Guarani had come with their own ancient muskets; with homemade lances and swords hammered out at village smithies; with weapons and ammunition stolen, item by item, from Allied camps. Parties of men scoured the deserted Pykysyry trenches and other battlefields returning with discarded arms and cartloads of cannon balls and shell fragments. The latter, along with every church bell and other useful piece of metal, were delivered to a makeshift arsenal where Scotty MacPherson and other foreigners were employed.
At the arsenal, near López’s provisional capital of Piribebuy just north of Cerro León, Scotty and his engineers had by April cast eighteen new field guns and mortars; several hundred thousand shells had been stockpiled. They had also made the light guns for the flatcars coupled to Piccadilly Pride and had bolted high iron plates to the sides of her open engineer’s platform to give the men there protection from enemy fire.
Hadley Tuttle had been reunited with Luisa Adelaida and her parents in late January at an estancia outside Piribebuy. They had stayed there since then, Scotty working at the arsenal five miles away, Hadley taking patrols into the cordillera, where he had surveyed the escarpment for trenches and battery positions, putting to good use his experience with Lieutenant-Colonel Thompson, who had left Paraguay after the fall of Angostura.
With Thompson gone, Hadley Tuttle was among López’s senior officers. El Presidente had come close to total defeat at Itá-Ybate: He had made his last will and testament on that hill, leaving all his worldly goods to Madame Eliza Lynch. In the four months since Itá-Ybate, as thousands of men and boys rallied to him, and his anger and sorrow rose at reports of the devastation of Asunción, López had found new spirit to combat the enemies of the fatherland.
Among those foes were Paraguayans suspected of plotting to overthrow the dictator. There were still a number of prime suspects under guard at Piribebuy, among them Venancio López, his other brother; two sisters; and, most injurious of all to El Presidente, his mother, the aging Dona Juana.
As Piccadilly Pride shot along the valley, Hadley Tuttle was confident of success. The Piccadilly Pride had a run of twenty-two miles to her objective, an advance Brazilian post near the comte d’Eu’s headquarters at Luque. The train had to pass through two stations above the valley of Pirayu, both of which scout patrols had reported deserted. Beyond the first of those stations, the railroad skirted the lake of Ipacaraí, at the tip of which was the village of Aregua, where the Brazilian forward units were camped.
Piccadilly Pride chugged comfortably up through a forested incline at the head of Pirayu valley. Beyond the forest, the engine picked up speed passing Tacuaral twenty minutes later, the station silent and deserted as the scouts had reported. Great Ipacaraí was off to the right now, the railroad skirting the lake. A six-mile run beside Ipacaraí and Piccadilly Pride passed the second unoccupied station, Patiño Cué. Aregua, the Brazilian advance post, lay six miles farther along the track. There was a cutting a mile from Aregua; beyond the cutting was a bend in the tracks, then a straight, level run to Aregua bridge, 138 feet long, supported by a trestled framework of ironhard timber.
Half a mile from the cutting, Hadley eased off the throttle, until Piccadilly Pride was panting along slowly. Entering the cutting, Hadley put the engine in reverse. The big driving wheels bit the iron rails, and Number 11 came to a stop with a shudder and hiss of steam.
When Hadley climbed down from the engine, the soldiers were assembling in front of the train. Five minutes later this group began to move off up along the railbed.
Hadley walked with the Paraguayan sergeant in charge of the company, Julio Nuñez, who had served with Hadley at Angostura. Nuñez was taking eighteen men to deal with a guard post on the north side of the bridge.
“They’ll be asleep, Major,” Nuñez said, the stub of a fat black cigar jammed in the corner of his mouth.
“I wouldn’t count on it.”
“At this hour? Macacos sleep, Major!”
Hadley accompanied them as far as the bend beyond the cutting. “If there’s trouble, you know what to do,” he said to Nuñez.
Hadley glanced at a soldier carrying two signal rockets; in the event of trouble, they would be fired. Tuttle would still make the run with Piccadilly Pride, hoping to force their way across, but it would be far better if the bridge, and their escape route, was secured.
“I promise you, Major Hadley, not one will sound the alarm.”
Seven Brazilians had been posted to guard the bridge, but not one was alert. It was almost 2:00 A.M., and Nuñez’s confidence was not misplaced, for the macacos were asleep, including one voluntário who had fallen into a deep slumber up on the bridge as he lay on his back between the rails. He did not wake until the instant a Paraguayan crept up to him: The man slit his throat. It was the same with the Brazilians in the tents.
Ten minutes later, Piccadilly Pride puffed out of the bend beyond the cutting and gained speed along the straight, level track to the bridge of Aregua. It rumbled onto the 138-foot span, running smoothly, the noise of her driving and coupled wheels, iron against iron rails, amplified, the flatcars clanking along with a jangle of links and pins. Past the bridge, fifteen hundred yards to go, Piccadilly Pride rolled on almost sedately at low speed to bring her to an easy halt within range of the enemy camp.
The gunners had loaded their pieces with projectiles that would ignite on impact, setting fire to everything within reach. This bombardment would be followed with canister delivering a hail of iron balls.
The small lead gun fired, with a bang and a flash, the first shell exploding to reveal a row of tents ahead and off to the right. A shell from the rear gunners shooting from a difficult angle fell short, but the flames showed men falling out of the tents. The gunners pumped rounds of carcass shot into the camp, the intense flame of these shells making a bonfire of tents and supplies. Hadley himself blazed away at the enemy with a .44 revolver.
But twenty minutes into the attack, the Brazilians began to retaliate effectively. Three of the men on the lead gun car were shot in quick succession.
With a long toot-toot-toot on Piccadilly Pride’s whistle, Hadley signaled they were pulling out. “Come on, old warrior!” The old engine responded beautifully. Under a small cloud of black smoke, Piccadilly Pride backed up, showering soot on the men up front, where the three-inch gun kept firing to keep the enemy at bay.
Sergeant Julio Nuñez ran along the bridge beside the engine as Hadley backed her up. Nuñez shouted that charges were placed in the trestles; his men were ready to fire the gunpowder.
Brazilian soldiers who had run down the tracks began to shoot at them from positions north of the bridge.
Julio Nuñez himself was a victim of this exchange. Struck by a bullet that ricocheted off the engine’s tender, he plunged headlong to the timbers beside the track.
Hadley backed up Piccadilly Pride as fast as he could go, to one hundred yards beyond the bridge. Then the charges blew with a thunderous roar, and flames leapt into the sky. Momentarily nothing was heard but the hiss and pant of Piccadilly Pride; then there was a mighty rending and crash of shattered timbers.
“Good work, men. Good work!” Hadley shouted amid the cheers of others as Aregua bridge came tumbling down.
They stopped to take on water at Patiño Cué. The small town was deserted, with its population moved behind López’s lines. While the engine’s tank was filled, some soldiers wandered off, smashing their way into a pulpeira, where they found a barrel of rum left behind by the owner. There were yells of laughter from another group who found a fat pig trotting down a street near the station: They cornered the terrified beast, slashed its throat, and lugged it back to their flatcar, where despite the protests of the wounded, the porker was hefted aboard.
It was a half-hour before Piccadilly Pride’s whistle blew and they were on their way again, with the liquor flowing and the laughter and singing growing louder mile by mile.
Hadley rejoiced with his men. He sent the engine backward smartly, the pile
of wood in the tender low enough for him to see the rails behind.
The Brazilians had been bloodied, with one hundred casualties, a third fatal, and their camp a shambles. But out of this debacle rode three hundred horsemen belonging to a superb Rio Grande do Sul cavalry regiment. A mile south of Aregua, they forded the river. They did not sweep directly back to the tracks but thundered along a road that led to the valley of Pirayu.
Piccadilly Pride chugged along beside Ipacaraí Lake and then past deserted Tacuaral, the last station before Pirayu valley. Hadley had her throttle open halfway, for there was no need to race on this last leg home.
“Fool! He’ll get himself killed!” Hadley shouted as one of his men leapt from the lead car onto the front of Number 11. The soldier was cheered as he loosened one of the flags next to Piccadilly Pride’s smokebox; balancing precariously on the frame, he waved the banner and cheered for Paraguay.
They were two miles from the forest at the head of the Pirayu valley when the Brazilian horse soldiers came thundering toward the tracks. Twenty-five of the cavalrymen had soon detached from the main group to await the train in the valley itself.
“Oh, damn!” Hadley cursed aloud, and flung open the throttle.
There was a scream as the man who had remained perched on Piccadilly Pride’s frame lost his footing and fell between the engine and flatcar. There were anguished shouts from the soldiers on both flatcars as they tried frantically to prepare for the onslaught. The prize pig was dumped as the men on that car sought to swing the fieldpiece around.
The cavalrymen did not quite know how to assault the monster, the first armored train to ride the rails in South America. As they stormed the train, Brazilians were killed by their comrades shooting wildly in the melee; others fell to their death after hurling lances that clattered harmlessly against Piccadilly Pride’s iron sides. But they were 275, and the men on the train who were not wounded, thirty, and wave after wave swept in, emptying their carbines and revolvers, charging beside the flatcars with lance and saber, raking them with lead and laying open heads and shoulders with their steel-bladed weapons.
Piccadilly Pride had picked up speed as she reached the forest and the decline, now, at the head of the valley. The cavalry were rapidly thinning out as exhausted chargers dropped behind.
Hadley scarcely had time to register his shock at the sight that suddenly loomed ahead of him. The cavalrymen detached from the main body had reached the bottom of the incline ten minutes before the attack and had heaped up logs on the track, throwing the last one on the pile as the train started down the slope.
“God blast them! The bastards!” He could not stop Piccadilly Pride, not a chance.
The rear flatcar rocketed into the logs. The nineteen-ton locomotive jumped the rails, her great driving wheels gouging the earth, plowing up dirt, splintering felled trees like twigs. With a screech of tortured metal and breaking parts, the engine tipped over, hissing and spluttering as water gushed out of her tanks and piles until nothing remained to cool the fire in her iron belly. In a matter of seconds, her overheated boiler blew with a terrific explosion, throwing iron like shrapnel, killing two cavalrymen who stood in the trees watching her die.
And then all was silent around Piccadilly Pride, engine Number 11 of the Balaklava line. Major Hadley Baines Tuttle, who had met her in the Crimean winter of 1855, lay close by, his long fight to help the warriors of Paraguay ended.
Paraguayan hit-and-run raids continued and the Brazilians retaliated in force, but in the Allied camps, most of May and June was given over to preparing for the final campaign. By the end of June, the Brazilian imperial army had twenty-six thousand battle-tested veterans ready to march. Several thousand Argentinians and a token squad of Uruguayans were on hand, but the last push against López was to be essentially a Brazilian effort, with the army divided into two corps, one of which was commanded by Osório, The Legendary.
At the beginning of July, the long columns of infantry, cavalry, and artillery rolled forward slowly until they reached the valley of Pirayu. North of the valley, the forested heights of the cordillera held the advance positions of the new Paraguayan line; eight miles northeast of the cordillera lay Piribebuy, provisional capital of Marshal-President López.
On August 1, the comte d’Eu gave the order to advance. The plan was a pincer movement to envelop Piribebuy: Argentinians, with heavy artillery support, were to move northeast up the escarpment against the Paraguayan right; the bulk of the twenty-six thousand Brazilians were to march southeast to cross the cordillera and deal with the Paraguayan left.
On August 11, Piribebuy was enveloped, and the next morning, after a devastating artillery barrage, the town was taken.
The army marched on, for Francisco Solano López, the beast who was the prey of this great hunt, remained at large. On August 15, the Brazilians took Caacupé, where the Paraguayans had their arsenal, with little resistance. Among the Europeans taken prisoner was Scotty MacPherson. Luisa Adelaida Tuttle, pale and dressed in widow’s black, stood silently between her mother and father as a Brazilian officer offered congratulations for their liberation from the tyrant López.
At dawn on August 16, the sledgehammer was raised again on a plain called Acosta Ñu, sixteen miles north of Piribebuy. The comte d’Eu brought twenty thousand men with him and divided them into four divisions, one on each side of the plain. Facing them in the red earth trenches were 4,300 Paraguayan soldiers, the rearguard and largest surviving contingent of the army López had built the past summer.
Among thousands of Brazilians at Acosta Ñu were three veterans who had been in the war from the start: Colonel Clóvis Lima da Silva; Lieutenant Surgeon Fábio Alves Cavalcanti; voluntário Antônio Paciência. They were all witness to what happened on the plain of Acosta Ñu this southern winter’s day in August 1869.
Clóvis da Silva, fully recovered from his incarceration by López and recently promoted to colonel, commanded an eighteen-gun battery on a knoll 2,100 yards west of the Paraguayan trenches. On eminences to the south and east were more howitzers and guns to sweep the enemy positions with a belt of fire. At 7:00 A.M., Colonel da Silva gave the order for two guns on the right of his battery to fire the first rounds.
As the artillery crews came smartly to orders, Clóvis da Silva stood with a telescope glued to his eye. The morning was overcast, a raw chill in the air, with patches of mist hanging over the plain, which was covered with clumps of macega, a short, hardy grass. Clóvis saw sections of the Paraguayan earthworks and part of their camp — a long, dark smear in the macega.
“Ready! Fire! Fire!”
Clóvis’s body stiffened noticeably as the guns roared out. Mentally, he counted off the seconds, waiting for the distant boom. He held the glass steady, watching the shells burst. Immediately, there were other loud reports from the other batteries.
“Another round, Number one and two,” Clóvis ordered. “More to the left.”
Clóvis cast a practiced eye over the gunners as they loaded charges and ammunition, trained the pieces laterally, adjusted elevation, and stepped to their places to the right and left at the command “Ready!”
“Fire! Fire!”
Again, Clóvis counted off the seconds before the shells burst, throwing up earth and dust at the Paraguayan trenches. Again, there were explosions from the Brazilian cannon on their right.
And from the enemy, answering fire, the first shells from six Paraguayan guns facing their position, whistling high over their heads to explode behind them.
“Keep this range,” Clóvis ordered. “Battery fire!”
Clóvis da Silva’s battery and the artillery to their right hammered the enemy’s positions. The Paraguayans returned fire with twenty-three fieldpieces, and where there had been mist, there were patches of drifting white smoke.
By midmorning, the infantry and cavalry attacks began. The overcast sky livened with battle’s fury; the white kepis of thousands of soldiers spread like blossoms in the macega, the steel of the
ir bayonets dull gray as they pressed toward the enemy’s trenches. And coming down from the north-still too distant to be more than a dark, indistinguishable mass; still too distant to hear the rumble of the earth — were the first blocks of cavalrymen unleashed from the body of eight thousand waiting to assault the enemy.
The Brazilians attacked from every direction, bullets humming and hissing through the macega. The cavalry sweeping down from the north tore into a band of Paraguayan horses riding out to meet them, sabering to the left and right, making swift work of the slaughter. But the Paraguayans’ inner defenses withstood the first onslaught and kept the Brazilians pinned down in the macega and at the overrun advance trenches. There was a lull in the battle. Then the Brazilians launched fresh assaults, hour after hour, slowly but relentlessly cleaning out the Paraguayan trenches.
Lieutenant Surgeon Fábio Alves Cavalcanti was at a field hospital two miles south of Acosta Ñu. There had been a steady trickle of ambulance wagons since early morning, bringing the human wreckage of battle to be pieced together, stitch by stitch.
Midafternoon, Fábio was still at the operating table. The orderlies had brought him a screaming Paraguayan, with one foot sliced off and one leg pulped below the knee, a Guarani boy, no more than twelve years old.
In the sixteen days since the start of the campaign across the cordillera, Fábio Cavalcanti had experienced a growing sense of tragedy. The sight of victims like this boy were ever more frequent as the Brazilian columns obliterated the enemy’s position and drove in the Paraguayan left. Two days ago, at Piribebuy, Fábio and his fellow surgeons had treated fifty-three of their own wounded. It was more than the carnage at Piribebuy that troubled Fábio: There were reports that the Brazilian troops had massacred women and children fleeing the ruined town. There was a rumor, too, that the infirmary of Piribebuy had been purposefully set alight and those within prevented from fleeing that hideous bonfire.
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