Have you ever watched a private try to win a battle by tucking the enemy in? In August of 1847 the United States Army stood in the Valley of Mexico, close enough to the capital to see its church towers on a clear day, and between the army and those towers lay a field of black volcanic rock that the Mexican command had declared impassable. What no one on either side expected was that one soldier in a borrowed nightcap would cross it in the rain with a candle, a blanket and a firm belief that the enemy only needed a good night's sleep.
General Winfield Scott had marched up from Puebla in early August with about 10,000 men. Rather than hit the fortified causeway at El Peñón, he swung south around Lake Chalco to San Agustín. In his way lay the Pedregal, miles of old lava broken into ridges, cracks and knife-edged stone, where a horse could not go and a man went slowly and bled on the way.
General Gabriel Valencia commanded the Mexican Army of the North, about 5,000 men by Scott's count, and some of the best troops Mexico had. Santa Anna ordered him to hold San Ángel. Valencia disliked the ground and disliked Santa Anna more, and he moved forward instead to a hill near the rancho of Padierna, with 22 guns covering the only road. He was certain nobody would come at him across the lava. When an officer reported that the Americans were doing exactly that, one historian records his answer as: "No! No! You're dreaming, man."
They were not dreaming. Captain Robert E. Lee and the engineers had found a way across, and on August 19 work parties cut a road over the Pedregal under fire. Valencia's guns punished everything that came within range. That afternoon brigades under Riley, Cadwalader and Persifor Smith worked around through the broken ground to the village of San Gerónimo, behind Valencia's flank. Then the sky opened. A cold rain fell all night on men with no tents, no fires and no supper.
Brandon Herrera was with Smith's men in San Gerónimo, wet to the bone and listening to the officers argue about what Valencia believed. Somebody repeated the line about dreaming. Brandon thought about it for a long time. "Then we'll help him," he told the Kentucky private beside him. "A man who thinks he's dreaming won't get up for anything."
The private, who had followed Brandon from the tortilla trail and had learned nothing from it, asked what he meant. Brandon explained. He had a candle stub, a gray blanket and a nightcap he had won from a sutler at cards in Puebla. If the Mexican pickets saw a man in a nightcap walking through the rain with a candle, at night, in the middle of a battle, they would have only two choices. Either the Americans had gone mad, or they themselves were asleep. "Nobody likes the first one," Brandon said. "They'll pick the second."
"You're a slugabed in a sleeping cap," said the private, "and you'll get shot." Brandon pointed out that he was already wet, already cold and already in the Army, and that being shot would at least be a change.
Shortly after dark, Lieutenant Zealous Tower of the engineers found a ravine that ran from San Gerónimo around to the rear of Valencia's camp. General Smith decided to march the brigades down it before dawn and strike from behind. Captain Lee volunteered to carry word of the plan back across the Pedregal to General Scott, alone, in the dark and the rain, over ground that had beaten horses in daylight. Scott later called Lee's night crossings the greatest feat of physical and moral courage by any individual he knew of in the campaign. It was real courage, and it was Lee's.
Brandon's contribution began about the same time, and it was smaller. He lit the candle under his hat brim, put on the nightcap, wrapped the blanket around his shoulders like a man looking for a chamber pot, and walked off into the rain toward the nearest Mexican picket.
The first sentry he found was standing under a dripping tree with his musket and his misery. He saw a pale figure with a candle come out of the dark, and he did not shoot it. Nobody is quite sure what to shoot in a dream. Brandon walked up, patted him gently on the shoulder and said, in the softest Spanish he had, that it was very late and that a man so tired should be in bed. Then he took the musket, leaned it against the tree, wrapped the sentry in the gray blanket and sat him down against the trunk. The sentry was asleep before Brandon had finished tucking in the corners.
This was encouraging. Brandon found a second sentry and sang him a German lullaby his Oma used to sing, badly, and in the wrong key. It worked. The third took a little longer, and Brandon had to tell him a bedtime story about a donkey who wanted to be a general. By the fourth he had run out of blankets and was using the sentries' own capes, and by midnight Brandon Herrera had tucked in four sentries, a corporal, and a lieutenant who had not asked.
The lieutenant was the difficult one. He sat up twice and demanded to know who Brandon was. Brandon told him he was a dream, and a dream with very good manners. The lieutenant thought this over, said that his dreams were usually better dressed, and lay back down.
The Kentucky private had followed at a distance to watch Brandon get shot. Instead he watched Brandon carry the candle along the edge of the ravine like a nurse doing rounds, stopping at each damp bundle to pull a cape up to its chin. "He's tucking in the Mexican army," the private told a sergeant who came looking for them. The sergeant said that was the stupidest thing he had heard in Mexico. Then he asked if Brandon needed help.
None of this changed what history records. Valencia had posted no sentries in the ravines along the route the Americans used, perhaps, one historian suggests, because he feared his own men would desert in the dark. The Americans did not need Brandon's bedtime stories to get through. History records that Valencia posted no sentries in the ravines. It does not record that the last one was tucked in.
Long before daylight on August 20, Riley's brigade, led by Lieutenant Tower, picked its way down the ravine in rain and mud and darkness, and Cadwalader and Smith's own men came after. Brandon fell in with them at the end of the line, still in the nightcap, because nobody had told him to take it off and he had grown fond of it. At about sunrise the columns came up on the high ground behind the Mexican camp. Across the valley, at the appointed time, Colonel Ransom's men opened a diversion on Valencia's front, guided by Captain Lee, who had apparently not slept either.
Then Riley's men went in from behind. The Mexican troops facing front found the shots coming from the rear. Some gunners stood by their pieces and fought, and the infantry resisted fiercely, but the camp came apart. Infantry, lancers, gunners, mules and camp followers went down the road toward San Ángel in one crowd. General Smith took out his watch. "It has taken just seventeen minutes," he said. Scott's official report said the same thing: seventeen minutes.
Brandon arrived at the parapet at about minute twelve, nightcap first. A Mexican officer running past looked at the cap, then at the candle stub still under Brandon's hat brim, and crossed himself. Valencia had been told he was dreaming. Valencia was the one who woke up.
Valencia himself got away. Scott reported 22 pieces of brass artillery taken, about 700 Mexican soldiers killed and 813 taken prisoner, among them four generals; a later count gives 843 prisoners. Two of the captured guns had belonged to Captain John O'Brien's battery, lost at Buena Vista in February, and the men who found them cheered them like old friends. American losses on the morning of the 20th were about 60 killed and wounded by Scott's report, and about 300 across both days by later counts.
The road to the capital was open. That same afternoon the army fought again, at the bridge and convent of Churubusco, and before night it stood within five miles of Mexico City. Lee was brevetted for his work. Scott rode up to the Regiment of Mounted Riflemen, took off his hat and told them, "Brave Rifles! Veterans! You have been baptized in fire and blood and have come out steel!" The regiment still carries the words.
Brandon's part was noticed later, and only in a small way. Six damp Mexican soldiers, including a lieutenant, were found among the prisoners still wrapped in American blankets and capes and swearing they had been put to bed by a ghost. A captain asked around. Brandon admitted it. The captain wrote in the company's report that Private Herrera had "conducted the enemy's pickets to their rest, without loss." Among the plunder from Valencia's camp was a folding camp bed from a general's tent, and the brigade's officers had it presented to Brandon, on the grounds that he was the only man in the Army who had not been to bed in two days.
He slept in it at once, in the nightcap. The Kentucky private stood over him, not knowing what else to do, and pulled the blanket up to his chin.
