Amazing Tales for Making Men Out of Boys (40 page)
Read Amazing Tales for Making Men Out of Boys Online
Authors: Neil Oliver
For General Cos there was worse to come. By December he had been brought to bay by a few hundred Texas volunteers in the chapel of an old Spanish mission station close by the San Antonio River. Its name was the Mission San Antonio de Valero but most folk close by knew it by the Spanish name for the cottonwood trees that grew around it: Alamo. Cos surrendered and was allowed to leave along with his surviving men. With their tails between their legs they were allowed to skulk home to Mexico. While many of his fellow Texians celebrated their eviction of the Mexican Army, Houston urged caution and continued vigilance. He could see the writing on the wall even if no one else could: that Santa Anna would seek revenge, and that the Mexican forces far outnumbered anything the fledgling Republic of Texas could put in their path. He pledged to fight but he wanted to do it his own way—by avoiding a head-on confrontation and using guerilla tactics to harass any Mexican invasion column. Once he had the larger animal bleeding from enough wounds, he would bring it to battle at a time and place of his own choosing.
Unfortunately for Houston, while the provisional government had made him commander-in-chief of its army, they stopped short of giving him total control over all of its would-be fighting men. Colonel James Fannin was one of them, and against Houston’s express wishes, he was able to lead a force of volunteers south, apparently to take the fight directly to Santa Anna. His campaign was shambolic from the outset, largely due to his inability to maintain discipline among the men. As he approached the city of Matamoros, on the Mexico/Texas border, he learned that one General Jose Urrea was marching toward him with a large force. Finally appreciating that discretion is the better part of valor, he withdrew 25 miles back in the direction he had come from and holed up in a town called Goliad, near San Antonio.
Houston’s worst dreams were, anyway, coming true. Santa Anna himself, his macho pride wounded beyond endurance by the drubbing meted out to his brother-in-law, was marching north at the head of an army 4,000-strong. Reinforcements were already gathering on the Rio Grande ready to join him and push into Texas like a juggernaut. Thanks to Fannin, Houston’s available fighting force was cut in two and he had now to find a way to slow down the Mexicans and give himself time to regroup. With Santa Anna en route to San Antonio, Houston sent Jim Bowie to round up the hundred or so soldiers still holding the nearby Alamo after the defeat of Cos the previous December. Bowie arrived at the mission station in mid-January, with orders to get the men and ammunition moving and to blow up the buildings. Houston knew Santa Anna would be trouble enough without gifting him buildings ideal for housing his soldiers. The Alamo was too big to be successfully defended by a small force and destruction and orderly withdrawal from the area seemed like the most sensible course of action.
But when Bowie met with the station commander, Colonel James Neill, he immediately had second thoughts about abandoning the place. Neill had been hard at work positioning the artillery he had available to him, reorganizing the interior of the compound and generally strengthening the fortifications. It no longer looked much at all like the house of God; more like a fort. Apart from anything else, Bowie was a fighting man, a duelist with a lethal reputation. Some said he was the most dangerous fellow in all the world. How likely was it that such a man—a man who’d gone so far as to design and make his own killing knife, who had never yet turned his back on a fight even when grievously outnumbered—would walk away from this one? There are, after all, some men who simply will not be told. In a letter from the Alamo dated February 2, Bowie wrote: “Colonel Neill and myself have come to the solemn resolution that we will rather die in these ditches than give it up to the enemy.”
William Travis, lawyer, adventurer and runaway husband, was by now a lieutenant colonel in Houston’s Texas Army. In February he was sent by the provisional government at the head of a force of around 30 cavalrymen to take command of the forces at the Alamo. Neill’s family had been taken ill and he had been given permission to go to their aid. Bowie was angry about the new command structure at first. For a start he was older than Travis and, as far as he was concerned at least, he bore the rank of full Colonel. More to the point, he was armed with far, far more experience in the business of fighting. There was a stand-off and a battle of wills before Bowie agreed to lead the volunteer infantry, while Travis would command the regular army and volunteer cavalry. In the event, he was taken ill not long afterward and spent most of the siege lying on what would become his deathbed. Davy Crockett—the so-called King of the Wild Frontier—came to join the fight as well, along with a handful of fellow Tennesseans.
On February 24, Santa Anna arrived in San Antonio at the head of as many as 6,000 men. He had advanced into Texas beneath a black flag—a declaration that no quarter would be given to those determined to oppose him. He at once demanded the surrender of the occupants of Mission San Antonio de Valera. It was then that Travis responded with a cannon shot toward the assembled host, before placing his letter to “the people of Texas and all Americans in the world” into the hands of a mounted courier, Albert Martin, and sending him on his way.
There was precious little support to be had. More letters were sent in the coming days—at least one to Fannin, holed up in nearby Goliad, but he sent no one to bolster the tiny band now facing the might of Santa Anna. Word reached the town of Gonzales, home of the infamous “Come And Take It” cannon, and around 30 Texians there answered the call. Approaching the fort under cover of darkness, they slipped through the defenses to join the beleaguered
few. There would be no more reinforcements, no more chance of help. Those now within the walls of the Alamo, around 180 fighting men—were all there would ever be.
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers
…
Travis knew, furthermore, that plans were afoot to split Texas from Mexico once and for all. Some 150 miles away, in the town of Washington-on-the-Brazos, a delegation had gathered to compose the Texas Declaration of Independence. While the talks went on, and while efforts got underway to raise a full army for the fight ahead, Travis saw it as the duty of the men now stubbornly dug in behind the walls of the Alamo to keep Santa Anna occupied. If he and his thousands were besieging the Alamo, then they weren’t off doing greater harm to the nascent independence movement elsewhere.
February gave way to March and still there was nothing for the defenders of the Alamo to do but watch the build up of enemy forces beyond the walls. By March 3 it was clear their situation was hopeless. Sometime that day or the next Travis had the defenders gather in the courtyard. He made the situation plain to all of them—as if anyone there could have been in any doubt—and stressed once again that there would be no reinforcements, no relief.
“We must die,” he told them. “Our business is not to make a fruitless effort to save our lives, but to choose the manner of our death.”
He said it was up to every man to choose what he would do. There would be no shame for any who decided it was better to leave the Alamo and take his chances trying to make it through the enemy lines to safety.
So saying, he drew his saber from his belt and used the tip of it to draw a long line in the sand and dirt at his feet. Only those willing and happy to join him and fight, come what may, should
step across it, he said. At that, a French veteran of the Napoleonic Wars by the name of Louis “Moses” Rose held up his hand and asked permission to leave. Travis stepped forward and shook him by the hand. He wished the man good luck and God speed and sent him away. (“By God, I wasn’t ready to die,” said Rose later, and it is because of his decision–and his successful run through the Mexican lines—that we know about Travis and his line in the sand.)
…
he which hath no stomach to this fight, let him depart
…
we would not die in that man’s company. That fears his fellowship to die with us
…
With the Frenchman gone, Travis turned once more to his remaining men.
“Those of you prepared to give their lives in freedom’s cause, come over to me,” he said.
Every one of them stepped across the line—all except Bowie. By now bedridden, he had had his bed carried out into the courtyard so he could hear what Travis had to say. Now he called to Crockett and a few of the other men and had them carry him over the line as well, bed and all.
Before dawn on March 6, with the sun still absent from the sky, the defenders heard the sound of a bugle from beyond the walls. Whether they recognized it or not, it was a tune called El Deguello that had been brought to Spain by the Moors. The most literal translation of the name is “slit-throat” and it was played at the bullfight to signal the sword was about to be used to finish off the cornered beast. For the Mexican soldiers gathered beyond the walls of the Alamo it meant no quarter was to be extended to those they found alive inside.
The best part of 3,000 howling, bellowing infantrymen then charged full tilt. From their positions on the walls above, the assembled Texians, Kentuckians, New Yorkers, Pennsylvanians, Tennesseans and the rest picked off the front-runners with
well-directed fire. The Mexicans were armed with smooth bore muskets, and at first the superior range and marksmanship of the defenders’ rifles took a toll. More than 600 attackers would fall in the next few minutes. Sheer weight of numbers made the difference from the start however, and within moments the Mexicans were using ladders to scale the walls. Travis was on the north wall when the firing started. He was seen to drop more than one attacker with his rifle before tackling another who lunged toward him from the top of a ladder. Travis knocked him to the ground with the butt of a pistol and was readying himself to fire again when an enemy musket ball hit him square in the forehead, killing him instantly.
The Mexicans came on in ever greater numbers, throwing themselves at the defenders. The fight spilled into the courtyard and then from room to room in the buildings of the interior. By the end, when there was neither time nor room to reload weapons, the fighting was hand-to-hand as each man chose his last opponent and fought to the death. There are as many accounts of Jim Bowie’s final moments as there were Mexicans at the Alamo but the most often repeated—and the one the man himself would doubtless have preferred—has him sitting bolt upright on his bed fighting to the very last with his pistols and the knife that bore his name. When news of his death reached his mother she said only, “I’ll wager no wounds were found in his back.”
There are reports that various women and other non-combatants survived the Battle of the Alamo, but not one fighting man lived to tell the tale. Afterward their bodies were burned in a great funeral pyre, on the orders of Santa Anna himself.
The dictator marched on. A worse fate awaited Fannin and his men at Goliad. Defeated in battle by the Mexicans they were marched onto a road outside the fort and shot by firing squads. Having seen all 350 of his men butchered, Fannin himself was executed while bound to a chair. Like the dead of the Alamo, the
victims of what came to be known as the Goliad Massacre were heaped in piles and set ablaze, again on Santa Anna’s explicit orders.
But in the end, Travis was right. The 13-day siege of the Alamo had given the provisional government precious time to arm and organize the Texas forces. Houston cornered the Mexicans at a place called San Jacinto on April 21. He was mounted on his great white warhorse, Saracen, and though he knew he was heavily outnumbered he rallied his forces with a cry that was new then but would soon be graven into the very rocks of America:
“Trust in God and fear not,” he shouted, waving his hat around his head. “Remember Goliad! Remember the Alamo!”
Houston’s victory that day was absolute—600 Mexicans slain and at least as many more taken prisoner. Among the captives was General Santa Anna himself. He was compelled to sign a document granting Texan independence—which the government back in Mexico City promptly denounced. Their petulance however, could not change the facts. With the defeat of Santa Anna, the independence of the Republic of Texas was assured. Lamenting the loss to his nation, the Mexican secretary of war, Jose Maria Tornel y Mendivil wrote:
The loss of Texas will inevitably result in the loss of New Mexico and the Californias. Little by little our territory will be absorbed until only an insignificant part is left to us…Our national existence…will end like those weak meteors that, from time to time, shine fitfully in the firmament and disappear.
Accurate and prescient though those sentiments undoubtedly were, they have nothing of the poignancy of Travis’s last letter from the Alamo. It was dated March 3—perhaps the very day when he
drew his line in the sand—and sent to a friend no more than three days or so before his death. Much has been written about the commander of that battle, and not all of it complimentary. Some point out that he was vain and proud and that he thought so highly of himself he had bothered to write an autobiography while still in his early twenties. The detractors also point out that, whatever his wife did or didn’t do, he was wrong to turn his back on his children. But in those last days, in that lost and desperate place, at least some of his final thoughts were of his son:
“Take care of my little boy,” he wrote. “If the country should be saved, I may make for him a splendid fortune. But if the country should be lost and I should perish, he will have nothing but the proud recollection that he is the son of a man who died for his country.”
This story shall the good man tell his son…
There’s an old saying that a coward dies a thousand deaths while a hero dies just one. Fear of hurt—and worse—might well be harder to cope with than the harm itself. Men like Travis, Bowie and Crockett either understood that truth instinctively or learned it along the way. They paid for their beliefs with their lives, but the manner of their deaths has granted them an immortality of sorts. They will never be forgotten and the light of their stubborn bravery burns forever. Scott in his turn carried a torch through the darkness of his own journey and when the time came, he too passed it on.
Manly men don’t concern themselves overmuch with the big picture—they don’t weigh up whether their sacrifice will win the war or guarantee the applause of a grateful nation.
When all’s said and done it’s about having
“‘Done things’ just for the doing, letting babblers tell the story.”
Manly men do what they set out to do because anything less is to let the side down.
Scott was the underdog when he set out with his team on the evening of November 1, 1911. He was accompanied by Edward Wilson, Edward Atkinson (expedition surgeon), Henry “Birdie” Bowers, Titus Oates, Apsley Cherry-Garrard, Charles Wright, and
Petty officers Tom Crean, Edgar “Taff” Evans and Patrick Keohane. A two-man team using 23 dogs would bring up the rear.
Despite the pall cast over the proceedings by the knowledge that Amundsen and his more experienced party were out there ahead of them on the ice, Scott remained determined that they should and would do their duty. The Pole was the target and that was all he would allow himself to think about.
In his journal he wrote:
The future is in the lap of the gods; I can think of nothing left undone to deserve success.
What he couldn’t know was that Amundsen and his team of four companions had set out two weeks before—and by the time Scott and his men were bidding farewell to their comrades at Cape Evans, the Norwegians were the best part of 200 miles further down the route toward the Pole.
Scott’s main party was using ponies—the tractors having left the week before, heading for the Great Ice Barrier with heavy loads of food and fuel. Right from the start the animals found the going heavy and covered only a handful of miles a day. On November 21 they caught up with the tractor team—Teddy Evans, Chief Stoker Lashly, Day and Hooper, the tractors having been abandoned miles back in the snow. The new technology had failed and the men had been reduced to the old nightmare of man-hauling.
The Norwegians, many miles ahead, were having no such problems. They’d set out with 52 dogs, and Amundsen had calculated, with ruthless precision, the day on which each animal would become more useful as a future food supply than as a beast of burden. When that day came the animal was dispatched with a bullet to the head and set aside as food for the journey home.
Trailing 200 miles or more behind him, Scott was being reminded that he was not—had never been—a lucky man. By the time they
were on the Beardmore Glacier they were suffering badly in atrocious weather conditions. The first week in December brought the worst blizzard Scott had yet experienced in the Antarctic. For four days the men were trapped in their tents eating food that should have been propelling them toward the Pole. When the snowfall finally stopped, the temperature was unseasonably warm, creating a scum of slush that ensured everything from clothes to sleeping bags remained soaking wet, day and night. By now, and just to compound the misery, they were man-hauling, too. The horses had found the going impossibly hard and had been shot, skinned and turned into a food supply.
On December 14, Scott ordered the dog team to turn back. They had delivered their food stores to the lower part of the Beardmore Glacier—ready for the main party’s return—and there was no point in their going any further or consuming more of the dwindling supplies. On the same day, Amundsen and his men reached the Pole. They had experienced next to nothing of the hardship that was a daily reality to the British team. Their experienced handling of their dogs—their suitability for the job in hand—meant the two parties might as well have existed on different planets.
Toward the top of the glacier Scott made his first decision about which of the 12 men should keep going, and which foursome should be sent back to Cape Evans. Only four would make the final push and so this was just the first of two heartbreaking judgment calls for the leader. Atkinson, Cherry-Garrard, Keohane and Wright were the first to turn around and head for home—and were bitterly disappointed. So much struggle and sacrifice could surely only be made worthwhile by a share of the final glory. The remaining eight split into two teams of four—one consisting of Scott, Oates, Wilson and Taff Evans; the other of Bowers, Crean, Lashly and Teddy Evans.
Beyond the Beardmore Glacier, out on the polar plateau itself, spirits were briefly raised as for the first time they felt they could
almost see the end of the journey. On January 3 Teddy Evans, Lashly and Crean were told they would be going home. Scott had changed his plans at the last possible moment and would lead four, rather than three, over the last stage. There’s no general agreement among historians about why he suddenly added an extra man to the party bound for the Pole. Perhaps he just wanted to allow as many of them as possible to share the glory. The homeward-bound trio accompanied Scott, Wilson, Taff Evans, Bowers and Oates for a few more miles the following day. Eventually, and amid much sadness, Scott insisted they had come far enough and the final farewells were said.
On January 16, Bowers spotted a dark speck off in the distance. It seemed out of place in the landscape. A few more miles of painful hauling in the traces revealed the truth. It was a flag on top of a cairn and stretching away from it in two directions were the tracks of sleds. By then, the Norwegian flag had been flying at the South Pole for the best part of a month, but for Scott and his men the disappointment was fresh, and cut as deeply as a newly sharpened blade.
They erected their own Union Jack, given to them by Queen Alexandra, and posed for photographs. A thread was used to operate the shutter remotely and take the famous snap shot of all five of them together.
Scott wrote in his journal about how sorry he was for his “loyal companions” and how he expected the journey back to Cape Evans would be “dreadfully tiring and monotonous.”
With hope and expectation gone from their souls, the men began to falter. Wilson suffered bouts of snow blindness and for the rest there was frostbite to hands, feet and faces, as well as strain injuries to muscles in legs and backs. The swelling of one of Oates’s feet began to give cause for real concern.
At no point did they get any breaks from the weather and every step of every mile was a horrible slog through bitterly cold temperatures and thick snowfalls. On February 3, Taff Evans took a heavy
fall from which he never fully recovered. As the days wore on his mood changed and his personality seemed to disintegrate. Wilson thought concussion might have been to blame, but more recent thought suggests the man may have been suffering the early symptoms of scurvy.
Whatever the cause, on February 16 Scott wrote, “Evans has nearly broken down in brain, we think. He is absolutely changed from his normal, self-reliant self.”
The following day, as they hauled and dragged as usual, Evans stepped out of the traces. He lagged further and further behind and, when his companions lost sight of him, they struggled back to find him collapsed in the snow. They carried him on a sled until they could make camp and then got him inside one of the tents. He never regained consciousness and died at around 10 p.m. that evening.
“A very terrible day,” wrote Scott.
Down off the glacier and on toward the Barrier. Still there was no respite and no help from nature. To add to their woes, the men were finding a shortage of fuel at each successive supply dump. Now even the prospect of a hot meal at the beginning and end of the day became too much to ask.
Oates was the next to be lost. His condition had deteriorated steadily and as March progressed his badly frostbitten feet became too inflamed and painful to walk on. At this point, Scott became understandably confused about dates, but around March 16 or 17 the men awoke to yet another blizzard and Oates asked to be left in his sleeping bag. His companions refused and the Soldier struggled on for one more day. He hoped not to wake next morning, but did—to hear the blizzard still howling.
He roused himself one last time and told the rest of them: “I am just going outside and may be some time.”
He was never seen again.
Scott wrote:
He went out into the blizzard and we have not seen him since. Though we tried to dissuade him, we knew it was the act of a brave man and an English gentleman.
The date of March 17 would have been especially significant to Oates: it was his 32nd birthday.
Scott, Bowers and Wilson were, by then, within 10 or 11 miles of One Ton Depot. Cherry-Garrard had waited there with the dog team for several days, until shortage of fuel and worsening weather forced the return to Cape Evans.
The same unrelenting blizzard forced the trio into their tent once more. They had mere scraps of food and no more fuel for heating or cooking.
They knew how close they were to the depot and the hope of salvation, but every time they thought about attempting the final push, the weather defied them.
“I do not think we can hope for any better things now,” wrote Scott. “We shall stick it out to the end, but we are getting weaker, of course, and the end cannot be far. It seems a pity, but I do not think I can write more.”
It was March 29, 1911.
