Gen. Victoriano Huerta, Soldier, Who in a Day Became a Leading Figure in the Country He Served So Long with Varying Fortunes.

New York Times 100 years ago today, February 23, 1913:
By Richard Barry.
    In all the fifty-six years of his life the most dramatic moment that ever occurred to Victoriano Huerta — until Tuesday of the past week, when he was suddenly made President pro tem, of the Republic of Mexico — came two years ago, when he was hastily summoned one morning to the palace by his generalissimo, Porfirio Diaz.
    He was received in the Hall of the Ambassadors, a long, narrow room used for state receptions, and one of the few places in the palace reached by only one door, and thus free from interruption. He found the aged President alone, as brief as ever in his words, but with a certain gentleness in his voice, which the commander of the army had not noticed before.
    It was the day before Diaz left for Vera Cruz, whence he was to sail for Europe, and he had summoned Huerta to announce to him his decision to quit Mexico forever. His hand had become too infirm for the ruling of the most tempestuous people an the western hemisphere, and he was reading, without quailing, the handwriting on the wall.
    Diaz's speech to Huerta at that moment, as reported to the present writer by a close friend of the new President, was as follows:
    "I am taking the only step possible for the peace of Mexico, and I have only one regret, my friend. That is, that a military man is not to take my place. God alone can tell what the future will bring forth. As for you, who have been always faithful, remember this: You are a soldier; obey; do not question authority, but rigorously prosecute every order that is given you to execute.
    "You are of Chapultepec. Remember that. If those of Chapultepec do not give good answer for their training then, indeed, is our nation faithless."
    The tears came into Huerta's eyes. He prostrated himself and kissed the hand of the nation's exalted hero, who was about to pass forever from the scene of his conquests. He said nothing. He made no remonstrance, by word or look. He was at that moment, as he had been from childhood, a soldier from hair to heels.
    The picture of the parting of these two gains more significance if we pause to consider what the men stood for. Diaz, the half-Indian adventurer, had scrambled from obscurity and poverty to a place in history which ranks him as one of the handful of surpassingly great men of the nineteenth century. Without education, without training, without observation of the ways of other nations, and with only the hard school of experience for his teacher and only intuition for his guide, he had tempered his government to the peculiar character of his people and had welded them into a cohesive mass.
    Huerta, by every right of heritage, should have been of an opposite type. Of an excellent family, bearing in his veins noble Spanish blood, associated from childhood with the most cultured circles of the Republic, one might have expected from him some slight satisfaction at the downfall of one whom, all his class had always considered an interloper.
    Yet Huerta, the aristocrat, had always been a loyal follower of Diaz, the plebeian. Huerta, the cultured, had always been devoted to Diaz, the unlettered.
    The explanation lies in the fact that both were born soldiers, and Huerta recognized in Diaz the essence of that spirit which he, all his life, had assiduously cultivated — an instant obedience to constituted authority.
    In reminding Huerta that he was "of Chapultepec," Diaz was appealing to the best of the martial spirit which he had been at lifelong pains to inculcate in the hearts of his army. Diaz never had any delusions about the secret of his hold on his people. He well knew it to be military, and he never, except toward the very last, was remiss in his cultivation of the strength of his army.
    One of his chief military plans was the establishment and maintenance of the military school at Chapultepec. It was the Mexican West Point. There Diaz had assembled the best instructors obtainable for the subjects required in the training of a modern soldier. Theoretically the students at Chapultepec were chosen, as are the students at West Point, one from each of the Congressional districts throughout the republic, and as a result of competitive examination. But like other things in Mexico practice and theory went far from hand in hand. The Mexicans have the best constitution and the worst government in the world.
    Diaz personally selected the students for the Chapultepec school. Curiously, his preference was always for the aristocrat. Nothing pleased him more than to learn that the young scion of some ancient house was desirous of entering Chapultepec.
    Thus, thirty-eight years ago. when Diaz was informed that the eighteen-year-old Victoriano, son of the Huertas of Chihuahua, desired to become a soldier, he did not hesitate a moment, but signed, immediately an order for his entrance to the military academy, despite the fact that the district from which he came already had three representatives in Chapultepec.
    Huerta served his four school years passably well. He was neither at the head nor the foot of his class. He was graduated with honors, being about the tenth in a class of nearly a hundred, and immediately went to join a regiment on the west coast.
    The entire history of the new President is that of a regular army officer and with none of the deviations from strict military duty which mar the history of nearly every other officer in the country.
    Orozco rose from the ranks. Blanquet is an adventurer, who was appointed to a military position because that seemed the easiest way to prevent his becoming a bandit. Zapata is an out-and-out bandit, and Mason a revolutionary Socialist.
    Of all the men who have risen to the top in the present upheaval in Mexico, Felix Diaz and Huerta, alone, are of the regular army, and possess military records of which any soldier might be proud. Reyes, who completed the trinity, was killed, and he was over 70 years old anyway.
    Early in his career Huerta gave the alert eye of Porfirio Diaz an opportunity to take his measure and it was not to his disadvantage. He had risen, through slow promotions, to the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel and was in charge of a station in Matanzas, far removed from the capital. There plots could easily be hatched and Diaz was loath to leave in charge any officer in whom he had not implicit confidence.
    Huerta was barely thirty-five when this incident occurred. One afternoon while he was riding, with an escort of but three men, through a mountain pass in the vicinity of his station, six or seven masked men stepped from the roadside and covered his little party. Naturally they threw up their hands.
    The highwaymen proved be members of the band of Flores Zegaza, the bandit who kept the community on the feather edge. It was his habit to descend on the towns along the coast and levy toll whenever hunger or caprice impelled him so to, do. Huerta soon stood in front of Zegaza's hut, an adobe dwelling, much dilapidated, far up the mountain.
    There Zegaza made the proposition which was not at all unusual in Mexico then, and which is, in fact, quite the vogue to-day. He proposed that Huerta should keep him informed as to the days when the military force would be inarching in a direction opposite from the town. On such days, Zegaza would make it a point to call, with his followers, and collect from the natives such stores of money and clothes and food and wine and tobacco as had accumulated since the last visit.
    Let us not, here in New York, at the present day, when Becker is not yet silent in his cell, shudder at the treachery and brutality of such a compact. In principle it is no different when the parties are Mexican bandits and officers of the regular Mexican army than when they are Manhattan policemen and gamblers.
    Zegaza was not at all surprised to have Huerta accept his proposition and to receive in return for the promised information an assurance that a share of whatever loot fell to the bandits should be left for the soldiers at an appointed place. In fact, had Huerta not accepted it, it is not likely that he would have returned alive to Matanzas.
    Ten days later Huerta sent word to Zegaza that he would be away from the station on the following Thursday.
    Promptly on Thursday the bandits rode into the town, confident there would be no opposition except from the sporadic pop-guns of the over-frightened storekeepers. As they turned into the main street, discharging their revolvers to frighten every one away, a squad of Huerta's soldiers closed in on their rear, and another squad appeared in their front.
    Huerta had double-crossed the bandit.
    A number of Zegaza's men were killed in the street. The remainder, with the bandit chief himself, surrendered. A week later Zagaza was shot in the cuartel of the prison attached to the station. The report of the affair that went to the City of Mexico said that he "had attempted to escape." It was the venerable Mexican excuse, a cloak to cover any crime, whether in the interests of justice or of injustice.
    Diaz, however, did not wait long to hear all the details.
    Such a man as Huerta had shown himself to be in the affair with Zegaza was the very sort of man to appeal to Diaz supremely. That was the very sort of Lieutenant he most desired, and the one most difficult to get; one who would be loyal to his trust even, though he succeeded with treachery and disloyalty.
    "One whose honor rooted in dishonor stood; where faith, unfaithful, kept him falsely true."
    It was some time after this that Huerta was called to the City of Mexico and offered his choice of positions under the War Department. Some aver this opportunity was the reward he gleaned from his disposal of Zegaza; others declare that Huerta was chosen naturally, because of his native equipment, for his next post.
    This was that of the Chief of the Geographical Survey of the republic. At any rate, it is certain that Huerta has often declared to his friends that this peaceful work was more to his liking than any other in which he ever engaged.
    For nearly ten years Huerta, who began the work as a Lieutenant Colonel, and emerged from it as a Brigadier General, went up and down, back and forth across the republic, making complete surveys, which should exist, for all time, as the basis of the Government's hydrographic charts.
    The larger part of the time he spent in his very pleasant home in the City of Mexico or on his estates in Chihuahua, associating with the most cultured people in the country, a favorite at the palace, and quite content to let political affairs take care of themselves. It is not noted by any of his friends that he over expressed any more than an orthodox soldier's ambition for himself, and at all times he was most outspoken in his admiration for and his loyalty to Porfirio Diaz.
    While never relaxing his attention to his duties as a soldier, and every day fulfilling punctually the routine necessary in the position he held, Huerta, at the same time, has for twenty years been engaged in cattle raising and lead mining on his family estates, and he has more than doubled a fortune which became his when he was 30. It is said that he annually ships over 3,000 head of cattle to Chicago.
    In this way he has had constant business relations with American houses, and those who have dealt with him describe him as a high type of Castilian business man, courteous in his dealings, prompt in his deliveries and punctilious in his accounts.
    Because of his extreme loyalty to Diaz, which was well known and widely commented on, it was quite generally supposed when Madero came into power that Huerta would join the revolutionists. Some even believed that he would go into exile with his revered chief.
    On the contrary, Huerta became Madero's most effective weapon in his efforts to quell the various insurrections which have broken out repeatedly during the past two years. Doubtless he was remembering the parting words of his old master given him that spring morning in the Hall of the Ambassadors.
    Orozco, who had been Madero's chief of staff in the revolution which swept him to the Presidency, turned against him when he was most needed, and is still in revolt in the north of Sonora.
    On the other hand, Huerta, who had bitterly fought Madero back to the very gates of the City of Mexico, once Madero had been duly constituted President, turned about and lent himself whole-heartedly to the execution of all orders that emanated from the Palace.
    "Remember that you are a soldier; obey!"
    These words of old Porfirio Diaz seem to have upheld him. Even in the crisis when it became necessary for him to turn against his President and order his arrest Huerta insisted that the procedure be according to — I was about to say Hoyle — according to the Constitution.
    Huerta required that Lascurain be advanced to the Presidency, while he himself was appointed to the portfolio of Foreign Affairs. Then, after twenty-six minutes, he accepted the Congressional appointment to the Presidency. And all of this was quite in accordance with the Constitution, and is no very great violence to Diaz's parting injunction; at least, it is not a great departure for Mexico.
    Whether Huerta can accomplish more in the Presidency than he could, first under Diaz and then under Madero, remains to be seen. He will have no larger a military force and no more loyal an army than he had then. Under both Presidents he was the Commander in Chief of the Mexican regular army. To those who object that he has no experience as a statesman, it may well be replied that the chief virtues required of a Mexican President, at the present time, are military virtues.
    It was rumored months ago that Huerta was planning just the very coup d'état which arrived last week, apparently without his direct effort. It was said that on the 16th of last September, the day of the celebration of Mexican independence from Spain, he would attack the garrison at Juarez and make himself President.
    When Madero faced him with this rumor, Huerta was exceedingly scornful.
    "I am no Orozco," was his reply, and evidently he meant it.
    Yet the moment arrived when even the most obedient of soldiers found it necessary to rise above the career for which the republic had been training him through a generation.