Eyes of Eagles

by William W. Johnstone

“At my orders, I want them to play the Degüello.” The Fire and Death song.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “General Cos?”

  “Ready, sir.”

  Santa Anna shivered. “Get my coat. Damn this weather!”

  With his warm coat around him, Santa Anna smiled, anxious for the Degüello to begin. He loved it. He’d loved the tune since he’d first heard its somber notes. The Degüello came from the Spanish word degollar, which means “to slash the throat” or “to behead.” To Santa Anna, the tune brought out the ancient beast in him. It hottened the blood. It was stirring.

  Travis had ordered several men to stand watch outside the walls, and several men to keep the fires going inside the walls. Those men outside the walls were never heard from or seen by their comrades again; or by anyone else for that matter. Hand-picked men from the Mexican Army had crept forward in the darkness and sliced their throats.

  Travis had grown increasingly restless. He had not taken his rifle, but a double-barreled shotgun, heavily loaded with rusty nails and whatever else the armorer could find, and mounted the parapet to stand by a cannon. He had consulted his timepiece before blowing out the candle in his room. It was four-thirty on the bitterly cold morning of March 6, 1836. Colonel William Barrett Travis had just about ninety minutes to live.

  Miles away, Jamie Ian MacCallister slept the sleep of the utterly exhausted.

  Jim Bowie stirred on his cot and suddenly became wide awake. “Sam?” he called.

  “I’m right here by your side, sir.”

  “Make sure those pistols are ready, Sam. All four of them, and put them by my side. Two to my right, two to my left.”

  “Yes, sir, Mr. Jim. Is the Mexicans comin?’ ”

  “They’re here. Unsheathe my blade, Sam.”

  “Yes, sir. Now you be careful, Mr. Jim. That there blade is mighty sharp.”

  Bowie chuckled in the darkness. “Careful? An old pirate like me? Pour us both a drink, Sam. And make them good ones, now, you hear.”

  “You wants me to drink with you, sir?”

  “That’s what I said, Sam.” He took the cup, brimming full of whiskey. “Thank you, Sam. Drink up. It’ll be your last time to drink with me before I meet the devil.”

  Before Bowie’s startled eyes, Sam, a man that Bowie felt almost never touched a drop, emptied the cup, smacked his lips, and said, “Ahhh! Mighty fine drinkin’ whiskey, Mr. Jim. Mighty fine.”

  Bowie had to laugh at Sam. “Is there any more in that jug, Sam?”

  “Not narely a drop, sir.”

  Bowie downed his cup. “Well, Sam, like the lady told me one time, years ago: Get off me, boy. You done got all you paid for.”

  Sam and Jim Bowie shared a chuckle in the quiet darkness of predawn.

  Jim said, “Now go over there in the far corner and sit down, Sam. When the soldiers bust through that door, you have your hands in the air just as high as you can stretch. Don’t make any attempt to help me. I want your promise on that.”

  “I done served you for years, Jim Bowie. I can’t make no promise like...”

  “Sam!”

  “All right, Mr. Jim. You gots my promise.”

  “I mean it, Sam.”

  “I knows you do. I’ll do what you say.”

  The time was twenty minutes until five.

  Davy Crockett tossed his blankets from him and rose, stretching the cold kinks out of his muscles. He picked up Ol’ Betsy and climbed stiffly up to the parapet, to stand staring out into the darkness.

  “She’s a quiet one, Davy,” one of his men said. “Too damn quiet.”

  “Ol’ Santy Anny’s a-comin’ this mornin’. That’s why she’s so quiet. As soon as his bands start tootin’ on the bugles and beatin’ the drums, they’ll be hell to pay, all right. Get the boys up and ready.”

  Four forty-five.

  Crockett left the platform and began rousing the men. “She’s due to come any minute now, boys. I feel it in my bones.”

  “You feel it, too, Davy?” Travis called from his post.

  “I damn shore do, Billy-Boy,” Davy replied with a grin, knowing how Travis hated to be called that.

  But Travis only laughed this time. “We’ll make them pay in blood, Davy.”

  “Damn right, Colonel!” Crockett’s strong voice boomed across the cold and windswept plaza.

  Ten minutes to five.

  Bowie lay on his cot, the blankets pulled up to his neck, but his hands were free. He thought fondly of his dead wife and children. “Just let me see them once more, Lord,” he whispered. “And then you can send me to Hell. Just once more.”

  “You ain’t goin’ to hell, Jim Bowie,” Sam whispered. “Ever’body knows God loves His warriors.”

  If Bowie heard him, he made no comment.

  Almeron Dickerson kissed his wife on the lips, held her close for a moment, and then ran to his artillery battery.

  “Return to me, Almeron!” she called.

  “If it’s God’s will, Susanna!” he called over his shoulder.

  It was not to be.

  Five minutes to five.

  Santa Anna rode his horse slowly through the silent streets to the house where he planned on observing the battle. He dismounted and entered the warmth of the building, accepting a cup of coffee from an aide. The coffee had not been sweetened. Santa Anna haughtily ordered the aide to sweeten his coffee and not to make that same mistake again.

  Then, in an uncharacteristic burst of charity, he apologized to the young aide. Santa Anna stood by an open window, sipping coffee and humming his favorite tune: the Degüello.

  Forty-two

  Remember the Alamo

  Five o’clock. March 6, 1836

  The heavy low notes of the Degüello sounded, and Travis yelled, “Here they come, boys! Here they come! To your posts, men. The enemy is about us.”

  They sure were. Some three thousand of Santa Anna’s best combat troops surged up from the ground and charged the walls of the Alamo, all of them screaming loudly.

  For just a very few seconds, the men of the Alamo were stunned by the enormity of it all. Then they rallied into action. Fifty Mexican soldiers were killed in the first volley of rifle fire from the walls.

  “Give them what for, men!” Travis yelled, waving his sword with one hand and holding the double-barreled shotgun in the other.

  And the volunteers at the Alamo did just that. Captain Dickerson ordered his cannon to be charged with grapeshot and fired nearly point-blank into the charging Mexican troops. It was carnage for the Mexican infantry.

  Travis stood on the reinforced platform holding the battery of eight-pounders in the center of the north wall. He calmly brought his sword down on the cold metal of the cannon with a ringing slap and told the gunner, “Fire it, man. Do your duty. For God, Freedom, and Texas.”

  The cannon roared and an entire line of Mexican troops was blown into eternity, the grapeshot shredding their bodies.

  Crockett and his men were guarding the front gate, and guard it they did. They stood calmly on the walls, fully exposed, and fired volley after volley into the charging troops until the Mexican commanders wisely decided to shift troops away from that part of the battle.

  The Mexican troops had suffered so many wounded during the first rush, their pain-filled shrieking and screaming and pitiful calling for help was clearly audible over the crack and boom of combat. Some Mexican troops were beginning to retreat — never had these seasoned combat veterans faced anything like the cold fury of the men defending the Alamo. The officers screamed and cursed at the men, beating them with the flat side of their swords, commanding them to turn around and once more charge into battle. Some did; most did not.

  The Mexican commanders ordered their buglers to sound recall; the first charge had failed miserably. Santa Anna went into a screaming rage as the first notes of the bugles reached him. His senior advisors tried to reason with him. It was no use. General Santa Anna was like a wild man in his fury. How was it possible, h
e screamed, that two hundred men could successfully beat back a charge by three thousand men?

  His advisors had no reply to that.

  Santa Anna jerked a very startled and very frightened young runner to him, holding the young man by the front of his jacket, and said, “You take this message to General Cos. He has one more chance to breach those walls. Just one. Now fly like the devil is nipping at your heels!”

  The young soldier did just that. He found a colonel, gave him the message from Santa Anna, and then got the hell out of there. He found a riderless horse, swung into the saddle, and rode straight east, away from the battle. He was never seen again.

  Incredibly, not one man defending the Alamo was killed or wounded during the first charge. When the ranks of the first charge broke, the cheering from the men inside the walls reached Santa Anna.

  The first rays of the sun were blood red peeking over the horizon. Santa Anna whirled to face his senior officers. He pointed to the sun. “I want the ground inside those walls that color. By the time the sun is fully exposed, I want to be standing ankle deep in Anglo blood. Do it!”

  “Reload and make ready!” Travis shouted his orders. “We held them, boys. By God, we held them. We can do it again.”

  “Not for long,” Jim Bowie muttered from his cot, after hearing the faint call. He knew far better than Travis the temper of the Mexican people. He had lived among them, worked side by side with them, and married a Mexican lady. Bowie knew that when that Latin blood turned hot, Santa Anna’s soldiers would be over those old walls, and then it would be man to man.

  “Bring me a cigar, Sam,” Bowie called. “I want one more smoke. And don’t tell me the doctor said I shouldn’t smoke. What the hell difference does it make now?”

  * * *

  Jamie’s eyes flew open and he silently cursed himself for nine kinds of a fool and weakling and ran to the stable while the others in the house slept on. He quickly saddled up and was gone. A couple of miles from the grand home, he stopped and listened. He thought he could hear the very faint sounds of cannon; but he couldn’t be sure. He touched his heels to the fine horse and headed for the road to Gonzales. The road itself was still some miles away.

  Just off the road, in a stand of trees, Tall Bull and his band of warriors waited. Their faces were impassive as the cold winds whipped around them. Man Who Is Not Afraid would come. And when he did, they would kill him. Slowly.

  * * *

  The bands played the Degüello, the buglers sounded charge, and the Mexican army surged forward for the second time that morning as the sounds of cannonballs whistled over their heads. The balls crashed against the walls and this time portions of the battered old walls gave way under the onslaught. Great gaping holes were blown in the walls. Defenders rushed to plug the holes with their own flesh and floor, hastily throwing up human barricades with rifles and pistols in their hands.

  On both sides, all knew that very soon it would come down to bayonets and knives at close quarter.

  “Hold, boys, hold!” Travis’s shout could be heard above the din of battle.

  And the volunteers held, beating back the second charge that morning.

  General Cos retaliated swiftly, sending his troops back into the fray without a second’s hesitation. The colonel had delivered the courier’s message word for word, perhaps even adding some additional dialogue, since General Cos was not a well-liked commander.

  It was six o’clock in the morning and the sun was blood red lifting into a cold and cloudless day when the first troops of the Mexican army breached the walls, pouring through a huge hole into the plaza of the Alamo.

  William Barrett Travis turned to look with dismay at the Mexican soldiers running screaming with bayonets fixed into the plaza. “Hold, boys, hold!” he shouted, waving his sword, the blade catching the rays of the sun. “Hold for God and for Texas!”

  Those were the last words the South Carolinian spoke. A single rifle ball caught the colonel in the center of the forehead, felling him instantly. He slumped to the platform, dead.

  William Travis was certainly among the first, or even the first, Texan death. But outside the walls, it was terrible bloody carnage. Over a thousand Mexican soldiers lay dead or dying. And within the remaining fifty or so minutes, another thousand or more would be dead or wounded inside the walls. That so few men could inflict so many casualties against a force so huge would remain a lasting tribute to the fighting spirit of these defenders of the Alamo.

  The Mexican army kept pouring men through the newly blasted-open holes in the wall. The fight became, for most of the Texans, hand to hand and eyeball to eyeball; the Mexicans used their long, needle-pointed bayonets, the defenders of the Alamo used their Arkansas Toothpicks and Bowie knifes. The walls and the grounds of the plaza became splattered with blood, most of it from the Mexican soldiers.

  To the uniformed Mexican troops, the sight of the men of the Alamo came as a shock, for many of the defenders were literally in rags.

  Ragged or not, the Texan force made it perfectly clear that surrender was not on their minds, and that they were prepared to fight to the last man.

  The first seventy-five Mexican soldiers to come through the shattered wall died on the spot. Those who came behind them were forced to use the bodies of their fallen comrades as shields.

  But within minutes, the Mexican troops had the upper hand. Once in the compound, the defenders had no place to go and death looked them square in the face.

  But the Mexican troops still had a horrible, bitter, and bloody fight on their hands from the Texas force.

  “Kill ’em all, boys!” Davy Crockett roared from his position along the walls. “Make ’em pay, by God. Make ’em pay in blood!”

  With a mighty pantherlike scream that chilled those Mexican troops who heard him, Davy leaped from the platform, his men right behind him, screaming like wild banshees, and then proceeded to literally cut and club their way through the advancing troops of Santa Anna, making their way across the compound toward the old church itself. As they leaped from the walls, the Tennessee volunteers fired rifles and pistols and then used their empty rifles as clubs with one hand and their long-bladed and extremely sharp knives to open a way to the church. They left behind them frozen ground slick with fresh blood and littered with dead and dying, horribly mangled Mexican troops.

  It was a scene that would haunt many of the surviving Mexican troops for the rest of their lives.

  Crockett and his men and a few others took refuge behind the low wall that separated the main plaza of the Alamo from the much smaller plaza of the old church. They had the high walls of the building used as the hospital on one side, and a battery of artillery on the other side. The church lay to their backs.

  Many of the Texans had retreated into the rooms in the buildings along the west, south, and east sides of the walls. Those left outside were quickly killed and then horribly butchered and the bodies mutilated, so great now was the rage of the Mexican soldiers.

  “I could have told you,” Bowie said aloud, as the sounds of knives and machetes striking cold dead flesh came to him in his room.

  But at Travis’s firm insistence, the rooms had been prepared for a last stand, and it was here that the defenders of the Alamo could, for the first time that bloody day, crouch behind cover and level their rifles and pistols at the enemy. Probably five hundred of Santa Anna’s troops, at least, were killed in this action alone.

  Davy Crockett, with an arm wound (left or right has never been firmly documented), was roaring like an enraged grizzly bear and killing Mexican troops as fast as he could load rifle and pistols. “You bastards will find Ol’ Davy hard to kill!” he bellered.

  His strong voice and unflagging courage gave the defenders new life. No hope, for they knew they were all minutes away from death, but new fighting spirit. Those who had run out of powder and shot started swinging their rifles like clubs, smashing open heads and smearing the ground and the walls with more blood. The Alamo defenders were a
ll shouting and cursing and taunting the enemy. Many of the Mexican troops simply could not bring themselves to kill any more of these brave men. They threw down their weapons and refused to kill again. Not because they were afraid — for they certainly were not — but because courageous men like these should not be killed.

  Their sergeants and officers shot those men dead.

  Jim Bowie cocked his pistols and waited for the door to his room to smash open.

  Sam sat on a stool in the corner.

  Travis’s slave, Joe, sat at Travis’s desk, his hands by his side. Like Sam, Joe had been ordered to offer no resistance when the door was smashed open.

  The plaza of the Alamo was now filled with hundreds of Mexican soldiers.

  Almeron Dickerson and half a dozen of his men were at the only cannons still in Texan hands. They loaded the two cannons with whatever they could find, lowered the elevation and touched a torch to the fire-hole. The cannon roared and the rocks and bits of rusty chain and broken pieces of muskets cleared a path fifty feet wide right down the center of the plaza, hurling bloody chunks of Santa Anna’s soldiers in all directions, splattering other soldiers with the blood of their comrades.

  The rifles of the Mexican troops cracked and the men manning the last battery of cannon fell dead.

  Susanna Dickerson would see her husband one more time — to identify the body.

  Troops kicked in the door to Bowie’s quarters and the famous knife fighter lifted his first two pistols and shot two soldiers dead. He tossed the empty pistols aside and grabbed his last two pistols and fired. He had double-shotted these and the four balls struck three Mexican troops. Soldiers scrambled over the bodies of their comrades and pinned Bowie to the cot with bayonets, running him through. Jim Bowie roared in pain, blood spraying from his mouth and with the last of his strength, swung his big-bladed knife at a soldier who had the misfortune to get just a tad too close to Bowie. The knife took the man’s head off clean just as another soldier drove his bayonet through Bowie’s right eye, pinning his head to the wooden frame of the cot. The head bounced once on the floor, the eyes open in astonishment.