Country of the Bad Wolfes (7 page)

He was there only a short time. On the march from Corpus Christi he had cultivated a hatred of the army far exceeding that of most enlisted men. The root of his antipathy had been planted at Fort Hamilton when he was caught dicing in the wagon shed with two other trainees. All the next day, under guard and in full view of the camp, the three of them were made to stand atop upright barrels on a layer of shattered bricks. It was a constant strain to maintain balance on the unsteady
barrelheads, and each man several times fell to the broken brick. At sunset they were helped off the barrels, bruised and aching, bloody of knees and hands, and would be stiff-jointed for days. The punishment made Samuel Thomas resentful, but its severity paled in contrast to what he witnessed on the way to Fort Texas and during his time there. While he understood that severe offenses called for severe punishments, he was enraged by the stark cruelty of some of the penalties inflicted for minor infractions. It was one thing to flog a man bloody for sleeping on guard, quite another to lash him for failure to salute an officer. Or to brand him on the forehead with the “HD” of the habitual drunkard because he stood too tipsy at morning muster. A rifle laxly carried or a tunic improperly buttoned, a surly glance at an officer, an insufficient alacrity in obeying a command—and a soldier could find himself straddling a sawhorse for hours with his hands tied behind him and weights attached to his ankles. Or lugging a ball and chain for a week. Or wearing a heavy iron collar affixed with spokes that made it impossible to lay his head down for sleep. Or passing a few hours sitting bucked and gagged on the ground—immobilized with his knees drawn up and his arms bound around them and a stout stick set crosswise under the knees and over the arms.

In an army whose officers were largely nativist and Protestant, it was only natural that the most maltreated in the ranks were Irishmen, three of whom—Jack Riley, John Little, and Lucas Malone—Samuel had become friends with during the southward march. Though he had no giveaway accent, he had at once been taken for Irish by Riley, and he admitted to an Irish grandfather. In keeping daily company with these men, Samuel Thomas began to assume a mild brogue, though he was unaware of it until they were almost to the Rio Grande and Lucas Malone said, “Listen to this lad, willya? Bedamn if he's not sounding like he was weaned in County Cork.”

Malone and John Little hated the army with even greater fervor than Samuel Thomas did. Both of them had been punished harshly numerous times, for one offense or another. Both had undergone the buck and gag, and Little had once worn the spiked collar, and Malone had taken a ride on the sawhorse on their first day at the Rio Grande. And though he'd never yet been physically punished, Jack Riley was no less galled than either of them. He had served almost ten years in the British army and earned a sergeant's stripes even in the face of English bigotry, then had mustered out and migrated to America and joined the Yankee ranks, confident that his military experience would soon win him another sergeancy as well as the respect denied him in Her Majesty's service. But he found the Irish were as much scorned by the Yanks as by John Bull, and in the six months since his American enlistment he had grown convinced he would never become a sergeant. As a man of sizable self-esteem, it enraged him to be rebuked by college-boy officers not half the soldier he was. The injury to his pride cut deep as a whip.

They had been on the Rio Grande four days when the corporal in charge
of Samuel Thomas's labor detail shot a nearby dog for no reason but boredom. The gut-wounded animal screamed and ran a short distance and fell down but kept trying to run, yowling and turning in a tight circle on the blood-muddying ground for an interminable half minute before John Little drove a pick through its head to end its misery. The corporal was recharging his pistol and didn't notice Samuel Thomas stalking toward him until too late to avoid the punch that knocked him sprawling with two dislodged teeth. It was Samuel Thomas's intention to kick the man to death but before he could commence he was subdued by others, including Malone, who hissed into his ear, “Hold enough, lad! Put the boot to him and you'll be fucked most truly.”

That evening he was convicted of assault on a non-commissioned officer and was sentenced to the loss of six months' wages, disqualification for promotion for two years, and a week of the buck and gag from daybreak to sunset.

For much of the following week Fort Texas was pounded by rainstorms, and Samuel Thomas was soaked without respite as he sat trussed and gagged in the mud, seething in his fury. On the third day of his punishment, the camp woke to find its soggy grounds littered with leaflets strewn by infiltrators in the night. Printed in English and signed by the Mexican commander in Matamoros, the flyers exhorted immigrant Yankee soldiers, especially the Catholics, to reject the imperialistic mission of the slave-owning, Protestant United States and join with anti-slavery Mexico in defense of its sovereignty and national faith. They promised enlistment bonuses, good pay, and land grants of 320 acres to every Yankee who would fight for the righteous Mexican side. Before the end of the day, the first desertions were reported.

Zachary Taylor was irate. He increased the number of river sentries and ordered them to shoot any man trying to cross over who refused the command to turn back. Over the next days six men would be shot in the water and four others drowned, but thirty or so would make it to the other side. When Jack Riley ambled up to where Samuel Thomas sat bucked and gagged and asked him in low voice if he was for going across, Samuel Thomas did not hesitate to nod. But he was under tent arrest every night of his week of punishment, so they had to wait until he'd completed it. Each day of the buck drove the pain deeper into the roots of his back, and when he was freed of the restraints for the seventh time he could not get to his feet without assistance and it was an agony to straighten up. Still, he was with Riley and Little and Malone that night when they sneaked along the shadows past the fort guards and crawled through the brush down to the river and eased into the water with their boots tied together and hung around their necks.

The river was misty silver under a bright moon but smelled of rot and tasted of mud. The current was stronger than usual with the runoff of the recent rains and Samuel Thomas wasn't the only one of them close to panic as they were carried downstream while struggling to swim across. Their frenetic splashings alerted the sentries, who shouted a warning and then opened fire. Rifles balls smacked the
water around them and John Little was hit in the calf and Lucas Malone nicked along the ribs but they all four made the opposing bank and clambered up through the cattails and into the cover of the trees. Mexican soldiers presently appeared, bayonets at the ready, but when the quartet declared their desire to fight for the Mexican cause, they were welcomed like brothers and taken to the garrison to have their wounds treated.

Thus began the band of Yankee army deserters known in Mexico as the gallant San Patricios—so named because most of them were Irish Catholics—and in the remoter pages of American history as the turncoat Saint Patrick Battalion. The unit's numbers grew as U.S. desertions continued, and they were formed into an artillery company under command of a Mexican captain, though Lieutenant Jack Riley was the executive officer and their true leader. In their first action against their former comrades, a week before the American declaration of war, the San Patricios bombarded Fort Texas and in the process killed one Major Jacob Brown, in whose honor the fort was renamed and Brownsville would be christened.

Everywhere they went this legion of foreigners pledged to Mexico's defense was honored by people of every social class. The Patricios were surprised to find that not all Mexicans were brownskinned, though the great mass of them were, being either Indian or, more likely, mestizo, the burgeoning Spanish-Indian caste that had over the past two centuries come to comprise the majority of the population. But the ruling native class, the peak of the social pyramid, was the Creole—the Spanish descendents whose Caucasian blood remained free of Indian taint. They were a courtly society, educated, formal of speech and manner, given to religious ostentation and devoted to European tradition. They were also passionate about their honor, both family and personal, and vehement in redressing injury to it.

In the course of their deployments over the following year, the San Patricios marched through sierra ranges of jagged peaks and thick timber, through deep canyons misted blue with the spray of booming rivers. They traversed broad plains of green and yellow grasses rippling in the wind like a restless sea. They crossed pale deserts flat as tables extending to the burning horizons and shimmering in the heat. They heard the roar of cougars in the mountain nights, their evenings in open country quivered with wolf howls and the high crying of coyotes. In Tampico they were granted two days of liberty and sported on the beach a few miles from town. Samuel Thomas had known only the cold cobalt water of the sharp-shelved North Atlantic coast and he reveled in the warm green clarity of the gulf shallows. They swam, lazed on the sand, got sunburned. They cut coconuts off the trees and hacked open the husks and punched holes in the eyes of the brown nut with their bayonets to get to the cool sweet milk, the most delectable drink Samuel Thomas had ever put tongue to. Where but in heaven might a man get milk from the trees? He relished
the spicy native cooking and acquired a taste for the coppery sting of tequila and the smoky burn of mescal. He delighted in the skiffle music of the villages and learned a variety of rustic dances. He had an affinity for the Spanish language and gained swift fluency with it, a great advantage with the camp women who traveled with the army and cooked for it and tended its wounds. Most of these women were young and given to playful laughter and mischievous banter. Any camp woman could share herself with whomever she wished but also had the right to refuse anyone, and a man who tried to take her against her will risked a maiming from his comrades.

The Patricios were a formidable force, dealing heavy casualties in their every engagement and stoking ever higher the vengeful wrath of the Yankees—or “gringos,” as the Americans were now known in Mexico, a newly-coined pejorative that would long outlast the war. But as the fighting progressed, the turncoats began to understand that Mexico could not win and that their own future was headed toward an ultimate choice of dying in battle or at the end of an American rope. Their desperation made them the more intrepid. General Lopez de Santa Ana, the supreme commander of the Mexican army, would later say that if he'd had but five hundred more men of the Patricios' mettle he could have won the war.

The Saint Patricks fought at Monterrey, at Saltillo, at Buena Vista, at Cerro Gordo. And then, in the war's decisive and bloodiest battle, on an infernal August afternoon at a place called Churubusco, at the very gates of Mexico City, they were done for. Some managed to escape but two-thirds of them were killed in that fight and the rest taken prisoner, many of them with severe wounds. Samuel Thomas's left hand was mutilated by shrapnel, his hipbone pierced by a bayonet. He would never again be able to sit a horse, and the thumb and remaining two fingers of his ruined hand would never come unclawed.

Seventy Saint Patricks stood trial for desertion. They were made to wear their unwashed and bloodied Mexican uniforms in court, exuding a reek that intensified the hateful grimaces in the room and seemed in keeping with the odiousness of their crime. Every man of them was convicted and sentenced to hang.

In his judicial review, however, General Winfield Scott pardoned five of the condemned outright on different legal bases, and he spared fifteen others on the ground that they had deserted prior to the declaration of war and so were exempt from the death penalty. Those fifteen—including Samuel Thomas, Jack Riley, and John Little—were sentenced instead to fifty lashes on the bare back and the “D” brand of the deserter burned into their right cheek. Because Lucas Malone's desertion had erroneously been recorded as occurring six weeks after it actually did, and because the court would give no credence to his comrades' attestations that he had deserted with them before the declaration of war, he remained among the condemned. “Aint it the shits?” Malone said. “I keep my skin through all the fightin and get done in by some jackass of a clerk.”