Read Amazing Tales for Making Men Out of Boys Online
Authors: Neil Oliver
Amazing Tales for Making Men Out of Boys (9 page)
Picking their way back through the buildings of Camarón, the Mexicans found a few more men of the 3rd Company still alive and, true to their word, saw to it that those wounded defenders were well treated.
All were imprisoned, but eventually returned to the Legion in exchange for Mexican prisoners taken elsewhere. While still incarcerated, Corporal Berg managed to get a message back to Jeanningros. Among other things he informed his commander, “The 3rd Company is no more, but I must tell you it contained nothing but good soldiers.”
On release from his Mexican prison cell, Berg was commissioned and fought in other wars in other places—before dying in Algeria in a duel with a fellow officer. Corporal Maine rose up through the ranks too, finishing his army career as a captain.
In their defense of the Hacienda Camarón the men of the 3rd Company lost three officers and 23 Legionnaires. The Mexican Army lost 300 men and saw a further 500 or more wounded. They never did capture the convoy—by leaving it to follow two hours behind him Danjou had ensured it was in a place of safety when the fighting started. The wagons carrying the gold simply waited on the road until they could be collected by a relief force sent out by Jeanningros.
The city of Puebla fell to the French on May 17, followed by Mexico City itself on June 7. A year later, on June 12, Emperor Maximilian and Empress Carlota entered Mexico City in triumph.
Thereafter the story was a less than happy one for the French occupation. Distracted by its own civil war, the United States of America had had no option but to turn a reluctantly blind eye to events unfolding in the lands of its southern neighbor. President Abraham Lincoln had made it known that he supported the Mexican Republicans opposed to France, but was unable to send any help.
Following his assassination on April 14, 1865, Lincoln was succeeded by his Vice President, Andrew Johnson. Immediately after the end of the war, Johnson sent General Ulysses S. Grant to the Mexican border at the head of an army 50,000 strong. The message was clear and unequivocal—France was to withdraw its forces from the country or face the consequences of riling an overwhelming enemy. On May 31, 1866, Napoleon III announced that he was pulling his men out of Mexico, and by November of that year the French soldiers were on their way home.
Denied the support of his erstwhile masters, Emperor Maximilian was on borrowed time, and he knew it. A reinvigorated Republican President Benito Juarez gained the upper hand in the fighting and Maximilian was captured on May 15, 1867. He was tried and sentenced to death, and despite pleas for clemency from no lesser figures than Victor Hugo and Giuseppe Garibaldi, was duly executed the following month. His widow, the Empress Carlota, went into exile, living first in Italy and finally in Belgium. Her estate was surrounded by the German Army during the Great War of 1914–18—but since she was the widowed sister-in-law of the Austrian President, no one was allowed to set foot upon her demesne. She never stopped loving her husband and believed always that he was not dead, that he would one day return to her. It was said she slept every night beside a doll she named Max. She died in 1927.
For the duration of the French occupation of Mexico all units of the Legion were under orders to halt whenever they had occasion to pass the site of the place they now called Camerone. To
this day the men of the 1st Regiment wear the Mexican Eagle as their cap badge. The ashes of the dead of that battle are held in an urn carved in the shape of an eagle and it is passed from regimental chapel to regimental chapel in an endless rotation down through the years.
Some time not long after the Battle of Camerone, a farmer working the land near the former hamlet found the wooden hand of Captain Jean Danjou. By a circuitous path it was eventually returned to the Legion and is now their most honored relic. Every year on April 30 the Legion celebrates Camerone Day and the hand of Jean Danjou is paraded before the men of the assembled regiments. All new recruits are told the story of the Demons of Camerone and left in no doubt that those are the standards expected of every Legionnaire.
On many battlefields since, when the last bullet has been fired and nothing remains but men and valor, a cry goes up from the Legionnaires,
Faire Camerone
—do as they would have done! And they fight to the last man, and beyond.
At Camerone itself there is little to see. In the aftermath of the fighting the Mexicans went to some lengths to forget the place where so many of their men had died trying to oust so few. A railway line was deliberately routed through the site of the former farmyard where so many men fell.
In 1892 the French were permitted to place a commemorative plaque on the low ruins of one partially surviving wall. It has these words on it:
Here there were fewer than 60 opposed to a whole army. Its mass crushed them. Life abandoned these French soldiers before courage.
Whenever I try to tell someone the story of the Demons of Camerone—and I’m the sort of person who does that kind of thing—I find it hard to speak toward the end. When I get to the bit where Maudet and his men are trapped in that outbuilding, like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, my throat thickens and my voice starts to break. It’s ridiculous and I know it. But that tale will never lose the power it has over me—and its power comes from the way it has become more than just another story from history, it has become a legend. (When I first told my wife, Trudi, the story of the Demons she said, “Stupid idiots,” but she’s a girl and girls don’t understand.)
Maybe events at the Hacienda Camarón didn’t unfold
exactly
as described here. But there are more important things to ask of great stories than the truth. Historians spend a lot of time on the details, winnowing the seed from the chaff, trying to pin down
precisely
who did what, and when, and why. That’s all very well, but sometimes it takes the thrill out of things. That’s the trouble with the truth. The message to be learned from the Demons of Camerone is about the power of the brotherhood. It has been passed down through the years because the people who bothered to remember it and retell it cared deeply about what those men represented. The story
is bigger than the sum of its facts. The important thing is to believe such behavior is possible.
There’s no way of knowing if Scott ever heard about the Demons of Camerone—but he came from a world and a time when knowledge of such stories was commonplace among boys and men. Somewhere along the line he certainly learned about sticking together with his men to the bitter end—but he was a military man and military men are trained to be like that.
Men are always impressed by military types (whether they admit it or not, and even if they’re not especially manly). Markham was right—in certain situations, like trying to keep people organized and motivated when the temperature is 50 degrees below zero, the huskies’ paws are stuck to the ice and it’s seal stew for lunch for the 100th day in a row, you want leadership from someone who reverts to training without a second thought.
No one in their right mind thinks war is a good idea but, as Plato said, only the dead have seen the end of it. It’s no use pretending the real wide world will ever be any different and so it’s a good idea to have people trained to cope with the worst of times.
There’s also no denying that many of the great stories of manly men come out of war. By far the majority of American men alive today have never been to war and that’s the way any reasonable person would want things to stay. But there are lessons for us civilians to learn from hearing about the kind of men who’ve been forged in that furnace.
(The older I get, the more I realize how easy I’ve had it all my life. Having been born white and male, into a loving family, living in Great Britain in the last third of the 20th century, I’ve been dealt what amounts to a winning hand from the cosmic deck of cards. All of the opportunities of life have been available to me since day one. I’ve never had to live with poverty, or endemic disease. I’ve never experienced any kind of prejudice or disadvantage born out
of race, religion or creed. I’ve been kept safe all of my life by nameless strangers, from dangers both foreign and domestic. Our politicians are as eager to send our soldiers into wars in foreign parts as they ever were, but having been born beyond the grasp of conscription or National Service, as I have, such dangers have always been the other guy’s problem. At 40, I’ve lived long enough to be too old to be drafted even if they reintroduced it tomorrow. My safety has been provided for me by people I don’t know and whom I haven’t bothered to thank. I have effectively enjoyed an endless childhood. I’ve acquired certain responsibilities along the way–jobs, mortgages, wife, children—but nothing on a par with the responsibilities borne by men of all the generations before me. To paraphrase Jack Nicholson’s deluded colonel in
A Few Good Men
, I’ve slept under the blanket of security provided for me by other people.)
Most 30 to 40-something men alive today started paying attention to war when they saw it in the form of action movies on screens both big and small. This is what it’s like when you live in perpetual childhood—the only deadly dangers you ever see are the fictional ones faced by fictional characters. And so you start to see everything as a made-up story. Danger is just a thrill. Who nowadays gets the chance to sit at a dinner table listening to a genuine old duffer recounting a tale of battle? It’s movies that have to get that job done now.
Who could resist the impact of watching
The Wild Geese
for the first time? A team of mercenaries handpicked by Richard Burton sets out to rescue an imprisoned African leader—only to find themselves betrayed by their employer, Stewart Granger, and left to fight for their lives against a bloodthirsty army of Simbas somewhere in the African bush.
At the climax, Burton’s best friend, Richard Harris, is running alongside a beat-up old DC-3 Dakota the team has managed to get
hold of as their getaway vehicle. Roger Moore is at the controls (they’re all in this one), and Burton and the rest of the survivors are already aboard ready to take off and make their escape to victory. Only Harris is still on the runway, fighting a desperate rearguard action to keep the Simbas at bay. They’ve been sharpening their machetes and you just know they’re going to show Harris a pretty thin time if they can get their hands on him.
He’s at the door of the plane, just about to be hauled in by Burton, when a lucky bullet gets him in the leg. He falls away from the plane and as both he and Burton realize he’s a goner now for sure, soon to be taken and horribly murdered by the Simbas, he knows it’s his time to die.
Having already thrown away his own rifle, he begs Burton to do the necessary.
“For God’s sake, shoot me!” he cries.
Burton is horrified—unable at first to contemplate killing his friend.
“No, no—I can’t,” he says.
Finally, through tear-filled eyes, Burton turns his rifle on Harris and cuts him down with a burst of machine-gun fire.
Harris’s body falls lifeless to the runway and the plane lifts into the sky. Look out Stewart Granger, you evil swine!
On every occasion that
The Wild Geese
is repeated on TV, everyone watching for the second time or more prays things will work out differently—that Harris will somehow get on the plane. (Hollywood missed a trick by not filming alternative endings. Imagine the impact in the holiday season if Steve McQueen managed to leap his Triumph Bonneville over the last line of barbed wire and escape the Nazis! There’d be dancing in the streets.)
But of course it never happens. Richard Harris dies on the runway, Steve gets sent back to solitary confinement and Frank Sinatra’s Von Ryan never catches that blasted Express.
The point of this is that most boys nowadays begin learning about manly men by watching the way they’re portrayed in the movies. Eventually, though, boys grow old enough to understand that some of the movies are not fiction, but based on real-life events.
It’s quite a revelation—that some of those brave men had once been real, heroes made of blood and bone. And out of countless viewings of films about the truth, can come an obsession with wondering how it would really feel to know that
this time
your luck has run out.
