Brazil

by Errol Lincoln Uys

  The Argentinian battery was brought back into action, adding to the cannonade all along the three-mile front.

  Nowhere along the Allied line was the Paraguayan assault as ferocious and sustained as against the guns of Emilio Mallet and Antônio Sampião’s division supporting the artillery. Wave after wave of the five thousand Paraguayans who had crossed the esteros stormed the Brazilians, breaking to the left and right as they made for the battery or the troop positions at the Yatai palms.

  For the Twenty-fifth Paraguayan Battalion — new recruits called to rebuild Marshal López’s army — the price of valor was high: The rapid fire from Emilio Mallet’s guns was devastating. The next company sent forward discovered that the quagmire had been filled in with the bodies of the men of the Twenty-fifth.

  But those troops who broke to the right were able to join up with infantry from the column of nine thousand foot and horse soldiers who had come through the jungle east of the Brazilian positions. The combined infantry made three charges against the Brazilians, driving them deeper into the palm forests. Three times the Brazilians rallied and hurled the Paraguayans back toward the esteros. After almost four hours of fighting, Antônio Sampião himself was critically wounded and one thousand of his men, both regulars and voluntários, were dead or injured. By 3:00 P.M., news of the perilous situation of the surviving defenders was carried to the Brazilian army chief, Manuel Luís Osório.

  Osório was known to his men as “The Legendary,” a title as well deserved as any baronetcy his emperor chose to bestow upon him. Gathering every man he could detach from his post, Osório hurried to assist Sampião’s battered division.

  The main body of Paraguayans were in the open between the Yatai palms and the esteros, mustering for another assault on the Brazilian positions. When Osório and his force began to advance, the Paraguayans blasted the front ranks with volleys of musket fire that felled men all along the line.

  “Avançar, Brasileiros! Avançar!” Osório commanded, his poncho blowing in the wind, his hand gripping the silver-plated lance he favored as weapon even when afoot.

  A bugler running next to Osório was shot dead. Out of the corner of his eye, Osório saw a soldier pick up the cornet. “Sound it, voluntário! Blow!” Osório shouted.

  The soldier held his rifle in his right hand; with his left, he raised the bugle to his lips and blew what sounded like the advance.

  Spurred on by The Legendary, the Brazilians tore into the Paraguayans with an almighty rage. In fifteen minutes, hundreds of Paraguayans were shot down at point-blank range or bayoneted.

  Osório’s infantry charge smashed the Paraguayans in this sector. By 4:30 P.M., all along the front, the Allied cannons began to fall silent.

  When it was over, General Osório saw the man who had picked up the bugle walking back to camp:

  “What is your name, voluntário?”

  “Policarpo Mossambe, my General, from Tiberica.”

  “Take note of it,” Osório told an aide. Policarpo had lost his forage cap and Osório noticed the deep dent in his skull. “Where did you get that wound, Policarpo Mossambe?”

  “It was before the war, my General. I am the slave Policarpo.”

  “I saw you fight today, Mossambe,” Osório said. “Go back to your company. Tell your commander General Osório says you earned your promotion on the battlefield of Tuyuti. You are to be corporal.”

  “Thank God you’re alive!” Major Clóvis da Silva found Firmino Dantas sitting at the edge of a field of wounded.

  Firmino had been slow to accept that he had been splattered by the blood of the Paraguayan cavalryman and not his own. The survivors of the battalion were being regrouped when Firmino had dragged himself to his feet. General Antônio Sampião himself had been there as Firmino returned dazedly to his men. “I’m not hurt,” he had said in response to the general’s concern. But, seeing the state he was in, Sampião had ordered him to join a reserve company guarding a munitions dump in the rear of the line.

  Clóvis, knowing nothing of this, looked respectfully at Firmino Dantas’s bloodstained uniform. “If only Ulisses Tavares could see you now, Firmino!” he said, beaming. “You have done him proud!”

  Antônio Paciência walked unsteadily beside Corporal Policarpo.

  “My Corporal, I was like a worm,” Antônio admitted. “I crawled into the earth to escape the enemy. But you saw me, Corporal Policarpo.” How he loved the very sound of his friend’s new rank. “When they came a second time, I fought.”

  “Like a young lion, Antônio Paciência!”

  It was the day after the battle. Policarpo and Antônio had been drinking cachaça at the wagon of a trader before going back to their encampment.

  Antônio saw smoke rising in front of the Allied lines. “What is it?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” Policarpo replied, frowning.

  “I heard no gunfire.”

  They hurried forward, and saw the cause of the fires.

  “Ai, Jesus Christ! How terrible!” Antônio cried. “Some are so small and thin, there’s nothing to burn!”

  The Paraguayan dead were being heaped up in alternate layers with wood, in piles from fifty to one hundred, and set on fire. Of 23,000 sent into battle, six thousand were dead and seven thousand injured. The Allied losses were four thousand. The Place of the Damned had reaped its first harvest.

  The night was incredibly dark as seven canoes glided swiftly down the Rio Paraguay. Four craft were lashed together in pairs and heavily laden, their gunwales four to five inches above the water. One of three dugouts escorting them rode ahead, two to the rear, the shapes of their crews just distinguishable. It was nearing midnight, August 20, 1866.

  “Steady, men. Steady. Let her run with the current,” said an officer in the lead canoe.

  The craft had come down from a marshy inlet near Curupaiti, an advance battery on the east bank of the Rio Paraguay six miles below the fortress of Humaitá, and were headed toward another earthwork, Curuzu. With thirteen guns in a sunken battery and 2,500 men, Curuzu was the first Paraguayan river defense above Tres Bocas.

  All eyes were on the officer in the lead canoe. Before the great war, Capitán Angelo Moretti, former master of the paddle wheeler La Golconda, had navigated the Paraguay under every condition. La Golconda had made her last trip six months ago, with her boilers cold, her machinery irreparable. Towed by the Tacuari, one of three war steamers remaining in service, La Golconda had ended her days in a channel in sight of Curupaiti battery, where she was sunk to impede the enemy’s passage.

  With his livelihood sitting on the bottom of the Rio Paraguay, the Italian capitán had offered his services to the navy, joining almost one thousand men of a dozen nationalities serving the forces of Marshal López, the majority paid technicians and artisans working day and night to supply war materiel from Asunción’s arsenal.

  Besides Moretti, there were three other officers with the forty men in the canoes. One was Ramos, a young Paraguayan who had spent several years in England, where he had trained as a munitions expert. Another was a Pole named Michkoffsky, who had arrived penniless at Asunción before the war and had had the good fortune to marry a cousin of El Presidente.

  The fourth officer sat amidships in one of the two pairs of canoes lashed together. Lucas Kruger had given scant attention to the navigation of the river. With a big straw hat pulled down low over his forehead and his shoulders hunched, he mostly dozed as the unwieldy craft shot forward, and looked up only when the sailors warned of a rough stretch of water ahead.

  The itinerant tinkerer from Pittsburgh, who had promised Francisco Solano López that he could make the Rio Paraguay a damnable passage for the enemy, had done exactly that. Just four months ago, sixteen wooden-hulled steamers and four ironclads of His Imperial Majesty Pedro’s navy had sailed up the Paraguay from Tres Bocas for about ten miles, and there they sat, twenty powerful warships kept at bay by Luke Kruger, master torpedoman of Paraguay.

  Luke’s torpedoes w
ere of two kinds: explosive devices planted in pattern in the channels between the islands and high sandbars from Humaitá to beyond the battery of Curuzu; and those dropped into the river to be carried down to the enemy’s ships by the current. Varying in size from 50-pounders to a monster boiler-plated 1,500-pounder, the stationary weapons were anchored so that they drifted four to five feet below the surface; those sent downstream floated attached to barrels or demijohns.

  Since the outbreak of the war, Luke had continued his attempt to devise an accurate self-propelled torpedo, but with no success. Three hundred torpedoes were anchored in the river by May 1866, when the Brazilians had finally entered the Paraguay; thereafter, Luke and his men had made regular trips downriver to release floating charges.

  The Brazilian warships were guarded by boats that carried long lines with grappling irons to hook the float of a torpedo, which they then towed ashore. They were on station day and night, the night watches the worst as they rowed across the river with only flickering lanterns to help them spot the menace drifting toward them. Young Ramos had recently confused the Brazilians with a diabolical scheme he himself had proposed: sending countless demijohns and barrels bobbing downriver weighted with leather bags filled with nothing more lethal than stones.

  On the night of August 20, the seven canoes racing toward the Brazilians carried ten torpedoes in the dugouts that had been lashed together. About a mile and a half above the enemy’s anchorage, four islands divided the waters of the Rio Paraguay, with two high, narrow strips of land near each bank and two islands close to the middle of the river. In the dry season, the inner islands were connected by a marsh, which was now flooded.

  This was the first time they had used this approach; previously they had released torpedoes in the channels to the left and right of the inner islands. Repeatedly the canoes came up against a wall of rushes, a solid, impenetrable mass of vegetation. The sailors waded into the rushes, wrenching them out of the mud by their roots, working a passage through them foot by foot. Mosquitoes and flies and a myriad other pests swarmed around the men, biting and stinging; birds nesting in the rushes scattered; larger creatures, possibly capybara, the great water rats, broke noisily into deeper cover.

  It took an hour to break through the rushes. Kruger and Michkoffsky themselves had to climb out to help lighten the craft and drag them through the soft mud.

  Moretti, who had had the idea of this approach, sat high and dry in his canoe humming to himself as he waited for them.

  “Moretti, next time you’ll be first over the side,” Luke said.

  Moretti greeted this with a huge, toothy grin. “I will, Luke?”

  “Damn right! With your fancy pants, silver buttons, and all, my lord Admiral!”

  Unlike Luke, whose shabby appearance had elicited complaints from none other than Marshal López himself, but who had done nothing to improve it, Moretti wore navy whites and blue jacket adorned with silver buttons bought from a soldier who had stripped the body of an Argentinian colonel killed at Tuyuti.

  “I think not,” Moretti said. “Our next stop will be opposite the Brazilians.”

  “Angelo, I hope you’re right,” Luke said.

  Moretti laughed. “Use your paddles quietly now, men,” he told his crew. “Not a sound.”

  Luke gave the same order. His canoe dropped back as Moretti left the open, inundated area for a narrower passage between the rushes.

  Fifteen minutes later, Moretti’s crew took their paddles out of the water. The dugout rode forward gently, coming to a stop behind a stand of rushes. One after the other, the rest of the squadron came up, drifting slowly near Moretti’s canoe.

  Through the rushes, the torpedomen could see the lanterns of the boats on guard duty in front of the Brazilian ships.

  “Have I ever misled you, Luke?” Moretti asked softly.

  Luke Kruger did not reply. He was already directing the off-loading of the first torpedo and float. Before the first pair moved off, other men swam to the opening to check for hazards — a log caught below the surface, for instance, against which a torpedo could strike. After crisscrossing the area several times, the men reported it all clear.

  “Easy, boys. Easy now,” Luke said. He glanced to the left through the reeds at the distant lanterns flickering like tiny fireflies. “Ramos,” he said. “What do you think?”

  “Maybe we’ll be lucky tonight. Sink one son of a bitch,” he said, mimicking Luke.

  In the open river behind the rushes, the current was running at three knots, carrying the torpedoes swiftly toward the fleet. A lieutenant with seven oarsmen in a guard boat shouted an alarm when he spotted a float.

  A minute later, the lieutenant swung out a line with a heavy grappling hook. The iron claws banged against the side of the barrel float; then the hook plopped into the water. The lieutenant jerked the line; the grappling iron slammed against the torpedo, striking the piston.

  A brilliant flash lit up the river behind the rushes.

  “Mother of God!” Ramos cried. “Luke!”

  “It was a guard boat.”

  “They work! The torpedoes work, Luke!”

  “Sooner or later, Ramos,” he said laconically.

  On August 27, 1866, one week later, Luke Kruger and young Ramos were prepared for another night raid on the Brazilian fleet. Paraguayan scouts operating in the carrizal below the Curuzu battery and toward Tres Bocas reported numerous transports steaming up behind the fleet — indication of an imminent assault against the defenses at Curuzu and Curupaiti.

  Luke’s plan of attack was different tonight and involved one boat, eight men, including Luke and Ramos, and one five-hundred-pound torpedo. The boat was a forty-foot steam launch that had been captured during the Paraguayan invasion of Mato Grosso in December 1864. The Paraguayans had called this prize “Yacaré” — “Alligator” — but Angelo Moretti had his own name for her: “Lucky Luke.”

  Moretti was to have gone on this mission, but he’d been summoned to Asunción.

  “What for?” Luke asked.

  “Perhaps they want to talk about La Golconda.

  Luke saw no chance of Moretti being compensated for the steamer that had been scuttled by the navy. “You’re wasting your time, Angelo. They did you a favor taking her off your hands.”

  “It isn’t true.”

  “I worked on her engines —”

  “Then you know: They ran like new.”

  “No, Angelo. It was a miracle you cleared Asunción Bay, but go to Asunción, Angelo. Go. I’ll take Ramos.”

  Luke Kruger shared Moretti’s view that the struggle by 525,000 Paraguayans against three nations with a combined population of twelve million was a battle for the very existence of Paraguay.

  “López’s enemies say they make war on him alone, but the Paraguayans know this is a lie,” Luke had said on one occasion. “Buenos Aires has many a score to settle with Asunción. I can accept this. But Pedro of Brazil, who sends his slave horde into battle claiming it’s to free Paraguayans from López? Pedro, whose armies slaughter Guarani by the thousands?

  “Pedro knows his own future will be decided on the battlefields of Paraguay. If Paraguay defeats Pedro’s armies, the Braganças won’t last six months. Six months and Brazilian republicans will follow the example of Juarez in Mexico.”

  “There will be more than an end to Bragança rule,” Moretti had suggested. “Emperor Pedro and his slaveholding barons know that your Civil War has doomed that institution in the Americas. To lose the war in Paraguay will be as devastating to the empire as the Confederate defeat. A republican Brazil will not tolerate the continued enslavement of three million people.”

  This evening of August 27, Luke was alone in the one-room house he shared with Moretti. He had spent most of the day on the Yacaré preparing the steam launch for this night’s mission, which he’d modeled on William Cushing’s attack on the Confederate iron-plated ram Albermarle in October 1864. The Yacaré would steam for a Brazilian ship with the torpedo l
owered into the water. By means of a cable leading back from the spar, the torpedo would be released to float below the ship’s hull; backing off, the Yacaré’s crew had only to pull a second line to fire the weapon.

  As he lay back on his cot, with smoke curling from a cigar, Luke thought of Angelo Moretti on his way to Asunción. He did not believe the Italian’s story about being called to discuss compensation for La Golconda. Luke laughed to himself. Truth is, you would rather sail with the devil than set foot in Lucky Luke tonight! Can’t say I blame you.

  Puffing on his cigar, Luke realized with a jolt that his journey could end here in Paraguay. He had come through many scrapes on his travels, though at no time had he placed himself in as hazardous a position.

  A half-hour before he had to leave to join Ramos aboard the launch, Luke got up from his cot and lit a lantern. The yellowish light revealed a sparsely furnished room: two cots, a table, two chairs. All Luke’s things were in one trunk at the side of the room. Neatly stacked on top of the trunk were his most treasured possessions — his collection of books. He took up his Bible and carried it to the table. He thumbed through the pages seeking the passage he knew by heart but found more powerful still when read aloud:

  “The Lord is my shepherd . . .” He spoke in a strong, resonant tone, and his voice rose as he reached the last verse: “. . . and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”

  Then Luke Kruger stood up. He took his straw hat from Moretti’s bed and stuck it on his head. He blew out the lantern and stepped outside, walking briskly toward the bank of the inlet and the mooring of the Yacaré.

  The forty-foot launch was painted black to make her less visible to the enemy. Luke heard young Ramos call out that they were ready. Luke waved in acknowledgment, but nearing a plank walkway between the bank and the side of the boat, he glanced toward the Yacaré’s prow. Jutting out in front of the launch was a sixteen-foot spar that was hinged to the bow and could be raised or lowered by a windlass. Secured near the end of this iron beam was a five-hundred-pound torpedo.