Part 30

After much outcry and violent denunciation by the allies, an armistice was signed at Bulair on April 19th by representatives of all the belligerents except Montenegro, which was thereby only incited to more heroic efforts to capture Scutari. Nevertheless the allies had profited so much by delay in their relations with the powers since the very outbreak of the war that they now hoped to secure advantages by a similar policy, and it was not until May 21st that their representatives reassembled at London. Even then there appeared to be no sincere desire to come to terms, and on May 27th Sir Edward Grey informed the delegates that they would soon lose the confidence of Europe, and that for all that was being accomplished they might as well not be in London. The delegates were very indignant at this strong language, but it had the desired effect, for on May 30, 1913, the Treaty of London was signed by the representatives of all the belligerents. Its principal provisions were those already suggested by the powers, _viz_.:

(1) The boundary between Turkey and the allies to be a line drawn from Midia to Enos, to be delimited by an international commission:

(2) The boundaries of Albania to be determined by the powers.

(3) Turkey to cede Crete to Greece.

(4) The powers to decide the status of the Aegean islands.

(5) The settlement of all the financial questions arising out of the war to be left to an international commission to meet at Paris.

It was time for a settlement, since the problem was no longer to secure peace between Turkey and the allies, but rather to maintain peace among the allies. The solution of the great problem of the war, the division of the spoils, could no longer be deferred. From the moment that Adrianople had fallen, the troops of Bulgaria, Servia, and Greece maneuvered for position, each state determined to secure possession of as much territory as possible, in the hope that at the final settlement it might retain what it had seized.

MEXICO PLUNGED INTO ANARCHY

HUERTA SEIZES A DICTATORSHIP A.D. 1913

EDWIN EMERSON WILLIAM CAROL

Mexico has loomed large in the affairs of the world during recent years. The overthrow of Diaz in 1911 did not, as the world had hoped, bring into power an earnest and energetic middle class capable of guiding the downtrodden peons into the blessings of civilization. On the contrary, the land passed from the grip of a cruel oligarchy into that of a far more cruel anarchy. Hordes of bandits sprang up everywhere. The new president, Madero, was a philosopher and a patriot. But he failed wholly to get any real grasp of the situation. He was betrayed on every side; rebellion rose all around him; and in his extremity he entrusted his army and his personal safety to the most savage of his secret enemies, General Huerta. Madero died because he was too far in advance of his countrymen to be able to understand them. After that, Huerta sought to reestablish the old Diaz regime of wealth and terrorism; but he only succeeded in plunging the land back into utter barbarism.

The Mexicans are the last large section of the earth's population thus left to rule themselves in savagery. Hence the rest of the world has watched them with eagerness. Europe repeatedly reminded the United States that by her Monroe Doctrine she had assumed the duty of keeping order in America. At last she felt compelled to interfere. The picture of those days of anarchy is here sketched by two eye-witnesses, an Englishman and an American, both fresh from the scene of action.

EDWIN EMERSON

There is a saying in Mexico that it is much easier to be a successful general than a successful president. Inasmuch as almost all Mexican presidents during the hundred years since Mexico became a Republic, owed their presidency to successful generalship, this saying is significant. At all events, no Mexican general who won his way into the National Palace by his military prowess ever won his way out with credit to himself or to his country.

General Victoriano Huerta, Mexico's latest Interim-President, during the first few months that followed his overthrow of the Madero Government found out to his own cost how much harder it is to rule a people than an army.

As a matter of fact, General Huerta was pushed into his interim-presidency before he really had a fair opportunity to learn how to command an army. At the time he was so suddenly made Chief Magistrate of Mexico he was not commanding the Mexican army, but was merely a recently appointed major-general who happened to command that small fraction of the regular army at the capital which was supposed to have remained loyal to President Madero and his constitutional government. Huerta had been appointed by President Madero to the supreme command of the loyal forces at the capital, numbering barely three thousand soldiers, only a few days before Madero's fall. Even if he had not turned traitor to his commander-in-chief, as he did in the end, Huerta's command of the loyal troops during the ten days' struggle at the capital preceding the fall of the constitutional government could not be described as anything but a dismal failure.

Before considering General Huerta's qualifications as a President, one should know something of his career as a soldier. During the last few years it has repeatedly fallen to my lot to follow General Huerta in the field, so that I have had a fair chance to view some of his soldierly qualities at close hand. I accompanied General Huerta during his campaign through Chihuahua, in 1912, and was present at his famous Battle of Bachimba, near Chihuahua City, on July 3, 1912--the one decisive victory won by General Huerta against the rebel forces of Pascual Orozco. Before this campaign I was in Cuernavaca, in the State of Morelos, during the time when General Huerta had his headquarters there in his campaign against Zapata's bandit hordes in that State after the fall of General Diaz's government.

General Huerta then took charge of the last military escort which accompanied General Porfirio Diaz on his midnight flight from Mexico City to the port of Vera Cruz. During the ten hours' run down to the coast, it may be recalled, the train on which President Diaz and his family rode was held up by rebels in the gray of dawn, and the soldiers of the military escort had to deploy in skirmish order, led by Generals Diaz and Huerta in person; but the affair was over after a few minutes' firing, with no casualties on either side.

Before this eventful year General Huerta had but few opportunities of winning laurels on the field of battle. Having entered the Military Academy of Chapultepec in the early 'seventies under Lerdo de Tejada's presidency, Victoriano Huerta was graduated in 1875, at the age of twenty-one, and was commissioned a second lieutenant of engineers. While still a cadet at Chapultepec he distinguished himself by his predilection for scientific subjects, particularly mathematics and astronomy. During the military rebellion of Oaxaca, when General Diaz rose against President Lerdo, Lieutenant Huerta was engaged in garrison duty, and got no opportunity to enter this campaign.

After General Diaz had come into power and had begun his reorganization of the Mexican army, young Huerta, lately promoted to a captaincy of engineers, came forward with a plan for organizing a General Staff. General Diaz approved of his plans, and Captain Huerta, accordingly, in 1879, became the founder of Mexico's present General Staff Corps. The first work of the new General Staff was to undertake the drawing up of a military map of Mexico on a large scale. The earliest sections of this immense map, on which the Mexican General Staff is still hard at work, were surveyed and drawn up in the State of Vera Cruz, where the Mexican Military Map Commission still has its headquarters. Captain Huerta accompanied the Commission to Jalapa, the capital of the State of Vera Cruz, and served there through a period of eight years, receiving his promotion to major in 1880 and to lieutenant-colonel in 1884. During this time he had charge of all the astronomical work of the Commission, and he also led surveying and exploring parties over the rough mountainous region that extends between the cities of Jalapa and Orizaba. While at Jalapa he married Emilia Aguila, of Mexico City, who bore him three sons and a daughter.

In 1890 Huerta was promoted to a colonelcy and was recalled to Mexico City. As a reward for Indian campaign services Huerta was promoted to the rank of brigadier-general. In Mexico's centennial year of 1910, when Francisco Madero rose in the north, and other parts of the Republic gave signs of disaffection, General Huerta was ordered south to take charge of all the detached Government force in the mountainous State of Guerrero. Almost simultaneously with his arrival in Chilpancingo, the capital of the State of Guerrero, almost the whole south of Mexico rose in rebellion. The military situation there was soon found to be so hopeless that Huerta was recalled to Mexico City.

After General Huerta saw General Porfirio Diaz off to Europe at Vera Cruz, he returned to the capital and placed himself at the disposition of Don Francisco L. de la Barra, Mexico's new President _ad interim_. President de la Barra dispatched him with a column of soldiers to Cuernavaca to restore peace.

Huerta placed himself at Señor Madero's complete disposition when the latter was elected and inaugurated as President at Mexico. Madero, for reasons that are self-evident, was anxious to propitiate the military element, and to secure the cooperation of the more experienced officers in the regular army for the better pacification of the country. Accordingly, when Zapata and his bandit hordes gave signs of returning to their old ways, refusing to "stay bought," President Madero sent General Huerta back into Morelos, at the head of a strong force of cavalry, mountain artillery, and machine guns, numbering altogether 3,500 men, with orders to put down Zapata's new rebellion "at any cost." At the same time President Madero induced his former fellow rebel, Ambrosio Figueroa, now Commander-in-Chief of Mexico's rural guards, to cooperate with General Huerta by bringing a mounted force of three thousand rurales from Guerrero into Morelos from the south so as to hem in the Zapatistas between himself and Huerta at Cuernavaca. Figueroa's men, though they had to cover three times the distance, struck the main body of the rebels first and got badly mussed up in the battle that followed. General Huerta's column did not get away from Cuernavaca until the second day of the fight, and did not reach the battlefield in the extinct crater of Mount Herradura until Figueroa's rurales had been all but routed. In the battle that followed, General Huerta succeeded in driving the rebels out of their strong position, but the losses of the federals, owing to their belated arrival and hastily taken positions, were disproportionately heavy.

This affair caused much ill-feeling between the rurales and regulars, and Figueroa sent word to Madero that he could not afford to sacrifice his men by trying to cooperate with such a poor general as Huerta. The much-heralded joint campaign accordingly fell to the ground.

President Madero thereupon recalled General Huerta, and sent General Robles, of the regular army, to replace him in command. This furnished Huerta with another grievance against Madero.

Some time afterward I heard General Huerta explain in private conversation to some of his old army comrades that he had been recalled from Morelos because of his sharp military measures against the Zapatistas, owing to President Madero's sentimental preference for dealing leniently with his old Zapatista friends. At the time when General Huerta made this private complaint, however, it was a notorious fact that his successor in Morelos, General Robles, had received public instructions from Madero to deal more severely with the Morelos rebels. General Robles did, as a matter of fact, handle the Morelos rebels far more ruthlessly than Huerta, leading to his own subsequent recall on charges of excessive cruelty.

Meanwhile the Orozco rebellion had arisen in the north, and became so threatening that General Gonzalez Salas, Madero's War Minister, felt called upon to resign his portfolio to take the field against Orozco. General Salas, after organizing a fairly formidable-looking force of 3,500 regulars and three batteries of field artillery at Torreon, rushed into the fray, only to suffer a disgraceful defeat in his first battle at Rellano, in Chihuahua, not far from Torreon. General Salas took his defeat so much to heart that he committed suicide on his way back to Torreon. This, together with the panic-stricken return of his army to Torreon, caused the greatest dismay at the Capital, the inhabitants of which already believed themselves threatened by an irresistible advance of Orozco's rebel followers. None of the federal generals at the front were considered strong enough to stem the tide.

The only available federal general of high rank, who had any experience in commanding large forces in the field, was Victoriano Huerta. President Madero, in his extremity, called upon Huerta to reorganize the badly disordered forces at Torreon, and to take the field against Orozco, "cost what it may." This was toward the end of March, 1912.

General Huerta, whom the army had come to regard as "shelved," lost no time in getting to Torreon. There he soon found that the situation was by no means so black as it had been painted--General Trucy Aubert, who had been cut off with one of the columns of the army, having cleverly extricated his force from its dangerous predicament so as to bring it safely back to the base at Torreon without undue loss of men or prestige.

Thenceforth no expense was saved by General Huerta in bringing the army to better fighting efficiency. Heavy reenforcements of regulars, especially of field artillery, were rushed to Torreon from the Capital, and large bodies of volunteers and irregulars were sent after them from all parts of the Republic.

President Madero had said: "Let it cost what it may"; so all the preparation went forward regardless of cost. "Hang the expense!" became the blithe motto of the army.

When General Huerta at last took the field against Orozco, early in May, his federal army, now swelled to more than six thousand men and twenty pieces of field artillery, moved to the front in a column of eleven long railway trains, each numbering from forty to sixty cars, loaded down with army supplies and munitions of all kinds, besides a horde of several thousand camp followers, women, sutlers, and other non-combatants. The entire column stretched over a distance of more than four miles. The transportation and sustenance of this unwieldy column, which had to carry its own supply of drinking water, it was estimated, cost the Mexican Government nearly 350,000 pesos per day. Its progress was exasperatingly slow, owing to the fact that the Mexican Central Railway, which was Huerta's only chosen line of advance, had to be repaired almost rail by rail.

After more than a fortnight's slow progress, General Huerta struck Orozco's forces at Conejos, in Chihuahua, near the branch line running out to the American mines at Mapimi. Orozco's forces, finding themselves heavily outnumbered and overmatched in artillery, hastily evacuated Conejos, retreating northward up the railway line by means of some half-dozen railway trains. Several weeks more passed before Huerta again struck Orozco's forces at Rellano, in Chihuahua, close to the former battlefield, along the railway, where his predecessor, General Gonzalez Salas, had come to grief. This was in June.

Huerta, with nearly twice as many men and three times as much artillery, drove Orozco back along the line of the railway after a two days' long-range artillery bombardment, against which the rebels were powerless. This battle, in which the combined losses in dead and wounded on both sides were less than 200, was described in General Huerta's official report as "more terrific than any battle that had been fought in the Western Hemisphere during the last fifty years." In his last triumphant bulletin from the field, General Huerta telegraphed to President Madero that his brave men had driven the enemy from the heights with a final fierce bayonet charge, and that their bugle blasts of victory could be heard even then on the crest.

Pascual Orozco, on the other hand, reported to the revolutionary Junta in El Paso that he had ordered his men to retire before the superior force of the federals, and that they had accomplished this without disorder by the simple process of boarding their waiting trains and steaming slowly off to the north, destroying the bridges and culverts behind him as they went along. One of my fellow war correspondents, who served on the rebel side during this battle, afterward told me that the federals, whose bugle calls Huerta heard on the heights, did not get up to this position until two days after the rebels had abandoned their trenches along the crest.

The subsequent advance of the federals from Rellano to the town of Jimenez, Orozco's old headquarters, which had been evacuated by him without firing a shot, lasted another week.

Here Huerta's army camped for another week. At Jimenez the long-brewing unpleasantness between Huerta's regular officers and some of Madero's bandit friends, commanding forces of irregular cavalry, came to a head. The most noted of these former guerrilla chieftains was Francisco Villa, an old-time bandit, who now rejoiced in the honorary rank of a Colonel. Villa had appropriated a splendid Arab stallion, originally imported by a Spanish horse-breeder with a ranch near Chihuahua City. General Huerta coveted this horse, and one day, after an unusually lively carouse at general headquarters, he sent a squad of soldiers to bring the horse out of Villa's corral to his own stable. The old bandit took offense at this, and came stalking into headquarters to make a personal remonstrance. He was put under arrest, and Huerta forthwith sentenced him to be shot. That same day the sentence was to be put into execution. Villa was already facing the firing squad, and the officer in charge had given the command to load, when President Madero's brother, Emilio, who was serving on Huerta's staff in an advisory capacity, put a stop to the execution by taking Villa under his personal protection. President Madero was telegraphed to, and immediately replied, reprieving Villa's sentence, and ordering him to be sent to Mexico City pending further official investigation.

This act of interference infuriated Huerta. For the moment he had to content himself with formulating a long string of serious charges against Villa, ranging from military insubordination to burglary, highway robbery, and rape. It was even given out at headquarters that Villa had struck his commanding general.

Huerta never forgave the Madero brothers for their part in this affair, and his resentment was fanned to white heat, subsequently, when Francisco Villa was allowed to escape scot-free from his prison in Mexico City.

Meanwhile Huerta kept telegraphing to President Madero for more reenforcements of men, munitions, and supplies, more engines, more railway trains and tank cars, and, above all, for more artillery. Madero kept sending them, though it cost his Government a new loan of forty million dollars. Every other day or so a new train, with fresh supplies, arrived at the front.

At the end of several more weeks, when Orozco had slowly retreated half-way through the State of Chihuahua, and when he found that the destruction of the big seven-span bridge over the Conchos River at Santa Rosalia did not permanently stop Huerta's advance, he reluctantly decided to make another stand at the deep cut of Bachimba, just south of Chihuahua City. This was in July.

By this time General Huerta's Federal column had swelled to 7,500 fighting men, 20 pieces of field artillery, 30 machine guns, and some 7,500 camp-followers and women, making a total of more than 15,000 persons of all sexes and ages, who were being carried along on more than twenty railroad trains, stretching over a dozen miles of single track. The column was so long that some of my companions and I, when we climbed a high hill near the front end of the column at Bachimba, found it impossible to discern the tail end through our field-glasses. All the hungry people that were being carried on all those twenty railroad trains had to be fed, of course, so that none of us were surprised to read in the Mexican newspapers that the Chihuahua campaign was now costing Madero's Government nearly 500,000 pesos per day.

The battle at Bachimba must have swelled this budget. During this one day's fight nearly two million rifle cartridges and more than 10,000 artillery projectiles were fired away by the Federals. Huerta's twenty pieces of field artillery, neatly posted in a straight line on the open plain, barely half a mile away from his ammunition railway train, kept firing at the supposed rebel positions all day long without any appreciable interruption, and all day long the artillery caissons and limbers kept trotting to and fro between the batteries and ammunition cars. Orozco had but 3,000 men with two pieces of so-called artillery, with gun barrels improvised from railroad axles, so he once more ordered a general retreat by way of his railroad trains, waiting at a convenient distance on a bend of the road behind the intervening hills. As at Rellano, at Conejos, and at other places in the campaign where the railroad swept in big bends around the hills, no attempt was made on the Federal side to cut off the rebels' retreat by short-cut flanking movements of cavalry, of which Huerta had more than he could conveniently use, or chose to use. The whole ten hours' bombardment and rifle fire resulted in but fourteen dead rebels; but it won the campaign for the Government, and earned for Huerta his promotion to Major-General besides the proud title of "Hero of Bachimba."

President Madero and his anxious Government associates were more than glad to receive the tidings of this "decisive victory." The only trouble was that it did not decide anything in particular. Orozco and his followers, while evacuating the capital of Chihuahua, kept on wrecking railway property between Chihuahua City and Juarez, and the campaign kept growing more expensive every day.

It took Huerta from July until August to work his slow way from the center of Chihuahua to Ciudad Juarez on the northern frontier. Before he reached this goal, though, the rebels had split into many smaller detachments, some of which cut his communications in the rear, while others harried his flanks with guerrilla tactics and threatened to carry the "war" into the neighboring State of Sonora. So far as the trouble and expense to the Federal Government was concerned this guerrilla warfare was far worse than the preceding slow but sure railway campaign. General Huerta himself, who was threatened with the loss of his eyesight from cataract, gave up trying to pursue the fleeing rebel detachments in person, but kept close to his comfortable headquarters in Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua City. This unsatisfactory condition of affairs gave promise of enduring indefinitely, until President Madero in Mexico City, whose Government had to bear the financial brunt of it all, suddenly lost his patience and recalled Huerta to the capital, leaving the command in General Rabago's hands.