By K.K.
(Based On Actual Events)
“ANTHONY! Get UP! They’re coming!” A hoarse voice bellowed to him, shattering sleep. Anthony Wolf fought to hold onto his last dream for one more second—a shining image of he and his family surveying their promised acres of new Texas homeland—and then opened his bleary eyes. Bloody hell, when AREN’T the bastards coming? They march up to get their heads blown off every day.
His eyes took in the filthy courtyard of the Bexar Mission, still ruled by shadows and torchlight. It seemed to be just before dawn, the sky above him shifting from black to indigo. Organized chaos raged around him, as his new brothers in arms scrambled to their posts. Over their shouts and commands, Anthony could hear a new sound. Bugling from beyond the Mission walls: long, low notes that seemed to resonate with evil.
He staggered to his feet, searched for his flintlock, found it and slung it. Nearby were Juan Abamillo and Carlos Espalier, their leathery faces both turning milk-white with horror. Juan crossed himself. “Deguello…” He croaked.
“ Santa Maria…” Carlos whispered.
Wolf stared at his comrades and felt cold, colder than dawn in March could explain. In Anthony’s eyes, Juan and Carlos had spines of iron. For the last twelve days he had watched them fight their own ex-countrymen like mad dogs, laughing, cursing, even singing at times. Yesterday a cannon-shot had smashed through one of the ramparts just between them, spattering them with dust and gravel. They had merely wiped the grit from their eyes, aimed and fired back.
Now, suddenly, something had both of them paralyzed with fear.
“Lads…what is it? What’s Deguello?” Wolf asked.
Juan turned to him with his dark eyes brimming with doom. “Deguello is bugle-call, senor. Deguello means ‘no quarter’.”
“Is the Death March.” Carlos added.
The cold exploded through Anthony Wolf’s body as he heard it, freezing him from the inside out. He felt the hair on his body bristle, and an involuntary shudder rippled through his stomach and groin. Now he, too, was paralyzed…but only for a moment. The point had been hammered home: today would be his last day on earth.
His hopes had slowly dwindled during twelve days of pure slaughter; each day at the parapet he saw a rippling stream of foppish blue uniforms surrounding the Mission of Bexar…but beyond that blue stream was a wide, white lake of reinforcements. Pitiful soldiers: mostly untrained peasants and Indian conscripts wearing sailcloth smocks. They barely knew how to fire a musket…scores of them died with every attack. Colonel Travis had come to call them “ghosts in the making”, and Anthony had actually begun to feel sorry for them. He’d concentrated his fire on the blue-coated Mexican regulars instead, since they were supposedly the ‘pride of the Mexican army’. Indeed, one of Anthony’s hopes had been that the enemy’s officers would finally take stock of their ever-mounting losses and lose morale…but if this infernal bugling was the ‘Death March’, then it was not to be.
Anthony’s breath misted out of him, into the morning air. He fancied it was hope itself taking flight, and perhaps that was what the cold feeling was: his mind, body and soul all saying their farewells to each other. Now that they had said their farewells, however, the cold feeling was gone. In its place was a strange liberation, almost relief. He was truly a Wolf at bay now, with nothing left to fear.
A smile crept onto Anthony Wolf’s face, and grew sickeningly wide. A sound between a chuckle and a snarl issued from him, and now Juan and Carlos looked afraid of him. Anthony turned back to his bedroll, and unsheathed Punch and Judy…his prized cutlass and main-gauche, crafted especially for him by his father. Punch was slightly shorter and thinner than the typical cutlass, but therefore much lighter. In contrast, Judy was a left-hand dagger long enough to almost qualify as a shortsword. His father had made them when he’d discovered that his son was not only a gifted fencer, but with the dexterity to fight two-handed. Anthony had not used them since the War of 1812, but he’d always kept them clean, oiled and honed to razor sharpness. He thrusted Punch between his belt and right hip, and Judy on the left.
“Let’s get to the parapets, lads.” Wolf said. “We’ll make this ‘Deguello’ a march to their own deaths.” He sprinted for the north wall without looking back.
There was more than enough room at the north wall parapet, since three of the Mission’s walls were under attack now, and the Mission had perhaps ten-score men to defend it. The north wall was particularly vulnerable, however, since Mexican cannons had been raining iron into it for over a week. The ramparts had been blasted to smithereens, and Col. Travis had ordered makeshift defenses set in their place: crude, temporary covers of cowhide wrapped around piles of dirt, braced by sharpened spears from cottonwood branches.
Behind one such shelter, Wolf saw the stream, and the lake.
The blue stream was surging towards the base of the north wall, with the soldiers in the forefront carrying two scaling ladders each. They roared unguessable war cries and stomped over the bodies of their fallen. Their escopetas—outdated English-style muskets that fired only when they felt like it—were slung on their backs, already fixed with bayonets. The blue stream of uniforms was dissipating into rivulets as it came closer to the walls, but the lake behind them was the true threat.
The lake of white sailcloth smocks behind the blue stream was everywhere…everywhere, and they all had guns. Antiquated, to be sure, and unskilled in their firing, but they all had guns. And now they were behind earthworks, even harder to shoot at. All four thousand of them.
By all rights, they should have taken the Mission San Antonio de Valero days ago, through sheer force of numbers, but they hadn’t. One reason was their sickening ineptitude as soldiers,
Another was the desperate, murderous fury of the Mission’s defenders, but the most important reason was Colonel Travis himself.
Most of the American defenders of the Mission had cursed the day their beloved James Bowie fell ill, and transferred command of the Mission to William Barrett Travis. Apparently the Americans felt Bowie was some sort of frontier demigod, and Travis was too young to be trusted. Indeed, he had spent nearly the first week of the siege in his office, writing desperate appeals for aid to anyone who would listen.
Then, realizing no aid was forthcoming; Travis had assembled the defenders and told them that grim truth. Then he had drawn a line in the sand with his cavalry saber, and asked all the defenders who were prepared to defend the Mission to the end to step over it. As Wolf remembered, all but one of them did…and the one man who’d declined was a sick and feeble man in his seventies. Stepping across it himself, Wolf took a look at Travis and saw how young he was…twenty-seven years old.
Strewth! If he’s made Lieutenant Colonel at twenty-seven, the lad must know something, Wolf had thought…and he’d been right.
Now Colonel Travis was commanding the four stout cannons on the north rampart, and he continually bellowed “FIRE!” at every opportunity. He would quickly glance at his bombardiers after each order, fire his own flintlock rifle, roar “RELOAD!!!” fire his wheel-lock pistol, reload his own weapons, then scream “FIRE!” again, as if he had the practice of slaughter down to an exact science. His voice still could be heard over the thunder of the bombardment.
As he reached the rampart, Wolf peered through a fog of white gunsmoke and saw the Mexicans retreating, as he thought they might. Twelve feet below them were the bodies of those who had the courage to carry the scaling ladders, piled three feet high. Looking down, he saw a bloody hand still quivering in death…an empty eyesocket weeping tears of blood…a now-serene face cratered in half by a cannonball…and more, so much more. Anthony’s empty stomach pitched and rolled as he heard Travis roar “Hurrah, my boys!”
What could be WORTH this? Wolf thought. What the HELL could possibly be worth this?
As the smoke and dust lifted around him, the rising sun made its first glance over the horizon…and Anthony Wolf answered his own question.
Texas was worth this.
Its rolling plains went on for hundreds of miles, in every direction. Not as rich in vegetation as his own green and pleasant land, but there was enough. And if the tales were true, his green and pleasant land could comfortably fit inside this one, ten times over. So much land that Mexico could not control it, and so its governors had made generous offers to anyone who would settle there and civilize it. Anthony Wolf, a far-sailing Englishman with a dream of his own land, had been one of them. On paper, he now owned a hundred and seventy-seven acres, free of any taxes or tariffs for seven years. Now it seemed that his new oath of fealty to Texas and Mexico had become a death sentence. A tyrannical general named Santa Anna had seized control of the entire Mexican government, and was hell-bent on seizing back all of Texas from its new settlers. Anthony wagered he was safely ensconced in one of the houses nearby even now, eating breakfast while he sent his men to their deaths.
Thunder roared again as the Mexicans fired a volley of their own cannon, and their escopetas from behind their earthworks. Anthony ducked below the parapet to avoid the volley, then loaded his own musket with its final shot.
A few days ago he’d heard one of the Americans, Colonel David Crockett, remark to Colonel Travis “Tomorrow I’ll be shooting nails, if I can find any. The day after that, I’ll be shooting stones.” There was barely any ammunition left.
And the Mexicans were charging forward once again. Swarming towards the Mission in three wide columns, bristling with bayonets and scaling ladders. Anthony looked for a blue-coated officer worthy of his final musket-ball, and then realized it made no difference. He shot one of the ladder-carriers instead, in the leg. The snarling soldier stumbled and fell, his ladder serving to trip up his fellows behind him as Anthony had hoped. But then the soldiers behind them either spread around them or ran straight over them.
“FIRE!” bellowed the voice of Colonel Travis again…and it was a moment before the cannons roared in obedience. Were they running low on shot…?
“RELOA—“ Travis began, and never finished the command.
Anthony Wolf looked to his right, and saw the Mission’s commander gazing at the brightening sky, with blood running down his face. His rifle fell from nerveless fingers, and he fell backwards onto the parapet, and was still. The men at his battery shouted his name, but there was scant time to mourn him. A hail of musket-fire forced the defenders on the parapet to take cover once more…and then the scaling ladders appeared on the walls.
“They’re on the walls!” Anthony roared, and he flung his now-useless musket at an approaching Mexican…it wasn’t as much of an attack as it was an opportunity to rid himself of it, and fill his hands with Punch and Judy.
One of the Mexican regulars was coming over the top, and Punch sang through the air with a hiss of steel, catching him in the side of the throat…not quite decapitating him, but enough to cut his neck wholly in half. His battle cry ended abruptly as his head flopped over and his blood pumped through the air. Anthony let the man spasm to death on the wall’s edge, then stabbed Judy’s razored point through the ear of the next man coming up the ladder. His cries were silenced as well.
As fast as he could, Anthony withdrew his blades, set their hilts side-by-side, and swung them mightily to hammer the soldier’s corpse backwards off the parapet. The body fell backwards into the surging mob, and the one below it as well, but the ladder stayed in place, held fast by all the howling furies beneath it. Even now, another ghost-in-the-making was scrambling upwards towards him.
Have a bite from a Wolf, Anthony thought, and drove Punch and Judy downward through the soldier’s back. The man screamed and died, but it made little difference. The rest just kept coming.
He took a moment to look left and right, and saw Juan and Carlos holding the parapet…but giving ground. They had no choice. With no time or space to reload, they were forced to rely on their bayonets…good to hold one or two foes at bay, but not scores.
Anthony decapitated the next soldier coming up the ladder, then felt a musket ball tear through his shoulder. It felt like an angry blacksmith using a hot hammer on him…he roared with pain and almost dropped Judy, but managed to hold her fast.
There was another volley of escopeta fire from below, and Wolf felt iron hornets soaring all around him. Apparently an officer had noticed the wiry Englishman’s wholesale slaughter and had made him a priority target.
Anthony ducked back behind the parapet, and saw Juan Abamillo prepare to bayonet a new foe, and then Juan’s head was gone, smashed off his body from an enemy cannonball. Juan’s headless body fell off the parapet from the impact, and the soldier charged at Anthony instead, with five or more of his comrades at his heels.
As the distance closed between them, another soldier scrambled over the top from the ladder Anthony had been defending. He brought Punch and Judy up and over, into the man’s torso, and shoved his body towards the other charging soldier, like a shield. The other man’s bayonet caught him in the back, and the hapless soldier shrieked in agony, three different blades buried in him.
Strewth! Insult to bloody injury, isn’t it? Anthony slid Punch back out of the dying man, then slashed the bayonet-wielder’s right hand off at the wrist. Even as that foe screamed in rage, two more were charging at him and two more were aiming at him…and yet another was scrambling over the ladder.
Anthony locked an elbow around the thrice-punctured soldier’s neck, then leapt off the parapet, twenty feet down into the inner courtyard of the Mission. At the last moment he twisted the man’s body beneath him, and the man coughed blood into Anthony’s face as he absorbed their impact onto the flagstones…most, but not all of it. A thunderbolt of pain ripped down Anthony’s left leg, making him cry out. Still, he was alive…for the moment…but probably not for too many more.
The Mexican quivered and died beneath him. Anthony struggled off of him and managed to get to his feet. His leg and shoulder felt like they were on fire, but he still stood, his prized blades in his hands. Gasping for breath, he glanced back up at the wall he’d leapt from.
Juan was gone. Carlos was could not be seen, and neither could Colonel Travis or his bombardiers. There were only the Mexicans, pouring over the walls like sheep, howling like men gone mad. From his new position, Anthony felt as if he was in the eye of a storm…a storm of gunshots and blood rather than thunder and rain. The Mexicans were racing down the parapet stairs into the courtyard, and once again dying by the score as they did so. The remaining force of the Mission’s defenders were in the courtyard; outnumbered, uncaring, and lethally savage.
Some fired from what cover could be had; most merely stood their ground, coolly choosing and shooting their targets who were too close to miss. They roared bestial curses, challenges and battle-cries, even louder than their foes who outnumbered them four to one. Anthony saw the river of blue uniforms and white smocks tumble into a surf of dying men…perhaps eighty killed or wounded at once…but then the river surrounded them all, and grew thicker.
After one more scattered volley of defensive fire, there was no more space or time for aiming or reloading. It was hand to hand, now. Clumsy, desperate fighting for those using bayonets, but practically sport for a man used to fighting with a sword in each hand. Dodging, twisting and spinning between the thrusts of the escopetas, Wolf wove a blurry web of razor-sharp death all around him.
Punch opened a soldier’s throat on his left, Judy crashed through another’s temple on his right; two down…Come get your fill, lads…then a stab through the ribs of another, and a slash through another’s leg; two more.
But nearly instantly, more rushed in to take their place, screaming in Spanish. Their bayonets came at him like birds of prey, but Anthony slid between them with catlike grace. Punch and Judy lashed out again, seeking and claiming hearts and eyes. The soldiers fell away from him like puppets cut from their strings. The other two who’d charged him were now locked in combat with other defenders…to his left, young David Cummings, a sixteen-year-old stripling from Pennsylvania, and to his right, a black freeman known only as ‘John’. Even as Anthony recognized them, his pounding heart surged with sorrow for the both of them. Here was a lad who’d marched out of adolescence straight into war, who’d have to find a woman’s embrace in Heaven…and here was a man born into slavery, then set free just in time to die in battle. If any at Bexar had been justified in not crossing Travis’s line in the sand, it was these two. Yet they had crossed it, like the others. Heroes both, heroes all.
John had the upper hand against his foe, but David was losing ground to the larger Mexican. Anthony changed that, leaping to his left and bringing Punch up and over in a savage arc that slashed the Mexican’s head from his shoulders. As he did so, he felt an explosion in his back that sent flames crackling through his nerves. Another musket-ball had found him. Breath poured out of him in a ragged gasp of agony and he stumbled, almost falling until Cummings reached up and steadied him with a free hand. Anthony tried to straighten up, but could only manage a painful slouch; it felt like a blazing serpent was trying to crawl deeper into his body.
“Mr. Wolf…the short barracks…behind us. We can barricade it…” David panted.
“Arrrhhh…” Anthony snarled, fighting back the pain. “And—then what, Master Cummings? A spot of tea? P’rhaps your Colonel Crockett’ll play the fiddle for us…”
John had dispatched his opponent with a lucky bayonet-thrust, and the trio surveyed the chaos around them…heaped corpses, smoke and flames, desperate battle…”Dis must be what Hell look like.” John grunted.
Anthony saw why they were momentarily unchallenged; Colonel Crockett wasn’t playing the fiddle for anyone. He and his loyal Tennesseans had waded farther out into the carnage, fighting like berserkers. The tall, rangy outdoorsman was using his rifle as a club, smashing down every enemy in his path like some ancient god of war. Blood spattered his buckskin clothing as he and his troops cut a merciless swath through the Mexicans.
Seeking easier prey than Crockett and his hell-hounds, another platoon of Mexicans charged towards Anthony and those around him.
Strewth…His cutlass and main-gauche seemed to weigh a hundred pounds each now, but he lifted them once again. “The short barracks it is, then, lads. Keep behind me.” He took a fast glance behind him to see where the door was, then began taking unsteady steps backwards. John and David had been given a moment to reload, and each brought down two more Mexicans as they surged forwards. As they closed in, screaming, Anthony wove the web of steel once more, the cutlass and main-gauche slashing back bayonets left and right. “Get the door!”
They did. A bayonet tore open Anthony’s side as they fought their way back into the short barracks. Devil eat you, bastard! He thought, and threw Judy at his attacker’s face. The blade slashed through the Mexican’s jaw and he recoiled, bawling in pain.
The next moment David was hauling him inside, while John was shoving the door shut against the oncoming horde. Just before it shut them out, Anthony saw the blue and gray flag of the New Orleans Greys being torn down from the top of the Long Barracks. A Mexican soldier planted El Aguila, the red and green flag of Mexico, in its place. He stiffened as a rifle shot tore through him, and died with his hands still on the staff. The door crashed home, and the furious war-cries outside were silenced to a muted din.
John and David set the thick oak beam in place, then threw the bolts home, and thuds of rifle butts against the oaken door began, then stopped. The Mexicans seemed to know it’d take more than rifle butts to break down an iron-banded door. They were safe for the moment…but Anthony knew there were cannons in the courtyard, cannons that would soon be captured and used against them.
He sagged against the wall, his free hand gathering his shirt against the wound on his side. Beyond the fire in his lower back, he could barely feel his legs. Through a gathering mist, he saw John and David scrambling to barricade the door with benches, stools, anything at all.
“Mister Wolf…it’s good to see you. Come here, please, if you can.” Croaked a voice nearby. Anthony shook his head, clearing the mist momentarily, and saw a bedridden figure beckoning from the first room to his left. Squinting, he could see it was Colonel Bowie.
He sat upright in his sickbed; its sheets sodden with the sweat of his terrible fever. His white face was wracked with concentration as he loaded flintlock pistols. There was another man in a chair to his right, a motionless man who gazed at the ceiling, open-mouthed.
Anthony staggered into the room. “Good to see you again ‘s well, Colonel. Sorry it weren’t under better circumstances.”
Colonel Bowie nodded, then looked at the dead man in the chair. “Daniel Cloud, from Kentucky. Very good lawyer as I understand it. Close his eyes for me, would you? I can’t reach him.” He whispered with fading effort.
Anthony came closer and saw that Daniel Cloud’s chest was swathed in bandages, where the blood of several wounds had dried. He remembered Daniel defending the palisade with Colonel Crockett at the beginning of the siege, and taking several musket-balls in the chest in doing so. Anthony closed his sightless eyes.
Bowie spoke again through cracked lips. “He said something very noble on the way here, Mr. Wolf. ‘If we succeed, the Country is ours. It is immense in extent, and fertile in its soil, and will amply reward all our toil. If we fail, death in the cause of liberty and humanity is not cause for shuddering.’” The force of the words seemed to sap his strength; Bowie sagged against his pillows, gasping.
Anthony Wolf wasn’t feeling much better. The mist was returning to cloud his vision, and cold was creeping into his arms and legs, now. “Noble indeed, sir. We shan’t…make our homes…here, as I thought we might. I daresay…we shall make history, though.” He whispered.
Jim Bowie nodded in agreement, and drew a deep breath to speak again. “Please give two of these pistols…to whoever would use them.” He gasped. “And as you’re so expert with a blade…take this…for yourself.” From the nightstand, he picked up the long, wide, shining knife that was his namesake, and handed it to Anthony. As his fingers closed around its hilt, the cold seemed to leave him.
“Thank you, Colonel. We’ll ‘ave tea on the other side, p’rhaps.” Anthony gathered the pistols, and turned away to give them to John and David.
Then a cannonball smashed through the door of their sanctuary, and a cloud of smoke and flying splinters heralded louder, renewed battle cries. As the first of the Mexicans charged over the shattered barricade, Anthony shot him.
“’Ave a bite from a Wolf.” He snarled.
Next he knew, there were bayonets everywhere, all around him, and he thrust the Bowie knife into their midst, over and over again, until the mist before him grew bloody, and he knew no more.
The stacking of dry wood and corpses had taken two hours. At five o’clock that evening, the fire was lit.
Colonel Almonte was by his side, but he did not look at the gigantic pyre. He looked behind him instead, toward a wide, white lake, now rippled with crimson. The lake was formed from the bleeding bodies of his countrymen…sixteen hundred in all. Here, at what would be called The Alamo, the death of each defender had cost eight Mexican lives.
“One more ‘victory’ like this, and we will all go to the Devil.”