Zapata’s and Villa’s wholesale shooting of prisoners, the looting of haciendas, banks and stores in captured cities, their retaliation against federal officers, now seem like kid-glove, pink-tea affairs, after the stories of German atrocities. In the light of these atrocities, Villa might be a Mexican Chesterfield, and Zapata a scrupulous Morelian hidalgo of the most fastidious tastes. Strange to relate, the most virulent attacks against Mexican civilization, methods of warfare and revolutionary barbarities, were written by German editorialists. The Mexicans had no Treitschkes, Nietzsches, von Bernhardis to sing the pæans of war, of the destruction and annihilation of enemies, and inoffensive non-combatants in the name of a higher culture and a greater civilization. The precedents of cruelties and wanton destruction were created by the federal officers under Diaz and Huerta. Where the Federals passed, they left a trail of death and desolation. To prove that they had fought valiantly the Federals killed peaceful peons and sent the ears of the Indians as vouchers to the War Department. Whole villages passed through fire and sword--in others all the men were impressed into the army, and the women and children concentrated in the cities. Thousands of fruit trees that had been growing for years, bearing fruit, and which were the sole source of income of families of peons, were ruthlessly cut down to be sold for firewood by greedy Jefes Políticos. A whole population was decimated because it would not stay under the leash of the slave driver on the sugar and tobacco plantations owned by half a dozen rich families. Their day of reckoning has almost arrived, and no matter what Zapata or any other leader may do politically, the peons of Morelos know that the lands are theirs for the taking. Morelos is one of the smallest States in Mexico, and one of the richest, and has an area of 2,734 square miles and a population of 179,114. As many as thirty thousand soldiers with machine guns and cannon were sent to conquer Zapata and his army, but Zapata remained unconquered. All the generals, including Huerta, who had won laurels in many battlefields, invariably lost them in Morelos. The Federals fought according to book-strategy, while Zapata and his chiefs fought with the same fabian tactics which defeated Hannibal in Italy and Napoleon in Spain. When the patient, ignorant, but physically powerful Indians discovered that they could shoot and fight as well as the trained Federals, and that a few thousand Indians banded together could keep at bay a whole army of Federals, the struggle for land was won.