Huerta, with nearly twice as many men and three times as much artillery, drove Orozco back along the line of the railway after a two days’ long-range artillery bombardment, against which the rebels were powerless.
Continuing Mexico Plunged Into Anarchy,
with a selection by Edwin Emerson.
Previously in Mexico Plunged Into Anarchy.
Time: 1913
Huerta, with nearly twice as many men and three times as much artillery, drove Orozco back along the line of the railway after a two days’ long-range artillery bombardment, against which the rebels were powerless. This battle, in which the combined losses in dead and wounded on both sides were less than 200, was described in General Huerta’s official report as “more terrific than any battle that had been fought in the Western Hemisphere during the last fifty years.” In his last triumphant bulletin from the field, General Huerta telegraphed to President Madero that his brave men had driven the enemy from the heights with a final fierce bayonet charge, and that their bugle blasts of victory could be heard even then on the crest.
Pascual Orozco, on the other hand, reported to the revolutionary Junta in El Paso that he had ordered his men to retire before the superior force of the federals, and that they had accomplished this without disorder by the simple process of boarding their waiting trains and steaming slowly off to the north, destroying the bridges and culverts behind him as they went along. One of my fellow war correspondents, who served on the rebel side during this battle, afterward told me that the federals, whose bugle calls Huerta heard on the heights, did not get up to this position until two days after the rebels had abandoned their trenches along the crest.
The subsequent advance of the federals from Rellano to the town of Jimenez, Orozco’s old headquarters, which had been evacuated by him without firing a shot, lasted another week.
Here Huerta’s army camped for another week. At Jimenez the long-brewing unpleasantness between Huerta’s regular officers and some of Madero’s bandit friends, commanding forces of irregular cavalry, came to a head. The most noted of these former guerrilla chieftains was Francisco Villa, an old-time bandit, who now rejoiced in the honorary rank of a Colonel. Villa had appropriated a splendid Arab stallion, originally imported by a Spanish horse-breeder with a ranch near Chihuahua City. General Huerta coveted this horse, and one day, after an unusually lively carouse at general headquarters, he sent a squad of soldiers to bring the horse out of Villa’s corral to his own stable. The old bandit took offense at this, and came stalking into headquarters to make a personal remonstrance. He was put under arrest, and Huerta forthwith sentenced him to be shot. That same day the sentence was to be put into execution. Villa was already facing the firing squad, and the officer in charge had given the command to load, when President Madero’s brother, Emilio, who was serving on Huerta’s staff in an advisory capacity, put a stop to the execution by taking Villa under his personal protection. President Madero was telegraphed to, and immediately replied, reprieving Villa’s sentence, and ordering him to be sent to Mexico City pending further official investigation.
This act of interference infuriated Huerta. For the moment he had to content himself with formulating a long string of serious charges against Villa, ranging from military insubordination to burglary, highway robbery, and rape. It was even given out at headquarters that Villa had struck his commanding general.
Huerta never forgave the Madero brothers for their part in this affair, and his resentment was fanned to white heat, subsequently, when Francisco Villa was allowed to escape scot-free from his prison in Mexico City.
Meanwhile Huerta kept telegraphing to President Madero for more reinforcements of men, munitions, and supplies, more engines, more railway trains and tank cars, and, above all, for more artillery. Madero kept sending them, though it cost his Government a new loan of forty million dollars. Every other day or so a new train, with fresh supplies, arrived at the front.
At the end of several more weeks, when Orozco had slowly retreated half-way through the State of Chihuahua, and when he found that the destruction of the big seven-span bridge over the Conchos River at Santa Rosalia did not permanently stop Huerta’s advance, he reluctantly decided to make another stand at the deep cut of Bachimba, just south of Chihuahua City. This was in July.
By this time General Huerta’s Federal column had swelled to 7,500 fighting men, 20 pieces of field artillery, 30 machine guns, and some 7,500 camp-followers and women, making a total of more than 15,000 persons of all sexes and ages, who were being carried along on more than twenty railroad trains, stretching over a dozen miles of single track. The column was so long that some of my companions and I, when we climbed a high hill near the front end of the column at Bachimba, found it impossible to discern the tail end through our field-glasses. All the hungry people that were being carried on all those twenty railroad trains had to be fed, of course, so that none of us were surprised to read in the Mexican newspapers that the Chihuahua campaign was now costing Madero’s Government nearly 500,000 pesos per day.
The battle at Bachimba must have swelled this budget. During this one day’s fight nearly two million rifle cartridges and more than 10,000 artillery projectiles were fired away by the Federals. Huerta’s twenty pieces of field artillery, neatly posted in a straight line on the open plain, barely half a mile away from his ammunition railway train, kept firing at the supposed rebel positions all day long without any appreciable interruption, and all day long the artillery caissons and limbers kept trotting to and fro between the batteries and ammunition cars. Orozco had but 3,000 men with two pieces of so-called artillery, with gun barrels improvised from railroad axles, so he once more ordered a general retreat by way of his railroad trains, waiting at a convenient distance on a bend of the road behind the intervening hills. As at Rellano, at Conejos, and at other places in the campaign where the railroad swept in big bends around the hills, no attempt was made on the Federal side to cut off the rebels’ retreat by short-cut flanking movements of cavalry, of which Huerta had more than he could conveniently use or chose to use. The whole ten hours’ bombardment and rifle fire resulted in but fourteen dead rebels; but it won the campaign for the Government, and earned for Huerta his promotion to Major-General besides the proud title of “Hero of Bachimba.”
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