Three

“Seize the Customs House at Once!”

WHEN FRANCISCO MADERO, leader of the revolution that broke the iron grip of Porfirio Díaz in 1911, rode in to the capital on a white horse, the peons hailed him as Mexico’s apostle and redeemer, but the old regime, priming its guns, crouched for a counterattack. It came in less than two years, all the time that Madero was given to try to graft democracy on the trunk of feudalism. After ten days of terror and bombardment ten thousand were dead and Mexico had a new iron man who, behind the blood and cannon smoke, had made his spring to power. He was General Victoriano Huerta, a pure-blooded Indian with a flat nose, a bullet head, a sphinx’s eyes behind incongruous spectacles, and a brandy bottle never far from hand. Wily, patient, laconic, and rarely sober, he had risen carefully through the Army, step by step, to its command, serving under both Díaz and Madero, whom he now betrayed and arrested. Gratefully the ruling class and foreign investors welcomed him as their redeemer.

Two weeks after Huerta’s coup, during the night of February 22, 1913, Madero and his Vice-President, Pino Suárez, while being moved under guard from house arrest in the National Palace to the National Prison, were assassinated—murdered, the world believed, on Huerta’s orders, though no evidence was ever found to prove his direct complicity.

History chose this precise moment to inaugurate Woodrow Wilson as the new President of the United States. In his way he too was an apostle, not a messiah like Madero, but rather a Luther, intent upon a reformation, schooled, incorruptible, and sure of his purpose, mandated by himself as by the electorate to sweep out the old iniquities and the new greeds and redeem the level of American politics. Reform was what the time demanded, and reform was the device on Wilson’s banner. With him he brought into office other devotees of the New Freedom, among them William Jennings Bryan, the most improbable Secretary of State America ever had, and Josephus Daniels, a pacifist, as Secretary of the Navy. To them, as to Wilson, General Huerta was everything that was abhorrent. Yet Wilson, in the long duel with Huerta that was to follow, could not suppress a “sneaking admiration” for his opponent’s nerve. Fulminating publicly, privately he confessed to finding Huerta “a diverting brute … so false, so sly, so full of bravado, yet so courageous … seldom sober and always impossible yet what an indomitable fighter for his own country.” To Huerta, a man of few words, Wilson was simply the “Puritan of the North.”

The murder of Madero, a reform president like himself, occurring only a few days before his own inaugural, brushed Wilson almost too closely and shocked him inexpressibly. It need not have, since hardly a ruler of Mexico in a hundred years had failed to die a violent death, but Wilson felt Madero’s death like a brother’s. Perhaps a sense that it might have been his own added to his indignation. From the day he took office on March 4, 1913, he was obsessed by the idea that it was his “clear duty” as a knight of the New Freedom and foe of the “Interests” to tear General Huerta, the “usurper,” off the backs of the Mexican people. He determined that Mexico should be ruled by the consent of the governed and that it somehow devolved upon him to accomplish this goal.

Just at this time Japan was aroused to fury when California passed a law forbidding Japanese nationals to own or lease land in that state. Unable to believe that the federal government was powerless to abrogate a state law, and convinced that the action was a deliberate insult, Japan protested hotly to Washington. The air over the Pacific became electric with tension; the long-predicted war seemed about to break.

Wilson, bursting with plans for domestic reforms, for busting the trusts, breaking the “interlocking directorates,” driving the dollar diplomats from the temple, had hardly got inside the White House door before he was confronted by possible war with Japan and a major crisis in Mexico. “It would be the irony of fate,” he said wistfully, “if my administration had to deal chiefly with foreign affairs”—a remark which fate, in a malicious mood, promptly proved the understatement of the era.

At such a moment, when fresh rumors were circulating that Japan was even then offering a secret alliance to Mexico, a less high-principled man than Wilson would not have risked throwing Mexico into Japanese arms by simultaneously weakening and alienating the Mexican government. But Wilson’s peculiar strength, as well as his ultimate weakness, was that, conscious of the purity of his motives, he unwaveringly pursued what he believed was right, regardless of expediency. He spurred against “that scoundrel Huerta,” determined to unseat him with the weapon of non-recognition. Withholding recognition from Huerta naturally encouraged the rise of a rival in the person of General Carranza, who had already got an insurrection going in the north, near the American border. His forces now spread southward, swelling daily, set up a rival government, and made of Mexico a Latin American Balkans inviting foreign intrigue. With both parties seeking guns, money, and other forms of support from abroad, Mexico was opened to any enterprising trouble shooter with an eye for a crack in the Monroe Doctrine.

More than one was watching for the right moment. Japan, in that summer of 1913, gladly sold Huerta a fat pack of arms and, to annoy Wilson the more, requested a special mission, which arrived in the person of Señor de la Barra, Mexico’s Foreign Minister, who was personally received by the Emperor and made the object of cheering demonstrations. Germany’s expectations of trouble warmed up at once. It looked as if the long-bruited alliance of Japan and Mexico was really taking shape. Mexico had two thousand miles of undefended coastline on the Pacific. Her northern border with the United States stretched for twelve hundred miles from Texas to California, touching all along its length against territory that had once been her own. Mexicans remembered the Alamo too. Mexico was, in short, the soft underbelly of the United States.

President Wilson, however, was not concerned with strategy but with reform. Seduced by the magic of the word “Constitutionalists,” which Carranza chose for his party, or perhaps by the nobility of Carranza’s long white beard, which made him look like a combination of John Brown and the prophet Isaiah, Wilson believed he saw in him a new leader of the oppressed. This was the man for Mexico, he decided, on behalf of the Mexicans. The Mexican people must be given democracy, ready or not. “My passion is for the submerged 85 per cent who are struggling to be free,” he said. Unfortunately the submerged 85 per cent, unable to distinguish a difference between Huerta and Carranza, were cowering in their huts or had taken to the hills, hoping to save one burro or a bag of corn from the battle of the rival tyrants.

In vain Ambassador Henry Lane Wilson drew a fearful prospect of the turmoil and anarchy that would again beset Mexico unless General Huerta was quickly confirmed in power. The President, who scorned the other Wilson as the most egregious of the dollar diplomats left over from Taft (and believed him half responsible for Madero’s murder for having denied the Mexican President asylum), refused to communicate with his Ambassador.

President Wilson’s policy made the European nations equally uneasy. Having shuddered for their investments during Madero’s regime, they had been delighted by Huerta’s coup and his promised re-establishment of the old order. They were pained and distressed by Wilson’s refusal to recognize him. They all urged upon Wilson the necessity of supporting a safe and stable government in Mexico. “The best thing that can happen is to get as soon as possible a dictator who will keep order and give a chance for material and educational progress,” advised Lord Bryce, who could not be shrugged aside as a tool of the Interests, though he was British Ambassador in Washington. The Kaiser put it more succinctly. “Morality,” he said, “is all right, but what about dividends?”

But Wilson was not to be swerved from his self-appointed mission to unseat “that person who calls himself the President of Mexico.” Although some sixteen nations had recognized Huerta’s right to call himself President, Huerta remained to Wilson a symbol of political sin, a golden calf around whom backsliding Mexicans and dollar diplomats were bowed in worship, an idol whom he, bidden by a voice from some inner Sinai, must smash.

Oil was the factor that quickened the coming of a climax. The world’s navies were just then completing the conversion from coal to oil, and Mexican oil supplied one-quarter of the world’s needs. Mexico supplied also, from the holdings of one man, Lord Cowdray, practically all the oil used by the British Navy. In this eleventh hour, as the sands of peace were running out, the rivalry of the British and German Navies was paramount. The British Navy depended upon Mexican oil; Britain depended upon its Navy. Lord Cowdray was becoming distinctly restless. His friend Sir Lionel Carden, the British Ambassador to Mexico, was squirming with frustration at not yet being allowed to hang the guerdon of recognition around Huerta’s neck as he believed Britain’s interests required. He bedeviled London for recognition. London bedeviled Washington. Wilson only dug his heels into the ground more firmly. He regarded the British Ambassador, as he did his own, with cold distaste, while over Sir Lionel’s shoulder the figure of Lord Cowdray loomed before his eyes like some dark monster dripping oil-stained footprints wherever he walked.

England, however, had come to feel that Lord Cowdray’s contract with the Royal Navy spoke more cogently than President Wilson’s passion for the submerged peons. On May 3 England recognized General Huerta. Wilson’s annoyance at this act was hardly soothed when on top of it came Japan’s angry protest against the California alien-exclusion act. The President remained calm, but the Joint Army and Navy Board did not. Upon its own authority it ordered five cruisers from the China station to Manila and recommended that the Pacific fleet be sent at once to Hawaii and two warships to Panama. This drastic move, carefully leaked to the press, left the country gasping and so infuriated the President that he dissolved the Joint Board, with the result that it remained out of existence throughout 1914 and most of 1915.

The Yellow Peril was the talk of the hour. Secretary Daniels complained that his admirals “sat up nights thinking how Japan was planning to make war on America and steal a march on us by taking the Philippine Islands and going on to Hawaii.” As this was a blueprint of Pearl Harbor twenty-eight years in advance, these admirals of an earlier generation at least were wide awake. But Daniels was, as he put it, disgusted with their “obsession,” and the President regarded it as “bad taste” at a time when he was trying to soothe Japanese feelings and keep the peace.

And he was getting nowhere in Mexico. Alarmed by the growing anti-Americanism Wilson’s policy was fostering, the leading American investors sent him a memorandum urging recognition of Huerta on condition that Huerta and Carranza each guarantee a free election, for, they said, “If Mexico is helped out of her trouble by Britain and Germany, American prestige will be destroyed in that country.”

For once Mr. Wilson paused, listened, and almost took advice. He went so far as to draw up a message to Huerta along the lines suggested by the businessmen, but when it came to actually giving recognition to “that desperate brute” he kept turning it round and round in his hand like a glass of nasty medicine. Had he gulped it down then, the American record would never have been stained by the blood of Veracruz.

But advice more to his liking now reached him. William Bayard Hale, to whom the Kaiser had confided that indiscreet interview, once more crosses the path of this history. Having journalistically embraced the New Freedom, Hale had been chosen to write Wilson’s campaign biography in 1912. Impressed by his talents, the President had sent him on a confidential fact-finding mission to Mexico. His qualifications for the mission consisted in knowing nothing whatever about Mexico but a good deal about Wilson. A quick glance around was all he needed to report back what he knew Wilson wanted to hear: that Huerta was indeed the archfiend, that his regime could not last, that Ambassador Wilson had actually invited the archfiend to dinner! Well! Wilson flung away the cup of recognition and sent another confidential emissary with a letter to Huerta informing him that he must remove himself as a candidate in the coming election. America, Wilson wrote, was “seeking to counsel Mexico for her own good.”

Like Cromwell against the Cavaliers, Wilson was right and Huerta reactionary. But, in his genuine desire to put an end to the exploitation of the Mexican people, Wilson took toward a neighboring chief of state a hectoring tone that was not well designed for persuasion. Huerta, however wicked, had sovereignty; as an Aztec, he had pride. His answer to Wilson’s advice was neat and unmistakable. He swooped down upon the Mexican Congress, arrested 110 of its members, and dissolved the rump. When the scheduled election duly took place a few weeks later, no one was less surprised than General Huerta to find himself confirmed as President of Mexico.

Wilson, who persisted in expecting Mexico to behave like a modern democracy although its political development was about on a level with pre-Bastille France, was terribly shocked by the arrest of the deputies. He took it as a personal insult and “impossible to regard as otherwise than an act of bad faith toward the United States.” Nor was he comforted when his Ambassador in London, Walter Hines Page, reported that there was no appreciation in England of his “moral” position on the Mexican problem. Exasperated, Wilson now publicly announced that he considered it his “clear duty” to force out the usurper by “such means as may be necessary to secure this result.”

Anger had led Wilson out on a limb; now Britain was to ease him off. Sir Edward Grey, the Liberal Foreign Secretary, unhappy over Wilson’s course in Mexico, sent to Washington an emissary, Sir William Tyrrell, who, overcoming Wilson’s suspicions of him, charmed the President into a frank talk. Among the impressions he brought home was the report that Wilson, on being asked what his Mexican policy was, replied, “I am going to teach the Latin American republics to elect good men!”

Within a few weeks of Tyrrell’s return, Wilson’s gratification was immense to learn that his bête noire, Sir Lionel Carden, had been transferred to another post; further, that Lord Cowdray, as reported by Page, had lost his aplomb and “they are taking to their tents.” This pleasing change was not due to England’s having a sudden rush of morality to the head but to Sir Edward Grey’s having set his heart upon an object for which he needed Wilson’s active support: repeal of the Panama Canal tolls. Grey did not believe that morally there was much to choose between Huerta and Carranza. He decided that British support for Huerta in preference to some replica of Huerta by another name was not worth making an issue of at the risk of gaining Wilson’s hostility. Hence the handsome gesture recalling Sir Lionel, to which Wilson responded with a handsome plea to Congress for repeal of the Panama Canal tolls. A gentlemen’s understanding, all on the highest principles.

General Huerta, inscrutable behind his incongruous spectacles, did not need to be told what it meant when the English began to pull out. When, in February 1914, Wilson, now happy in England’s new appreciation of his moral position, lifted the arms embargo upon Carranza, Huerta knew himself to be in an extremity. In that extremity help was reached out to him. Germany saw an opening. To Huerta came the German Minister, Admiral von Hintze, with an offer of military aid against the rebels, provided he would cut off oil to the British Navy in case of war. Within a few days derricks on the decks of Hamburg were swinging huge crates of rifles and other munitions aboard the ships Ypiranga, Bavaria, and Kronprinzessen Cecilie; their destination, Veracruz.

Another ship now enters the picture, the U.S.S. Dolphin, flagship of Admiral Mayo, anchored in Mexican waters off Tampico. On April 6 a gunboat from the Dolphin, carrying seven sailors and a paymaster, went ashore to load supplies. Tampico was then under martial law. A minor Huertista officer, carrying out orders not to permit any ship to dock, arrested the Americans and marched them off to his superior. This officer, confronted by a live casus belli walking into his guardroom, instantly ordered the men returned to the Dolphin, whither they were shortly followed by a Mexican officer bringing an explanation and the polite regrets of the Tampico commander.

Admiral Mayo, however, believing that American honor required a twenty-one-gun salute in token of official Mexican apology, as well as punishment of the arresting officer, issued an ultimatum answerable within twenty-four hours. Afterward he informed Washington of what he had done. Hardly knowing how it had happened, the government found itself plunged into a crisis from which neither Wilson, Bryan, nor Daniels could think of any quick egress in case Huerta refused to apologize. The hour appointed by the ultimatum came and went, but no guns saluted the American flag. Overnight the Tampico affair swelled into a national insult. Diplomatic hell broke loose, telegrams flashed, warships scurried to the Gulf, further ultimata clattered down on Huerta’s head like hailstones. He would not yield. Why, he asked with a wry logic, should the United States demand a salute from a government it did not recognize? Nearly beaten, facing ruin, pressed by a power ten times his size, he fended off the final moment by one argument after another until Wilson, horrified and helpless, found himself maneuvered onto a pedestal of national honor from which there was no climbing down except by way of war.

Yet, caught on the horns of his own ambivalence, Wilson in fact welcomed the opportunity to oust the dictator Huerta and, as he saw it, free Mexico for democracy. He shrank from the use of force, but his hand reached out for the gun. He issued a last personal ultimatum to Huerta, which was due to expire at six o’clock on the evening of April 19. Military sanctions, in the event of Huerta’s refusal, were to take the form of blockade and occupation of Mexico’s largest port city, Veracruz, and the armed forces had been ordered to prepare for this action. Six o’clock passed without an answer from Huerta, but Wilson did nothing that night.

All next day, April 20, Washington was in turmoil; rumors buzzed, headlines blazed. Wilson called the Cabinet at 10:30 A.M. and told them he was going to ask Congress that afternoon to pass a resolution authorizing the use of arms to seize Veracruz. Although, needless to say, he cared little about a salute to the flag for its own sake, he narrowed the issue entirely to that question and left everyone feeling distinctly uncomfortable. The President himself, recalled one Cabinet member, was “profoundly disturbed” and closed the meeting with a plea that if any of them believed in prayer he should use it now before a decision that “might take the nation into war.” The next moment, in one of those twists which often make Wilson difficult to follow, he told reporters waiting outside the Cabinet room that “in no conceivable circumstances would we fight the people of Mexico.”

Shortly after the Cabinet meeting, he was informed by a telegram from the American consul at Veracruz of the approach of the Ypiranga, believed to be bringing a cargo of arms for Huerta. At 2 P.M. he met with four House and Senate leaders and read them the resolution which he wished Congress to pass justifying the use of force to secure amends for “affronts and indignities” to the United States. He also told the Congressional leaders that he wished to intercept the German ship, but when he went up to the Capitol an hour later to ask for the resolution in person, he did not mention the Ypiranga. Congress was left to debate the use of force solely on the issue of an outworn ritual of apology due to the national honor of the United States, and there were many who blushed for the cause. Uneasily the debate began; it turned sour; Wilson anxiously returned for a cloakroom conference at 6 P.M.; by nightfall nothing had been settled. Washington went to bed on a lighted fuse.

By now the ultimatum had lain unimplemented for over twenty-four hours. Legally Wilson did not need Congressional authorization but, still tortured by indecision, he did not act. He longed to pull the trigger against Huerta, but the flimsiness of his case, which even dollar diplomats, hardened to manipulating Latin American affairs for their own ends, might have hesitated to use, held him back. It was the German arms ship that precipitated what happened next.

In the still hours before dawn of April 21 the shrill ring of the telephone pierced the sleep of the President. Struggling to come awake in the dark, he picked up the receiver and heard the voice of Secretary Bryan, who was calling in pajamas from his home in Calumet Place. Another voice joined in, that of Secretary of the Navy Daniels, who, previously roused from bed, was plugged in on a three-way hookup. Downstairs in the White House, the President’s secretary, Joseph Tumulty, also in pajamas, listened in on an extension.

“Mr. President,” said Bryan, tuning the famous larynx to a solemnity suitable for midnight crisis, “I am sorry to inform you that I have just received a telegram from Veracruz reporting that the Ypiranga is due to dock at ten this morning.”

“What? Oh, yes, yes. Go ahead, Mr. Bryan.”

“The telegram is from our consul at Veracruz, William Canada. He wires, ‘Steamer Ypiranga, owned by Hamburg-Amerika line, will arrive tomorrow from Germany with 200 machine guns and 15,000,000 cartridges; will go to Pier 4 and start discharging at 10:30.’ Consul Canada also says that three trains, each coaled up and ready, are waiting on the pier to load the munitions and will leave as soon as loaded and that the Veracruz commander, General Maas, has stated ‘he will not fight but will leave with all soldiers and rolling stock tomorrow tearing up the track behind him.’ ”

“Do you realize what this means, Mr. Bryan?” Distress and hesitation wrinkled the President’s voice. “Daniels, are you there, Daniels? What do you think?”

“The munitions should not be permitted to reach Huerta,” Daniels answered. “I can wire Admiral Fletcher to prevent it and take the Customs House. I think that should be done.”

A pause fell upon the listeners as each in his separate room, gripping the telephone that linked him with the others, felt the heaviness of the decision the President must make. Then the pause was broken. “Daniels,” came the President’s voice, “send this order to Admiral Fletcher: Take Veracruz at once!” This pre-dawn parley, since known to history as the Pajama Conference, launched the United States upon the invasion of a neighboring state.

Over in the Navy Department a light went on, and minutes later the Secretary of the Navy’s message went tapping through the night air to Admiral Fletcher at Veracruz: SEIZE THE CUSTOMS HOUSE. DO NOT PERMIT WAR SUPPLIES TO BE DELIVERED TO HUERTA GOVERNMENT OR TO ANY OTHER PARTY.

Next day Wilson, pacing the floor, waited for news along with Bryan, white-faced and fidgety, and Daniels, drained of all his bounce and cheer. Secretary of War Garrison and Robert Lansing, Counselor of the State Department, waited with them while up on Capitol Hill a bewildered Congress now found itself debating in anger and incredulity a resolution approving the President’s midnight action in virtually putting the United States at war over what appeared to the public to be “some medieval points of punctilio” in a petty quarrel about a salute.

Already at 8:30 that morning Admiral Fletcher’s flagship, with ominous signals wigwagging from its deck, had blocked the path of the Ypiranga and sent its engines clanging into reverse. Three hours later American marines and bluejackets poured ashore at Veracruz and took possession of the Customs House, the railroad yards and rolling stock, the cable, telegraph, and post offices.

Then occurred a regrettable mischance: the Mexicans resisted. How were they to know the running bluejackets with fixed bayonets had really come down to Mexico, in Wilson’s words, “to serve mankind”? Mexican cadets barricaded a stone fort and opened fire upon the invaders. Encouraged by this sign of defense, angry citizens rushed to shoot from upstairs windows. In reply the guns of the U.S.S. Prairie shelled the city. Blood spattered the walls, dead bodies fell in the streets.

FOUR OF OUR MEN KILLED, 20 WOUNDED. FIRING ALL AROUND THE CONSULATE, wired Consul Canada at 4 P.M. to the men waiting in the White House. When all the casualties had been counted after the occupation of Veracruz was completed, 19 Americans and 126 Mexicans had been killed, 71 Americans and 95 Mexicans wounded.

These irretrievable deaths stared Wilson in the face and left him shaken. Facing the press next day, he looked, one of the newsmen remembered, “preternaturally pale, almost parchmenty—the death of American sailors and marines owing to an order of his seemed to affect him like an ailment.” On top of tragedy came humiliation. Even before the echo of the firing reached Washington, Germany lodged a protest at the State Department.

His Excellency Count von Bernstorff, correct in his Homburg, with pearl-gray cutaway and gray pearl stick-pin, called in person upon the Secretary of State to protest the halting of the Ypiranga without prior declaration of blockade or state of war. Bowing him out, Mr. Bryan worriedly consulted his legal experts. Precedents hastily examined revealed the painful truth: the German Ambassador was right. Secretary Bryan, seeming almost to relish the opportunity for a public display of Christian humility, proceeded at once to the German Embassy to apologize in person. While exposing his country’s embarrassment he managed to spare his own by blaming the whole thing on Admiral Fletcher, who, he said, “through a misunderstanding exceeded his instructions.” Full tilt upon public confession—for Mr. Bryan tended to conduct diplomacy like a penitent at a revival meeting—he let it be known that “by direction of the President” he had offered an explanation and apology to the German Ambassador and that Admiral Fletcher had been instructed to call personally upon the captain of the Ypiranga and do likewise. With somewhat less relish, Secretary Daniels was forced to inform the bewildered admiral of this duty.

Publicly the Germans announced that the munitions would be returned to Hamburg, but while American attention was focused on Veracruz they privately ordered the Ypiranga to slip down the coast to Puerto Mexico, where, after she was joined by the Bavaria carrying 1,800,000 rounds of ammunition and 8327 rolls of barbed wire, both ships quietly completed delivery of their cargoes to the Huerta forces. Whether it was to compel a salute from General Huerta or to prevent delivery of German arms to him that nineteen Americans had died, it was now difficult to avoid the conclusion that they had died in vain.

Germany was entranced by the results of her experiment in Latin American meddling. “Mexico is a god-send to us,” privately wrote Count Bernstorff. The United States would soon annex Mexico, explained Der Tag, and thus arouse all Latin America to unite to throw off the Yankee yoke. Germany could then move in. Der Tag foresaw the United States sucked into a war in Mexico’s mountains and jungles, lasting five years at least. “The intervention of Japan is more than a possibility,” it affirmed and drew a happy picture of Japanese forces landing on the coast of Mexico and marching on California.

Veracruz did, in fact, provoke the resentment Germany was hoping for. American travelers returning from South America reported the people seething with antagonism toward the United States. Unhappily Germany was prevented from taking advantage of it, owing to the consequences of the midsummer murder of an Austrian archduke at Sarajevo.

The dauntless Kaiser, optimistic as ever, was not to be diverted by the unfortunate affair at Sarajevo from seizing the golden opportunity for German expansion opening at last in Latin America. Playing his usual personal hand, he dispatched an emissary to London to invite England to collaborate with Germany to block the evident design of the United States for the conquest of Mexico. “I am ready to give you the highest official assurance,” the emissary told an astonished Foreign Office, “that your country and my country would have no difficulty in arranging our respective spheres of influence in Mexico.” Considering that the hour was July 1914, the Kaiser’s proposal was an odd one and evoked only a British stare of hauteur.

President Wilson knew nothing of this at the time, but he was unhappy enough already. Rather helplessly he told the country at the funeral of the Veracruz casualties, “We have gone down to Mexico to serve mankind, if we can find out a way. We do not want to fight the Mexicans. We want to serve the Mexicans if we can.” But in a personal letter to a friend he acknowledged, “I am longing for an exit.”

Again he was given one, this time by the ABC powers, Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, who offered to mediate. With equal relief Wilson and Huerta accepted, but for Huerta it came too late. Veracruz was a blow from which his regime never recovered, and before long Carranza had marched upon the capital and ousted him. Luckier than Madero, he got away to exile, and, as Díaz had done before him, he sailed to exile on a German ship. On July 17, Captain Kohler and the entire officer complement of the cruiser Dresden in dress uniform stood at attention on the station platform of Puerto Mexico to greet the departing dictator and escort him to their ship. Díaz died in exile, but, unlike Díaz, General Huerta would return—with Germany, still lured by Mexico, behind him.

In the meantime Huerta went to Spain, arriving there on August 1, three days before the world exploded.