Ulysses S. Grant by Michael Korda Read Free Book Online Page A

wounded Americans “fell into the hands of the enemy during the night, and died.”
    Here, in his usual clipped, unemotional prose is another perfect portrait of the horrors of war, a scene (and an outcome) worthy of Goya. By the next day Monterrey had been taken, and Grant’s pity was aroused by the sight of the Mexican prisoners of war, particularly the cavalry “on miserable little half-starved horses that did not look as if they could carry their riders out of town.”
    Few other officers would have been equally moved by the distressing sight of enemy troops taken prisoner and by that of the charnel house of wounded American officers and men, but Grant had that rare quality among professional soldiers, even at the very beginning of his career, of feeling deeply for the wounded and dead of both sides. It was not weakness—it was that he spared himself nothing. Grant saw what happened in war, swallowed his revulsion, pity, and disgust, and went on. He did not, in Yeats’s famous phrase, “cast a cold eye on life, on death”; he cast a saddened and mournful one—one has only to look at photographs of him—which nevertheless did not prevent him from doing his job.
    In the meantime the war’s growing importance was emphasized by the administration’s decision to send the aging General in Chief Winfield Scott to take command in Mexico. Scott had no faith in Taylor’s attack from the north, and proposed to advance on Vera Cruz, seize it, then march inland on Mexico City. Old Rough and Ready continued his own advance, while his rival, Old Fuss andFeathers, decked out in every feather, sash, and gold decoration the law allowed (as Grant sourly observed) marched slowly on Vera Cruz, both generals having their eyes firmly fixed, in the great American tradition, on the next presidential election.
    In the event Taylor moved faster and fought and won the decisive battle of Buena Vista (February 22–24, 1847) with his army of volunteers, against a much larger Mexican force, thus guaranteeing his nomination by the Whig Party and his election as president in 1848.
    As for Grant, his regiment was transferred from Taylor’s army to Scott’s, where Grant found both the slow pace and the insistence on military formality and correct uniforms at all times difficult to bear. He served under Gen. William J. Worth, of whom he commented trenchantly, “Some commanders can move troops so as to get the maximum distance out of them without fatigue, while others can wear them out in a few days without accomplishing so much. General Worth belonged to this latter class.”
    Grant participated in the siege of Vera Cruz and the Battle of Cerro Gordo (in which Capt. Robert E. Lee played a dashing and glamorous role), after which Grant was appointed quartermaster and sent off with a train of wagons to “procure forage,” a position of no glamour but considerable responsibility. If Grant had not bothered to read Napoleon’s comment on war—“An army marches on its stomach”—while he was immersed in novels at West Point, he soon got a chance to observe the truth of this maxim in the field as a quartermaster. He also got a chance to compare Taylor and Scott in action, and noted, “Taylor was not a conversationalist, but on paper he could put his meaning so plainly that there could be nomistaking it,” a description Grant might as easily have applied to himself.
    Scott’s army now was in place to advance on Mexico City, and Grant fought at Contreras, Molino del Rey (where he had the quick wit to use an upturned cart to climb onto the roof of a building and overwhelm the Mexicans defending it), and Chapultepec (where his quick action under fire led to the taking of a key portion of the town’s defensive line with a few troops he had hastily scratched up). Although he was to write in his memoirs that the Battles of Molino del Rey and Chapultepec were “wholly unnecessary,” there is no doubt that he fought courageously in both of them