His return from America coincided with Isabel’s recovery. For unfathomable reasons – and against doctor’s orders – she agreed to hitch her fortunes to his. They were married in 1861.
Burton also managed to extract quite unwarranted loyalty from the Foreign Office, which appointed him to a post as HM Consul, Santos, Brazil. It was a decision that Lord Russell would live to regret. He’d spend four years demanding that Burton explain what he was doing with Her Majesty’s funds, and more to the point, what he was doing at all. The answer was simple: he was out exploring the Brazilian hinterlands. Officially, these expeditions were described as ‘sick leave’, but as covers go, this wasn’t even a fig-leaf. Enthusiastic illness wasn’t the only source of rancour; Burton refused to implement the suppression of the Brazilian slave trade. To him, the money would have been better spent shipping a million British paupers to Brazil (as well as 60,000 defeated Confederates) and letting cheap labour and market forces take their course. Slavery – a ‘peculiar institution’ – would be quietly smothered. Lord Russell was unimpressed.
Isabel too was less than impressed by her husband’s adventures, but she put a brave face on it all. Santos was sheer hell (‘The Wapping of the Far West’), and as all the men were off fighting the Paraguayans, the women had become dangerously lustful. When Isabel tried to improve her lot by taking on Chico, a midget slave, he roasted Burton’s favourite cat and ate it. After that, Chico emulated his master in every detail, even in a miniaturised version of his clothing. Burton sought – and got – extended sick leave.
He learnt Guaraní and booked a passage on the Yi, return fare to Humaitá.
Never at his best in matters of the human spirit, Burton was positively waspish after 676 miles cooped up with his prattling fellow-passengers. As for the crew, or what remained of them, they weren’t even worthy of his contempt.
‘The three stewards,’ he swiped, ‘are expected to do the work of one man; they are exceedingly civil, and they do nothing. Of course, this is the fault of the comisario, or purser, a small Spanish bantam, or rather “hen-harrier”, who spends all his time in trifling with the feminine heart.’
After three weeks of cabbage and enervating human frailty (fancy trying to trifle with the feminine heart, or anything feminine), Burton was in a foul state when he arrived in Humaitá. He’d missed the fighting by two months. The fortress itself was a bitter disappointment. He’d read the French geographer Elisée Reclus’ description of Humaitá in Revue des Deux Mondes and had conjured up an image of the fortress as hyperbolic as Sebastapol, Vicksburg or Gibraltar. What he found instead he described as ‘absurd’, and Reclus, he decided, was ‘the Prince of Humbugs’. But he was also mystified at how the Paraguayans had managed to keep the Allies at bay so long, and when he saw what remained of their antique artillery, he was forced to admit to the inconceivable power of human emotion.
‘I felt something of the hysterical passion,’ he wrote, ‘at the thought of so much wasted heroism. And this personal inspection of the site where the last struggle had so lately ended impressed me highly with Paraguayan strength of purpose, and with the probability of such men fighting to the last.’
Just as I had, Burton toured the twenty miles of fortification in a day. However, unlike my tour, on a fretful bicycle, he had an obliging horse. I was pleased to read that, though war had only just passed through, Burton was able to enjoy much the same fauna as I had; pewits, spoonbills, jacuanas, lily-trotters, urubús, snipe and snippet. His mood lightened.
I was also gratified to see that the carnivores had spared him no more than they had me. His skin was barnacled by sandflies and mosquitoes. I like to think that the fact we were both insect-food in the swamps of Humaitá is all that Burton and I have in common. Admire him as I might, I was finding it hard to like him and was glad that when the Brazilians refused him permission to follow the fighting, he turned round and went back to Argentina.
He wasn’t away for long.
56
THE RUMP OF López’s army headed north – back across the swamps – and after some delay, I followed.
As the land rose from the sticky green bogs, the grasses browned and then erupted in flames. The slough of winter was being burnt away by the cowboys, thousands of hectares disappearing under great orange banners of fire. The horsemen stood at the scorched margins of this catharsis, staring thoughtfully into the brilliant, gassy plumes. They looked as though they were tending animals and not destruction on such a geographical and – some say – pointless scale. Sometimes their fire sparkled along a charred horizon like a fuse, and at other times it rushed at the bus as an outrageous coloured storm. The swirling, crackling vapours were then so close that I imagined that I could feel their heat through the glass. It was merely my anxiety. I am sure that if there had been any other passengers on the bus this anxiety would have blossomed into a group activity, like panic. As it was, I had the possibility of being roasted in an old bus all to myself.
I was reminded that López had set fire to the landscape as he retreated north. His scorching of the earth was as pointless as the present one. The idea that the Allies would be foraging off the land was fanciful. They moved their massive armies northwards – complete with its brothels and theatres – under steam and phenomenal horse-power. They even had a little railway built to chase López out of the Chaco. Whereas previously the Allies had moved only haltingly forward, they now began a menacing, unstoppable conga. It would be a merry dance indeed. For the next nineteen months López led them backwards and forwards through the bogs and forests of eastern Paraguay.
As to what López hoped to achieve in his baroque, jungly ramblings, one can only guess. He kept with him all his wine and the National Treasury, several cartloads of swanky uniforms and the Pleydel piano. Perhaps he hoped that the Allies would tire of their pursuit and he’d be able to set himself up as a well-looped despot in the extremities of civilisation. Perhaps he hoped that his ‘faithful agents’ in the United States would swing opinion in his favour and a spanking-new relief force would smash its way through and save him. It was pure fantasy.
Salvaging anything from the wreckage of the Marshal-President’s thinking was now an increasingly delicate task. The first truly alarming signs surfaced when he had all the stragglers in his vaudevillian entourage dragged into the grass and bayoneted. Then, in the spring of 1868, his homicidal tendencies became rather more grandiose. Deep in his brandy-pickled synapses he’d stumbled upon the Grand Conspiracy. He saw treachery wherever his eye settled. The first to enjoy his retribution were his brothers, Venancio and Benigno. As they were now well-established sex-pests, no one was unduly concerned by the sight of their fat buttocks getting the flogging that they should have had years ago. Encouraged by their squeals, López turned his attention to his sisters – those two gigantic Bavarian eggs, Innocencia and Rafaela. He’d already had their husbands shot, and now he had the women nailed into crates. They were let out only on special occasions, to be whipped.
López then applied considerable imagination to winkling out the other conspirators. Generals were flogged and ladies-in-waiting rudely sliced open. The Marshal-President appointed his priest, Father Fidel Maiz, as the Chief Torturer, a task the warted cleric took up with surprising enthusiasm. His methods were inspirational; 110 years later, Pastor Coronel was still setting torture to music – La Palomita – and thinking of ways to make the nervous system burn. At first, ‘conspirators’ had their fingers smashed with mallets or were strapped across ant-hills to be devoured by the sun and the ants. This was later refined; victims had their eyelids torn off so that they could better appreciate the glare. But the greatest refinement of all was the Cepo Uruguayo, where the victim was bound into a parcel with a weight of muskets on his neck. The effects are described in a deposition made by Alan Taylor, the builder:
First the feet went to sleep, and then a tingling commenced in the toes, gradually extending to the knees, and the same in the hands and arms till the agony was
unbearable. My tongue swelled up and I thought my jaws would have been displaced. I lost all feeling on one side of my face, for a fortnight afterwards. The suffering was dreadful. I should certainly have confessed, if I had anything to confess.
Taylor wasn’t the only foreigner to face such neurological challenges – or worse. Of the fifty-nine British contractors caught in the war’s blockade, twenty-five perished. Several were protractedly tortured, including Taylor and a gentle apothecary called Masterman. Had it not been for the ominous presence of two British gunboats on the river, these two might also have ‘died in prison’.
With the administration of justice proceeding colourfully, the war in the swamplands now lurched into fresh disasters. The remaining 12,000 Paraguayans faced the allies for their last set-piece of the war, at Lomas Valentinas. As 25,000 Brazilians bore down on him, López loaded the carts and fled, leaving his men to cover his retreat. He managed to get clear with all his liqueurs, his treasures and his caged sisters (he’d got tired of flogging Benigno and had had him shot – along with the bishop, blind Colonel Alen and several others).
‘He went away in a great hurry,’ said Thompson, ‘leaving to her fate Mrs Lynch, who went among the bullets, looking for him.’
Eliza Lynch made her own escape just in time. By 27 December 1868, it was all over. The ‘Waterloo’ of South America had annihilated López’s forces.
Oblivious of the catastrophe, Colonel Thompson held out for a further two days in his impenetrable redoubt at Angostura Narrows. He had with him 800 soldiers (‘the greater part being small boys … most having lost their arms’) and ammunition for two hours’ fighting. He dispatched a raiding party for supplies and was encouraged when it returned with twenty-seven mules, a Brazilian colonel and 120 cases of claret. But the Brazilians sent him an English messenger to assure him the situation was hopeless; he was surrounded by 20,000 allied troops. The Marques de Caxias and General Gelly were present to accept his surrender personally, with all the honours of war.
Thompson’s captivity was a rather informal matter. He gave Caxias a stern lecture about the treatment of Paraguayan prisoners and refused the duke’s offer of a lift to Buenos Aires. He said he wanted to pay his own way. In truth, he despised Caxias. Not only did he think he was a warmonger but, worse, he thought Caxias was an ‘imbecile’. After a frank and distinctly frosty exchange of views, the two men went their separate ways.
Despite Caxias, Thompson was full of admiration for the Allies. On his return to England, he stopped by in Rio de Janeiro to pay his respects to Dom Pedro II. The Brazilian Emperor was far more his man, a scholarly individual, disinterested in the affairs of state and un-fashionably concerned for the well-being of the common negro and the Indian. Emperor and mercenary bade each other well and parted.
Thompson wasn’t back in England for long. His bold, battle-smoked account of the war was complete by the end of the year. He gave the Royal Geographical Society its copy and there I found it – much as he’d left it – with its spidery maps and ‘with the Author’s compliments’ looping over the title page in coppery ink. I read it again on my return, with both fascination and a sense of emptiness which I couldn’t decide was his or mine. Thompson’s yellow-paged war – the bloodiest mankind can remember – had become an adventure, a brilliant technical exercise. Was it really just a ‘change of air’?
Thompson had fooled himself if no one else. He’d lived among the Paraguayans for eleven years and he now found it hard to live anywhere else. The War in Paraguay had wholly failed to exorcise the affection he felt for those he called his ‘Guaraní’. When it was completed, he returned to his troops, his beloved Paraguayans, for ever. He married a Paraguaya and produced a generation of Paraguayan Thompsons, whose descendants are still found in Asunción today. He lived just long enough to take a role in the rebuilding of his adopted country and to get the railway running again. He died six years later, in 1876, and was conveyed to the cemetery at Recoleta by the President’s horses, plumed in black. He was thirty-seven.
Stricken with grief, the Paraguayans repaid his affection with a small town, west of Asunción, renamed in his honour: Thompson.
57
A WEEK AFTER Thompson’s defeat, Asunción fell to the Allies. There was no resistance; it had been evacuated a year before on one of the Marshal-President’s less than rational orders. Asunceños had spent a freezing winter in the forest and were secretly grateful for defeat. As the Allies headed for the city, López’s scabby remnants veered west into the central highlands. Caxias was so confident the war was over that he went home.
His celebrations were premature. López had yet to be extracted from the jungles of the central highlands, and whilst the Allies hesitated, he built himself another army – from children, the old and the maimed. Dom Pedro sent another champion out to extirpate the monster. It was his son-in-law, the Comte d’Eu. Doubtless the Emperor was enjoying a little symmetry: López had once presumed the Comte to be his rival for Isabella; now he could regard him as his nemesis. In reality, the Comte was hardly a champion at all. He was only twenty-seven, and although he was extravagantly cruel, he cut a mincing figure in magenta and gold. Repeatedly shrilling disgust at the muckiness of war endeared him to no one. To make matters worse, he conducted an uncomfortably public and torrid affair with one of his generals (who got his head blown off) and then, when the war moved back to the jungle, he declared that the whole business was beneath his dignity and flounced back home.
In the same week that the Comte was taking up his appointment in Asunción, Burton returned – in typically foul humour. He’d spent the last five months avoiding Isabel and scowling around Argentina, Chile and Peru. He was now drinking his way back home, to take up a diplomatic post in Damascus. If the Foreign Office had known half of what his friends knew, they might once again have paused to reflect on the wisdom of the appointment.
His dress and appearance [reported the poet and fellow-Arabist, Wilfred Blunt, from Argentina] were those suggesting a released convict rather than anything of more repute. He wore habitually, a rusty black coat with a crumpled silk stock, his throat destitute of a collar, a costume which his muscular frame and immense chest made singularly and incongruously hideous, above it a countenance the most sinister I have ever seen, dark, cruel, treacherous, with eyes like a wild beast’s …
Asunción perfectly reflected his mood. Just as the amoral Asunción of 1969 had, to Graham Greene, been the embodiment of Greeneland, so the Asunción of 1869 was pure and vicious Burtonia. The men were all gone and the Brazilian slave-soldiers were lavishing their syphilis on the women. The buildings had been punched about by ironclads and the streets were broken and fissured like tumbling mountain rivers. The port was cluttered with sunken ships and the ruins seethed with López spies. Into this smouldering nest of misfits and thieves, Burton’s steamer discharged more of the same; his fellow-passengers were, he said, ‘the veriest ruffians, riffraff, ragamuffins that I had ever seen in South America, even at Montevideo’. Burton was briefly happy.
One surprising discovery on this ravaged Boschian landscape was that of an old friend, Baron Wisner von Morgenstern. The Minister of War had been utterly successful in avoiding any contact with the war he’d started. Burton now found him running a downtown pulpería, dishing out rum to the Brazilian officers. There’s no telling whether the little Hungarian volupté still wore his waistcoats embroidered with green frogs, but Burton noted (with ill-disguised relish) that he now kept a pretty ‘daughter’ who – in return for important intelligence – offered most favourable rewards.
A sad thought occurred to me: perhaps – as publican and pimp – this might be the last we’d see of Wisner. Happily, I was to be proved wrong.
Meanwhile Burton’s own happiness was beginning to sour. The Brazilians still wouldn’t let him near the slaughter. There was only a brief moment of satisfaction when the Paraguayans brought the fighting to him – by train. López threw South America’s first armoured train into
the heart of Asunción. Burton loved it. ‘The Paraguayans, after doing some damage, leisurely retired, and stopped the train to pick up two of their wounded who had fallen out of it.’
With an uneasy calm restored to the city, Burton vented his frustrations by uncorking his most vintage spleen. He set himself the formidable intellectual task of rehabilitating López (who was still lumbering around in the jungle, thrashing his relatives). He reasoned – against reason – that López was the victim in all of this, that the Allies were the protagonists and that Madame Lynch was the heroine of the piece. As to the complaints of the British employees, these were essentially contractual grumbles enlivened by ‘fancies, theories and fictions’. Masterman’s accounts of being tortured were all lies. Washburn’s version could not be relied upon because he was a hopeless neurotic (and American), and Thompson’s reports were all hearsay (he didn’t wait for the book). After three weeks cooped up in Asunción, he had the measure of the situation and bundled his theory up for publication. A month later, he was back home and Paraguay was well in his past.
To his apologists, Letters from the Battlefields of Paraguay is a work of genius pre-empting the revisionists’ view of the war by sixty years. Genius he may have been, but the conclusion bolted on to his report is hardly inspired. If he’s right and the Paraguayans found themselves in this predicament without so much as a pinch of duress, they emerge as fondly helpless and faintly absurd. As to the revisionists, their work is hardly admirable, coinciding as it did with the demands of Paraguayan fascism.
At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig Page 26