Brazil

by Errol Lincoln Uys

  Inevitably, Antônio Conselheiro’s preaching against the changes brought by the republic had led him into conflict with the backlands chieftains. Bahia in the early years of the republic was in a state of political chaos as men who had wielded absolute power under the empire fought to assert themselves in the republican regime. In this tumultuous climate, opponents of the state governor, Luis Viana, were quick to point to his lack of interest in persecuting the fanatics at Canudos as an intolerable weakness; further, they accused him of harboring secret monarchist sympathies.

  Politics aside, Governor Viana had received increasing complaints that Canudos was a nest of bandits, among them Zé Cavalcante, the son of Chico TicoTico. After fleeing Jurema município in 1882, Zé had joined a band of jagunço outlaws operating below the São Francisco, attacking remote vilas and robbing unwary travelers. Zé had reached Canudos a year later than Antônio Paciência, riding in with eight bandits of whom he was undisputed leader.

  The outlaws at Canudos numbered several hundred, but by late 1896, an estimated twenty thousand souls were gathered on the plain, the majority of them sertanejos whose most serious offense had been to turn their backs on the poderosos de sertão. They were vaqueiros, squatters, agregados, the poor from dozens of fazendas and towns, not only here amid the caatingas but also from the green valleys of Pernambuco and Bahia. All had heard the voice of Hope calling them to the New Jerusalem.

  Gathered around the fire with the rebel leaders on June 27, 1897, Antônio Paciência listened as João Abade, the commander-in-chief, spoke about the next assault against the government forces: The camp on Monte Favela was to be stormed again at daybreak.

  Antônio had emerged as one of the community’s military leaders when the second and third expeditions had been sent against Canudos. Respected for his courage and his modesty, he had repeatedly proven himself in battle, often riding with Zé Cavalcante to ambush the government columns. Equally important, though, he had brought to the conflict his experience from the Paraguayan War. Several hundred veterans now served in the army of Canudos. They had directed the construction of a maze of trenches and dugouts along the perimeter of the town; the half-constructed church had been converted to a fortress.

  Except for two black men, the group of commanders were caboclos and mulattoes. There were a handful of foreigners at Canudos, mostly poor Portuguese, but also a few Syrians, a family of Bolivian Gypsies, and the Spaniard Xever Ribas. The majority were sertanejos from Bahia and Pernambuco.

  Like Antônio Paciência, several commanders were fugitives from justice. The general, as they addressed João Abade, was from a good family in the município of Bom Conselho, where Antônio Conselheiro had torn down the new republic’s tax notices. He had served many years as a capanga for a priest landowner in Pernambuco, brutally enforcing his patrão’s rights until even the normally inactive district police could not ignore João Abade’s crimes. And there was “Pajeú,” who had deserted from the Pernambucan police after slaying a fellow trooper; and João Grande, a black commander, fast as lightning with a knife, who was rumored to have slit the throats of six men; and old Quimquim, a jagunço-turned-bandit, with features strongly reminiscent of his warrior-Tapuya ancestors.

  Over the months, the commanders had become consummate guerrilla fighters, for whom the caatinga provided an impenetrable shield. Around Canudos itself, thousands of rebel foot soldiers manned the trenches and dugouts, many of them interconnected, but in the field, the bands of rustic leather-clad cavalry, with the steel of their cattle goads honed razor sharp, had lacerated the earlier assault columns in lightning attacks. Whether longtime bandits like Zé Cavalcante or simple, honest vaqueiros who had left their ranches for the better life promised at Canudos, mounted on their fiery ponies they stormed through the caatinga seeing a hundred passages where their enemies were hopelessly lost. As quickly as they rode upon the soldiers they were gone, their war cries fading as the caatinga closed behind them.

  Discussing their plans for the next day, General João Abade, a short, bowlegged man in his late forties, proposed that Antônio Paciência and two other commanders lead one of these hit-and-run attacks: While the main assault was launched against the camp on Favela, they were to take two hundred men to the south to ambush the First Column’s supply train.

  “We can’t stop the Second Column,” João Abade said, referring to the soldiers approaching Canudos through the sertão from the east. “We’ve cut them up badly, but they’ll get through to Favela. Grab the supplies, Antônio. Artur Oscar will sit sweating up there, with five thousand starving men.”

  “We’ll do it, General.”

  “What you can’t bring back, burn.”

  “Everything, my General, except our ammunition.”

  The commanders laughed. The rout of Moreira César’s expedition had supplied the rebels with several hundred thousand rounds. Two Krupp guns they had captured were in working order, but with only thirty-seven shells: The pieces were mounted to defend the most likely crossing point of the Vasa-Barris, to the left of the new church.

  The meeting broke up. Walking up a steep street in the center of the town, Antônio glanced off to the left. Facing the open area behind the new church and headquarters building stood the house of Antônio Conselheiro. It was in darkness, but six women kept vigil outside. They were part of a small contingent of pious women — including Idalinas Marques — chosen as beatas. Complementing these “saints” was a male brotherhood, the Santa Companhia, comprised of eight hundred members who had taken a vow of poverty and guided the community’s religious observances.

  “God keep you, Counselor,” Antônio Paciência murmured as he passed the women, an appeal for the health of the sixty-nine-year-old Antônio Conselheiro, who was ailing. With the escalation of the conflict to a full-blown rebellion, The Counselor had left the military operations to João Abade and the other commanders, meeting with them often but devoting himself to preparing the faithful of New Jerusalem for the apocalyptic battle that lay ahead — when Dom Sebastião and heaven’s legions came to combat the army of the Antichrist.

  As Antônio Paciência approached his house on an alley in the upper town, he saw Teotônio sitting outside the doorway, his back against the wall, his cheek pressed against the blunderbuss in his hands. He was fast asleep. Antônio stepped past him to the half-open front door and entered the larger of the two modest rooms. As he did, he heard a small voice: “Papai?” Antônio Paciência crossed to the hammock. “Yes, Juraci.”

  Juraci Cristiano was now almost four and a half years old. “I heard the guns, Papai.”

  He ruffled his son’s hair. “You were frightened?”

  The child did not answer the question. “Papai killed the macacos?” he asked, and before Antônio could respond, he added, “Teotônio says he killed one.”

  “We saw many macacos fall.”

  “I was scared, Papai.”

  Antônio held the boy close to him, his mind teeming with memories of the rage of these same macacos, his fellow Brasileiros, there at Curupaití where Policarpo had died.

  The surprise attack had struck General Artur Oscar’s men on Monte Favela like a shock wave, leaving 109 dead or wounded. What had been cocky regiments marching into the basin behind triumphal drum and bugle just hours before had been reduced to small groups huddled in terror wherever they could find cover. When, after an hour, it was accepted that the fanatics had withdrawn, an irate Artur Oscar had ordered his troops into immediate battle formation.

  At 5:30 A.M., Clóvis da Silva was on a low hill to the right of Favela. The night cold having numbed his rheumatic pain and, at the same time, kept him alert since the 11:00 P.M. attack. With companies of the Third Brigade to protect them, the Krupps had been taken down the north slope of Favela to this hill a thousand yards closer to the Vasa-Barris. To the right of their position, on another eminence, was a second battery, with the Whitworth.

  Clóvis stood behind his guns, holding a mug of steaming coffee with
both hands; as he sipped the scalding liquid, he watched Major Lauro Correia prepare for action. His gaze moved beyond the Krupps, down past two other hills, and across the Vasa-Barris. A bank of mist along the river and the gray light above Canudos heightened the menace of the place. Clóvis studied the two towers of the half-built church: he could feel the eyes of lookouts upon him.

  To the left of the Krupps was a defile with a stream, and opposite, a tabletop hill. Clóvis’s eyes roved it, from south to north, searching every crevice, every outcrop that could hide a sharpshooter. As on the previous afternoon, he detected no movement. He looked down the slope of the hill where his guns were emplaced: Toward the defile, it was steep and rocky; toward the north, it sloped gently, with thick patches of thorny brush. Just visible below their position was the ruin of the fazenda, which an advance company had gone to secure.

  Before moving his guns down here, Clóvis had had a private conversation with General Artur Oscar, who’d served in Paraguay for five years:

  “For a time, there, I thought I was back in Paraguay,” the general said.

  “I heard them screaming at us like the Guarani,” Clóvis replied.

  “They have their mad dictator, too, who prepares them for sacrifice. Clóvis, we must bring a swift end to this insanity. Fanatics, monarchists, bandits, whatever they are, we must strike them hard and fast. It’s not only a question of the army’s honor; they challenge the very soul of the nation.”

  “I’ve long feared this, General. The republic I accepted, and gave Marshal Deodoro my full support. But the very night of November fifteenth, I stared into the gulf that separates us from millions of illiterate serfs and former slaves who understand nothing but orders from their master. In this godforsaken region, those orders come from Antônio Conselheiro.”

  “Most of our poor are honest and god-fearing; in time, the republic will pull them up. What we have, here, Clóvis, are degenerates. They want to drag Brazil back into the dark ages. They must be eradicated without mercy.”

  At precisely 6:00 A.M., June 28, General Artur Oscar gave the order for the eradication to begin.

  In quick sequence, the guns of Clóvis’s battery commenced firing, the first shells plowing up the ground beyond the new church. The battery on the right opened up, the roar of the guns becoming continuous, the cross fire reaching deep into the rebel citadel. After fifteen minutes’ bombardment, when the dust and debris cleared, it was seen that the damage was negligible. Some mud houses were demolished; a few shacks blazed.

  “What the hell are they shooting at?” Clóvis complained to Lauro Correia. “The praça at Uauá?”

  The Whitworth’s shells were exploding in the caatinga beyond the northwest bank of the Vasa-Barris.

  At 6:30 A.M., the defenders of Canudos counterattacked — from the hills opposite the Krupp batteries; from out of the defile; from the direction of the old fazenda, where the advance platoons were overwhelmed.

  The Nordenfeldts on the battery’s left poured a stream of bullets into the defile. The Krupps’ range was shortened to blast the fanatics advancing below. Men of the Third Brigade protecting the battery fought back, but their positions were exposed to a lethal fire from the hill to the west.

  Major Lauro Correia was shot dead minutes into the attack, dropping instantly with his neck torn open.

  Clóvis saw the gunners near Correia’s body glance back in alarm toward the slopes of Favela. All around them, soldiers were falling back in that direction. The Nordenfeldts were holding back the advance from the direction of the defile, but the 7-pounders did little against the sertanejos swarming over the lower hills.

  “So help me God, I’ve a bullet for the first man who runs!” Clóvis shouted.

  To his right, the Whitworth stopped firing. Two Krupps were also out of action. But the support for those guns held a stronger position, with a line of communication open to the rear along a spur of Favela.

  Twelve minutes later, Clóvis’s guns began to fall silent.

  “God help us,” he said calmly, as a young lieutenant at the third Krupp gun fired their last shell. There was no hope of resupply, as the battery’s ammunition was miles away with the mule train.

  “Viva Bom Jesus! Viva Conselheiro!”

  The cries rose from the foot of the hill occupied by Clóvis’s guns.

  Clóvis had had one of the Nordenfeldts moved in front of the Krupps. The machine gun, too, had little remaining ammunition. All along the battery now the gunners were firing down the slope with their rifles.

  From the top of Favela and a dozen places below the northern ridge, where men of the Third Brigade had been regrouped, there was a continuous barrage against the rebels. But on the hill below Favela, Clóvis and his gunners were virtually isolated.

  “Viva Bom Jesus! Viva Conselheiro!”

  “Wait, boys! Wait till you hear the bastards breathing,” Clóvis ordered the men at the Nordenfeldt.

  Not one gunner had run away. What had kept them there was not the revolver in Clóvis’s hand but the sight of their commander standing straight and unflinching as the bullets sang around him.

  “Viva Bom Jesus! Viva Conselheiro!”

  The Nordenfeldt mowed down the front-runners. The riflemen picked off others — left, right, and center. Still they came storming up the hill, screaming their holy appeals, cursing the macaco weaklings, hurling themselves at the thin line of gunners. The artillerymen on the extreme left of the battery took the brunt of the assault — trampled on, bayoneted, hacked to death with machetes. Jubilantly, the sertanejos began to drag away the 7-pounder.

  Clóvis had emptied his revolver and fought with sword in hand, holding the ground in front of the first and second Krupps with sixteen men. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the rebels dragging off number 4. He did not hesitate. With a cry of rage, he broke from the fight and ran across the ground behind the other guns, shouting for others to follow. Nine men took up the charge with him; first to reach the enemy was a black sergeant from Santa Catarina wielding a double-bladed ax he had snatched from a rebel. He was shot in the thigh before he reached the Krupp, but this didn’t stop him: With his first blow, he severed the lower arm of a caboclo clinging tenaciously to the Krupp.

  The hand-to-hand combat at number 4 was ferocious. Clóvis swore at the top of his lungs that the rebels would not move the gun another inch. He was right. Minutes into the bloody clash, there was a tumultuous cry from behind them: Men of the Third Brigade who had fallen back toward Favela had seen the struggle and were advancing to help the gunners.

  A bayonet charge by two companies of Bahianos carried them into the midst of the men fighting around the Krupp. The rebels were thrown back, those with a hope of saving themselves plunging down toward the defile.

  Clóvis stood with one hand on the gun’s wheel rim. A cadet gunner, a stripling of barely eighteen, knelt a few feet away, his hands trembling as he pulled cartridges from a belt across a dead rebel’s chest and reloaded his own weapon. The cadet looked around as Clóvis said something inaudible to him, and was shocked when he saw the dark stain at Clóvis’s abdomen. The colonel’s sword hand, too, was red with blood from an arm wound.

  “Oh my God, Colonel Clóvis — ”

  “Shoot, son! Shoot the devils!”

  Five minutes later, several hundred soldiers of the Third Brigade were streaming toward the guns. Some men of the Third Brigade cheered the valiant artillerymen; others rained curses on the field of dead below.

  The soldiers found Clóvis Lima da Silva on the ground next to number 4. Here he breathed his last:

  “Brasil . . . oh, Brasil . . . ”

  Then, like his bandeirante ancestor Amador Flôres da Silva, the old gunner died. In the sertão.

  Five miles to the south, Zé Cavalcante let fly with insults as his pony clattered down a breakneck slope charging toward General Artur Oscar’s supply train. Antônio Paciência was close by, the two of them leading two hundred men whose fanaticism differed from the pious ter
ror preached by their supreme commander.

  Soldiers who stood their ground fought bravely but hopelessly. Many tropeiros, themselves sertanejos, took off into the caatinga, abandoning the broken line of mules. A third of the animals bolted and were lost to both sides. After fifteen minutes, the soldiers still alive made a run for it, back in the direction of Monte Santo. Behind them, Zé Cavalcante, Antônio Paciência, and others yelled triumphantly as they began to round up as many mules as they could find.

  The sertanejos were still there at 9:00 A.M., an hour after the attack. Forty mules laden with supplies were ready to be led back to Canudos. Most carried ammunition, including a team hauling a cart with Krupp shells.

  “Take the supplies to Conselheiro, Antônio,” Zé Cavalcante said. “I’ll be there later.”

  “I’ll go with you.”

  “I need no voluntários!” Zé joked. “My men know how to handle this.”

  Antônio laughed. “I’m sure they do.”

  Zé rode with eleven men to a fazenda two miles to the south. Before burning down the ranch house, they executed the owner and his son. It was a punishment for having permitted the supply train to halt overnight on their property.

  On the night of June 30, forty-eight hours after the first battle, the army was trapped on Monte Favela, a huge beast run to earth in the caatinga, breathless, flanks quivering, ears straining. On the dark hills beyond, a deadly silence enveloped the slopes.

  It was quiet on Favela, too, as soldiers began to settle in for the night. Except to the south, where a mournful wail rose from 817 wounded. A short distance from the field hospital, the caatinga had been burned and cleared for the graves of Colonel Clóvis Lima da Silva and 108 men.