Brazil

by Errol Lincoln Uys

  At daybreak, two orderlies moved from cot to cot dispensing mugs of coffee and checking names against a list prepared for the surgeons. An hour after the orderlies had completed their rounds, Firmino was dozing fitfully; he sensed someone approach his cot and opened his eyes to see one of the surgeons standing beside him.

  “Firmino Dantas da Silva?”

  He made a slight movement of his head in acknowledgment.

  “From Tiberica? The fazenda of Itatinga?”

  “Yes.”

  The surgeon gave him a friendly look. “Relax, Capitão, I’m not here to take you to the operating table.”

  “You know our vila? The barão?”

  “I’m told it’s a fine town. You’ll soon be back there, Firmino Dantas.”

  “And your name, Doctor?”

  “Cavalcanti,” he introduced himself. “Fábio Alves Cavalcanti. I’m from Recife.”

  “There were ninety-two voluntários in Tiberica’s company, Doctor,” Firmino said. “Oh, God, so many are dead. . . .” Pain in his arm caused him to wince. “Which one told you about Tiberica, Doctor?”

  “Not a voluntário, Firmino Dantas. One of Dona Ana’s girls. A perfect angel from your Tiberica — Senhorita Renata Laubner.”

  “Renata . . . Renata.” An inner voice had told him it was Renata Laubner, yet he repeated her name with disbelief.

  “The daughter of apothecary Laubner. Golden hair, blue eyes . . . a lovely girl. Surely you remember her, Capitão?”

  “Renata . . . in Paraguay?”

  “At Corrientes hospital. She’s been there for six months, since May,” Cavalcanti said. “Senhorita Laubner is a wonder. However foul or tedious her duties, you’ll never hear a complaint. Oh, she’s brave, that girl! I’ve seen men reduced to tears of gratitude when she bathes their wounds or wipes their fevered brows. A gentle word from her and their courage is restored. A perfect angel.”

  “Yes, Doctor. Senhorita Renata is a rare jewel.”

  “I must go,” Fábio Cavalcanti said abruptly. “I have other patients to attend to. I’ll be back, Capitão — to remove the enemy’s bullets.” He looked happily at Firmino. “I want to hear all you know about the senhorita, Capitão.”

  All that night, Firmino’s fever raged. Several times he cried out for Renata. The next morning, he lay motionless, spent. He could just make out the figure of a nurse in black leaning over him. “Oh, Renata . . .” His parched lips formed her name.

  “The fever’s breaking. Rest quietly.”

  As the nurse sponged his face, Firmino saw that she was an older woman, with gray hair.

  The woman nursing Firmino was “Dona Ana,” Ana Néri, the inspiration for Renata and others who had come to nurse the sick and wounded. Dona Ana had been fifty-one years old, living comfortably at her family holding at Cachoeira outside Salvador, Bahia, when she had caused a stir by publicly volunteering to go to Paraguay as a nurse. The city fathers of Salvador lauded her noble gesture, but despite her plea Dona Ana had been turned down with a polite reminder that the Casa Grande, not the battlefield, was the proper place for a lady of her quality. Five days later, Dona Ana took passage for Rio de Janeiro, where she badgered the military authorities until they were happy to see her sail for the Plata. Ana Néri had become a legend, not only for her compassion toward both friend and foe, but also for fearlessness in passing through the very fire of battle to aid the wounded, a mission that had brought her the deepest sorrow a mother can know: Following a skirmish near the esteros, Dona Ana had found one of her own sons dead at the edge of the morass.

  Lieutenant Surgeon Fábio Alves Cavalcanti had been here since his first experience of war on the blood-drenched decks of the Jequitinhonha at the battle of Riachuelo in June 1865. In early 1867, when thirteen thousand men were stricken with cholera, the army medical corps had appealed to the navy for help, and Lieutenant Cavalcanti was among the surgeons and doctors who had accepted a transfer to the army. He had been at Corrientes hospital until sent up to Paso la Patria four days ago to deal with the hundreds of casualties from Tuyuti.

  As he’d promised, Fábio himself removed the bullets from Firmino’s right leg and right shoulder and sewed up the machete gash. Firmino’s wounds healed slowly, and twice within three weeks he came down with high fevers. Fábio Cavalcanti was responsible for the patients in this tent ward, so that not a day passed without his stopping at Firmino’s bedside; besides the routine visits, he came here, too, to talk about Renata Laubner.

  Firmino had little to tell Fábio about Renata Laubner: He met her at a ball at Itatinga; he saw her a few times at apothecary Laubner’s shop; he remembered her as a lovely girl with a strong, independent spirit. And he loved her dearly, the Renata Laubner of his dreams, but this he did not tell the young doctor.

  When Fábio spoke so admiringly of Renata, Firmino listened with envy, yes, but without rancor. He felt a bond in their mutual admiration for the girl.

  Firmino and Fabio were almost the same age — Fábio, at twenty-nine, was two years older — and both were sons of old families of Brazil: Fábio Cavalcanti, the Pernambucano, whose forebear Nicolau Gonçalves Cavalcanti had founded Engenho Santo Tomás; Firmino da Silva, the Paulista, a descendant of Amador Flôres da Silva. Pernambucano and Paulista, their families had carved personal empires out of the Brazilian wilderness.

  Fábio was the third son of Guilherme Cavalcanti, the present owner of Santo Tomás. One of his brothers was a lawyer; the other lived at the engenho. Fábio himself had stayed mostly at the Cavalcantis’ town house since his school days at Olinda. Senhor Guilherme also spent much of the year at Olinda, leaving the plantation in the care of Rodrigo, his eldest son, but neither Guilherme Cavalcanti nor his two sons whose careers had taken them away from Santo Tomás for one moment forgot that the clan’s power lay in those green valleys.

  Firmino Dantas felt a pang of guilt when he listened to Cavalcanti talk of his family and pictured himself returning to Itatinga, where Ulisses Tavares waited to greet a hero. It would disgust Ulisses Tavares to know that his grandson had quailed before the Guarani.

  Firmino left Paso la Patria on December 20, 1867, with other wounded men on a steamer sailing for Buenos Aires, where they would be transferred to a ship bound for Santos. He had been up and walking for a week, and had bade farewell to Fábio Cavalcanti the previous night.

  “Thank you, Doctor, for everything.”

  “I enjoyed talking with you, Firmino Dantas,” Fábio said. “There are too many heroes here.”

  Firmino flushed, wondering if Cavalcanti had somehow learned of Firmino’s cowardice.

  “Conquistadors!” Fábio added. “They seek a conquest no matter what it costs in blood and suffering.”

  Relieved, Firmino said, “The war can’t go on much longer.”

  “We were told that when we sailed from Rio de Janeiro three years ago.”

  On the evening of December 20, the Aurora, the steamer in which Firmino sailed, stopped at the port of Corrientes, where her captain announced they were to anchor for two days. Firmino was often at the ship’s railing those two days, but he did not set foot ashore.

  Two months later at Humaitá, in the early hours of February 19, 1868, at the Bateria de Londres and other gun emplacements, men and boys waited at eighty-four cannon. Some were battle-hardened veterans, the best artillerymen left in López’s army, and to them fell the duty of manning the modern rifled pieces. Some stood ready at a seventeenth-century thunderer, San Gabriel. Child gunners waited gallantly to serve their elders beside cannon the muzzles of which they could reach only on tiptoe.

  Four miles inland, strategic points along the network of trenches were reinforced by the bulk of fifteen thousand defenders remaining at Humaitá. Paraguayan scouts had come back through the marshes and swamps to report battle preparations by units of fifty thousand enemy troops now in siege position beyond Humaitá’s earthworks.

  Major Hadley Tuttle was with the gunners in the Bateria de Londres. Colonel Georg
e Thompson had left him at Humaitá to complete an earthwork west of López’s headquarters at Paso Paicú on the outer trenches. Thompson himself was across the Rio Paraguay in the Chaco, setting up a river battery ten miles above Humaitá, a work in itself indicative of the increased awareness of the threat to Humaitá in the three months since Luisa Adelaida Tuttle and her parents had returned to Asunción.

  Marshal-President López kept up a defiant stance for the sake of the men and boys in the ranks. Mounted on a white horse, he rode with his aides along Humaitá’s trenches, stopping often to chat with soldiers and share their jokes about the macacos bogged down beside the esteros. After second Tuyuti, López had ordered campaign medals struck and distributed them to the survivors, a celebration that some — Hadley Tuttle among them — found farcical, for El Presidente himself had instigated the looting of the enemy’s camp, a grave error that had cost the Paraguayans many lives.

  Publicly, El Presidente continued to show confidence. On his instructions, the slightest damage to his house by the enemy’s shells was repaired instantly, so that the Guarani and mestizo ranks who saw the unmarked whitewashed walls would take this as a sign of the great señor’s invincibility. But privately, with his generals and top aides, Marshal López accepted that Humaitá could not hold out indefinitely against the enemy.

  López and his generals had no intention of surrendering Humaitá outright. Before the Allies could cut them off completely, however, ten thousand men would be withdrawn across the Rio Paraguay into the Chaco, the only route of escape with Humaitá enclosed by land and the enemy fleet stationed below the fortress.

  Just past 3:00 A.M. on February 19, Major Hadley Tuttle was with the commander and other officers at the Bateria de Londres, where Tuttle had been given charge of two 32-pounders this night. Hadley Tuttle felt an anticipation of battle keener than at any other time, for, like the rest of the men, he accepted the hour as critical for Humaitá.

  For more than a year, the Brazilian squadron anchored in the channels between Curupaiti and Humaitá had thrown thousands of shells at the two positions, but had made no attempt to force a passage beyond Humaitá’s formidable batteries. The bows of every warship were reinforced and fitted with protective overhanging spars; patrol boats constantly searched the river as far up as they dared go. But the loss of master torpedoman Luke Kruger had been a fatal blow to the Paraguayan torpedo unit, for Capitán Angelo Moretti and others had been unwilling to risk further hazardous experiments. The channels of the Rio Paraguay were increasingly free of torpedoes; the enemy still had to run the gauntlet of Humaitá’s guns, but otherwise the way to Asunción, 150 miles up the Rio Paraguay, was open.

  At the 32-pounders in the Bateria de Londres, Hadley Tuttle’s glance moved frequently to the gun embrasures and the dark river beyond, straining for the first sight of the enemy. Tuttle did not have long to wait. At 3:30 A.M., with a distant roar, cannon on nineteen ships began to fire against various positions ashore. When they opened their bombardment, most of the ships were steaming along a sinuous bend of the Rio Paraguay that swung toward Humaitá’s cliffs and then looped back to the northwest.

  A small battery a mile below the Bateria de Londres was first to return the enemy’s fire. Then three positions — Coimbra, Taquari, Maestranca — with a total of twenty guns, opened up, and the darkness along the cliff to the south was broken with flash after flash of cannon fire.

  The vanguard of the enemy fleet passed through the storm of plunging shells. Their own gun flashes marked their position for the sixteen heavy cannon of the Bateria de Londres, the first rounds of the battery like a broadside from a man-of-war.

  Tuttle’s gun crews sprang to reload in the haze of powder smoke swirling in the light from lanterns strung along the roof of the battery. Tuttle stepped up to an embrasure and peered out, seeing the flame of guns on the armor-clad corvettes positioned along the Chaco shore. He discerned in the main channel three new vessels of war — gunships that had joined the Brazilian fleet a week ago.

  Constructed at Rio de Janeiro, these ships weren’t much to look at: Almost oval in shape, 127 feet long, they lay low in the water like squat black beetles. Each was 340 tons, with iron plates nearly six inches thick, this armor backed by eighteen inches of Brazilian hardwood stouter than oak. Alagoas, Pará, Rio Grande — they were named for provinces of the empire. Of a revolutionary design, the first vessel of their kind had steamed to battle and glory on her maiden voyage in 1862 during the U.S. Civil War: the Monitor, victor of the clash with the rebel steamer Virginia.

  The Brazilian monitors each had a single oval-shaped revolving gun turret, the Alagoas equipped with a 70-pounder Whitworth, her sister ships with 120-pounders, the guns capable of a 180-degree angle of fire. The monitors had steam up, but were not proceeding under their own power; each was under tow by an ironclad with engines capable of greater knots for the run past Humaitá.

  Brazilian shells ignited an ammunition supply and set fire to the brush and trees. A Brazilian corvette close to the cliffs was burning, and an ironclad towing a monitor took a hit amidships, but neither vessel was in danger of sinking.

  The guns of the Bateria de Londres kept up a relentless bombardment. The smoke was so dense, Tuttle and his men could scarcely make out gun crews to the far right and left of them. The battery was the prime target of the monitors and ironclads, their shells exploding along its revetment and tearing the earth in the cliff below Londres. One shot passed clean through an embrasure on the right of the battery, where the men at an ancient muzzle-loader had run the gun back on its slides to reload. The blast killed every one of the crew, wounded others close by, and sent a drizzle of blood and brains far up along the line of guns.

  The lead ironclad crossed the place where the chain boom lay submerged in the river; it turned to port, steaming toward the north. The ironclad still had to pass two batteries on the northern end of the cliffs, but it was out of range of Londres’ guns. The ironclad Bahia, towing the monitor Alagoas, also rode comfortably over the sunken boom.

  Tuttle jerked the lanyard of one of the 32-pounders, stepping aside quickly to avoid the recoil as the gun roared out. The second 32-pounder and two other cannon fired almost simultaneously, their shot also directed against the Alagoas. Two shells struck the monitor’s stern, with no more effect than before; two projectiles exploded in front of the vessel.

  “Damn! Damn! Damn!” Tuttle swore. His uniform was soaked, his jacket clinging to his back. His face was streaked with dust and powder grains.

  Minutes later, from off to the right, a man shouted, “The monitor! We’ve cut the cable, sir!”

  Tuttle leapt to the embrasure. In the glow from the blazes along the cliffs, he saw the monitor dropping back rapidly, the third ironclad and her tow passing the small ship. “Hurry, boys! Load!” he shouted. “We can sink her yet!”

  For thirty minutes, the Alagoas was under a violent cannonade. Shell after shell struck the monitor, including steel-tipped shot that pierced her plates; missiles burst in the water next to her hull, shaking her from stem to stern and deluging her deck; balls from Humaitá’s vintage cannon shattered into fragments against her turret. They were drifting back almost helplessly, for when the tow had parted, there had been low pressure in the Alagoas’s boilers.

  At the Bateria de Londres, Tuttle and a gunnery sergeant were trying to extract the stem of a priming tube wedged in the vent of a 32-pounder when they heard someone shout, “Cease fire!” Tuttle looked up to see the battery commander standing there.

  “Cease fire?” Tuttle asked incredulously.

  “Stop shooting at the monitor. Watch closely, Major. There are one hundred fifty men out there. They’ll storm her decks and take her prize!”

  The batteries along the river north of Londres were still shooting at the three ironclads and two monitors, but it was a desultory, futile cannonade. At Londres itself and farther south, the rate of fire also decreased. The sky was beginning to turn a deep gray; the surface of th
e river no longer flamed with the reflections of battle. Hundreds of eyes stared down at the river now as the flotilla raced to capture the monitor.

  One hundred fifty men paddling twelve canoes! Bogavantes, they called themselves; but they gave the word — “paddlers” — a whole new meaning. They stood up as they dipped their paddles in the water to drive their craft swiftly toward the enemy. The lead canoe would cut across the monitor’s bows, letting the rope catch against her hull so that as she forged ahead.

  “Hurry, boys! Hurry, there!” Hadley Tuttle said breathlessly, as if spurring on his gun crews. The monitor was beginning to move upriver again. “Oh, take her, boys! Take her now!”

  A canoe shot past the Alagoas, the rope linking it to a second craft snared by the monitor’s bow. The Alagoas surged forward; the two canoes were rapidly drawn up beside her. The first bogavantes made to leap to the enemy’s deck as two other canoes raced alongside.

  Four canoes managed to put men aboard, but only a handful of bogavantes got within thirty feet of the turret. Two men stormed the pilothouse, striking it with their sabers in frustration at finding it sealed with an iron cover. Other bogavantes fell to their knees at the hatches, tearing at the covers with their hands until bullets from the turret ports riddled them. In less than ten minutes the attack was repulsed, with the Alagoas, her decks littered with the bodies of the bogavantes, dragging along the empty canoes.

  It was not over. The commander of the Alagoas now had his monitor under full steam. It would have been easy for them to drop back with the swift current to protection by the line of corvettes, but they had waited for pressure to build up in their boilers.

  The monitor’s iron bows shattered the wooden craft; her hull rode over the men spilled into the water. Four canoes of bogavantes perished; four escaped into shallows too hazardous for the monitor to navigate.

  The Alagoas ended her pursuit and crossed the sunken boom to join the five other ships this gray dawn when the Brazilians forced the passage beyond Humaitá.