Insurgent Mexico by John Reed

There were a hundred and fifty of us stationed at La Cadena, the advance guard of all the Maderista army to the West. Our business was to guard a pass, the Puerta de la Cadena; but the troops were quartered at the hacienda, ten miles away. It stood upon a little plateau, a deep arroyo on one side, at the bottom of which a sunken river came to the surface for perhaps a hundred yards, and vanished again. As far as the eye could reach up and down the broad valley was the fiercest kind of desert,-dried creek-beds, and a thicket of chaparral, cactus and sword plant.

Directly east lay the Puerta, breaking the tremendous mountain range that blotted out half the sky and extended north and south beyond vision, wrinkled like a giant's bed-clothes. The desert tilted up to meet the gap, and beyond was nothing but the fierce blue of stainless Mexican sky. From the Puerta you could see fifty miles across the vast arid plain that the Spaniards named Llano de los Gigantes, where the little mountains lie tumbled about; and four leagues away the low gray houses of Mapimi. There lay the enemy; twelve hundred colorados, or Federal irregulars, under the infamous Colonel Argumendo. The colorados are the bandits that made Orozco's revolution. They were so called because their flag was red, and because their hands were red with slaughter, too. They swept through Northern Mexico, burning, pillaging and robbing the poor. In Chihuahua, they cut the soles from the feet of one poor devil, and drove him a mile across the desert before he died. And I have seen a city of four thousand souls reduced to five after a visit by the colorados. When Villa took Torreon, there was no mercy for the colorados; they are always shot.