Brazil

by Errol Lincoln Uys

  Six Brazilian ironclads now operated above Humaitá, and Allied land divisions had been victorious in their simultaneous attack against an outwork two miles north of the garrison. But the Bateria de Londres and the other guns on Humaitá’s cliffs still commanded the loop of the river. Across the Rio Paraguay lay the jungle and swamps of the Chaco, which the Allies, once again underestimating their enemy, had failed to secure. During March 1868, López crossed into the Chaco with ten thousand soldiers, taking the best guns from Humaitá and leaving three thousand men, who abandoned Curupaiti battery and withdrew into Humaitá’s fifteen thousand yards of inner trenches.

  Through the winter of 1868, a cold, miserable four months, the Allies laid siege to Humaitá. The three thousand defenders deceived the Allies into believing their strength to be much greater with such ruses as rows of Quaker guns — leather-bound tree trunks — and a frequent clangor and thud of brass and drums. In July, under fire from Brazilian ships and the Allied guns now higher up on the Chaco bank, the defenders evacuated their wounded and women, for they still had access to the narrow jungle peninsula opposite the fort. On August 5, 1868, Humaitá surrendered to the Allies; it was four days since the men had eaten the last food in the garrison, and two hundred of its thirteen hundred soldiers were unable to rise from the ground, where they had collapsed.

  López’s new headquarters were at San Fernando, fifty-five miles north of the fortress and about one hundred miles from Asunción. El Presidente had earlier ordered all but essential military personnel to leave the capital; the administration had moved to Luque, nine miles east on the railroad to Cerro León, which had been Paraguay’s main military base before the war.

  When Paraguayan outposts beyond Humaitá began to fall to the Allies, López and his army left San Fernando and marched sixty-five miles farther north to an area below Asunción, thirty-five miles to the northwest. According to a previous land survey by George Thompson and Hadley Tuttle, it offered the strongest positions for a defensive front. The Paraguayans dug in five miles inland from the small port of Angostura, above the Pykysyry, a narrow river that flowed into the Rio Paraguay.

  Beyond the extreme left of their trenches was Itá-Ybate, “The High Rock,” an elevated position among the low hills known as Lomas Valentinas, where López set up his headquarters. Some four thousand troops manned the Pykysyry line and Angostura’s batteries; five thousand with twelve guns were kept as a mobile reserve to intercept the Allies on their approach to Lomas Valentinas.

  In late August 1868, when the Allies finally began to advance north to Asunción, the conduct of the war was in Brazilian hands, with the marques de Caxias commander-in-chief: Bartolomé Mitre was in Buenos Aires; and Venancio Flores was dead, the victim of an assassin’s bullet at Montevideo in February 1868.

  The Allied commanders decided against a frontal assault on the Pykysyry line, sending their engineers into the Chaco, at a point below Angostura, to forge a passage through the jungle and across the swamps. Seven miles of the road passed through morasses that had to be filled in with the trunks of palm trees laid side by side, but when the engineers were finished in late November, the Allies sent 32,000 men along the route. Ironclads that had run past the guns at Angostura then transferred the soldiers back across to the east bank of the Rio Paraguay, landing them above the Pykysyry line. At the beginning of December 1868, the Allied corps began to move south toward Lomas Valentinas, bent on dealing the deathblow to López and his army.

  “Here! Antônio Paciência! Here’s one! A general? A colonel? A commander-in-chief?” The dim yellow light of a lantern swung low as the man bent down for a closer inspection. “Ai, caramba! Spurs of silver! Gold! O Santa Maria! Bless me! A Cross the size of my hand! Hurry over, Antônio! Hurry!”

  “I’m coming.”

  The man suddenly straightened up and turned around, held the lantern away from him, and peered into the dark. “Padre?” He got no response. “Where is Padre?”

  “Behind us.” Antônio Paciência carried his own lantern as he made his way slowly across to the man.

  “I don’t see him.”

  “He’s down there in those trees.” Antônio Paciência reached the place where the man was standing. The light from his lantern fell on a dead Paraguayan.

  “Look, Antônio . . . I do not lie!” The man had short arms, and with one furious movement, his lantern swinging wildly as he bent down, he tore the gold Cross from the Paraguayan’s neck.

  Antônio smiled grimly. “He won’t run away.”

  The man placed his lantern on the ground, went down on one knee, and, pulling out a knife, began to rip open the pockets of the man’s uniform. “A bullet here.” He touched the tip of his knife to the man’s chest. “A lance.” He pointed to a slash in the abdomen.

  The man continued to speak as he worked, complaining about the paltry treasures from the Paraguayan’s pockets: a few religious medallions, some pieces of silver, a broken cigar, some loose cartridges. Antônio loosened the silver spurs, consoling his partner with the fact that here at Avaí the ground was thickly sown with enemy.

  But the man responded with another grumble: “Brazilians, too! And tomorrow, when the sun rises like fire in the sky? Aieee! We’ll work like slaves!” He stopped talking as he saw a lantern moving toward them. “Padre?”

  In reply came a distant “Yes.”

  The man said to Antônio, “As always, late!”

  Like the one he called “Padre,” this man had a nickname: “Urubu.” None was so adept as he in picking his way across a field after battle to find spoils among the dead.

  Urubu, a full-blooded native of Brazil, was one of thirty-four Pancurus enlisted as voluntários da patria from a village in the sertão beside the Rio Moxoto, about twenty miles above the Rio São Francisco. Their village had once been a Jesuit aldeia where their forefathers had found refuge, and long before that, these Pancurus had roamed the surrounding caatinga.

  Urubu’s real name was Tipoana. He was in his forties, a small, vigorous man with straight, pitch-black hair, sparse eyebrows, and no trace of a beard.

  Antônio Paciência had met Tipoana after the storming of Curupaiti, where Policarpo Mossambe had been killed. That battle had so reduced Antônio’s battalion that its survivors had been sent to other units; Antônio went to the Fifty-third Battalion, which had been organized at Recife, Pernambuco, and included the company with the Pancurus.

  Antonio, Urubu, and the man they called “Padre” were attached to the Second Corps, which, together with the First and Third, had advanced toward Lomas Valentinas at the beginning of December 1868. Five days ago, on December 6, the army had come to a narrow bridge at a stream, the Itororó, defended by five thousand Paraguayans. Three times the bridge was won and lost, until a final assault drove the Paraguayans away.

  The combat at Itororó had been a prelude to what occurred earlier this day, December 11. The spot where the silver-spurred Paraguayan lay was at the edge of a narrow plateau three miles inland from the Rio Paraguay. Directly below were two rivers, one of which, the Avaí, gave its name to the battle that had raged today across these heights and in the depressions between them: For four hours in an incessant rainstorm, with heaven’s roll above the thunder of the guns and lightning rending the skies, 22,000 men had fought here, 18,000 Allies and 4,000 Paraguayans, with no quarter given. The Paraguayan battalions had been annihilated, 2,600 dead, 1,200 wounded, and 200 left to make their way south to Lomas Valentinas. But 4,200 Brazilians and Argentinians, too, went down, among the wounded the veteran commander of the Third Corps, Manuel Luís Osório.

  Almost four years since Antônio Paciência had marched from Tiberica, he had participated in every major campaign since Curupaiti, though his role had changed after his transfer to the Fifty-third Battalion: He had been drafted to serve as stretcher-bearer with the Second Corps field hospital.

  It was 2:00 A.M. now, and Urubu, Antônio Paciência, and others were still out searching for wounded. They had been bu
sy for nine hours since the battle ended, wandering across this landscape of horrors. Arms, legs, heads, torsos had been scattered by shell blasts; hundreds of men were strewn haphazardly in unnatural positions, their bodies broken and contorted; as many horses littered the area, huge, stiff, with flies swarming upon their warm carcasses.

  Urubu had finished with the dead Paraguayan’s pockets, but on the Paraguayan’s belt he had found a broken leather strap to which a pouch would have been attached, and he was prowling the darkness, swinging his lantern from side to side, as he searched the ground just beyond the corpse.

  Padre was over six feet tall, with bony limbs, sloping shoulders, and a spare, angular frame. He bent his head as he walked, holding his lantern to search the ground he covered.

  “Ola!” he shrilled. “Ola! I have it!” He stooped and picked up an object. “Is this what you seek, Tipoana?” He dangled a pouch in front of Urubu; there was a distinctive clink as he shook it. “Silver? Gold?” Padre grinned, his huge teeth exposed. He had a long, narrow face with a narrow, hooked nose, his eyes were small and set close together.

  Urubu squirmed with displeasure. “Open it! Open it!”

  “Calma!” Padre nodded toward the Paraguayan. “Or you’ll wake the dead yet!”

  Urubu spoke to Antônio: “See? What did I tell you? He strolls up here, late like a grand senhor. The first thing he sees — my pouch!”

  “Your pouch?”

  “I found him.”

  “And I found the pouch,” Padre said.

  Urubu sulked. “Go on, then,” Urubu said. “Open it.”

  “Not much here.”

  “Look at him! The man was no Guarani beggar!” Urubu said. “There must be more.

  There was some money loosely tied in a small kerchief: ten silver coins.

  Urubu was visibly relieved. He dug into one of his pockets and pulled out the Cross. “This is worth much more!” he announced.

  “To a pagan like you?”

  Urubu laughed. “A beauty, isn’t it?”

  The three made their way back to camp walking a distance apart, holding up their lanterns to light the ground and undergrowth.

  Padre’s great loves in life were talking, ale, and women. And since he couldn’t enjoy the other two at the moment, he talked.

  Padre’s loquacious outbursts often led to sermons on whatever theme happened to occupy his mind; thus his sobriquet. He was a mulatto, like Antônio Paciência, though light-skinned, and three years older than Antônio. His name was Henrique Inglez, the same as his father’s.

  An English actor of no mean talent, Henrique Inglez the elder had been in Brazil for forty years, first at Belém do Pará and later at Pernambuco, where he had found acceptance among the gentry of Recife and Olinda. The loquaciousness of Henrique Inglez the son came from an early start on the stage. His father had made him recite love poems for his audiences at the tender age of four. The precociousness had not matured into real acting skill, and his grotesque teeth and rakish looks were a further hindrance. By his early twenties, Padre was a habitual loafer, whom Henry the Englishman had been delighted to see enlisted with the voluntários.

  Padre and Urubu had become close comrades of Antônio Paciência in the eighteen months they’d served together as stretcher-bearers. Before coming to Paraguay, Antônio had known only the company of slaves. The images of that day he had stood like a beast for sale had haunted him since childhood; as he reached manhood, the memory of being inspected by the slaver, while still vivid, was but one of many memories that had aroused a burning hatred of his enslavement.

  Freedom! How often he had listened to Policarpo Mossambe talk of his great hope — that he would earn his freedom by fighting for Dom Pedro Segundo. If only Policarpo had lived two months longer, till November 1866, to hear Dom Pedro II’s decree that slaves with the imperial army in Paraguay were to be emancipated. The law freed 25,000 black and mulatto slaves then serving with the Brazilian divisions and provided the same freedom for all future recruits for the Paraguayan War.

  In truth, freedom had not yet come to mean much to Antônio. Nor, for that matter, to many slave soldiers. When their initial euphoria was tempered by the routines of war, they saw that apart from the promise of freedom, their circumstances were unchanged. When thousands were stricken with cholera and other diseases in the summer of 1867, the slaves were reminded that to earn the reward Dom Pedro II was offering them, they had first to survive the jungles and swamps of Paraguay. Liberty was as distant as ever.

  But on that August day at Curupaiti, Patient Anthony had climbed down the face of the earthworks and walked toward the spot where Policarpo had died. He would do as others did who paid personal homage to a dear friend: He would mark this place with a simple wooden Cross bearing the inscription “Corporal Policarpo Mossambe — Brasileiro.”

  Returning to the tent he shared with Tipoana and Henrique Inglez, Antônio Paciência had told his friends of his plan, and asked if one of them would write the inscription on the Cross.

  Over the next three days, when Antônio was off duty, he carved out each letter with a knife.

  Never before had Antônio Paciência attempted to write anything more than a scrawled “X” next to his name on lists of voluntários da patria. When he was finished, he heated the blade of his bayonet in a flame and seared the letters.

  Henrique Inglez had gone with Antônio to Curupaiti, where Antônio had planted the Cross. “Corporal Policarpo Mossambe — Brasileiro,” he had repeated several times as he looked at his handiwork. Just as they were leaving, Antônio stepped up to the Cross and ran his fingers lightly over the crosspiece.

  “Never again a slave, Policarpo Mossambe,” he whispered. “Never again.”

  At Itá-Ybate, where Francisco Solano López had his headquarters, first light on Christmas Day 1868 was heralded by a bombardment from forty-six guns and rocket stands deployed in a semicircle opposite the hill. It was the most violent and sustained cannonade of the war, and was answered by six guns remaining in the Paraguayan positions.

  Four days ago on December 21 in a blazing 101 degrees, 25,000 Brazilians came down through the Lomas Valentinas from camps near Avaí, reaching positions opposite the trenches below Itá-Ybate at noon. A group had immediately been sent off to destroy the Pykysyry line, which they had done, slaying or capturing nine hundred of the fifteen hundred defenders and forcing the rest to flee toward the Rio Paraguay. At 3:00 P.M. the main attack on Itá-Ybate commenced, with wave after wave of cavalry and infantry charges; the Brazilians took fourteen guns but failed to penetrate López’s lines. At six o’clock the assault was called off, with Allied losses at four thousand. But the defenders had been reduced to two thousand men.

  The three days from December 22 had seen incessant cannon and rifle fire, but no major moves by either side. On December 24 though, the Allied commanders sent a message inviting President López to surrender, which had been rejected.

  The bombardment of Itá-Ybate on December 25 was followed by new attempts to break through the Paraguayan lines. The Brazilians advanced up the hill along two narrow gorges, only to be repulsed again, with heavy casualties.

  The next day, seven thousand Argentinians who had come up across the demolished Pykysyry line joined the Brazilians. These fresh troops were to decide the battle of Itá-Ybate.

  Again, on the morning of December 27, an artillery barrage thundered against the Paraguayan positions. Then, with the Argentinians in front, the Allied generals sent 25,000 men along the two defiles and up the slopes of the hill. Here and there, a Paraguayan gun, dismounted but propped up on a mound of earth, roared defiantly. Here and there, a lone Paraguayan rose up in the trenches along the hillside, a Guarani war cry upon his lips and his sword raised against an entire battalion running toward him. Here and there, a child of tender years, his body riddled with bullet wounds, lay down to die as silently as he had suffered. By 11:30 A.M., the flags of the Allies flew triumphantly on the shell-splintered flagstaff of Francisc
o Solano López’s headquarters.

  At first, when the Brazilian officer was still a distance away, Antônio Paciência didn’t recognize him, and he thought, too, that he was coming toward them with a child in his arms. Antônio, Padre, and a medical orderly were in a wood a mile behind López’s headquarters, where the victorious troops had found a stockade holding prisoners of the Paraguayans. As the officer drew nearer, Antônio saw that he was carrying not a child but a man whose small body was horribly emaciated. The officer himself walked unsteadily, his ragged uniform hanging loosely on his frame.

  “Gently, now. Be gentle with him,” the officer said, when Antônio and Padre helped him lower the man onto a stretcher. “He’s been a prisoner of these dogs for four years.”

  The dark eyes of the man on the stretcher shifted from one rescuer to the next. Suddenly he grew terrified and uttered an awful cry.

  “Calma . . . calma, Sabino,” the officer said. He reached down, giving the frightened man a reassuring pat on the shoulder.

  It was Sabino do Nascimento Pereira de Mendonça, the revenue inspector who had been a passenger on the Marquês de Olinda when the Tacuari seized the ship. Mendonça’s traveling companions, Coronel Frederico Carneiro de Campos, president-designate of Mato Grosso, and the Cuiabá miner and farmer Telles Brandão, were dead, the victims of disease. But Mendonça, for whom life had been a living hell from the instant the Tacuari’s gun blasted his ears, had survived the long internment at an estancia north of Humaitá. When López retreated north to Itá-Ybate, Mendonça and other prisoners had been moved to this stockade.

  As Antônio Paciência and Padre picked up Sabino, the officer introduced himself to the medical orderly: He was Major Clóvis Lima da Silva. There had been times during the past thirteen months when Clóvis da Silva himself had not expected to survive his incarceration. At San Fernando, after the retreat from Humaitá, he and other captured Allied officers had been penned up with the political opponents of López: Day after day, they had seen men dragged away for trial and execution.