The General and the Jaguar (29 page)

Due to the inadequate weight-carrying capacity of the airplanes, it was impossible to carry even sufficient food, water or
clothing on many of the reconnaissance flights. During their flights the pilots were frequently caught in snow, rain, and
hail storms which because of their inadequate clothing, invariably caused considerable suffering. In several instances, the
pilots were compelled to make forced landings in desert and hostile country, 50 to 70 miles from the nearest troops. In every
case, the airplanes were abandoned or destroyed and the pilots, after experiencing all possible suffering due to the lack
of food and water, would finally work their way on foot, through alkali deserts and mountains, to friendly troops, usually
arriving thoroughly exhausted as a result of these hardships.

The maiden voyage into Mexico was just the beginning of the squadron’s harrowing experiences. The very next day, March 20,
Lieutenant Thomas Bowen was turning to make a landing when his machine was caught in a whirlwind, stalled, and went into a
partial nosedive. Bowen managed to escape with a broken nose and numerous bruises, but the airplane was completely destroyed.

In early April, two airplanes flew from San Geronimo to Chihuahua City to deliver dispatches to Marion Letcher, the American
consul. In one airplane was Lieutenant Herbert Dargue with Captain Foulois as observer. The second airplane was flown by Lieutenant
Joseph Carberry with Captain Townsend Dodd as observer. By prearrangement, Dargue and Foulois, who were carrying the original
dispatches, were to land on the south side of the city. Carberry and Dodd, who were carrying duplicate copies, were to land
on the north side.

The two planes reached their prearranged locations without any trouble. Foulois got out to take the dispatches into town and
instructed Dargue to fly to the north side of the city and join the other plane. “As I left the ground,” Dargue later told
a correspondent for the
Washington Post,
“I saw a squad of Carrancista soldiers drop to their knees and fire at my plane.” Upon hearing the gunshots, Foulois raced
back, began screaming at the soldiers to stop, and was promptly arrested. As he was marched to jail, followed by a surly mob,
he saw a U.S. citizen and urged him to contact the American consul and tell him what had happened.

Dargue managed to fly to the north side of the city, where he met Carberry and his plane. (His partner, Captain Dodd, had
already left to deliver his duplicates.) The two airplanes soon attracted another mob. “There was quite a crowd of natives
and Carrancista soldiers standing around, and it was easy to see that they weren’t any too friendly. Carberry and I had both
seen a larger field near an American factory (about six miles from the city), and we decided to fly over there, where we would
have protection,” Dargue continued.

While the two pilots discussed their plans, the crowd drew closer. “The natives were crowding around the planes, cutting off
pieces of fabric for souvenirs, burning holes in the plane with cigarettes, and tampering with the rigging. We inspected Carberry’s
plane and found that they had taken the pins for the elevator and rudder, so we fixed them up with nails,” Dargue remembered.

Carberry cranked up his engine. With the mob shouting, he taxied down the field and rose into the air. Dargue took off next,
the crowd pelting him with stones. He had only flown a short way when the top section of the fuselage blew off, requiring
a forced landing. When he got out, he saw people jumping up and down on the aircraft part and chased them off.

At that moment, a photographer appeared to take a picture of the aviator and his plane. Playing for time, Dargue would move
just as the photographer was about to snap the shutter, blurring the image. The photographer would then have to repose him
and return to his camera. “For more than 30 minutes, he kept the photographer on the verge of hysterics and the crowd interested
by moving just as the shutter was about to be snapped. He posed and reposed, and the crowd forgot its ire,” the
Post
reported. Finally a group of more sympathetic Carrancista soldiers arrived and dispersed the crowd. The airplanes were repaired
and a few days later they returned to Pershing’s advance base.

Dargue soon found himself in trouble again. While reconnoitering roads near Chihuahua City with Robert Willis, he recalled,
“We passed over a precipice and hit the most terrific air bump I have ever met. It was so severe that it bent the crankshaft
and put the motor out of commission. I saw a little sandbed below and headed for it. There wasn’t enough room for a landing
and I knew a crash was coming, but I had enough control to turn on a wing and light in a clump of trees which broke our fall.”

The two men were both knocked unconscious. Willis was the first to awaken. His feet were caught between the engine bed and
gasoline tank and he had a deep gash in his head. “I thought he [Dargue] had probably thought me dead or gone off for help.
After a time I heard him groan.”

After they had bandaged each other, they burned the plane and began walking in the direction of the nearest U.S. Army camp,
which was sixty-five miles away. They tried to maintain a schedule of walking for an hour and then resting for ten minutes
but soon grew delirious from thirst and hunger. “There was a little town ahead of us called Bustillos,” remembered Dargue,
“and we were both watching it when we fell asleep. We slept for exactly an hour and then occurred the most peculiar experience
I have ever had. We both awoke suddenly, both sitting upright and both staring toward Bustillos. There we saw four American
Army automobiles, moving in our direction, as if they were searching for us. I knew both of us saw them, for we sat there
for some time and discussed them, wondering how they had happened to become anxious about us when there was no check on our
movements and no way of knowing where we were. Then, while we watched them, the cars slowly disappeared and the town was as
empty as ever.” It was the first of many hallucinations they would suffer before finally reaching safety.

TO GENERAL PERSHING,
the hostility that Foulois and his pilots encountered was just one more piece of evidence that proved the Carrancistas had
no intention of helping him capture Villa. In fact, it seemed that troops of the de facto government were doing everything
to obstruct his efforts. Similarly, the inhabitants in the villages and towns were also turning against the U.S. soldiers.
As one captain put it, “The sentiment of the people in this section is growing stronger and more bitter against Americans
on account of the presence of U.S. troops in Mexico.”

Occasionally, though, friendly residents visited his camp, mostly to sell food or gawk at the large horses and equipment.
One evening, when spring had returned to the land, a wagon materialized in the blue dusk and began slowly rolling toward him.
It was filled with musicians—a violinist, guitar player, cornetist, and bass viol player—dressed in rough cotton garb of peons.
They were on their way home from a birthday party and wondered if the soldiers would like to hear some music. The men nodded
enthusiastically and the visitors arranged themselves in a semicircle and began to play.

The musicians played Spanish love songs, full of yearning and pathos, and quick-tempoed tunes of
bailes.
This was the music that Pancho Villa had often danced to; even as his troops were laying siege to one city or another he
would slip away to a dance, lumber around the floor in his great heavy field boots, and return at dawn to direct the military
campaign. Glancing slyly at their hosts, the musicians ended their performance with “La Cucaracha,” the many-stanzaed song
that celebrated Villa’s military victories and romantic exploits:

A hat was passed and the soldiers filled it with silver. Someone begged the musicians to play one last song:
“La Paloma,” por favor.
Shrugging their shoulders, they began. The melody was beautiful and filled with longing that matched the fading light and
the mood of the homesick soldiers. Suddenly one of Pershing’s aides held up his hand. Confused and alarmed, the musicians
stopped and the journalists looked uncomfortably at one another. The song, it seemed, had been a favorite of the general’s
late wife. Everyone looked toward Pershing, who had moved farther away to study the mountains. For a moment, the peaks glowed
with a red transparent light and the flat, pale rocks on the hillsides resembled fish scales. Then the color vanished and
the mountains resumed their immutable shapes. Pershing returned to the campfire and asked the musicians to keep playing. So
they finished the song, passed the hat once more, climbed back into the creaking wagon, and disappeared into the night.

D
YSPEPTIC AND DISTRACTED,
always distant from his men, Pershing was not a man who inspired affection. But respect he had plenty of, for he shared equally
in the hardships, and although he was meticulous and reserved in his personal habits, he understood the needs of his soldiers
and let them have their dice and poker games and even went so far as to establish a “sanitary village”—a sanctioned whorehouse—at
the expedition’s field headquarters, which was guarded by the military police, and where both customers and local prostitutes
were regularly inspected for venereal disease.

Such entertainment was not for him. Pershing kept his focus on one thing: the hunt for Pancho Villa. Suspecting that Villa
might be heading toward Parral or the Durango state line, Pershing again sought to entrap him. Leaving Colonel Dodd and the
horse soldiers of the Seventh to scour the mountainous country southwest of Guerrero, he sent three more columns south. The
three roving squadrons formed a trident pointing toward Parral: Colonel William Brown and a squadron of Buffalo Soldiers from
the Tenth would search the roads to the east; Major Frank Tompkins, who had chased the Villistas from Columbus, would drive
down the middle; and Major Robert Howze, Eleventh Cavalry, would hunt the rugged trails to the west.

Within a day or two, Frank Tompkins and his provisional squadron of one hundred men had left the others behind. Tompkins was
a distinguished-looking soldier, with thick hair going gray at the temples and an arrogant thrust to his chest. The son and
grandson of West Point graduates, he had eschewed his own slot at the academy in order to enter the army early and speed up
his advancement. He was a brave and energetic officer, but extremely contemptuous of all things Mexican. Now this pugnacious
and opinionated man was the spearhead of the new advance.

Exultant at his new freedom, Tompkins ordered the horses into a trot, a gait that, paradoxically, was less tiring than a walk
and allowed them to make about seven miles per hour. The rider at the front of the column used hand signals to indicate the
pace: the right hand, raised briskly several times, was the signal to trot and the same hand held horizontally above the head
meant slow down. The soldiers rode two abreast whenever the trail allowed and the horses eyed each other with a competitive
playfulness. The countryside streaked by in muted tones of grays and greens. The horses that had managed to survive the first
few weeks in Mexico had grown leaner and stronger and were now capable of marching for thirty to thirty-five miles a day on
half rations. The nights were warmer, too, and both man and beast slept better and awoke less fatigued. Only the pack mules,
which stood perhaps fourteen hands high and weighed eight hundred pounds, continued to lag behind. Their pace was somewhat
understandable; they were often loaded down with machine guns and supplies that were equal to half their weight, and no amount
of cajoling could make them go faster.