Bloodiest Hour

Jose Gonzalo Escobar, the Mexican rebel leader who has retreated with Fabian cunning half the length of Mexico, made a stand last week at Jiminez. It resulted in what Minister of War Plutarco Elias Calles called "the bloodiest hour in Mexican history."

Dashing, theatrically handsome, 37-year-old General Juan Andreu Almazan was the hero of a battle that seemed to have definitely broken the backbone of the revolution.

General Escobar chose Jiminez, the flat sandy town that has been his headquarters for the past three weeks, on receiving word from rebel generals in the north that the morale of all their troops would suffer unless a show of force was made.

A wide semicircle of trenches was dug south of Jiminez railway station. There the insurrectos piled in and waited for the army of dapper General Almazan, plodding across the desert.

Long before daybreak, the federals appeared in three columns. Right and left closed in on Jiminez like a nutcracker, while the main column under General Almazan himself pressed straight forward. It was impossible to see. A thousand crashes which left the eardrums ringing, and the darkness burst into points of flame. Artillery, machine gunners and riflemen banged away at the opposing flashes. The rebels, with three lines of trenches, held out bravely to the dawn and through the heat of the ensuing day.

In the afternoon the federal left wing reached the town. Street fighting commenced. The railway station, which had become a veritable fortress with sandbags and machine guns, was captured. At the height of the battle federal cavalry was sent to cut the railway north of Jiminez and prevent the rebels escaping. A lucky shot by a federal bombing plane exploded an ammunition train behind the town. The rebels, believing themselves surrounded, fled. Jiminez was captured.

Swift to follow up his advantage. General Almazan pressed forward with his cavalry, caught up with the fleeing rebels at the broken railway bridge of La Reforma. Here was "the bloodiest hour." Federal bands of Indian cavalry swept down on the rebel trains from both sides. Aviators bombed the trains repeatedly. Over 1,000 were killed in the slaughter, and after the remnant of the rebels had escaped, the dead were piled on freight cars like logs.

"In my opinion," crowed General Calles, federal commander-in-chief, when the news of Almazan's feat was brought to him, "this most infamous rebellion has been dealt a death blow."

While freight cars of Mexican corpses lay in the heat and dust of La Reforma, the name of the stalwart Negro buck private John Finezee appeared on the front page of all U. S. papers. Private Finezee was a member of a cavalry patrol of the famed 10th U. S. Cavalry, which discovered a hidden cache of hand grenades that the rebels were attempting to smuggle across the border into Mexico. The rebels appearing a few minutes later to claim their bombs, a brush ensued, in the course of which Private Finezee received a bullet in the chest. Painfully, but not seriously wounded, he law in an army hospital while papers headlined U. S. TROOPS FIRE ON MEXICANS.