“More Mexican efficiency,” the dean shrugged. “After the last scrap out here in the hills they made a stab at burning the bodies. They’d pile twenty or thirty in a heap, pour a bottle of kerosene over it, light the soaked clothing, then walk off swelling with the consciousness of hygienic duty well performed. Now when the wind blows this way—it’s hard on a white man, though the Mexicans don’t seem to mind. Appeals to the natural vulture in them, I suppose.”
While they stood watching before crossing to the shaded promenade, the crowd opened behind them to permit the passage of a dozen men under guard. All Spaniards, they ranged in age from the threescore and ten years of a hawk-nosed old man to the twelve of his grandson. But one thing they had in common, the dull, blue hue of mortal fear. In the extremity of his terror the boy repeatedly stumbled and fell—to be picked up and prodded on by a rifle-barrel. Heads hanging, fearful, and hopeless, they shuffled through the crowd.
“Ole, Enrico!” As they came opposite, Bull’s friend hailed the officer in command.
After walking a few feet with him, he came back. “They’re Spanish storekeepers on the way to ‘the place designated,’ which is a revolutionary euphemism for being shot. ‘The place’ is the cemetery where they will be stood up against the wall. A nice little Mexican refinement, eh, making a man’s legs carry him to his own funeral? Their crime? Respectability, most likely. They have either dallied in contributing to the ‘Cause,’ been caught hiding their goods, or perhaps have unreasonably refused some officer access to their daughters’ beds. Even in this country”—he spoke with bitter irony—“there are still men to be found who draw the line at that. Or it may be simply that they are Spanish. God knows, it’s enough. Valles never forgets that he is a peon. After the lapse of centuries he is visiting on their children’s children the violences offered by the Spanish conquerors to his Aztec forebears. It may be poetic justice. A philosopher might find some justification for it—if it were only a cause and effect. But”—his pitying glance followed the stumbling boy—“it is rotten hard to watch.”
It was only the beginning of a series of sights and events that, while running the gamut from acute tragedy to grim humor, revealed in flashing glimpses the bandit tyrannies that were masquerading as government. As the Spaniards disappeared, there came marching in their wake a group of Carranzista prisoners, mostly women, captured and brought in from an interior town. As they filed through the jeering crowd, a revueltoso would reach and snatch away a woman that pleased him without a protest from the guards. Always she raised an outcry. But always she ceased at the flash of a knife or as a heavy fist closed her mouth. Whereafter, quietly sobbing, she would be dragged away by the hair or hand.
“That isn’t quite so bad.” The correspondent nodded at one struggling desperately with her captor. “She’ll soon give in and dry her tears. In one battle we took over five hundred women prisoners, and within twenty-four hours they had all settled down to housekeeping with Valles’s soldiers. Four years of war whose fluctuations are recorded by a change of husbands is bound to breed philosophy. For their kind it doesn’t matter so much. They have ceased to care. But the others—daughters of the upper classes, reared in luxury, refined, many of them educated in Europe—well, during the sack of Durango forty girls of the upper classes committed suicide.”
After crossing the plaza, Benson and Bull left the correspondents and turned down a side street where stood the British consulate. An old Spanish mansion, with a great patio and interior garden, its high walls shut out even the murmur of the swarming humanity without. The glass doors of the office opened upon a wide, tiled veranda beyond which flowery paths ran under great trees that let down the brilliant sun blaze in a greenish rain of light. Its peace and beauty accentuated by contrast the drama of human misery that was in course in its quiet demesne.
As they sat waiting for the consul, they saw in the garden two nuns in earnest conversation with an old, black-robed priest.
“More victims of the ‘Cause.’” After he had greeted them, the consul, a bluff Englishman, nodded toward the group. “Valles has robbed churches, seized their lands, shot the priests. He crowns it with—this. Last spring he quartered one of his regiments in the nunnery of the order to which these poor women belong. Now they are about to become mothers, and came here to-day to ask the priest—who is himself a refugee whom I saved from a mob that was stoning him to death outside—to ask permission for themselves and others to end their desecration by suicide. One would think that such experiences would kill in any human being the belief in a righteous God. But the old fellow is made of good stuff. Sticks right to his guns.”
Through the open doorway, in confirmation, the voice of the priest came just then out of the quiet garden. Old and quavery it was with the burden of his sorrow and years, yet firm in the faith: “The life He gave none but He may take away. Why this terrible thing has befallen it is not for us to say. His purposes are closed in mystery, beyond our sight. It may be that we had grown proud; were swollen with self-righteousness; puffed up with the vanity of good works. Or it may be your sacrifice was necessary to scandalize the world of good people and bring these wicked ones to their proper end? It may be”—he paused, shaking his old head, tears coursing down his furrowed cheeks—“but it is not for us to attempt answer when He chooses to put our faith to the test. I have wished that He had seen fit to take me as I lay there under the stones of the mob. But that was impious, a wicked thought. We can only wait till His brightness pierces the veil of our mortal vision.”