Brazil

by Errol Lincoln Uys

  Antônio had seen Firmino Dantas’s cousin at Corrientes and Tuyuti, but did not immediately recognize this gaunt-featured man who had been a captive of the Paraguayans for over a year. The five of them moved off, Clóvis da Silva and the orderly walking beside the stretcher.

  “I served with Tenente Firmino Dantas,” Antônio told Clóvis da Silva when there was a lull in the conversation between the major and the orderly.

  “Firmino Dantas is here?”

  “I don’t know, Major. After the tenente went to the depot at Itapiru, I didn’t see him again.”

  “Firmino Dantas was back at Tuyuti last November.”

  “I wasn’t there, Major.”

  “God willing, I’ll find my cousin alive.”

  It was three hours since Itá-Ybate had been taken. For Clóvis da Silva, the relief at being liberated was marred by news that López had escaped with a hundred men.

  “How could our generals permit it!” he said to the orderly.

  “It’s all over, Major. With no army, López is finished. He has no guns. No support. No hope. The war is over!”

  “The beast is loose. Until they run him down, López will remain a curse on this land,” Clóvis da Silva said, prophetically.

  On December 29, forty-eight hours after the fall of Itá-Ybate, the Angostura battery was the only point in the battle sector still held by the Paraguayans. Angostura had been under fire from Brazilian ironclads since December 21, and had received a flood of refugees from the Pykysyry line and other positions; 2,400 men and women, eight hundred capable of fighting, were in the earthworks, with provisions for less than ten days. The battery’s guns had ninety rounds of ammunition for each weapon, a supply that would last no more than two hours if they were attacked.

  By this night, too, Lieutenant-Colonel George Thompson, commander of the battery, accepted Angostura’s situation as hopeless. During the day, he had sent a commission of five officers under a flag of truce to Itá-Ybate: They had been allowed to inspect López’s headquarters and interview wounded Paraguayans, and had returned with confirmation of the defeat. After a conference with his staff, Thompson had sent a letter to the Allied generals proposing surrender of the garrison by noon on December 30.

  Hadley Tuttle had been with the commission that went to Itá-Ybate, and had voted in favor of capitulation. When Thompson dismissed the officers, Tuttle had stayed behind.

  “It’s the only thing to do,” Tuttle said. “They outnumber us twenty to one, with one hundred guns.”

  “Not from the Paraguayans’ point of view. You’ve heard them, Hadley. They consider it a sacred duty to oppose the Brazilians to the last man.”

  “All that matters is to save lives and begin the work of rebuilding this devastated land.”

  Thompson had been in Paraguay for eleven years. Throughout the war he had served the country with such unswerving loyalty, López had made him a knight of the Order of Merit, the only foreign officer so honored. “Paraguay won’t be rebuilt,” he said flatly. “Emperor Pedro and his minister, for all their denials, favor annexation. The threat of a war with Buenos Aires — that’s all that may stop them.”

  Tuttle, too, feared the aftermath of war, above all the danger to his wife, Luisa Adelaida, and her family, who left Asunción when López ordered the capital evacuated.

  “I must go to my family, George,” he said.

  “I see no problem. Our surrender is conditional on our liberty to go where we please.”

  “How long before the formalities are settled, do you think?”

  “A few days?”

  Hadley laughed. “More like weeks, George.”

  “Did you forget? The roads to the north are sealed. Perhaps it would be best to wait a bit.”

  Tuttle shook his head. “No. Tonight, George. I’ll go through the Chaco.”

  Thompson realized he couldn’t dissuade Tuttle, and did not order him to stay at Angostura. “You’re probably right,” he said. “Go to them, Hadley. Get them to safety. God knows, it may not be over yet.”

  “One drop of blood shed now would be a waste.”

  “López is making for Cerro León.” This was the military base at the railhead fifty miles from Asunción, where several thousand men were in the camp hospital. “The Marshal will get those invalids out onto the parade ground. If the slaughter continues, one man alone will be to blame: Marquês de Caxias. What stops him from ordering the capture of López? Does he want to keep a Brazilian army in occupation and prepare for annexation? Or could it be that the Brazilians want López to escape and reassemble the surviving men of Paraguay?”

  Tuttle was genuinely puzzled. “Whatever for?”

  Thompson smiled grimly. “Wouldn’t it provide, through civilized warfare, the opportunity to exterminate the last Guarani?”

  From the spires of Asunción’s cathedral on the third Sunday of January 1869, the peal of bells rang out over the capital as the marquês de Caxias, his fellow commanders, and a host of Brazilian and Argentinian officers gathered to thank God for victory. Three days earlier, January 14, the marquês issued Order of the Day, Number 272: “The war has come to its end, and the Brazilian army and fleet may take pride in having fought for the most just and holy of all causes.”

  As the marquês de Caxias and his officers raised their voices to heaven, outside the cathedral the scene was closer to hell. The first Allied troops had entered Asunción on January 1, encountering minimal resistance; a few days later, the bulk of the army started to march in from Lomas Valentinas, until by this Sunday there were thirty thousand men in and around the capital. López had ordered Asunción evacuated months ago. His administration, the remaining foreigners, and the upper-class citizens had gone to towns east of the city; but when the Allied army marched in, there remained several thousand poorer Guarani and mestizos who had not fled or had drifted back to the city from the outskirts seeking food.

  And there were the defeated, who watched the macacos stream into a city deserted and neglected, her broad boulevards overflowing with trash and the bloated carcasses of beasts, and stinking like open sewers. Propped up against the wall of the unfinished opera house, leather pads bound to the stumps of his legs, was a gunner who had been at Itapiru resisting the enemy’s first approach to Paraguay; in the shade of a tree stood a Guarani lancer who’d ridden for the guns of the Argentinians at first Tuyuti; he’d been blinded by grape, and half his nose was shot away. A mestizo infantryman, the victim of a skirmish in the Chaco, lay on his back, wearing a ragged poncho that failed to conceal his upper legs and genitals, which were reeking and moist with gangrene. “Macacos . . . macacos . . . macacos,” the soldier gibbered.

  And for every man, there were four or five women and twice that number of small children. The women, emaciated and almost nude, stood silently staring at their conquerors. The children peered out from behind their legs at the giants passing noisily in parade.

  The rape of the Mother of Cities by the victors began slowly. A group of camaradas smashed their way into a pulperia and made off with the tavern’s most expensive supplies. Looters stormed a silversmith’s shop. Frustrated booty hunters torched an empty house. Discipline so broke down that even officers were about, pilfering items for shipment back to Brazil.

  The ravaging of the city gained momentum with the rumors being spread about the nature and whereabouts of the fortunes of El Presidente and his mistress, La Lynch. Mobs of soldiers prowled the residential barrios on the outskirts of the city searching for booty. Ax-wielding men chopped through the doors of warehouses and attacked the homes of Asunción’s elite, ripping them apart. No place was inviolable: The U.S., French, and Italian consulates were devastated. When none of these efforts uncovered the fortunes of López and Madame Lynch, the soldiers looked elsewhere — to the cemeteries, where the best-appointed tombs were burst open for inspection.

  Night after night, the sky above Asunción glowed with fires set by the rampaging soldiers. In the light from those flames, men who we
re either bored with the treasure hunt or satisfied with what they had already stolen from deserted homes turned to other pleasures: Some of the living skeletons who had lined the streets when the Brazilians marched in gave their bodies freely to the soldiers in exchange for food; other Guarani women and girls had to be held down forcibly, but their cries went either unheeded or unheard.

  The sixty-five-year-old marquês de Caxias was well aware that his troops were on a rampage, but two years in Paraguay had left him utterly exhausted and unable to control them. In the cathedral this January 17, during the elaborate thanksgiving, the marquês collapsed in a faint: The following day, Caxias relinquished his command and immediately set sail for Brazil.

  Fifty miles to the east of Asunción, Francisco Solano López walked among the wounded at Cerro León base. The half-blind, the crippled, the maimed listened intently as their leader swore that the fight would not be over as long as a single Guarani was able to stand up to the macaco horde.

  Fábio Cavalcanti was present at the thanksgiving service in the cathedral. Cavalcanti and other members of the army medical corps had come up from Humaitá, where they had been based since the garrison’s surrender in August 1868; they had taken over the barrack hospital outside Asunción to receive hundreds of wounded men from the Lomas Valentinas campaign.

  Like every man celebrating the victory Te Deum, Fábio Cavalcanti, who had been in Paraguay for almost four years, had offered heartfelt thanks for an end to the war. And like others in the weeks following the service, he came to be bitterly disappointed as reconnaissance patrols found that López was up to something. At first, there was talk that El Presidente, his concubine, and their sons were dashing for the Bolivian border. But, as the weeks passed, scouts discovered bands of armed Paraguayans moving up along the cordillera and along lower sections of the fifty-mile railroad between Asunción and Cerro León.

  When the marquês de Caxias left Asunción, the command of the army passed to a field-marshal, Xavier de Souza. When it dawned on the army that they might yet have to march again to mop up Guarani resistance, morale collapsed. The soldiers intensified their depredations against Asunción; many officers sought and were granted leave to return home for reasons of poor health, though most were simply sick and tired of the war, and some began to talk of the need to offer López terms for an honorable surrender.

  A thousand miles away, His Imperial Majesty Dom Pedro thought differently. Supported by his more bellicose ministers, Pedro reaffirmed his belief that Brazilian honor demanded the elimination of Francisco Solano López. What was needed to achieve this, His Majesty decided, was a young commander capable of reinvigorating the imperial army and leading the hunt for López — a bandit upon whose head His Majesty now placed a reward.

  The young man whom Emperor Pedro chose for the final conflict was his son-in-law, the twenty-six-year-old Prince Louis Gaston d’Orléans, comte d’Eu, husband of the imperial princess, Isabel. The comte, who had reached Rio de Janeiro on the eve of the war, had been considered too young and inexperienced to go to battle alongside such veterans as Caxias and Osório. There was also some question about the comte’s ability to inspire Brazilian troops. In March 1869, however, Dom Pedro and his ministers appointed the young Frenchman marshal in full command of the Brazilian army in Paraguay.

  Fábio Cavalcanti was among the hundreds of officers who went down to Asunción Bay on April 14 to greet the comte d’Eu. Prince Louis Gaston set up headquarters at Luque, eleven miles to the east of Asunción, and wasted no time beginning an overhaul of the army. But, on April 28, he reluctantly agreed to a suspension of drills and inspections while the army mounted a review in mass and held a festa to celebrate the twenty-seventh birthday of its new commander-in-chief.

  On the night of the comte’s birthday, the officers of the medical corps held a dance in their quarters, the villa of an army doctor who had been executed for treason at San Fernando. The rambling single-story house was neglected, its whitewashed walls stained with red dust; its huge garden, though overgrown, carried the scents of magnolia, jasmine, gardenia.

  When the bandsmen playing for the officers and their guests were almost ready to end their performance, Fábio was out in the garden, experiencing an odd mixture of joy and guilt: In this dolorous land, where he had witnessed so much pain and suffering, he, Fábio Cavalcanti, now found himself sublimely happy, strolling arm in arm with Renata Laubner.

  Fábio had gone back to the main hospital at Corrientes after tending the wounded from second Tuyuti at Paso la Patria. Again, he had watched wonderingly as nurse Laubner cheered up her patients, the majority of them freed slaves and rude sons of the backlands. And this time he had taken every opportunity to show his affection for her, knowing full well he was but one among many who cherished the hope of courting Senhorita Renata. And then came the night when they sat together on a bench on the hospital grounds at Corrientes and Renata laid her golden head against his shoulder and said, “I love you, Fábio.”

  When Humaitá had been surrendered, Fábio was sent there with other doctors to take over the garrison hospital. Renata had asked her superior, Dona Ana Néri, for a transfer to the fortress, which a sympathetic Dona Ana had granted, there being no secret about the love between Dr. Cavalcanti and nurse Laubner. Early in January they had been so hopeful that the war was finally over and they could go home — first to Tiberica, where Fábio would ask apothecary August Laubner for his daughter’s hand, then to Recife, Pernambuco.

  Renata knew that Fábio was compassionate and understanding, and loved her dearly, but even as a child she had noted the contempt of the fazendeiros toward the common people, like the Swiss, they hired to pick their coffee. She remembered what her father had said to her the night they went to the ball at Itatinga: “We are here, daughter, because Baronesa Teodora Rita invited you to the fazenda. The barão himself welcomes me, apothecary Laubner, from whom he takes his pills and tonics, but I see he is not happy. It bothers him to have a poor, untitled, unlettered man like August Laubner among his guests.” There had been no rancor in his voice.

  Oh, how she had danced that night! How she had flashed her eyes and laughed and sighed in the arms of the handsome grandson of the barão de Itatinga!

  And he had come to her afterward, treading softly into her father’s shop, saying she was the loveliest girl in the world. When her father remarked on his visits, she had said, “Don’t worry, Papa. They already plan to marry him off to the baronesa’s sister. Besides” — and she’d kissed him on the cheek — “I’d never be comfortable in a house where my father wasn’t welcome!”

  And now she was apprehensive about the reception she would get from other members of the Cavalcanti family. To waltz around playfully in the arms of Firmino Dantas was one thing, but to walk into the Casa Grande at Santo Tomás the chosen bride of Doutor Fábio — she prayed that she would have the patience and strength of her papa, who had refused to be the slave of the fazendeiros.

  Fábio had no such doubts about his family’s acceptance of Renata. “Soon, my love, soon we will be walking like this but in the beautiful gardens of Santo Tomás. There the air is sweeter and —”

  “Oh, Fábio, how I wish it!” Renata burst out. “I wish the war was over!”

  “It won’t be long, my dear. Three months, they say. López has at most three thousand men, most of them in bandages.” Fábio himself added soberly. Suddenly he quickened his step. “My darling, let’s go inside. It’s the last waltz!”

  Thirty miles beyond the comte d’Eu’s headquarters at Luque lay the long valley of Pirayu, with wooded hills rising on either side. On April 30, 1869, forty-eight hours after the celebration of the comte’s birthday, in the dead of night, forty enemy raiders entered Pirayu on their way to offer Prince Louis Gaston a different reception in the land he had come to conquer.

  The raiders did not travel quietly. They burst into Pirayu from their base camp at Cerro León to the south in a locomotive hurtling past the dark slopes of Mbatovi M
ountain at the bottom of the valley, with two tattered red, white, and blue banners of the Republic of Paraguay streaming to each side of the engine’s smokebox, its chimney spewing a fiery rain of hot ash and cinders. The raiders rode on two sandbagged flatcars, one coupled in front of the engine, the other behind the tender, each car carrying a three-inch field gun.

  The engine was a rickety piece of equipment, nineteen tons of iron and brass, but her two six-foot-high driving wheels powered her forward at a cracking forty miles an hour: She had been built twenty-five years ago at the great works in Crewe, England, and had served the London and South Western until late 1854, when she had been shipped out to the Crimea. As she chuffed along, the glow above her chimney illuminated the name plate on her boiler: Piccadilly Pride. Standing on her footplate was Major Hadley Baines Tuttle, who knew her well, old Number 11 of the Balaklava line, which he had helped to lay on the hills overlooking Sevastopol in that murderous winter of 1855.

  “Say, Hadley, man! We’ve seen a wee miracle here!” Scotty MacPherson had declared earlier at Cerro León station, when the armored train was ready to depart. Scotty was referring not only to the raiding party with Piccadilly Pride but also to the astonishing fact that four months after Francisco Solano López had fled Itá-Ybate with a handful of officers, he was ready to march again-with an army of thirteen thousand soldiers.

  The nucleus of the force comprised fifteen hundred troops who had withdrawn from Asunción on the eve of its occupation by the Allies; among thousands of wounded at Cerro León, as soon as a man had strength to pick up a rifle, he, too, joined the ranks. But the majority responding to López’s call came in small groups from every corner of Paraguay: escaped prisoners of the Allies, soldiers who had been scattered across the countryside during the Lomas Valentinas battles; veterans who had laid down their arms welcoming peace but chose war again when they saw what the invaders were doing to their country; tribesmen from the interior of the Chaco, where they had heard talk of the macaco horde, a pest greater than the Spaniards and other interlopers they had resisted for generations.