“The barão didn’t encourage you to volunteer for so miserable a post,” Clóvis da Silva said that first night as they dined together at the Hotel Riachuelo, one of many establishments flourishing at Corrientes with the influx of thousands of troops and camp followers.
“I’m not a professional soldier, Clóvis.”
“Good God, man, that’s not the issue. As the grandson of the barão de Itatinga, you can do better than sit in camp for eight months. Ulisses Tavares expects more than this, Firmino Dantas.”
After that meeting, Clóvis da Silva had arranged for Firmino to be made liaison officer with Osório’s headquarters. The promotion had brought him into contact with the command of the First Corps and offered good prospects for rapid advancement. Still Firmino Dantas had been a reluctant participant, carrying out his orders efficiently but without the show of spirit to win the attention of his superiors.
Firmino dearly longed to be back at Itatinga, where he could continue his experiments with the coffee mill. Where he could see the girl about whom he had dreamed all these months! Since the night of the baronesa’s ball, Firmino’s passion for the golden-haired Renata had grown. Before marching away, he had gone to August Laubner’s shop in Tiberica and asked the apothecary to put together a personal medical kit for his campaign. There he had seen Renata Laubner. Firmino had gazed into those brilliant blue eyes as she talked with him, and had openly revealed his admiration — his adoration! The moment August Laubner went to the back of the shop in search of something, Firmino had suddenly taken hold of Renata’s hand and pressed it to his lips.
His commitment to Carlinda troubled him. He knew also that his betrothed’s fiery-tempered ally, Teodora Rita, would oppose any breach of promise. But, as the months passed, Firmino had built up hopes of a relationship with the Swiss beauty that went far beyond what could be justified by one touch of his lips to her hand. “Oh, my love, Renata,” Firmino would whisper to himself “I’ll fight this war and return to Tiberica, where you await me.”
Now, as Firmino stood on the deck of the steamer leading the invasion flotilla toward Itapiru, the thunder of war bursting around him, with an ironclad off to starboard, her flame-belching Whitworths unleashing destruction against the enemy, his nervous anticipation gave way to elation.
Firmino glanced toward General Osório, who was fifty-eight years old, gray-haired, with alert, genial eyes, a bona fide officer and gentleman. Osório had been nineteen when he fought in his first battle in the Banda Oriental in 1827, and had gained a legendary reputation as a lancer.
When Firmino first met the general at his headquarters, where he had gone as battalion liaison officer, Osório had remarked that the name of Ulisses Tavares da Silva ranked high among those who had made King João’s conquest of the Banda Oriental in 1817. “Show half the spirit of the barão on that campaign, Firmino Dantas, and you’ll make the old Paulista a proud man.” Firmino Dantas had promised to do his best. Alone, he had felt his deep dread of failure in battle against the Guarani, whom Ulisses Tavares, like His Majesty Dom Pedro, considered a worthless enemy.
But Firmino’s apprehension vanished as the invading force rode forward. The Paraguayan gunners were finding their mark now, and scored hits on a nearby ship and a floating pier. But as the range closed, with the steamers still several hundred yards off the Isle of Redemption, the lead ships of the flotilla began to turn to port. One after the other, with the floating piers in tow and the canoes keeping in the lee of the transports, the ships began to move down the Upper Paraná toward Tres Bocas: The landing had been planned not at Itapiru but at a point about half a mile beyond Tres Bocas on the Rio Paraguay itself.
“Macacos . . . macacos . . . macacos.”
General Juan Bautista Noguera intoned the epithet with a deadly calm as he watched the river armada draw near the lowlying banks where the Rio Paraguay fell into the Paraná.
Four thousand soldiers were in position along the banks of the Upper Paraná, the majority between Itapiru and Paso la Patria. An invasion by the Allies had been accepted as inevitable for months, and the Paraguayan High Command had seen little hope of effectively resisting a landing by the enemy’s overwhelming numbers. Cacambo had been among the few to protest this; he agreed with Marshal López’s English engineers, Colonel George Thompson and Lieutenant Hadley Tuttle, who had argued that Paso la Patria, Itapiru, and other possible landing places should be defended with every gun that could be brought down from Humaitá garrison.
Marshal López had rejected this plan. He accepted the fortification of Humaitá as Paraguay’s key defense. The riverside batteries provided tremendous firepower, and almost a year after the victory at Riachuelo; the Brazilian fleet had not yet dared make passage toward Humaitá. But more than the guns of Humaitá awaited an enemy: There were the esteros, a natural defense every bit as daunting as the man-made works at Humaitá. The “Place of the Damned,” Marshal López called it.
Behind the carrizal, situated between two parallel streams — Bellaco Norte, just below one line of outworks of Humaitá, and Bellaco Sur, about three miles to the south toward the Upper Paraná — lay the esteros. A dense forest of yatai palms grew on heights thirty to eighty feet above the swamps, which were clogged with rushes and three to six feet deep. For an invading force, few fields of operation could be worse than that toward which the Allied troops were heading this morning of April 16, 1866.
Just past 8:30 A.M., Cacambo and his company were in a palm grove two hundred yards from the Rio Paraguay. Behind them was an extensive morass; in front of them, a narrow strip of open, firm ground, which for the past twenty minutes had been plowed up in a continuous bombardment by the enemy.
“Macacos . . . macacos . . . macacos.”
War steamers, transports, flat barges, and canoes as far as the eye could see. And to challenge them, Cacambo with two hundred men and boys, most of them carrying flintlock muskets and machetes. Cacambo had sent three men to a Paraguayan detachment two miles to the east, behind the morass and below Itapiru, but he knew it would take his messengers at least an hour to get through the marshes.
The palm grove stood on lowlying ground and provided the scantiest cover for Cacambo’s force. Here and there, men had thrown up small earthworks where they sheltered, but the Brazilian barrage was relentless and deadly. In fifteen minutes, Cacambo’s company had lost fifty men, and in the firestorm between the palms, many more were deafened by the blasts. Only a few stood firm as the majority backed off into the morass.
Cacambo saw how bad it was. He did not curse those who fled. The company flag bearer, a boy of eleven, stood near him. Cacambo stared at the red, white, and blue banner of the Republic of Paraguay. “Go!” he said. “Carry our flag to safety.”
The boy was a Guarani from Cacambo’s town. He shook his head.
“Go! Go!” Cacambo said. “You can do nothing here. Take our colors to Marshal López. Tell him, Cacambo —” A shell whistled into the palm grove, exploding close by. “Go!” he shouted. The young Guarani ran for the morass.
The Brazilian guns stopped firing. In the palm grove, trees cracked and thudded to earth; wounded men cried out; and on the ground beyond, where dust and smoke drifted, silence. But the stillness was soon broken by voices as three floating piers and two canoes of the enemy approached the bank of the Rio Paraguay.
With six men remaining, General Juan Bautista Noguera stormed toward the invaders. His comrades ran ahead of him, for he had not much wind left, this old Guarani who long ago should have taken his rest with those elders who lay in their hammocks. He stumbled a few times, almost losing his footing as he skirted the craters from the enemy cannonade. He had unsheathed his sword and was wielding it with both hands.
The men in the floating piers saw the six front-runners bunched close together, their red blouses offering easy targets. Fusillades from two crowded piers stopped the six Paraguayans in their tracks.
“Macacos . . . macacos . . . macacos.”
Cacambo ran
on. His gaze was on the lead canoe. He saw a great macaco there, standing insolently in the prow, wearing a white kepi and blue poncho and carrying a silver-plated lance.
Cacambo was twenty yards from the edge of the riverbank when four Minit balls struck him. General Juan Bautista Noguera stumbled forward a few feet and then fell.
“My Guarani . . .” he wept, with his last breath.
The man in the white kepi was the first Brazilian to set foot on Paraguayan soil: General Manuel Luís Osório, who would be honored for this triumphant moment with the title Barão de Herval.
Thirty-eight days after the landings near Tres Bocas, the exhilaration Firmino had experienced during the invasion was gone.
On the push through the carrizal east from the low banks at Tres Bocas toward Paso la Patria, Brazilian troops had skirmished with Paraguayans deployed around the lagoons and morasses. The Tiberica contingent had reached Paso la Patria on April 21 without firing a shot other than rounds spent by nervous voluntários blazing away at noises in the jungle.
Firmino began to pay the price for the months in which he had kept to himself: utter loneliness, no fellowship at all with other officers or the men of his company. Even with Clóvis da Silva, whom he saw often at Paso la Patria — now a sprawling base for the Allied bridgehead — Firmino found it difficult to make conversation. The artilleryman’s confidence left Firmino feeling totally inadequate. He recognized the major — Clóvis had been promoted since the landings — as exactly the kind of soldier Ulisses Tavares expected Firmino to be.
To make matters worse, listening to Clóvis and the others, with their boisterous, passionate, jocular talk of combat, only intensified Firmino’s feeling of isolation. He looked at dead Paraguayans beside the route of march and imagined himself a corpse; he spoke with survivors of the May 2 attack on the vanguard, which had lost sixteen hundred men, and was certain he would run from such an onslaught. These anxieties grew until he could contemplate little else, not even the command of Ulisses Tavares, who had sent him south to uphold the heroic name of the da Silvas of Itatinga.
On May 24, 1866, thirty-eight days after the landings, the Allies’ forward positions were along a three-mile front at Tuyuti, an area of higher ground with palm forests just north of the stream of Bellaco Sur and on the southern fringes of the swamps and morasses. Thirty-five thousand men had moved up here from Paso la Patria, with more than one hundred field guns. The Brazilian divisions held the left flank, the Argentinians the right. There were nine hundred Uruguayans, all that remained of the battalions led by the Colorado general Venancio Flores. The Allies were still under the overall command of the Argentinian president, General Bartolomé Mitre, and General Osório led the Brazilian army.
On May 24 at Tuyuti, General Mitre ordered a reconnaissance in force into the esteros. Firmino Dantas and the Tiberica company were with a division near the rear of the Brazilian left flank. General Antônio Sampião, a veteran infantryman from the northeast province of Ceará, commanded these battalions of Paulista, Carioca, and Cearense voluntários holding positions in support of an artillery regiment — the Bateria Mallet — with twenty-eight Whitworth and La Hitte cannons. Major Clóvis da Silva served with these batteries, which were led by and bore the name of the French-born Emilio Mallet, who had come to Brazil as a mercenary in the 1820s and had risen to be the best gunner in the imperial army.
Late morning, along the Allied lines, the battalions chosen to reconnoiter the esteros were awaiting orders to penetrate the marshes. The atmosphere was hot and humid, the sky cloudless, and as the reconnaissance forces were mustered, sweat-drenched men cursed impatiently; they didn’t expect the probe into the esteros to amount to much.
Firmino Dantas and his men were with other voluntários three hundred yards to the left of the Bateria Mallet. The company’s position was on an elevation covered with Yatai palms. Below the slight slope, the ground leveled out toward an open morass extending from the reed-clogged esteros. A wide, deep ditch had been dug in front of the twenty-eight field guns, and the earth that had been removed from this trench spread out in front of and behind it so that from the edge of the esteros the long pitfall would not be visible.
At precisely 11:55 A.M., a Congreve rocket tore into the air and burst above a patch of jungle to the left of the Brazilian positions. Here and there a bugle sounded, a whistle shrilled, as officers quickest to react brought their men to orders.
A few minutes after the rocket explosion, a Brazilian skirmisher came running out of the jungle:
“Camarada! Camarada! Os Paraguaios! Os Paraguaios!”
From the jungle on the left came eight thousand infantry and one thousand cavalrymen, who had had to dismount and lead their horses in single file through the dense undergrowth. Sweeping down on the right toward the Argentinian flank, thundering out of the cover of a palm forest, came seven thousand cavalrymen with two thousand foot soldiers running up behind them. Pouring directly from the estero in a frontal assault on the Bateria Mallet were five thousand infantrymen, with four howitzers. Altogether some 23,000 men, the bulk of Paraguay’s army.
By noon of May 24, 1866, five minutes after the Paraguayans’ rocket signal to commence the attack, the battle of Tuyuti was raging along the whole line of the Allies.
The Tiberica company was in position with its battalion between the Yatai palms, firing down the slope toward the enemy at the edge of the esteros seven hundred yards away. The Paraguayans were closely bunched together as their front ranks sploshed through the morass toward the firm ground in front of the Bateria Mallet and in the direction of the heights with the palm forest. Colonel Mallet’s twenty-eight guns went into action with a thunderous oration, but the deluge of fire and iron did not break the red-bloused wave rolling toward the Brazilians.
“Fogo!” Clóvis Lima da Silva commanded the men at the four brass La Hittes, with the earth quaking beneath his feet and bullets whistling and singing over his head.
Colonel Emilio Mallet himself moved among his gunners, with only one order for the line: “They shall not enter here!”
“Fogo! Fogo! Fogo!” came the command, and three hundred yards from the roaring guns, Tiberica’s voluntários blazed away at the Paraguayans.
Firmino Dantas was thirty feet behind his men, taking cover at the base of a Yatai palm. With the utmost effort, he manipulated hands that trembled, fingers that seemed frozen as he took out cartridges and caps.
Bayonets flashed and gleamed as the Paraguayans advanced resolutely through the morass. Those up front charged the instant they hit firm ground: The rapid fire from the Bateria Mallet cut them down in bunches, but the gaps were quickly filled.
Firmino Dantas’s feelings plunged from terror to hopelessness as he glanced around for a safer place and saw none.
No matter. Within seconds, screaming at the top of their lungs, several hundred Guarani horsemen broke through the extreme end of the Brazilian left flank and came thundering toward the Yatai palms.
Antônio Paciência was no less afraid than Firmino Dantas. He and Policarpo Mossambe and seven voluntários had taken up a position behind a group of low rocks that gave far less protection than the men hugging the earth behind them imagined.
“Load, Antônio! Fire, Antônio! Load, damn you!” Policarpo growled when he saw the young mulatto paralyzed behind a big stone. Antônio obeyed. Mechanically, he pointed his weapon and fired at the mass of men at the edge of the esteros. Then he waited motionless again, his mouth open as he stared at the enemy.
“Baioneta, Antônio! Baioneta!”
Antônio heard Policarpo’s command, but he did not obey. Like others, he was transfixed with horror as he saw the Guarani cavalrymen.
Heavy rifle fire from the voluntários brought down the front riders and sent several ponies crashing to the ground. But the voluntários had no time to reload and no place to hide before the thundering, yelling, snorting stampede was upon them, slashing with saber and machete.
With a bloodcurdling ye
ll, a Paraguayan rode at Policarpo, swinging his machete. There was a clash of iron as Policarpo warded off the blow with his bayonet; then he jabbed upward with his weapon, the razor-sharp triangular bayonet biting into the Guarani’s cheek, and the man’s horse tore away with its screaming stricken burden. A second cavalryman came, and he fell from his saddle as he lunged for Policarpo, who bayoneted him.
But there were few kills like Policarpo’s. One hundred voluntários lay dead or wounded beneath the palms; many more had fled toward the Bateria Mallet. The Paraguayans rode on, too, to cover the three hundred yards to the guns, but their ponies stormed into a solid wall of rifle fire from troops massed by General Sampião.
Antônio Paciência looked up shamefacedly at Policarpo. “Oh, Mossambe, I did nothing!” When the cavalry struck, Antônio had clung to the earth behind the rocks.
The Mozambican held out his hand to help Antônio to his feet. “It was the first fight,” he said.
Firmino Dantas lay at the palm tree. His face was streaked with blood, his jacket stained crimson. He heard the continuing thunder of battle, but it seemed far away; he heard voices of troops coming up to fill the breach in their lines, but made no effort to appeal for help. Firmino looked at his fingers, which he had pressed against his side. He moaned softly.
A Paraguayan cavalryman lay six feet away. Mortally wounded, this enemy had been hurled from his horse, his body smashing into the palm, splattering Firmino Dantas with blood.
On the Allied right flank, detachments of the seven thousand Paraguayan cavalrymen clashed with a mounted Argentinian regiment, cutting them up and scattering them. Four hundred Paraguayan chargers did not stop, for the rout of the enemy horsemen had cleared the way to a twenty-gun battery. They raced for the guns, with canister and grape emptying their saddles at such speed that only half their number reached the canyon, killing or putting to flight the men who had stayed beside their pieces. The Paraguayans were busy turning the field guns in order to drag them over to their own side when Argentinian cavalry reserves suddenly appeared. Numbers of Paraguayans immediately dismounted to maneuver the guns — they refused to abandon their prizes — and to a man, they were slaughtered.
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