Along the single track in the middle of the desert lay ten enormous trains, pillars of fire by night and of black smoke by day, stretching back northward farther than the eye could reach. Around them, in the chaparral, camped nine thousand men without shelter, each man's horse tied to the mesquite beside him, where hung his one serape and red strips of drying meat. From fifty cars horses and mules were being unloaded. Covered with sweat and dust, a ragged trooper plunged into a cattle-car among the flying hoofs, swung himself upon a horse's back, and jabbed his spurs deep in, with a yell. Then came a terrific drumming of frightened animals, and suddenly a horse shot violently from the open door, usually backward, and the car belched flying masses of horses and mules. Picking themselves up, they fled in terror, snorting through wide nostrils at the smell of the open. Then the wide, watchful circle of troopers turned vaqueros lifted the great coils of their lassoes through the choking dust, and the running animals swirled round and round upon one another in a panic. Officers, orderlies, generals with their staffs, soldiers with halters, hunting for their mounts, galloped and ran past in inextricable confusion. Bucking mules were being harnessed to the caissons. Troopers who had arrived on the last trains wandered about looking for their brigades. Way ahead some men were shooting at a rabbit. From the tops of the box-cars and the flat-cars, where they were camped by hundreds, the soldaderas and their half-naked swarms of children looked down, screaming shrill advice and asking everybody in general if they had happened to see Juan Moñeros, or Jesus Hernandez, or whatever the name of their man happened to be.... One man trailing a rifle wandered along shouting that he had had nothing to eat for two days and he couldn't find his woman who made his tortillas for him, and he opined that she had deserted him to go with some —— of another brigade.... The women on the roofs of the cars said, "Valgame Dios!" and shrugged their shoulders; then they dropped him down some three-days-old tortillas, and asked him, for the love he bore Our Lady of Guadelupe, to lend them a cigarette. A clamorous, dirty throng stormed the engine of our train, screaming for water. When the engineer stood them off with a revolver, telling them there was plenty of water in the water-train, they broke away and aimlessly scattered, while a fresh throng took their places. Around the twelve immense tank-cars, a fighting mass of men and animals struggled for a place at the little faucets ceaselessly pouring. Above the place a mighty cloud of dust, seven miles long and a mile wide, towered up into the still, hot air, and, with the black smoke of the engines, struck wonder and terror into the Federal outposts fifty miles away on the mountains back of Mapimi.
When Villa left Chihuahua for Torreon, he closed the telegraph wires to the north, stopped train service to Juarez, and forbade on pain of death that anyone should carry or send news of his departure to the United States. His object was to take the Federals by surprise, and it worked beautifully. No one, not even Villa's staff, knew when he would leave Chihuahua; the army had delayed there so long that we all believed it would delay another two weeks. And then Saturday morning we woke to find the telegraph and railway cut, and three huge trains, carrying the Brigada Gonzalez-Ortega, already gone. The Zaragosa left the next day, and Villa's own troops the following morning. Moving with the swiftness that always characterizes him, Villa had his entire army concentrated at Yermo the day afterward, without the Federals knowing that he had left Chihuahua.
There was a mob around the portable field telegraph that had been rigged up in the ruined station. Inside, the instrument was clicking. Soldiers and officers indiscriminately choked up the windows and the door, and every once in a while the operator would shout something in Spanish and a perfect roar of laughter would go up. It seemed that the telegraph had accidentally tapped a wire that had not been destroyed by the Federals—a wire that connected with the Federal military wire from Mapimi to Torreon.
"Listen!" cried the operator. "Colonel Argumedo in command of the cabecillos colorados in Mapimi is telegraphing to General Velasco in Torreon. He says that he sees smoke and a big dust cloud to the north, and thinks that some rebel troops are moving south from Escalon!"
Night came, with a cloudy sky and a rising wind that began to lift the dust. Along the miles and miles of trains, the fires of the soldaderas flared from the tops of the freight-cars. Out into the desert so far that finally they were mere pin-points of flame stretched the innumerable camp-fires of the army, half obscured by the thick, billowing dust. The storm completely concealed us from Federal watchers. "Even God," remarked Major Leyva, "even God is on the side of Francisco Villa!" We sat at dinner in our converted box-car, with young, great-limbed, expressionless General Maximo Garcia and his brother, the even huger red-faced Benito Garcia, and little Major Manuel Acosta, with the beautiful manners of his race. Garcia had long been holding the advance at Escalon. He and his brothers—one of whom, José Garcia, the idol of the army, had been killed in battle—but a short four years ago were wealthy hacendados, owners of immense tracts of land. They had come out with Madero.... I remember that he brought us a jug of whisky, and refused to discuss the Revolution, declaring that he was fighting for better whisky! As I write this comes a report that he is dead from a bullet wound received in the battle of Sacramento....
Out in the dust storm, on a flat-car immediately ahead of ours, some soldiers lay around their fire with their heads in their women's laps, singing "The Cockroach," which tells in hundreds of satirical verses what the Constitutionalists would do when they captured Juarez and Chihuahua from Mercado and Orozco.
Above the wind one was aware of the immense sullen murmur of the host, and occasionally some sentry challenged in a falsetto howl: "Quien vive?" And the answer: "Chiapas!" "Que gente?" "Chao!" ... Through the night sounded the eerie whistle of the ten locomotives at intervals as they signaled back and forth to one another.
CHAPTER II
THE ARMY AT YERMO
At dawn next morning General Torribio Ortega came to the car for breakfast—a lean, dark Mexican, who is called "The Honorable" and "The Most Brave" by the soldiers. He is by far the most simple-hearted and disinterested soldier in Mexico. He never kills his prisoners. He has refused to take a cent from the Revolution beyond his meager salary. Villa respects and trusts him perhaps beyond all his Generals. Ortega was a poor man, a cowboy. He sat there, with his elbows on the table, forgetting his breakfast, his big eyes flashing, smiling his gentle, crooked smile, and told us why he was fighting.