thirty
a pack of generals
The Division of the North’s trains headed north carrying their wounded to Parral, Chihuahua, and Ciudad Juárez. Two thousand five hundred of these had been cared for, or were being cared for, in hospitals in cities throughout Chihuahua. Torreón turned out to be the most gruesome and bloodiest battle in this second Mexican Revolution, which was hardly a year old.
Those same trains returned from Juárez with provisions. In Torreón, Villa—with the aid of the small infrastructure that had been created over these months—tried to govern the territory. He informed Fidel Ávila that the remaining hacendados (whom he referred to derisively as “los Científicos”) were trying to sell cattle from the Santa Clara hacienda to the gringos and he was trying to stop them. That he had responded to offers from Sommerfeld (it was possible to purchase cannons) and to Lázaro de la Garza about “rifles that came from Germany.” However, selling La Laguna’s cotton in order to buy weapons, as well as replenish munitions stocks, was the key.
Hipólito was reported in Marfa for selling goods stolen by Villa in Torreón, forcing him to cross the river and return to Ojinaga. Shortly thereafter, he traveled to New York and set himself up in the Astoria Hotel with a large checking account of the Guaranty Trust to purchase munitions direct from the manufacturers. The Madero brothers received one hundred thousand dollars. Félix A. Sommerfeld signed contracts to provide munitions in three weeks’ time in exchange for five checks for a total of $180,000.
Soldaderas (women soldiers also known as Adelitas) were so important that leaders among the Zapatistas included coronelas (female colonels) in their lists of troops with the coronels (their male counterparts). When the Secretary of War, Ángel García Peña tried to keep soldaderas from fighting, federal leaders warned of revolts among the troops, ca. 1914.
After the battle, Eugenio Aguirre Benavides, now in command of the city’s plaza, created the Comisión de Agricultura de La Laguna which took charge of haciendas expropriated from Porfiristas and Huertistas, in many cases properties that had been abandoned by their owners or had fallen inactive. Following custom and the current reality, sharecroppers continued working them. The main blow was directed against the Luján family, kin to the assistant Secretary of the Treasury under Huerta, from whom 15,000 hectares of irrigated land spread over seventeen ranches were confiscated. One of them was ceded to Roque González Garza to manage in exchange for 30 percent of what he earned being payable to the commission. The decree was significant and applied to around fifty haciendas, some of which were granted to tenant farmers. On August 14, the La Concha hacienda was transferred to Lázaro de la Garza who ran it for three months. They tried a little bit of everything to generate income: grants to landless campesinos, taxes from large ranchers, contracts with sharecroppers, and land transfers to Villista officers (as was the case with the San Juan de Casta hacienda which was ceded to the brothers Máximo and Benito García who operated it to pay their brigade’s expenses). In other cases, such as Rafael Arozamena’s Santa Teresa hacienda, the owners were permitted to keep their property in exchange for paying a tax in gold from cotton sales carried out through foreign consulates in El Paso. It seems that this was not the only such example. The entire scheme was aimed at keeping the land productive, redressing the most obvious social grievances, and financing the Division of the North.
At this point, the Division of the North was in need of restructuring. Villa named Eugenio Aguirre Benavides military commander of Torreón and picked Raúl Madero to take charge of his old Zaragoza brigade. He formed two new brigades comprised of recent volunteers who presented themselves at the barracks: one led by Pedro Bracamonte, which adopted his surname, and the Guerrero brigade, led by Agustín Estrada, one of the Maderistas from Ciudad Guerrero that had made the revolution alongside Orozco.
Now it was time to evaluate the military situation. Should he rest the Division of the North after the sanguinary and exhausting Battle of Torreón? Or, on the contrary, was it time to finish off the Federales?
The Huertista army had been concentrating its troops in San Pedro de las Colonias around a nucleus augmented by reinforcements arriving from Saltillo and Mexico City, the same, in fact, that Toribio de los Santos and, later, Toribio Ortega had blocked and prevented from getting to Torreón. By April 5, it was a significant force. Gen. Maure had 1,700 men and 4 cannons under his command, Gen. García Hidalgo had 1,700 with 2 cannons, Gen. Maas had 1,300 men with 4 cannons, Gen. Romero had 500 men, along with an additional 800 soldiers serving under a diverse collection of junior officers and irregular Colorado commanders. All in all, the force added up to 6,000 men and too many generals, each of whom led their own column, meaning they lacked a unified command.
There were also the escapees from Torreón led by Velasco, who recomposed his force in Viesca. Thus, Villa was threatened by two federal armies that could reunite at any moment, one in San Pedro some fifty-five kilometers to the northeast of Torreón and the other in Viesca a little more than sixty kilometers to the southeast. Villa never hesitated.
The very day they captured Torreón, the vanguard of the Robles brigade departed by train in the direction of San Pedro. Villa quickly followed up by mobilizing a series of units commanded by Urbina (who was granted supreme operational authority), including elements from Contreras, José Rodríguez, and Rosalío Hernández’s brigades.
Just as John Reed had been surprised to see Villa fighting with a mule, Dr. Encarnación Brondo was taken aback to find Maclovio Herrera fighting with two horses while trying to reload them onto the trains. Villista generals working as ranch hands were creating a brand-new tradition.
Urbina’s troops were the first to make contact on April 8. The Federales had dug in in the town of San Pedro, taking cover behind bales of cotton and barricades built from logs and even furniture. When the Villistas came within 500 yards, the entrenched troops opened fire. The revolutionaries fell back, finding protection around corners and behind ruts in the ground. Rafael F. Muñoz painted a picture of the men from the Durango brigades: “They were accustomed to extreme temperatures and the dust; without any signs of fatigue or impatience, they remained immobile for hours hidden among the rocks and hills with their carbines resting on their thighs and taking small sips of the warm water they brought from the river. Meanwhile, the white dust falling all around, mixed with their sweat, formed thick, muddy masks on their skin.”
Gen. Velasco, then in Viesca, realized that his own survival depended on uniting the two federal columns. He sent Benjamín Argumedo with 600 riders to meet with the generals in San Pedro to explain that in order to meet up he was going to need munitions. On April 7, Argumedo attempted to move thirty boxcars of bullets towards Viesca, but Urbina’s troops discovered his movements and attacked, obliging him to return to San Pedro after heavy losses.
Argumedo tried again the following day, April 8, this time with artillery support. The Federales mounted a diversionary maneuver so the convoy could head out for Viesca. The operation worked well, although, again, they suffered heavy casualties, and a half-million cartridges made it through to Gen. Velasco.
The following morning, Villa arrived in the San Pedro area with the rest of his artillery. Less than a week had passed since the fighting in Torreón. He was accompanied by Ángeles and Candelario Cervantes (who had been shot in the arm in Torreón, although the bullet did not hit his bone) at the head of the Dorados. Villa, Ángeles, and Urbina reviewed the lines and decided that it was necessary to resolve the situation quickly. No siege this time, they would launch a frontal assault.
At four o’clock in the morning on April 10, Good Friday, Villa commenced the attack from west and north of the town. The assault developed chiefly in the area around the cemetery defended by García Hidalgo, however, it was moving slowly. Rafael Muñoz spoke of there being “little enthusiasm” among the attackers. The wing fighting near the cemetery went many hours without water. At this point, which must have been around six or seven in the evening, Gen. Velasco approached San Pedro from Viesca under the cover of a protective screen provided by Almazán and Argumedo’s cavalry. Faced with the Federale reinforcements, Villa ordered a withdrawal as they were putting the artillery and his right wing in danger.
The Federale forces now numbered close to 12,000 men with twenty-two generals, including what remained of three divisions (one of them still in training): the Division of El Nazas, the Division of the North, and the Division of El Bravo. This was Victoriano Huerta’s prideful army. The first battle lasted fourteen hours, from four o’clock in the morning to six in the evening.
Ángeles’s artillery raked the enemy lines and bombarded them with great precision until it ran out of shells.
Juan Andreu Almazán believed that the Villistas would be exhausted after Torreón and, thus, did not create a defensive perimeter around San Pedro. The Federales defended the town poorly and, worse still, failed to launch a counterattack. The troops arriving in San Pedro were all crammed together in the vicinity of the train station.
Pancho Villa (in Martín Luis Guzmán’s words) declared, “it was a military decision not to block Velasco from meeting up with the rest of the enemy troops [. . .] there is no law of war that says that two armies together are worth more than two separate ones.” However, his statement may have been more a justification than a reality; at any rate, he couldn’t prevent the two Federale armies from making contact and he now had a harder bone to crack.
The positions the Villistas had won in the morning were lost during the night when they were pushed out of the area around the cemetery. The entire plaza was a graveyard and houses were burning all around. Federale soldiers had set the fires under orders from Gen. Maas because, according to what he told Gen. Velasco, the “population is very revolutionary.”
Villa set up his headquarters in Concordia, a small town situated twelve kilometers up the rail line to the west of San Pedro. From there, he called for the reserve troops left in Torreón, bringing the total of his troops to 14,000 when they were all assembled.
Juan Andreu Almazán considered whether what had seemed like a victory, the unification of the two federal armies, might turn out to be a disaster. “That was not an army, it was a mass composed of listless and hopeless men.” All the generals were giving orders to Benjamín Argumedo and Almazán himself because “we were the mounted guards who might allow them to save themselves.”
The calm held on April 13 during the day; however, at three o’clock in the morning, the Villistas launched a nighttime attack of the kind that had served them so well along the entirety of the defensive perimeter, once again using dynamite bombs. The attack took the defenders by surprise. At certain points, the Federales scattered, and the officers shot at their own troops to try to keep them in line. The axis of the new assault ran from the area around the cemetery where the remnants of the Division of El Nazas was located. Unable to prevent the disordered flight of his troops, Col. Pedro Villalobos committed suicide.
During the fighting Villa moved very close to the front lines. At one point, Villa’s adjutant, Rafael Castro, dismounted his horse to retrieve the general’s fallen hat. A volley of enemy fire exploded around Villa and his guard and a bullet grazed Castro’s temple, who collapsed. Two members of the guard, Jaurrieta and José Fernández, picked him up and helped him get back on his horse, however, Fernández was wounded in the leg and Jaurrieta’s horse was killed out from under him just then. Villa could hear bullets whistle past.
Around ten o’clock in the morning, the Federales controlled only the town center. Gen. Velasco was injured in the arm and handed over command to Gen. Maas just as their front was collapsing around the cemetery. The first orders to evacuate the town were issued, but they were not immediately carried out. Around three o’clock in the afternoon, two cavalry charges by Argumedo and Almazán failed and there were reports that some of Argumedo’s soldiers were drunk. On the Villista side, an order was transmitted all along the front: “Intensify the attack because the Federales are bending.” In fact, they were beginning their evacuation towards Saltillo. Col. Mateos stayed behind to provide cover. The revolutionaries advanced to the town center illuminated by burning buildings while enemy cavalry charges were contained and rebuffed. During the night, the Federales made a disorderly retreat, managing to get a train out of the town with Gen. Velasco aboard.
On April 14, the Villistas entered the town amidst the flames. The fighting had ended. Villa decided not to pursue the fleeing Federales because the Division of the North was badly burnt out, worn down by the long Battle of Torreón, the subsequent marches, and four days of clashes in San Pedro.
Villa’s report to Carranza was laconic. He recounted having defeated the 12,000 Federales concentrated in San Pedro and noted that, in retreat, they had attempted to burn the town. He stated that he recovered 12 enemy cannons and reported that the Division of the North had suffered 650 casualties—among them was Martín López who had been discharged from the hospital in Chihuahua hardly a week before and now would return for another twenty-two days—while the Federales had suffered 3,500 casualties between those “dead, wounded, prisoners, and dispersed.” Gen. Hidalgo’s report stated that he arrived in Saltillo with 500 men out of the 1,700 original. If Villa was understated, Ángeles’s report to Carranza was not. If it had not been for the universal excitement created by the fall of Torreón, he wrote, the Battle of San Pedro de las Colonias would have been considered more important than was generally understood: “All of Huerta’s trusted generals were in San Pedro and, judging by the telegrams received by headquarters, [. . .] that’s what his government’s support boiled down to.” A few days later in Torreón, Villa would comment to Felipe Ángeles, “To win this battle I had to bring down a pack of twenty-two generals.”
Both Villa and Ángeles requested that Carranza mobilize Pablo González, in command of the Division of the Northeast, to finish off the retreating Federales. And, once again, Pablo González stayed put.
One witness recounted Villa meeting with the town’s wealthy residents in the San Pedro train station, “dressed in a dull, khaki suit with an unbuttoned collar, totally unkempt [. . .] his eyes were incomparably bright.” He tried to convince them to sell their goods and food at cost. The people had gone ten days without eating and Federales had not let them leave their houses. “Do it for charity, if not for patriotism.” He offered to let them bring goods in from Juárez free from customs fees. “As long as things are like this, don’t capitalize on them; be content with earning something and helping the people.”