Insurgent Mexico by John Reed

At General Urbina's door sat an old peon with four cartridge-belts around him, engaged in the genial occupation of filling corrugated iron bombs with gunpowder. He jerked his thumb toward the patio. The General's house, corrals and storerooms ran around all four sides of a space as big as a city block, swarming with pigs, chickens and half-naked children. Two goats and three magnificent peacocks gazed pensively down from the roof. In and out of the sitting-room, whence came the phonographic strains of the "Dollar Princess," stalked a train of hens. An old woman came from the kitchen and dumped a bucket of garbage on the ground; all the pigs made a squealing rush for it. In a corner of the house-wall sat the General's baby daughter, chewing on a cartridge. A group of men stood or sprawled on the ground around a well in the center of the patio. The General himself sat in their midst, in a broken wicker arm-chair, feeding tortillas to a tame deer and a lame black sheep. Before him kneeled a peon, pouring from a canvas sack some hundreds of Mauser cartridges.

To my explanations the General returned no answer. He gave me a limp hand, immediately withdrawing it, but did not rise. A broad, medium-sized man of dark mahogany complexion, with a sparse black beard up to his cheek-bones, that didn't hide the wide, thin, expressionless mouth, the gaping nostrils, the shiny, small, humorous, animal eyes. For a good five minutes he never took them from mine. I produced my papers. "I don't know how to read," said the General suddenly, motioning to his secretary. "So you want to go with me to battle? " he shot at me in the coarsest Spanish. "Many bullets! " I said nothing. "Muy bien! But I don't know when I shall go. Maybe in five days. Now eat! "Thanks, my general, I've already eaten. "Go and eat," he repeated calmly. "Andale! "A dirty little man they all called Doctor escorted me to the dining-room. He had once been an apothecary in Parral, but was now a Major. We were to sleep together that night, he said. But before we reached the dining-room there was a shout of "Doctor! " A wounded man had arrived, a peasant with his sombrero in his hand, and a blood-clotted handkerchief around his head. The little doctor became all efficiency. He dispatched a boy for the family scissors, another for a bucket of water from the well. He sharpened with his knife a stick he picked up from the ground. Seating the man on a box, he took off the bandage, revealing a cut about two inches long, caked with dirt and dried blood. First he cut off the hair around the wound, jabbing the points of the scissors carelessly into it. The man drew in his breath sharply, but did not move. Then the doctor slowly cut the clotted blood away from the top, whistling cheerfully to himself. "Yes," he remarked, "it is an interesting life, the doctor's. " He peered closely at the vomiting blood; the peasant sat like a sick stone. "And it is a life full of nobility," continued the doctor. "Alleviating the sufferings of others. " Here he picked up the sharpened stick, thrust it deep in, and slowly worked it the entire length of the cut! "Pah! The animal has fainted! " said the doctor. "Here, hold him up while I wash it! " With that he lifted the bucket and poured its contents over the head of the patient, the water and blood dribbling down over his clothes. "These ignorant peons," said the doctor, binding up the wound in its original bandage, "have no courage. It is the intelligence that makes the soul, eh? ". When the peasant came to, I asked: "Are you a soldier? " The man smiled a sweet, deprecating smile. "No, señor, I am only a pacifico," he said. "I live in the Canotillo, where my house is at your orders. "Some time later-a good deal-we all sat down to supper. There was Lieutenant-Colonel Pablo Seañes, a frank, engaging youth of twenty-six, with five bullets in him to pay for the three years' fighting. His conversation was sprinkled with soldierly curses, and his pronunciation was a little indistinct, the result of a bullet on the jaw-bone and a tongue almost cut in two by a sword. He was a demon in the field, they said, and a killer (muy matador) after it. At the first taking of Torreon, Pablo and two other officers, Major Fierro and Captain Borunda, had executed alone eighty unarmed prisoners, each man shooting them down with his revolver until his hand got tired pulling the trigger. "Oiga! *" Pablo said. "Where is the best institute for the study of hypnotism in the United States? . As soon as this cursed war is over I am going to study to become a hypnotist. " With that he turned and began to make passes at Lieutenant Borrega, who was called derisively "The Lion of the Sierras," because of his prodigious boasting. The latter jerked out his revolver: "I want no business with the devil! " he screamed, amid the uproarious laughter of the others.