Descriptions like those of the war with Paraguay, particularly the battle of Tuiuti, do not find in our literature any rival capable of surpassing them and evoke the great passages of War and Peace rather than best-sellers of current extraction.

 

Four days after the battle, Firmino was moved from a field hospital to the base at Paso la Patria and placed in a tent ward with thirty officers from Tuyuti. He felt immensely guilty among these men, who greeted him as a brave man among brave men. His first night he lay awake listening to others cry for mother, for God, for water.

At daybreak, two orderlies moved from cot to cot dispensing mugs of coffee and checking names against a list prepared for the surgeons. An hour after the orderlies had completed their rounds, Firmino was dozing fitfully; he sensed someone approach his cot and opened his eyes to see one of the surgeons standing beside him.

“Firmino Dantas da Silva?”

He made a slight movement of his head in acknowledgment.

“From Tiberica? The fazenda of Itatinga?”

“Yes.”

The surgeon gave him a friendly look. “Relax, Capitão, I'm not here to take you to the operating table.”

“You know our vila? The barão?”

“I'm told it's a fine town. You'll soon be back there, Firmino Dantas.”

“And your name, Doctor?”

“Cavalcanti,” he introduced himself. “Fábio Alves Cavalcanti. I'm from Recife.”

“There were ninety-two voluntários in Tiberica's company, Doctor,” Firmino said. “Oh, God, so many are dead. . . .” Pain in his arm caused him to wince. “Which one told you about Tiberica, Doctor?”

“Not a voluntário, Firmino Dantas. One of Dona Ana's girls. A perfect angel from your Tiberica — Senhorita Renata Laubner.”

“Renata . . . Renata.” An inner voice had told him it was Renata Laubner, yet he repeated her name with disbelief.

“The daughter of apothecary Laubner. Golden hair, blue eyes . . . a lovely girl. Surely you remember her, Capitão?”

“Renata . . . in Paraguay?”

“At Corrientes hospital. She's been there for six months, since May,” Cavalcanti said. “Senhorita Laubner is a wonder. However foul or tedious her duties, you'll never hear a complaint. Oh, she's brave, that girl! I've seen men reduced to tears of gratitude when she bathes their wounds or wipes their fevered brows. A gentle word from her and their courage is restored. A perfect angel.”

“Yes, Doctor. Senhorita Renata is a rare jewel.”

“I must go,” Fábio Cavalcanti said abruptly. “I have other patients to attend to. I'll be back, Capitão — to remove the enemy's bullets.” He looked happily at Firmino. “I want to hear all you know about the senhorita, Capitão.”

 

---

 

All that night, Firmino's fever raged. Several times he cried out for Renata. The next morning, he lay motionless, spent. He could just make out the figure of a nurse in black leaning over him. “Oh, Renata . . .” His parched lips formed her name.

“The fever's breaking. Rest quietly.”

As the nurse sponged his face, Firmino saw that she was an older woman, with gray hair.

The woman nursing Firmino was “Dona Ana,” Ana Néri, the inspiration for Renata and others who had come to nurse the sick and wounded. Dona Ana had been fifty-one years old, living comfortably at her family holding at Cachoeira outside Salvador, Bahia, when she had caused a stir by publicly volunteering to go to Paraguay as a nurse. The city fathers of Salvador lauded her noble gesture, but despite her plea Dona Ana had been turned down with a polite reminder that the Casa Grande, not the battlefield, was the proper place for a lady of her quality. Five days later, Dona Ana took passage for Rio de Janeiro, where she badgered the military authorities until they were happy to see her sail for the Plata. Ana Néri had become a legend, not only for her compassion toward both friend and foe, but also for fearlessness in passing through the very fire of battle to aid the wounded, a mission that had brought her the deepest sorrow a mother can know: Following a skirmish near the esteros, Dona Ana had found one of her own sons dead at the edge of the morass.

Lieutenant Surgeon Fábio Alves Cavalcanti had been here since his first experience of war on the blood-drenched decks of the Jequitinhonha at the battle of Riachuelo in June 1865. In early 1867, when thirteen thousand men were stricken with cholera, the army medical corps had appealed to the navy for help, and Lieutenant Cavalcanti was among the surgeons and doctors who had accepted a transfer to the army. He had been at Corrientes hospital until sent up to Paso la Patria four days ago to deal with the hundreds of casualties from Tuyuti.

As he'd promised, Fábio himself removed the bullets from Firmino's right leg and right shoulder and sewed up the machete gash. Firmino's wounds healed slowly, and twice within three weeks he came down with high fevers. Fábio Cavalcanti was responsible for the patients in this tent ward, so that not a day passed without his stopping at Firmino's bedside; besides the routine visits, he came here, too, to talk about Renata Laubner.

Firmino had little to tell Fábio about Renata Laubner: He met her at a ball at Itatinga; he saw her a few times at apothecary Laubner's shop; he remembered her as a lovely girl with a strong, independent spirit. And he loved her dearly, the Renata Laubner of his dreams, but this he did not tell the young doctor.

When Fábio spoke so admiringly of Renata, Firmino listened with envy, yes, but without rancor. He felt a bond in their mutual admiration for the girl.

Firmino and Fabio were almost the same age — Fábio, at twenty-nine, was two years older — and both were sons of old families of Brazil: Fábio Cavalcanti, the Pernambucano, whose forebear Nicolau Gonçalves Cavalcanti had founded Engenho Santo Tomás; Firmino da Silva, the Paulista, a descendant of Amador Flôres da Silva. Pernambucano and Paulista, their families had carved personal empires out of the Brazilian wilderness.

Fábio was the third son of Guilherme Cavalcanti, the present owner of Santo Tomás. One of his brothers was a lawyer; the other lived at the engenho. Fábio him­ self had stayed mostly at the Cavalcantis' town house since his school days at Olinda. Senhor Guilherme also spent much of the year at Olinda, leaving the plantation in the care of Rodrigo, his eldest son, but neither Guilherme Cavalcanti nor his two sons whose careers had taken them away from Santo Tomás for one moment forgot that the clan's power lay in those green valleys.

Firmino Dantas felt a pang of guilt when he listened to Cavalcanti talk of his family and pictured himself returning to Itatinga, where Ulisses Tavares waited to greet a hero. It would disgust Ulisses Tavares to know that his grandson had quailed before the Guarani.

Firmino left Paso la Patria on December 20, 1867, with other wounded men on a steamer sailing for Buenos Aires, where they would be transferred to a ship bound for Santos. He had been up and walking for a week, and had bade farewell to Fábio Cavalcanti the previous night.

“Thank you, Doctor, for everything.”

“I enjoyed talking with you, Firmino Dantas,” Fábio said. “There are too many heroes here.”

Firmino flushed, wondering if Cavalcanti had somehow learned of Firmino's cowardice.

“Conquistadors!” Fábio added. “They seek a conquest no matter what it costs in blood and suffering.”

Relieved, Firmino said, “The war can't go on much longer.”

“We were told that when we sailed from Rio de Janeiro three years ago.”

On the evening of December 20, the Aurora, the steamer in which Firmino sailed, stopped at the port of Corrientes, where her captain announced they were to anchor for two days. Firmino was often at the ship's railing those two days, but he did not set foot ashore.

 

---

 

Bateria de Londres, Humaita

Two months later at Humaitá, in the early hours of February 19, 1868, at the Bateria de Londres and other gun emplacements, men and boys waited at eighty-four cannon. Some were battle-hardened veterans, the best artillerymen left in López's army, and to them fell the duty of manning the modern rifled pieces. Some stood ready at a seventeenth-century thunderer, San Gabriel. Child gunners waited gallantly to serve their elders beside cannon the muzzles of which they could reach only on tiptoe.

Four miles inland, strategic points along the network of trenches were rein­ forced by the bulk of fifteen thousand defenders remaining at Humaitá. Paraguayan scouts had come back through the marshes and swamps to report battle preparations by units of fifty thousand enemy troops now in siege position beyond Humaitá's earthworks.

Major Hadley Tuttle was with the gunners in the Bateria de Londres. Colonel George Thompson had left him at Humaitá to complete an earthwork west of López's headquarters at Paso Paicú on the outer trenches. Thompson himself was across the Rio Paraguay in the Chaco, setting up a river battery ten miles above Humaitá, a work in itself indicative of the increased awareness of the threat to Humaitá in the three months since Luisa Adelaida Tuttle and her parents had returned to Asunción.

Marshal-President López kept up a defiant stance for the sake of the men and boys in the ranks. Mounted on a white horse, he rode with his aides along Humaitá's trenches, stopping often to chat with soldiers and share their jokes about the macacos bogged down beside the esteros. After second Tuyuti, López had ordered campaign medals struck and distributed them to the survivors, a celebration that some — Hadley Tuttle among them — found farcical, for El Presidente himself had instigated the looting of the enemy's camp, a grave error that had cost the Paraguayans many lives.

Publicly, El Presidente continued to show confidence. On his instructions, the slightest damage to his house by the enemy's shells was repaired instantly, so that the Guarani and mestizo ranks who saw the unmarked whitewashed walls would take this as a sign of the great señor's invincibility. But privately, with his generals and top aides, Marshal López accepted that Humaitá could not hold out indefinitely against the enemy.

López and his generals had no intention of surrendering Humaitá outright. Before the Allies could cut them off completely, however, ten thousand men would be withdrawn across the Rio Paraguay into the Chaco, the only route of escape with Humaitá enclosed by land and the enemy fleet stationed below the fortress.

Just past 3:00 A.M. on February 19, Major Hadley Tuttle was with the commander and other officers at the Bateria de Londres, where Tuttle had been given charge of two 32-pounders this night. Hadley Tuttle felt an anticipation of battle keener than at any other time, for, like the rest of the men, he accepted the hour as critical for Humaitá.

For more than a year, the Brazilian squadron anchored in the channels between Curupaiti and Humaitá had thrown thousands of shells at the two positions, but had made no attempt to force a passage beyond Humaitá's formidable batteries. The bows of every warship were reinforced and fitted with protective overhanging spars; patrol boats constantly searched the river as far up as they dared go. But the loss of master torpedoman Luke Kruger had been a fatal blow to the Paraguayan torpedo unit, for Capitán Angelo Moretti and others had been unwilling to risk further hazardous experiments. The channels of the Rio Paraguay were increasingly free of torpedoes; the enemy still had to run the gauntlet of Humaitá's guns, but otherwise the way to Asunción, 150 miles up the Rio Paraguay, was open.

At the 32-pounders in the Bateria de Londres, Hadley Tuttle's glance moved frequently to the gun embrasures and the dark river beyond, straining for the first sight of the enemy. Tuttle did not have long to wait. At 3:30 A.M., with a distant roar, cannon on nineteen ships began to fire against various positions ashore. When they opened their bombardment, most of the ships were steaming along a sinuous bend of the Rio Paraguay that swung toward Humaitá's cliffs and then looped back to the northwest.

A small battery a mile below the Bateria de Londres was first to return the enemy's fire. Then three positions — Coimbra, Taquari, Maestranca — with a total of twenty guns, opened up, and the darkness along the cliff to the south was broken with flash after flash of cannon fire.

The vanguard of the enemy fleet passed through the storm of plunging shells. Their own gun flashes marked their position for the sixteen heavy cannon of the Bateria de Londres, the first rounds of the battery like a broadside from a man-of-war.

Tuttle's gun crews sprang to reload in the haze of powder smoke swirling in the light from lanterns strung along the roof of the battery. Tuttle stepped up to an embrasure and peered out, seeing the flame of guns on the armor-clad corvettes positioned along the Chaco shore. He discerned in the main channel three new vessels of war — gunships that had joined the Brazilian fleet a week ago.

Passsage of Humaita

Constructed at Rio de Janeiro, these ships weren't much to look at: Almost oval in shape, 127 feet long, they lay low in the water like squat black beetles. Each was 340 tons, with iron plates nearly six inches thick, this armor backed by eighteen inches of Brazilian hardwood stouter than oak. Alagoas, Pará, Rio Grande — they were named for provinces of the empire. Of a revolutionary design, the first vessel of their kind had steamed to battle and glory on her maiden voyage in 1862 during the U.S. Civil War: the Monitor, victor of the clash with the rebel steamer Virginia.

The Brazilian monitors each had a single oval-shaped revolving gun turret, the Alagoas equipped with a 70-pounder Whitworth, her sister ships with 120-pounders, the guns capable of a 180-degree angle of fire. The monitors had steam up, but were not proceeding under their own power; each was under tow by an ironclad with engines capable of greater knots for the run past Humaitá.

Brazilian shells ignited an ammunition supply and set fire to the brush and trees. A Brazilian corvette close to the cliffs was burning, and an ironclad towing a monitor took a hit amidships, but neither vessel was in danger of sinking.

The guns of the Bateria de Londres kept up a relentless bombardment. The smoke was so dense, Tuttle and his men could scarcely make out gun crews to the far right and left of them. The battery was the prime target of the monitors and ironclads, their shells exploding along its revetment and tearing the earth in the cliff below Londres. One shot passed clean through an embrasure on the right of the battery, where the men at an ancient muzzle-loader had run the gun back on its slides to reload. The blast killed every one of the crew, wounded others close by, and sent a drizzle of blood and brains far up along the line of guns.

The lead ironclad crossed the place where the chain boom lay submerged in the river; it turned to port, steaming toward the north. The ironclad still had to pass two batteries on the northern end of the cliffs, but it was out of range of Londres' guns. The ironclad Bahia, towing the monitor Alagoas, also rode comfortably over the sunken boom.

Tuttle jerked the lanyard of one of the 32-pounders, stepping aside quickly to avoid the recoil as the gun roared out. The second 32-pounder and two other cannon fired almost simultaneously, their shot also directed against the Alagoas. Two shells struck the monitor's stern, with no more effect than before; two projectiles exploded in front of the vessel.

“Damn! Damn! Damn!” Tuttle swore. His uniform was soaked, his jacket clinging to his back. His face was streaked with dust and powder grains.

Minutes later, from off to the right, a man shouted, “The monitor! We've cut the cable, sir!”

Tuttle leapt to the embrasure. In the glow from the blazes along the cliffs, he saw the monitor dropping back rapidly, the third ironclad and her tow passing the small ship. “Hurry, boys! Load!” he shouted. “We can sink her yet!”

For thirty minutes, the Alagoas was under a violent cannonade. Shell after shell struck the monitor, including steel-tipped shot that pierced her plates; missiles burst in the water next to her hull, shaking her from stem to stern and deluging her deck; balls from Humaitá's vintage cannon shattered into fragments against her turret. They were drifting back almost helplessly, for when the tow had parted, there had been low pressure in the Alagoas's boilers.

At the Bateria de Londres, Tuttle and a gunnery sergeant were trying to extract the stem of a priming tube wedged in the vent of a 32-pounder when they heard someone shout “Cease fire!” Tuttle looked up to see the battery commander standing there.

“Cease fire?” Tuttle asked incredulously.

“Stop shooting at the monitor. Watch closely, Major. There are one hundred fifty men out there. They'll storm her decks and take her prize!”

The batteries along the river north of Londres were still shooting at the three ironclads and two monitors, but it was a desultory, futile cannonade. At Londres itself and farther south, the rate of fire also decreased. The sky was beginning to turn a deep gray; the surface of the river no longer flamed with the reflections of battle. Hundreds of eyes stared down at the river now as the flotilla raced to capture the monitor.

One hundred fifty men paddling twelve canoes! Bogavantes, they called themselves; but they gave the word — “paddlers” — a whole new meaning. They stood up as they dipped their paddles in the water to drive their craft swiftly toward the enemy. The lead canoe would cut across the monitor's bows, letting the rope catch against her hull so that as she forged ahead.

“Hurry, boys! Hurry, there!” Hadley Tuttle said breathlessly, as if spurring on his gun crews. The monitor was beginning to move upriver again. “Oh, take her, boys! Take her now!”

A canoe shot past the Alagoas, the rope linking it to a second craft snared by the monitor's bow. The Alagoas surged forward; the two canoes were rapidly drawn up beside her. The first bogavantes made to leap to the enemy's deck as two other canoes raced alongside.

Four canoes managed to put men aboard, but only a handful of bogavantes got within thirty feet of the turret. Two men stormed the pilothouse, striking it with their sabers in frustration at finding it sealed with an iron cover. Other bogavantes fell to their knees at the hatches, tearing at the covers with their hands until bullets from the turret ports riddled them. In less than ten minutes the attack was repulsed, with the Alagoas, her decks littered with the bodies of the bogavantes, dragging along the empty canoes.

It was not over. The commander of the Alagoas now had his monitor under full steam. It would have been easy for them to drop back with the swift current to protection by the line of corvettes, but they had waited for pressure to build up in their boilers.

The monitor's iron bows shattered the wooden craft; her hull rode over the men spilled into the water. Four canoes of bogavantes perished; four escaped into shallows too hazardous for the monitor to navigate.

The Alagoas ended her pursuit and crossed the sunken boom to join the five other ships this gray dawn when the Brazilians forced the passage beyond Humaitá.

 

 

Bombardment of Humaita Cathedral

Museo Histórico Nacional

Buenos Aires

---

 

Six Brazilian ironclads now operated above Humaitá, and Allied land divisions had been victorious in their simultaneous attack against an outwork two miles north of the garrison. But the Bateria de Londres and the other guns on Humaitá's cliffs still commanded the loop of the river. Across the Rio Paraguay lay the jungle and swamps of the Chaco, which the Allies, once again underestimating their enemy, had failed to secure. During March 1868, López crossed into the Chaco with ten thou­sand soldiers, taking the best guns from Humaitá and leaving three thousand men, who abandoned Curupaiti battery and withdrew into Humaitá's fifteen thousand yards of inner trenches.

Through the winter of 1868, a cold, miserable four months, the Allies laid siege to Humaitá. The three thousand defenders deceived the Allies into believing their strength to be much greater with such ruses as rows of Quaker guns — leather-bound tree trunks — and a frequent clangor and thud of brass and drums. In July, under fire from Brazilian ships and the Allied guns now higher up on the Chaco bank, the defenders evacuated their wounded and women, for they still had access to the narrow jungle peninsula opposite the fort. On August 5, 1868, Humaitá surrendered to the Allies; it was four days since the men had eaten the last food in the garrison, and two hundred of its thirteen hundred soldiers were unable to rise from the ground, where they had collapsed.

López's new headquarters were at San Fernando, fifty-five miles north of the fortress and about one hundred miles from Asunción. El Presidente had earlier ordered all but essential military personnel to leave the capital; the administration had moved to Luque, nine miles east on the railroad to Cerro León, which had been Paraguay's main military base before the war.

When Paraguayan outposts beyond Humaitá began to fall to the Allies, López and his army left San Fernando and marched sixty-five miles farther north to an area below Asunción, thirty-five miles to the northwest. According to a previous land survey by George Thompson and Hadley Tuttle, it offered the strongest positions for a defensive front. The Paraguayans dug in five miles inland from the small port of Angostura, above the Pykysyry, a narrow river that flowed into the Rio Paraguay.

Beyond the extreme left of their trenches was Itá-Ybate, “The High Rock,” an elevated position among the low hills known as Lomas Valentinas, where López set up his headquarters. Some four thousand troops manned the Pykysyry line and Angostura's batteries; five thousand with twelve guns were kept as a mobile reserve to intercept the Allies on their approach to Lomas Valentinas.

In late August 1868, when the Allies finally began to advance north to Asunción, the conduct of the war was in Brazilian hands, with the marques de Caxias commander-in-chief: Bartolomé Mitre was in Buenos Aires; and Venancio Flores was dead, the victim of an assassin's bullet at Montevideo in February 1868.

The Allied commanders decided against a frontal assault on the Pykysyry line, sending their engineers into the Chaco, at a point below Angostura, to forge a passage through the jungle and across the swamps. Seven miles of the road passed through morasses that had to be filled in with the trunks of palm trees laid side by side, but when the engineers were finished in late November, the Allies sent 32,000 men along the route. Ironclads that had run past the guns at Angostura then transferred the soldiers back across to the east bank of the Rio Paraguay, landing them above the Pykysyry line. At the beginning of December 1868, the Allied corps began to move south toward Lomas Valentinas, bent on dealing the death blow to López and his army.

---

“Here! Antônio Paciência! Here's one! A general? A colonel? A commander-in-chief?” The dim yellow light of a lantern swung low as the man bent down for a closer inspection. “Ai, caramba! Spurs of silver! Gold! O Santa Maria! Bless me! A Cross the size of my hand! Hurry over, Antônio! Hurry!”

“I'm coming.”

The man suddenly straightened up and turned around, held the lantern away from him, and peered into the dark. “Padre?” He got no response. “Where is Padre?”

“Behind us.” Antônio Paciência carried his own lantern as he made his way slowly across to the man.

“I don't see him.”

“He's down there in those trees.” Antônio Paciência reached the place where the man was standing. The light from his lantern fell on a dead Paraguayan.

“Look, Antônio . . . I do not lie!” The man had short arms, and with one furious movement, his lantern swinging wildly as he bent down, he tore the gold Cross from the Paraguayan's neck.

Antônio smiled grimly. “He won't run away.”

The man placed his lantern on the ground, went down on one knee, and, pulling out a knife, began to rip open the pockets of the man's uniform. “A bullet here.” He touched the tip of his knife to the man's chest. “A lance.” He pointed to a slash in the abdomen.

The man continued to speak as he worked, complaining about the paltry treasures from the Paraguayan's pockets: a few religious medallions, some pieces of silver, a broken cigar, some loose cartridges. Antônio loosened the silver spurs, consoling his partner with the fact that here at Avaí the ground was thickly sown with enemy.

But the man responded with another grumble: “Brazilians, too! And tomorrow, when the sun rises like fire in the sky? Aieee! We'll work like slaves!” He stopped talking as he saw a lantern moving toward them. “Padre?”

In reply came a distant “Yes.”

The man said to Antônio, “As always, late!”

Like the one he called “Padre,” this man had a nickname: “Urubu.” None was so adept as he in picking his way across a field after battle to find spoils among the dead.

Urubu, a full-blooded native of Brazil, was one of thirty-four Pancurus en­listed as voluntários da patria from a village in the sertão beside the Rio Moxoto, about twenty miles above the Rio São Francisco. Their village had once been a Jesuit aldeia where their forefathers had found refuge, and long before that, these Pancurus had roamed the surrounding caatinga.

Urubu's real name was Tipoana. He was in his forties, a small, vigorous man with straight, pitch-black hair, sparse eyebrows, and no trace of a beard.

Antônio Paciência had met Tipoana after the storming of Curupaiti, where Policarpo Mossambe had been killed. That battle had so reduced Antônio's battalion that its survivors had been sent to other units; Antônio went to the Fifty-third Battalion, which had been organized at Recife, Pernambuco, and included the company with the Pancurus.

Antonio, Urubu, and the man they called “Padre” were attached to the Second Corps, which, together with the First and Third, had advanced toward Lomas Valentinas at the beginning of December 1868. Five days ago, on December 6, the army had come to a narrow bridge at a stream, the Itororó, defended by five thousand Paraguayans. Three times the bridge was won and lost, until a final assault drove the Paraguayans away.

The combat at Itororó had been a prelude to what occurred earlier this day, December 11. The spot where the silver-spurred Paraguayan lay was at the edge of a narrow plateau three miles inland from the Rio Paraguay. Directly below were two rivers, one of which, the Avaí, gave its name to the battle that had raged today across these heights and in the depressions between them: For four hours in an incessant rainstorm, with heaven's roll above the thunder of the guns and lightning rending the skies, 22,000 men had fought here, 18,000 Allies and 4,000 Paraguayans, with no quarter given. The Paraguayan battalions had been annihilated, 2,600 dead, 1,200 wounded, and 200 left to make their way south to Lomas Valentinas. But 4,200 Brazilians and Argentinians, too, went down, among the wounded the veteran commander of the Third Corps, Manuel Luís Osório.

Almost four years since Antônio Paciência had marched from Tiberica, he had participated in every major campaign since Curupaiti, though his role had changed after his transfer to the Fifty-third Battalion: He had been drafted to serve as stretcher-bearer with the Second Corps field hospital.

It was 2:00 A.M. now, and Urubu, Antônio Paciência, and others were still out searching for wounded. They had been busy for nine hours since the battle ended, wandering across this landscape of horrors. Arms, legs, heads, torsos had been scattered by shell blasts; hundreds of men were strewn haphazardly in unnatural positions, their bodies broken and contorted; as many horses littered the area, huge, stiff, with flies swarming upon their warm carcasses.

Urubu had finished with the dead Paraguayan's pockets, but on the Paraguayan's belt he had found a broken leather strap to which a pouch would have been attached, and he was prowling the darkness, swinging his lantern from side to side, as he searched the ground just beyond the corpse.

Padre was over six feet tall, with bony limbs, sloping shoulders, and a spare, angular frame. He bent his head as he walked, holding his lantern to search the ground he covered.

“Ola!” he shrilled. “Ola! I have it!” He stooped and picked up an object. “Is this what you seek, Tipoana?” He dangled a pouch in front of Urubu; there was a distinctive clink as he shook it. “Silver? Gold?” Padre grinned, his huge teeth exposed. He had a long, narrow face with a narrow, hooked nose, his eyes were small and set close together.

Urubu squirmed with displeasure. “Open it! Open it!”

“Calma!” Padre nodded toward the Paraguayan. “Or you'll wake the dead yet!”

Urubu spoke to Antônio: “See? What did I tell you? He strolls up here, late like a grand senhor. The first thing he sees — my pouch!”

“ Your pouch?”

“I found him.”

“And I found the pouch,” Padre said.

Urubu sulked. “Go on, then,” Urubu said. “Open it.”

“Not much here.”

“Look at him! The man was no Guarani beggar!” Urubu said. “There must be more.”

There was some money loosely tied in a small kerchief: ten silver coins.

Urubu was visibly relieved. He dug into one of his pockets and pulled out the Cross. “This is worth much more!” he announced.

“To a pagan like you?”

Urubu laughed. “A beauty, isn't it?”

The three made their way back to camp walking a distance apart, holding up their lanterns to light the ground and undergrowth.

Padre's great loves in life were talking, ale, and women. And since he couldn't enjoy the other two at the moment, he talked.

Padre's loquacious outbursts often led to sermons on whatever theme happened to occupy his mind; thus his sobriquet. He was a mulatto, like Antônio Paciência, though light-skinned, and three years older than Antônio. His name was Henrique Inglez, the same as his father's.

An English actor of no mean talent, Henrique Inglez the elder had been in Brazil for forty years, first at Belém do Pará and later at Pernambuco, where he had found acceptance among the gentry of Recife and Olinda. The loquaciousness of Henrique Inglez the son came from an early start on the stage. His father had made him recite love poems for his audiences at the tender age of four. The precociousness had not matured into real acting skill, and his grotesque teeth and rakish looks were a further hindrance. By his early twenties, Padre was a habitual loafer, whom Henry the Englishman had been delighted to see enlisted with the voluntários.

Padre and Urubu had become close comrades of Antônio Paciência in the eighteen months they'd served together as stretcher-bearers. Before coming to Paraguay, Antônio had known only the company of slaves. The images of that day he had stood like a beast for sale had haunted him since childhood; as he reached manhood, the memory of being inspected by the slaver, while still vivid, was but one of many memories that had aroused a burning hatred of his enslavement.

Freedom! How often he had listened to Policarpo Mossambe talk of his great hope — that he would earn his freedom by fighting for Dom Pedro Segundo. If only Policarpo had lived two months longer, till November 1866, to hear Dom Pedro II's decree that slaves with the imperial army in Paraguay were to be emancipated. The law freed 25,000 black and mulatto slaves then serving with the Brazilian divisions and provided the same freedom for all future recruits for the Paraguayan War.

In truth, freedom had not yet come to mean much to Antônio. Nor, for that matter, to many slave soldiers. When their initial euphoria was tempered by the routines of war, they saw that apart from the promise of freedom, their circumstances were unchanged. When thousands were stricken with cholera and other diseases in the summer of 1867, the slaves were reminded that to earn the reward Dom Pedro II was offering them, they had first to survive the jungles and swamps of Paraguay. Liberty was as distant as ever.

But on that August day at Curupaiti, Patient Anthony had climbed down the face of the earthworks and walked toward the spot where Policarpo had died. He would do as others did who paid personal homage to a dear friend: He would mark this place with a simple wooden Cross bearing the inscription “Corporal Policarpo Mossambe — Brasileiro.”

Returning to the tent he shared with Tipoana and Henrique Inglez, Antônio Paciência had told his friends of his plan, and asked if one of them would write the inscription on the Cross.

Over the next three days, when Antônio was off duty, he carved out each letter with a knife.

Never before had Antônio Paciência attempted to write anything more than a scrawled “X” next to his name on lists of voluntários da patria. When he was finished, he heated the blade of his bayonet in a flame and seared the letters.

Henrique Inglez had gone with Antônio to Curupaiti, where Antônio had planted the Cross. “Corporal Policarpo Mossambe — Brasileiro,” he had repeated several times as he looked at his handiwork. Just as they were leaving, Antônio stepped up to the Cross and ran his fingers lightly over the crosspiece.

“Never again a slave, Policarpo Mossambe,” he whispered. “Never again.”

 

Trenches of Curpati, (detail), Candido Lopez

Colección Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes

Buenos Aires

---

 

At Itá-Ybate, where Francisco Solano López had his headquarters, first light on Christmas Day 1868 was heralded by a bombardment from forty-six guns and rocket stands deployed in a semicircle opposite the hill. It was the most violent and sustained cannonade of the war, and was answered by six guns remaining in the Paraguayan positions.

Four days ago on December 21 in a blazing 101 degrees, 25,000 Brazilians came down through the Lomas Valentinas from camps near Avaí, reaching positions opposite the trenches below Itá-Ybate at noon. A group had immediately been sent off to destroy the Pykysyry line, which they had done, slaying or capturing nine hundred of the fifteen hundred defenders and forcing the rest to flee toward the Rio Paraguay. At 3:00 P.M. the main attack on Itá-Ybate commenced, with wave after wave of cavalry and infantry charges; the Brazilians took fourteen guns but failed to penetrate López's lines. At six o'clock the assault was called off, with Allied losses at four thousand. But the defenders had been reduced to two thousand men.

The three days from December 22 had seen incessant cannon and rifle fire, but no major moves by either side. On December 24 though, the Allied commanders sent a message inviting President López to surrender, which had been rejected.

The bombardment of Itá-Ybate on December 25 was followed by new at­tempts to break through the Paraguayan lines. The Brazilians advanced up the hill along two narrow gorges, only to be repulsed again, with heavy casualties.

The next day, seven thousand Argentinians who had come up across the demolished Pykysyry line joined the Brazilians. These fresh troops were to decide the battle of Itá-Ybate.

Again, on the morning of December 27, an artillery barrage thundered against the Paraguayan positions. Then, with the Argentinians in front, the Allied generals sent 25,000 men along the two defiles and up the slopes of the hill. Here and there, a Paraguayan gun, dismounted but propped up on a mound of earth, roared defiantly. Here and there, a lone Paraguayan rose up in the trenches along the hillside, a Guarani war cry upon his lips and his sword raised against an entire battalion running toward him. Here and there, a child of tender years, his body riddled with bullet wounds, lay down to die as silently as he had suffered. By 11:30 A.M., the flags of the Allies flew triumphantly on the shell-splintered flagstaff of Francisco Solano López's headquarters.

 

---

 

At first, when the Brazilian officer was still a distance away, Antônio Paciência didn't recognize him, and he thought, too, that he was coming toward them with a child in his arms. Antônio, Padre, and a medical orderly were in a wood a mile behind López's headquarters, where the victorious troops had found a stockade holding prisoners of the Paraguayans. As the officer drew nearer, Antônio saw that he was carrying not a child but a man whose small body was horribly emaciated. The officer himself walked unsteadily, his ragged uniform hanging loosely on his frame.

“Gently, now. Be gentle with him,” the officer said, when Antônio and Padre helped him lower the man onto a stretcher. “He's been a prisoner of these dogs for four years.”

The dark eyes of the man on the stretcher shifted from one rescuer to the next. Suddenly he grew terrified and uttered an awful cry.

“Calma . . . calma, Sabino,” the officer said. He reached down, giving the frightened man a reassuring pat on the shoulder.

It was Sabino do Nascimento Pereira de Mendonça, the revenue inspector who had been a passenger on the Marquês de Olinda when the ship was seized by the

As Antônio Paciência and Padre picked up Sabino, the officer introduced him­ self to the medical orderly: He was Major Clóvis Lima da Silva. There had been times during the past thirteen months when Clóvis da Silva himself had not expected to survive his incarceration. At San Fernando, after the retreat from Humaitá, he and other captured Allied officers had been penned up with the political opponents of López: Day after day, they had seen men dragged away for trial and execution.

Antônio had seen Firmino Dantas's cousin at Corrientes and Tuyuti, but did not immediately recognize this gaunt-featured man who had been a captive of the Paraguayans for over a year. The five of them moved off, Clóvis da Silva and the orderly walking beside the stretcher.

“I served with Tenente Firmino Dantas,” Antônio told Clóvis da Silva when there was a lull in the conversation between the major and the orderly.

“Firmino Dantas is here?”

“I don't know, Major. After the tenente went to the depot at Itapiru, I didn't see him again.”

“Firmino Dantas was back at Tuyuti last November.”

“I wasn't there, Major.”

“God willing, I'll find my cousin alive.”

It was three hours since Itá-Ybate had been taken. For Clóvis da Silva, the relief at being liberated was marred by news that López had escaped with a hundred men.

“How could our generals permit it!” he said to the orderly.

“It's all over, Major. With no army, López is finished. He has no guns. No support. No hope. The war is over!”

“The beast is loose. Until they run him down, López will remain a curse on this land,” Clóvis da Silva said, prophetically.

 

---

 

On December 29, forty-eight hours after the fall of Itá-Ybate, the Angostura battery was the only point in the battle sector still held by the Paraguayans. Angostura had been under fire from Brazilian ironclads since December 21, and had received a flood of refugees from the Pykysyry line and other positions; 2,400 men and women, eight hundred capable of fighting, were in the earthworks, with provisions for less than ten days. The battery's guns had ninety rounds of ammunition for each weapon, a supply that would last no more than two hours if they were attacked.

By this night, too, Lieutenant-Colonel George Thompson, commander of the battery, accepted Angostura's situation as hopeless. During the day, he had sent a commission of five officers under a flag of truce to Itá-Ybate: They had been allowed to inspect López's headquarters and interview wounded Paraguayans, and had returned with confirmation of the defeat. After a conference with his staff, Thompson had sent a letter to the Allied generals proposing surrender of the garrison by noon on December 30.

Hadley Tuttle had been with the commission that went to Itá-Ybate, and had voted in favor of capitulation. When Thompson dismissed the officers, Tuttle had stayed behind.

“It's the only thing to do,” Tuttle said. “They outnumber us twenty to one, with one hundred guns.”

“Not from the Paraguayans' point of view. You've heard them, Hadley. They consider it a sacred duty to oppose the Brazilians to the last man.”

“All that matters is to save lives and begin the work of rebuilding this devastated land.”

Thompson had been in Paraguay for eleven years. Throughout the war he had served the country with such unswerving loyalty, López had made him a knight of the Order of Merit, the only foreign officer so honored. “Paraguay won't be rebuilt,” he said flatly. “Emperor Pedro and his minister, for all their denials, favor annexation. The threat of a war with Buenos Aires — that's all that may stop them.”

Tuttle, too, feared the aftermath of war, above all the danger to his wife, Luisa Adelaida, and her family, who left Asunción when López ordered the capital evacuated.

“I must go to my family, George,” he said.

“I see no problem. Our surrender is conditional on our liberty to go where we please.”

“How long before the formalities are settled, do you think?” “A few days?”

Hadley laughed. “More like weeks, George.”

“Did you forget? The roads to the north are sealed. Perhaps it would be best to wait a bit.”

Tuttle shook his head. “No. Tonight, George. I'll go through the Chaco.”

Thompson realized he couldn't dissuade Tuttle, and did not order him to stay at Angostura. “You're probably right,” he said. “Go to them, Hadley. Get them to safety. God knows, it may not be over yet.”

“One drop of blood shed now would be a waste.”

“López is making for Cerro León.” This was the military base at the railhead fifty miles from Asunción, where several thousand men were in the camp hospital. “The Marshal will get those invalids out onto the parade ground. If the slaughter continues, one man alone will be to blame: Marquês de Caxias. What stops him from ordering the capture of López? Does he want to keep a Brazilian army in occupation and prepare for annexation? Or could it be that the Brazilians want López to escape and reassemble the surviving men of Paraguay?”

Tuttle was genuinely puzzled. “Whatever for?”

Thompson smiled grimly. “Wouldn't it provide, through civilized warfare, the opportunity to exterminate the last Guarani?”

 

Paraguayan Hospital

photo, The War in Paraguay, Lt.Col George Thompson

---

 

From the spires of Asunción's cathedral on the third Sunday of January 1869, the peal of bells rang out over the capital as the marquês de Caxias, his fellow commanders, and a host of Brazilian and Argentinian officers gathered to thank God for victory. Three days earlier, January 14, the marquês issued Order of the Day, Number 272: “The war has come to its end, and the Brazilian army and fleet may take pride in having fought for the most just and holy of all causes.”

As the marquês de Caxias and his officers raised their voices to heaven, outside the cathedral the scene was closer to hell. The first Allied troops had entered Asunción on January 1, encountering minimal resistance; a few days later, the bulk of the army started to march in from Lomas Valentinas, until by this Sunday there were thirty thousand men in and around the capital. López had ordered Asunción evacuated months ago. His administration, the remaining foreigners, and the upper-class citizens had gone to towns east of the city; but when the Allied army marched in, there remained several thousand poorer Guarani and mestizos who had not fled or had drifted back to the city from the outskirts seeking food.

And there were the defeated, who watched the macacos stream into a city deserted and neglected, her broad boulevards overflowing with trash and the bloated carcasses of beasts, and stinking like open sewers. Propped up against the wall of the unfinished opera house, leather pads bound to the stumps of his legs, was a gunner who had been at Itapiru resisting the enemy's first approach to Paraguay; in the shade of a tree stood a Guarani lancer who'd ridden for the guns of the Argentinians at first Tuyuti; he'd been blinded by grape, and half his nose was shot away. A mestizo infantryman, the victim of a skirmish in the Chaco, lay on his back, wearing a ragged poncho that failed to conceal his upper legs and genitals, which were reeking and moist with gangrene. “Macacos . . . macacos . . . macacos,” the soldier gibbered.

And for every man, there were four or five women and twice that number of small children. The women, emaciated and almost nude, stood silently staring at their conquerors. The children peered out from behind their legs at the giants passing noisily in parade.

The rape of the Mother of Cities by the victors began slowly. A group of camaradas smashed their way into a pulperia and made off with the tavern's most expensive supplies. Looters stormed a silversmith's shop. Frustrated booty hunters torched an empty house. Discipline so broke down that even officers were about, pilfering items for shipment back to Brazil.

The ravaging of the city gained momentum with the rumors being spread about the nature and whereabouts of the fortunes of El Presidente and his mistress, La Lynch. Mobs of soldiers prowled the residential barrios on the outskirts of the city searching for booty. Ax-wielding men chopped through the doors of warehouses and attacked the homes of Asunción's elite, ripping them apart. No place was inviolable: The U.S., French, and Italian consulates were devastated. When none of these efforts uncovered the fortunes of López and Madame Lynch, the soldiers looked elsewhere — to the cemeteries, where the best-appointed tombs were burst open for inspection.

Night after night, the sky above Asunción glowed with fires set by the rampaging soldiers. In the light from those flames, men who were either bored with the treasure hunt or satisfied with what they had already stolen from deserted homes turned to other pleasures: Some of the living skeletons who had lined the streets when the Brazilians marched in gave their bodies freely to the soldiers in exchange for food; other Guarani women and girls had to be held down forcibly, but their cries went either unheeded or unheard.

The sixty-five-year-old marquês de Caxias was well aware that his troops were on a rampage, but two years in Paraguay had left him utterly exhausted and unable to control them. In the cathedral this January 17, during the elaborate thanksgiving, the marquês collapsed in a faint: The following day, Caxias relinquished his command and immediately set sail for Brazil.

 

---

 

Fifty miles to the east of Asunción, Francisco Solano López walked among the wounded at Cerro León base. The half-blind, the crippled, the maimed listened intently as their leader swore that the fight would not be over as long as a single Guarani was able to stand up to the macaco horde.

---

 

Fábio Cavalcanti was present at the thanksgiving service in the cathedral. Cavalcanti and other members of the army medical corps had come up from Humaitá, where they had been based since the garrison's surrender in August 1868; they had taken over the barrack hospital outside Asunción to receive hundreds of wounded men from the Lomas Valentinas campaign.

Like every man celebrating the victory Te Deum, Fábio Cavalcanti, who had been in Paraguay for almost four years, had offered heartfelt thanks for an end to the war. And like others in the weeks following the service, he came to be bitterly disappointed as reconnaissance patrols found that López was up to something. At first, there was talk that El Presidente, his concubine, and their sons were dashing for the Bolivian border. But, as the weeks passed, scouts discovered bands of armed Paraguayans moving up along the cordillera and along lower sections of the fifty-mile railroad between Asunción and Cerro León.

When the marquês de Caxias left Asunción, the command of the army passed to a field-marshal, Xavier de Souza. When it dawned on the army that they might yet have to march again to mop up Guarani resistance, morale collapsed. The soldiers intensified their depredations against Asunción; many officers sought and were granted leave to return home for reasons of poor health, though most were simply sick and tired of the war, and some began to talk of the need to offer López terms for an honorable surrender.

A thousand miles away, His Imperial Majesty Dom Pedro thought differently. Supported by his more bellicose ministers, Pedro reaffirmed his belief that Brazilian honor demanded the elimination of Francisco Solano López. What was needed to achieve this, His Majesty decided, was a young commander capable of reinvigorating the imperial army and leading the hunt for López — a bandit upon whose head His Majesty now placed a reward.

The young man whom Emperor Pedro chose for the final conflict was his son-in-law, the twenty-six-year-old Prince Louis Gaston d'Orléans, comte d'Eu, husband of the imperial princess, Isabel. The comte, who had reached Rio de Janeiro on the eve of the war, had been considered too young and inexperienced to go to battle alongside such veterans as Caxias and Osório. There was also some question about the comte's ability to inspire Brazilian troops. In March 1869, however, Dom Pedro and his ministers appointed the young Frenchman marshal in full command of the Brazilian army in Paraguay.

Fábio Cavalcanti was among the hundreds of officers who went down to Asunción Bay on April 14 to greet the comte d'Eu. Prince Louis Gaston set up head­ quarters at Luque, eleven miles to the east of Asunción, and wasted no time beginning an overhaul of the army. But, on April 28, he reluctantly agreed to a suspension of drills and inspections while the army mounted a review in mass and held a festa to celebrate the twenty-seventh birthday of its new commander-in-chief.

On the night of the comte's birthday, the officers of the medical corps held a dance in their quarters, the villa of an army doctor who had been executed for treason at San Fernando. The rambling single-story house was neglected, its white­washed walls stained with red dust; its huge garden, though overgrown, carried the scents of magnolia, jasmine, gardenia.

When the bandsmen playing for the officers and their guests were almost ready to end their performance, Fábio was out in the garden, experiencing an odd mixture of joy and guilt: In this dolorous land, where he had witnessed so much pain and suffering, he, Fábio Cavalcanti, now found himself sublimely happy, strolling arm in arm with Renata Laubner.

Fábio had gone back to the main hospital at Corrientes after tending the wounded from second Tuyuti at Paso la Patria. Again, he had watched wonderingly as nurse Laubner cheered up her patients, the majority of them freed slaves and rude sons of the backlands. And this time he had taken every opportunity to show his affection for her, knowing full well he was but one among many who cherished the hope of courting Senhorita Renata. And then came the night when they sat together on a bench on the hospital grounds at Corrientes and Renata laid her golden head against his shoulder and said, “I love you, Fábio.”

When Humaitá had been surrendered, Fábio was sent there with other doctors to take over the garrison hospital. Renata had asked her superior, Dona Ana Néri, for a transfer to the fortress, which a sympathetic Dona Ana had granted, there being no secret about the love between Dr. Cavalcanti and nurse Laubner. Early in January they had been so hopeful that the war was finally over and they could go home — first to Tiberica, where Fábio would ask apothecary August Laubner for his daughter's hand, then to Recife, Pernambuco.

Renata knew that Fábio was compassionate and understanding, and loved her dearly, but even as a child she had noted the contempt of the fazendeiros toward the common people, like the Swiss, they hired to pick their coffee. She remembered what her father had said to her the night they went to the ball at Itatinga: “We are here, daughter, because Baronesa Teodora Rita invited you to the fazenda. The barão himself welcomes me, apothecary Laubner, from whom he takes his pills and tonics, but I see he is not happy. It bothers him to have a poor, untitled, unlettered man like August Laubner among his guests.” There had been no rancor in his voice.

Oh, how she had danced that night! How she had flashed her eyes and laughed and sighed in the arms of the handsome grandson of the barão de Itatinga!

And he had come to her afterward, treading softly into her father's shop, saying she was the loveliest girl in the world. When her father remarked on his visits, she had said, “Don't worry, Papa. They already plan to marry him off to the baronesa's sister. Besides” — and she'd kissed him on the cheek — “I'd never be comfortable in a house where my father wasn't welcome!”

And now she was apprehensive about the reception she would get from other members of the Cavalcanti family. To waltz around playfully in the arms of Firmino Dantas was one thing, but to walk into the Casa Grande at Santo Tomás the chosen bride of Doutor Fábio — she prayed that she would have the patience and strength of her papa, who had refused to be the slave of the fazendeiros.

Fábio had no such doubts about his family's acceptance of Renata. “Soon, my love, soon we will be walking like this but in the beautiful gardens of Santo Tomás. There the air is sweeter and —”

“Oh, Fábio, how I wish it!” Renata burst out. “I wish the war was over!”

“It won't be long, my dear. Three months, they say. López has at most three thousand men, most of them in bandages.” Fábio himself added soberly. Suddenly he quickened his step. “My darling, let's go inside. It's the last waltz!”

---

 

Thirty miles beyond the comte d'Eu's headquarters at Luque lay the long valley of Pirayu, with wooded hills rising on either side. On April 30, 1869, forty-eight hours after the celebration of the comte's birthday, in the dead of night, forty enemy raiders entered Pirayu on their way to offer Prince Louis Gaston a different reception in the land he had come to conquer.

The raiders did not travel quietly. They burst into Pirayu from their base camp at Cerro León to the south in a locomotive hurtling past the dark slopes of Mbatovi Mountain at the bottom of the valley, with two tattered red, white, and blue banners of the Republic of Paraguay streaming to each side of the engine's smokebox, its chimney spewing a fiery rain of hot ash and cinders. The raiders rode on two sand­bagged flatcars, one coupled in front of the engine, the other behind the tender, each car carrying a three-inch field gun.

 

The engine was a rickety piece of equipment, nineteen tons of iron and brass, but her two six-foot-high driving wheels powered her forward at a cracking forty miles an hour: She had been built twenty-five years ago at the great works in Crewe, England, and had served the London and South Western until late 1854, when she had been shipped out to the Crimea. As she chuffed along, the glow above her chimney illuminated the name plate on her boiler: Piccadilly Pride. Standing on her footplate was Major Hadley Baines Tuttle, who knew

her well, old Number 11 of the Balaklava line, which he had helped to lay on the hills overlooking Sevastopol in that murderous winter of 1855.

“Say, Hadley, man! We've seen a wee miracle here!” Scotty MacPherson had declared earlier at Cerro León station, when the armored train was ready to depart. Scotty was referring not only to the raiding party with Piccadilly Pride but also to the astonishing fact that four months after Francisco Solano López had fled Itá-Ybate with a handful of officers, he was ready to march again with an army of thirteen thousand soldiers.

The nucleus of the force comprised fifteen hundred troops who had with­drawn from Asunción on the eve of its occupation by the Allies; among thousands of wounded at Cerro León, as soon as a man had strength to pick up a rifle, he, too, joined the ranks. But the majority responding to López's call came in small groups from every corner of Paraguay: escaped prisoners of the Allies, soldiers who had been scattered across the countryside during the Lomas Valentinas battles; veterans who had laid down their arms welcoming peace but chose war again when they saw what the invaders were doing to their country; tribesmen from the interior of the Chaco, where they had heard talk of the macaco horde, a pest greater than the Spaniards and other interlopers they had resisted for generations.

Guarani had come with their own ancient muskets; with homemade lances and swords hammered out at village smithies; with weapons and ammunition stolen, item by item, from Allied camps. Parties of men scoured the deserted Pykysyry trenches and other battlefields returning with discarded arms and cartloads of cannon balls and shell fragments. The latter, along with every church bell and other useful piece of metal, were delivered to a makeshift arsenal where Scotty MacPherson and other foreigners were employed.

At the arsenal, near López's provisional capital of Piribebuy just north of Cerro León, Scotty and his engineers had by April cast eighteen new field guns and mortars; several hundred thousand shells had been stockpiled. They had also made the light guns for the flatcars coupled to Picadilly Pride and had bolted high iron plates to the sides of her open engineer's platform to give the men there protection from enemy fire.

Hadley Tuttle had been reunited with Luisa Adelaida and her parents in late January at an estancia outside Piribebuy. They had stayed there since then, Scotty working at the arsenal five miles away, Hadley taking patrols into the cordillera, where he had surveyed the escarpment for trenches and battery positions, putting to good use his experience with Lieutenant-Colonel Thompson, who had left Paraguay after the fall of Angostura.

With Thompson gone, Hadley Tuttle was among López's senior officers. El Presidente had come close to total defeat at Itá-Ybate: He had made his last will and testament on that hill, leaving all his worldly goods to Madame Eliza Lynch. In the four months since Itá-Ybate, as thousands of men and boys rallied to him, and his anger and sorrow rose at reports of the devastation of Asunción, López had found new spirit to combat the enemies of the fatherland.

Among those foes were Paraguayans suspected of plotting to overthrow the dictator. There were still a number of prime suspects under guard at Piribebuy, among them Venancio López, his other brother; two sisters; and, most injurious of all to El Presidente, his mother, the aging Dona Juana.

As Piccadilly Pride shot along the valley, Hadley Tuttle was confident of success. The Piccadilly Pride had a run of twenty-two miles to her objective, an advance Brazilian post near the comte d'Eu's headquarters at Luque. The train had to pass through two stations above the valley of Pirayu, both of which scout patrols had reported deserted. Beyond the first of those stations, the railroad skirted the lake of Ipacaraí, at the tip of which was the village of Aregua, where the Brazilian forward units were camped.

Piccadilly Pride chugged comfortably up through a forested incline at the head of Pirayu valley. Beyond the forest, the engine picked up speed passing Tacuaral twenty minutes later, the station silent and deserted as the scouts had reported. Great Ipacaraí was off to the right now, the railroad skirting the lake. A six-mile run beside Ipacaraí and Piccadilly Pride passed the second unoccupied station, Patiño Cué. Aregua, the Brazilian advance post, lay six miles farther along the track. There was a cutting a mile from Aregua; beyond the cutting was a bend in the tracks, then a straight, level run to Aregua bridge, 138 feet long, supported by a trestled framework of ironhard timber.

Half a mile from the cutting, Hadley eased off the throttle, until Piccadilly Pride was panting along slowly. Entering the cutting, Hadley put the engine in reverse. The big driving wheels bit the iron rails, and Number 11 came to a stop with a shudder and hiss of steam.

When Hadley climbed down from the engine, the soldiers were assembling in front of the train. Five minutes later this group began to move off up along the railbed.

Hadley walked with the Paraguayan sergeant in charge of the company, Julio Nuñez, who had served with Hadley at Angostura. Nuñez was taking eighteen men to deal with a guard post on the north side of the bridge.

“They'll be asleep, Major,” Nuñez said, the stub of a fat black cigar jammed in the corner of his mouth.

“I wouldn't count on it.”

“At this hour? Macacos sleep, Major!”

Hadley accompanied them as far as the bend beyond the cutting. “If there's trouble, you know what to do,” he said to Nuñez.

Hadley glanced at a soldier carrying two signal rockets; in the event of trouble, they would be fired. Tuttle would still make the run with Piccadilly Pride, hoping to force their way across, but it would be far better if the bridge, and their escape route, was secured.

“I promise you, Major Hadley, not one will sound the alarm.”

Seven Brazilians had been posted to guard the bridge, but not one was alert. It was almost 2:00 A.M., and Nuñez's confidence was not misplaced, for the macacos were asleep, including one voluntário who had fallen into a deep slumber up on the bridge as he lay on his back between the rails. He did not wake until the instant a Paraguayan crept up to him: The man slit his throat. It was the same with the Brazilians in the tents.

Ten minutes later, Piccadilly Pride puffed out of the bend beyond the cutting and gained speed along the straight, level track to the bridge of Aregua. It rumbled onto the 138-foot span, running smoothly, the noise of her driving and coupled wheels, iron against iron rails, amplified, the flatcars clanking along with a jangle of links and pins. Past the bridge, fifteen hundred yards to go, Piccadilly Pride rolled on almost sedately at low speed to bring her to an easy halt within range of the enemy camp.

The gunners had loaded their pieces with projectiles that would ignite on impact, setting fire to everything within reach. This bombardment would be followed with canister delivering a hail of iron balls.

The small lead gun fired, with a bang and a flash, the first shell exploding to reveal a row of tents ahead and off to the right. A shell from the rear gunners shooting from a difficult angle fell short, but the flames showed men falling out of the tents. The gunners pumped rounds of carcass shot into the camp, the intense flame of these shells making a bonfire of tents and supplies. Hadley himself blazed away at the enemy with a .44 revolver.

But twenty minutes into the attack, the Brazilians began to retaliate effectively. Three of the men on the lead gun car were shot in quick succession.

With a long toot-toot-toot on Piccadilly Pride's whistle, Hadley signaled they were pulling out. “Come on, old warrior!” The old engine responded beautifully. Under a small cloud of black smoke, Piccadilly Pride backed up, showering soot on the men up front, where the three-inch gun kept firing to keep the enemy at bay.

Sergeant Julio Nuñez ran along the bridge beside the engine as Hadley backed her up. Nuñez shouted that charges were placed in the trestles; his men were ready to fire the gunpowder.

Brazilian soldiers who had run down the tracks began to shoot at them from positions north of the bridge.

Julio Nuñez himself was a victim of this exchange. Struck by a bullet that ricocheted off the engine's tender, he plunged headlong to the timbers beside the track.

Hadley backed up Piccadilly Pride as fast as he could go, to one hundred yards beyond the bridge. Then the charges blew with a thunderous roar, and flames leapt into the sky. Momentarily nothing was heard but the hiss and pant of Piccadilly Pride; then there was a mighty rending and crash of shattered timbers.

“Good work, men. Good work!” Hadley shouted amid the cheers of others as Aregua bridge came tumbling down.

They stopped to take on water at Patiño Cué. The small town was deserted, with its population moved behind López's lines. While the engine's tank was filled, some soldiers wandered off, smashing their way into a pulpeira, where they found a barrel of rum left behind by the owner. There were yells of laughter from another group who found a fat pig trotting down a street near the station: They cornered the terrified beast, slashed its throat, and lugged it back to their flatcar, where despite the protests of the wounded, the porker was hefted aboard.

It was a half-hour before Piccadilly Pride's whistle blew and they were on their way again, with the liquor flowing and the laughter and singing growing louder mile by mile.

Hadley rejoiced with his men. He sent the engine backward smartly, the pile of wood in the tender low enough for him to see the rails behind.

The Brazilians had been bloodied, with one hundred casualties, a third fatal, and their camp a shambles. But out of this debacle rode three hundred horsemen belonging to a superb Rio Grande do Sul cavalry regiment. A mile south of Aregua, they forded the river. They did not sweep directly back to the tracks but thundered along a road that led to the valley of Pirayu.

Piccadilly Pride chugged along beside Ipacaraí Lake and then past deserted Tacuaral, the last station before Pirayu valley. Hadley had her throttle open halfway, for there was no need to race on this last leg home.

“Fool! He'll get himself killed!” Hadley shouted as one of his men leapt from the lead car onto the front of Number 11. The soldier was cheered as he loosened one of the flags next to Piccadilly Pride's smokebox; balancing precariously on the frame, he waved the banner and cheered for Paraguay.

They were two miles from the forest at the head of the Pirayu valley when the Brazilian horse soldiers came thundering toward the tracks. Twenty-five of the cavalrymen had soon detached from the main group to await the train in the valley itself.

“Oh, damn!” Hadley cursed aloud, and flung open the throttle.

There was a scream as the man who had remained perched on Piccadilly Pride's frame lost his footing and fell between the engine and flatcar. There were anguished shouts from the soldiers on both flatcars as they tried frantically to prepare for the onslaught. The prize pig was dumped as the men on that car sought to swing the fieldpiece around.

The cavalrymen did not quite know how to assault the monster, the first armored train to ride the rails in South America. As they stormed the train, Brazilians were killed by their comrades shooting wildly in the melee; others fell to their death after hurling lances that clattered harmlessly against Piccadilly Pride's iron sides. But they were 275, and the men on the train who were not wounded, thirty, and wave after wave swept in, emptying their carbines and revolvers, charging beside the flatcars with lance and saber, raking them with lead and laying open heads and shoulders with their steel-bladed weapons.

Piccadilly Pride had picked up speed as she reached the forest and the decline, now, at the head of the valley. The cavalry were rapidly thinning out as exhausted chargers dropped behind.

Hadley scarcely had time to register his shock at the sight that suddenly loomed ahead of him. The cavalrymen detached from the main body had reached the bottom of the incline ten minutes before the attack and had heaped up logs on the track, throwing the last one on the pile as the train started down the slope.

“God blast them! The bastards!” He could not stop Piccadilly Pride, not a chance.

The rear flatcar rocketed into the logs. The nineteen-ton locomotive jumped the rails, her great driving wheels gouging the earth, plowing up dirt, splintering felled trees like twigs. With a screech of tortured metal and breaking parts, the engine tipped over, hissing and spluttering as water gushed out of her tanks and piles until nothing remained to cool the fire in her iron belly. In a matter of seconds, her over­ heated boiler blew with a terrific explosion, throwing iron like shrapnel, killing two cavalrymen who stood in the trees watching her die.

And then all was silent around Piccadilly Pride, engine Number 11 of the Balaklava line. Major Hadley Baines Tuttle, who had met her in the Crimean winter of 1855, lay close by, his long fight to help the warriors of Paraguay ended.

 

1861-era locomotive, photographed c 2000

Sapucai, Paraguay

© www.histarmar.com.ar/

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Paraguayan hit-and-run raids continued and the Brazilians retaliated in force, but in the Allied camps, most of May and June was given over to preparing for the final campaign. By the end of June, the Brazilian imperial army had twenty-six thousand battle-tested veterans ready to march. Several thousand Argentinians and a token squad of Uruguayans were on hand, but the last push against López was to be essentially a Brazilian effort, with the army divided into two corps, one of which was commanded by Osório, The Legendary.

At the beginning of July, the long columns of infantry, cavalry, and artillery rolled forward slowly until they reached the valley of Pirayu. North of the valley, the forested heights of the cordillera held the advance positions of the new Paraguayan line; eight miles northeast of the cordillera lay Piribebuy, provisional capital of Marshal-President López.

On August 1, the comte d'Eu gave the order to advance. The plan was a pincer movement to envelop Piribebuy: Argentinians, with heavy artillery support, were to move northeast up the escarpment against the Paraguayan right; the bulk of the twenty-six thousand Brazilians were to march southeast to cross the cordillera and deal with the Paraguayan left.

On August 11, Piribebuy was enveloped, and the next morning, after a devastating artillery barrage, the town was taken.

The army marched on, for Francisco Solano López, the beast who was the prey of this great hunt, remained at large. On August 15, the Brazilians took Caacupé, where the Paraguayans had their arsenal, with little resistance. Among the Europeans taken prisoner was Scotty MacPherson. Luisa Adelaida Tuttle, pale and dressed in widow's black, stood silently between her mother and father as a Brazilian officer offered congratulations for their liberation from the tyrant López.

At dawn on August 16, the sledgehammer was raised again on a plain called Acosta Ñu, sixteen miles north of Piribebuy. The comte d'Eu brought twenty thousand men with him and divided them into four divisions, one on each side of the plain. Facing them in the red earth trenches were 4,300 Paraguayan soldiers, the rearguard and largest surviving contingent of the army López had built the past summer.

Among thousands of Brazilians at Acosta Ñu were three veterans who had been in the war from the start: Colonel Clóvis Lima da Silva; Lieutenant Surgeon Fábio Alves Cavalcanti; voluntário Antônio Paciência. They were all witness to what happened on the plain of Acosta Ñu this southern winter's day in August 1869.

Clóvis da Silva, fully recovered from his incarceration by López and recently promoted to colonel, commanded an eighteen-gun battery on a knoll 2,100 yards west of the Paraguayan trenches. On eminences to the south and east were more howitzers and guns to sweep the enemy positions with a belt of fire. At 7:00 A.M., Colonel da Silva gave the order for two guns on the right of his battery to fire the first rounds.

As the artillery crews came smartly to orders, Clóvis da Silva stood with a telescope glued to his eye. The morning was overcast, a raw chill in the air, with patches of mist hanging over the plain, which was covered with clumps of macega , a short, hardy grass. Clóvis saw sections of the Paraguayan earthworks and part of their camp — a long, dark smear in the macega.

“Ready! Fire! Fire!”

Clóvis's body stiffened noticeably as the guns roared out. Mentally, he counted off the seconds, waiting for the distant boom. He held the glass steady, watching the shells burst. Immediately, there were other loud reports from the other batteries.

“Another round, Number one and two,” Clóvis ordered. “More to the left.”

Clóvis cast a practiced eye over the gunners as they loaded charges and ammunition, trained the pieces laterally, adjusted elevation, and stepped to their places to the right and left at the command “Ready!”

“Fire! Fire!”

Again, Clóvis counted off the seconds before the shells burst, throwing up earth and dust at the Paraguayan trenches. Again, there were explosions from the Brazilian cannon on their right.

And from the enemy, answering fire, the first shells from six Paraguayan guns facing their position, whistling high over their heads to explode behind them.

“Keep this range,” Clóvis ordered. “Battery fire!”

Clóvis da Silva's battery and the artillery to their right hammered the enemy's positions. The Paraguayans returned fire with twenty-three fieldpieces, and where there had been mist, there were patches of drifting white smoke.

By mid-morning, the infantry and cavalry attacks began. The overcast sky livened with battle's fury; the white kepis of thousands of soldiers spread like blossoms in the macega, the steel of their bayonets dull gray as they pressed toward the enemy's trenches. And coming down from the north-still too distant to be more than a dark, indistinguishable mass; still too distant to hear the rumble of the earth — were the first blocks of cavalrymen unleashed from the body of eight thousand waiting to assault the enemy.

The Brazilians attacked from every direction, bullets humming and hissing through the macega. The cavalry sweeping down from the north tore into a band of Paraguayan horses riding out to meet them, sabering to the left and right, making swift work of the slaughter. But the Paraguayans' inner defenses withstood the first onslaught and kept the Brazilians pinned down in the macega and at the overrun advance trenches. There was a lull in the battle. Then the Brazilians launched fresh assaults, hour after hour, slowly but relentlessly cleaning out the Paraguayan trenches.

Lieutenant Surgeon Fábio Alves Cavalcanti was at a field hospital two miles south of Acosta Ñu. There had been a steady trickle of ambulance wagons since early morning, bringing the human wreckage of battle to be pieced together, stitch by stitch.

Mid-afternoon, Fábio was still at the operating table. The orderlies had brought him a screaming Paraguayan, with one foot sliced off and one leg pulped below the knee, a Guarani boy, no more than twelve years old.

In the sixteen days since the start of the campaign across the cordillera, Fábio Cavalcanti had experienced a growing sense of tragedy. The sight of victims like this boy were ever more frequent as the Brazilian columns obliterated the enemy's position and drove in the Paraguayan left. Two days ago, at Piribebuy, Fábio and his fellow surgeons had treated fifty-three of their own wounded. It was more than the carnage at Piribebuy that troubled Fábio: There were reports that the Brazilian troops had massacred women and children fleeing the ruined town. There was a rumor, too, that the infirmary of Piribebuy had been purposefully set alight and those within prevented from fleeing that hideous bonfire.

Fábio had left Asunción in June, with the medical corps, for the cordillera campaign. Renata had remained at the barrack hospital, and Fábio was thankful she was spared the horrors of this final thrust against the enemy — for that it would bring an end to the war, he had no doubt.

In the operating tent, the Guarani boy, sedated with ether, lay naked on the table. Fábio and his helpers staunched the flow of blood where the boy's foot had been severed; the other leg was amputated below the knee.

The boy died while they were stitching the flaps on the stump.

Late afternoon at the plain of Acosta Ñu, the Paraguayan lines were collapsing. For nine hours they had withstood the onslaughts, but on every quarter now, gun positions were overrun; trenches were stormed and taken. Hundreds