



Produced by Al Haines.





                               *INSURGENT
                                MEXICO*


                                   BY

                              *JOHN REED*



                          NEW YORK AND LONDON
                        D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
                                  1914




                          COPYRIGHT, 1914, BY
                        D. APPLETON AND COMPANY

            EPISODES IN THIS BOOK ARE ALSO PROTECTED BY THE
                          FOLLOWING COPYRIGHT:
         COPYRIGHT, 1914, BY THE METROPOLITAN MAGAZINE COMPANY



                PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA




                                  _To
                  PROFESSOR CHARLES TOWNSEND COPELAND
                                   of
                          HARVARD UNIVERSITY_


_Dear Copey:_

_I remember you thought it strange that my first trip abroad didn't make
me want to write about what I saw there.  But since then I have visited
a country which stimulated me to express it in words.  And as I wrote
these impressions of Mexico I couldn't help but think that I never would
have seen what I did see had it not been for your teaching me._

_I can only add my word to what so many who are writing already have
told you: That to listen to you is to learn how to see the hidden beauty
of the visible world; that to be your friend is to try to be
intellectually honest._

_So I dedicate this book to you with the understanding that you shall
take as your own the parts that please you, and forgive me the rest._

_As ever,_
       _Jack._

_New York,_
       _July 3, 1914._




                               *CONTENTS*


On the Border


                           PART I. DESERT WAR

      I. Urbina's Country
     II. The Lion of Durango at Home
    III. The General Goes to War
     IV. La Tropa on the March
      V. White Nights at Zarca
     VI. "Quien Vive?"
    VII. An Outpost of the Revolution
   VIII. The Five Musketeers
     IX. The Last Night
      X. The Coming of the Colorados
     XI. Meester's Flight
    XII. Elizabetta


                        PART II. FRANCISCO VILLA

      I. Villa Accepts a Medal
     II. The Rise of a Bandit
    III. A Peon in Politics
     IV. The Human Side
      V. The Funeral of Abram Gonzales
     VI. Villa and Carranza
    VII. The Rules of War
   VIII. The Dream of Pancho Villa


                   PART III. JIMINEZ AND POINTS WEST

      I. Dona Luisa's Hotel
     II. Duello a la Frigada
    III. Saved by a Wrist-Watch
     IV. Symbols of Mexico


                       PART IV. A PEOPLE IN ARMS

      I. "On to Torreon!"
     II. The Army at Yermo
    III. First Blood
     IV. On the Cannon Car
      V. At the Gates of Gomez
     VI. The Companeros Reappear
    VII. The Bloody Dawn
   VIII. The Artillery Comes Up
     IX. Battle
      X. Between Attacks
     XI. An Outpost in Action
    XII. Contreras' Men Assault
   XIII. A Night Attack
    XIV. The Fall of Gomez Palacio


                    PART V. CARRANZA--AN IMPRESSION

Carranza--An Impression


                        PART VI. MEXICAN NIGHTS

      I. El Cosmopolita
     II. Happy Valley
    III. Los Pastores




                           *INSURGENT MEXICO*



                            *ON THE BORDER*


Mercado's Federal army, after its dramatic and terrible retreat four
hundred miles across the desert when Chihuahua was abandoned, lay three
months at Ojinaga on the Rio Grande.

At Presidio, on the American side of the river, one could climb to the
flat mud roof of the Post Office and look across the mile or so of low
scrub growing in the sand to the shallow, yellow stream; and beyond to
the low _mesa_, where the town was, sticking sharply up out of a
scorched desert, ringed round with bare, savage mountains.

One could see the square, gray adobe houses of Ojinaga, with here and
there the Oriental cupola of an old Spanish church.  It was a desolate
land, without trees.  You expected minarets.  By day, Federal soldiers
in shabby white uniforms swarmed about the place desultorily digging
trenches, for Villa and his victorious Constitutionalists were rumored
to be on the way. You got sudden glints, where the sun flashed on field
guns; strange, thick clouds of smoke rose straight in the still air.

Toward evening, when the sun went down with the flare of a blast
furnace, patrols of cavalry rode sharply across the skyline to the night
outposts.  And after dark, mysterious fires burned in the town.

There were thirty-five hundred men in Ojinaga.  This was all that
remained of Mercado's army of ten thousand and the five thousand which
Pascual Orozco had marched north from Mexico City to reinforce him.  Of
this thirty-five hundred, forty-five were majors, twenty-one colonels,
and eleven generals.

I wanted to interview General Mercado; but one of the newspapers had
printed something displeasing to General Salazar, and he had forbidden
the reporters the town.  I sent a polite request to General Mercado.
The note was intercepted by General Orozco, who sent back the following
reply:


ESTEEMED AND HONORED SIR: If you set foot inside of Ojinaga, I will
stand you sideways against a wall, and with my own hand take great
pleasure in shooting furrows in your back.


But after all I waded the river one day and went up into the town.
Luckily, I did not meet General Orozco. No one seemed to object to my
entrance.  All the sentries I saw were taking a siesta on the shady side
of adobe walls.  But almost immediately I encountered a courteous
officer named Hernandez, to whom I explained that I wished to see
General Mercado.

Without inquiring as to my identity, he scowled, folded his arms, and
burst out:

"I am General Orozco's chief of staff, and I will not take you to see
General Mercado!"

I said nothing.  In a few minutes he explained:

"General Orozco hates General Mercado!  He does not deign to go to
General Mercado's cuartel, and General Mercado does not dare to come to
General Orozco's cuartel!  He is a coward.  He ran away from Tierra
Blanca, and then he ran away from Chihuahua!"

"What other Generals don't you like?" I asked.

He caught himself and slanted an angry look at me, and then grinned:

"_Quien sabe....?_"

I saw General Mercado, a fat, pathetic, worried, undecided little man,
who blubbered and blustered a long tale about how the United States army
had come across the river and helped Villa to win the battle of Tierra
Blanca.

The white, dusty streets of the town, piled high with filth and fodder,
the ancient windowless church with its three enormous Spanish bells
hanging on a rack outside and a cloud of blue incense crawling out of
the black doorway, where the women camp followers of the army prayed for
victory day and night, lay in hot, breathless sun.  Five times had
Ojinaga been lost and taken. Hardly a house that had a roof, and all the
walls gaped with cannon-shot.  In these bare, gutted rooms lived the
soldiers, their women, their horses, their chickens and pigs, raided
from the surrounding country.  Guns were stacked in the corners, saddles
piled in the dust. The soldiers were in rags; scarcely one possessed a
complete uniform.  They squatted around little fires in their doorways,
boiling corn-husks and dried meat. They were almost starving.

Along the main street passed an unbroken procession of sick, exhausted,
starving people, driven from the interior by fear of the approaching
rebels, a journey of eight days over the most terrible desert in the
world.  They were stopped by a hundred soldiers along the street, and
robbed of every possession that took the Federals' fancy.  Then they
passed on to the river, and on the American side they had to run the
gantlet of the United States customs and immigration officials and the
Army Border Patrol, who searched them for arms.

Hundreds of refugees poured across the river, some on horseback driving
cattle before them, some in wagons, and others on foot.  The inspectors
were not very gentle.

"Come down off that wagon!" one would shout to a Mexican woman with a
bundle in her arm.

"But, senor, for what reason?..." she would begin.

"Come down there or I'll pull you down!" he would yell.

They made an unnecessarily careful and brutal search of the men and of
the women, too.

As I stood there, a woman waded across the ford, her skirts lifted
unconcernedly to her thighs.  She wore a voluminous shawl, which was
humped up in front as if she were carrying something in it.

"Hi, there!" shouted a customs man.  "What have you got under your
shawl?"

She slowly opened the front of her dress, and answered placidly:

"I don't know, senor.  It may be a girl, or it may be a boy."


These were metropolitan days for Presidio, a straggling and
indescribably desolate village of about fifteen adobe houses, scattered
without much plan in the deep sand and cotton-wood scrub along the river
bottom.  Old Kleinmann, the German store-keeper, made a fortune a day
outfitting refugees and supplying the Federal army across the river with
provisions. He had three beautiful adolescent daughters whom he kept
locked up in the attic of the store, because a flock of amorous Mexicans
and ardent cow-punchers prowled around like dogs, drawn from many miles
away by the fame of these damsels.  Half the time he spent working
furiously in the store, stripped to the waist; and the remainder,
rushing around with a large gun strapped to his waist, warning off the
suitors.

At all times of the day and night, throngs of unarmed Federal soldiers
from across the river swarmed in the store and the pool hall.  Among
them circulated dark, ominous persons with an important air, secret
agents of the Rebels and the Federals.  Around in the brush camped
hundreds of destitute refugees, and you could not walk around a corner
at night without stumbling over a plot or a counterplot.  There were
Texas rangers, and United States troopers, and agents of American
corporations trying to get secret instructions to their employees in the
interior.

One MacKenzie stamped about the Post Office in a high dudgeon.  It
appeared that he had important letters for the American Smelting and
Refining Company mines in Santa Eulalia.

"Old Mercado insists on opening and reading all letters that pass
through his lines," he shouted indignantly.

"But," I said, "he will let them pass, won't he?"

"Certainly," he answered.  "But do you think the American Smelting and
Refining Company will submit to having its letters opened and read by a
damned greaser?  It's an outrage when an American corporation can't send
a private letter to its employees!  If this don't bring Intervention,"
he finished, darkly, "I don't know what will!"

There were all sorts of drummers for arms and ammunition companies,
smugglers and _contrabandistas_; also a small, bantam man, the salesman
for a portrait company, which made crayon enlargements from photographs
at $5 apiece.  He was scurrying around among the Mexicans, getting
thousands of orders for pictures which were to be paid for upon
delivery, and which; of course, could never be delivered.  It was his
first experience among Mexicans, and he was highly gratified by the
hundreds of orders he had received.  You see, a Mexican would just as
soon order a portrait, or a piano, or an automobile as not, so long as
he does not have to pay for it.  It gives him a sense of wealth.

The little agent for crayon enlargements made one comment on the Mexican
revolution.  He said that General Huerta must be a fine man, because he
understood he was distantly connected, on his mother's side, with the
distinguished Carey family of Virginia!

The American bank of the river was patroled twice a day by details of
cavalry, conscientiously paralleled on the Mexican side by companies of
horsemen.  Both parties watched each other narrowly across the Border.
Every once in a while a Mexican, unable to restrain his nervousness,
took a pot-shot at the Americans, and a small battle ensued as both
parties scattered into the brush.  A little way above Presidio were
stationed two troops of the <DW64> Ninth Cavalry.  One  trooper,
watering his horse on the bank of the river, was accosted by an
English-speaking Mexican squatting on the opposite shore:

"Hey, <DW53>!" he shouted, derisively, "when are you damned Gringos going
to cross that line?"

"Chile!" responded the <DW64>.  "We ain't agoin' to cross that line at
all.  We're just goin' to pick up that line an' carry it right down to
the Big Ditch!"

Sometimes a rich refugee, with a good deal of gold sewed in his
saddle-blankets, would get across the river without the Federals
discovering it.  There were six big, high-power automobiles in Presidio
waiting for just such a victim.  They would soak him one hundred dollars
gold to make a trip to the railroad; and on the way, somewhere in the
desolate wastes south of Marfa, he was almost sure to be held up by
masked men and everything taken away from him.  Upon these occasions the
High Sheriff of Presidio County would bluster into town on a small pinto
horse,--a figure true to the best tradition of "The Girl of the Golden
West." He had read all Owen Wister's novels, and knew what a Western
sheriff ought to look like: two revolvers on the hip, one slung under
his arm, a large knife in his left boot, and an enormous shotgun over
his saddle.  His conversation was larded with the most fearful oaths,
and he never caught any criminal.  He spent all of his time enforcing
the Presidio County law against carrying firearms and playing poker; and
at night, after the day's work was done, you could always find him
sitting in at a quiet game in the back of Kleinmann's store.

War and rumors of war kept Presidio at a fever heat. We all knew that
sooner or later the Constitutionalist army would come overland from
Chihuahua and attack Ojinaga.  In fact, the major in command of the
Border Patrol had already been approached by the Federal generals in a
body to make arrangements for the retreat of the Federal army from
Ojinaga under such circumstances.  They said that when the rebels
attacked they would want to resist for a respectable length of
time,--say two hours,--and that then they would like permission to come
across the river.

We knew that some twenty-five miles southward, at La Mula Pass, five
hundred rebel volunteers guarded the only road from Ojinaga through the
mountains. One day a courier sneaked through the Federal lines and
across the river with important news.  He said that the military band of
the Federal army had been marching around the country practicing their
music, and had been captured by the Constitutionalists, who stood them
up in the market-place with rifles pointed at their heads, and made them
play twelve hours at a stretch.  "Thus," continued the message, "the
hardships of life in the desert have been somewhat alleviated."  We
could never discover just how it was that the band happened to be
practicing all alone twenty-two miles from Ojinaga in the desert.


For a month longer the Federals remained at Ojinaga, and Presidio
throve.  Then Villa, at the head of his army, appeared over a rise of
the desert.  The Federals resisted a respectable length of time--just
two hours, or, to be exact, until Villa himself at the head of a battery
galloped right up to the muzzles of the guns,--and then poured across
the river in wild rout, were herded in a vast corral by the American
soldiers, and afterward imprisoned in a barbed-wire stockade at Fort
Bliss, Texas.

But by that time I was already far down in Mexico, riding across the
desert with a hundred ragged Constitutionalist troopers on my way to the
front.




                               *PART ONE*

                              *DESERT WAR*



                              *CHAPTER I*

                           *URBINA'S COUNTRY*


A peddler from Parral came into town with a mule-load of _macuche_,--you
smoke _macuche_ when you can't get tobacco,--and we strolled down with
the rest of the population to get the news. This was in Magistral, a
Durango mountain village three days' ride from the railroad.  Somebody
bought a little _macuche_, the rest of us borrowed from him, and we sent
a boy for some corn-shucks.  Everybody lit up, squatting around the
peddler three deep; for it was weeks since the town had heard of the
Revolution.  He was full of the most alarming rumors: that the Federals
had broken out of Torreon and were headed this way, burning ranches and
murdering _pacificos_; that the United States troops had crossed the Rio
Grande; that Huerta had resigned; that Huerta was coming north to take
charge of the Federal troops in person; that Pascual Orozco had been
shot at Ojinaga; that Pascual Orozco was coming south with ten thousand
_colorados_.  He ret