John Reed and Ivor Thord-Gray in Mexico, France and Russia

Ivor Thord-Gray and John Reed might not have been acquainted, but they sure came close: they were both with Pancho Villa in Mexico, were both in France for the Great War, and were both packing arms in the Bolshevik revolution, although not on the same side.

John Reed joined Pancho Villa in the autumn of 1913, just after the battle of Tierra Blanca. Thord-Gray recently left on a gun-running mission for Pancho Villa to Tucson, Arizona. Reed covered Villa for several months, most famously writing about the battle of Torreón.

Reed, like Thord-Gray, evidently saw both sides of Mexican sympathies toward Gringos. From “Insurgent Mexico” Reed tells of this little ditty recited menacingly to him in a barroom:

 “Yo tengo un pistole

Con Manago de marfil

Para matar a todos los Gringos

Que vienen por ferrocarril”

of which the well-travelled John Reed said: “I thought it diplomatic to leave…”

Thord-Gray wrote of similar circumstances, where he thought it best that he “..kept [his] own council” and both men lived to tell his tale.

Out of the frying pan into the fire, both Reed and Thord-Gray quit Mexico in August, 1914, to join in the war which had broken out on the Continent. Thord-Gray served as a Major in the British Army, writing a manual on trench warfare, while Reed wrote

“..we must not be duped by this editorial buncombe about Liberalism going forth to Holy War against Tyranny.”

Out of the fire and into the frying pan, even before the war to end all wars ended, the great Red Wheel turned, carrying both men into the Bolshevik revolution, Reed hanging with Trotsky and even picking up a rifle to join a red patrol, while Thord-Gray was with the anti-Bolhsevik White Russians, as Lieutenant Colonel in the Canadian Expeditionary Force in 1918 and Major-General commanding the 1st Siberian Assault Division in 1919. Reed died of Typhus in Moscow in 1920, while Thord-Gray was just getting to publishing his memoir of the Mexican Revolution, four decades later.