Customer Reviews

The Diezmo: A Novel

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An absorbing account, written with much foreshadowing of an old man looking back upon the foolishness and stupidity of war. Comparisons with BLOOD MERIDIAN are natural, and here the message is quite the same, that men are addicted to war, that there is no glory in it, that stupidity and violence will continue to prevail.

Bass structures his narrative on the historical memoirs left us, which were biased and conflicting, but perhaps, as Cormac McCarthy might say, the truth of what did not happen may be about as true as what can be documented, the memories of men being uncertain and biased.

Some of the characters and scenes are imagined, but some characters such as Thomas Jefferson Green and William Fisher are historical. There is violence and gore in here, but it is not laid on. The author has an eye for the telling detail, as in this paragraph describing the commanders planning the invasion into Mexico:

"They sat in a circle of mismatched chairs. Green and Somervell's chairs were turned backwards so that they straddled them like horses. They leaned forward in the chairs, resting the weight of their torsos against the backs, as if even here they intended to somehow charge into battle."

The prose is nothing like McCarthy, of course, but is sparkling and fresh and goes down like a clean drink of water. Typical Rick Bass prose. The title refers to the black bean lottery that Mexicans used to determine which prisoners were shot and which survived. This may seem too obscure for browsing bookbuyers, but the attractive dustjacket may encourage them to look more closely.

Rick Bass lists his sources on the Acknowledgments Page in the rear of the book, so as to alert scholars who hunger for more details. The author says that he wrote it as our troops were charging into Baghdad--suggesting that his emotions then may have influenced the book.

However he came to write it, I'm glad that he did. This book is short, just 208 pages, but exactly the length needed to tell the story of these soldiers of misfortune. It is a treasure. Bravo!

I found this book to be an excellent historical novelation (or is it a novelation of a historic event)? Anyway, as someone who is familiar with Texas history, I still found much to admire about this novelisation (novelization?) of the Meir escapade, which I learned a lot about, in spite of my (supposed) knowledge of the story. It is made more interesting by the centering of the story on one fictional character, intermixed with real, historic figures. I would recommend the book highly to anyone wanting to learn about this tragic event in Texas history, as well as anyone wanting to read an exciting, bloody story in its own right.

I was reluctant to continue after hearing some of the horrific deeds commited by the men who (after reading the dustjacket) I thought to be Texas heroes. But just as I was appalled I was mesmerized into reading throughout the night in hopes of learning how their fates played out. And as I write this just a few minutes later I am wondering how the survivors fared, the ones that were less critical to the story at hand but may have played a more powerful and less publicized role. Overall I recommend this to anyone with an interest in Texas...or history... or man in general.

A workmanlike retelling, in the form of a survivor's memoir, of the filibustering excesses of a group of Texas patriots who set out to defend the borders of their new republic but stumble, instead, into a confrontation with vastly superior Mexican forces on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande; this tale captures the naive eagerness and unabashed savagery of the glory-crazed Texas combatants through the eyes of a diffident and surprisingly passive narrator. Fifteen year old James Alexander and his boon companion James Shepherd respond to the call to glory and the defense of their newly born nation when a contingent of Texas irregulars arrives on a recruiting mission in their small rural community. Excited by the promises of glory they are swiftly swept up in an ill-conceived and badly executed campaign which rapidly descends into looting and pillage of Mexican communities along the border and then, after a riotous slaughter in the town of Laredo, devolves into an excursion on the Mexican side against the Mexican town of Mier.

But the leaders of the unit of irregulars fall to quarreling and indecisiveness as one of their number refuses to cross the river and takes his troops home while the others conceal their orders which proscribe atrocities against the indigenous Mexican communities as they lead their men on a mission of brutal slaughter and theft. The remaining troops with the two rogue leaders pursue a dream of military conquest, only to stumble into a Mexican force that is many times the size of their own. Undaunted and without regard to the reality of this mismatch, and after much bloody fighting, the Texans are borne down by the greater numbers arrayed against them. Their inevitable surrender begins what is to become a long nightmare of brutal captivity as the Mexicans force them to clean and rebuild the town they have destroyed and then march them south, ever deeper into Mexico, parading them before the local towns and villages where they are further brutalized. Forced labor and even more horrific imprisonment await them.

After an abortive attempt at escape, the remnants of the Texans is forced to participate in a lottery wherein one in ten of their number will be shot, the rest to suffer endless and degrading imprisonment. The story follows the awakening of the fictional James Alexander to the foolishness of his choice to pursue war and glory and of his failure, after the horrors of the enterprise began to strike home with him, to yank himself free of the passivity that allowed him to be swept along in the atrocities of his associates until their comeuppance before superior Mexican forces. More forethought on the part of their leaders alone would probably have spared them their defeat while certainly sparing the Mexican villagers the rapine and pillage wrought by the Texans before the Mexican army overwhelmed them. More energetic assertion of his own intentions would have likely removed young Alexander from the ensuing carnage and suffering.

Young James comes of age in his captivity, realizing all that he has lost as he tells his story from the vantage point of advanced age many years afterwards. When we leave him at the end, we see only a lonely and isolated man who has retreated into a kind of self-imposed exile from those around him, reliving and regretting the stupidity that drove him, in his youth, to such wanton destruction, costing the life of his good friend and, perhaps, his own once richer future. Rick Bass has written an anti-war tale in the guise of an apparently accurate historical account of events from Texas history. But the narrative is marred by certain limitations including the personal isolation of its narrator and the odd lapses in the memoirist voice. Alexander tells us things he shouldn't know were he a real person, as when he describes a rock as being the shape of the map of Mexico (it's unlikely a back country Texas farm boy would have had a good picture of the geography of that country, especially in a time of shifting borders like that was) or when he provides precise details as to the distances of places. At such moments the author's own historically educated voice appears to creep in and overhelm the narrator's. And yet, despite a slow and somewhat abstract start to the book, I found the tale compelling, particularly after their travails on the long trail to imprisonment in the south -- and, afterwards, during their time in the prison fortress into which they are finally thrust.

There is a brief and hard-to-credit romantic interlude when young Alexander attracts the school age daughter of a Mexican officer who is building a road and for which purpose Alexander and his cronies have been impressed into service but it doesn't go far and, given the tale's stark ending, we are led to suspect that this was to be the high point of the Texas youth's romantic life due in part, at least, to the terrible toll the war and imprisonment imposed on him. Overall the foolishness and emptiness of war's reckless violence and vanity are the real characters of this tale in which the various leaders, William Fisher, Thomas Jefferson Green and Bigfoot Wallace, legends in Texas history, come across as superficial and vainglorious fools, overbearing and in search of loot and glory above all else. It's an antidote to the oft imagined glory of war and yet it is finally one-sided since it cannot stand as a proxy for all wars ever fought. After all, if the Texans are brutal and racist in their aggressive behavior in crossing over to loot the Mexican town of Mier, then can the Mexican soldiery who defended Mier and beat the rampaging Texans be equally bad? If one side is the aggressor, whichever side we think it to be, then there is a good side in war, too, found finally in those who stand against the aggression.

Bass offers credit to neither side, however, in his narration which focuses on war's futility through the eyes of this young Texan while ignoring the value of defending Mier and other communities against those men who have come to the town for rapine and pillage. It's a quandary for all those who condemn war out of hand and something that may never be easily reconciled for war is, finally, a brutal and dehumanizing thing that plays no favorites in the violence it visits on winners and losers both.

Stuart W. Mirsky
author of The King of Vinland's Saga

I've always been fascinated by the story of the Mier Expedition. My great-great grandfather, Willis Coplan, was one of the survivors. The book is wrong on page 146, however, where it states that Willis, after escaping and then being caught, spent 20 years in captivity in Matamoros, withing sight of the Texas border. On the contrary, he was sent to Perote Castle. In his memoirs, he wrote that he was "glad to get back with the boys, with whom he had experienced so many hardships." His memoirs also contradict Rick Bass's description of the black bean incident, where Rick's characters are stoic and despondent. Willis, however, wrote that the men who drew the black beans joked about it. One said, "This beats raffling all to pieces," while another said, "Boys, I never failed in my life to draw a prize." It was the men who drew the white beans who grieved, and some of them offered to trade their white beans for black ones, but they had no takers.
Nevertheless, this is a wonderful novel. I'm grateful to Rick Bass for bringing to life a story that, for me, had almost become a fable. Thanks, Rick

Bass recounts the story of a troop of sometimes reluctant, but always relentless men ostensibly fighting for their new nation of Texas. The historical incident, obscure to most of us, is well known to Texans, the retaliation for the Battle of San Jacinto. We come to know what drives some of them and the regrets of others. Mostly, we marvel at their capacity for survival. When everything is taken away from them; when they live day after day in toil and torture, infested with an army of lice and tested by disease after disease, they still have the ability to experience the small joy that comes with the minutest reprieve.

There is little joy in reading the book, though the author presents the story as well we could expect. Like castor oil, though, it may be good for us to see those so eager for war get their wish, then regret it for every minute of their lives.