They Came To Cordura (6 page)

The officer who had looked at his watch felt his stomach knot. Only a man too old to make the last decision would keep them there as though on parade. They would pay for every second with casualties. He looked again at his watch. He could not believe it. The time was 05.30. Only a minute had passed. It is 05.30 hours, he noted, and this is the morning of 16th April 1916.

The charge blatted.

The khaki line, a quarter of a mile long, kicked forward into the gallop and within instants let out into the extended run, reins loosened. There was no yelling. Guidons stood out taut with speed. Manes waved. Nostrils distended. The rumps of horses bunched in perfect unison. Dirt clods flew. The surface of the plain was like hide stretched tight to cure and on it more than a thousand hoofs drummed and boomed. The line of five troops remained firm for more than a mile, a remarkable feat when the condition of the animals was considered, then, without a single shot from the ranch, slowed, wavered, and finally broke asunder. The actual charge by Provisional Squadron, 12th Cavalry, in single line at
Ojos Azules
, ended nearly a mile from objective.

The mile of extended run took most of what the horses had to give. Their breathing became liquid, they sobbed humanly. Their gallop altered to a series of desperate, drunken lunges. A few horses foundered and fell, dead before they crashed to ground. Most lurched on blowing red spray.

On the far left A Troop ran headlong into a field of withered standing corn. Dry stalks beat and crazed the animals. When the troops emerged on the other side thirteen out of forty men were afoot, running. One of them ran crying aloud, hand over an eye, sight in it destroyed by the slash of a cornstalk as he was thrown.

The remainder of A was joined by C, which had been slowed by several acres of ploughed ground. Progress of the two troops was unimpeded until, within two hundred yards of the left, or east, end of the ranch, they found strung across their front a three-strand barbed-wire fence.

Officers shouted for wire-cutters, which every fourth man carried in his saddlebags.

Up to this time there had been no sign whatever of enemy presence.

At this moment, evidently on signal, the entire ranch fairly erupted fire. The detonation of hundreds of rifles of many calibers ripped and tore the thin air of the plain like fabric.

A large, a very large, Mexican force had been waiting.

On the left fire came in sheets from three points: the adobe outbuildings where lived the
vaqueros
of the ranch; from a log corral; and, most unexpectedly, from a stone fence along a hillside half a mile to the rear of the ranch.

Troops A and C milled at the shock. While wirecutters were located they bunched up to pass through the cuttings, offering a massed target.

Fire from the hill-side was ineffective, but that from the log corral took immediate toll.

The first casualty, a soldier in A, slid from his saddle as though to rest.

Hit, a horse ran half-way through the barbed wire, disentrailing its belly, tangling its rear legs, pitching its rider over the fence.

Far to the rear, Machine-Gun Troop had lost much distance during the charge. The mules, the southwestern strain which came of a cross with a Mexican jack, were too small and carried loads too heavy to keep up: 312 pounds on the ammunition mules and 292 pounds on the gun mules.

Seeing the situation of A and C Troops at the fence, however, the officer in charge had the fagged and braying animals whipped off the road to the left and ordered the four guns got into action against the Mexican position at the hillside fence.

The machine-guns were the old Benét-Merciers, complicated weapons requiring perfect conditions in order to function. The first gun set up fired a few rounds and jammed.

As the wire was being cut, Troops A and C still bunched up, a trooper shot out from them and got his horse to a gallop. It was the private from C with twenty years’ service who had determined before the fight to find an irrigation ditch and out of sight put a bullet into his mount. Now he rode perpendicular to the fence for more than a hundred yards towards the log corral. Six or seven Villistas fired at him as he neared. Pulling up, he emptied his pistol at them, killing one who wore a sombrero figured with silver, then leaped to the ground and taking his rifle ducked through the wire and ran bent to the corral. Seeing him come, the Mexicans made for their horses, which were saddled, while he reached the log wall and fired over it, pumping the bolt of the Springfield rapidly. He killed two more and disabled three horses, so that the rest of the enemy fled the corral on foot or spurring.

During this incident Troops A and C cut and passed through the fence.

Fire from behind the row of giant cottonwood trees on the near side of the ranch burst upon the center of the line at two hundred yards’ range.

Coming up the road D Troop and the Apache Scouts were halted completely by it for a reason no one could have foreseen.

At the instant they were fired upon, the Apaches dismounted, knelt or lay prone, and began to return fire, first with pistols, then with rifles. Orders to mount and charge were ignored by the Indians.

D Troop, its horses winded and staggering, inexplicably drew up abreast of them.

Colonel Rogers hopped from his horse, shouting, and ran among the Apaches flailing at them with his campaign hat, but they would not budge. A thousand years of training and tribal instinct told them to stay where they were. They would stand their ground as well as any white man, but the concept of being under fire and not returning it was alien to their nature.

G Troop, weaving along the road in column of fours by platoons, overran the Indians, snarling all semblance of formation.

Two horses, shot through the lungs, purple spuming from their nostrils, bucked and plunged, throwing their riders and trampling them.

It was several minutes before Colonel Rogers could wave D Troop ahead.

With the center of the line stopped, the attack became, after all, one upon the Mexican flanks.

To the right of the road, moving unsteadily, gaps in its front where animals had fallen, E Troop received little enemy fire but suffered severe injuries to its mounts when it came suddenly upon an
acequia,
or irrigation ditch, within a hundred yards of the ranch. The ditch here was fourteen feet wide and ten deep, with only a trickle of water at the bottom between slant banks.

Troopers in the lead tried to leap the ditch. The gaunt animals were incapable of such a jump.

Three of them slammed into the ditch bank stiff-legged, snapping the cannon bones of their forelegs with reports heard above the rifle-fire from the ranch.

Screaming like terrified women, two of the beasts attempted to claw over the rim of the ditch upon splintered bone and dangling hoofs.

The third reared and fell backward upon its rider, crushing him face down into muddy water.

One of the troopers was hurled forward from his saddle with such force that the impact struck him unconscious.

Another emptied his pistol into the neck and head of a maddened brute before it died.

A fourth horse came belly-down upon the edge of the bank, breaking its back-bone, and as it sank upon its haunches, shaking, from its tail a spurt of yellow water founted.

Of the forty-two men in D, eighteen were unhorsed at the ditch. Some of the animals ran before they could be caught.

Those riders able to dismount at the ditch assisted in destroying the injured horses.

Unable to reassemble, D Troop took no part in the remainder of the attack.

At the far right, or west, of the broken khaki line F Troop had encountered neither obstacles nor enemy fire. Aware of the gap in the line where E had collapsed at the ditch, its officer wheeled it left, towards the roads, and, careening, it responded.

Here it found itself face to face with a high adobe wall which bounded the ranch on the west, running several hundred yards along the road.

The wall was twelve feet high. F Troop could neither see over it nor be seen.

Riders circled, bumped one another. At full strength, F Troop had nothing to fight.

Someone headed down the road and the rest followed. They pulled up at a large gate stripped with iron. Rifle-fire on the other side deafened. If they could open the gate they could reach the center of the ranch.

Several troopers drew rifles from boots and still mounted hammered with butts against the heavy wood. The gate was barred from inside.

Another stood in his saddle, and supporting himself with one hand and craning his neck emptied his pistol over the top of the gate.

As he turned to reload, shouting something, a neat hole appeared in both temples. He closed his eyes, stood motionless as though thinking, slid down, straddled the head of his horse, toppled to the ground.

D Troop, signaled forward by Colonel Rogers after the Apache Scouts had proved immovable, took the heaviest enemy fire from the row of cottonwoods and the low ranch buildings behind it. But with most men managing to hold their horses up, more than thirty made the cottonwood trunks in a final rush.

There was some dismounted fighting at close range, through doors and windows, but in the main the Mexicans melted rearward as D Troop paused to reload pistols around the corners of the outbuildings. Peering from them, they saw an oasis.

Color astonished: green of grass, red and orange and purple of flowers, blue of a large pool into which flowing water spilled. The
casa grande,
or great
hacienda
, of
Ojos Azules
was a low, square structure, brilliant white, set amid an acre of tended ground, its near side shaded by overhangs,
portales,
a flight of steps slanting to the roof-top.

On the flat roof at least thirty Villistas had concentrated, some standing, some squatting, muzzles of rifles spitting infernally, bullets raking the open yard, or
terreno,
spanging into the outbuildings, unleafing the cottonwoods.

Across the
terreno
a dozen Mexicans fled in different directions, heavily weighted down with bandoleers of cartridges criss-crossed over their shoulders.

Shot, three fell. One lay still. He was dressed in blue overalls and a suit coat.

The bare, horny feet of the second twitched.

On hands and knees the third crawled towards the troopers, grinning, moustached. He wore a green uniform and a felt fedora.

He crawled until shot again.

On the far side of the
casa grande
stretched a high wall, in its center a barred wooden gate over which rose the campaign hat and pistol of a trooper. Hat and pistol disappeared.

The roof-top was the heart of the Mexican resistance. To clear it would require covering fifty yards of open ground and reaching the steps.

The officer of D hesitated, thinking of deploying his men in three groups for a rush.

Hatless, the sergeant of D, the one who, before the fight, had sung to himself the lewd song of the ostler’s wife, ran from the corner of an outbuilding. Taking great strides, his pistol swinging, he headed for the
casa grande.
Villista fire clipped earth about him, wet him with water as he passed the pool. He started up the steps to the roof four at a time. Near the top of the flight a Mexican, with rifle swung in an arc, struck him a terrible blow on the head with its stock. He staggered back, shot the Mexican, then reeling upwards firing killed two others, reached the roof, hurled his pistol into the Villistas, followed it. The two nearest him he seized in long arms and threw bodily off the roof. The next he took by the throat, standing up, and strangled.

Outside the gate most of F Troop milled uncertainly, trying to avoid trampling the fallen trooper.

Finding himself beside the gate, the young private who, high on the hills in darkness, had writhed with an imaginary wound, holstered his pistol and hoisting himself vaulted over the gate and leaped to the ground just as two Mexicans were thrown from the roof of the
casa grande.
One fired point-blank at the private with his rifle. Drawing his pistol, the private shot him in the groin, then turned to the gate and frantically slid the heavy bar sideways. The second Mexican, weaponless, his leg broken by the fall from the roof, limped to the private from behind and grappled with him. On the roof a Villista lit with his cigar the fuse of a grenade hand-made from a baking-powder can and sailed the grenade at the gate. There was a tremendous explosion. The Mexican, whose body had served as a shield, fell riddled with tin, and in a shower of dirt the private unbarred and opened the gate.

F Troop poured through mounted.

The remainder of D rushed from the outbuildings.

The Apache Scouts, no longer under fire on the road, came through the cottonwoods war-crying.

Villistas leaped from the roof of the
casa grande
in suicidal attempts to escape.

The
terreno,
thick now with the Mexicans’ black-powder smoke, was a hell of men and horses.

There was hand-to-hand fighting. Men shot, clubbed, kicked, bit, and choked each other.

To keep hoofs from their heads fallen men shot crazed, excreting horses through the belly.

Struck by a bullet in his bowels, a young trooper pulled himself under the
portale
and there, unashamed, moaning questions, took down his patched and bloody breeches to examine himself.

Wounded, wearing a pith helmet, one Mexican struggled into the pool, reddening the water with his wound, was caught bellowing from behind by an Apache. The Indian removed the pith helmet, put it on his own head, scalped the man with his knife, pushed him underwater to drown.

A and C Troop had passed through the barbed-wire fence east of the ranch, and C, seeing the bulk of the Villistas fleeing on foot or trying to reach their grazing horses, deployed right and rode into them. Those on foot surrendered or were shot down.

A Troop, spurring the flanks of their animals mercilessly, headed up the slopes south, towards the enemy position behind the stone fence on the hillside.