El Paso: A Novel (22 page)

I ascended the Ridge from Orchard Knob, just like we did in ’64. Weren’t those grand old times! Flags flying, cannon roaring, shot and shell and the smoke descended onto the knob like a blanket of cotton. But we took it then and could take it again today, if needs be. Walked ten miles today.

Next afternoon he visited Chickamauga. He told his journal:

Made a sketch of Grizzly’s battery with its inscription and sent it to Grizzly. Stayed at the Hotel Patten and walked fifteen miles. Rosecrans disgraced us here; only great defeat of Army of the Tennessee.

A day later he was outside Nashville:

Rained most of the afternoon. At the Franklin battlefield I walked seven miles. It’s not much different now than it was fifty years ago. Lots of corn planted now in the fields where Hood’s army had to cross and many of our old fortifications are still there. What terrible slaughter. Still can’t believe they tried it.

Finally Bierce arrived at Shiloh—Pittsburgh Landing—the site of his first major battle. Referring to the fact that he was visiting the battlefields in inverse order to when the battles had been fought, he wrote:

I seem to be doing all this backwards, but it’s the only sensible way. Poured cats and dogs all day long and the asthma’s acting up. I’ll be glad to get to Mexico where maybe it won’t rain. The steamboat trip from Nashville was long and tedious and we stopped at every landing to put on freight. The landings are not towns, just dirt roads coming down to the water. River is beautiful but at so low a tide you cannot see the countryside over the banks.

Walked maybe twenty miles. Found the graves of twenty of our regiment. Their names are all right in the cemetery record but only half the bodies have been identified. The Confederate dead still lie where buried and none named. The fields across the river are still much the same as described in “What I saw at Shiloh.” I wonder if Mexicans fight like this? I expect they die like this, anyway. I’ve lost about ten pounds.

Next day Bierce took a ramshackle old automobile to Corinth, Mississippi, where he caught a night train to New Orleans. On arrival he was still suffering from asthma but was met by three reporters who wanted to interview him, and he sat up all night with them.

Good to see New Orleans. People in the streets are not in a hurry; corridors of hotels are crowded; men play billiards as they did years and years ago and the bars—oh, you should see a New Orleans bar! The drinks they make, and the trays and trays of them sent upstairs. Talked Mexico all afternoon; it’s on everyone’s lips here—more so than the war in Europe—since they do a brisk trade through the port. Some say Villa is a bandit, some say a hero. Newspapers print both sides, but I’m looking forward to finding out for myself.

Took a stroll along the river among the cotton bales. All my old haunts are lost to me and excepting the few blocks about the Monteleone Hotel, it is a strange city. Can’t find even a few places where Pollard and I dined and drank so many years ago.

Bierce was a man who’d made a career in doomsaying, but he was set in a gloomier mood than usual by New Orleans. He sat on the balcony of his room at the Monteleone, watching the bustling streets below and recording his impressions. After the third drink, he had a sudden premonition that he was on his last roundup and he took his tablet out once again. He wrote:

Dear Miss Christiansen, since it is in no way certain that I will survive the conflict in Mexico, I am sending you these pages of my journal by post and will continue to do so daily if possible. By the way, at Shiloh visiting the graves of the 9th Indiana I found a headstone with the bald inscription No. 411, T. J. Patton. Captain Patton was our adjutant and fell early in the engagement and for more than fifty years has been lying there, denied the prestige of his rank. I have corrected that and though he will sleep no better for it, I will.

Having said this and having mailed the pages to Miss Christiansen, Bierce packed up and caught the train to San Antonio, where he got his first look at Mexicans. He did not think much of them at first blush.

San Antonio is a city of 110,000 but you can cover the Alamo with a hat. Passed an hour there; the name Alamo means cottonwood trees. It was rather interesting with relics, old documents and bad poetry—the shrine of each Texan’s devotion. Outside the wall are large numbers of idle Mexicans. The Mexicans like nothing better than to sit in the sun smoking cigarettes and drinking pulque—their national alcoholic beverage—unless the sun is too hot and, on those frequent occasions, they sit in the shade smoking cigarettes and drinking pulque.

Journeying on to Laredo, Bierce observed it was “
a town of 18,000 of which 3,000 are Americans. English is not spoken by any of the Mexicans, not even the hotel waiters or chambermaids. Mexicans run the city and federal government offices—particularly the Post Office. Took half an hour to buy a stamp.
”

He was interviewed by the editor of the only English newspaper in Mexico, who regaled him with the story of a Mexican cabinet member who kept an old copy of
Cosmopolitan
and bored all his friends by reading and quoting from “A Wine of Wizardy,” a poem written by George Sterling, whom Bierce had chosen to mentor. It pleased Bierce to be recognized so far south of the border, but after he left Laredo, he went underground.

He assumed the name “Jack Robinson,” both to diminish his recognizability by American officials, who he feared might prevent him from crossing the border, and also because he’d heard stories about Mexicans kidnapping anybody they considered rich or famous. He also dyed his snow-white hair with black shoe polish, which turned it more or less to the color of an eggplant, and began growing a beard. There would be American reporters around Villa’s army and his picture had been in the papers enough that he needed a disguise. Besides, when he looked in the mirror, he thought it took ten or fifteen years off his age. Total anonymity was his desire.

At El Paso, Bierce linked up with a middle-aged man known as Cowboy Bob, who claimed to have inroads to Villa and his army. After outfitting himself handsomely with horse, guns, and supplies, including a parasol and a roll of Mexican postage stamps, Bierce, Cowboy Bob, and three of Bob’s friends set out for Chihuahua, where Villa was then rumored to be holding court.

Bierce wrote Miss Christiansen:

Have regained lost health and about five pounds of lost weight. Am in Mexico at last. Juárez is nothing more than a collection of bars, whorehouses and churches whose bells ring night and day.

In the lobby of the Toltec Hotel before leaving El Paso I observed a man making a scene right out of a Booth Tarkington novel. It was pointed out to me that he was a Colonel Shaughnessy, a muckity-muck from Boston who owns a railroad and has a big spread down in Mexico. He was declaiming wildly over Pancho Villa’s alleged crimes and depredations and I was tempted to identify myself and find out more but decided instead to get it straight from the horse’s mouth!

At Juárez, I was cordially received by officials and given credentials to accompany Gen. Villa’s army. I now weight 165 pounds. No rain in sight.

NINETEEN

“T
hat man looked familiar,” the Colonel said. He and Arthur were standing at the bar in El Paso’s Toltec Club, which adjoined the hotel.

“Which man, Papa?”

“The old coot with the beard. The one who was sitting there eyeing me in the lobby when we came through. I’ve seen him someplace, or his picture.”

“Well, why don’t you ask at the desk when we get back?” Arthur said.

“I think I’ll do just that,” replied the Colonel. “He looked kind of shifty, didn’t you think? You can’t be too careful down here. There are spies all over the place. Besides, it looked like he’d dyed his hair with shoe polish or something, didn’t it?”

Arthur was grateful that the Colonel in fact had
not
lorded the race over him. Maybe he hadn’t felt he needed to—after all, facts speak for themselves. He must have known that flying all the way cross-country from Chicago was important to Arthur, and while his father could be bellicose and domineering, he wasn’t petty. Arthur was proud of that in the Old Man, and rightly so.

The Colonel had been furious all morning, ever since he picked up the newspaper and the lead story said that Pancho Villa had issued a proclamation saying that foreigners, including Americans—especially Americans—could no longer hold property in Mexico and their lands would be confiscated and nationalized. The Colonel was blowing his stack when he saw a second article that said the rail tracks between El Paso and Chihuahua City were still not repaired and there was no telling when they would be.

“So now I imagine we’ll have to organize a caravan of automobiles and drive ourselves across the desert,” the Colonel groused.

“Are you sure you still want to go through with this?” Arthur asked. “After all, we have the women and children to think about.”

“They’ll be fine,” the Colonel said. “By all accounts he’s still over in Coahuila—even the newspaper says it—and he can’t bother us from there. Besides, as I’ve said, I’ve met this Villa. I don’t know what’s got into him. I still don’t understand everything that’s gone on down there. I’m inclined to think there’s been some kind of mistake. Nationalize our property, by God! Who does he think he is? I’d like to see him try it! Besides, I’m going to start taking care of things right now.”

“How so?” Arthur said.

“I think the smart thing is to go straight to Wilson himself.”

“To the president? I thought you couldn’t abide him.”

“I
can
’
t
abide him. That moron Bryan, either,” said the Colonel. “‘Cross of Gold,’ and all that nonsense.”

TWENTY

J
ohn Reed was as excited as a respected and ambitious young reporter could be.

He was on the assignment of his career and knew it. War—not just any war, but revolution. As a devout Marxist, Reed quickly realized he was in the perfect place at the perfect time. Beside him in a big Oldsmobile touring car was the wealthy brunette Mabel Dodge.
The
Mabel Dodge, with whom he was conducting an affair, temporary as it might be. The Texas sun beat down; the sky was blue and the roads were bumpy but dry as they made their way to El Paso after a slide had blocked the rail tracks and Reed persuaded the wealthy Mrs. Dodge to spring for the automobile. They would have already been in El Paso by now if they hadn’t stopped to help the troubled airman stranded in the desert.

“You know, Mabel,” Reed remarked as they rounded a turn in the Hueves Mountains, “I don’t give a hoot in hell about getting in the war in Europe, but this—this is what wars should be about! This man Pancho Villa—a peasant who a few years ago didn’t have any other choice than to rob trains and steal cattle—and he’s now the leader of the greatest political uprising on this continent since the American Revolution!”

“What about the Civil War?” Mabel asked.

“That was different,” Reed asserted. “I’m talking about an uprising of the masses.”

“Well, that was a lot of masses in the South that uprose, if memory serves me,” she said.

“I’m surprised at you.”

“You might have given a little more thought to what Linc wrote you.” Mabel Dodge said. Lincoln Steffens had been Reed’s mentor at Harvard and, in fact, had introduced Reed to Mabel Dodge and her salon in New York. Steffens was already in Mexico, but down in Mexico City, covering Carranza’s side—
the other side
—of things.

Reed kept his hands on the wheel and glared down the road ahead. He had Steffens’s number, all right. Steffens didn’t like Villa because Wall Street did, at least for the moment. Reed thought it ridiculous to conclude that because Wall Street slightly favors somebody, you automatically take the other side. He figured Steffens was just jealous, and doing his redder-than-thou thing.

“Linc’s been a good friend to you—you know that. And I think you should at least value his advice,” Mabel said.

Reed felt blissful in the south Texas sunshine, and full of radical politics. He was not only covering the revolution for the
Metropolitan
, one of the leading socialist magazines of the day, but also for the
New York World
, which would give him a huge national following. In his mind, he’d already built up a legend around Villa that would make Robin Hood look like a cheap sheep thief. If Lincoln Steffens thought Pancho Villa was merely a capitalist tool, Reed was there to prove him wrong.

They reached El Paso late in the afternoon and checked into separate (but adjoining) rooms in the Toltec Hotel. He found the city teeming with correspondents, munitions salesmen, pitiful refugees, and spies of all descriptions. Outside a dingy shack stood a line of several hundred Mexican soldiers. Inside, an agent for a portrait company was taking orders for colorized enlargements of their snapshots and photos. All in all, the air was fierce with electricity, as if a storm were brewing over the horizon. Reed took Mabel Dodge down the dusty main street that led to the international bridge. There, as the sun sank over the western mountains, the two of them gazed across the shallow muddy Rio Grande at their first view of Mexico. In the distance was Juárez, its church steeples and adobe walls pink in the fading light. Giant ancient mesas framed the valley, lined southward like a fleet of great battleships in the darkening desert. On a plain outside the buildings of Juárez some Federal troops were on mounted parade, passing in review in front of a cadre of officers.