EIGHTY-TWO

WAR OF INDEPENDENCE,” is how I heard the leaders refer to the rebellion they were starting. That’s also what the Spanish called their war against Napoleon in Spain. And while Father Hidalgo and Allende had been born in the colony and called themselves americanos, both were Spaniards by blood and heritage. So as far as the leaders were concerned, it would be a war of brother against brother.

But as I thought about it, these men did not consider this rebellion as being against the Spanish people in general but against a small group of greedy men who wore the same spurs I once wore and bloodied everyone else in the colony with them. Allende had insisted that the insurrection be in the name of Ferdinand VII, who was presently a captive of Napoleon. It was wise to use Ferdinand’s name because criollos had much to lose if peons suddenly were the ruling class. By stating that the Spanish king would still rule, it created a sense of stability for criollos.

My impression was that Allende was sincere about forming a government in the name of the king, but I was just as certain that a tyrannical king was not part of Hidalgo’s concept of government by the people. To the padre, “the people” did not mean only the prescribed few but all people. He also had cleverly portrayed the rebellion as an act to protect the religion that dominated life in the colony.

In Spain, the great battle against the invaders was being fought by the common people who had taken matters into their own hands after their leaders failed them. Of those who immediately answered the padre’s call to arms, almost all were poor peons—again, an army of the people—and the focus of their hostility was again “foreign” invaders, those who came to the colony for a few years to stuff their pockets and leave behind a wake of poverty and misery, not unlike what the French were doing in Spain.

Ay! Was there something wrong with me? Was it possible for a man to fight in two wars of independence in such a short space of time? A more important question was whether Señora Fortuna would permit me to survive a second war. Maybe that fickle bitch would decide I had used up too much of the luck she had doled out already.

The padre ordered our first assault the moment his speech had ended: We were to take Dolores.

I watched the preparations quietly, with dark forebodings. The padre ordered a predawn roundup of Dolores’s gachupines and a search of their homes for weapons. We emptied the local jail of all prisoners sentenced for minor offenses, mostly political crimes—an indio who refused to pay tribute, a mestizo who insulted a gachupine—and filled it with gachupines, some still in bedclothes, all shocked and angry.

A small detachment of soldiers was deployed in the town, no more than a dozen men, a unit of the same San Miguel regiment to which Allende belonged. Used to obeying an officer, when Allende and Aldama entered their barracks and told them they were to grab their weapons and supplies and fall in, they did so without question. I wondered if any of them realized they had joined a rebel army and might one day face a firing squad.

Within a few hours we had seized the town without firing a shot—and achieved the first objective on the long road to independence. I was surprised at how quickly the conspirators moved. The indios, however, seemed surprised by nothing, including the hundreds of crudely manufactured weapons now being passed out. Word of revolution had obviously been sizzling among them.

I still was not impressed by the padre’s cache of weapons. He had perhaps twenty muskets stored away, but they were old and inferior. As to his wooden cannons, I could only hope I wasn’t near one when it was fired. The only serviceable weapons I saw were the personal weapons of Allende, his criollo amigos, a few local criollo volunteers, the barracks-soldier conscripts, and of course, my own. But a couple dozen well-armed men were not the essentials of a revolution.

Once the padre’s small supply of lances, slings, and other crude weapons were distributed, most of his “army-of-the-poor” would still be pathetically ill-equipped. Many had no better weapon of war than a kitchen knife or an improvised wooden club.

When these poor devils charged into synchronized volleys from musketeer firing lines or into cannon shot, I shuddered to imagine their fright, their panic, the bloody casualties they would take.

True, the revolt leaders expected to seize the San Miguel armory, with which Allende was intimately familiar, and its large stock of arms and munitions, but I doubted the commanders there would simply abandon their weapons, especially when news came that a large force was marching on San Miguel.

Allende also expected the viceroy’s colonial militia in San Miguel and ultimately those throughout the colony to desert and join the ranks of the rebels. Most of the viceroy’s forces were units composed of gachupines as commanding officers, criollos as lower-ranking officers, and mestizos and other castes as foot soldiers. Indios were exempt from having to serve, but a few did so voluntarily.

Because criollos universally hated the gachupines, Allende believed that they would flock to the insurrection, bringing with them money, effective weapons, and their own mounts.

“I hope they get their wish,” I told Marina and Raquel, as people around me excitedly jabbered about the birth of the revolution.

“You have a funereal face,” Marina chided. “Start smiling or people will think you know some terrible secret.”

Putting aside my own thoughts on what appeared to be an outbreak of insanity around me, I grinned at her. “I will smile for you.”

I couldn’t get out of my mind thoughts of the courageous sacrifices I saw all around me. The criollos taking up the fight were risking their lives and everything they owned, all that their families had accumulated over decades. The poor Aztec and other peons, if they lost, the viceroy’s men would burn their fields, rape their women, and starve their children.

I rode away ahead of the main unit, but I had to keep turning and looking back at the people we called Aztecs and the castes called mestizos. Peons, their hats in their hands, had listened to the passions of a priest. Now they marched, men, women, babes in arms.

I remembered the war horrors I had seen and heard about, of what a bucket of nails blazing out of the barrel of real cannon did to a column of men, shredding flesh and splintering bone, of what volleys of musket balls did to ranks of men. I thought about war without quarter, to “the knife,” and the bayoneting of wounded men as they lay on the ground and stared up at another human being who was about to stick a long blade in them, murder in cold blood.

The padre and Allende were not thinking about the horrors of war but of the freedoms that only fighting man to man with the viceroy’s forces and winning could bring. They had hope, courage, and enthusiasm for a better world.

I thought about the sacrifices that Hidalgo, Allende, Aldama, Raquel, Marina, and others who possessed property and status were making. These brave people had comfortable lives but were willing to risk their lives and everything that their personal worlds had consisted of: homes, fortunes, and the very welfare of their families. That they were putting their own lives on the line to fight for millions of other people told of their supreme courage. The Spanish guerrillas fighting the French also had that kind of courage. I personally risked nothing but a life that only I found any value in possessing; I had no meaningful possessions, family, or even an honorable name.

I told the padre that I would fight for him, Marina, and Raquel. Now that I watched the faces of the leaders and the indios, their glowing pride and great expectations, I felt envious of them. They had a dream they were willing to fight and die for.

As we began the march out of the city, the padre and the criollo officers on horseback led the way. Behind them came the “cavalry” of the new army, a troop of men on horses and mules, mostly vaqueros from nearby haciendas who had abandoned their herding of cattle to join the padre’s army, and the few criollos from Dolores who had decided to join. Many of the horsemen were mestizos, although there were a few indios among them. Next came the foot soldiers, almost all Aztecs, hundreds of them, with their machetes, cooking knives, and wooden cannons.

I don’t think anyone made an accurate count of the “army,” nor was it possible to do so because it was like a puddle of water that kept growing. One moment there were a hundred of us . . . then another hundred and another, as men, singly and in small groups, joined the parade. Soon it was a fluid mass of thousands.

No one took names, gave any instructions, did any training. There was no time and not enough qualified soldiers to train the horde. I suspect the only thing these indios knew was that at some point the padre would point at the enemy and they would go forth and do battle.

People carried food with them: already-rolled tortillas as well as sacks of maize and beans, and meat that was cooked and salted to keep it edible. I don’t know how many had grabbed a store of provisions kept for emergencies or how much of the food the padre had been hording for this fateful day. Obviously he had been storing supplies because wagons loaded with supplies and pulled by teams of mules suddenly were part of the procession.

My admiration for this warrior-priest who read Molière, defied his government and church to create wine and silk industries by force of his will, and who had an incredible abundance of love for all, but especially for the downtrodden, soared. I would have thought the two experienced military men, Allende and Aldama, would have planned the logistics of an army, but the padre was a human whirlwind, capable of handling a dozen tasks at the same time and fearless in making decisions. Miguel Hidalgo, small-town parish priest, had taken up the sword as enthusiastically as he once took up the cross.

From the tone of conversations and body language, I sensed that the military-trained Allende did not want the priest to be in charge, nor did Allende’s fellow officers, but the padre was able to attract large numbers of volunteers, something no one else had so far been capable of. I didn’t know for certain whether or not Padre Hidalgo was aware of Allende’s reluctance, of the officer’s own ambition to be in charge, but if he was, he gave no sign of it. I had been around him enough to know that little escaped his awareness.

A warrior-priest, I thought. Not one of those “turn-the-other-cheek” conquer-with-love martyrs of the New Testament, but the “eye-for-an-eye” fire-and-brimstone prophet of the Old Testament. The ability to pick up a sword and wield it had been inside him all the time, waiting to be ignited when his frustrations with the injustices that the common people suffered finally burst. The wrongs to his people ate at him until he picked up a sword, just as Moses, Solomon, and David had taken up the sword to defend their people.

According to Raquel, humans had long engaged in war and religion as if they were two sides of the same coin. The conquest of the New World had been launched in the name of Christianity, or so the avaricious conquistadors shouted as they grabbed indio gold for their own purses. And didn’t Michael take a sword and drive Satan and his fallen angels from Heaven?

As we marched toward San Miguel, I realized that the rebellion had begun with good omens: the maize was in full ear; there were hacienda pigs and cows aplenty along the way. We would not want for access to food, not at this time, at least.

I rode beside Raquel and Marina. Looking back at the many women and children accompanying the indios, I asked, “Why do they bring their families? To cook their meals?”

“What do you think the viceroy’s men will do when they come to Dolores? What will they do to the women left behind in villages when all the able-bodied men have gone to fight?”

I realized the naiveté of my question. The answer did not take much imagination or even need to be expressed. And I noticed she said “when” they came. I don’t think she realized her slip of the tongue. If the revolution was successful, the viceroy’s men would not be coming to Dolores because there would no longer be a viceroy or a royal army.

Padre Hidalgo was suddenly beside me. He leaned a little toward me and spoke in a low voice. “So much is happening so fast I have not had a chance to discuss some matters with you. As soon as we are able, I need to talk to you.”

He was gone as quickly as he had approached. Puzzled, I looked over at Marina.

“Has it occurred to you,” she said, “that you are the only person in this army who has ever actually fought in a war? Not even the criollo officers have experienced warfare.”

I almost groaned aloud.

How was I going to explain to these people that my experience in war was as a reluctant warrior and my main objective had been to stay alive? Did they think I was a leader of the guerrilla warfare against the French? Up to now, I had permitted others to overestimate my experiences and abilities, but I didn’t want to get myself killed or put the padre’s rebellion in jeopardy because of inflated notions of my military experience.

“Don’t worry,” Marina said, “I’m sure the padre thinks of you as more of a bandido than a soldier.”

“Stop reading my mind,” I snapped.