But on that birthday of mine that I was speaking of, we were not considering why to die, we were just doing it. Your cannonade went on much of the day, a bombardment too terrible to recount. At the end of the day, scores of the soldiers were dead. Others lay wounded in the long corridor that had become our hospital.
How can it be imagined? The blood everywhere, the weeping and groaning, the pile of amputated limbs, the priest giving rites . . . you have been in hospital after battle, sí? I need not describe it. I was one of about forty of our cadets still fit for duty. Most of the night I spent helping with hospital chores. Then when I should have lain down to rest I was instead put on the parapet as a sentry, looking down into the darkness and listening. Too much in my mind and spirit had been shocked and horrified, and so it required all my strength and discipline to hold myself together. At times during the night I must have slept standing; at times I nearly strangled in my effort not to weep or scream. Even my prayers were in chaos. By morning I had passed from boyhood to old age, without having ever been a man.
And then that morning came your army’s assault on Chapultepec. If I am to tell you about that day, I must fortify myself. How much have we left in our bottle, Señor Periodista?
PADRAIC QUINN’S DIARY
Mixcoac, Mexico Sept. 12, 1847
TODAY THE SHELLING of the grand castle on Chapultepec began. Gen. Scott thinks we can take that place! Or is this a feint?
Lieut. Mick Maloney saw me, and called me to him, with a big smile that showed he was really glad to see me, or that he was generally in high spirits, with another good fight looming. He recalled to me a conversation we had long ago, by the Rio Grande, concerning the disgrace being reflected upon Irishmen by the desertion of such as that John Riley of the 5th Infantry. Did I, pray, remember that? I confessed that I did, whereupon the brave lieutenant asked me, had I enjoyed as much as he had, the fair punishment lavished upon that scurvy rogue Riley? Lt. Mick Maloney had seen me up in my tree observing the entertainment, as he called it. He hoped that I as an Irishman had felt absolved of a bit of shame by that fine display of justice. “Perfect justice, though, would have hanged him! Had he stayed loyal,” Lt. Maloney said, “he might be a lieutenant!”
I thought: In the Mexican army he rose to Major. But I carefully replied, “Did I enjoy the entertainment as much as you did, Sir? That would be hard for me to say, as I can only imagine how much you enjoyed it. May God keep you, Sir.” Upon that, I saluted him with my only hand, and excused myself, for I had just purged one Irish hero out of my heart, one who’d gloat over another’s suffering. And I who had so lately basked in any attention Mick Maloney gave me. I’ll be content not ever to see him again.
I learn that Gen. Scott really is planning to storm the Castle! The bombardment today is preparing for infantry to go up, probably tomorrow morning. I look at that place and think the General has gone giddy from too many successes. If I ever saw a place not to attack, that’s it. Our cannons on it until it’s too dark to shoot, and just one chunk of wall breached at all. Some loads of ladders were hauled up the road at dusk, to be used for to scale the castle wall. Who are the unlucky fellows who get to go up those? Gen. Worth and Gen. Pillow massing on the west side of the castle, Gen. Quitman on the south. Saw Lt. Grant of the 4th Inf., in Gen. Worth’s division, and he told me the plan of it. He was more talkative than usual, as if by talking, he’d not have to brood on what’s to come. Asked if I still draw pictures. I told him I’m working on the one of John Riley’s punishment. That seemed to get him down. He said maybe I should do just portraits and good military scenes, not such awful things. I said well it really happened, and he shrugged. He said I ought to portray Mr. Maloney in his officer uniform. I said I’d already drawn him as a Private, and would remember him as that. Then we talked about that loyalty matter & I told him my thought, that probably Mister Riley feels as secure in his honor as Mister Maloney does. Mister Grant said I should keep that kind of thought to myself or some of these soldiers might whip me for saying it because to their way of thinking Mister Maloney is as high as a body can get and Mister Riley is as low. Lt. Grant said he was himself pretty sorry for Mister Riley, but is glad that those San Patricios aren’t up there on the castle with their cannons. Said he’s had enough of facing their kind of gunnery for his lifetime. Then he said he won’t be here to see the hangings of the rest of them tomorrow, as he will be going up against the castle. He said attacking the castle wouldn’t be much worse than seeing men whipped and branded and hanged.
I told him that I was going to the hanging. That I didn’t want to see those cruelties again, but it is an important occasion and I intend to make illustrations. That I was going to stay off the battlefield this time. I had promised my mother that.
I didn’t tell Lieut. Grant this, but I have just about persuaded her to go with me to the hangings tomorrow. Told her it’s something really important that will be in history someday. That it is all about native Irish and she’s native Irish and so she should be there. Even more reason, the executioner is her own Col. Bill Harney.
I didn’t say this to her, but I sure just damned well believe that when she sees that murderous son of a bitch torture and execute a few dozen unfortunate of her countrymen, and his enjoyment of it, she will sure shed herself of him. What I’ve told her about him so far hasn’t been quite enough for her to give up what he provides. But I can see that whatever affection there ever was, if it ever was that, is about all gone. She looks at him with contempt half the time, and gets like a banshee whenever he’s a real horse’s ass, that being most of his waking hours. I want her away from him before he kills or maims her. Tomorrow ought to do it. With a headscarf and a veil she can just mix right in amongst the Mexican women and he’ll not know she’s there. The older he gets, the meaner. It could be that I’m saving my own mother’s life. Good way to think of it.
At daybreak everything’s supposed to start, the executions and the battle. What a day to expect. Dark out there tonight. Can feel some power in the air. It could be so many thousand people praying all at the same time.
Mixcoac, Mexico Sept. 13, 1847
THE INK HAS dried in this pen several times already as I sit here trying to find words to begin the narrative of this day. There is too much of everything. The great authors of all time, I bet, would have to scratch out a half dozen false starts before they’d find language enough to tell of a day like this.
This is just a boy’s diary, not a classical tome of history. The correspondents I guess are writing what will get read about this day. That the American soldiers did even more than Gen. Scott could have expected them to do. That they didn’t stop at Chapultepec Castle but charged on up the road and got into the gates of Mexico City! Or so the rumor is.
All I can do is write down what I saw, myself, from right here in Mixcoac. It was hell enough for me. And sure I reckon it was enough hell for my Ma. I doubt Col. Bill Harney will ever see a trace of her again, not if he’s lucky. She will surely kill him if he ever comes into spitting distance of her! If I ever had any triumph in my life, this is it: I contrived to make her see the Red Devil as he is. Viva me!
The punishments and executions of the rest of Mister Riley’s men was much like seeing Gen. Twiggs’s show played again: the men on the gallows having to watch the others be whipped and branded, before being hanged themselves. But Col. William Harney is a fiend, where Gen. Twiggs was just a ruthless executioner. I think I said before that the military does its rituals like a dramatic theater. Col. Harney did the theater with a whole genuine battle for his backdrop. That’s how my Ma said it. She’s been to theaters. I haven’t, but the way she explained it sure sounded true to what we saw.
Maybe it was Gen. Scott who planned to have the executions in a place where you could see the battle. The big Chapultepec Castle looms up not very far away from Mixcoac, I’d guess maybe a mile off. Col. Harney had the deserters standing in the wagons with the nooses on by the time there was enough light for the ca
nnons to open up again. Col. Harney got the whipping and branding started, and I watched my Ma’s face as much as I watched that. There were Mexican men and women around again, too, but not as many as there were at the San Angel punishments. I didn’t see that one Mexican woman today.
Col. Harney yelled to the prisoners that they would stand there watching true American soldiers win a battle. However long that took. He said that when the American flag rose over the castle, the wagons would move and they’d swing. He said they’d be hung without hoods, so they could watch their moment arrive. Then it was that one Irishman with a noose around his neck called out the Colonel’s name and in a merry voice said that if they didn’t get hung before his dirty old flag was up over the castle, they would live long enough to eat the goose that ate the grass on the Colonel’s own grave! Some of the others laughed at that, and red devil Harney got three shades redder, and I feared he would just order them hung right then. I doubt if anybody ever taunted him that boldly before, except maybe my Ma. Well, would a man with a noose around his neck be afraid to sass? What more has he to lose? Also some of Harney’s own deserters stood under the nooses, and the Lord knows how his own men hated him. John Riley could have thanked Col. Harney for causing so many good Irishmen to cross over to Santa Anna!
By the middle of morning it was starting to look like they wouldn’t hang, if it depended on that flag going up. The American cannons had stopped and the infantry was up there in the woods on the slope, not getting anywhere. The Mexican cannons were still booming, and there was no pause in the musketry, just a continuous rattle of it, banks of gunsmoke drifting. The sun was fierce. It was a wonder those deserters sweating up there on those wagons didn’t just faint from the heat and hang themselves by falling. One was almost dead even before they put the noose on him, the one whose legs had been blown off at Churubusco. He had been hauled out of the hospital and set up in the wagon bed. Ma kept looking at him, I noticed, and she’d shake her head, then look at Harney there on his horse.
Her darlin’ Bill looked ever more sour and gloomy as the battle thundered on, so close by it was almost deafening. There were the priests standing off to the side with their crosses, there were the whipped and branded fellows, eight of them, their backs all raw meat covered with flies, waiting with gravedigger shovels. Just pretty much like the other day at San Angel, but the Colonel had got stalled by his own grand announcement about that flag way up there, and couldn’t continue his entertainment unless he went back on it.
Sure and it couldn’t have been easy for those American soldiers ranked around the square there, either, in their full uniforms in that heat. Now and then one of them keeled over. But there they stood useless while their comrades were getting killed a mile or so away. I thought now and then that if it kept on, these very men might have to be called away from this spectacle to be reinforcements in that other one.
Then shouts went up. We could see faintly through the shimmering heat that our infantry had emerged beyond the woods, was moving in a mass of light blue uniforms up the steep ground toward the Mexicans’ emplacements at the base of the castle wall. The Mexican defense at that level was failing. Col. Harney was looking fierce again, and the prisoners sure must have felt the sand shifting in their hourglass.
It was too far and smoky and shimmery to see much detail, but after a time an officer with a spyglass cried that they were on the ladders. Musketfire went on and on. I had my sketchbook out and tried to sketch the scene broadly, though mostly was wiping sweat away with my sleeve. I labored that way for a long time. My heart was tripping and my hand a-shaking. I thought often of what it must be like to climb a high ladder closer and closer toward an enemy who is loading his musket to blow you off the top rung. I felt as close to the jeopardy of those men so far over there—Lieuts. Grant & Maloney surely in the midst of it—as to these Irishmen on the gallows, who were beyond jeopardy, fully doomed.
I felt my Ma lay a hand on my shoulder, what an unusual tenderness! and looked up to see her looking at my spattered page. Maybe she thought it was tears dripping on it rather than sweat. Maybe it was that, too.
The sound of the battle was changing. More muffled. The officer with the glass called to Col. Harney, “They’ve gone in, Sir!” An excited murmur passed through the soldier ranks, and then to my astonishment I heard a clear voice sing out in the brogue,
“Colonel Harney, my dear old Colonel!”
I looked up to the gallows, where the priests had begun moving from wagon to wagon giving the rites, nobody impeding them, and one of the men all bound up and his noose on, was calling,
“Ye know me, Colonel! I served with ye in the old Second, in Flarida! Would ye grant a wee last favor to a doomed man?”
Why, I’d seen that man in the Swamp War! Though I’d not known him by name, well enough to remember it. My Ma and I watched in considerable wonder as Col. Harney rode over to his wagon and asked, “Eh, what is it?”
Said the man in that clear sweet voice, “Colonel, thanky! I knew y’r a kind-hearted man! Colonel, would ye kindly take me dudeen pipe from me pocket—me hands are tied, y’see—and light it for me with y’r flamin’ red hair? Just that little favor, Colonel!”
There was a little laughing there among the doomed, but the rest of the soldiery gaped in silence. The Colonel actually got down from his saddle, and climbed up on the wagon bed to face the Irishman. Said nothing that we could hear. But he didn’t draw the fellow’s pipe. Instead he drew his saber, and with his fist in that big metal hilt he struck the poor fellow so hard on the mouth that sure it broke every tooth the man had. The Colonel sheathed the saber without a word and jumped down off the wagon and mounted his horse. My Ma’s hand was on my shoulder as I said, but now her fingers digging in so hard they hurt, and she seemed about to say something to me when that poor wretch spat out blood and teeth, and called after him:
“Ah, Colonel! Y’ve ruined me for smokin’! How can I ever hold a pipe in this mouth as long as I live? Here’s bad luck to ye, Colonel!”
And laughed, he did, like a man at a comedy!
My Ma was tugging me to stand up, and her eyes were fixed on her old beau so cold and hard he surely must have felt it like a knife.
It was that moment when someone yelled for all to look up, for there on the castle, the Mexican flag was out of sight, and the Stars and Stripes rose on the flagstaff, glimpsed through the smoke. A roaring cheer went up from the soldiers ranked around the gallows. And then, what I’ll never forget, or quite understand.
Those thirty men with nooses round their necks, loud as a brass band, they gave up a single cheer of their own!
And upon that, Col. Harney faced the gallows, gave the order, the bullwhips cracked, the wagons rolled out from under, and those San Patricios were left to dance and twirl on air. My Ma yanked me to my feet. Said she,
“Come to the wagons, Paddy. We’re vacating. And a blight on our tongues if we either one speak the name of that thug again!”
So at the end of this day of days we two are encamped in the Little America, where my Ma found two old friends among the laundresses. They are at this time getting hugely and merrily drunk together in celebration of their reunion, of her riddance of old Horny Harney, and, as they imagine, the end of this unholy war. In which they may be right, or wrong, as we’ll know any day now, Gen. Scott having got a foothold inside the gates of Mexico City before the day was over. The ladies began drinking about the time I started this day’s journal entry, and are still at it. They expect tomorrow to be a long and hard workday, blood being very hard to wash out. The noise of combat long since gone quiet at both Chapultepec and Mexico City, the only sound now is mostly drunken voices. Though when the breeze shifts I hear screams from the Surgery, and expect that will continue through the night.
Here beside my candle stands a new bottle of rum that I took from the Colonel’s wagon. I’ve not uncorked it yet. I might not. In honor of John Riley who doesn’t drink and wouldn’t like seeing me do it, I just
might not touch a drop of it.
Yes, in his honor, and all his brave Irish gunners! Their suffering wasn’t altogether in vain. For I guess seeing it inflicted on them by her Red Devil himself, it may yet prove to have saved my Ma’s life.
More honor to John Riley! Viva him and his wild geese soldiers, God rest their souls.
AGUSTIN JUVERO
SPEAKING TO THE JOURNALIST
ON THE PILGRIMAGE ROAD
Here is a fact about me that I can boast of: that I once refused to obey an order of el General Santa Anna! It is of course because of that disobedience that I am “abbreviated” in this manner. Is that an interesting story? I will tell it to you. It is next in the story I was telling you, about General Scott’s attack on Chapultepec.
You see, when el General saw that your army was shelling the Citadel, he sent an order that we the cadets were to leave. He did not want boys harmed by your attack.
The senior cadet among us was eighteen years old, a fine and handsome youth, whose name was Agustín Melgar. Sí, the same given name as mine. Cadet Melgar plainly wanted to stay and defend. He did not think of himself as a boy anymore. Others of us declared that we also were ready to stay and defend. And so in the night we took a vote. We all chose to stay. Cadet Melgar took the message of our vote to General Bravo, who was the defender of Chapultepec, another old comrade of my uncle. Bravo. What could have been a more fitting name? For he was a courageous and splendid man. He told Cadet Melgar that el General was strict about the obedience to orders, particularly his own orders, but that if he would forgive disobedience to any order, it would be this brave kind of disobedience.
St. Patrick Battalion Page 28
