Our marines remained on duty until the end of the month when General Funston arrived from Galveston with about four thousand troops and took possession of the port. It was hard to see what turn affairs would take next for Huerta had an army of 5,000 men not very far from Vera Cruz. But I guess he had heard of General Funston before and he didn’t care about being captured as Aguinaldo, the Philippine leader, was.
Instead of having some small war the diplomats of the A B C governments of South America, as Argentine, Brazil and Chile are called, offered to try to negotiate a friendly settlement between the United States and Mexico. President Wilson, who liked peace and hated war, at once accepted their kind offer and agreed to send representatives to their proposed conference. The following day Huerta agreed to send his representatives to the A B C conference which was to be held in the town of Niagara Falls on the Canadian side of the river.
Finally, when all the representatives met, the first thing that was done was to have an armistice signed by the United States and Huerta’s government. As soon as this was done Huerta’s representatives tried to have the United States withdraw its forces from Vera Cruz and the United States forego the salute for the insult to our flag. The representatives of the United States asked only that Huerta resign.
After deliberating for five weeks the representatives of all the countries agreed that a provisional government should be established in Mexico, and that Huerta should resign; that the United States should not ask Mexico to pay an indemnity nor to ask for a salute or other apology for the insult to the flag at Tampico and that our troops were to remain at Vera Cruz.
In the meantime Huerta was being hard pressed by Carranza on the north and the rebel Zapata on the south and with our troops occupying Vera Cruz it evidently suited him very well to resign. So on the 10th of July Huerta appointed Chief Justice Corbajol to be president in his place.
It was common talk among the blue-jackets on our ship that Huerta had some 3,000,000 dollars deposited in banks somewhere in Europe and that he planned to go there. Be that as it may he handed in his resignation to the Chamber of Deputies a week later and left for Puerto, Mexico, on a special train under heavy guard. From there he sailed for Jamaica and thence for Europe.
Thus it was that Huerta, the Indian descendant of the Aztecs, who always went one way and came back another, got out of saluting our flag and probably saved his life.
CHAPTER IX—ON A SUBMARINE CHASER
Very shortly after Huerta resigned the presidency of Mexico and made his get-away, the ex-Kaiser let loose the war-dogs of Europe and here I was signed up for four years in the Navy and, I figured, didn’t stand a ghost of a chance of breaking into the fight. It seemed to me a pretty tough deal that old Huerta could resign his job while I, a free American citizen, couldn’t quit, resign, go-over-the-hill, or anything.
What I wanted to do was to get over to England and sign up there for it was dollars to doughnuts in my mind that there would be some small bickerings going on between the British and the German navies and it would be well worth while to see those big guns get into action. I hadn’t the remotest idea, then, that the Imperial German Navy, as those boches so loved to call it, would be afraid to come out in the offing and put up a fight. But when it came to torpedoing unarmed passenger ships loaded with women and children, or hospital ships carrying wounded soldiers they were right there Fritzy-on-the-spot with their blackheads as they called their Whitehead torpedoes.