Can a last stand be politically incorrect? As territories expand and contract, as countries change from within and without, as peoples lose their self-confidence, moments in national history once viewed as prototypically heroic take on a different hue.
Central Europe, especially around the Balkans, is filled with such battles. In 1389, for example, the Serbs under Prince Lazar Hrebeljanović confronted the invading Ottomans at the Battle of Kosovo, a clash in which the Christian and the Muslim commanders were killed and both armies effectively destroyed. The Serbian losses, however, prevented any further effective defense against the Turks, and much of Serbia fell under Islamic domination. To the Serbs, the date of the battle, June 15 in the Julian calendar (June 28 in the Gregorian), is one of the most sacred days in Serbian national history.
When the restive and heavily (96 percent) Muslim Serbian province of Kosovo broke away from Serbia in 1999 following the dissolution of Yugoslavia a few years earlier, the Serbs fought to maintain control but were on both the wrong side of history and of the forces of the United Nations. Kosovar self-determination won out over Serbian history, although even today the territory is the subject of considerable dispute in the region. Still, Serbian history counted for little in the teeth of democratic zeitgeist.
On the American continents, the great divide has never been Christianity versus Islam, but the legacy of Spanish colonialism against the Anglo-Saxon tradition of territorial settlement. The voyages of discovery to the New World in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were dominated by Spain, then at the height of its military and naval power, as well as Portugal. With the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), the two Catholic powers essentially divided South America into spheres of influence between themselves. They followed up this diplomatic effort with the Treaty of Zaragoza in 1529, which sorted out Asia, thus accounting for the Portuguese colonies along coastal Africa, India, and China, including Mozambique, Goa, the Spice Islands (the Moluccas), and Macau. For their part, the Spanish made the Philippines, the Marianas, Guam, and even parts of Formosa (Taiwan) constituent elements of the Spanish East Indies.
Portugal never threatened the British colonies in North America, but the Spanish did—or perhaps it was the other way around. Spain claimed much of what today is the United States, from Florida, through Texas, to California, as well as New Spain, in the form of Mexico, and continued to do so well into the nineteenth century; the final acquisition of Mexican territory occurred with the Gadsden Purchase of 1854. Before that came the Mexican War of 1846–48, one of the most consequential and yet least considered wars in American national history. As issues of Hispanic immigration into Anglophonic America loom ever larger in contemporary political discussion, the fraught and antithetical history of England and Spain needs to be taken into account.
The defeat of the Spanish Armada by British forces under Good Queen Bess in 1588 broke Habsburgian Spanish dominance of the high seas and, despite the Treaty of Tordesillas, opened the way for British colonization of the Americas. The war continued to be contested in the New World, especially in the Caribbean (birthing the romantic notion of pirates and privateers, celebrating cutthroats and criminals depending on whose side they were on), where a rough demarcation between the Latin Catholic and English Protestant powers was established. Europeans generally established themselves in areas that most closely resembled their continental homelands: the Spanish in New Spain and Mexico, the English in what became New England, the Germans in Pennsylvania, the Scandinavians in the upper Midwest and, later, the Pacific Northwest.1
What a difference between the British and Spanish/Portuguese approaches to colonization: the British sent settlers, the Iberians sent caudillos.2 It was a cultural mind-set that resonates to this day. Whereas the British were determined to “make the world England,”3 the Spanish under Hernán Cortés de Monroy y Pizarro Altamirano, Marquis of the Valley of Oaxaca, were content to defeat the natives and thus do Western civilization a signal service by destroying the Aztec Empire in what is now Mexico. And yet the Spanish never followed up on their victory in Mexico or the rest of Latin America. To this day, the political class of most of South America is, or has been, largely white descendants of the Spanish aristocracy, with administrative and ethnic bona fides that keep the largely mestizo and/or former slave/mulatto populations in subordination. If there is any “racism” in the Americas, look to south of the border for its origins.
The fact is that the Spanish model4—the imposition of colonial governorship by Spaniards eager to return to the mother country after their tour of duty in the Americas, and an exploitation of the peoples and the natural resources of the colonies—was the worst possible model for the Americas. In Mexico, the Spaniards subjugated the Indians and, by interbreeding, created a class of mixed-race mestizos to occupy the large middle, along with the unslaughtered Indians. In Argentina, they annihilated the native population, imported few African slaves,5 but opened up the country to large-scale European immigration, especially from Italy, Germany, and the British Isles.6
The United States sits uneasily between Mexico and Canada—a huge geographical entity with the population of California, a former British colony, and largely Anglophone, the first anti-American country, owing to its Tory origins during the Revolution and the War of 1812. Aside from a few brief flurries of belligerence between the United States and Canada, the border between the two largely Anglophonic North American states has been mostly peaceful.
True, there was some unpleasantness about “54-40 or fight,” a winning campaign slogan for President James K. Polk of Tennessee in his 1844 victory over the heavily favored Whig candidate, Henry Clay. At the time, both Britain and America had claimed the Oregon Territory, which included the present U.S. states of Oregon, Idaho, and Washington as well as the now-Canadian province of British Columbia. The numbers referenced the latitude of the boundary that Polk was demanding, far into what is Canadian territory today. In 1846, the two nations settled on the 49th parallel, thus largely establishing the current border. No blows were exchanged—and besides, the United States was also embroiled in considerable difficulty with its troublesome southern neighbor, Mexico—a historical conflict that would eventually (if, in retrospect, temporarily) be settled by the Mexican and Spanish-American wars, both of which the Americans won.
Polk’s expansionism was part of his larger program of Manifest Destiny, the notion that the United States was determined by fate to occupy the entire midriff of the North American continent, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, “from sea to shining sea.” Never mind that the American Indians, as well as European powers and their colonial offspring, often stood in its way: the westward migration of the American population was not to be denied. Polk—a one-term president known as the “Napoleon of the Stump,” owing to his small stature—was more flatteringly termed “Young Hickory,” in homage to his fellow Tennessean7 and presidential forerunner Andrew “Old Hickory” Jackson. Often lost among the mediocrities occupying the White House during the run-up to the Civil War, Polk was one of the most consequential of presidents, who, next to Jefferson, territorially created the country we know today.
By the time the Oregon Treaty was ratified and hostilities with Britain thus averted, war was already raging south of the Rio Grande: the Mexican War of 1846–48. It’s a war not much remembered today, but it was to have immense significance for the United States less than two decades later. The Mexican territory of Texas had been annexed under Polk’s immediate predecessor, John Tyler, during his last week in office in March 1845, and would be admitted to the Union during the first year of Polk’s presidency. The seeds of the Reconquista—the notion that formerly Mexican territory, ironically, rightfully belongs to the remnants of New Spain—were born here.
The loss of Texas rankled the newly independent Mexican government, but in many ways it only had itself to blame. As noted, the Spanish colonized but did not settle. Instead, they sailed across the Atlantic for plunder and booty to be spent on advancement back in the mother country. Like the huge area known as Alta (Upper, as opposed to Baja, or Lower) California, Texas itself, for all its vast territory, was sparsely populated by whites, and Mexico needed more people in order to secure control of the lands contested by the Comanche Indians, who freely raided Mexican outposts. The Mexican government, therefore, not only turned a blind eye to the influx of American settlers moving into the northern territories but also encouraged them at times. It was a decision that by 1829 the Mexicans had come to regret, as the Americans quickly began annexing large swaths of Texas and coastal California in their push westward. In response, Mexico closed Texas to American immigration, although the Americans kept coming and, in 1836, proclaimed the Republic of Texas. Mexican forces under General Antonio López de Santa Anna, a descendant of a prominent Spanish colonial family and one of the principal figures in Mexican history,8 were sent northward to sort things out.
And thus we come to the Alamo.
Few battles on the American continent, not even that between Wolfe and Montcalm at Quebec, have affected the course of North American history as has the Alamo. And none has turned out to be, in retrospect, more controversial. For a century and a half, the Alamo has been celebrated as the throwing off of the yoke of Spanish/Mexican oppression. Today, in large part as a result of the aspirational Reconquista, it is seen as another vestige of colonialism, the seizure of sovereign Mexican territory by Anglo interlopers.
The truth, as usual, lies somewhere in between. There is no doubt that the American settlers, called Texians, essentially seized Mexican territory by force of eminent domain; the Mexicans were in no position to contest Manifest Destiny. Thanks to the lackadaisical Spanish attitude toward colonization, the turf was ripe for taking. The Mexicans could not effectively combat the warrior tribes of North America, especially the fierce Comanches, who were as feared in their day as the Lakota Sioux along the Canadian border would be a few decades later. As military history from the Greeks on demonstrates, to the victor go the spoils, a notion much contested today.
The battle of the Alamo is one of the most famous last stands in history, certainly in American history, where it is rivaled only by Custer’s Last Stand. Like “54-40 or fight,” or “Remember the Maine” (which in part provoked the Spanish-American War), “Remember the Alamo” became a rallying cry for the American public, but to even greater effect. Without the loss of the Alamo and its small garrison (about 250 men) of Texians and other American immigrants, the Mexican War itself might never have happened just a decade later. Without the Mexican War, a whole generation or two of American military officers, including both Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant, would not have been blooded in actual combat. Indeed, the complex tangle of personal and professional relationships among the officers fighting in the Mexican War (James Longstreet, Winfield Scott, Stonewall Jackson, William T. Sherman, George McClellan, George Meade, Zachary Taylor, among others) gave not only the Union and Confederate forces their leadership in the Civil War but also the United States several future presidential candidates and presidents, among them Franklin Pierce, Scott, McClellan, Taylor, and Grant.
The principal defenders of the Alamo, all of whom died during the 13-day siege, are no less prominent; some have even entered the mythos of the American West in a way most of the famous generals have not:
The Battle of the Alamo, a former Franciscan mission10 in what is now San Antonio, in some ways resembles the Siege of Szigetvár. It was a contest between rebels (the Texians) and an investing, superior force (the Mexicans). It was, like Szigetvár, in part a conflict of faiths, the Americans being primarily Protestant and the Mexicans Catholic. The ratio of attackers to defenders was wildly lopsided. The defenders, as in all sieges, were running low on everything—food, water, ammunition, men. But their spirit was unbroken and their heads unbowed. They died for those most abstract and yet most fundamental of concepts: duty, honor, country.
Still, it took the Hungarians more than a century after Szigetvár to finally liberate the heart of their kingdom from the Turkish yoke, whereas the Texians under Gen. Sam Houston polished off the Mexicans two months later in just 18 minutes at the Battle of San Jacinto, capturing Santa Anna and effectively forcing Mexican acknowledgment of the reality of Texas independence.
What was it about the Alamo that changed the history of the American southwest? Militarily, its importance was minor; just another fort to be conquered and re-subsumed into sovereign Mexico. The Mexicans had made the fatal mistake—as the Romans had a millennium and a half before—of inviting in foreigners from an antithetical ethnicity, faith, language, and culture and allowing them to flourish and supersede the natives in population and thus overwhelm them by sheer force of numbers—enhanced, of course, by considerable cultural and political animosity. Diversity, it seems, was of as little use to the Mexicans as it was to the Romans in the fifth century. There was no “strength” in it, only trouble.
One thing that distinguished the Alamo from other famous last stands, however, was that the Texians were clearly in the wrong and the Mexicans clearly within their rights to put down the rebellion. Perhaps this is why the Alamo is to most Americans, outside of Texas, relatively uninvolving, its heroes having morphed briefly into Disney action heroes and coonskin-cap merchandizing mechanisms and then retired into the cultural woodwork, like so many other television icons of the midcentury. In which context today could they ever be politically correct? Having failed in 1836, the current Mexican attempt at Reconquista is proceeding with armies of illegal immigrants wielding sick children as weapons and responding, whether consciously or not, to the “Aztlan”11 movement, which holds as a strategic objective the reclamation of formerly Mexican or Spanish lands within the current territorial United States.12
Additionally, the rapid growth of the American population into east Texas (where “Texas” began) was fueled by a number of factors, one of them slavery. Many of the settlers came from the slave state of Louisiana, and the expansion of slavery into the new western territories was very much the hot political topic of the day. The Missouri Compromise had been effected in 1820, when Missouri entered the Union as a slave state but was balanced by the creation of Maine out of part of Massachusetts and admitted as a free state. Southerners wanted to stake a claim to Texas as potential slave territory, and possession at that time was still very much nine-tenths of the law.
Further, the Texians under Stephen Austin and Sam Houston were born troublemakers, as wandering expats can often be. In 1825, Austin had brought the first of three hundred American families into the area under a Spanish land grant that had been honored by Mexico; among them were slaveholders. More arrivals quickly followed; what had begun as a kind of garrison program, with the Anglos defending the northern precincts of Mexico against the Indians, had morphed into outright colonization. Too late did the Mexicans realize the error they had made in admitting so many Anglos, and Santa Anna’s revanchist war was designed in large part to sweep them out of Mexican territory forever.
Still, the Texians at the Alamo under Travis may have been fighting for an illegal and perhaps even immoral cause, as we have the luxury of believing today. But they did not regard it so at the time. They were not at the Alamo because they loved slavery or hated Mexicans but because they loved freedom and self-determination, and were willing to die for it—archetypal revolutionary American traits still being evinced 60 years after the Revolution.
It is noteworthy how many last stands take place on frontiers. Thermopylae blocked the Persians’ way west. Roncevaux was fought, poetically, on one of Islam’s bloody borders, as was Szigetvár. The Romans collided with the Germans in the Teutoburg Forest, near the Rhine, the border between the two cultures. It is perhaps one thing to fight and even lose a battle well within your own turf (as the Romans did at Cannae) when you have the solace of knowing you can retreat and live to fight again another day. It is quite another when your back is to the wall, ammo is running short, you have nowhere to run and so therefore face near-certain death. In that situation, men become tigers, determined to sell every last drop of their blood as dearly as possible, whatever the modern “rightness” of their cause.
So when Travis, Bowie, Crockett, and the others made their final stand in the old mission, effectively at the spot where Mexico would become the United States, they epitomized the gallant spirit of all doomed warriors. It went without saying that, to the Americans, their cause was not simply just but heroic. Iconographically, it could be presented as mustachioed, superstitious Catholic Spaniards against the clean-limbed American pioneers who owed their allegiance to neither pope nor potentate—a visual dichotomy that would inform all subsequent iconographic depictions and retellings of the battle.
And so the legends sprouted: the wounded Bowie, abed, emptying a brace of pistols into the onrushing Mexicans until they overwhelmed and killed him. Crockett fighting until swarmed, then cut down where he stood. Travis falling, shot in the head as he rallied the dwindling defenders. Never mind that other accounts suggest that Bowie was hiding under his bed when he was killed, and that Crockett had surrendered and then was murdered on Santa Anna’s orders, and that Travis (like Roland or, later, General Gordon at Khartoum) was too stiff-necked to surrender as he waited for reinforcements that came too late. Print the legend.
The final assault came at dawn on the morning of March 6, 1836. Like Suleiman, Santa Anna had ordered his men to make a decisive attack. At first, his men were repelled at the north wall by the defenders’ cannons and muskets, but gradually the Mexican sappers breached the fort’s perimeter while Mexican cavalry opened a salient at the southwest corner and pushed the Texians and the Americans back into the convent and the church itself. But there was no sanctuary to be found; Catholic or no, the superior Mexican forces moved from room to room, liquidating the resistance as they went with bullets and bayonets. Some defenders, perhaps as many as 60, managed to break out but were quickly cut down by the cavalry. Many of the civilians were spared, as well as a few of the couriers, but the fighting men died, to live on as martyrs for the cause of Manifest Destiny.
Just how much the resonance of the story of the Alamo has changed can be seen by a glance over the past 70 years or so of American popular culture. During the 1950s, it was the rare American boy who didn’t have a Davy Crockett coonskin cap, buckskin jacket, lunch pail, or rubber Bowie knife. Fess Parker portrayed Crockett in a television miniseries in 1954–55, and the show’s theme song—“Davy, Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier”—could be sung by just about everybody under the age of ten. The series covered Crockett’s past as an Indian fighter and a member of Congress from Tennessee, and his death, battling against the Mexicans to the last, at the Alamo.
In 1960, the battle got the full-scale Hollywood treatment in The Alamo, not only starring John Wayne as Crockett but being produced and directed by him as well. Running nearly three hours, shot on 70-millimeter film, and costing some $12 million to make, it was intended as an epic retelling of the story to rival the various swords-and-sandals historical extravaganzas then nearing the apex of their popularity. Starring alongside Wayne were Richard Widmark as Jim Bowie and Laurence Harvey as a stiff-necked Colonel Travis; even crooner Frankie Avalon shows up as the most youthful of Crockett’s Tennessee volunteers. That said, the picture is almost unwatchable today. An hour or more of needless exposition, pointless subplots (the budding romance between Crockett and a Mexican beauty13 goes nowhere), extended byplay between and among the minor characters, and long-winded speechifying for the principals make it a tedious slog. Widmark is wasted, Harvey steals the picture, and we look forward to the last act when they all finally get killed. The picture, into which Wayne himself put $1.5 million of his own money, was a modest success, earning about $20 million.
The Alamo was remade in 2004 in a big-budget ($107 million) production starring Billy Bob Thornton as Davy Crockett, Jason Patric as Bowie, and Patrick Wilson as Travis; it was produced by Ron Howard and Brian Grazer’s Imagine Entertainment. As might be expected, this version was more politically correct, offering the Mexican side of the story and even featuring a major role for Emilio Echevarria as Santa Anna (who is only barely glimpsed in Wayne’s treatment). But time had passed the Alamo by; a changing American demographic wasn’t particularly interested in seeing a handful of Anglo interlopers hold off the entire Mexican army on what was, at the time, sovereign Mexican territory, and the film earned less than $26 million.
As a heroic legend, the battle of the Alamo now appears to be as dead as Davy Crockett. In late 2019, the remains of three people were unearthed during excavation for a renovation project at the tourist site, raising the issue (as the New York Times put it) of “how best to accommodate tourists while respecting the Alamo’s complex history—and about whose stories have been venerated and whose have been forgotten.” Some American Indians claim the battlefield as a burial ground. Further, as the Times noted, “before it became an artifact of Anglo expansionism, the Alamo was known as the Misión San Antonio de Valero, a mission populated mainly by Spanish priests and Indigenous people who had converted to Christianity.”
And so the battle rages on in the political arena. Texas won its independence and then, as we have seen, became a part of the United States—an acquisition cemented by the successful prosecution of the Mexican War by Winfield Scott, Zachary Taylor, Robert E. Lee, and Ulysses S. Grant a decade later. In that conflict, in a brilliant feat of logistics, the American army landed amphibiously at Veracruz, on the Gulf of Mexico, and marched inland to Mexico City, forcing surrender and the cession of the territory north of the Rio Grande.14
In his memoirs, Grant spends a good deal of time on the Mexican War, which was such a formative part of his military life and career. He had a great deal of sympathy for the Mexicans, as he would later have for the plight of the African American slaves (Mexico had abolished slavery in 1843), whom he rightly viewed as American citizens worthy of respect, dignity, and freedom. In fact, he regarded the Mexican War as fundamentally immoral. “To this day,” he wrote, “I regard the war which resulted as one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation. It was an instance of a republic following the bad example of European monarchies, in not considering justice in their desire to acquire additional territory. An empire in territory, it had but a very sparse population, until settled by Americans who had received authority from Mexico to colonize. These colonists paid very little attention to the supreme government, and introduced slavery into the state almost from the start, though the constitution of Mexico did not, nor does it now, sanction that institution.… The Southern rebellion was largely the outgrowth of the Mexican war. Nations, like individuals, are punished for their transgressions. We got our punishment in the most sanguinary and expensive war of modern times.”
By which Grant, writing near the end of his life in 1885, meant the American Civil War—a war that, as we shall see, produced the principal figure of the most electrifying last stand in our history, George Armstrong Custer. But that was still to come, eleven years after Lee’s capitulation at Appomattox Court House, Virginia—at which, in one of history’s consonances, Custer was present. The conclusion of the Mexican War, which Polk had effectively micromanaged from the White House, solved a political problem and allowed him to keep his campaign promise that he would be a one-term president—probably the most significant one-term presidency in the history of the Republic. He may also have been fatally ill. He returned to Tennessee and died in Nashville just three months after leaving office.
Polk was succeeded by Zachary Taylor, one of the heroes of the war (Grant was a great admirer of Taylor, and vastly preferred his informal leadership style to that of “Old Fuss and Feathers,” Winfield Scott). Taylor, however, was destined to be one of our shortest-serving presidents, in office only 16 months before suddenly dying; he was succeeded for the remainder of his term by his vice-president, Millard Fillmore—the last of the Whigs, the party that would soon give way to the new Republicans. Slavery had become the most important political consideration of the day, and Taylor/Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan (all one-term administrations) each attempted to find, and failed, a resolution to the intractable problem. With the election of the first Republican president—Abraham Lincoln, running on a National Union ticket—the conflict would now have to be settled militarily before it could be repaired politically.
Meanwhile, Mexico was in the throes of a prolonged political crisis as well, brought on by its defeat in the war, which left it open to interference from its old colonial master, Spain, and the French Bourbons under the emperor Maximilian. The interplay and rivalry between France and Spain regarding Mexico is largely forgotten today, but Napoleon, during his Peninsular War, deposed the Spanish monarchy and in 1808 installed his elder brother Joseph15 as the Iberian ruler for five years, until Joseph abdicated after Napoleon suffered a series of military reverses. The Spanish Bourbons were restored in 1813 and deposed again in 1868; and it is with this period in Mexican history we are now concerned.
In 1864, the Austrian archduke, Maximilian (brother of the Austrian emperor Franz Joseph I), accepted the position of emperor of Mexico from the French monarch, Napoleon III. This nephew of Napoleon had first been elected as president of France during the short life of the Second Republic, then, nearing the end of his term, seized power in an 1851 coup and reigned as emperor until the Franco-Prussian War, when the crushing French defeat toppled him in 1870 and sent him into exile in England, where he died in 1873. His principal legacy was the reconstruction of Paris by Baron Haussmann, who designed and gave us the Paris we know today.
The position came to Maximilian after a joint French-British-Spanish invasion of Mexico in 1861. The proximate cause was an attempt to collect debts from the government of Benito Juárez, a Zapotec Indian who had emerged as a reformist leader following the Mexican War. Juárez was a novelty, an indigenous Mexican rather than a scion of Spanish invaders, and was quickly recognized by the American government as the country’s rightful head of state. Under pressure from the United States16—acting on the authority of the Monroe Doctrine, which forbade European interference in the affairs of the Western Hemisphere—the British and the Spanish soon withdrew, but Napoleon III sent a French force to take and occupy Mexico City. He proclaimed the Second Mexican Empire on June 10, 1864—at the same time Ulysses S. Grant was suffering one of his worst defeats17 at the hands of Robert E. Lee at the Battle of Cold Harbor during the ultimately successful Overland Campaign that eventually drove Lee to surrender.
So with America distracted, the French took the opportunity to expand their sphere of influence abroad. It could not, and did not, stand. With the war over in 1865, America put renewed pressure on France to withdraw and, in 1867, she did. Cut off from military support, Maximilian surrendered Mexico City to troops under Porfirio Díaz, and was executed. Juárez resumed control of the government.
All of which is prelude (and postlude) to one of history’s greatest, and least-sung, last stands: the Battle of Camarón—Camarone, in French—in 1863. If Szigetvár is generally unknown in the West, then Camarón has been almost completely forgotten, even in the Western Hemisphere. It is, however, remembered in France, where it has become the foundational myth of one of France’s most celebrated and potent fighting forces, the Légion étrangère, better known in English as the French Foreign Legion. And all—or at least in significant part—because of Captain Danjou’s hand.
Jean Danjou was born in 1828 and attended the military academy of Saint-Cyr (the French West Point). In 1852, he was assigned to the Second Foreign Infantry Regiment, which later became part of the French Foreign Legion. Sent to Algeria, then undergoing French colonization, he lost his left hand when it was blown off by a musket malfunction. Rather than muster out, Danjou had a prosthetic wooden hand made for him, which he wore for the rest of his life. He served during the Crimean War, in central Europe, and in Morocco before being sent to Mexico in 1862, where he became (as Grant had been in the Mexican War) a quartermaster to Colonel Jeanningros, the commander of the Legion. With French forces besieging the critical town of Puebla, southeast of Mexico City, where the French had previously been defeated on May 5, 1862,18 a convoy was on the way inland to supply money and ammunition to the besiegers.19 Short of manpower, Captain Danjou decided to personally command a force consisting of three officers and 62 Legionnaires to protect the convoy. It proved to be his last command.
Guarding a 40-mile portion of the Royal Road that ran through tropical lowlands from the port city of Veracruz, occupied by the French, westward to Puebla and then on to Mexico City, the Legion’s posting was one of the worst imaginable. As the Americans had discovered a few years earlier, conditions were primitive, and deadly diseases, such as malaria, typhus, and yellow fever, were rampant. (The majority of deaths during combat in Mexico were from illness.) They were also under occasional attack from guerillas loyal to Juárez.
Danjou’s unit, the Third Company, First Battalion, Foreign Regiment, had only been in country a month but was hard hit by illness; a third of his command had already been stricken with yellow fever and had spent time in the hospital. This left him with the equivalent of two platoons, the men drawn from all over Europe. Among them were twenty Germans, sixteen Belgians, eight Swiss, and a smattering of others. Their principal weapons were a rifled musket called the Minié, for which they carried 60 rounds of ammunition (minié balls), and a sword bayonet. The makeshift uniforms consisted of a dark blue jacket with yellow or green epaulets, a red sash, beige trousers, and a Mexican sombrero instead of the standard képi.
On April 30, 1863, they were assigned to a reconnaissance mission to assess guerilla activity along a portion of the road that would soon see the artillery convoy heading toward Puebla. Resting along the way in the town of Palo Verde, Danjou and his Legionnaires were roused by the sound of hoofbeats. It was Mexican cavalry. Forming a hollow infantry square, bayonets fixed—the textbook response to a cavalry charge—Danjou led his men in a controlled, fighting retreat back to the small village of Camarón, where they shot their way into its farmyard and then sought refuge within La Trinidad Hacienda, a Spanish colonial villa fallen into desuetude but whose demesne was surrounded by a ten-foot wall.20 Unfortunately, some Mexican troops were already occupying the upper floor of the residence (as was typical of this kind of structure, there was no interior staircase; stairs ran along the exterior of the building), which meant that their snipers had a clear field of fire into the enclosed farmyard and would be difficult to dislodge by return fire.
Taking shelter in the hacienda was a rational decision. At this point, Danjou had no idea of the strength of the Mexican forces chasing him, which ultimately turned out to be a combination of infantry and cavalry battalions that numbered around two thousand men. But mounted horsemen would find it difficult to assault the hacienda and would be at a disadvantage in the close quarters of the farmyard. If the Mexicans were going to defeat the Legionnaires, it would have to be on foot.
At about 9:30 in the morning, a Mexican emissary arrived to demand the French surrender. Just before he arrived, Danjou opened his last bottle of wine and gave each of the men a few drops to drink; having marched all night and fought their way into the redoubt, the wine was the first liquid they’d had that day. It would also be the last. Sending the envoy packing with the words, “We have munitions. We will not surrender!” the Legion braced for battle. Each of the men swore an oath on Danjou’s wooden hand to fight to the finish. The first attack came 15 minutes later.
Danjou was among the first men killed, shot in the chest by one of the snipers while moving from the house to the men defending the two open gateways from behind the courtyard walls. Command was assumed by 2nd Lt. Jean Vilain, 27; normally the battalion paymaster, he had volunteered for the reconnaissance mission. With the house rapidly becoming overrun by Mexican troops, the French decided to abandon the villa and fight outside; of the original fourteen troops stationed inside, only five remained. Around noon, Mexican reinforcements arrived, adding three infantry battalions (about 1,200 men) under Col. Francisco Milan to the besieging force. Again, surrender was demanded; again, it was refused.
The bulk of the remaining Legionnaires, the reserve, was stationed between the two gateways, with other units at various corners of the farmyard. By this time, however, the Mexicans had blown huge holes in the walls of both the farmyard and the hacienda and were peppering the Legion, forcing it out of its defensive position and toward a couple of sheds near the southern gateway; one of the sheds was in serviceable condition, with good walls, while the other was a ruin. At about 2:30, Vilain was killed by a shot to the head, leaving only one other officer, 2nd Lt. Clément Maudet, a 15-year veteran of the Legion who had worked his way up from Legionnaire to junior officer. He was also the regimental standard-bearer.
It must have been clear to everyone at this point that the Legion had no chance. The surviving men hadn’t eaten or drunk anything, aside from Danjou’s wine, for the entire day. The Mexican sun was broiling them alive. Some of the men drank their own urine; others, driven mad by their wounds, lapped their own blood, the bodies of their comrades piled up all around them. Sometime after 3 p.m., the Mexicans fired the hacienda and then riddled the Legionnaires with gunfire.
Around five o’clock in the afternoon the Mexicans withdrew, expecting surrender this time for certain. The French took their count: only 12 able-bodied men left, including Maudet. A third surrender offer was made; it was greeted with silence. Outside the walls, the Mexican commander, Milan, exhorted his men to finish the job. In a sudden rush, the Mexicans eliminated the resistance at the gates. Holed up in the good shed, down to his last five men, out of ammunition, Maudet ordered a last volley, followed by a bayonet charge. Two of the men were killed outright; Maudet was badly wounded. Three—a corporal and two Legionnaires—were captured. The Battle of Camarón was over.
When the three remaining Legionnaires were brought to Milan—who had lost an estimated three hundred men in the fight—he exclaimed, “These aren’t men, they are devils!” In all, including men previously wounded, there were about 12 survivors. (Maudet died of his wounds about a week after the battle.) They were imprisoned, cared for, and later exchanged for Mexican prisoners of war.21 The regimental drummer, Casimir Lai, had been shot twice and run through by lance or saber seven times but had managed to crawl out from beneath the dead and escape into the brush. He survived.
In retrospect, Danjou’s decision to fight seems suicidal, a display of Gallic bravado that would have done Vercingetorix proud, unwarranted by the military circumstances. But was it? The French, just 50 years past Napoleon, still had confidence in their military prowess (that would be destroyed seven years later when Bismarck’s Prussians annihilated them at Sedan) and professional contempt for, as we might today term it, the Third World army they were facing. As we have seen from the Greeks at Thermopylae through Grant’s remarks regarding the Battle of Cold Harbor, the notion that one soldier of X is worth five of Y is ingrained in the Western way of war. Sometimes, it is true; sometimes it is not. At Camarón, it probably was—but the Legionnaires still died, nearly to a man.
In the larger strategic sense, however, Danjou’s resistance was important. Once Danjou realized he was engaging a large Mexican force, he knew he was fighting the units that had been sent to disrupt the convoy with supplies for the ongoing siege of Puebla. The longer he could keep the Mexicans tied down, and bloodied, the better chance the convoy would have to get through.
The Mexicans were fighting for their country; the Legionnaires were fighting for their honor and that of the Legion. “The Legion dies,” Danjou is said to have shouted as the battle began. “It does not surrender.” It may be argued that the Legionnaires were fighting for nothing but themselves. After all, the whole point of the legion was to take foreigners of likely dubious pasts and weld them into a fanatically loyal fighting force whose efforts would lead, if they survived, to French citizenship. But to this day Legionnaires swear their fealty not to France but to the Legion itself: Legio Patria Nostra is one of the Legion’s mottos. Part of their Code of Honor reads, “Each legionnaire is your brother in arms whatever his nationality, his race or his religion might be. You show him the same close solidarity that links the members of the same family.”22
Some time after the battle, a Mexican farmer poring through the wreckage found Danjou’s wooden hand and sold it to the French military authorities. The painted hand made its way back to the Legion’s headquarters in Sidi Bel Abbès, Algeria. After the Algerian War, the Legion relocated its administration to France, Corsica, and other French possessions, and the hand currently rests in the Museum of the Foreign Legion in Aubagne, east of Marseille. It is paraded with honor before the assembled Legionnaires every year on April 30, known as Camarón Day.
The Alamo changed both Mexican and American history. The Mexicans would soon enough have cause to regret they had martyred the men at the Alamo, for vengeance was surely on the minds of many American soldiers and sailors during the Mexican War a decade later, when they blockaded the country on both coasts and then marched from Veracruz to Mexico City and forced a humiliating peace and loss of considerable territory on Mexico. What delusions of Spanish or Mexican military grandeur that might have been dancing in the head of Santa Anna vanished at San Jacinto, never to return. Mexican suspicion of, resentment of, and jealousy of el Norte grew from that day forward.
Camarón, meanwhile, changed nothing. The French were eventually forced out and had to abandon their revanchist notion of Empire under the Napoleons. Mexican dreams of a Reconquista of the American southwest were briefly rekindled when Wilhelmine Germany proposed an alliance with Mexico should the United States enter the First World War against the Kaiser: Mexico would recover Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico, the latter two having only become states in 1912. But the notion died in January 1917 when the British intercepted and decoded the Zimmermann Telegram from the German Foreign Office; the revelation that Germany and Mexico were plotting to seize American territory inflamed public sentiment against both countries23 and possibly speeded America’s entry into the war a few months later.
None of this, however, diminishes the gallantry shown by both sides in each battle. In each case, the Mexicans were up against extraordinary groups of men, if fighting for different causes. The fact that General Milan, near the end of the Battle of Camarón, had to exhort his men to one last great effort in order to destroy just a handful of Europeans signified both its moral and psychological significance to the Mexicans. Similarly, Santa Anna’s impatience to get the siege of the Alamo over in one final assault bespoke the importance of the siege, not just to him—as president of Mexico and its top military commander—but to his young country, newly liberated from Spain.
The problem for the Mexicans in both fights, however, was that they weren’t up against men, they were up against devils, fueled on hunger and thirst and anger and fear and hopelessness and courage. Both sides welcomed the final charges. The defenders knew they would die, in the hope that the Cause might live. Whether it was rational or just or worthwhile they have left for us to decide. On all sides, it certainly seemed to be.