The Training Ground (11 page)
Taylor’s army marched toward the Mexican line. Once again, it was the Mexicans who would fire first — and this time they were using the proper lethal armament. “A heavy discharge of grape was fired into our advance, showing that the enemy still disputed our march,” Meade noted wryly.
As he did the day before, Taylor moved his artillery to the front of the column. The oxen dragged two eighteen-pounders and a pair of twelve-pounders forward. And while the chaparral that hid the Mexicans also provided perfect cover for the Americans, allowing the guns to be drawn perilously close to the Mexican lines, it was also so tall and thick that the artillerymen couldn’t accurately aim. It would be up to the infantry to find gaps in the chaparral and overrun the Mexican positions.
This suited Meade just fine. His sadness about being separated from his wife and children had been set aside. He was enjoying the war very much. Meade was proud that Taylor was using him as a messenger, and he took an almost glib satisfaction in noting that “an officer of the General’s staff had his horse shot under him, not two yards from me, and some five horses and men were killed at various times right close to me.”
It was as if Meade had committed an act of bravery just by being in the vicinity of someone else’s death.
Brown Bess
M
AY 9, 1846
T
he Mexican soldiers hadn’t eaten in more than twenty-four hours and were losing faith in their officer corps. Despite the decline in morale, they prepared to stand fast against the American onslaught.
But the officer corps wasn’t the only test of their faith. A Mexican soldier crouched in the folds of Resaca de la Palma needed to look only to the weapon in his hands to cast further doubt on the Mexicans’ ability to defeat the Americans. The gun was a British-made “Brown Bess” musket, a smoothbore flintlock that had a range of less than a hundred yards. Part of the British army’s Land Pattern musket series, first introduced in 1722, the .75-caliber gun weighed ten pounds, had a walnut stock, and could be fitted with a seventeen-inch bayonet — which was important because the gun’s accuracy was so minimal that the manufacturers had never bothered to install a gun sight. The Brown Bess (a nickname believed to stem either from slang for England’s Elizabeth I or from
braun buss,
German for “brown gun”) had long been used throughout the British Empire, and both redcoats and rebels had fired it during America’s Revolutionary War. But in 1838 the British began moving toward a percussion-cap rifle and sold thousands of their Brown Besses to Mexico. As Arista’s men stood fast and awaited the American onslaught, the majority of them were armed with a century-old relic that possessed such a fearful recoil that most Mexicans fired from the hip so that the gun didn’t break their facial bones (which would prove to be a problem inside the
resaca,
where shooting from a prone or kneeling position with the stock nestled against the cheeks was ideal).
They had the advantage when it came to sheer numbers, but their best hope lay in allowing the Americans to draw close. The Mexicans could then let loose a volley and swarm toward the enemy en masse in a bayonet charge — a case of their tactics being restricted by their weapons.
I
N MCCALL’S ABSENCE
, Grant was thrust into the role of temporary company commanding officer. He reveled in the “honor and responsibility,” but found himself simultaneously eager to lead men into battle and fearful of getting them slaughtered. When Taylor gave the order to advance, Grant and his men were on the army’s far right flank. What followed was an ungainly, uncertain march into the Mexican position. Though the Mexicans knew that the Americans were on their way, and were poised to open fire the instant they saw a blue uniform, all the Americans could see was a thorny wall of chaparral. Grant led his company “through the thicket wherever a penetrable place could be found, taking advantage of any clear spot that could carry me towards the enemy.” “At last I got up pretty close without knowing it,” he recalled. “The balls commenced to whistle thick overhead, cutting the limbs of the chaparral right and left. We could not see the enemy, so I ordered my men to lie down — an order which did not have to be forced.”
Pinned down, Grant ordered a retreat. He and his men fell back into the dense brush so that Grant could study the landscape and find a better place to attack. Up and down the American line, other officers were doing the same. Individual military units were unable to see one another, so junior officers and company commanders improvised a new strategy, advancing bit by bit, searching for an elusive hole in the chaparral that would allow them to attack without being mowed down.
As they did so, they realized that they had waded not onto a battlefield but into a well-laid trap. The Mexican forces were spread in front of and inside the rugged ravine, a strategic conceit brought on by their numerical superiority. General Arista knew that the Americans would be unable to outflank his men, thanks to the chaparral, and that any breakthrough on his right was impossible because the ravine wound to the north on that side; if Taylor attempted an attack there, his army could be trapped within the gulch, an easy target for artillery and infantry sharpshooters. As Arista had planned it, the Americans had no choice but to attack head-on, into the maw of a fortified, well-manned defensive position. All through the night and morning, his artillery had dug in. The fresh replacements who had forded the Rio Grande from Matamoros were rested and fed, with plenty of ammunition at the ready and the luxury of spending hours concealing themselves among the trees and earthen crags, digging in while they awaited the Americans. The Mexican army was fighting on Texas soil, but they planned to defend it as if it were still their own. Arista’s army was buoyed by the prospect, and deeply confident of victory.
But Taylor had the rare gift of being able to conceive instant battlefield stratagems that never occurred to other leaders. He knew that if he spread his men across the entire length of the canyon, as Arista had done, his troops would be easily overwhelmed. And though Palo Alto had been a victory, he couldn’t afford to be foolish. The few thousand American men inching forward through the chaparral were the only soldiers he had. In fact, those troops represented almost the entire U.S. Army. America’s prewar force numbered just 6,562 officers and enlisted men. With two-thirds of those men stationed with Taylor in Texas, that left just a few thousand soldiers to guard the entire Canadian border and western frontier. Arista didn’t just have more soldiers at his disposal than General Zachary Taylor; the Army of the North outnumbered that of James K. Polk, commander in chief and president of the United States.
But Taylor had a plan: to follow Napoleon’s axiom that “fire must be concentrated on one point, and as soon as the breach is made, the equilibrium is broken and the rest is nothing.” It was a premise borrowed from Alexander the Great, Hannibal, and Caesar. Taylor would concentrate his forces on a single point at the center of the Mexican line. They would burst through like a fist shattering a thin pane of glass, using their speed and guile to make up for inferior numbers. McCall would lead the way.
The attack would have to be brisk. If the Mexican line held, Arista could reposition his forces, encircling the Americans and using the chaparral as a natural barricade to prevent them from escaping. “The determination today was to go the whole hog and charge at once, without standing off at a shooting distance,” an officer noted.
Bayonets were fixed. Brogans were tied. Prayers were murmured. Then the Americans charged, screaming as they ran forward, a bansheelike wail piercing the thick Texas air.
The Mexican artillery fired point-blank into the wall of onrushing American troops. Their cannons were Napoleonic War surplus nine-pounders that had been purchased secondhand from Britain in the 1830s. Arista’s gun crews included as many as seven men, each wearing the dark blue coats and trousers and black stovepipe shako hats of Mexican foot artillery. Working at top speed, they could fire a round every three minutes — but more often it was one round every five. When the enemy was a quarter mile away, that was more than enough. But the enemy wasn’t a quarter mile away; Taylor’s army was running right at the cannons, without regard to their safety. Mexican canister rounds were still hot out of the barrel as they claimed their first victims. Survivors reported that their clothes caught fire when the fabric was nicked by passing shot. But although some Americans went down, more remained upright and closed in on Arista’s increasingly concentrated troops.
Not to be outdone, American cavalry charged ahead of the infantry, their horses dodging their comrades on foot as well as chaparral and cannonballs on the path to the Mexican defenses. This, too, was a Napoleonic tactic: first the cavalry and infantry, then the light artillery, always moving forward.
It worked. Mexico’s frontline artillery crews, stunned by the American onslaught and lacking time to reload, were quickly overrun. For the rest of the Mexican army, it was vital that they stand their ground. If they fell back now, there was little to stop Taylor from sweeping in and charging down the road into Matamoros.
The Americans overran the cannons and collided with a wall of Mexican infantry and cavalry. The combat now was mostly hand-to-hand. Both sides were armed with bayonets and sabers, but they just as often swung the wooden butt of a musket as a weapon.
The next two hours saw an explosion of mayhem and carnage, yet Taylor’s plan was unfolding just as he’d scripted it. And with the cavalry and infantry holding the center, American light artillery now moved forward to fire canister and grape rounds into the heart of the Mexican ranks. This prevented Arista from sending reinforcements into the thick of the battle.
Another obstacle facing the Mexican troops was Arista himself. He was confident that the American charge was a diversion, so he remained in his tent, writing at his desk, and entrusted the battle to Brigadier General Rómulo Díaz de la Vega. Even when reports filtered back to his campsite, making it clear that the attack was not a ruse, Arista failed to believe them.
Once the center of their line had been obliterated, the Mexican troops panicked. It was now obvious that their right and left flanks were incapable of collapsing onto the Americans, which had been their only chance to overwhelm Taylor’s army. Men began to sprint toward the Rio Grande. The distance to the river was three miles. Many didn’t make it that far, hacked to death by the blade of an American cavalry saber as they ran for their lives. Numerous Mexicans hid in the chaparral to await the end of the battle, when they would give themselves up as prisoners of war. In all, more than four hundred Mexicans were captured, including General Díaz de la Vega, a gracious man who was dumbfounded by the defeat. “If I had had with me,” he marveled, “$100,000 in silver, I would have bet the whole of it that no 10,000 men on earth could drive us from our position.”
Arista had eluded capture by fleeing his tent just in time. American troops ransacked its belongings, coming away with a silver dining set and another, far more valuable bit of plunder: a topographical map of the Texas frontier, showing roads, villages, and mule trails. The Americans had been feeling their way through the countryside without any such guide. As a means of anticipating Mexican strategy and deploying troops, the map was priceless to Taylor.
G
RANT AND HIS
men missed out on the bayonet charge. Rather than join the action, he had held his company back, waiting for conditions to improve. “I at last found a clear space separating two ponds. There seemed to be a few men in front and I charged upon them with my company. There was no resistance, and we captured a Mexican colonel, who had been wounded, and a few men.”
Just as Grant was congratulating himself, a group of American soldiers marched toward him from the direction of the Mexican position, and it dawned on Grant that he had not “captured” the wounded colonel and those few men. The line of battle had already moved far forward, and Grant was merely taking custody of men who had been overlooked during the charge.
Grant remained infuriated at his cowardice in holding back his company during the infantry charge. “The ground had been charged over before,” he wrote. “This left no doubt in my mind that the battle of Resaca de la Palma would have been won, just as it was, if I had not been there.”
Nonetheless, he had fought. His letter to Julia that day was written from the captured Mexican camp on the south side of the Resaca de la Palma. Lacking a writing desk, he set his paper atop the head of a captured Mexican drum.
Longstreet, too, was thinking of home and his beloved Louise — and had been during the battle itself. “A pause was made to dip our cups for water,” Longstreet later recalled, “which gave a moment for other thoughts; mine went back to her whom I had left behind. I drew her daguerreotype from my breast-pocket, had a glint of her charming smile, and with quickened spirit mounted the bank.”
Meade had done little but observe, yet he was euphoric about the action-packed spectacle he had witnessed. “They gave away in all directions, and there was a total rout of the Grand Mexican Army that was going to eat us up. We captured seven pieces of artillery, all their pack mules, several hundred in number, all their ammunition, several hundred stands of arms, and all their baggage. Took one general, two colonels, several captains and subalterns, and some hundred and fifty men, prisoners.” Then he added, as if aware that his gloating was inappropriate: “It is supposed to take all day today and tomorrow to bring in their dead and wounded off the field, as the ground is said to be literally strewn.”
Indeed, the Mexicans had suffered 256 killed and 182 missing — losses that dwarfed the Americans’ 127 casualties. Corpses — horses, mules, and men — carpeted the road. Flies coated the bodies in thick black swarms, and the hot afternoon air reeked of death. The bulk of the Mexican fatalities was not due to American bullets but to the tricky currents of the Rio Grande. Unable to swim, yet so overcome with fear that they leaped into the river anyway, scores of soldiers drowned; their bodies would litter the muddy banks for miles and miles in the days to come, many of them naked, their uniforms having been swept away by the river as submerged rocks and branches held them underwater. Rotting in the sun, bloated beyond recognition, these men became carrion for coyotes, crows, and the turtles that made their home in the red river clay.
W
ITH THE BATTLE
won, the American soldiers turned their thoughts back to Fort Texas. The first order of business was to make sure it was still in American hands. Without it, they were without a home, naked against a surprise Mexican attack.
Closer and closer they marched, until finally, looking into the distance, they could see the U.S. flag flying over the embattled structure — shot full of holes by Mexican snipers, barely fluttering in the languid heat after six days of bombardment, but atop the flagpole nonetheless. The fort had held.
The men inside that fort were more than just soldiers of the Seventh Infantry; they were friends and comrades who had shared the beach at Corpus Christi, the Rio Colorado crossing, and all those long hours plunging shovels into the ground and reshaping the earth into an ingeniously designed defensive fortress. The tattered flag that marked their survival was a deeply welcome sight.