By late 1916, Pancho Villa's fortunes in the Mexican Revolution had narrowed to a desperate improvisation. His forces had scored an unlikely triumph in November by occupying Chihuahua City, but celebration was brief. General Francisco Murguia was marching north from Torreón with 16,000 Carrancista troops, a force Villa could not hope to match. Rather than stand and fight, Villa conceived an audacious swap: yield Chihuahua and race south to seize the nearly unguarded Torreón instead. His army evacuated on December 4, looting trains and absorbing recruits along the way through Camargo and Parral. By December 20, between 2,500 and 3,000 Villistas had gathered outside the twin cities of Torreón and Gómez Palacio, where roughly 4,000 Carrancista defenders waited behind only a few cannons.

The assault began at five in the morning on December 21. Nicolás Fernández pushed along the right side of the railway tracks, seizing the heights of Calabazas and La Polvareda, while Baudelio Uribe drove up the center into fierce resistance that cost about fifty men, including Villa's brother-in-law Juan Martínez. From the south, Eligio Reyes advanced across the plain of El Pajonas toward the city's Alameda. The next day brought a Carrancista counterattack toward Calabazas. José María Jaurrietta galloped to the front with only four companions, riding through cannon fire across open ground, and his presence alone stopped the Villista line from breaking. By the morning of December 23, the defenders were crumbling. Some of Fortunato Maycotte's cavalry had already fled. General Severiano Talamantes, one of the last to leave, ordered a withdrawal. By ten o'clock, the city belonged to Villa.

What followed the battle revealed the revolution's capacity for both cunning and savagery. The body of the Carrancista general Luis Herrera was found in a hotel and hung from a tree near the train station. Someone placed an image of Venustiano Carranza in the corpse's clothing and stuffed Carrancista banknotes into its hand -- a grim mockery of the constitutional government. Unlike many earlier battles, most prisoners of war were not executed. Instead, on Baudelio Uribe's suggestion, their ears were cut off, a punishment aimed especially at soldiers who had once fought for Villa before switching sides. Among these prisoners was Barraza, the farmer left for dead with a bullet through his head. The Kiikaapoa warriors abandoned by the retreating Carrancistas in their trenches south of the city were persuaded to surrender by Villa's own men of Kiikaapoa descent -- a rare moment of restraint in a conflict defined by its brutality.

Villa's triumph was incomplete in the way that mattered most. His forces seized plenty of gold and silver from Torreón, but found far less ammunition than they had expended in the fighting. In a revolution increasingly fought with bullets rather than ideology, this deficit was devastating. Villa summoned the city's wealthy merchants, craftsmen, and farmers and demanded two million pesos in forced military loans, eventually collecting half that amount. He levied a separate tax of 100,000 pesos on Torreón's Spanish, German, and French residents. Two days after the battle's conclusion, Talamantes -- the Carrancista commander who had been among the last to retreat -- killed himself at Enconada train station on the road to Saltillo. The Third Battle of Torreón was over, but the war that produced it would grind on for years, carrying both its victors and its survivors toward fates none of them could foresee.