At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig

by John Gimlette

  I tried to picture the defenders: khaki uniforms, caps with leather visors, rich brown boots called choclateras. Weren’t they already Chaco veterans? They’d marched 450 miles from their railhead in Bolivia, surviving on hard tack and jingoism. They were used to hardship and had good reason to believe that victory would be theirs: Bolivia was a giant against puny Paraguay, three times as rich; she had tanks and flame-throwers and a splendid German commander called General Kündt (he was a veteran of the Russian Front and would lick these savages in days). The enemy didn’t even have boots.

  But beneath the bravado was anxiety. The soldiers were mostly Indians from the Altiplano and had neither affection nor loyalty for their white officers. Everything they’d learned about this lowland hell they hated: the sickly heat, the barbs that tore their uniforms and skin, the voracious ants, the endless diarrhoea.

  It was a different story thirty metres away through the scrub. True, the Guaranís would fight in bare feet, but they saw a different war ahead. It wasn’t an adventure but a matter of survival. The very existence of Paraguay was threatened and they responded as their grandfathers had – with stealth, guile and ferocity. The patas peladas – The Unshod – would move fast through the scrub, carrying only ponchos, canteens and rifles. The last stages of battle were often fought on their terms, concluded with machetes.

  The Chaco would be no kinder to them, but it suited their purposes perfectly.

  We followed a tapir’s footprints round to the west side, where the forest hadn’t grown back. It was still an open space, sprayed with tiny yellow flowers. Along the edge of the clearing, the bottle-trees had been hollowed out to make nests for Bolivian guns. It was here that the Paraguayans tried to force their way in.

  For three weeks the two sides poured fire into each other’s faces. The orchestras stopped and the forest wailed. The earth began to boil. Young men were vaporised in shell-bursts and their shreds pinned up in trees. Others were unexpectedly lopped and pruned and died in the open, peeled alive by ants. At midday the field was covered in butterflies, licking up the moisture from the dead. Then came the flies who, as the weeks passed, grew fat and blue and bloated.

  It wasn’t long before thirst began to kill. In that heat, each man needed ten litres a day just to function. The Paraguayans couldn’t deliver it and a form of madness evolved; men wandered off into the scrub to look for fountains or to ambush their own water trucks. Sanity was restored summarily and without blindfolds.

  It was worse for the Bolivians. The enemy had aligned their weapons on the lagoon and any movement was spattered with fire, even at night. At first the water was merely filmy and meaty, but then the pond was crusted over by the dead. The Bolivians ate their mules and then their beautiful boots. After dark, they crawled into the wasteland to pick the carrion clean of bottles and bullets.

  Maria found one they’d missed, a bright green cartridge.

  ‘This stuff turns up everywhere,’ she said. ‘It’s endless.’

  Veterans of these battles believe that they are indeed endless. They say that the whistle and crunch of shells bounces through the ether for ever. The rest of us hear only the ant-shrike and the sleepy whirr of insects.

  But this battle did end, although not with a boom. The last Bolivian positions were overrun by the writer Arthur Bray. He was a scholarly man, an Anglo-Paraguayan who’d served on the Western Front and who’d lost the facility for pleasure. The experience of Boquerón would render him permanently sinister. Both sides had lost nearly two thousand men. Both had fought with alarming obstinacy. Bray’s captives were men reduced to gristle and maggots. Some had lost their minds and believed that the pot-bellied trees had eaten their comrades. When they heard this, the Guaranís wept.

  We headed back to Toledo.

  124

  BOQUERÓN DIDN’T END the war, as it should have done. It proved to be merely an overture. The Paraguayans had also rushed back, along these picadas, to Toledo. They were off to meet the counterattack.

  The trenches burrowed outwards from Jakob’s zoo. They’d lasted better than Boquerón’s. But for the snakes, I could have climbed through the bunkers and awaited bombardment.

  The fort was built by General Belaieff, the anthropologist. He wasn’t the only White Russian on the Paraguayan side; there were sixty others in gold braid. It was a war much to their liking; Major Chirkoff would cut down an entire Bolivian company with his machine-gun and Captain Kassianoff was to die in a magnificent cavalry charge. They are remembered in a popular drink: tereré ruso (tereré with sugar and muddy water). Of course, it’s coincidence that – once again – Kündt, the Russians and the Fernheimers all faced each other across the same battlefield, but it gave Toledo a certain symmetry.

  In all other respects the battle was grotesque.

  It started with a tiny Bolivian aeroplane straying into small-arms fire. First, the observer jumped out without a parachute, and then the pilot smeared himself across the Paraguayan lines. Both were buried with full honours and the Bolivians sent a wreath and a fly-past. With the funerals over, the killing began.

  It lasted two weeks. The Bolivians eventually got just near enough to the Paraguayan trenches to be caught up in the thorns and barbed wire. The Guaranís then finished them off with home-made grenades and bayonets.

  The Mennonites have gathered up a thousand carcasses. They kept a skull for their museum and buried the rest in a pretty spot beneath the paratodos.

  ‘Why do men do these things?’ they ask, and then life reverts to Sunday.

  125

  AFTER TOLEDO, THE war moved west and out of sight.

  It was a curious war. Some have described it as a dress rehearsal for the Second World War, but in the field it was its own show, picaresque and surreal. The last bi-plane dogfight in aviation history was enacted over Ballivian. At Campo de Los Muertos, the Guaranís played dead and then jumped up for a devastating curtain-call. At Nanawa, their line was held by kitchen boys and cooks, and at Strongest, the armies tried to blast each other out with music and obscenities. Often the Paraguayans bombed their thirsty troops with ice-cubes. Often the Bolivians just bombed themselves. The show ground west.

  A pattern emerged. The Bolivians would be separated from their water and then the Guaranís would cut round the back to offer them dehydration or surrender. Behind these moves was a man with chilly blue eyes who played the war like chess, not theatre. General Estigarribia is often credited with genius, and later he would stand for presidency. Had his propeller not come off over Altos, he might have spared Paraguay the Stronato and the uncomfortable years ahead.

  Meanwhile, Paraguay was rounding up the enemy. She captured 21,000 soldiers and 10,000 civilians, or one per cent of Bolivia’s population. They were marched back east and set to work in gardens and farms. Many stayed on after the war and their descendants are still affectionately referred to as Los Bolivianos. There was booty too: 28,000 rifles, 2,300 machine-guns and $10,000,000 worth of ammunition. It would be enough to meet Paraguay’s military requirements for the next forty years. Even a decade ago, the artillery was still trundling round Asunción with Schneider mountain-guns, made in 1927.

  Bolivian morale slithered. The myth of Paraguayan invincibility took shape: the Guaranís lived on palm hearts and thin air, fought like wildcats and were everywhere. For some, the solution was izquierdismo, blowing the left hand off and walking home with the wounded. Others swam across the Pilcomayo into Argentina. Ten thousand deserted and more would have gone if only they’d had compasses.

  Kündt was constantly amazed by the collapse of his strategy. Why weren’t his machines grinding up the savages? At the height of his astonishment, he was fired. He returned to Germany, where failure finally killed him. His flame-throwers hadn’t worked and the tanks had lurched around like ovens before being captured by barefoot Guaranís. The planes and artillery had proved useless; they could never find their target – until too late. They were added to Asunción’s armoury.

  As t
he war moved into its third year, manpower faltered. The Chaco was entombing men faster than they could be recruited. Soon, there’d be more people buried in its dust than had ever lived there. The war would claim 88,000 men, 36,000 of them Paraguayan. Asunción responded to such losses with all it could; the police force was mobilised; the age of conscription was lowered to seventeen.

  Both sides used mercenaries, although all they could offer them was thrills. Some found them. Thomas Wewege-Smith flew Junker K43s for Bolivia and would later set pulses racing with his saucy log-book: War, Planes and Women, the Enthralling Story of an Airman’s Adventures in Love and War. Paraguay meanwhile received unwelcome assistance from Argentina’s ‘Machetemen of Death’. After some embarrassing looting, they were asked to leave. The quality of the freebooters was never high. Here is another one, who pops up in Waugh in Abyssinia:

  The German driver – an adventurous young airman who had come to look for good fortune after serving in the Paraguayan War – kept a rifle across the wheel and inflicted slight wounds on passing farmers at point-blank range.

  Surprisingly, Paraguay’s new arrivals rallied to the call to arms (even though they could have sought exemption). There were the Russians, of course – but the roll of honour would also contain Germans, Poles, Americans, Italians and Arabs. New Australia sent its share, men like Rod MacLeod, Sid Apthorpe and the Wood brothers – veterans of Gallipoli and Palestine. The English socialists provided Ricardo Smith and the Kennedy boys; Nigel served as a water-carrier and Douglas died in captivity on the Altiplano, where he’s buried. Plenty of others were sacrificed; Shepperson, a young American, died of typhoid and Walter Gwynn was killed in a dogfight. Each of the newcomers seems to have found in Paraguay something precious, something worth preserving.

  ‘Paraguay was the way it was,’ said Don Nigel, ‘but we liked it that way.’

  Most of the immigrants emerged transformed. Some were empowered: Arthur Bray became Chief of Police and Stroessner became president. Others were just less foreign. Charley Kent the trapper became an army guide and Robert Eaton ended up with a prison camp. He watched in horror as the war hacked across his ranch.

  ‘The Bolivian was outclassed,’ he told me. ‘Not everyone died a hero’s death.’

  Elsewhere, the world regarded the slaughter with only mild interest. The thirties was a busy time. The League of Nations protested and then collapsed under its own weightlessness. The Morning Post dispatched a reporter to see if there was a story. It was Reggie Thompson. He bought a Winchester Repeater, like Bobby Frick’s, and stamped around the Chaco looking for the front line. He never found it and was appalled by whisky at 2/6 a shot. After a month, he prematurely announced the Paraguayan victory and then went off sightseeing to Iguaçu Falls.

  Eventually, Estigarribia’s brilliant moves ended in the foothills of the Andes and in stalemate. Bolivia didn’t have the ferocity to throw the Paraguayans off and Paraguay didn’t have the strength to deliver the coup de grâce. They agreed a truce for noon on 14 June 1935. In the last half-hour of the war, the antagonists opened up on each other with almost everything they had. No one knows how many widows and orphans were created in the final minutes of this senseless conflict. At twelve, the guns fell silent and men climbed out of their trenches from east and west and met in No-Man’s-land. It was now only a short walk between the two sides of the continent. The men are said to have wept and embraced and then the two armies turned and began the long march home.

  It seems hardly right to talk of a victor. Both countries were left ragged and exhausted and neither has ever fully recovered. Within years, both would turn in on themselves, self-digesting in civil war. But in the short term, Paraguay had achieved all she’d needed to: she’d fought for survival and she still existed. Along the way, she’d secured 20,000 square miles of empty, greenish desert. That’s two Paraguayan and three Bolivian lives for every dreadful square.

  The victory parades in Asunción were muted. Not even Reggie Thompson came out to watch.

  126

  ONE SUNDAY, THE Ungers took me up the Trans-Chaco Highway to where the tarmac ran out.

  ‘They had promised to pave it all the way to Bolivia …’ said Jakob ruefully.

  As we drove westwards, it got drier, as I’d expected, and the trees shrivelled into claws. More surprisingly, the weather changed and an icy surazo was whipped in from the south like a ghostly orange cavalry. As the sand kicked and whinnied at the windows, I could sense Jakob’s mood cloud over. He spotted a red flag in the cactus.

  ‘The Swiss colony,’ he said. ‘Most of them are pensioners. They were told this would be a sweet retirement. Hospitals and swimming pools! They hardly have enough water to wash …’

  Jakob’s treasured desert had turned to broken promises.

  ‘And all this,’ he said, gathering up the northern horizon in his grimace, ‘is owned by a thief. Did you ever hear of the Süd Milch scandal in Germany? The shareholders of a dairy were fleeced of millions and millions of dollars. It all ended up here.’

  ‘Is crime the new cash crop?’ I asked.

  ‘You need to ask the army about that. They’ve been at it for years.’

  Suddenly, there, at the end of the tarmac, was the army. They’d taken over the old Bolivian garrison, Camacho, and renamed it ‘Mariscal Estigarribia’. It was a parade of cement and dust-devils and not much else. A concrete banner had been hauled up over the road: ‘Third Army Corps’. It was guarded by three old men, dressed for an old war: green fatigues, floppy green hats, machetes and blankets slung from the shoulder.

  ‘They’re the best soldiers,’ said Jakob. ‘Recruited from the western tribes, the Guaraní-Nandeva.’

  As for the rest, few Paraguayans held them in affection. The heroes of the Chaco War had been tidied away in the Stronato, when the army became the Ministry of Theft. Mariscal Estigarribia itself had developed a reputation as a pit-stop for the army’s stolen cars, bound for Bolivia. The Colorados’ sultans even enjoyed a little slavery, with a ready supply of puppyish conscripts.

  ‘Look at them,’ said Maria. ‘Some are only thirteen or fourteen!’

  A squad of shaven children were dabbing whitewash on the guardhouse.

  ‘Sometimes these kids learn too much,’ said Jakob. ‘I expect you’ve heard what happens?’

  Everyone knew. The over-curious were boxed up and sent home with their cards marked ‘leukaemia’, ‘rabies’ or ‘accidental gunshot wound’. Such misfortune hadn’t ended with the departure of Stroessner; in the last decade, a hundred and three conscripts had met improbable deaths. I’d often seen their parents marching around Asunción. Murderers! they shouted. Clean up the Army!

  Many Asunceños agreed, although saying so in public was still considered a little unhealthy.

  We drove out to a stadium on a plain of giant craters.

  It was sports day for the children of the Chaco. The Indians sent drummers and the army sent a captain in jackboots and mirrors, a reminder that youth is not always fun and games. The Germans won the football and the Lengua won the long barefoot dash through the grit. I asked Jakob about the craters.

  ‘The Americans dug them. To build their runway.’

  ‘They have an airbase? Here?’

  ‘People say it’s huge. Deep tunnels under the desert.’

  ‘But we’re five hundred kilometres out of Asunción. Why here?’

  Jakob shrugged. ‘On the map, its almost the centre of the continent.’

  ‘Well, yes, but it’s not exactly its heart.’

  ‘No,’ said Jakob, looking around bleakly, ‘not exactly.’

  Maria had another idea. ‘I heard it was their fuelling stop for the South Pole.’

  This was quite a thought: the crossroads of two plump armies, one heading south with Froot Loops and atomic clocks, the other heading west in stolen cars. I was surprised by the amount of secrecy that seemed to be thriving in this enormous, empty wilderness. Perhaps openness merely encourages grander distortion
.

  We returned to the cement village and ate at ‘The French Hotel’. Whatever chain of events had brought them here had left the owners in a state of stubble and deep shock. All they could remember of their former lives was gratin dauphinois.

  What happens after the tarmac? I asked the Frenchmen.

  ‘Rien,’ they said. ‘Pas d’eau. Pas d’essence. Seulment des épines.’

  I’d reached an extremity. It was time to turn round and head for home.

  Epilogue

  ‘In this blessed land of Paraguay,’ Mr Visconti spoke as though he were adding a moral to the story, ‘there is no income tax and no evasions are necessary.’

  Graham Greene, Travels With My Aunt

  I had begun, not only to dimly understand, but to enthusiastically fall in love with the brutal and tender land of Paraguay.

  Ariel Dorfman, foreword to Son of Man

  127

  IN ASUNCIÓN, I had lunch with the soil scientist, Dr Palacios. We talked about the places I’d been to.

  ‘You probably think you understand us now,’ he said, ‘but you won’t. You can’t. We don’t even understand ourselves. You think I’m joking? Remember that three-quarters of all Paraguayans were born during the Stronato, which was one long lie. It’s been no better since then. We’re still ruled by liars. We live in a state of deception. What intrigues me is that we’ve always been this way.’