willies.”r />
  A: “Everyone hates clowns.”

  B: “Still, ain’t no laughing matter.”

  A: “Oh, I dunno. Not at the moment, maybe, but wait awhile. Times to come, there’s them in their future like to find it the fucking height of fucking hilarity.”

  A: “Think?”

  B: “I do.”

  A: “And that should put a smile on my face?”

  B: “Nah. It should just keep you from blowing your brains out.”

  C: “For now.”

  Travis Diary, Feb. 28, 1836:

  40 degrees. Drizzle. Jameson continues his work upon our defective North Wall, vets it with all care and consideration, even, dare I say, affection. Exalts in the baroque improvisations of its restoration. These superhuman labors to keep even with the damage done, the collapses and cave-ins effected by the enemy’s artillery which outpaces his efforts at repair. The man and his crew are indefatigable. On they go by torch and lantern light, brawn and brain, beavers at their beavering mending what has been dismantled. Yesterday I spied him upon the wall scrutinizing the horizon for any sign of intelligent life and, detecting none, turning back to his men, perhaps spying less. I find myself now fallen increasingly prey to spending inordinate blocks of time time-traveling the passageways of that most savage and inhospitable of all climes—my own mind. There, at one amidst the cenotes and hypogea, the constellation of unmapped and unmappable cunicular corridors, I have discovered that death—young death in my case, sudden violent death—is lined up eager to pounce; chupacabra. I recall my mother’s words, unintelligible to me at the time, that life is little but a bust, “a load of damn rubbish masquerading as a miracle.” A man, I reckon, can turn his back and pretend not to see, but he does so alone and uncared for through eyes that hurt more than he can say. Nothing to fear here but nothing, more nothing, the inclining nothingness. Meanwhile, the written words of my dispatches are, apparently, considered by their considerers as little but cornball cheap theatrics, and my plea for aid and succor dismissed as trafficking in gross hyperbole and the politics of petty posturing. Damn Houston! Damn him to perdition!

  Fannin

  Some 90 miles to our south and east, in the town of Goliad, sat the Presidio La Bahía, yet another frontier papist mission-cum-fortress. Its garrison of 300 to 400 “provisionals”—one heard conflicting numbers—chafed, so the rumor, under the high-handed command of one James Walker Fannin, the bastard-born, 32-year-old, slave-trading syndicalist and West Point dropout who fancied himself, as he more than once had boasted in my presence, “the best artillerist in Texas.”

  Perhaps he was. I honestly could not have said. I knew Fannin some, and knowing what I knew, knew enough to know that not everything he said, particularly about himself, ought be accepted at face value.

  What interested me more than Fannin’s fondness for brag, however, were his men. We needed them, desperately. Aqui. Here. Ahora. Now. Ayer. Yesterday. I needed Fannin to march his 300 or 350 or 400 men northward, instanter. Not that that number alone would be enough to win the day come day’s end, but such a contingent might be sufficient to hold off the enemy long enough for Houston’s army to reach us before an assault was launched in force.

  Resolved to continue to dispatch couriers so long as they were dispatchable as I had dispatched so many already, I implored Fannin—who I knew for a brave man, if a supremely self-interested, often erratic one—to move, and with all expedition.

  Could I count upon him, this Georgian cannoneer and self-confessed Houston myrmidon? The question was moot. I had no choice but to count upon him. I had to count upon him. Whether I counted upon him or not was wholly immaterial. He would march to our relief, or he would not march to our relief. He would arrive in time, or he would arrive too late, or he would arrive not at all.

  He would. He would march. He would arrive in time. Because he must. Because he could not do otherwise. Because he could not forsake us. His brothers. His fellow Texians.

  I had every confidence that he would do so.

  Every confidence. For the moment.

  Travis Diary, Feb. 29, 1836:

  44 degrees. Blustery raw. Today marks week one of our besiegement. Earlier, S.A. reiterated his offer of surrender, the same he had proffered us on day one. I was much tempted to accept it. I have women (9) and children (10) here, all of them sequestered in the sacristy of the chapel. It would have been both imprudent and irresponsible of me not to have given it serious consideration. But in the end, I was obliged to decline, although this time I did think better of doing so with a cannon shot. For the moment, we must only sit still and rely upon help arriving as I remain confident it soon must. But it does not come easily to the men. To wait. For the storm to break. Nor, frankly, does it come easily to me. That is one art, forbearance, biding my time, that always has escaped me. Escape! I daresay that escape from this place is precisely what many of us dream of now, for in truth, we are not “defending” this Alamo. Here could be anywhere. It could be the moon. We sought a refuge. Some asylum. We sought a sanctuary, not a citadel. These walls were available, close at hand, and we availed ourselves of their availability, though that hand has since become a fist, one closing tighter by the day. I feel for the citizens of this neighborhood, these innocent townfolk, however poor and ignorant, so thoroughly infected with papist superstition, who, through no fault of their own, find themselves snared upon the horns of a dilemma not of their making. We are prey now to news that is non-news, no-news, to rumor, gossip, whisper, conjecture, hearsay and hunch and guess. As much as it must remain the surrounding enemy outside our walls that occupies our attention, there grows the suspicion that another enemy encircles us within. This fatigue of boredom. The exhaustion of vigilance. The dread of irresolution and debility of hope. Not ennui, inanition. It is Time itself, the inclining press of its passage, that we would give anything to lose track of, for each day it seems that we persist less even as we perish more. Col. Bowie, poor soul, is worse and worsening. Gripped by fever dream, he no longer can lift his head from his cot. The doctor, Pollard, is at a loss to say what ails him. Something “typhoidol,” is his considered diagnosis. Whatever it is, it is a horror to behold. The little that is left of the man is but a smear suppurating beneath quilts where he is melting inexorably to so much levigated mucilage. When I visited him, mere hours ago, he was racked by a most horrid, sawtoothed yowl—yaarrrgggghhhhh!!—before gurging up the words, “¡Fuera! ¡Si bien todavía se puede!” I ask myself why these words—“Get out! Get out while you still can!”—the words of a dying man half out of his mind with mortal fever, should so discommode me. Whatever the good doctor administers—ginger, bromine, creosote, nitrate of silver, tincture of iron, lead, camphor, quinine, turpentine, potassium, ammonia, aromatic sulfuric acid, dover’s powder, licorice, whiskey and rye, May wine and milk, as well as, so he tells me, salix alba, eupatorium, pefoliatum and oleum terebinthine—each fail, in his words, “to so much as slow the downward spiral of his condition.” This diminution of a strong man. His reduction to a loaf of human fester.

  Travis Diary, March 1, 1836:

  34 degrees. Hard rains, harder winds. Blue Norther, Blue Whistler, Blue Darter, Blew-tailed Norther. Burr cold. Weather regardless, as of this hour, reinforcements have arrived, 32 from Gonzales through the enemy’s lines under cover of darkness to huzzahs all around. Thirty-two! 320 would not be enough, not by half. Are we to take this as a sign that more are on the way? Are the settlements at last awakened and arising? Are these paltry few but the vanguard of thousands more? Is Houston’s army readying to march to our relief at last? Is Fannin en marche even now? These Gonzales men say they know of no others. Lieutenant Bonham still is out, Sam Maverick and Captain Seguin as well. Despite the appearance of these 32, or perhaps because of it, I sense a shift of mood, a conturbation of spirit. How, really, could it be otherways? Existing—surviving—like animals amidst such muck and rubble, penned animals, pent-up animals inside an enormous hog wallow bundled enclosed one upon the other d
ay in day out all day all night day after day, skin is gotten under, nerves are gotten on, petty irritations build to boiling botherations and tempers flare, words are exchanged, fists fly. Every family has its issues. But how we stink! Our stench alone must give the enemy pause. Discipline, I seem to recall General Washington observing, is the soul of an army, in light of which I must only judge us soul-less—filthy, infragrant and soul-less. A surfeit of skunks. A chine of polecats. Doldrum + Fatigue + Dread is a recipe for nothing useful. Time has become our noose; we sense its knot tighten to the navel of our necks. The men are left with little to do but to imagine the worst, and what can be imagined always is worse than what is in fact the case. Tired, hungry, dirty, bored, scared. We all are scared. We all wish we were someplace, anyplace else. Fear can be faced. Fear can be mastered and vanquished. Properly harnessed, fear can even mobilize, it can galvanize. Absent fear, after all, what would we be? Fearless? Only a stupid man, or a barking mad one, is fearless. But dread, dread is different. Dread is a drug and it seeps into and slows all it settles through with lassitude, hebetude, desuetude, with torpor. Wherever it lands, it narcotizes the soul, weevils its way into every warp and woof of every waking hour of every sleepless day. It is left to me, no other, to conjure an effective antidote. In this, Crockett’s fiddling is not unhelpful, but Crockett’s fiddling is, after all, just that—fiddling. ¡Basta ya!

  Travis Diary, March 2, 1836:

  34 degrees. Clear. No wind. To endure this daily ascent of the sun. The slow, painfully slow arrival of first light, its sash of pink strapped brute taut against the bruise of purple. Merciless. To awake each morning flopped in sweat breathing mortuary air. Monstrous. The way we wait. Then wait some more. Keep waiting. Still wait. Are left to wait. Compelled. Powerless. To do else but wait. For some word. An indication. But no word comes. And no indication. No one comes and then no one comes again. Where are they? Where are they now? Who are they now? When are they now? God forgive me, but I no longer believe help is coming. I no longer believe that if it does come it will reach us in time. I no longer believe that we will be rescued. I believe that we have been abandoned. Forsaken. Sacrificed. DESPERO ERGO SUM. There is no deliverance, no salvation. There is but ruth, wroth and ruination. There is but extravasation and exudation. For God is not here. God is elsewhere. God is otherwise occupied. God is everywhere we are not. What is here, is Evil. It dwells here. Abides here. I have seen It. I see It each day from a distance astride Its prancing pale horse, Aguirre. I have watched Him in my field glass for no reason save that He exists. I harbor no personal animosity towards Him. I do not know Him. My enmity exists in the abstract, my animus on principle. I despise what He represents, the values He personifies. I damn His soul. We are in control of nothing, He is in control of everything. He inflicts, we forbear. We are at His mercy, He has no mercy. And still, we wait. Still, I continue to dispatch couriers. How many have there been now? Dozens. I have lost count. So many. In the beginning was the Word? Ha! Couldn’t prove it by me. And the danger, for clearly it is a danger, of pleading so often for rescue, is that I become, inevitably, the proverbial Boy Who Cried Wolf. I am not cut out for the part I have been assigned to play in this…calamity. I need to pull myself together, but my hands refuse to cooperate and my heart is not in it. And yet, I am left little choice but to act contrary to my nature. I refuse to dream the dream of victimhood, but it is difficult. When under the gun, with none who will listen, it is difficult, difficult not to believe that life is penance, little but that to which we are sentenced for having dared to live it, mired hip-deep in Mictlan. It is difficult not to God damn James Fannin, to God damn Sam Houston, and wherever God is, to God damn God.