Warriors [Anthology]

by George R. R.

  The casualties were massive. Still, Kline, Rourke, and their fellow legionnaires continued fighting. When the officer in charge of a regular French unit insisted that no one had a chance and that surrender to the Germans was the only reasonable choice, the Legion commander had shot him to death. A second French officer tried to retaliate, and this time, it was Kline who did the shooting, defending his commander, whose back was turned. Every legionnaire understood. From their first day of training, absolutes were drilled into them, and one of them was,Never surrender your arms.

  “What do Baptists believe?” Rourke asked the night after another battle. They were cleaning their rifles.

  “God punishes us for our sins,” Kline answered.

  “What can you do to be saved?”

  “Nothing. It all depends on Christ’s mercy.”

  “Mercy?” Rourke’s thin face tightened as he considered the word. “Seen much of that?”

  “No.”

  “Me, neither,” Rourke said.

  “What do Catholics believe about being saved?” Kline asked.

  “We say we’re sorry for our sins and do penance to prove we mean it.”

  Thinking of his wife and daughter, of how he’d left them alone while he’d helped in the bank robbery, of how his wife had committed suicide after his daughter had died, Kline asked, “But what if your sin’s so bad that you can’t possibly make up for it?”

  “I ask myself that a lot. I was an altar boy. I almost went into the seminary. But maybe I’m in the wrong religion. You say God punishes us for our sins and our only hope is to depend on His mercy? Makes sense to me.”

  That was when Kline decided that Rourke hadn’t joined the Legion to avoid being hunted by the British Army. No, he was in the Legion because, like Kline, he’d done something horribly wrong and was punishing himself.

  * * * *

  Kline missed his friend. Staring between the boulders, he sought distraction from his regrets by reaching for his canteen under the blanket that protected him from the sun. He unscrewed it and withdrew his gaze from the ancient sandstone buildings only long enough to drink the metallic-tasting, warm water.

  He focused again on the target. Men with rifles were over there, watching this ridge. Of that, he had no doubt. There would be a battle tomorrow. Of that, he had no doubt, either.

  Behind him, footsteps approached, dislodging rocks.

  Durado’s voice said, “The first ceremony’s over. I’ll take your place.”

  “Everything’s quiet,” Kline reported.

  “It won’t be tomorrow. The captain says we’re definitely going in.”

  Kline pulled the blanket off him, feeling the harsh rays of the sun on his now-exposed arms and legs. Careful to stay low, he made his way along the bottom of the rocky slope. After passing other sentry emplacements, he reached the main part of camp, where half the Thirteenth Demi-Brigade was in formation next to its tents.

  The air was blindingly bright as the colonel stepped onto a boulder, facing them. His name was Amilakvari. He was a Russian who’d escaped the Communist revolution when he was eleven and joined the Legion when he was twenty. Now in his mid-thirties, he looked gaunt and sinewy after months of desert combat. Nonetheless, he wore a full-dress uniform.

  Despite his Russian background, the colonel addressed the legionnaires in French, their common language, even though privately most still spoke their native language and formed friendships on the basis of it, as Kline had done with Rourke. Solemn, the colonel raised a hand, but the hand didn’t belong to him. It had been carved from a block of wood, the palm and the fingers amazingly lifelike.

  Neither Kline nor anyone else needed to be told that it was supposed to be a replica of the wooden hand of the Legion’s greatest hero, Captain Jean Danjou. All of them knew by heart the events that the colonel was about to describe, and every battle-hardened one of them also knew that, before the ceremony was completed, tears would stream down his face.

  * * * *

  Camarón, Mexico. The Legion called it Camerone.

  As many times as Kline had heard the story, with each telling it became more powerful. Listening to the colonel recite it, Kline sensed he was there, feeling the cool night air as the patrol set out at 1 a.m. on April 30, 1863.

  They were on foot: sixty-two soldiers, three officers, and Captain Danjou, a decorated combat veteran with a gallant-looking goatee and mustache. Few understood why they were in Mexico, something to do with a pact between Napoleon III of France and Emperor Maximilian of Austria, a scheme to invade Mexico while the United States was distracted by its Civil War. But legionnaires were indifferent to politics. All they cared about was completing any mission they were assigned.

  The French force had arrived at the port of Veracruz in the Gulf of Mexico, where they immediately discovered an enemy as lethal as the Mexican soldiers and furious civilians who resisted them. The ravages of yellow fever killed a third of them and forced them to move their headquarters sixty miles inland to the elevated town of Cordoba, where they hoped the air would be less contaminated. The shift in location meant that the supply route between Veracruz and Cordoba needed to be kept open, and the responsibility for doing that fell to patrols like the one Captain Danjou commanded.

  Kline imagined the long night of walking along the remote, barren road. At dawn, the legionnaires were allowed to stop for breakfast, but as they searched for wood to build cook fires, a sentry pointed to the west.

  “Mexican cavalry!”

  The dust raised by the approaching horses made it difficult to count the number of riders, but this much was clear—there were hundreds and hundreds of them.

  “Form a square!” Danjou ordered.

  The men assembled in rows that faced each direction. The first row knelt while the second stood, their rifles aimed over the heads of the men kneeling in front.

  The Mexican cavalry charged. As one, the legionnaires in the first row fired, breaking the attack. While they reloaded, the men behind them aimed, ready to fire if ordered.

  Knowing that he’d gained only a little time, Danjou studied the open area around him, in search of cover. To the east, a ruined hacienda attracted his attention. He urged his men toward it, but again, the Mexicans charged, and again, the legionnaires fired, their fusillade dispersing the attack.

  “Keep moving!” Danjou yelled.

  Nearing the ruins, he peered over his shoulder and saw foot soldiers joining the Mexican cavalry. Out of breath, he and his patrol raced into a rubble-littered courtyard.

  “Close the gates! Barricade them!”

  Danjou assessed where they were. The hacienda had dilapidated farm buildings arranged in a fifty-yard square. A stone wall enclosed it. In places, the barrier was ten feet high, but at other spots, it had collapsed, forming a chest-high heap of stones.

  “Spread out! Take cover!”

  A sentry scurried up a ladder to the top of a stable and reported the dust of more horsemen and infantry arriving.

  “I see sombreros in every direction!”

  “How many?” Danjou yelled.

  “At least two thousand.”

  Danjou quickly calculated the ratio: thirty to one.

  “There’ll soon be a lot less of them!” he shouted to his men.

  He got the laugh that he’d hoped for. But his billowy red pants and dark blue jacket were soaked with sweat from the urgent retreat toward the hacienda. In contrast, his mouth was dry, and he knew that, as the day grew hotter, his men would be desperate for water.

  A quick search of the ruins revealed that there wasn’t any, however. But that wasn’t the case with the Mexicans. A nearby stream provided all the water the enemy could want. Danjou’s lips felt drier at the thought of it.

  “A rider’s coming!” the sentry yelled. “He’s got a white flag!”

  Danjou climbed the ladder to the top of the stable. The movement was awkward for him. He had only one intact hand. Years earlier, his left one had been blown off by a musket
. Undaunted, he’d commissioned a carver to create an ornate wooden replacement. Its lacquer was flesh-colored. Its fingers had hinges that made them flexible. It had a black cuff into which he inserted the stump of his wrist. By moving the stump against leather strips inside the cuff, he had taught himself to make the wooden fingers move.

  Keeping that artificial hand out of sight behind his back, lest it be interpreted as a weakness, Danjou peered down at a Mexican officer who rode to him. The many languages of Danjou’s legionnaires had forced him to become multilingual.

  “You’re outnumbered,” the Mexican officer said. “You don’t have water. You’ll soon run out of food. Surrender. You’ll be treated fairly.”

  “No,” Danjou said.

  “But to stay is to die.”

  “We won’t lay down our arms,” Danjou emphasized.

  “This is foolishness.”

  “Try to attack us, and you’ll learn how foolish that is.”

  Enraged, the Mexican officer rode away.

  Danjou descended the ladder as quickly as he could. Even though he shouted encouragement to his men, he was troubled that the hacienda was situated in low terrain. The elevated ground beyond it allowed enemy riflemen to shoot down past the walls and into the compound.

  Mexican snipers opened fire, providing cover for another cavalry charge. The dust the horses raised provided cover for advancing infantry. Bullets walloped through the wood of the buildings and shattered chunks of stone from the walls. But despite the unrelenting barrage, the disciplined volleys from the legionnaires repelled attack after attack.

  By 11 a.m., the heat of the sun was crushing. The barrels of their rifles became too hot to touch. Twelve legionnaires were dead.

  Danjou urged the remainder to keep fighting. Gesturing with his wooden hand, he rushed from group to group and personally made each man know that he counted on him. As he crossed the courtyard to help defend a wall, he lurched back, struck in the chest by a sniper’s bullet.

  A legionnaire who ran to help him heard him murmur with his last anguished breath, “Never give up.”

  Danjou’s second-in-command took charge, shouting to the men, making them swear to fight harder in Danjou’s honor. “We may die, but we’ll never surrender!”

  With two thousand Mexicans shooting, the enormous number of bullets hitting the compound—perhaps as many as eight thousand per minute— would have felt overwhelming, like the modern equivalent of being strafed by numerous machine guns. The noise alone would have been agony. Buildings crumbled. Gun smoke filled the air.

  The farmhouse caught fire, perhaps ignited by muzzle flashes. Smoke from it further hampered vision and made the legionnaires struggle to breathe. But they kept shooting, repelling more attacks, ignoring more pleas to surrender.

  By four in the afternoon, only twelve legionnaires remained alive. By 6 p.m.,the number of men able to fight had been reduced to five. As the Mexicans burst into the compound, the handful of survivors fired their last remaining ammunition, then attacked with fixed bayonets, rushing through the smoke, stabbing and clubbing.

  A private was shot nineteen times while he tried to shield his lieutenant. Two others were hit and fell, but one struggled to his feet and joined his last two comrades. They stood back to back, thrusting with their bayonets.

  The Mexican officer, who’d spoken to Danjou earlier, had never seen fighting like it.

  “Stop!” he ordered his men.

  He spun toward the survivors. “For God’s sake, this is pointless. Surrender.”

  “We won’t give up our weapons,” a wounded legionnaire insisted.

  “Your weapons? Are you trying to negotiate with me?” the Mexican asked in amazement.

  The bleeding legionnaire wavered, trying not to fall. “We might be your prisoners, but we won’t give up our weapons.”

  The Mexican gaped. “You don’t have any ammunition. Your rifles are almost useless anyhow. Keep the damned things.”

  “And you need to allow us to take care of our wounded.”

  Astonished by their audacity, the Mexican officer grabbed the sinking legionnaire and said, “To men like you, I can’t refuse anything.”

  * * * *

  Kline stood under the stark Syrian sun, listening to his commander describe the battle at Camerone.

  Kline had heard the details many times, but with each telling, they gained more power. In his imagination, he smelled the blood, heard the buzzing of the flies on the corpses, and tasted the bitter smoke from the gunpowder and the burning buildings. The screams of the dying seemed to echo around him. He felt his eyes mist with emotion and took for granted that the men around him felt the same.

  All the while, the colonel held up the wooden hand, a replica of Danjou’s wooden hand, which had been recovered after the long-ago battle. The original hand was now protected in a glass case at Legion headquarters. Each year on April 30, the anniversary of the battle, the hand was carried around a crowded assembly room, allowing everyone to gaze at the Legion’s most precious relic. On that same day, a similar memorial—minus the hand—occurred at every Legion base around the world. It was the most important ritual in the Legion’s year.

  But no one had ever arranged for a replica of Danjou’s hand to be carved. No one had ever gone this far to imitate the ceremony as it took place each year at Legion headquarters. Moreover, this wasn’t April 30. Given what was scheduled to happen the next morning, Kline understood that the wrong date reinforced how determined the colonel was to remind him and his fellow legionnaires of their heritage.

  Standing on the boulder, holding the wooden hand above his head, the colonel spoke so forcefully that no one could fail to hear.

  “Each of the sixty-six legionnaires at that battle carried sixty rounds of ammunition. Every round was used. That means they fired thirty-eight hundred rounds. Despite the heat and thirst and dust and smoke, they killed almost four hundred of the enemy. Think of it—one out of every ten bullets found its mark. Astonishing, given the circumstances. Those legionnaires were offered repeated opportunities to surrender. At any time, they could have abandoned their mission, but they refused to dishonor the legion or themselves.

  “Tomorrow, remember those heroes. Tomorrow, you will be heroes. No legionnaire has ever encountered what all of you will face in the morning. We never walk away from a mission. We never fail to honor our obligations. What is our motto?”

  “The Legion Is Our Country!” Kline and everybody else automatically shouted.

  “I can’t hear you!”

  “The Legion Is Our Country!”

  “What is our second motto?”

  “Honor and Nobility!”

  “Yes! Never forget that! Never forget Camerone! Never disgrace the Legion! Never fail to do your duty!”

  * * * *

  Brooding about the bleak choice he would face the next morning, Kline returned along the bottom of the rocky slope. Barely noticing the numerous sentries along the way, he came to where Durado lay under the blanket and peered between the two boulders toward the outskirts of Damascus.

  “You’re back already? Just when I was getting comfortable,” Durado said.

  Kline half smiled. The humor reminded him of the jokes that Rourke had used to make.

  Heat radiated off the rocks.

  “Do you think the colonel’s speech made a difference?” Durado squirmed to the bottom of the slope.

  “We won’t know until tomorrow,” Kline answered, taking his place between the boulders. “No legionnaire’s ever been forced into this situation before.”

  “Well, we do what we need to,” Durado said, starting to walk away.

  “Yes, God punishes us for our sins,” Kline murmured.

  Durado stopped and turned. “What? I didn’t quite hear what you said.”

  “Just talking to myself.”

  “I thought you said something about God.”

  “Did you ever realize that it didn’t need to happen?” Kline asked.

&nbs
p; “Realize that what didn’t need to happen?”

  “Camerone. The legionnaires were out of water. They had almost no food. Their ammunition was limited. In that heat, after three days without anything to drink, they’d have been unconscious or worse. All the Mexicans needed to do was wait.”

  “Maybe they were afraid reinforcements would arrive before then,” Durado suggested.

  “But why would the Mexicans have been afraid?” Kline asked. “There were so many of them that a rescue column wouldn’t have had a chance. If they’d set it up right and made it seem that only a couple of hundred Mexicans surrounded the hacienda, they could have lured the reinforcements into an ambush.”