The Training Ground by Martin Dugard

Author:Martin Dugard [DUGARD, MARTIN]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS020040
ISBN: 9780316032537
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2008-06-15T16:00:00+00:00

FARTHER TO THE right, Colonel Garland and an injured Major Mansfield were leading a frantic retreat from the outskirts of Monterrey. Those city streets had initially been a sanctuary after the nonstop hail of bullets during their long charge across the plain. The soldiers’ chests had heaved from the dash, sweat flecking their foreheads and darkening the blue armpits of their tunics — yet they had felt deeply elated to still be alive. The euphoria soon wore off. The Americans were new to street fighting and quickly made the fatal mistake of maintaining column formation — that is, marching rank and file in straight, orderly lines — as they crept through the unfamiliar lanes. But the wide-open dirt streets offered no cover. The Mexicans fired down on Garland’s troops from rooftops and secret gun emplacements, popped up suddenly from behind low stone walls, blasted point-blank rounds of grape from perfectly camouflaged cannons, and blocked many of the streets with heaps of wood and dry brush to better contain the Americans.

Once it became clear that Garland and Mansfield would be unable to navigate the streets without additional firepower, Lieutenant Braxton Bragg and his mobile artillery were summoned to break the bottleneck. Yet Bragg’s usually nimble six-pounders presented problems all their own. Their small shells proved laughably ineffective, literally bouncing off the four-foot-thick stone walls protecting the Mexican gunners. Making matters worse, Mexican cannons quickly cut down ten of Bragg’s artillerymen and a dozen horses.

In tragically comic fashion, when the order to retreat — “retire in good order” — was called, the city streets proved too narrow for Bragg’s cannons to be turned around while harnessed to a horse. Garland’s embattled infantry had to save the day by manually lifting and pivoting each gun — no small feat, considering that a single cannon weighed 880 pounds.

Mansfield had been shot through the calf, but with a white handkerchief wrapped around the bloody bullet entry, he led the way out of town. Infantry soldiers ran close behind, and Bragg’s horse-drawn cannons trailed in their wake, taking “the streets by which we had entered — there was no difficulty in finding our route, for it was painfully marked,” said one officer, since almost half of Garland’s men lay dead or dying along Monterrey’s suddenly terrifying streets.

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