Mexican Army Flagbearer

Flags were the loud language of the nineteenth-century battlefield, and the Mexican Army carried two kinds at the Alamo. The first was the national tricolor — green, white, and red, the eagle and serpent of the old Aztec emblem at the center — carried by each battalion's color party as the regimental standard, the rallying point in formation and the point of regimental honor in combat. The second was the deguello, the bloodred no-quarter flag that Santa Anna ordered hoisted from the church tower of San Fernando in San Antonio on the morning of February 23, 1836 — the visible warning to the defenders inside the Alamo that the assault, when it came, would offer no surrender and no prisoners. The same word in Spanish for "throat-cutting" and for the bugle call that announced it, the deguello was the deliberate cruelty Santa Anna intended as the war's settling lesson to anyone considering rebellion against the Mexican Republic. Two flags above the same army — the national colors that gave the soldiers a cause to fight for, and the deguello that told the enemy what was coming. This King & Country figure shows a junior Mexican officer carrying the national colors forward into the assault — the green-white-red tricolor with the eagle-and-serpent emblem on the white center panel, mounted on a pike-staff topped with the gilt finial of Mexican federal service. He wears the officer's regulation order: dark blue coatee with red collar and cuffs heavily laced in gold, gold epaulettes at each shoulder marking commissioned rank, crimson silk sash at the waist, white trousers, and a sword at the left hip. The straw hat with the tricolor cockade — in place of the regulation shako — is a field-service indulgence common among Mexican officers in the Texas campaign, the heavier dress hat reserved for parade. Color-bearers were the most visible targets on any battlefield, and the Alamo defenders included the Tennessee long-rifle marksmen of Davy Crockett's company who could pick out an officer at two hundred yards. The flagbearer carries the colors at the head of the column with Santa Anna's Laddermen bringing the scaling ladders up behind him, under the overall command of General Santa Anna directing the attack. Model: RTA138 / King & Country / 1/30 (60mm) scale / matte finish / 1 piece set