Insurgent Mexico by John Reed

I went south from Chihuahua on a troop train bound for the advance near Escalon. Attached to the five freight cars, filled with horses and carrying soldiers on top, was a coach in which I was allowed to ride with two hundred noisy pacificos, male and female. It was gruesomely suggestive: car windows smashed, mirrors, lamps and plush seats torn out, and bullet holes after the manner of a frieze. The time of our departure was not fixed, and no one knew when the train would arrive. The railroad had just been repaired. In places where there had once been bridges we plunged into arroyos and snorted up the farther bank on a rickety new-laid track that bent and cracked under us. All day long the roadside was lined with immense distorted steel rails, torn up with a chain and a backing engine by the thorough Orozco last year. There was a rumor that Castillo's bandits were planning to blow us up with dynamite sometime during the afternoon. Peons with big straw sombreros and beautifully faded serapes, Indians in blue working clothes and cowhide sandals, and squat-faced women with black shawls around their heads, and squalling babies,-packed the seats, aisles and platforms, singing, eating, spitting, chattering. Occasionally there staggered by a ragged man with a cap labeled "conductor" in tarnished gold letters, very drunk, embracing his friends and severely demanding the tickets and safe conducts of strangers. I introduced myself to him by a small present of United States currency. He said, "Señor, you may travel freely over the Republic henceforth without payment. Juan Algomero is at your orders. " An officer smartly uniformed, with a sword at his side, was at the rear of the car. He was bound for the front, he said, to lay down his life for his country. His only baggage consisted of four wooden bird-cages full of meadowlarks. Farther to the rear two men sat across the aisle from each other, each with a white sack containing something that moved and clucked. As soon as the train started these bags were opened to disgorge two large roosters, who wandered up and down the aisles eating crumbs and cigarette butts. The two owners immediately raised their voices. "Cock-fight, señores! Five pesos on this valiant and handsome rooster. Five pesos, señores! " The males at once deserted their seats and rushed clamoring toward the center of the car. Not one of them appeared to lack the necessary five dollars. In ten minutes the two promoters were kneeling in the middle of the aisle, throwing their birds. And, as we rattled along, swaying from side to side, swooping down into the gullies and laboring up the other bank, a whirling mass of feathers and flashing steel rolled up and down the aisle. That over, a one-legged youth stood up and played "Whistling Rufus" on a tin flute. Someone had a leather bottle of tequila, of which we all took a swig. From the rear of the car came shouts of "Vamonos a bailar! Come on and dance! " And in a moment five couples, all men, of course, were madly two-stepping. A blind old peasant was assisted to climb upon his seat, where he quaveringly recited a long ballad about the heroic exploits of the great General Maclovio Herrera. Everybody was silently attentive and showered pennies into the old man's sombrero. Occasionally there floated back to us the singing of the soldiers on the box-cars in front and the sound of their shots as they caught sight of a coyote galloping through the mesquite. Then everybody in our car would make a rush for the windows, pulling at their revolvers, and shoot fast and furiously.

All the long afternoon we ambled slowly south, the western rays of the sun burning as they struck our faces. Every hour or so we stopped at some station, shot to pieces by one army or the other during the three years of Revolution; there the train would be besieged by vendors of cigarettes, pine-nuts, bottles of milk, camotes, and tamales rolled in corn-husks. Old women, gossiping, descended from the train, built themselves a little fire and boiled coffee. Squatting there, smoking their corn-husk cigarettes, they told one another interminable love stories.