Skin Medicine

Cannon balls whistled over the heads of the volunteers, exploding with gouts of shattered rock and flying dirt. Grapeshot ripped into men, spraying their anatomies in every which direction. Smoke hung like a ground fog over everything and the cavalry looked like ghost riders pounding through it. Men were screaming and shrieking, blood covered the ground in viscous, steaming pools. Soldiers-both American and Mexican-dropped and died, piling up like corded lumber. Some rose only to fall again and be crushed under the thundering hooves of horses. Bugles sounded out. Men crawled through the carnage, missing limbs and/or pressing their viscera back into ruptured abdomens. Some wanted to escape…but others, piecemeal, wanted to fight on.

Cobb bayoneted a soldier and slashed the face off another. He saw volunteers fall…but each time he advanced to their aid, bodies fell at his feet, blood and brains spattered into his face, enemy soldiers rushing out at him.

So he busied himself shooting and knifing, taking them as they came.

And around him, the volunteers scrambled over heaped bodies as mounted troopers of the Mississippi Rifles charged into the fray. They wore bright red shirts and broad-brimmed straw hats. The Mexican cavalry met them on deadly ground and muskets sounded and sabers slashed, horses were ripped apart by cannon balls and men fell by the hundreds, the landscape becoming a bleeding, blasted sea of bodies and limbs and glistening internals.

Behind the Mexican cavalry, a body of lancers came shouting and running, infantry with fixed bayonets backing them up.

The Missouri volunteers, many of them burnt black with powder, fought on, ready to take anything that came. Cobb emptied his pistols until they were smoking and hot. He fired his musket, loaded, rammed, fired again with swift expertise. But the Mexicans poured forward in a surging, shrieking tide, severing the American lines, and Cobb found himself crushing skulls with the butt of his rifle, opening bellies and throats with his knives, and taking weapons off dead men, fighting and fighting.

The Mexicans charged not only from the front, but from both sides and behind now. It was sheer pandemonium. Men were falling and writhing. Horses stampeding and throwing their riders, mad now with gaping wounds and terror from the pounding and shooting and screaming. Shells were bursting and rifle balls whizzing like mad hornets, smoke billowing and dust rising up in blinding whirlwinds. Musketry was crashing and big guns thundering. Wagons and their loads were shattered to kindling and everywhere the dead and the dying, blood and smoke and wreckage.

And still more fresh Mexican troops charged in.

Cobb, filled now with a tearing, raging hunger, dashed in amongst their numbers, cutting men down with musket-fire and blazing pistols. He split open the head of a lancer with his hatchet, slit the throat of another, took up his lance and speared a Mexican officer from his horse. He sank the shaft through the man’s chest and impaled him into the ground. Killing two or three others, he mounted the Mex’s horse-a fine white stallion-and charged in, hacking and cutting, shooting and stabbing.

The horse was blown out from under him, a volley of grapeshot blowing the animal’s legs into shrapnel.

From above, the landscape was ragged and gutted, a chasm filled with smoke and fire, swarming with men and riderless horses. It was a slaughter of the first degree and in the confusion, it was hard to tell who was winning and who was losing.

But Cobb didn’t know and didn’t care.

He fought on, killing more men, stealing horses, slicing through the Mexican lines like a red-hot blade. The fighting continued for some time, but eventually, the dead heaped across the ground in great flesh-and-blood ramparts, the Mexicans broke off their advance. Pounded continually by artillery, their cavalry shattered, they pulled back and even this cost them hundreds and hundreds of men.

When the fighting had ended, the battlefield was a graveyard.

A slaughterhouse.

As far as the eye could see, bodies and parts thereof, men blown up into trees, horses disemboweled by cannonball, soldiers cut in half from musketry. It looked like an image from Bruegel’s The Triumph of Death -smoke and fire, cadavers and shattered wagons. Pitted earth. Pools of blood. Thousands of flies lighting off the dead and those near to it. Men begged for medical aid, for water, for their mothers and sweethearts, for an ounce of life so they could do just a little more killing.