The Training Ground Page 21

  Taylor had finally ridden Old Whitey into the city — with elements of the Second Dragoons riding alongside as his personal escort — and set up a command post in La Tenería. American estimates showed that there were seven thousand Mexican regulars in the plaza, with at least another two thousand local conscripts. Ampudia also had forty-two cannons at his disposal, with ample ammunition. “Our artillery,” Taylor noted wryly, “consisted of one ten-inch mortar, two 24-pound howitzers, and four light field batteries — the mortar being the only piece suitable to the operations of a siege.”

  And while it was obvious that the Mexicans had pulled back into the plaza, it soon became clear that their retreat was not total and that they also occupied defensive positions in many streets along the way. The Third and Fourth infantries encountered heavy fire as they moved carefully forward, remaining outdoors in order to travel more quickly. “The streets leading to the plaza,” Grant wrote, referring to the Mexican defenses, “were commanded from all directions by artillery . . . the roofs were manned with infantry, the troops being protected from fire by parapets made of sandbags. All advances into the city were attended with much danger.” He added: “A volley of musketry and a discharge of grape shot were invariably encountered.”

  The constant cannon fire and musket shots were deafening. Oftentimes the American soldiers could not hear their officers’ commands and instead relied on visual cues: a line of men abruptly changing direction, signifying a new point of attack; the commander waving his saber, motioning for his men to follow him into battle; a fellow soldier keeling over from the musket shot they never saw coming; or, most horrifically, an entire group of men ripped open and dismembered by a burst of grape.

  Death came from all angles at all times. One American soldier estimated that there were “a thousand musketeers on the housetops, and in the barricades at the head of the street up which we advanced, and at every cross street, and you may form some idea of the deluge of balls poured upon us. Onward we went, men and horses falling at every step. Cheers, shrieks, groans, and words of command added to the din.

  “I sat down on the ground with my back to the wall of a house. On my left were two men torn nearly to pieces. One of them was lying flat on his back with his legs extending farther in the street than mine. Crash came another shower of grape, which tore one of his wounded legs off. He reared up, shrieked, and fell back a corpse. I never moved, for I was satisfied that one place was as safe as another.”

  One group of regular soldiers and Texas Rangers managed to find an extremely safe place in the form of a small market. “We reached a corner house of a block,” wrote one of the regulars. “It was a corner grocery full of wine, aquadenta and Mescal. On the opposite side of the street we had to cross was another one of those infernal fortified stone walls.” Up the street, the Mexicans were bayoneting American wounded, crying out loudly and defiantly as they did so. Sensing that their situation was getting desperate, the soldiers in the market proceeded to get “crazy drunk.” Only then did they throw open the door and make a dash for the wall. “Our foes met the rush with so heavy a fire that the air seemed to rain balls. Bullets striking on the stone, pavements and walls, ricocheting and glancing from side to side, as we staggered on. At least a regiment of infantry came up a side street, poured their fire in our flank, and then charged us with bayonet. All fought now on his own hook, and fought more like devils than human beings, with axes, clubbed rifles, sabre, and Bowie knife.”

  That action took place on the hotly contested eastern side of Monterrey. Davis and the First Mississippi were close by — cold, wet, tired, hungry, and miserable from sleeping in the open and not eating for almost two days and nights. Now they maneuvered street by street, under that same “murderous fire,” until the main plaza was in sight. The Rifles were low on ammunition and depleted by casualties, and orders soon arrived for them to retreat from what was clearly a vulnerable position. Obeying that command was not so easy. “The enemy was behind us,” Davis noted plainly, with a nod to the artillery battery with a gun aimed squarely down their escape route. He decided to personally test the Mexican response. “If only one gun was fired at me, then another man should follow; and so on, another and another, until a volley should be fired, and then all of them should rush rapidly across before the guns could be reloaded. In this manner the men got across with little loss.”

  GRANT WAS ALSO navigating his way through those streets with the greatest caution, paying particular attention to the rooftops. He watched as five of the Third Infantry’s twelve remaining officers went “toes up” in the withering crossfire of musket and grape, and he could hear the cries of Mexican soldiers exhorting one another in the heat of battle. There were female voices, too; as the men of Mexico fought for Monterrey, it was the local women who carried fresh bullets to the rooftops. “A young woman, Dona María Josefa Zozaya, appeared amid the soldiers fighting on the roof of the home of Sr. Garza Flores. She gave them courage and passed them munitions; she showed them how to face down danger,” noted one of the Mexicans.

  Many of those female voices were far more anguished. In one home, two Mexican women, fearful of their young daughters’ being raped, pleaded for the Americans to “spare the senoritas and use them as we wished,” wrote one soldier about entering a home. In another, the cries were not of a woman but of a young child, sobbing at the sight of his mother, killed by a random shot. “In every house,” the soldier lamented, “fearful sights told of a town taken by storm.”

  Meanwhile, lack of munitions threatened the Third and Fourth’s forward advance. The shortage could hardly have come at a worse time. They were deep inside Monterrey, just a single block from the plaza. Colonel Garland needed to get word back to General Twiggs that reinforcements and ammunition were urgently required. He asked for a volunteer, someone willing to travel back out of the city alone and get the message to Twiggs. It was Grant who stepped forward. The heat of battle and concern for his fellow soldiers had turned the passive observer of Palo Alto and timid company commander at Resaca de la Palma, without warning or plan, into a brave-hearted warrior.

  Grant’s horse that day was named Nelly. He had dismounted once they were inside the city and led her carefully through the fields of fire. But now was not the time to walk. He needed to gallop Nelly back out of town to bring help as quickly as possible.

  All of his years on horseback had prepared Grant for this act of daring, and he relied on his skill to devise an unconventional plan. “I adjusted myself on the side of the horse furthest from the enemy, and with only one foot holding to the cantle of the saddle, and an arm over the neck of the horse exposed, I started at a full run.” Nelly galloped down the street, Grant clinging to the side of her. “It was only at street crossings that my horse was under fire, but these I crossed at such a flying rate that generally I was past and under cover of the next block before the enemy fired,” he recalled. “At one point on my ride, I saw a sentry walking in front of a house, and stopped to inquire what he was doing there. Finding that the house was full of wounded American soldiers, I dismounted and went in.”

  Soldiers and officers lay about the floor. One of the officers, an engineer named Williams, had been shot in the head. The bowels of a nearby lieutenant spilled from his body. Grant promised the men filling the small home that he would report their location and return with help. Then he ventured carefully back out into the fray.

  Dead-running Nelly through the streets of Monterrey, Grant succeeded in reaching Twiggs. But his gallantry was in vain — Garland had once again retreated. His advance position a block from the plaza soon fell back into Mexican hands. As for the wounded soldiers to whom Grant had promised relief, their position was overrun. None of them survived the battle.

  ON THE OPPOSITE side of the city, Worth began firing a single mortar round into the main plaza, one every twenty minutes. The shells, wrote one soldier in position a few blocks away, “rushed over our heads with a strange roaring scream.” Each round consisted of
a hollow iron cannonball filled with gunpowder. Each explosion killed between six and ten Mexicans. This show of force was meant to simultaneously unnerve Ampudia’s men and underscore that they were, in fact, pinned within a relatively small quadrant. American soldiers weren’t yet capable of penetrating the plaza, went the message, but the parabolic lob of an exploding mortar shell could reach it quite easily. Ongoing Mexican attempts to silence the mortar with cannon fire from the Black Fort proved futile.

  Reaching the Capella, that smaller city plaza where the mortar was positioned, had involved a bloody and vicious fight. Following the lead of a small advance unit, Worth’s men had breached the city that morning, spreading wide as they did so; instead of attacking down just one street, American soldiers filled six different avenues. Whenever fire was encountered, they entered private homes and tore down connective walls, slowly making a passage to the heart of the Mexican force. One of the Texas Rangers fighting under Worth later recalled how “the street fighting became appalling — both columns were now closely engaged with the enemy, and steadily advanced, inch by inch. Our artillery was heard rumbling over the paved streets, galloping here and there as the emergency required, and pouring forth a blazing fire of grape and ball — volley after volley of musketry, and the continued peals of artillery became almost deafening. The artillery of both sides raked the streets, the balls striking the houses with a terrible crash, while amid the roars of battle were heard the battering instruments used by the Texans. Doors were forced open, walls were battered down, entrance made through the longitudinal walls, and the enemy driven from room to room, and from house to house, followed by the shrieks of women, and the sharp crack of Texan rifles. Cheer after cheer was heard in proud and exulting defiance, as the Texans or regulars gained the housetops by means of ladders.”

  By two o’clock, Worth’s division was very near the main plaza. “Here we were brought to a stand,” wrote Dana. “The tops of the houses were filled with Mexicans and they poured their bullets like hail upon us in the streets. In one place three men of our company were wounded (one of them mortally) in less time than you could count three. We had nothing to do but fight them in their own way. So after constructing ladders we left our artillery and a strong force to keep the streets whilst we took the tops of the houses.”

  The rooftop fighting that ensued was the day’s most intense action. Mexicans and Americans fired at one another from behind parapets and sandbags, raising their heads to shoot and then ducking back down to begin that laborious process of reloading their muskets — the Americans always creeping steadily toward Ampudia’s men, who fell back toward the plaza again and again, rather than sally forth and wage an offensive battle. Progress was painfully slow. Protective artillery was nonexistent, the imprecision of cannon and howitzer fire making it impossible to target most Mexican positions without risk of hitting Americans, too.

  Still, like clockwork, that mortar dropped a shell into the plaza every twenty minutes. The cathedral and plaza were full to overflowing with Mexican soldiers and citizens. Wounded stretched out on pews. Families slept on the nave’s sacred floor. There was no place to run or hide when the mortar rounds fell. The shells did not distinguish between combatant and noncombatant, young and old; and to the plaza’s odors of gunpowder, vomit, and overflowing toilets were added the moans of the injured and the anguished weeping of the bereaved.

  There was pride among the defenders, for they had proved themselves a lethal fighting force. But the end was clearly in sight, and there was quiet talk of mutiny. In addition to soldiers and civilians, the plaza was home to a huge magazine of ammunition. One lucky mortar round could kill them all. Better to overthrow Ampudia and seek a truce than to get blown to kingdom come.

  At 11:00 p.m., Taylor ordered Worth to cease fire until dawn. The mortar’s barrel went cold. The starless night turned silent. Worth waited, his troops on alert, not sure what would happen next.

  A MESSENGER FROM Ampudia soon galloped through the darkness, flying the white flag of truce. The Mexican general was requesting that his army be allowed to leave the city and to march away unmolested.

  The petition wasn’t as ludicrous as it first appeared. Ampudia understood Taylor’s strengths and weaknesses just as clearly as his own. And despite having the upper hand, Taylor was in trouble. The Mexican army had suffered just 367 killed and wounded. Even with the bulk of his force penned inside the plaza, Ampudia still outnumbered Taylor two to one. Taylor could not launch a full-scale assault on the plaza without losing hundreds more men, and even then the city would not be his. The Black Fort would still have to be assaulted, and thus far it had proved itself impregnable. “Being without siege artillery or entrenching tools, we could only hope to carry this fort by storm, after a heavy loss from our army,” Dana observed.

  The victory, in those terms, would be Pyrrhic. Taylor’s army would be too weakened to fight another day. They were hundreds of miles inside a hostile foreign country, cut off from their supplies. Taylor had only enough rations to feed his troops for ten more days. He needed more bullets, musket balls, shells, and, most of all, men.

  By the time Ampudia’s messenger came forth, Taylor had ridden back to Walnut Springs to spend the night. Hours passed as the message was sent by courier to his tent and the general penned a reply. Taylor did not wish to destroy Mexico or the Mexican army; he simply wanted to end the battle — and perhaps the war. He chose his words carefully. “The consideration of humanity was present on my mind,” Taylor wrote in his official report, “and outweighed, in my judgment, the doubtful advantages to be gained by a resumption of the attack on the town.”

  But those thoughts of humanity extended to his own forces, too. Taylor had lost more men than Ampudia, some 120 killed, 368 wounded, and 43 missing in action (a polite term, “missing in action” was the military’s way of saying that a cannonball had rendered a soldier’s body nonexistent).

  Taylor let the Mexican army go — all seven thousand of them.

  Meade recorded the terms: “The Mexican Army was to evacuate the place in seven days, and retire beyond the Rinconada, forty miles from here, to which point we were at liberty to advance. The infantry and cavalry to take their arms; the artillery, six pieces of light-artillery; all the rest of the public property and munitions of war to be ours, and the two to be given up to our exclusive possession,” he wrote. In addition, the Black Fort, which Taylor had almost completely bypassed while taking the city and which still contained more than two thousand troops, would be evacuated.

  Ampudia was given one hour to accept. He required just thirty minutes. A team of commissioners, three from each side, drew up the formal surrender document. Along with General Worth and General J. Pinckney Henderson of the Texas Division, Taylor appointed Jeff Davis to represent the United States — and it was Davis, as junior officer, who acted as secretary, writing out the treaty in longhand.

  Taylor and Ampudia met face-to-face during the proceedings, with the Mexican assuring his American adversary that he had received information that very morning from Mexico City, stating that an American minister (James Buchanan) would soon be received by acting president General José Mariano Salas (since the war’s beginning, President Herrera and his equally ineffectual successor, General Mariano Paredes, had been forced from office) to discuss a truce. Taylor came away convinced that the Mexican withdrawal from Monterrey could signify the end of the war. “It was no military necessity that induced General Taylor to grant such liberal terms, but a higher and nobler motive,” wrote Meade. “First, to grant an opportunity to the two governments to negotiate for peace, knowing, as he did, that should he destroy the Mexican army, the Government would never listen to overtures of peace under the disgrace. Secondly, to stop the unnecessary effusion of blood, not only of soldiers, but of old and infirm women and children, whom necessity kept in the city, and who were crowded with our troops, from whom every shot told. Thirdly, as a tribute of respect to the gallantry of the Mexicans, who had defen
ded their place as long as it was in their power.”

  The agreement was signed on the evening of September 24. Two days later, Ampudia began marching his troops out of the city, on their way south to the city of San Luis Potosí. Most of the soldiers were uneducated peasants or local Indians, simple men who had been forced into service. The Americans were unimpressed.

  “My pity was aroused by the sight of the Mexican garrison of Monterey marching out of town as prisoners, and no doubt the same feeling was experienced by most of our army who had witnessed it,” wrote Grant. “Many of the prisoners were cavalry, armed with lances, and mounted on miserable half-starved horses that did not look as if they could carry their riders out of town. The men looked in but little better condition. I thought how little interest the men before me had in the results of the war.”

  Ampudia was downcast and anxious. The route passed directly through the Texas Rangers’ encampment, and he was terrified of being shot down from the roadside. But the Texans let him pass, uttering not a sound or oath to their longtime tormentor.

  The results, for the Americans, could be counted best in the military lessons learned: well-trained volunteer units made for surprisingly good fighters; an offensive stance was preferable to defensive entrenchment; knocking down walls was a more effective method of street fighting than advancing in column formation; light artillery was effective against cavalry and infantry, but large cannons were necessary for assaulting fortified positions; and, most personally, a vast and terrible grief accompanied the death of longtime friends. “How very lonesome it is here with us now. I have just been walking through camp, and how many faces that were dear to the most of us are missing,” Grant wrote to Julia.