Figueroa's rurales had been all but routed. In the battle that followed General Huerta succeeded in driving the rebels out of their strong position, but the losses of the federals, owing to their belated arrival and hastilytaken positions, were disproportionately heavy.

This affair caused much ill-feeling between the rurales and regulars, and Figueroa sent word to Madero that he could not afford to sacrifice his men by trying to co-operate with such a poor general as Huerta. The much-heralded joint campaign accordingly fell to the ground.

President Madero thereupon recalled General Huerta, and sent General Robles, of the regular army, to replace him in command. This furnished Huerta with another grievance against Madero.

Some time afterwards I heard General Huerta explain in private conversation to some of his old army comrades that he had been recalled from Morelos because of his sharp military measures against the Zapatistas, owing to President Madero's sentimental preference for dealing leniently with his old Zapatista friends. At the time when General Huerta made this private complaint, however, it was a notorious fact that his successor in Morelos, General Robles, had received public instructions from Madero to deal more severely with the Morelos rebels. General Robles did, as a matter of fact, handle the Morelos rebels far more ruthlessly than Huerta, leading to his own subsequent recall on charges of excessive cruelty.

Meanwhile the Orozco rebellion had arisen in the north, and became so threatening that General Gonzalez Salas, Madero's War Minister, felt called upon to resign his portfolio to take the field against Orozco, together with Generals Blanquet, Trucy Aubert, and Tellez. General Gonzalez Salas,

after organizing a fairly formidablelooking force of 3,500 regulars and three batteries of field artillery at Torreón, rushed into the fray, only to suffer a disgraceful defeat in his first battle at Rellano, in Chihuahua, not far from Torreón. General Gonzalez Salas took his defeat so much to heart that he committed suicide on his way back to Torreón. This, together with the panic-stricken return of his army to Torreón, caused the greatest dismay at the Capital, the inhabitants of which already believed themselves threatened by an irresistible advance of Orozco's rebel followers. None of the federal generals at the front were considered strong enough to stem the tide.

The only available federal general of high rank, who had any experience in commanding large forces in the field, was Victoriano Huerta. President Madero in his extremity called upon General Huerta to reorganize the badly-disordered forces at Torreón, and to take the field against Orozco, "cost what it may." This was toward the end of March, 1912.

General Huerta, whom the army had come to regard as "shelved," lost no time in getting to Torreón. There he soon found that the situation was by no means so black as it had been painted-General Trucy Aubert, who had been cut off with one of the columns of the army, having cleverly extricated his force from its dangerous predicament so as to bring it safely back to the base at Torreón without undue loss of men or prestige.

Thenceforth no expense was saved by General Huerta in bringing the army to better fighting efficiency. Heavy reinforcements of regulars, especially of field artillery, were rushed to Torreón from the Capital, and large bodies of volunteers and irregulars were sent after them from all parts of the Republic.

President Madero had said: "Let it cost what it may"; so all the preparation went forward regardless of cost. "Hang the expense!" became the blithe motto of the army.

When General Huerta at last took the field against Orozco, early in May, his federal army, now swelled to more than six thousand men and twenty pieces of field artillery, moved to the front in a column of eleven long railway trains, each numbering from forty to sixty cars, loaded down with army supplies and munitions of all kinds, besides a horde of several thousand camp followers, women, sutlers, and other non-combatants. The entire columu stretched over a distance of more than four miles. The transportation and sustenance of this unwieldy column, which had to carry its own supply of drinking water, it was estimated, cost the Mexican Government nearly 350,000 pesos per day. Its progress was exasperatingly slow, owing to the fact that the Mexican Central Railway, which was Huerta's only chosen line of advance, had to be repaired almost rail by rail.

After more than a fortnight's slow progress, General Huerta struck Orozco's forces at Conejos, in Chihuahua, near the branch line running out to the American mines at Mapimi. Orozco's forces, finding themselves heavily outnumbered and overmatched in artillery, hastily evacuated Conejos, retreating northward up the railway line by means of some half-dozen railway trains. Several weeks more passed before Huerta again struck Orozco's forces at Rellano in Chihuahua, close to the former battlefield, along the railway, where his predecessor, General Gonzalez Salas, had come to grief. This was in June.

Huerta, with nearly twice as many men and three times as much artillery, drove Orozco back along the line of the railway after a two days' long

range artillery bombardment, against which the rebels were powerless. This battie, in which the combined losses in dead and wounded on both sides were less than 200, was described in General Huerta's official report as "more terrific than any battle that had been fought in the western hemisphere during the last fifty years." In his last triumphant bulletin from the field General Huerta telegraphed to President Madero that his brave men had driven the enemy from the heights with a final fierce bayonet charge, and that their bugle blasts of victory could be heard even then on the crest.

Pascual Orozco, on the other hand, reported to the revolutionary Junta in El Paso that he had ordered his men to retire before the superior force of the federals, and that they had accomplished this without disorder by the simple process of boarding their waiting trains and steaming slowly off to the north, destroying the bridges and culverts behind them as they went along. One of my fellow war correspondents, who served on the rebel side during this battle, afterward told me that the federals, whose bugle calls Huerta heard on the heights, did not get up to this position until two days after the rebels had abandoned their trenches along the crest.

The subsequent advance of the federals from Rellano to the town of Jiménez, Orozco's old headquarters, which had been evacuated by him without firing a shot, lasted another week.

Here Huerta's army camped for another week. At Jiménez the longbrewing unpleasantness between Huerta's regular officers and some of Madero's bandit friends, commanding forces of irregular cavalry, came to a head. The most noted of these former guerrilla chieftains was Francisco Villa, an old-time bandit, who now rejoiced in the honorary rank of a

splendid Arab stallion, originally imported by a Spanish horse-breeder with a ranch near Chihuahua City. General Huerta coveted this horse, and one day, after an unusually lively carouse at general headquarters, he sent a squad of soldiers to bring the horse out of Villa's corral to his own stable. The old bandit took offence at this, and came stalking into headquarters to make a personal remonstrance. He was put under arrest, and Huerta forthwith sentenced him to be shot. That same day the sentence was to be put into execution. Villa was already facing the firing squad, and the officer in charge had given the command to load, when President Madero's brother, Emilio, who was serving on Huerta's staff in an advisory capacity, put a stop to the execution by taking Villa under his personal protection. President Madero was telegraphed to, and immediately replied, reprieving Villa's sentence, and ordering him to be sent to Mexico City pending further official investigation.

This act of interference infuriated Huerta. For the moment he had to content himself with formulating a long string of serious charges against Villa, ranging from military insubordination to burglary, highway robbery, and rape. It was even given out at headquarters that Villa had struck his commanding general.

Huerta never forgave the Madero brothers for their part in this fair, and his resentment was fanned to white heat, subsequently, when Francisco Villa was allowed to escape scotfree from his prison in Mexico City.

At length the camp at Jiménez, which had grown exceedingly dirty and unhealthy, was broken up, and Huerta resumed his slow advance northward along the railway line. Inasmuch as the rebels retreated just as steadily and slowly as the fed

ing any real show of resistance, there was no more fighting for several weeks. The so-called campaign settled down into a mere contest of railroad destruction on one side and railroad reconstruction on the other. Whenever a railroad station with a water tank was reached on the Chihuahua desert, the federal army halted for a comfortable rest of three or four days, or more, leaving the rebels some five or six miles ahead, beyond the customary gap of burnt bridges and tornup rails, to enjoy their leisure in their own way.

Meanwhile Huerta kept telegraphing to President Madero for more reinforcements of men, munitions, and supplies, more engines, more railway trains, and tank cars, and, above all, for more artillery. Madero kept sending them, though it cost his Government a new loan of forty million dollars. Every other day or SU a new train with fresh supplies arrived at the front.

At the end of several more weeks, when Orozco had slowly retreated halfway through the State of Chihuahua, and when he found that the destruction of the big seven-span bridge over the Conchos River at Santa Rosalía did not permanently stop Huerta's advance, he reluctantly decided to make another stand at the deep cut of Bachimba, just south of Chihuahua City. This was in July.

By this time General Huerta's federal column had swelled to 7,500 fighting men, 20 pieces of field artillery, 30 machine guns, and some 7,500 camp followers and women, making a total of more than 15,000 persons of all sexes and ages, who were being carried along on more than twenty railroad trains, stretching over a dozen miles of single track. The column was so long that some of my companions and I, when we climbed a high

hill near the front end of the column at Bachimba, found it impossible to discern the tail end through our field glasses. All the hungry people that were being carried on all those twenty railroad trains had to be fed, of course, so that none of us were surprised to read in the Mexican newspapers that the Chihuahua campaign was now costing Madero's Government nearly 500,000 pesos per day.

The battle at Bachimba must have swelled this budget. During this one day's fight nearly two million rifle cartridges and more than 10,000 artillery projectiles were fired away by the federals. Huerta's twenty pieces of field artillery, neatly posted in a straight line on the open plain, barely half a mile away from his ammunition railway train, kept firing at the supposed rebel positions all day long without any appreciable interruption, and all day long the artillery caissons and limbers kept trotting to and fro between the batteries and ammunition cars. Orozco had but 3,000 men with two pieces of so-called artillery, with gun barrels improvised from railroad axles, so he once more ordered a general retreat by way of his railroad trains, waiting at a convenient distance on a bend of the road behind the intervening hills. As at Rellano, at Conejos, and at other places in the campaign where the railroad swept in big bends around the hills, no attempt was made on the federal side to cut off the rebels' retreat by short-cut flanking movements of cavalry, of which Huerta had more than he could conveniently use, or chose to use. The whole ten hours' bombardment and rifle fire resulted in but fourteen dead rebels; but it won the campaign for the Government, and earned for Huerta his promotion to Major General besides the proud title of "Hero of Bachimba."

President Madero and his anxious

Government associates were more than glad to receive the tidings of this “decisive victory." The only trouble was that it did not decide anything in particular. Orozco and his followers, while evacuating the capital of Chihuahua, kept on wrecking railway property between Chihuahua City and Juarez, and the campaign kept growing more expensive every day.

It took Huerta from July until August to work his slow way from the centre of Chihuahua to Ciudad Juarez on the northern frontier. Before he reached this goal, though, the rebels had split into many smaller detachments, some of which cut his communications in the rear, while others harried his flanks with guerrilla tactics and threatened to carry the "war" into the neighboring State of Sonora. So far as the trouble and expense to the federal Government was concerned this guerrilla warfare was far worse than the preceding slow but sure railway campaign. General Huerta himself, who was threatened with the loss of his eyesight from cataract, gave up trying to pursue the fleeing rebel detachments in person, but kept close to his comfortable headquarters in Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua City. This unsatisfactory condition of affairs gave promise of enduring indefinitely, until President Madero in Mexico City, whose Government had to bear the financial brunt of it all, suddenly lost his patience and recalled Huerta to the capital, leaving the command in General Rábago's hands.

For reasons that were never quite fathomed by Madero's Government, Huerta took his time about obeying these orders. Thus, he lingered first at Ciudad Juarez, then at Chihuahua City, then at Santa Rosalia, next at Jiménez, and presently at Torreón, where he remained for over a week, apparently sulking in his tent like Achilles. This gave rise to grave sus

picions, and rumors flew all over Mexico that Huerta was about to make common cause with Orozco. President Madero himself, at this time, told a friend of mine that he was afraid Huerta was going to turn traitor. About the same time, at a diplomatic reception, President Madero stated openly to Ambassador Wilson that he had reasons to suspect Huerta's loyalty. At length, however, General Huerta appeared at the capital, and after a somewhat chilly interview with the President, obtained a suspension from duty so that he might have his eyes treated by a specialist.

Thus it happened that Huerta. who was nearly blind then, escaped being drawn into the sudden military movements that grew out of General Felix Diaz' unexpected revolt and temporary capture of the port of Veracruz in October, 1912.

General Huerta's part in Felix Diaz' second revolution, four months later, is almost too recent to have been forgotten. He was the senior ranking general at the capital when the rebellion broke out, and was summoned to his post of duty by President Madero from the very first. He accompanied Madero in his celebrated ride from Chapultepec Castle to the National Palace on the morning of the first day of the famous "Ten Days," and was put in supreme command of the forces of the Government after the first hurried council of war. President Madero, totally lacking in military professional knowledge as he was, confided the entire conduct of the necessary war measures to General Huerta; but it soon became apparent that the old general either could not or would not direct any energetic offensive movement against the rebels. From the very first the Government committed the fatal blunder of letting the rebels slowly proceed to the Citadel-a fortified military arsenal-the retention of which was

of paramount importance, without even attempting to intercept their roundabout march or to frustrate their belated entry into the poorly guarded Citadel. Later, when it became clear that the rebels could not be dislodged from this stronghold by street rushes, no attempt was made to shell them out of their strong position by a highangle bombardment of plunging explosive shells.

After it was all over General Huerta explained the ill-success of his military measures during the ten days' street fighting by saying that President Madero was a madman who had spoiled all Huerta's military plans and measures by utterly impracticable counter orders. At the time, though, it was given out officially that Huerta had been placed in absolute, unrestricted command. When the American Ambassador, toward the close of the long bombardment, appealed to President Madero to remove some federal batteries, the fire from which threatened the foreign quarter of Mexico City, President Madero replied that he had nothing to do with the military dispositions, and referred the Ambassador to General Huerta, who promptly acceded to the request. On another occasion, later in the bombardment, when Madero insisted that the federal artillery should use explosive shelis against the Citadel, General Huerta did not hesitate to take it upon himself to countermand the President's suggestions to Colonel Navarrete, the federal chief of artillery. Afterwards General Navarrete admitted in a speech at a military banquet that his federal artillery "could have reduced the Citadel in short order had this really been desired."

Whether General Huerta was really able to win or not is beside the issue, since the final turn of events plainly revealed that his heart was not in the fight, and that he was only waiting