twenty-eight
torreón
The Prologue
Soon enough a new song swept the rebellious territories of Mexico called “La Cucaracha.” Victoriano Huerta himself inspired the ballad as to some he appeared to resemble a cockroach (La Cucaracha) in official photographs when he wore his dress coat with tails, while his reputation for heavy drinking and marijuana use were hard to forget.
La cucaracha, la cucaracha,
ya no puede caminar,
porque no tiene, porque le falta,
marijuana pa’ quemar.
Pobrecito de Madero,
casi todos la han fallado,
Huerta el ebrio bandolero,
es un buey para el arado.
he can’t walk or stand upright,
because he has no, because he’s missing,
marijuana to set alight.
Poor forsaken Señor Madero,
almost everybody’s gone by now,
General Huerta the drunken bandit,
is just a donkey for the plow.
This version—which had been popular for months among Pablo González’s troops—was composed by Rafael Sánchez Escobar based on his recollections of childhood tunes while playing piano in a brothel.
It’s possible that the Division’s military band might have played this song along with many others (no doubt including the obligatory “Las Tres Pelonas”) when, on Sunday, March 15 at four o’clock in the afternoon, a train arrived in Chihuahua, by way of Ciudad Juárez, transporting a character for whom full military honors and a cavalry honor guard lay in wait, as well as greetings from Chihuahuan Governor Manuel Chao and General Pancho Villa, of the Division of the North. Gen. Felipe Ángeles disembarked the train, sparking the following dialogue:
“My general, I come to place myself at your orders,” began Ángeles.
“No, my general, I am the one ready for yours,” replied Pancho Villa.
Like two well-mannered gentlemen, they embraced.
What explained Villa’s deference? Pancho, as we well know, respected very few people on the face of the planet. Yet, one day prior, Villa had sent two telegrams to Lázaro de la Garza telling him to treat Felipe Ángeles as if he were his own representative when arrived in Ciudad Juárez.
Perhaps we can find the answer in this gaunt, elegant forty-five-year-old man’s biography. Felipe de Jesús Ángeles was born in a village in the state of Hidalgo, the son of a former military officer turned wealthy farmer. At the age of thirteen, he entered Mexico’s Colegio Militar, where he graduated as an engineering lieutenant. He rose up the army’s ranks, due more to time served than to merit, before returning to the Colegio as an instructor where he taught ballistics, mathematics, and artillery. At the beginning of the century, he traveled to France to study the manufacture of Schneider-Canet 75mm cannons which Porfirio Díaz had purchased and, in 1902, returned to study the Saint-Chamond-Mondragón 75mm gun. By then a lieutenant colonel, he traveled to the United States to learn about smokeless gunpowder. When the revolution erupted, he held the rank of colonel. More a professor than a fighter, he did not participate in the repression of the 1910 uprising. Madero named him director of the Colegio Militar. However, surprisingly, on August 3, 1911, he then sent him to put down the Zapatista rebellion in Morelos with 4,000 soldiers. He returned to Mexico City in time to resist the military coup. He was detained on February 18, 1912, along with Madero and Pino Suárez in the National Palace and it looked like he might be killed, but he was spared owing to his rank: “dogs don’t eat dogs,” as Huerta put it. Nonetheless, he was considered “suspect” by the new order. He was removed from his leadership positions at the Colegio and was sent to Belgium to serve as a military adjunct. Before he left, he was once again arrested and incarcerated in Santiago Tlatelolco, accused of having ordered the execution of a minor during the fighting at La Ciudadela. Furthermore, the French delegation filed charges against him relating to the shooting of a French subject, although the charges were not substantiated at trial.
Broadside with song lyrics, illustrated by Posadas. During the Mexican Revolution the “Cucaracha“ was synonymous with “camp follower” and referred to women who would follow their male partners to the war camps. The song explains the hardships of camp life: no starch, no ironed clothes, no money, no soap. In the city, la cucaracha does not do well either; she no longer has money to go out to the bullring. Ca. 1913.
Be that as it may, Huerta kept him in prison until he negotiated a furtive exile in France with a commission to pursue his artillery studies. He was finally set free on July 31. At some point, he must have made contact with Carranza in France via Juan Sánchez Azcona. Ángeles then decided to place himself at the service of the revolution and landed in Sonora on October 16, 1913. Madero named him Minister of War and the Navy, but the appointment did not please Obregón and many other revolutionary generals, leading Carranza to retract the post, converting Ángeles into a vice minister.
So, this was the character standing before Villa. What in this brief biography might have attracted him? As noted, he was more a professor than a soldier, more an observer than a man of action. Usually, when a general joined the Division of the North he brought along his own brigade. Ángeles brought only four young, ex-Federale officers who had studied under him in the Colegio Militar and who had deserted Huerta’s government. Capt. José González was an artillery officer, nicknamed Gonzalitos based on his diminutive stature, who hailed from Hauchinango and had assisted Ángeles in the Morelos campaign. The others included Gustavo Bazán, Alberto Ángeles (Felipe’s nephew), and Federico Cervantes, who was immediately placed in charge of fabricating bombs for the Villista aircraft. Earlier that day, Villa had telegraphed Lázaro de la Garza, who was then trying to secure a second plane, telling him he needed it “in twenty-four hours or never.” Capt. Cervantes, who later became one of Villa and Ángeles’ biographers, left us his first impression of Villa: “He was a man who commanded respect.”
The manner by which Ángeles came to be attached to the Division of the North is very confusing. He had repeatedly requested that Carranza give him a combat commission, something that Carranza had denied to avoid a confrontation with the Sonoran revolutionaries who did not look favorably on this career official, no matter his Maderista credentials. Ángeles must have felt asphyxiated in the atmosphere of petty intrigue in Hermosillo. He had not come all the way from Europe to passively observe the revolution. It seems that his appointment to the Division of the North originated with a congratulatory telegram Ángeles sent Villa after the victory at Ojinaga in which he likely suggested that he was interested in joining him. Villa, in response, telegraphed Carranza (who was then traveling with Ángeles on their way to Chihuahua) asking him to grant Ángeles a commission in the Division of the North to take charge of the artillery in the next phase of the war. This seemed to Carranza like a convenient way to free himself from the general. They parted ways in Agua Prieta. Carranza continued his trip, crossing the mountains in order to avoid traversing US territory, following the tradition established by Benito Juárez in the war against the empire of not taking a single step outside of Mexican territory. Ángeles, meanwhile, continued his journey by train to El Paso and then Ciudad Juárez and Chihuahua where he was received with a banquet.
What did Villa see in this man? No doubt, he had remained loyal to Madero until the final moment—a fact that Villa (among many other things) appreciated. But more than anything, Villa knew he was an artilleryman. And Villa needed to get the cannons his troops had seized from Huerta’s army over the previous months into working order. He needed them to be as effective as they had been against him. It was said that Felipe Ángeles was the best artillery officer in Mexico. Was it true?
Shortly before the Division of the North’s departure from Chihuahua, Aitken—Mutual’s representative—traveled to New York where he was interviewed by the press, stating that in his hands he had a contract to film “The Life of General Francisco Villa,” which would be directed by none other than D. W. Griffith—in the end, Christy Cabanne directed it—with Raoul Walsh playing the role of Villa. Villa charged $500 in gold each month for the rights to film “his battles and executions.” Aitken added, “He is a serious man who conducts his army’s business in a systematic and orderly manner.”
Villa placed a railway car, especially adapted by the Division’s carpenters, at the filmmakers’ disposition, which was also used by various US photographers and journalists including John Reed, John Williams Roberts of the El Paso Times, Timothy Turner (the author of Botellas, Balas, y Gardenias) who worked for the Associated Press, and a Chinese cook named Foing. The car boasted a restroom, a long wooden table, an old Remington, and even a darkroom for developing photographs. But the only film crews permitted were Mutual’s. The Sun commented that Carranza was annoyed because his own camera crews were unceremoniously rejected in Villista territory based on Mutual’s exclusivity clause.
While he was negotiating with Hollywood, Villa asked Woodrow Wilson to free the US labor activist Mother Jones. Katz referred to the letter from March 1914 printed in Appeal to Reason, suggesting that Wilson’s petitions for Villa to release Terrazas could have been an opening for an exchange based on “humanitarian considerations,” if Wilson would, in turn, release the eighty-year-old woman. It’s not clear if John Reed had anything to do with this or if Villa was merely responding to a request that the American revolutionary had directed to his “friend, Gen. Francisco Villa.”
On the eve of the operation, John Reed, who had closely followed the army’s preparations, wrote: “Villa’s men had rapidly secured uniforms, training, and pay, and had been disciplined. He is going to fight with cannons, officers, telegraphs, and a typewriter. The Division of the North is becoming respectable, professional. It doesn’t stand out and it’s not authentically Mexican.” Villa would have lynched him if he’d read it. Had the Division of the North really changed so much in the two months after its triumph in Ojinaga, or had John Reed succumbed to an attack of Folclorismo? There was nothing new in the bit about a typewriter, in fact, since the Maderista insurrection, the revolutionary detachments always appointed a secretary to their ranks who packed a typewriter on his horse. Telegraphs had been part of the Villista war since the beginning and officers were born along with the 1910 revolution. After all, the only means by which the revolutionary bands could be made effective was by establishing a powerful chain of command. Uniforms were necessary to avoid shooting compañeros in the night, and it was necessary to replace huaraches with boots to protect the soldiers’ feet. Finally, it was necessary to pay the men who had left their families behind so they could continue to support them. The pay rates were only moderately differentiated: a soldier earned $1.50 pesos per day, a corporal $1.75 pesos, a second sergeant 2 pesos, a lieutenant $3.50 pesos, a captain $5 pesos, a major $8 pesos, and colonels $10 pesos, a little more than the pilots. Villa’s artillery had been snatched in its entirety from the Huertistas in multiple battles and taking Torreón without it would be difficult to imagine. And that would be it for the insurrection. It’s true that over the course of a couple months in their barracks, the rebels had taught soldiers who didn’t know how to shoot to use a Mauser, and had insisted they recognize orders by bugle call, but not much else. It was a disciplined army, merciless when faced with desertion or weakness in combat, but as Reed himself put it, “When Villa’s army entered into combat, they didn’t worry about saluting their officers.”
Preparations were completed when the last 1,100 rifles from Sommerfeld in the United States crossed the border.
Eusebio Calzado, a friend of Madero’s, was the central figure controlling the Division of the North’s complex train movements. Villa had put him in charge of the complicated clockwork, replacing Rodolfo Fierro whom he had demoted for the umpteenth time for killing a railway worker while he was drunk in the Santo Niño neighborhood. Legal proceedings were initiated against Fierro who would be saved by later events. At the time, Villa was very angry with him. Reed drew up a picture of Villa:
A strapping and bulky Mexican with a big mustache, dressed in a dirty brown suit, an open, collarless shirt, was pushing and kicking mules along [. . .] at that moment I had left the splendid entrance hall to the Palace of Government where I had been for many hours, hat in hand, alongside many functionaries, capitalists, promoters, and generals, waiting in vain for [. . .] Pancho Villa. I watched the hulking man load mules onto the cattle cars. An immense hat rested on the back of his neck; a stream of curses streamed from his open mouth. He was covered in dust. Sweat ran down his face. Each time he attempted to lead a mule onto the gangway, it would resist.
“SOB! Move it! Sonofabitch!” bellowed the man as he forcefully kicked the mule in the stomach. The animal huffed and puffed and walked up the plank.
“Friend,” he shouted at a passing soldier, “give me a bit of water.”
The soldier handed over a canteen which the other man drained.
“Hey! You don’t need to drink all of it!” the soldier yelled at Pancho Villa.
One day after Ángeles’s arrival on March 16, the Division of the North departed for the south. It was an odd spectacle. The trains were torn to pieces, burnt around many of their edges, riddled with bullet holes. One of Aultman’s photographs depicts men packed tight, riding on the roofs of several wagons. On Villa’s trains, only the horses rode comfortably inside the cars, everyone else was on the roof, including young ones who hung hammocks between the wheels, taking their lives in their hands as they traveled, practically kissing the rails and the dust. There were kitchens on the wagon roofs with women baking tortillas in cooking oil cans with portable clay anafres (stoves). Another photo, this one from an anonymous source, shows a small camp store perched on the roof of a railway car with a clothesline with clothing, saddles, and a dozen skins twisting in the wind.
Chava Flores memorialized the event in a song,
Here comes the train,
Here comes the train,
amidst the smoke,
I can already make out Pancho Villa
And Manuel Maples Arce, one of the finest Mexican poets, left this for our collective memory,
[. . .] Military trains
heading for the four cardinal points
the baptism of blood
where everything is confusion
[. . .] resounding and martial trains
where we sang the revolution.
Yet, perhaps the best image was shared by the Villista soldier Félix Delgado: “The trains were leaving, leaving, leaving.”
John Reed recounted: “When Villa left Chihuahua for Torreón, he shut down the telegraph service to the north, cut the lines along the tracks to Ciudad Juárez, and prohibited, under pain of death, anyone from transmitting or bringing news of his departure to the United States. His objective was to surprise the Federales, and his plan worked. No one, not even his general staff, knew when Villa would leave Chihuahua [. . .] everyone believed he would delay two more weeks before leaving.”
Besides the troops and the medical train, there were twenty-nine cannons with 1,700 shells. At six o’clock in the morning, the train carrying Villa and his general staff started up. Accompanying Villa as his personal physician was Dr. Rauchsman, insisting that he give up eating red meat if he wanted to control his fits of rage. Villa took his advice seriously, although a diet without beef was a terrible sacrifice for him. And it turned out to be unbearable. Fortunately, in light of the fact that his temperament did not improve, he let his doctor’s culinary guidance slide after a short time.
At 3 a.m. on March 17, they arrived in Santa Rosalía de Camargo, just in time for Rosalío Hernández’s wedding, with Villa acting as the best man. Villa, the great dancer, spent the night doing the polka. Reed recorded the scene, perhaps exaggerating a little: “he danced continuously without a break, they said, for all of Monday night and all day and all night on Tuesday, arriving at the front on Wednesday with red eyes and an air of extreme listlessness.” The US press made light of the dancing: “Villa is an expert in the Argentine tango and the maxixe.”
On March 18, around nine o’clock in the morning, now joined by Rosalío Hernández’s Camargo Faithful, the army departed the train station amidst festive throngs and cheers from the crowd, scheduled to arrive at Jiménez at midday.
Villa came across two elderly people on the platform who were asking for him, kissing each on the forehead ceremoniously. These were Villa’s godparents—the chronicler didn’t leave us their names. Might the old man have been Pablo Valenzuela? Villa gave them a little money to help them out. All of the town’s poor gathered around him and Villa commissioned two majors from his brigade to share out food.
If the poor drew close to Villa, the bourgeoisie backed away. The English historian Alan Knight took note of how Villa’s advance towards La Laguna was marked by the flight of the oligarchy. In Piedras Negras, as the hotels filled up with bourgeois refugees, a British hacendado commented that wherever Pancho went “the members of the upper class (with whom I did business), have gone away.”
The first train rolled ahead very cautiously, serving as an exploratory train, with a repair train following behind. Then came the cars with the horse pens, the provisions wagons, the medical brigade’s white boxcars (forty wagons with operating tables and surgical instruments), platform cars mounted with both large and small canons, and passenger cars for the infantry and officers.
On March 18, they arrived in Escalón, a train station located on a dry, white plain. It was five o’clock in the afternoon. Maclovio Herrera’s brigade went ahead, and Orestes Pereira and José Isabel Robles departed Durango while other groups began to approach the assembly point, including Calixto Contreras and the Arrieta brothers’ brigades. Villa was putting on the field at Torreón the same Division of the North which had won its first victory, but this time they were seasoned, hardened, enlarged, and armed with artillery.
One day later, they concentrated their forces in Yermo. John Reed described the scene: “There was a broken-down water tank with a little bit of filthy, alkaline liquid; the train station was demolished, pulverized by Orozco’s cannons years before. There was no water or forage within sixty kilometers.” Villa ordered twelve enormous tank cars filled with water to be sent from Chihuahua.
They arrived at Estación Conejos at four o’clock in the afternoon on March 19. “Conejos was exactly the same as Yermo, except that there wasn’t even a water tank.” The American journalist found Pancho “leaning on the wall of a car, with his hands in his pockets. He was wearing an old hat bent downwards, a dirty shirt without a collar and a beat-up old dark suit, glistening with sweat. Men and horses appeared as if by magic before him on the flatlands.” At night, Villa toured the encampments and ate grilled beef with Col. Andrés U. Vargas’s troops. “Look, you brought a lot of people. You have to help them get warmed up, so they can get their courage up.”
Villa deployed Maclovio Herrera’s Juárez brigade (1,300 men), Eugenio Aguirre Benavides and Raúl Madero’s Zaragoza brigade (1,500 men), Toribio Ortega’s González Ortega brigade (1,200 men), Trinidad Rodríguez’s Cuauhtémoc brigade (400 men), Máximo García’s Madero brigade (400 men)—Máximo had taken his fallen brother’s place some months prior—Rosalío Hernández’s Camargo’s Faithful (600 men), José Rodríguez’s Villa brigade (1,500 men), Col. Miguel González’s Guadalupe Victoria (400 men, 550 according to some sources), and the fragments of Durango units under Col. Mestas (600 men), plus Villa’s guard, the aforementioned Dorados, which included the general staff itself (around 300 men). To this, we must add support personnel, artillery troops, and the medical staff. Altogether, Villa commanded more than 8,000 men, and they would soon be joined by Urbina, José Isabel Robles, and Contreras’s brigades as well.
The concentration of troops sounded the alarm. No wonder Reed wrote that “a thick cloud of dust five kilometers long and almost one kilometer wide mixed in with the black smoke from the locomotives.” They intercepted a message from Benjamín Argumedo by portable telegraph in which the Colorado commander, who was then in Mapimí, reported to Velasco in Torreón, informing him of the approaching cloud of dust.
Federale Gen. Velasco had placed his garrison along an external arc in an attempt to avoid Villa surrounding him as he had done during the first Battle of Torreón. He positioned troops in Bermejillo, forty kilometers to the north along the railroad tracks, sixty-one kilometers to the north in Mapimí, to the northeast in Tlahualilo, and in a second rung in Sacramento, protecting the tracks to Monterrey.
Villa organized everything. Reed described the scene: “He listened to the report from a high command officer who came racing up to him on horseback, he returned a concise order without vacillating and the officer departed. He gave instructions to Señor Calzada, manager of the railway, regarding an order to keep the trains running towards the south. He signaled to Señor Uro, quartermaster of the army, that provisions should be distributed by train along with the troops. To Señor Muñoz, director of the telegraph, he gave the name of a Federale officer” (who had been killed several days before by Urbina), and he ordered the lines be connected in order to pass along a false message to Velasco, stating that he was in Conejos awaiting orders. “He seemed to have a hand in everything.”
On March 20, Aguirre Benavides’s brigade left Conejos at five o’clock in the morning headed towards the southeast with the objective of taking Tlahualilo and beginning the encirclement of the cities around La Lagunas. The remaining troops advanced along the rail lines: the infantry onboard the train, the cavalry deployed.
Urbina received the order to seize Mapimí, moving unexpectedly from Las Nieves. Villa, speaking through Luis Guzmán, explained: “The forces of my compadre Urbina passed through Pelayo, through Hornillo, through La Cadena, and threw themselves on Mapimí. Then it came to pass that the enemy, seeing that we did not hesitate before their center and right, and understanding the danger posed to the Mapimí garrison, abandoned the town square in a great rush of fear.” At this very moment, Urbina was suffering through a terrible attack of rheumatism. Reed recalled that Urbina traveled with a typewriter, four sabers, a fifty-liter container of sotol to fend off his rheumatism, and an iron for branding cattle.
Shortly before taking Mapimí, a black pox outbreak that had devastated Morelos spread to Urbina’s brigade. Despite this, they seized the town on March 21. The north of Mexico suffered mightily from diseases produced by sanitary conditions and the war. There were smallpox, typhus, and yellow fever epidemics. One anonymous song asked, “Is it the end of the world? Are the last days coming?”
Toribio Ortega’s advanced guard made contact with the Federales, a detachment of Colorados commanded by Benjamín Argumedo, at the Peronal station. Upon seeing them, Ortega’s men attacked in a withering, arc-shaped cavalry charge. The Colorados fled. During the pursuit, a second encounter with 300 Rurales in Bermejillo took place, leaving 106 dead on the battlefield. The path was littered with the cadavers of men and horses. The Rurales retreated and were chased by Ortega’s men; in the end, only thirty of the original 300 survived.
Simultaneously, Tlahualilo fell into Eugenio Aguirre Benavides’s hands. Villa would say that “in a furious assault, and according to what I believe happened, with highly-skilled movements, he achieved his goal, inflicting nearly sixty deaths on the traitors while suffering no more than fourteen dead and wounded.”
The central body of the Division established itself in Bermejillo on March 21. Reed saw Villa in his railway car: “It was divided into two rooms by partitions, the kitchens and the general’s room [. . .] which measured three by seven, where fifteen generals from the Division of the North were meeting. It was painted dark gray.” There were portraits of Carranza, Fierro, and Villa on the wall as well as photos from several artists. One surprising element of Reed’s description was the northern revolution’s commanders’ austere living conditions: “There were two double-wide, wooden bunks, folded against the wall, Villa and Gen. Ángeles slept on one and José Rodríguez and Dr. Rauchsman, Villa’s personal physician, slept on the other.”
Keeping with his custom of speaking to the men with whom he was going to do battle—and probably following advice from Ángeles who thought that Velasco might listen to reason—Villa talked to Gen. Velasco by telephone from Bermejillo.
José Refugio Velasco was then sixty-three years old; as a young man he had fought against Maximiliano’s empire and had been promoted to general of the Division of Nazas after having rescued Torreón. Vasconcelos attributed the following phrase to him: “We are defending a traitor in Huerta, but on the other side, there are only bandits with Villa.” Cumberland painted a glowing picture of him, claiming that he had opposed the military coup but was “a disciplined man”—a phrase that makes the author of this book particularly nervous when it is used to justify a military coup—while suggesting that he was the only federal general capable of going on the offensive and that his victory in rescuing Torreón provided the only breather for Huerta during those months. The Division of Nazas, under his command, consisted of some 7,000 soldiers, nineteen cannons, and thirty-five machine guns and machine gun rifles.
Ángeles spoke first in an attempt to convince Velasco to surrender the city’s plaza. Velasco paid no attention to him and then Villa took the phone.
“Francisco Villa?” asked Velasco.
“At your service,” replied Villa.
“Well, we’ll see you there, get dinner ready for us.”
“If you don’t want to bother, we’ll come to you. I’ve covered so much ground already just to come and see you!” continued Villa. The conversation grew increasingly bitter, producing a verbal duel that Villa ended with, “You must be some kind of fool, the kind that is too worn out to fight.”
Velasco’s priority was to keep the lines of communication open with the east and he ordered Col. Juan Andreu Almazán to fortify Sacramento, located along the train tracks, and to assemble the scattered groups of defeated Federales. He would also be able to count on reinforcements from infantry detachments that were being gathered and sent by train from Hipólito.
Meanwhile in Bermejillo, Villa was worrying about the Division’s food supplies and talked it over with Roque González Garza. What cattle were on hand for the troops to eat? What about pasture for the horses? He telegraphed Chao in Chihuahua, who was operating as his rearguard, asking him to send more horses and more cattle. Owing to a slow response to his inquiries, Villa fired off a series of telegraphic reproaches. Eduardo Andalón had a strange perspective on the Battle of Torreón as he spent it “hauling cattle” to the front over and over again to feed everyone.
A court-martial was held in Bermejillo for a cigar maker who had informed on several Villistas who were then captured and tortured. He was sentenced to death and shot.
John Reed wrote, “Today in the countryside, when the army arrived to set up camp, Villa threw his horse’s reins to an assistant, draped his sarape over his shoulders and went off by himself looking for shelter in the hills. He never seems to sleep. When he returns in the morning, he comes from a different direction.” His secretary, Pérez Rul, confirmed Reed’s account: “Villa went to sleep in one place and woke up in a very different one.” Silvestre Terrazas corroborated Villa’s elaborate precautions: “Villa distrusted everyone. He ate where he was least expected, and he would grab his own tacos without letting anyone else touch them first.”
On March 21, Villa was thinking along the same lines as Velasco. The two contenders appeared to be synchronized. That morning, he ordered Aguirre Benavides to take Sacramento along the central rail line in order to isolate Torreón from Monterrey. It was necessary to cut the railroad off from potential reinforcements before moving against Gómez Palacio and Torreón. From Bermejillo, Villa had insisted that the Division of the Northeast’s commanders cut the route. He would later state, “Pablo González, who had promised for more than a month to not allow the Federales to pass, let eleven trains come through.”
The Colorado Juan Andreu Almazán took charge of the Sacramento garrison. He was hungover and worn out from the Federales’ last binges in Torreón where the officers had been partying in brothels and who knows what else. Shortly before the Villista attack, he positioned his cavalry and one hundred Rurales who had fled from Tlahualilo along with nearly 200 infantries. Later that afternoon, Col. Meraz arrived with some 600 additional infantries, who had been reassembled and had come by way of Hipólito, but they continued on towards Torreón. Contreras Torres, commenting on Almazán’s recollections, claimed that Gen. Velasco did not like the Colorado colonel, believing him to be a turncoat and that he was “untested.”
The fighting started at 5:45 p.m. when Almazán discerned through binoculars what they believed to be a dust cloud kicked up by some cattle, but it was the “Villistas coming at breakneck speed.” Almazán asked to be put in touch with Col. Meraz’s train, demanding that his troops return. Meanwhile, he organized his dragoons, a well-armed veteran unit mounted on good horses, preparing them to flank the charging attackers once they clashed with the defenders along a cliff, but the Villista wave outflanked them first and wiped them out.
They fought hand-to-hand. Almazán recognized Raúl Madero and ordered one of his machine gunners to fire on him. The officer replied that doing so ran the risk of hitting his own troops to which Almazán replied, “Oh well, take your pick.” The Federales retreated to the hacienda’s main complex, fortifying themselves in the buildings, on the rooftops, behind bales of cotton, and the hacienda’s corrals.
The first clash turned out favorably for the defenders. The Federales halted Aguirre’s brigade and Trinidad Rodríguez’s troops, who were just barely able to seize the church. These units supposedly had carried several pieces of artillery with them, but they had been damaged along the way and many of the dynamite bombs they brought turned out not to work. Aguirre did not request reinforcements, but Villa, upon receiving the first report, ordered Rosalío and Camargo’s Faithful to set off.
The fighting continued during the night. Curiously, the Villistas had not cut the telephone wires and Almazán spoke to Velasco, who said he was going to shoot Col. Meraz and ordered Almazán to hold his position. Almazán believed that “the attackers will obstruct one another because there are so many of them.” At dawn, despite Camargo’s Faithful arriving, the Villista attack had stalled.
Villa had to decide whether or not to initiate his assault on the three Lagunas cities or to wait for the outcome of the terrible battle underway in Sacramento. Aguirre Benavides and Madero assured him that Sacramento would be taken within a few hours. Villa then decided to begin the advance on Gómez Palacio. On March 22, the first trains arrived from El Vergel and, behind a line of engines and wagons stretching several kilometers, flanked by the cavalry. It was thirty-nine kilometers from Gómez Palacio. Reed described how the first car on the repair train, which traveled with the vanguard, was an iron-armored platform car upon which the smaller cannon, el Niño, had been mounted “with an open case just behind it filled with shells. An armored car filled with soldiers was next in line, followed by a car carrying steel rails, and then four more filled with railroad ties. The locomotive came next with the engineer and boilerman, their rifles at the ready and cartridges hanging from their chests. Two or three box cars followed, filled with soldiers and their women [. . .]. Up front, laying face-down on the other end of the platform, there were two men with lanterns examining every meter of tracks, looking for wires indicating mines that might blow them up.”
The hospital train brought the wounded from Sacramento, among them Trinidad Rodríguez, with two bullet wounds in the thorax, whose brigade had suffered heavy losses. Isaac Arroyo had also been injured. A little while later, Col. Máximo García arrived in serious condition with a bullet wound in his stomach.
In El Vergel, Villa convened his troops and ordered them to search wagon by wagon, along the endless column of trains then arriving, to mobilize all support personnel performing other tasks: horse wranglers, telegraph operators, railway workers, lookouts, cooks, and track repairmen. He also told them to round up any soldiers who had dropped out of sight. Their efforts produced 1,500 men. Villa let loose with one of his brilliant speeches. Staying behind meant betrayal, those who took a step forward could go and join the fight, those that did not, he promised would not come face-to-face with the enemy because he would shoot them right then and there. Three battalions were formed from the involuntary volunteers, two of which advanced towards the front led by two young men who would play a role in the future of our story, Col. Mateo Almazán, and Lt. Col. Santiago Ramírez (a railway worker who had joined Villa in San Andrés). The third was led by José San Román, who remained in Bermejillo in reserve.
The approach to Gómez Palacio created a five-kilometer-wide arc. At six o’clock in the afternoon, the attackers came into view. From Santa Clara on, the rail lines had been destroyed by the Federales. Reed commented, “We were only twelve kilometers from Gómez Palacio [. . .] it was incredible that they allowed us to get so close without offering any resistance.” In Santa Clara, Villa met with a group of campesinos and asked them if they had seen the bandit Pancho Villa pass by. “God would not allow it,” said one.
Urbina arrived with the remnants of his brigade from Mapimí. He was limping due to rheumatic fever “and leaned upon two soldiers. He held a rifle in his hand (an old, discarded Springfield, with the sights filed down) and wore a double cartridge-belt around his waist.”
Meanwhile, in Sacramento, Almazán was waiting for his reinforcements to arrive by train from Torreón, but Velasco appeared to prefer consolidating his defenses in place of exposing more troops to what had begun as a secondary battle. The desertion of a company of scouts decided the fighting. Led by their captain, Alfonso Durón, who had been a student of Felipe Ángeles, the Federale soldiers switched sides. Félix Delgado recalled how they started joining in shouts of ¡Viva Villa! The scouts then raised a white flag and threw down their guns.
Almazán withdrew towards Torreón while Madero and Aguirre Benavides entered the ranch. Sacramento was finished. During his retreat, Almazán came across an exploratory cavalry party from Federale Gen. Reina’s forces. He had salvaged just 200 men, of whom only sixty were uninjured.
Nothing remained of the garrison in front of the Villistas, nor on its flanks.
