St. Patrick Battalion

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  Whenever I say the name of Coronel Riley, Señor, I think I see your ears grow. And your eyes brighten. I suspect that you are more interested in him than in me. Of course! Mexico loves the memory of the San Patricios as much, perhaps even more, than that of the Heroic Children. And your nation cannot forgive them.

  I am a scholar of the history of your nation, Señor, as well as that of mine. Since that war, half of my country has been yours. I have ancestors who were buried in their homeland of California when it was Mexico. And now, though their graves were never moved, they are buried in the United States. So, how could I not study your nation’s history?

  I know that your American army for a long time called Señor Riley the most hated man of America. Even though he never was a citizen of your country!

  And that your Department of the Army is so ashamed of their deserters in that war, that your army historians now deny that he ever existed. ¡Ay de mi! How confusing for one’s reputation, eh, to be the worst traitor ever, but never to have existed? Coronel Riley must be laughing!

  I have finished sprinkling this place. Now, Señor, I need to resume my pilgrimage. This has been an interesting visit for me. I think you will have to come along and talk with me on the road if you hope to hear more of my knowledge and wisdom.

  You come? Good! It’s long way yet. And if your Yanqui whiskey makes me fall down, you can help me up. Heh!

  I was speaking of Coronel Riley. In your army he was only un soldado raso, a lowly private. But in General Santa Anna’s army he rose to coronel. He might have been an officer in your army, too, had he not been an Irishman and a Catholic. That is not my bias only, Señor Periodista. It was the opinion also of his own commanding officer in your army, who admitted it to journalists. I read it in some of the New York newspapers. And some of the Catholic journals as well. The officer said those words at Señor Riley’s court-martial.

  I am addicted to your Norteamericano periodicals, Señor, for I try to understand your country.

  Yes, I have even read articles written by you, and I have seen illustrations by your hand. They are not bad. Some, in truth, are excellent. Only last year I saw your reportage and drawings of the last days of the insurrectionist, that John Brown. Time and again I marveled at the story. A great and terrible man, eh? You were near enough to see and hear him? He looked quite like God. That is to say, God as you Yanquis imagine God. Or as even Michelangelo imagined God! It thrilled me, his shaming of your slavers! I memorized his words, from your article: I, John Brown, am now certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away, but with Blood! You said that those were his last written words. ¡Magnífico! What a people you Yanquis are, at your best and worst!

  And Señor Brown spoke true, I believe. The blood to be spilled in this new war of yours, it will purge your crimes, not only of slavery, but your crime against my country. You cannot like to hear me say it. But you came to hear me. Just as the crime of the conquistadors was purged away by the blood of our revolución against Spain.

  ¡Perdón! I am a man of strong opinions, Señor, in matters of what is right and what is wrong. But I was speaking of your work, and you did a fine thing when you told the world of the righteous and defiant heart of that insurgent Señor Brown. Your portrait of him is engraved forever in my mind, as are the words he spoke at the end of his life, at the gallows: I am ready at any time. Do not keep me waiting. A man who looked like God could speak that way!

  What I would like very much to see is a portrait of Coronel Riley. None was ever done, to my knowledge. No painting, no daguerreotype. If only I had one to refer to for my memory! It has been so many years, and, sí, he was a familiar to me. You did not know that. Maybe you don’t believe it. Many wanted to claim familiarity with him, who never knew him. I can tell you. ¡Un hombre guapo! Of stature and vigor, strong as oak. And the eyes of that man! One would trust him at once and put oneself under the protection of his arm.

  ¡Ay de mi! Alas, even trust well deserved can lead to disaster for the faithful, for we do not know God’s designs. Coronel Riley never betrayed our trust, but we who loved him were to suffer, as he did. We cannot presume to know what God intends. Unlike you Yanquis, who believe God meant you to seize the continent. You called it Manifest Destiny. The end of that is yet to be seen.

  But God perhaps has other plans than those we presume. It is said, if you would hear God laugh, tell him your plans.

  Don Juan Riley, a good Catholic and honorable man, put his body and soul to what he thought was God’s purpose. Many followed him to their doom. Likewise, many followed General Santa Anna.

  Perhaps it is well, Señor Periodista, that I am on my little stumps now and cannot follow anyone. Following has not done me well. But I don’t regret.

  You have followed me, and found me, to ask questions. I am on a pilgrimage of atonement. To listen to me answer your questions, you must now follow me on this road of atonement to Our Lady of Guadalupe. You Yanquis have much to atone for, God knows. Can you stay along? It will take a long time. Can a Gringo go so slow?

  You are a Catholic, are you not? Look, Señor, what a good Catholic I am:

  Permanently on my knees!

  PADRAIC QUINN’S DIARY

  New Orleans June 15, 1845

  SINCE GOD AND my mother saw fit to make me literate, I have made up my mind to keep a diary. This is the beginning of it. Nothing much is happening to write about at this time, but it appears the United States Army will be going to Mexico pretty soon, and I’ll be going along with it. I ought to keep a diary.

  Here it is about me and the Army. I was with the soldiers in the last year of the Seminole campaigns in Florida. I was an errand boy in camp. Mostly I did servant work for the officers who didn’t have their own personal slaves. Officers are pretty helpless, so many of them being gentlemen and too good to shine their own boots or empty their own chamberpots, or go fetch anything they need, so there was always something for me to do to earn my keep.

  You see my handwriting is pretty good. Soldiers who can’t write asked me to write letters home for them, and I earned some pennies from them. They would tell me what they wanted their families to know about the Indian campaign, and I came to like writing it. It’s like storytelling, and I practiced making the stories sound the way the soldiers would have told them if they had the gift of words. Or what my mother called Blarney. It seemed to me that a man soldiering against those Seminole Indians in their great swamp, a man doing that would want to seem like a heroic sort of fellow back home. So I sometimes wrote some flourishes and maybe little exaggerations to make their folks back home admire them.

  I never wrote any outright lies, such as, a fellow had been awarded a medal for bravery. But I might suggest in the letter that he deserved one.

  Sure and they did deserve medals just for being down there in that mucky, prickly swamp with all the poison snakes and those mosquitoes. And officers who were meaner than alligators! The Seminoles themselves were scary, being cunning and in their own kind of countryside, where white folk don’t really belong, not having webbed feet. The Seminoles don’t really have webbed feet, either, but a body could believe they do, the way they get around in there.

  I don’t think we really won that Swamp War, but a couple of years back the government said it was over and we moved back into garrison on solid ground. What I am getting at here is that I regret I wasn’t writing down all those interesting events and occasions, so that I could remember them better. I was only nine then. I write much better now. I teach myself by reading everything I can get.

  Lately our country and Mexico got to squabbling about their border with Texas, and pretty soon our Army moved here to New Orleans where we can load on all kinds of ships and go straight over to Mexico, if it comes to that. It seems the President is pretty determined to have a war against Mexico. You don’t do this much getting ready if you don’t really mean to do something. This city is all a-stir with soldiers and officers. More ships here at the wharves of
the Mississippi than I would have believed there are in the whole world, and the docks are piled high as a house with the stuff an Army uses.

  In this old city there’s every kind of people you ever could imagine. Merchants who talk all kinds of foreign languages, fancy men and ladies, sailors and pilots and pirates, stage actors and gamblers off the steamboats. You can’t quite tell the whores from the other ladies. There are churches about every hundred paces, and they have religious processions and parades and carnivals. The land here is so low and wet, they can’t bury dead people in the ground, so their big cemetery is above-ground, looks like a whole city of tombs and crypts, like little stone houses.

  It’s a steamy, lazy place where just about everybody sweats and drinks all day and all night. Most of the work gets done by negro slaves. I never knew there were this many negroes in the world. You can go to auctions and buy people if you can afford them. Soldiers like to go to those auctions, not that they can afford slaves, but can sometimes see the slave women stripped. Some of the slave men have been flogged so much their backs look like the backs of the alligators I saw in Florida. Lots of our soldiers likewise have whip scars, so I’m used to the sight.

  I followed some officers to Chalmette, near the city, where General Jackson beat the British Army in 1815, before he was president. Our officers like to go there to see the place because they learned about it at West Point army school. From the way I hear them talk, it raises their pride. It makes them cocky for what might come with Mexico. You hear them say that since America whipped the greatest Army in the world, Britain’s, it should be real easy to whip the Mexican Greasers. That’s what they call the Mexicans. In fact, that’s what they call most of the people here in New Orleans. Greasers, Creoles, and Frogs. All the same, they sure go after the tan and brown ladies. They figure they’ll be easy to conquer, too, because Catholic ladies don’t have the same high virtue that their wives and sisters at home have, they like to say. I don’t know how these officers know such things, but they talk as if they have the wisdom of experience. The more they talk to each other, the more sure they sound.

  They sure are eager to conquer anything that’s in their way.

  About half of all the soldiers are Irish immigrants, or Catholics from Germany and other places in Europe, a lot of them are veterans of armies over there. The officers grouse a lot that they don’t have more real Americans in their companies. Last Sunday a troop of Mississippi Volunteers taunted some Irish soldiers coming out of Mass. Big mistake. Half those yokels are now halt and lame.

  This is my first writing in my diary. I like writing in here. I like saying whatever comes into my head.

  What I’d like to write in here next is some of my adventures before this. Things I don’t want to forget. I have had an interesting start, and probably there aren’t many boys my age have so much to remember.

  New Orleans June 18th 1845

  I HAVE BEEN thinking how to start writing about myself. I thought, I’ll just tell it like a story, not a real happy one.

  Saint Patrick’s Curse is what I call it.

  I have been under Saint Patrick’s Curse from the first day of my blighted life, & sure through no fault of mine. I wasn’t even born in Ireland. I was born . . .

  Sure, why not start right at the start? Never mind that about the Curse. Mark that out. Start over.

  I was born in the state of Michigan, by chance. It was Michigan instead of some other place only because my sire—I can’t bring myself to call that vicious bastard my “father,” for “father” has a fond sound to it—he was a veteran soldier of the War of 1812 and living in Michigan when he set himself upon my poor Ma.

  I don’t know whether she tried to resist him; probably not. But if she’d known how mean he was, maybe she’d have kept him off. But to hell with all that; it was before my ken.

  He was not Irish, that’s all I know. He was some persuasion of English Protestant, and my mother won’t even speak his name, that’s how much she came to hate him. That’s why I’ve carried the name Quinn. It was her maiden name.

  By giving me that Irish name, she put Saint Patrick’s curse on me. If I’d had my father’s Protestant name, whatever it was, my youth’d not have been near so rough and thorny and low.

  She was overweening proud of being a Quinn. You’d have thought it was Queen, she was that proud of it. Tell me, if you can, how a laundress and seamstress following Army camps gets pride.

  Aye, well, she was proud she was no barbarian heretic like the brute who begot me, I guess that was enough for her, and so, I’m a Quinn like her. And like her, I’ve been following the soldiers all my life, what little there’s been of it so far. I can’t guess what any other career would be like. And I reckon I’ll become a soldier myself when I get to the manly age. If God willing I do get to that age. The Seminoles in the Swamp War never got me. God willing the Mexicans won’t, either. Sure and there’s no other tolerable work for any Irishman in America. Well, shoveling muck and breaking rock to make canals, or hammering spikes on a railroad, or toting loads onto a steamboat. Those are hard, and no one’s ambition, but at least they’re honest labor and no shame.

  But I’ve only been an Army camp boy, and that’s why I think soldierly, and don’t know much else until I read of it.

  I am grateful that my Ma saw to it I learned to read. Many of the soldiers I write letters for say they regret they didn’t have mothers to make them read. You get to know a soldier well when you write to his family. You don’t get to know officers that same way. They write their own letters. It’s about the only thing they do for themselves. A camp boy can stay busy fetching for them and cleaning up after them, polishing their boots and brass. But they can write. That’s one reason they’re officers. That, and their not being Irish or German immigrants. Or negroes.

  I swear half this Army is Irishmen. More of them can read and write, taught by the Church, than the U.S.-born soldiers. But being able to read and write won’t make you an officer if you’re an Irish Catholic, especially one born in the Old Country. There are a few Irish officers in this Army, but only if they were American-born, maybe two generations or more, you see, established, educated somewhat, own land or a business. Those like that, they can get in West Point. It helps if they’ve had the foresight to unIrish their names a bit. Or have one of those names that aren’t too plainly Irish. Some quit the Mother Church and pretend they’re Scot, or Ulsterman, and they might get by.

  Now, that man who fathered me. Ignorant brute he was, to be sure. A sutler at one of the garrisons up there. He had been born a Virginian, moved to Kentucky, and could just barely write and cipher, but that was all enough to make him a captain in the militia cavalry, and that’s how he’d got up to Michigan. He went up there in the War of 1812, and there he stayed when he was mustered out. Ma wouldn’t tell me what his name was, but she told me some about him. He used to knock her about. In truth, that is the first damned memory I have in this world, all that thumping and outcry of beatings. And the rum smell.

  I myself was barely toddling when he found some fault with me and took his razor strop to me. I should tell you about that strop. It was his most treasured object. Two thicknesses of brown leather, the backing side cowhide, the other side being, he said, skinned off the back of the Indian chief Tecumseh, the evening after the Battle of the Thames River in Ontario, year 1813. Said he’d flayed Tecumseh himself. Told Ma all this, that he’d been the one, not Colonel Johnson, who’d shot Tecumseh down. Well, that could have been so, as far as she knew. I know that strop hurt so bad, it might well have come off a warrior chief.

  Once he whipped me, though, Ma got us out of there, and carried me away. She settled at another garrison and did washing and mending. And then when the Seminole campaigns drew some regiments down to the Florida swamps, I was just big enough to do some camp errands. So rather than go to the priests’ school with Indian tykes, I stowed away with a company of garrison soldiers who went clear down to Florida. By boats and ships, the
n by marches, and by dugout canoes in those swamps. Ended up with Col. Harney. I’ll write more later about that flaming red devil, who was I guess the most vicious son of a bitch I’d ever have the honor to meet. Made all his men carry nooses, he did, to hang Indians, runaways, anybody he told them to.

  It would be hard to judge who old Harney hated most: Negroes, Indians, or Irishmen. Got him in trouble sometimes. Even in an army of tyrants, he had a bad name.