The Training Ground Read online

The guns of La Tenería went inexplicably quiet at that very moment. When the Third Division commander General Quitman was slow to issue fresh orders, redheaded Lieutenant Colonel Alexander McClung of Mississippi’s Company K took matters into his own hands. With a cry of “Charge!” McClung impulsively rushed to the fort, waving his saber. Davis and the First Mississippi rose as one and sprinted behind him, heedless of the fact that their rifles lacked the bayonets necessary for the close-quarters fighting that surely awaited those lucky enough to make it over the walls.

  Quitman hastily ordered the First Tennessee — whose muskets did possess bayonets — to do the same. Letting loose with a piercing battle cry of their own, they sprinted straight at La Tenería. The fort’s guns opened fire, barking musket balls and grape at the frenzied Americans. In seconds the landscape was splattered with blood, bones, and brains, and so many of the First Tennessee died that forever after they were known as the Bloody First. McClung clambered up the fort’s rampart and waved his sword to encourage the troops. Davis was close behind. Spying a nearby sally port (a small opening through which the defenders could enter and exit unobtrusively), Davis burst into La Tenería. He was the second man into the fort — but far from the last. American volunteers surged over walls and squeezed through openings, anything to find a way into La Tenería. McClung was felled by a musket ball that tore through his left hand, entered his torso at the hip, and exited at his spine. He would live, though only after being wrapped in a blanket and hidden in a culvert until the battle for La Tenería was through.

  Which it soon was. Thanks, in part, to Davis’s bravery and gallant leadership, the Americans soon controlled the fortress.

  It was noon. The commander of the Mississippi Rifles had officially made a name for himself — but his wartime heroics were far from over.

  FARTHER TO THE right, Colonel Garland and an injured Major Mansfield were leading a frantic retreat from the outskirts of Monterrey. Those city streets had initially been a sanctuary after the nonstop hail of bullets during their long charge across the plain. The soldiers’ chests had heaved from the dash, sweat flecking their foreheads and darkening the blue armpits of their tunics — yet they had felt deeply elated to still be alive. The euphoria soon wore off. The Americans were new to street fighting and quickly made the fatal mistake of maintaining column formation — that is, marching rank and file in straight, orderly lines — as they crept through the unfamiliar lanes. But the wide-open dirt streets offered no cover. The Mexicans fired down on Garland’s troops from rooftops and secret gun emplacements, popped up suddenly from behind low stone walls, blasted point-blank rounds of grape from perfectly camouflaged cannons, and blocked many of the streets with heaps of wood and dry brush to better contain the Americans.

  Once it became clear that Garland and Mansfield would be unable to navigate the streets without additional firepower, Lieutenant Braxton Bragg and his mobile artillery were summoned to break the bottleneck. Yet Bragg’s usually nimble six-pounders presented problems all their own. Their small shells proved laughably ineffective, literally bouncing off the four-foot-thick stone walls protecting the Mexican gunners. Making matters worse, Mexican cannons quickly cut down ten of Bragg’s artillerymen and a dozen horses.

  In tragically comic fashion, when the order to retreat — “retire in good order” — was called, the city streets proved too narrow for Bragg’s cannons to be turned around while harnessed to a horse. Garland’s embattled infantry had to save the day by manually lifting and pivoting each gun — no small feat, considering that a single cannon weighed 880 pounds.

  Mansfield had been shot through the calf, but with a white handkerchief wrapped around the bloody bullet entry, he led the way out of town. Infantry soldiers ran close behind, and Bragg’s horse-drawn cannons trailed in their wake, taking “the streets by which we had entered — there was no difficulty in finding our route, for it was painfully marked,” said one officer, since almost half of Garland’s men lay dead or dying along Monterrey’s suddenly terrifying streets.

  THE AMERICAN ARMY was having far more success atop La Federación. The hill featured two prominent fortified heights, and these had to be taken one at a time. The first one was captured early in the afternoon, just as Garland’s men were blundering through Monterrey. “When we were at the top of the hill, we saw right before us and a little lower than we their second height. There was a stone fort on it, and the top of the hill was covered with large tents,” Dana wrote, remembering the triumph. “We were flushed with victory. A tremendous shouting and yelling was raised and all cried out, ‘Forward!’ The sight was too tempting and we must have the second hill before sunset.”

  The Americans took fire from a Mexican nine-pounder as they swarmed the small redoubt. “We routed them from their fort. They fled like good fellows, scarcely stopping to look behind once,” wrote Dana. “We placed our colors on the hills and cheered like real Americans.”

  Cannon fire from the Bishop’s Palace atop La Independencia ended the celebration. Shells landed uncomfortably close to the American troops, kicking up dirt and spraying splinters of rock. As if Worth’s men needed another reminder, it was clear that capturing La Federación was tactically meaningless if the Americans did not also claim its sister hilltop of La Independencia. As long as the Mexicans held that bit of high ground, the American advance would be in jeopardy.

  AS C. F. SMITH’S MEN were capturing La Federación, Grant and the Fourth crept into Monterrey, hoping to capture Fort Diablo, a small fortification five hundred yards southwest of La Tenería, defended by more than a hundred Mexican soldiers under the command of Colonel Ignacio Joaquín del Arenal. El Fortín del Rincón del Diablo rested on a long ridge above the Río Santa Catarina, anchoring the left side of the Mexican lines. Capturing El Diablo would give American forces tentative control of Monterrey’s perimeter.

  Once inside the city, the Americans were again driven back by point-blank canister rounds. Comrades were blasted into red and left sprawled, dead and maimed, on the streets. The brigade was horrified. “The slaughter here was terrific; ten of our gallant officers fell to rise no more, and some ten others were wounded, some beyond the hope of recovery. The two regiments constituting the brigade were literally cut to pieces,” one officer wrote. Taylor ordered that all American forces retreat from the city. The dead and wounded were left behind.

  The only American toehold inside Monterrey was La Tenería. Davis’s Mississippi Rifles remained there with Bloody First Tennessee, awaiting further orders. Captain Randolph Ridgely, Taylor’s top artillery specialist, had made his way to them and was repositioning the captured Mexican cannons. They would be aimed no longer toward the American lines but into the city itself, at the Mexican army.

  When the First Mississippi and First Tennessee were finally relieved and allowed to march back across the plain to the siege guns, a weary but elated Davis was content to travel at the rear of the column, with the wounded and the feeble. As they trudged through a cornfield lined with chaparral, Mexican lancers leaped their horses over the thorny berm and “commenced slaughtering stragglers and wounded men,” in the words of one witness. A voice soon cried out above the chaos — it was Davis, forming his men into a line and shouting for them to take careful aim. His quick action drove away the lancers and saved countless American lives.

  Later that night, Grant ventured alone back out onto the battlefield to search for his friends among the dead. Taylor’s army had suffered 394 wounded and killed that day, a figure that equaled more than one-tenth of the men who saw battle — and almost twice as many casualties as Ampudia. Grant’s dear pal Robert Hazlitt had been among the killed. As he searched for the body, a wounded soldier cried out to him. Grant tended to the man with water from his canteen, gently washing grime from the soldier’s face with his handkerchief. Wooden ambulance wagons would be along in the morning to collect the soldiers of both sides. Should he make it through the night, that wounded man would be carefully lifted inside and carted b
ack over painfully bumpy ground to a primitive field hospital. Grant offered what comfort and hope he could, knowing that the man faced a long, cold night out in the open.

  Taylor’s army had been just half the size of the Mexican force at the start of the day. To lose so many men, in such a short time, was appalling. Even Grant, who idolized Taylor in so many ways, labeled the battle plan of September 21 “ill-conceived.” As he walked back to Walnut Springs, he was overcome by an unexpected sense of loss. And he knew, like the rest of his fellow soldiers, that more death was to come.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Monterrey, Day Two

  SEPTEMBER 22, 1846

  A few short hours after Grant returned to his tent, American prospects took a sudden turn for the better. At three in the morning, Worth ordered the five hundred regular soldiers and Texans camped at the base of La Independencia to quietly begin making their way up the eight-hundred-foot-high hill. Worth’s men faced the demanding chore of capturing two separate fortresses. First they would attack a small redoubt known as Fort Libertad; the second target would be the Bishop’s Palace, also known as the Obispado.

  Longstreet was among them. The night was cold and wet, with a howling wind making conditions nearly unbearable. For three long hours the clandestine force climbed in pitch-blackness and pelting rain. They uttered not a sound, lest the Mexican sentries hear them. The steep hill was covered with thick bushes and rocks. Just before sunrise, a heavy fog slipped in, further concealing the Americans. By the time the rising sun burned off the mist and gave them away, they were just a short sprint from the summit.

  Worth’s men were crouched fifty yards from Fort Libertad when the sentries first spied them. The Mexicans fired immediately. The Americans pressed carefully forward, holding their volley until they were closer to the fort rather than firing and being pinned down while reloading. Finally, the Americans loosed a salvo and then immediately followed it with a bayonet charge. In the ensuing hand-to-hand combat, Mexican troops either died fighting or turned and fled to the safety of the Bishop’s Palace, on a low rise 350 yards southeast.

  Made of thick squares of gray stone, with flying buttresses and lofty parapets, the castle was a daunting sight. Twice, the Americans attempted to charge the Bishop’s Palace, and twice the Americans were repelled. There seemed no way to penetrate the Mexican defenses.

  The solution turned out to be simple and yet ingenious. When it became clear that musket fire alone would not drive out the defenders, a twelve-pound howitzer was disassembled at the base of La Independencia and hand-carried up to the American position. The sum of the gun’s parts weighed 1,757 pounds, and not a single piece was designed to be manually transported up a steep hillside. But once the howitzer reached the top, those bulky pieces were reassembled into a cannon, and every single bit of firepower implied by that considerable heft was aimed squarely at the Bishop’s Palace. “Which piece, with great skill threw shrapnel shells [shells filled with musket balls] right into the palace and the open work in front,” wrote Meade.

  The besieged Mexicans could see just a few skirmishers — advance scouts — and that gun emplacement. The American force appeared small and easily beatable. Mexican cavalry and infantry soon ventured back out of the castle, eager to drive the Americans off their mountain. The Mexicans had no clue that three full regiments of American infantry rested behind an earthen brow near the twelve-pounder. Their job was to remain hidden so that the Mexicans would underestimate the size of the American force. This tactic, in part, was the brainchild of the West Point instructor Dennis Hart Mahan, America’s leading military theorist. Mahan advocated using pickets in front of a main column to draw out the enemy, whereupon the main column would charge and the pickets would fall back and join their ranks. Mahan could not possibly have imagined how that scenario would play out in the fog on the summit of La Independencia: instead of Mexican infantry pickets on foot, lancers on horseback charged out from the castle. The main column of Mexican troops was the infantry regiment right behind them. But while the strategies were somewhat alike, sharp differences soon made themselves clear.

  When the lancers had advanced halfway toward the American position, they were suddenly stunned to see twelve hundred U.S. soldiers rise from their hiding place in the rocks and rush toward them. “You never saw such a surprised set of fellows in this world as were those lancers,” Dana wrote Sue. “They turned their horse’s [sic] tails and struck off like quarter horses for the city, leaving some twenty or thirty of their fellows on the ground.”

  Now the Americans turned their attention to the Mexican foot soldiers, who had also turned to run for their lives. Most of them raced for the protective walls of the Bishop’s Palace, rather than for Monterrey, hoping to get inside before the Americans. The pursuit became a footrace, contested “so hotly that they entered pell-mell with the enemy into the palace before they could close their doors on the position for defense,” Dana recalled.

  By 3:00 p.m. the battle was won. Four pieces of artillery inside the Bishop’s Palace were captured. Like the cannons captured atop La Federación, they were reaimed down onto the Mexican positions inside Monterrey. Few prisoners had been taken: those enemy soldiers who were able had fled — and those who did not run for their lives were dead, clubbed with muskets, shot, or killed by swords.

  With the American flag raised over the Bishop’s Palace, Taylor’s army officially controlled most of the easternmost, and all the westernmost, points in the battlefield. The Mexican army was trapped in between. Now, all Taylor had to do was squeeze the jaws of this vise, and the battle would be won. “I felt confident that with a strong force occupying the road and heights in his rear, and a good position below the city in our possession, the enemy could not possibly maintain the town,” Taylor noted optimistically.

  To capture Monterrey, Taylor’s army would have to reenter the deadly streets and alleys. To the Americans it looked painfully simple, yet this was the showdown General Ampudia had been waiting for all along.

  TWENTY-TWO

  The Mortar

  SEPTEMBER 23, 1846

  Just after midnight, Worth’s sentries atop La Independencia and La Federación heard commotion on Monterrey’s western outskirts. When they looked more closely, however, the streets seemed deserted. Worth ordered Meade to quietly investigate. “The general sent me forward on a reconnaissance, to ascertain what batteries the enemy had in our direction. In doing this, I ascertained the enemy had abandoned all that portion of the town in our direction, and had retired to the central plaza of the town, where they were barricaded, and all the houses occupied by infantry.”

  Meade had made an amazing discovery: all of Ampudia’s perimeter fortifications, with the exception of the Black Fort, had been abandoned in favor of making one final stand at the very heart of the carefully engineered defensive bastion. His troops would focus their activity around the main plaza, a large, square open space that looked very much like a military parade ground. The buildings fronting the plaza were almost all just one story high, with protective shutters that opened from the inside, metal barricades over many windows, and those flat roofs and parapets so perfect for concealing Mexican marksmen. The only multistory building was the cathedral, with its three-story bell tower, which formed a perfect lookout position. Solid masonry walls had been erected across all the streets leading into or out of the plaza, with cannon portals that resembled the openings on the side of an old-fashioned man-of-war. For maximum destructive effect, those guns would fire rounds of grape.

  Worth changed his plans accordingly. “Two columns of attack were organized,” the general wrote, “to move along the two principal streets in the direction of the great plaza, composed of light troops, slightly extended, with orders to mask the men whenever practicable, avoid those points swept by the enemy’s artillery, to press on to the first plaza, get hold of the end of the streets beyond, then enter the buildings, and, by means of picks and bars, break through the longitudinal section of the walls, w
ork from house to house, and ascending to the roofs, to place themselves upon the same, breast-high with the enemy.”

  The Second Dragoons had been kept out of the fighting, instead acting as couriers, riding their horses back and forth from Taylor’s camp at Walnut Springs to Worth’s position west of the city. Thus Worth was able to plan his attack knowledgeably, using the information about street fighting that had been gleaned after Garland’s debacle. Instead of marching in columns, advancing street by street, the Americans would attempt to advance house to house — from the inside. Most homes shared a common wall, so advancement was as laborious as knocking a hole in the stone and then clearing the next house of enemy occupants. Battering rams, sledgehammers, pickaxes, and even small cannons were assembled for the job.

  Couriers weren’t the only soldiers making the circuitous loop from Walnut Springs to the Saltillo road. On the morning of the twenty-third, an artillery squad came dragging the ten-inch mortar used during the first day of the battle, giving Worth a gun capable of inflicting enormous damage. Worth planned to station the piece somewhere inside Monterrey and then rain mortar shells down on the main plaza. The location he had in mind was a smaller plaza, known as the Capella, which, by resonant coincidence, housed a cemetery.

  Worth had already shifted the bulk of his force to the summit of La Independencia, the summit offering the shortest downhill route into the city. His infantry now began picking their way down through the rocks and grass, even as his twelve-pounder and the captured Mexican cannons opened fire from the Bishop’s Palace.

  Like it or not, it was time to enter the trap.

  AS A LONE dragoon galloped back through the muddy cane fields with the results of Meade’s reconnaissance, a small group under Jeff Davis’s command probed the Mexican defenses on the other side of town. There, too, the Americans discovered that the enemy had retreated. “On the morning of the 23rd we held undisputed possession of the east end of Monterey,” noted Grant, who was then moving back into the outskirts with the Fourth.