V
In Tapachula, the insurrection was marked principally by much blowing of bugles on the part of the Obregon garrison.
The civilian population remained unperturbed.
The soldiery hailed the affair as another good excuse for drinking. Possibly their officers had paid them as a first step toward insuring their loyalty in the campaign to follow. They promptly filled the local bar-rooms, and swaggered about the streets with the air of increased importance which comes to a military man in time of war.
As always in Mexico, the martial spirit brought to the surface the anti-foreign sentiment. The peon, whatever his opinion of gringos, is usually polite, but inspired by thoughts of battle—and a few swigs of rum—he occasionally tells the foreigner what he thinks of him. A fat sergeant, careening wildly by on a little burro, so drunk that he threatened at every lurch to overturn his diminutive mount, reviled my ancestry as he galloped past. A group of soldiers, making merry in a saloon near the plaza, set down their bottle of mescal to damn all Americans. One of them staggered out with the evident intention of picking a quarrel, but his attention was distracted at the sight of a Tehuana girl lingering at the curb. Seizing her arm, he grinned in an effort at blandishment. She broke loose with an angry, “Vaya! Run along! Andale!” and hurried down the street, while a policeman on the corner chuckled and twirled his own moustachios. The soldier turned to me again, muttering something about tearing a gringo’s heart from the breast. He started toward me, wavered unsteadily, collided with a house-wall and collapsed in the gutter.
For a day the soldiery swaggered all over town, but the next morning their generals—now in business-like khaki—rounded them up and marched them to the railway station, where all passenger traffic had ceased and all cars had been commandeered for transport.
They passed beneath my hotel balcony—a motley crew of evil-visaged little fellows, with cartridges glistening from many bandoleers—cheering and singing. Behind them came a nondescript mob of slatternly women, old and young and middle-aged—the soldaderas, or camp-followers, who transport the baggage, cook the food, perform whatever other services a soldier may require, and sometimes assist in the actual fighting, occasionally with a rifle, but usually with sticks or stones, wherewith they engage in combat the soldaderas of the enemy. Barefoot, bedraggled, unwashed, they were bent under loads of fruit-baskets, blankets, saddle-bags, water-jars, and even live chickens.
A few of the marchers glanced up at my balcony to hurl a last curse at the gringo. Then they vanished around the corner, bound northward to the scene of battle. Tapachula resumed its atmosphere of peace, quite as though Mexico were untroubled by one of its chronic insurrections.