“Cast off, Ramos!” Luke commanded the instant he stepped aboard.
Drifting clouds intermittently obscured a sliver of moon. Ramos conned the launch out of the inlet and into the channel that lay closest to the east bank of the Rio Paraguay on their left. This route passed the batteries of Curupaiti and Curuzu and had not been strewn with anchored torpedoes. If the enemy captains were foolhardy enough to steam up this way, their ships would come under direct fire from the fifty-eight guns at the two earthworks.
Ten minutes after leaving the inlet, the launch was throbbing forward in the lee of Curupaiti battery. Luke stood with Ramos, leaning back against the side of the boat. Ramos had the Yacaré heading steadily down the channel, keeping her in midstream. Two sailors were tending her firebox and boiler; the others were sitting on the deck, checking their rifles — new Enfields taken from Allied soldiers killed in battle.
The Yacaré was passing below the thirty-foot sand-and-clay cliff at Curupaiti when Ramos, who had been talking incessantly since leaving the inlet, said, “I’m happy Angelo Moretti was summoned to Asunción.”
“Why, Ramos?”
“I would’ve stood there watching you leave with Moretti.”
“You may yet change your mind.”
“No, Captain Luke! I want to be there when you get your son of a bitch —”
Young Ramos died with the epithet on his lips.
Riding swiftly down the dark channel with the five-hundred-pound torpedo secured to her spar, the Yacari smashed into the wreck of La Golconda, her stack submerged by the rise in the river. Angelo Moretti would have known of this deadly hazard.
Six crewmen were blown skyward by the blast.
And what had been just a passing thought for Lucas Kruger a short while ago became reality. His journey did end here on the Rio Paraguay.
On September 1, sixteen Brazilian ships began to thread their way up the channels of the Paraguay, steaming slowly north toward Curuzu. A smaller squadron provided cover for the transports, which began to land fourteen thousand men on the edge of the carrizal below the Paraguayans’ first river defense work. At noon, with most of the fleet within range of Curuzu, an artillery duel commenced between the ships and shore batteries, which lasted seven hours.
At dawn, September 2, the cannonade was resumed. The Brazilians fired more than two hundred shells an hour at the sunken battery of Curuzu, without doing much damage and in return taking only light punishment from the defenders’ thirteen guns.
Among the Brazilian ships that had been hit was the Rio de Janeiro. Launched in February 1866, the new ironclad, with four-and-a-half-inch plate and six guns, was one of the fleet’s most powerful warships; in the vanguard, she had taken a pounding from the guns of Curuzu, losing a 68-pounder and suffering other damage to her decks. But her commander kept her on station, fighting back gallantly.
At 2:00 P.M., the Rio de Janeiro blew up. An anchored torpedo had blasted her poop, and a second had blown a gaping hole near her bow. Within minutes she began to sink.
Master torpedoman Luke Kruger had got his ironclad.
On September 22, the flags of the Allies flew above the earthworks at Curuzu, which had been taken on September 3. With the fall of Curuzu, Curupaiti battery, three thousand yards to the north, was the only obstacle preventing the Allies from attacking the Paraguayan trenches at Humaitá.
For seven hundred men of the Paraguayan Tenth Battalion who had held the trenches on the left of Curuzu, the burden of defeat was terrible. The Tenth had been so outnumbered that they broke rank, leaving only their commander and a few officers, who had been killed. Back at Humaitá, Marshal López had ordered the men of the Tenth to fall in on the parade ground, at attention. When they were assembled, every tenth man in the rank was told to step forward, and the soldiers thus selected were shot in front of their comrades.
At Curuzu, General Bartolomé Mitre ordered an assault on Curupaiti on the morning of September 22. The Allied commander-in-chief’s plan of attack involved eighteen thousand men — eleven thousand Brazilians and seven thousand Argentinians —- who would approach Curupaiti from three directions, the bulk of the Brazilian divisions taking the only road between the two positions.
For three days and two nights, torrential downpours had flooded the carrizal, turning the simplest camp duties into feats of endurance. There were guns to be moved up for the attack, and with one hundred men harnessed like beasts to a piece and wallowing up to their knees in mud as they hauled on the drag ropes; there were rearguard trenches to be dug, and companies of sappers worked day and night against tons of earth that slid back into the ditches; there were passages to be slashed through patches of inundated jungle. Just last night, September 21, the rain had finally stopped, and the fleet had been signaled that the attack was on, its preliminary bombardment to commence at 7:00 A.M.
The rolling fire of the guns brought the great army to its feet. The men were tired and hungry and walked stiffly in damp, dirty uniforms, but they reacted quickly enough to the shrieking whistles and bugle blasts. The sun rose; a light breeze carried with it the sweet perfume of the thorny aromitas; the sound of guns played in the background.
The slave soldiers Antônio Paciência and Policarpo, two of forty-seven volunteers remaining from the Tiberica contingent, were attached to a battalion consisting mainly of Pernambucans, Bahians, and other men from the northeast provinces, which were contributing a disproportionate number of volunteers, both slaves and free men. The Tiberica volunteers had been in action once since the battle of Tuyuti, when the Paraguayans again attacked the Allied left flank, in July 1866, an indecisive engagement, but the thousands of Allied soldiers either killed or wounded at Potrero Sauce had brought to an end the days of glory that followed the great victory of Tuyuti.
Firmino Dantas da Silva was not with the Tiberica company. Three weeks after Tuyuti, Second-Lieutenant da Silva had been posted behind the lines at Itapiru on the Upper Paraná, where he joined the quartermaster-general’s staff. The slaves from the fazenda of Itatinga — three of the six had been killed — had not seen or heard a word about Firmino Dantas since his taking leave of them.
At Curuzu on September 22, Corporal Policarpo’s squad was attached to a section under a caboclo sergeant, Mario Bomfim, whose family were vaqueiros in the Pernambucan sertão north of the Rio São Francisco.
Antônio had told Sergeant Bomfim all he could remember about Jurema, which was not much. “Senhor Heitor Batista and his son, João Montes, sold me to a slaver when I was a child.”
“Coronel Heitor Baptista Ferreira and his family? I know the Ferreiras, boy,” Bomfim, a scraggy, yellow-faced man in his forties, had responded. “If you cross Coronel Heitor Baptista himself or another poderoso of the family, any one of their hundred armed capangas will make your throat sing like a violin!”
“I can’t forget Mãe Mônica,” Antônio had said. “I will go back for her.”
“Boy! If you set foot on Ferreira lands, know what you’re doing: Coronel Ferreira isn’t a man to tamper with!”
“My mother is an old slave with not many years left. Why would Coronel Ferreira want to keep an extra mouth to feed?”
Late this morning of September 22, 1866, Sergeant Bomfim and his section were about halfway along the Brazilian column and had to wait ten minutes after the first battalions had started up the road near the riverbank before they themselves began to move forward.
They had covered three hundred of the three thousand yards to Curupaiti, when a deafening barrage drowned the noise from the guns of the Brazilian ironclads. The Paraguayans had forty-nine guns at Curupaiti, thirteen along a concave cliff facing the river, thirty-six covering the land approaches from the direction of Curuzu.
At fifteen hundred yards, Sergeant Bomfim and his section had not lost a man, but were finding it difficult to advance in close order. They went forward a hundred yards or so, through smoke spreading like fog over the carrizal, with the fearsome sounds around them, until they ca
me to a place in the road where a Paraguayan shell had exploded. They broke to the left and the right to pass the corpses heaped up there, and tramped on resolutely.
At one thousand yards, the order came down to move into the carrizal to the right, the snap and crack of reeds and rushes and the oaths of men indicating that hundreds were already pushing through the water-logged marshes to reach positions opposite the enemy’s earthworks.
“Right! Keep to the right! Forward! Forward!” officers moving along the advancing lines shouted into the reeds.
“Oh, my God!” Sergeant Mario Bomfim cried when he got his men to the trees.
Two hundred yards away, beyond a broad stretch of earth cleared of trees, was Curupaiti’s first defense lines. The felled trees had been piled up along the front of the Paraguayans’ earthworks to make an abatis — a twenty-foot-wide, eight-foot-high mass of thickly entwined tree trunks and boughs, every projecting limb fashioned into a sharp stake. Behind the abatis, the earth sloped toward the thirty-six guns mounted on raised platforms to give them the broadest possible range. Their crews used this to great advantage, raking the Allied columns with canister and grape as they came out of the carrizal.
Two Brazilian battalions had come through the morasses to a narrow strip of forest at the edge of the clearing in front of the abatis. To the left, the clearing was strewn with men who had marched ahead of them and had charged toward the abatis; groups of soldiers who had made it across were pinned down behind the wall of tangled timber. To the right, an Argentinian battalion was advancing across the clearing, its officers on horseback, riding between the infantry and rallying them forward. The voluntários saw the Argentinian commanding officer and his horse hurled to earth when a shell burst next to them. Four men immediately went to the colonel’s aid and began to carry him back toward the carrizal.
Another shell exploded, leaving a swirl of smoke and dust and no sight of the wounded officer and his four rescuers.
Fifteen minutes later, a colonel with sword in hand gave the order for the battalion to advance: “Forward, Brasileiros! Forward, voluntários!”
Corporal Policarpo Mossambe broke out of the trees and ran forward, with Antônio Paciência close on his heels. Policarpo dodged between stumps and charred undergrowth, shouting for his squad to follow him.
“Up, Brasileiros! Up!” shouted officers to any who dropped behind stumps to escape the storm. “Viva Dom Pedro!” they yelled.
A shell plowed up the earth within thirty feet of Antônio Paciência. The screams of the men caught there mingled with an insane cacophony of shrieks and roars and the hiss and hum of musket balls, the volleys rising in deadly accompaniment to the thunder of the guns.
When Antônio and Policarpo got to the tangled mass of timber, Sergeant Bomfim was already there, with perhaps five hundred others spread out along several hundred yards of the abatis. Some voluntários found places where they could fire at the enemy through the abatis, but a curtain of dust and smoke in front of the trench made it impossible to see the effect of their shots. Some were assaulting the abatis itself with axes, trying to open a passage for a charge against the enemy.
A soldier standing on a log as he swung his ax suddenly dropped the implement: “O Mary, Mother —” He fell back on the ground beside Bomfim, a ball in his chest.
Policarpo Mossambe stepped up to the log. He seized the ax and swung it, sending chips of wood flying like bullets.
“At it, Corporal! At it!” Sergeant Bomfim shouted.
When Policarpo had chopped through a thick limb, Bomfim and the others dragged it away. Policarpo kept swinging at the timbers, tearing off smaller branches with his hand, ignoring the bullets singing over the abatis.
Sergeant Bomfim soon saw how little progress Policarpo was making against the great barrier. “We won’t get through this way!” he said. “Set fire to it!” Policarpo had worked his way about six feet into the abatis. He didn’t react immediately to the sergeant’s words but continued swinging the ax.
“Policarpo!” Antônio shouted. “Come down! We’ll burn it!”
Policarpo had his back to Antônio; he nodded his head affirmatively but raised the ax for one last swing. He froze, with the blade held high.
An instant later, the shell exploded at the front edge of the tangle of trees, hurling Policarpo Mossambe high into the air.
Antônio was stunned by a chunk of flying timber and fell to the ground. “Oh, God!” he gasped, rocking his body, as a shattering pain shot through his head. He opened his eyes: Sergeant Mario Bomfim was lying ten feet away, his brains scooped out and spread on the ground beside him.
“Policarpo?” Antônio mumbled. “Mossambe?”
Policarpo lay at the edge of the abatis, one eye glaring lifelessly, the other mashed in with the flesh and bone of a wound at the side of his face.
A bugler close by was blowing the Retreat. Antônio saw voluntários all along the abatis start back toward the trees. The gunfire from the Paraguayans was intermittent, desultory, but a new sound came from that direction. Maddening to men who had survived the slaughter: the sound of music from Paraguayan bands behind the parapet — saluting the gunners of Curupaiti.
“Fall back!” an officer shouted, running toward Antônio. “Back, voluntário! Save yourself!”
Patient Anthony joined the stampede to the trees and the carrizal beyond.
The full extent of the Paraguayan victory was not immediately known; they could count only fifty-four casualties among their gunners and infantry. When the routed Brazilians and Argentinians were lost from sight in the carrizal, thousands of Paraguayans left their trench, climbing over the abatis and swarming into the clearing. For hours they worked, bayoneting the wounded enemy, stripping the dead, rejoicing in the gold coin so many macacos carried. When it was over, the Paraguayans left five thousand corpses in the clearing. And two thousand wounded were being carried through the marshes, altogether more than one-third of the Allied army.
“Tu-ru-tu-tu . . . Tu-ru-tu-tu . . .”
The ululation of the turututu horns was a response to the ineffectual bombardment from ten Brazilian ironclads that steamed upriver within range of both Curupaiti and Humaitá. After the rout at Curupaiti, the Allied offensive had bogged down beside the esteros, the first major advance coming nine months after the disaster, with an encircling movement of thirty thousand troops to positions northeast of Humaitá.
Hadley Baines Tuttle, the young Londoner, found the sound of the turututus ominous: After three years of hard service, Hadley Tuttle saw no end to the sacrifices that were being asked of the Paraguayan people. Humaitá and the esteros, reeking with the smell of death, increasingly reminded him of that dire winter of 1854/1855 outside Sevastopol.
Tuttle had been promoted to major and had served these past three years under Colonel George Thompson, the former British army officer whom López had made responsible for the defenses of Humaitá. With seven hundred shovel-wielding men in their engineering battalions, Thompson and Tuttle had directed the construction of 75,000 yards of earthworks — altogether forty-two miles of trenches and fortifications. At Humaitá, eight riverside batteries with sixty-eight guns now flanked the brick-and-stone Bateria de Londres. With Curupaiti battery and artillery positions on Humaitá’s outer earthworks, the total firepower was 380 guns, mortars, and rocket stands.
For the two armies ground to a halt amid the steaming jungles and swamps just below Capricorn, summer was murderous: Forty-two miles of Paraguayan trenches either baked in the sun or were raked by torrential downpours; cholera raged, a minimum of fifty men a day carted off to the garrison hospital, and on some days, more than fifty carried out of the wards to mass graves at the cementario.
Hunger was another problem. The scouring of the countryside for new recruits after the carnage at Tuyuti was stripping Paraguay’s small farms of labor. The ordinary soldier was in rags, considering himself lucky if he held onto a tattered poncho. And with the dwindling rations, he was growing emaciated. B
ut his eyes still flashed boldly, and when the turututus sounded, he cheered. No matter how great the privation and sorrow to be endured, so long as the marshal-president lived and commanded, the soldier could believe in the ultimate success of Paraguay’s cause.
Hadley Tuttle was present at an affair one evening in late October 1867, during which Francisco Solano López was praising the spirit of his soldiers:
“Listen,” López said, holding up a hand for silence from those seated near him. The marshal’s face was flushed from the brandy he’d consumed after dinner. “Listen.” In the distance, the turututus answered a shell from the Brazilian squadron. “Blow, my brave trumpeters!” he declaimed. “Blow, my sons, like the valorous three hundred of Gideon, champion of farmer warriors. Let the Brazilians hear you! May they tremble out there!”
The group with López this night were gathered in the house of Madame Eliza Lynch, who maintained a separate residence in the garrison at a respectable distance from her lover’s quarters. She was seated at a table with three other ladies at the far end of the room playing whist, a game at which she excelled.
As Hadley Tuttle sat with the marshal, Colonel George Thompson, and two other guests, he occasionally glanced toward the card table with a look of adoration at the young woman on Madame Lynch’s right — Luisa Adelaida.
Hadley Tuttle had married Luisa Adelaida in May 1865. López and Eliza Lynch were present because of Madame Lynch’s fondness for Luisa Adelaida’s mother, Dona Gabriel — one of the few to befriend La Lynch when she arrived at Asunción from Paris in 1855, already pregnant with her lover’s child. “They are not worth your tears,” Dona Gabriel had said once in response to Eliza Lynch’s misery at being scorned by the ladies of Asunción. “They reject you because they envy your beauty and intelligence.”
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