by Jack Beatty
Federal headquarters ordered the conductor to return immediately, stopping at stations along the way to confirm his unmolested progress. Villa loaded two thousand men on the train and aimed it at Juárez. At each station, a Villista soldier held a gun on the telegraph operator while, with a Villa telegrapher listening, he reassured Juárez that Villa was nowhere to be seen. An El Paso Times reporter described what happened when the Trojan train reached its destination: “Shortly after two o’clock this morning, a freight train rolled into the Juárez yards over the Mexican Central, and from it poured hundreds of rebels. That the surprise was complete is proved by the fact that not a shot was fired until the rebels had penetrated into the very heart of the city … The federal garrison made but little resistance.”49
With only isolated pockets of federals left in Chihuahua, Villa turned from war to politics by appointing himself “military governor” of Chihuahua, Huerta’s thugs having assassinated the elected Maderist governor Abraham González. During his six months in prison, Villa had befriended a Zapatist intellectual, who tutored him in agrarian radicalism. Thereafter Villa professed devotion to Zapata’s Plan of Ayala. In the four weeks he could spare as governor before leading the drive south toward Mexico City, “hopelessly perplexed with the piles of paper that were presented to him and longing to get back among his soldiers,” he managed nevertheless to confiscate the Chihuahuan oligarchy’s million-acre estates, or, rather, those belonging to his opponents. Villa’s radicalism was personal, arbitrary, animated by score settling, not ideology. By his decree, the lands would be divided among veterans of his army, among the villages dispossessed by the hacendados, and, in the form of pensions funded by land sales, among the widows and orphans of the fallen—this social revolution to occur “after the victory of the revolution.” Until then, Villistas would run the estates to raise money for the army.50
To meet Huerta’s demands for cannon fodder, press gangs were kidnapping Mexico City servants, messenger boys, and fans leaving bullfights, dressing them in uniforms, and packing them into northbound trains. Villa’s volunteers went south to meet Huerta’s conscripts believing that if they survived the battles ahead they would own land and if they died their dependents would receive pensions.51
Villa led by fear as well as hope. He assigned fear to a former collection agent named Manuel Banda. “What is your role?” an old friend asked Banda. “To force people into battle at the point of a gun … In some battles I may have killed as many of our men as the federal troops have done … They know me, and they are gripped by panic when they see me on my motorcycle with a pistol in my hand … That’s the system of General Villa.”52
Villa wanted the enemy to be as afraid of him as his men were of Banda. His reputation for killing captured federal officers and sparing the men (if they agreed to switch sides) motivated retreats, surrenders, and mutinies. From the first battle of the new war against Huerta, Villa earned his reputation. The Villistas took prisoners; Villa’s autobiography recorded their fate: “I formed the sixty prisoners in files three deep and had them shot in that formation, to save ammunition by killing three with one shot.” It sounds comical and then you picture it.53
The professional European armies of the late nineteenth century banned women and children from following soldiers to war. But in the wars of the Mexican Revolution, women did everything, including spying and fighting. The federal army depended on wives and girlfriends to feed their men and nurse the wounded—and to keep conscripts from deserting. Reports in the American press bear out the sensational charge made by John Lind that men without women were also provided for. “Huerta is capturing women as well as men for the army,” Lind wrote to the president in January. “Some of them are undoubtedly decent women, but many of them vile. These are assigned to the conscripts as soon as they commence to ‘make good.’ ” Dr. Louis Duncan, who set up a field station in Presido, Texas, to treat federal soldiers wounded in a border battle, reported that half of his patients had carnal diseases.
Villa did not require soldaderas to perform military functions. A quartermaster corps fed his soldiers, sixty American and Mexican doctors housed in a forty-car hospital train cared for the wounded, and Banda discouraged deserters. Still, Villa understood, as one of his officers put it, that “we had to have soldaderas if we wanted to have soldiers.”54
An American mercenary painted a scene of Villa’s camp on a day of battle:
The men were told to eat and be ready to march at dawn … and “without women.” Rumors … spread of a large enemy force marching against us and not far distant. The men accepted the news with calm and austere fortitude … Just before sunrise, this ill-equipped little rebel force of about 5,500 men, with bandoliers three-quarters empty, moved out. Some didn’t even have a gun, but proudly carried their machetes … The women camp followers had orders to remain behind, but hundreds of them hanging onto their stirrups followed their men on the road for a while. Some other women carrying carbines, bandoleers, and who were mounted, managed to slip into the ranks and fight with us. These took their places in the firing lines and withstood hardship and machine gun fire as well as the men. They were a brave worthy lot.55
Millions marched to war in 1914 and a million died, but only in Mexico for justice and dignity. The great French socialist Jean Jaurès assigned different moral weights to the violence of war and revolution: “In the Europe of today, it is not by means of international war that the work of freedom and justice will be accomplished … If we have a horror of war, it is not at all because of a weak and enervated sentimentality. The revolutionary resigns himself to human suffering when it is the necessary condition of a great human advancement, when by it the oppressed and exploited rise up to freedom.”
That describes one face of Mexico’s violence in 1914 and suggests why it frightened the ruling classes of Europe and why they wanted “order” restored in Mexico. European governments risked alienating the Wilson administration by recognizing General Huerta not only because he protected their industrialist’s mines and oil fields from nationalization by the rebels but because the “Mexican Revolution represented the first serious challenge to the international order established by the industrial nations in the mid-nineteenth century.” The world had yet to witness a successful nationalist revolt of a brown-skinned people against a dictatorship serving the interests of imperial powers. When Britain’s Morning Post called for a joint Euro-American occupation of Mexico, writing that the Americans needed to learn “the meaning of the white man’s burden” in places of “un-civilization,” it voiced a shared European anxiety about the contagion of Mexico’s example.56
“Mexico’s Two Strong Men”
Torreón—the “Chicago of Mexico,” rail hub of the north-south, east-west trunk lines, a third of the way between the Texas border and Mexico City—was a strategic prize. For three years its people had been war’s playthings, with each new occupier settling scores with supporters of the old. Seizing the city in May 1911, Maderist troops went on a xenophobic rampage—massacring hundreds of Chinese immigrants and sacking their stores. With an American consular agent watching over his shoulder, Villa had controlled his troops during his October–December 1913 occupation of Torreón, which ended when Villa redeployed to Chihuahua. Now, in March 1914, he meant to return. Two other rebel armies were moving against Huerta’s stretched forces, one down the Pacific coast, the other in the northeast; but Villa in the middle, descending on Torreón, constituted a mortal threat. Huerta responded to it, sending his best troops and generals to hold Torreón. “Their soldiers numbered no less than ten thousand,” Villa writes. “They had twelve cannons, an enormous number of grenades, and plenty of supplies. They had machine guns mounted on permanent emplacements and many good officers to direct them.”57
In mid-March 1914, Villa’s Division of the North flowed south on long trains—including an armored flatcar carrying the celebrated cannons El Niño and El Chavalito, the hospital train with its staff of one hundred, and
Villa’s own train with a car for the machine guns and the automobiles, a sleeper and a salon car for the journalists and the movie men,* and Villa’s private car, a chintz-curtained red caboose. Above their heads, above the machine guns and the artillery, on the flat roofs of the boxcars, sprawled the soldiers of Villa’s peasant army and their women and children. Some soldaderas were baking tortillas over mesquite twig fires “so that it seemed as if each boxcar had a chimney”; some, hanging out their washing to dry in the desert air. Others rode beneath the cars on planks held by ropes; yet others, on the cowcatchers of the locomotives. When the trains stopped, the soldaderas, children strapped on their backs and babies clasped to their breasts, climbed down from the cars, lit fires, and cooked while the men gathered over the steaming pots—for at least five hundred fighters of the Northern Division, perhaps their last meal with their women.58
Many of Villa’s soldiers were boys—twelve- to sixteen-year-olds; most were of mixed blood; but some were pure Apaches, Tarahumaras, and Tepehuanes. “They are able to bear the pain of wounds with the patient insensibility of animals,” the London Times ineffably observed. Besides peasants fighting for their own land, others fought for village autonomy against the local jefe; cowboys, laborers, and drifters joined for the regular pay with bonuses for victory. “What are you fighting for?” John Reed asked one soldier. “Why, it is good fighting,” he replied. “You don’t have to work in the mines.” The soldiers wore khaki uniforms made in a Chihuahua textile plant, and carried Mausers and Colts. They included descendants of the old military colonists in the north, given land by the Spanish crown if they agreed to fight the Apache; and their Villista sons and grandsons, raised to shoot from the saddle, made superb cavalry.59
Soldaderas. They traveled with all the armies in Mexico. Since the Spanish king gave Cortés “a province for a garden,” the history of Mexico had been a struggle for the land of Mexico. Women like these fought beside their men for the land stolen from their Indian ancestors.
Villa led cavalry charges at desperate moments outside Torreón, but the eleven-day battle belonged to soldiers fighting on foot. In night attacks they hurled themselves at federal strongpoints on three hills outside Torreón. In Villa’s words, “[The federals] were dying in order to save those positions; we were dying in order to seize them.” Pounded by federal artillery, sited by French and German gunners, and counterattacks, the Villistas gave ground by day only to renew the attack at night. Seven rings of dead circled the Hill of the Cross. “Each receding tide of the attacking force left a gruesome flotsam of dead and dying, weltering in stagnant eddies of blood,” a Washington Post correspondent reported.
When they broke into Torreón the Villistas exacted revenge. In hand-to-hand fighting, they hacked the federal conscripts with machetes, clubbed them with rifle butts, and blew them up with homemade grenades flung by leather slings. Facing mutiny from soldiers petrified by Villa’s reputation for killing prisoners, the federal commander ordered a retreat. The cameramen for the Majestic Motion Picture Company shot two hundred feet of street fighting, including a bayonet charge. Having persuaded Villa to don a general’s uniform, they were pleased with their star’s close-ups.60
A U.S. Army intelligence officer disguised as a war correspondent was “filled with admiration” for the will to fight displayed by soldiers motivated by Villa’s promises and threats. “I saw many instances of men who were quite seriously hurt—shot through the shoulders or elbows or hands or wounded in the head—who held their places in the line, refusing to go to the rear.” And he pronounced “notably heroic” the conduct of the “women who came along on the railway trains … many of whom accompanied their men into the firing line around Torreón.” In contrast, fifteen hundred federals either deserted or switched sides. The corpses of the dead—roughly a thousand federals and five hundred Villistas—were piled on wooden pyres on the hillsides and burned, suffusing Torreón with an evil smell. Reporters found Villa “cheered as the military genius of modern Mexico” at the Hotel Salvador, “smiling through his black uneven teeth like a boy who had obtained the toy he wanted.”61
“The Trench” by José Clemente Orozco
On July 17, the German cruiser Dresden conveyed General Huerta to Jamaica, her captain reporting that “Huerta had roughly half a million marks in gold with him [and] a much greater amount in checks and other paper.” The British minister in Mexico City traced the three-month unraveling of Huerta’s rule to “the utter demoralization of the federal army since the fall of Torreón.” In his farewell message, Huerta ascribed his defeat to “scarcity of funds as well as to the manifest and decided protection which a Great Power on this continent has afforded to the rebels,” that is, to the team of Wilson and Villa.62
Just when the Constitutionalist rebels were everywhere prevailing against a federal army whose officers hid casualties to pocket the pay of dead soldiers, just when Wilson’s policy of permitting the rebels to buy arms in the United States was achieving the results the president had hoped for, in short, just when events had obviated U.S. intervention against Huerta, the United States intervened against Huerta.63
Wilson’s assessment of Mexican realities was skewed by his agent, John Lind. The significance of Villa’s victory at Torreón had failed to register on Lind when he left Mexico to confer with Wilson in Washington in early April. His pessimism conditioned by the Huertista press, Lind had been writing from Veracruz that the rebels were “a lost cause,” and that ridding Mexico of Huerta might take U.S. action. “The temporary taking of Mexico City” to force out Huerta “should not be regarded as intervention in the offensive sense.” That semantic torture ought to have impeached Lind’s judgment that “it is not believed that … any resistance [would] be offered to the expedition this side of Mexico City.”64
On April 6, Lind left Veracruz for Washington aboard the presidential steam yacht Mayflower. April 9 brought the “Tampico incident,” the most discreditable episode in Wilson’s eight-year stewardship of American foreign policy.
In the port of Tampico, where American ships were standing by to evacuate refugees from the encroaching fighting and to protect the nearby oil fields, a party of American sailors trying to obtain gasoline for their admiral’s launch was briefly detained by an overzealous federal officer rattled by recent rebel attacks. Within minutes his commander set the sailors free, jailed the errant officer, and apologized to the American admiral. That did not satisfy Rear Admiral Henry T. Mayo, a martinet restive from months of standing by “with his big fleet there away on the horizon and the ordinary Mexicans … utterly oblivious to its presence.” Without informing the State Department or his immediate superior, Mayo threatened fire and blood unless the Mexican authorities raised the American flag over a prominent government building and delivered a twenty-one-gun salute to atone for the “insult” given the flag. The Mexicans demurred, agreeing only if Mayo promised in writing to answer the salute “gun by gun, instead of by 21 shots after the Mexican salute.” Mayo appeared ready to accept this condition, but, incited by Lind’s militancy, Woodrow Wilson demanded unconditional compliance.65
Projecting his gentleman’s code onto Tampico, Wilson magnified a mistake into a calculated affront. In an April 20 address to Congress, he gave a mendacious account of the Tampico and similar incidents as manifesting Huerta’s “disregard for the dignity and rights of this Government.” With a “rebel yell,” the House voted him authority to use force to settle what the president called “an affair of honor.”*66
Wilson decided to capitalize on “the psychological moment” of Tampico for reasons he explained to John Reed, of all people. (“I opened my mind to him completely,” Wilson told his press secretary.) After Reed sent him a copy of an article based on their White House interview, Wilson forbade its publication, likely on account of this passage:
President Wilson did not send the army and navy to [Tampico and] Veracruz to force Huerta from the dictatorship. He sent them to prevent war … For a long time
it was known that Huerta was … trying to create irritation between the Mexican people and the American people so that he might unite the Mexicans behind him. If he could … bring about an act of retaliation, he might become … the representative of a united people … But the President saw what he was trying to do and called his bluff before he was ready to act.
Huerta might have occupied Galveston, “hurl[ing] us, on a wave of popular emotion, into a bloody war.” So Wilson retaliated before Huerta could provoke him to retaliate. This specious stratagem nearly caused what it was intended to prevent—the unification of all Mexico behind Huerta. Wilson was right to deny Reed’s request to publish. Statesmen claiming not merely to have divined but surprised the flow of events invite ridicule.67
Meanwhile, news arrived that a German merchant ship, the SS Ypiranga, was about to land an arms shipment at Veracruz, three hundred miles to the south.68
The saga of “the arms of the Ypiranga” is the stuff of spy fiction, except that no one would believe it. In late 1913, Huerta had bribed the vice consul of the Russian embassy in Mexico City, Leon Rast, to travel to New York under his diplomatic passport carrying a million and a half pesos in Banco Nacional bills. Rast conveyed this sum to an American middleman, a legitimate importer, who delivered it to the general sales agent of the Colt Automatic Arms Company in Hartford, who handed over twenty machine guns to the importer. These were added to weapons already stockpiled in New York and, to disguise their destination from the U.S. government, shipped to Veracruz by a continent-scrambling route. Rast had them sent first to Odessa via Constantinople, the arms for Huerta passing the Bosporus as Liman von Sanders was arriving in that city. At Odessa, Nicholas’s security men, thinking the guns were for Armenian rebels, impounded them. Two weeks passed before they could resume their journey to Mexico, via a dogleg to Hamburg. There the Mexican agents shepherding the guns briefly inspected a ship that would soon be laden with a clandestine cargo of arms for the Ulster rebels before settling on the Hamburg American line’s Ypiranga to complete their eighteen-thousand-mile passage to Veracruz.69
