The mass of rebels was divided into eight groups, to which Juan Méndez gave the name “companies.” He had been selected as “General” of the entire operation because of his military background. As a sergeant he had more than once had occasion to direct the drill of a group of soldiers whose officer had either drunk himself to insensibility or was too lazy to get out of bed in the morning and had delegated his authority.
Méndez took command of the first company. His battalion companion, Corporal Ortiz, took command of the eighth and last, the one that was to act as rear guard during the march. The Professor was given the title of Supreme Chief of the forces. Andrés was made quartermaster. Matías, Fidel, and Cirilo were to supervise transportation and weapons.
Juan Méndez took Celso as his chief of staff, but Celso gave that fact no importance. He said: “Chevrons? Oof, they make me laugh! I’ll be in the front rank next to the chief when the music starts. Then I’ll put on my first uniform. They gave me a pistol, but I really have more confidence in my machete.”
“As you like, comrade,” Méndez replied. “We’ll talk about it again later, after the first combat—if we come out alive.”
Very few of the men were armed. Pistols were scarce, rifles even more so, and some of the latter were so old that they were breech-loaders. Six of these had been taken from the artisans. The revolvers had been collected by force from the storekeepers and were of the same poor quality. They had never been fired, and their chief value was to frighten. On the other hand, the machetes and axes were all well sharpened. No profound understanding was required to reach the conclusion that the armament of the troop was virtually nonexistent.
When one took into account that the armament of the rural police and the state police devoted to the dictator was considerable, and that furthermore they could count on a good supply of ammunition, one could well consider the march of the rebels against such forces as suicide. The regular soldiers did not carry more than a rifle or a carbine each, but when they separated into small groups they set out armed with one machine gun to each fifty men. With these little toys, bought from the best factories in the United States, they had already given numerous proofs of their skill, suppressing strikes and a considerable number of peasant uprisings. When fifty rural police met five hundred rebels, the result was always more or less as follows: among the soldiers about three men were killed and five wounded, whereas among the rebels four hundred and fifty were killed and none wounded. The remaining fifty owed their lives to very rapid flight into the mountains or the jungle.
The only men in the troop who knew the exact conditions of the struggle that had now been undertaken were the “Professor,” the “General,” and the “Colonel.” The Colonel was Lucio Ortiz, promoted to this rank by decision of Juan Méndez. None of these three made any mystery of what he knew about the possible results of the unequal combat that would take place if the troop of mahogany-workers should meet a column, or even just a patrol, of rural police. Again and again, at night around the campfires, they had explained to the men in detail what the situation was. But neither those who explained nor those who listened to the explanations wavered the slightest in their determination. They had suffered so much, they had borne so much, they had stored up so much rancor and hatred in their hearts, that the struggle, whatever the result might be, seemed to them the only moral comfort possible. To them the idea of coming out the losers was inconceivable. They would win, or they would lose their lives: they saw no other alternative. Their existence had been so miserable, so empty, that to die with the satisfaction of having rebelled seemed to them a thousand times preferable to taking refuge in the jungle in flight from the enemy. Expressing himself like this, Celso was giving voice not merely to his own opinion, but also to that of all the men. They were all convinced that the portals of paradise would open to them if before they died they accounted for five or six federal soldiers.
This fierce hatred of the dictator and his toadies was not a feeling limited to the oppressed. It could be taken for granted that three-quarters of the Mexican people harbored it. This hatred was what was carrying the revolutionary hurricane across the entire country. To it could be attributed the acts of harshness, the determination of the men neither to ask for mercy nor to grant it. No prisoners were taken: the defeated who could not or would not flee were killed. No wounded men remained on the battlefields. The women of the revolutionaries, accompanying their men into combat, scoured the battlefield like furies and finished off the enemy wounded with their kitchen knives. The cause of this savagery was the dictatorship and nothing but the dictatorship. What happened here was what always happens: when the dikes break, the blind forces of nature carry away without pity whatever lies in their path.
Nevertheless, Juan Méndez felt obliged to explain again and again, as clearly as possible, what the situation was. He would say: “If our first company meets two hundred federals, not one of us will come out alive. Not one of us will have time even to aim a pistol—which, in any case, very few of you know how to manage—before a rain of bullets will be falling on us. And then what will we do?”
“What’ll we do?” Matías replied once. “Well, I’ll tell you, Juanito! If two hundred men fall on us, two hundred victims will be offering themselves to us. And it would be a pity if only two hundred appeared, because the more who face us, the more we’ll kill. Right now, if you like, all of you can drop out before things get serious. We’ll go ahead and we’ll never turn back.”
“Neither will I turn back. I’m to lead the fight. All I want is for you to realize what’s going to happen to us. I know by experience, and you don’t.”
“That’s possible,” Fidel answered. “But then, you used to be a military man. We’re mahogany-workers, and now you’re one too. And that’s not the same as being a soldier. Any idiot can be a soldier! But to be a revolutionary you have to have qualities that are developed only in the wombs of certain women. My mother was one of them.”
“Well, to change the subject, Santiago is right: we ought to do away with those artisans. That breed isn’t worth a shit!”
A general really acquainted with military matters would have viewed the projected march with dread. He would have foreseen so many difficulties that he would have said: “The devil! With the means at my disposition I’ll have lost half of my army in six miles.” He would have called together his general staff and tried to overhaul his plans. But Juan Méndez was a revolutionary general who had never even conceived the idea of strategy, of whose very name he was ignorant. “Forward, march!” And his army marched as best it could.
During the dry season an expedition like this, with this number of men and beasts of burden, would have been so complicated that no contractor would have dared to undertake it. In the height of the rainy season it was positive madness.
If they had been reasoning men they would never have rebelled. Uprisings, mutinies, revolutions, are always irrational in themselves, because they come to disturb the agreeable somnolence that goes by the names of peace and order. The men were proving that they were not just simple strikers but authentic revolutionaries, because real revolution does not recognize obstacles. The true rebel, he who feels rebellion down to the last fiber of his being, who leaps over an obstacle even with his last breath, always marches forward—and he who never interrupts his onward march has won three-quarters of the game. Had the men been told that they would have to march for a week through the infernal regions, they would have answered: “What does it matter? We’ll end by getting out of there. And when we get out, we’ll be better revolutionaries than before we went in.”
The infernal regions certainly awaited them, not for one week, but for three weeks that would seem endless.
Even the slightly raised trails, which usually escape flooding, had become transformed into vast swamps. Rain poured down every three or four hours. The clouds became rivers, and the water fell with such violence as to dig out pools in the forest clearings. Great branches were broken from the trees, and footpaths were converted into streams. Big rocks were swept along by the raging floods and flung against the forest giants, smashing against their trunks and overturning them. When the rain momentarily let up, the sun beat down again on the soaking undergrowth, from which it drew so much steamy vapor that the whole forest became a steam bath in which it was difficult to breathe. When the tops of the trees and the foliage covering the few open spaces began to be dry again, a fine rain would start falling, lasting about ten minutes as the prelude to another storm, another deluge, accompanied by thunder and lightning.
For inexperienced people to have undertaken a long march through the forest in the rainy season would have been a reckless adventure, but for these men, who knew perfectly all the dangers that such a march implied, the mere setting out was proof that they had made up their minds to face the worst in order to carry through implacably to its end the revolution they had begun.
During one of the discussions, one of the rebels had proposed that they should wait until the rains ended.
The Professor had replied: “Certainly we could wait, but there are many others who can’t, and they are the peons of the fincas, who want to be free as much as we do, and who want, like us and with us, to march to fight for the liberty of their brothers.”
After a time what tormented them was no longer the burning desire to return to their land and their homes. That desire did not leave them, but now a new desire stirred their hearts. The uprising was a fact, and all the men working in the jungle had joined the first rebels. Every day new groups were arriving to swell their ranks, and this multitude had almost forgotten about the longed-for return home. Now they thought of nothing but the rebellion against the bosses and complete liberation.
More and more they were becoming convinced that if the rebellion did not embrace all their brothers in misery, whatever liberty they won would endure for a short time only. To this conviction, too, they had been led thanks to the able arguments of the Professor.
He had told them a thousand times: “If we rebel and just return afterwards to cultivate our cornfields and take care of our children, we’ll bring in one harvest—if we’re lucky. But just one and no more. Before we know it, we’ll have the rural police and federals on our necks dragging us back here again to be more slaves than before—and forever. That’s why our revolution must be powerful and complete. That’s why we must either bring the federals and the rural police over to our side or eliminate them. We must not do things by halves or believe in promises. As soon as we fall on the first fincas and the first villages, they will begin to promise us the sky. We must not let ourselves be taken in, because all those promises will be dictated by fear. Everything they’ll promise will have absolutely no value if we do not make a complete revolution and carry it to the farthest corner of our land.”
“Bravo, Professor! You’re right, and we’ll follow your advice.”
And so it was gradually and on their own initiative that the men had given a new meaning to their rebellion. The desire to return home had given place to the more ardent desire to achieve a complete victory.
Even Andres and Celso, who, to begin with, had thought only of returning to see their family and friends, now thought of that only occasionally.
“When it comes down to that, they can wait. Don’t you think so, Celso?”
“You’re right about that, Andresillo. In my house nobody expects to see me back before four years at the earliest. So they will wait. It’s better that they should wait a year longer rather than that we should have to start over again. The devil! I’m certain that we’ll return home to stay and that we won’t have to live in perpetual fear that one day they’ll compel us to leave again.”
“That’s it, Celso. That’s what we’ll do. Land and liberty—or death!”