Ulysses S. Grant by Michael Korda Read Free Book Online

in another battle, at Resaca, in which he took temporary command of a company, captured a wounded Mexican colonel, and observed that, “the battle of Resaca de la Palma would have been won, just as it was, had I not been there.” Tolstoy could not have put it better. Nevertheless, reading betweenthe lines, it is possible to discern that Grant had demonstrated, if nothing else, a keen power of observation, a capacity for command, no tendency to panic or flinch under fire, and a strong stomach for the awful scenes of combat—in short, that he had the makings of a real soldier.
    During the lengthy time that the army spent at Matamoras, Grant met many of the officers who would be his opponents or his fellow Union generals in the Civil War, and his sharp memory would pay dividends later on, for he could often guess what they would do in command based on how they had behaved in Mexico—hence his instinctive judgment that Buckner would cave under pressure at Fort Donelson. He served with such future Confederate generals as Lee, Joseph E. Johnston, and Albert Sidney Johnston (no relation), and later remarked in his memoirs, “My appreciation of my enemies was certainly affected by this knowledge. The natural disposition of most people is to clothe a commander of a large army whom they do not know, with almost superhuman abilities. A large part of the National army, for instance, and most of the press of the country, clothed General Lee with just such qualities, but I had known him personally, and knew that he was mortal [italics added].”
    The problem of overestimating or even hero-worshipping successful enemy commanders in time of war was not, of course, confined to nineteenth-century America. In World War II “the Rommel factor,” much resembling the universal admiration for Lee, overcame the British public and most British generals until Gen. Sir Bernard Law Montgomery (as he was then) finally beat Field Marshal Erwin Rommel at El Alamein and put an end to Rommel’sreputation for invincibility and battlefield omniscience. Apparently undiminished by defeat, however, Rommel’s legend, like Lee’s, continues to impress historians and biographers.
    Among the officers Grant met, surprisingly, was none other than Congressman Hamer, who had yielded to Jesse Grant’s request to get his son into West Point and was now a major of the Ohio volunteers, waiting to be appointed a brigadier general—an object lesson for Grant in the uses of political influence and in the ease with which amateur soldiers climbed the ladder of promotion in wartime, as opposed to professionals.
    Eventually the army, now reinforced to 6,500 men, lurched through the Sierra Madre mountains to threaten Monterrey, the last major town on the long road to Mexico City, defended by a garrison of more than ten thousand. After a short siege Taylor attacked the city, and Grant was caught up in the street fighting that followed, distinguishing himself by volunteering to ride back through the streets under a hail of rifle fire to ask for more ammunition to be sent up. He rode at a full gallop, Indian style, clinging to the side of his horse to shield himself from the enemy’s fire, with one foot cocked over the cantle of the saddle and an arm around the horse’s neck—the kind of thing Kevin Costner (or his stuntman) might do in a movie today (not unlike the scene at the beginning of Dances with Wolves ), but Grant did in real life in Monterrey, with real bullets whizzing around him and his horse’s hooves skittering on cobblestones that were, in some places, slippery with blood. The feat won Grant a considerable degree of respect.
    At one point stopped by American soldiers, he entered a house and found it full of badly wounded Americans, including two heknew, a captain with a bad head wound and a lieutenant “whose bowels protruded from his wound.” He promised to send help, then got back on his horse to resume his run, but in the confusion of battle the