Free The Training Ground by Martin Dugard Page B

their dreams and conversations for two years, lay on the opposite shore. The river was muddy and thin. The current veered between sluggish and deceptively fast. Cotton grew wild on the banks, its puffy white buds nestled in among the mesquite and palmetto. The thriving city of Matamoros fronted the river on the Mexican side. The houses were made of wood and bricks. Its entire population of a few thousand citizens stood on their rooftops to peer across at Taylor’s arriving army. American soldiers could hear the peal of church bells and even watch with longing as the young local girls came to the river and undressed to bathe.
    Taylor’s camp was on a dusty patch of freshly tilled farmland, just inland from a bend in the river that thrust itself like a sharply pointed finger into the Mexican landmass. The Americans bivouacked in full sight of the Mexican army, daring them to provoke an attack. A pole was stuck upright in the fertile soil, and the Stars and Stripes was raised with great ceremony and blowing of horns. “For the first time this banner waved proudly before our forces, as if taking possession of what by every title properly belonged to us,” wrote a Mexican officer, watching from Matamoros. “The soldiers of the army of the North were incensed in observing this insult of the enemy. Their cry was for the contest, and they beseeched their General to permit them to avenge the outrage.”
    But while his troops were inside the city’s fortifications and armed for battle, Mexican general Mejía forbade any attack unless the Americans tried to cross the river. Taylor, who had no intention of doing any such thing, ordered his men to pitch those familiar white tents in a square formation, with their supply wagons positioned in the center for protection.
    In this way, the two armies faced off, waiting to see who would make the first move.
    “M Y DEAR JULIA ,” Grant began his letter the next day. He missed her terribly and longed for a reunion. When he was with Julia, Grant was at his best. But with this great distance between them, he now found himself at loose ends. “A long and laborious march and one that was threatened with opposition from the enemy, too, has just been completed, and the Army now in this country are laying in camp just opposite the town of Matamoros. The city from this side bears an imposing appearance and no doubt contains four to five thousand inhabitants.”
    Grant didn’t know the true size of the Mexican army, nor that the Americans’ foes enjoyed a formidable advantage. But it didn’t take a military genius to realize that Taylor’s forces were relatively small and that the nearest source of fresh ammunition and food was thirty miles away on the Gulf of Mexico, where ships were being offloaded at a place called Port Isabel, which the Mexicans had evacuated. With little trouble, the Americans in both places could easily be surrounded and cut off. In many ways, Taylor’s army was in a position very much like that of the Alamo defenders, which had fallen ten years earlier that month.
    Taylor immediately ordered the construction of a proper defensive structure. Designed by Captain Joseph K. F. Mansfield, a Connecticut-born engineer who had specialized in fort building for two dozen years, it would be laid out in a roughly rectangular shape, with six diamond-shaped bastions on which to mount cannons thrusting out from the edges and corners. The structure would be capable of housing eight hundred men, with walls nine feet high and fifteen feet wide, made of thickly packed dirt and timber. A moat measuring twenty feet wide and eight feet deep would ring the perimeter. Fortified subterranean chambers would provide safe storage for ammunition. The men would live in tents pitched on the small parade ground, out of range of rifle fire but not of the long, parabolic lob of an artillery shell.
    The days soon took on a predictable schedule. Each morning began with reveille, assembly, and roll call.