General Salvador Mercado, then the supreme authority in Chihuahua, with practical powers of life and death over its people, proved to be a squat, thick, bull-necked man with the face of an Indian and the bearing of a bully }
His first words stirred my temper to the bottom, luckily for me. If I had confronted the man with any other emotion than raging anger I should not be alive now.
"Your Consul will do no good," he told me sneeringly. "He says you are not a German. You are a Gringo. You are a bandit and a robber. You have turned spy against us too. I am going to make short work of you. But first you are going to tell me all you know."
As the completeness of the charge flashed upon me I went wild. There was a chair beside me. I converted one leg into a club and started for Mercado. The five other men in the room got the best hold upon me that they could. By the time they had mastered me Mercado had backed away into the farthest corner of the room.
The remainder of our interview was stormy and fruitless. It resulted in my being taken to Chihuahua penitentiary, the strongest prison in Mexico, and thrown into a cell. It was two months and a half before I came out again.
There is small use going in detail into the major and minor degradations of life in a Mexican prison. I pass over cimex lectularius and the warfare which ended with my release. There are more edifying things to tell. For instance, how I came into possession of half a blanket and a pair of friends.
I was confined a sentry with fixed bayonet standing before my door in an upper tier in the officers' wing. Usually confinement in the officers' wing carried one special privilege in which I, the desperado, did not share. During the day the cell doors were left open and the prisoners had the run of the corridor and galleries. My sentry's bayonet barred them from me, but could not keep them from talking of the new prisoner who claimed to be a German and was suffering because he was suspected of attachment to the Constitutionalist cause.
On my third or fourth night there I was attracted to my cell door by a sibilant "Oiga, Aleman!" and something soft was thrust between the bars.
"German," whispered a voice in Spanish out of the blackness, "it is cold to-night. We have brought you up a blanket."
So began my friendship with Pablo Almandaris and Rafael Castro, two young Constitutionalist officers. Almandaris, in particular, later became a chum of mine. He was a long, lank, solemn individual, the very image of Don Quixote of La Mancha. I remember him with love, because he was the man who gave to me in prison, out of kindness of heart, a full half of his single blanket.
This is how it happened. He and Rafael Castro, who were cell-mates, had contrived a way to pick their lock and roam the cell block at night, stark naked, their brown skins blending perfectly with the dingy walls. They had already heard the story of my plight. That night Almandaris had cut his blanket in two, and the pair, with the bit of wool and a bottle of tequilla they had bought that day when the prison market was open, sneaked up to the gallery and my cell. They gave the liquor to the sentry, who, being an Indian, promptly drank the whole of it down and became blissfully unconscious.
The blanket was the first of many gifts, and many were the chats we had together, all with a practical purpose.
"If you ever escape or are released," Almandaris kept telling me, "go to Trinidad Rodriguez. He is my colonel. And if you ever get out of Mexico go to El Paso and hunt up Labansat. He is there."
So they contrived to alleviate the minor evils of my predicament, and I shall never forget them. The major difficulty was beyond their reach. The trap had closed completely round me. The charge of spying and Mercado's general truculence were only cloaks for a more subtle hostility from another quarter. The reason for my imprisonment was soon revealed openly.
I had made various attempts to communicate with Kueck, the German Consul. Always I met the retort that Kueck himself said I was no German. At the same time, managing to smuggle an appeal for aid to the American Consul, I was informed that etiquette forbade his taking any steps on my behalf. Kueck himself, he said, had told him the German Consulate was doing all it could to protect me. It did not need a Bismarck to grasp the implications of those contradictory statements.
After I had been in prison for about three weeks Kueck came to see me and made the whole matter thoroughly plain.
"Von der Goltz," he opened bluntly, "you are in a bad situation."
"Do you think so?" I asked him significantly.
"I have every reason to think so," he said. "My hands are tied. I positively can take no steps in your behalf, unless--" he looked straight at me "unless you restore certain documents you have no right to possess."
They had me nicely. The surrender of my letter was the price I must pay for my life. Acting under instructions, he had made me a definite offer. I had to take it or leave it.
I could not give the letter up. It was my guarantee of safety. As long as Kueck did not know where it was I was valuable to him only while alive. Furthermore, I had some hopes of being freed by outside aid. Through Almandaris I had learned that the Constitutionalists were attacking Chihuahua, with good hope of taking the city. I knew that if they succeeded, the German whose suffering for their cause, I was told, was known throughout their forces would be well cared for. So I reached my decision.
"Herr Consul," I said, "I will not give up the papers you refer to. I am not a child. Those papers are in a safe place. So are instructions as to their disposal in case of emergency. Let anything happen to me, and within a fortnight every newspaper in the United States will be printing the most sensational story within memory."
On July 23, 1913, I was tried by court-martial and sentenced to death. That led to a bitter personal quarrel between General Manuel Chao, the Constitutionalist commander attacking the city, and Mercado, who defended it.
Chao sent in a flag of truce, absolving me from any connection with his cause and threatening that, if I were killed, Mercado personally would have to pay the score when the Constitutionalists took Chihuahua. The Indian bully retorted that if the Constitutionalists ever captured the city they would not find their pet alive there.
Three times in the weeks that followed the Constitutionalist forces seemed on the point of capturing Chihuahua. Have you ever walked out with your own firing squad and spent an endless half hour on a chilly morning in the company of an officer with drawn sword, five soldiers with loaded rifles and a sergeant with the revolver destined to give you your coup de grace? Three times that happened to me, at Mercado's orders! My profession has seldom permitted me to indulge in personal hatreds, but as I was marched back from that third bad half-hour my mind was filled with one thought: If ever I got Mercado where he had me then I would let him know what it felt like.