The War in Paraguay -- A Small Nation's Epic Struggle Against Brazil

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THE PARAGUAYAN WAR

"The Greatest War Fought Between Nations in the Americas"

Excerpt from Book Five,BRAZIL,Sons of the Empire

Descriptions like those of the war with Paraguay, particularly the battle of Tuiuti, do not find in our literature any rival capable of surpassing them and evoke the great passages of War and Peace rather than best-sellers of current extraction.

-- Wilson Martins, Jornal do Brasil

April 1866 -— March 1870

In late March 1866, the venerable Guarani general, Juan Bautista Noguera - Cacambo - seventy-nine years old now, small, shrunken, with his hatred of the Brazilians mightier than ever, took great pleasure in a war trophy delivered to Francisco Solano López at his headquarters across the Upper Paraná: a leather bag filled with the heads of nine Allied soldiers.

Cacambo waved his tiny hands and danced with glee at the sight of these enemies. Unsheathing his sword, Cacambo cut the air above the trophies and repeated his vow: "I, Cacambo, will slay the first macaco who dares to leap to our soil!"

An Allied invasion was imminent. The Paraguayan offensive in the Argentine province of Corrientes had been disastrous: Sixteen thousand Paraguayans perished in battles and through sickness before the last units crossed the Upper Paraná back into Paraguay at the end of October 1865.

Paraguayan conscripts had again brought their army up to 25,000 men, most of whom were deployed in camps above the Upper Paraná. Their main base was at Paso la Patria, ten miles east of Tres Bocas. Between these two locations, the carrizal - deep lagoons and mud flats that extended inland for one to three miles - broke the northern banks of the Upper Paraná. At Itapiru, between Tres Bocas and Paso la Patria, there was a battery revetted with brickwork and mounting seven cannon. At Paso la Patria, thirty feet above the carrizal, there were thirty field guns; elsewhere in the jungle along the riverbank, artillery companies were concealed in the woods at likely enemy landing places.

By March 1866 the Allied army of Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay was assembled below the Upper Paraná. The Brazilians now had an effective strength of 67,000 men, including 35,000 voluntários da patria. President Bartolomé Mitre, who, in terms of the Triple Alliance Treaty, was commander-in chief of the Allied army during operations on Argentinian territory, headed an Argentinian contingent of 15,000 men. The Uruguayans, led by the Colorado general Venancio Flores, contributed 1,500 men, all they could muster in the aftermath of the civil war with the Blancos.

Dom Pedro Segundo had made a brief journey to the seat of war with his two sons-in-law, Prince Louis Gaston, comte d'Eu, and Prince Louis Augustus, duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. Traveling by horseback through southern Brazil, the royal trio had been present when a column of 4,200 Paraguayans had surrendered at Uruguaiana in September 1865. The thirty-nine-year old Dom Pedro, imposing as ever with his six-foot-three-inch frame and luxurious golden-brown locks and beard, had been unimpressed by the captured Paraguayans. "An enemy not worthy of being defeated," His Majesty had declared in a letter to a friend.

Dom Pedro II

Emperor of Brazil

The ninety-two voluntários of Tiberica, led by Firmino Dantas da Silva, had left the town late February 1865, marching first to São Paulo and then down to Santos, where they had taken passage on a ship with other Paulista volunteers for Rio Grande do Sul. There they had been drilled for four months until July 1865, when they were posted to guard a crossing on the Uruguay River. For eight months they sat here without a glimpse of the enemy and with nothing to break the monotony but news of victories won by others, until they received orders to join the Brazilian First Corps at Corrientes.

In April 1866, the main body of the Brazilian army began to move to forward positions on the south bank of the Upper Paraná opposite the Paraguayan battery at Itapiru. On April 5, an advance group of eleven hundred men with La Hitte cannon and mortars occupied and entrenched themselves on a grassy sandbank separated from Itapiru by a narrow channel. Supporting their landing were eight Brazilian warships.

At 4:00 A.M. on April 10, thirteen hundred Paraguayans launched a counterattack by canoe from Itapiru to dislodge the men on the low spit of land opposite the battery. Within a quarter of an hour, immense flashes broke the blackness of predawn as the Brazilian ships opened fire, the booming guns adding to the din of battle rising from the sandbank.

Only sixty of the ninety-two men who had left Tiberica in February 1865 were present to see the first action since departing their town: The rest had contracted dysentery, smallpox, and other diseases, and of these, fourteen had died, eight were in the hospital at Corrientes, and ten had been sent home unfit for service. Firmino Dantas da Silva himself had spent two weeks in the hospital with measles. He was serving as liaison officer between the battalion and the headquarters of General Manuel Luís Osório, commander of the Brazilian First Corps.

Two Tiberica voluntários watching the flashes of cannon and musketry stood together yelling encouragement to the unseen gunners aboard the Brazilian ships. The enemy's cannon blazed in the dark line of jungle opposite, and shells intended for the warships roared through the air above them, but the two men greeted the Paraguayan shot with derisive laughter. When it began to grow light, they climbed the hillside to reach a better vantage point, though they found the sandbank obscured by thick smoke, the gun flashes less distinct as dawn broke.

The early light showed one of these voluntários to be much older: The man had not yet fought a skirmish with the enemy, but he bore a scar so terrible that soldiers thinking of the battles they must soon face were reluctant to gaze upon it. The old wound lay across his skull, from above his left temple to the back of his head. He had gone completely bald after suffering this awful blow.

This voluntário was Policarpo, one of the slaves bought for Itatinga from the trader Saturnino Rabelo by Ulisses Tavares in January 1856. Policarpo, twenty-nine at the time, had assured the senhor barão that he was a Mossambe whom the lash had taught obedience and hard work.

In truth, Policarpo was lazy, and had resented the regimen of the plantation, particularly at harvest time, when the slave bell rang at 5:00 A.M. for assembly and prayers in front of the mansion before work in the coffee groves until dusk. One morning four years ago, when Policarpo did not respond to the bell, an overseer had rushed to the dormitory, but Policarpo was not there. A search had been mounted immediately for the runaway; with the soaring prices for slaves after the abolition of imports from Africa, even idle Policarpo was a valued possession of the senhor barão.

Policarpo had not run from Itatinga. When the search party set out, he had been less than five miles from the senzala, snoring loudly in a patch of forest beside the road from Tiberica. He had collapsed there in the early hours gloriously drunk, a jar of cachaça and a package of the best Bahiana tobacco beside him. Policarpo detested the work of the harvest, but there had been a consolation: He would occasionally steal a sack of coffee beans from where they were stored in the old fazenda, and trade them to the squatter Gonzaga for a supply of cachaça and tabak and trinkets.

Policarpo had still been befuddled when they found him. His captors tied his hands and made him run back toward the fazenda at the end of a length of rope attached to one man's saddle pommel; when the horse had suddenly jerked forward, the rope flew loose and Policarpo sprang away toward a hill covered with coffee trees. Dashing between the trees, he had eluded his mounted pursuers for a few minutes until their shouts alerted the overseers of a slave gang working on the next hillside. An overseer had arrested Policarpo's flight by striking him over the head with a seven-foot iron bar used for driving holes into the earth to plant seedlings. Unconscious and with his skull indented by the blow, Policarpo had not been expected to survive.

But he had recovered, and had been led to Ulisses Tavares, who closely inspected his wound and questioned him at length. (The squatter Gonzaga had fled Itatinga immediately upon hearing what had happened to Policarpo.) Policarpo had been placed in the stocks, the tronco diabo, and had also been flogged with one hundred lashes. Returned to the coffee groves, he had suffered fainting spells and sudden ravings and was unable to meet his daily quota. The overseers had finally confined him to the terreiro to rake the berries as they dried in the sun.

Policarpo had become tractable, and apart from overindulgence in cachaça, gave little trouble at Itatinga. But other slaves working on the terreiro grumbled about him: It seemed to them that whenever the sun blazed down on the drying terrace and it became unbearably hot, Policarpo would have one of his spells, shaking his head and moaning until he was compelled to seek the shade for a recuperative nap.

There were slaves, too, who wondered about Policarpo, the Mozambican: Wasn't it true that after his head had been broken, Policarpo had risen higher than any man in the eyes of the mãe de santo, the mother of the daughters of the saints? When the drums played, wasn't it extraordinary what energy came to Policarpo Mossambe as he danced for the African deities? And when the spirits descended, wasn't it the feebleminded Policarpo whose lips spoke with the greatest strength?

The young man with Policarpo this morning watching the fight for the sandbank near the Paraguayan shore was the mulatto Antônio Paciência. Patient Anthony, nineteen years old now, was tall and lean, with a tough, spare frame and iron muscles. His nose was slightly aquiline; the look in his brown eyes suggested inner strength; his dark-skinned countenance was frank, an expression often misconstrued as insolent. A good worker, slaver Saturnino Rabelo had predicted, and this was correct: Antônio Paciência had given no cause for complaint about the quality of his labor. Still, he had been a thoroughly bad slave.

Antônio Paciência could remember the delight of the iaiá - the slaves' corruption of "Sinhazinha" - when he had been given to her. Teodora Rita couldn't wait to show him off when visitors came to Itatinga.

Except for his behavior during inspection by the iaiá's relatives and friends, however, Antônio Paciência had seemed incapable of pleasing the baronesa. Teodora Rita's tongue wagged incessantly with complaints about Antônio Paciência and the difficulty she had training him.

There had been the time the iaiá's silver shoehorn disappeared. Iaiá Teodora Rita said she had left it in a boot given to Antônio for cleaning. The iaiá and Dona Feliciana, wife of Eusébio Magalhães, insisted on watching Cincinnato, the carriage driver, cane him, ordering that the punishment continue, until Antônio Paciência had finally admitted stealing the shoehorn: "Oh, iaiá, forgive me! I put it in my pocket . . . Oh, iaiá, I lost it, I do not know where!" (Months after the caning, the iaiá told Antônio to clean a pair of shoes she hadn't worn for a long time, and as he was carrying them to the fazenda's kitchen, something dropped with a clink to the stone floor. His terror was absolute when he saw that it was the silver shoehorn! Pausing just long enough to pick it up, he crept out of the house and buried the shoehorn far down the slope toward the Rio Tietê.)

Two and a half years after arriving at Itatinga, Antônio Paciência had been ordered to the senzala. He was genuinely puzzled, for there had been no recent clash with the iaiá, certainly nothing as grim as the loss of her shoehorn.

"I'm the slave of Iaiá Teodora Rita," Antônio Paciência protested to the overseer who had been sent to fetch him from the fazenda's kitchen. "I work in the big house.

The overseer, a mulatto like Antônio, had grabbed him by the scruff of his neck. "The senhor barão's wife herself gave the order!"

It took a long time for Patient Anthony to understand that Teodora Rita sim ply had lost interest in her birthday gift from the senhor barão.

The move to the senzala had been almost as traumatic as being sold away from Mãe Mônica. Cast among the mass of Itatinga's 220 slaves, Antônio had experienced a deprivation that went far beyond being stripped of the nice clothes he had worn on parade in front of the iaiá's guests or denied the food from the fazenda's kitchen.

Chigger Man was the first to bring Antônio Paciência close to understanding the loss of dignity.

Chigger Man, who was said to be more than ninety years old and had served the senhor barão's father in the canoes of the monsoons, was expert in prying loose the tiny mites that attacked the slaves' feet, burrowing under the skin to lay their eggs. Chigger Man performed his crude surgery outside one of the slave dormitories, and Antônio himself had submitted to Chigger Man's knife. Watching the old slave probe and scratch for chiggers had left Antônio with a feeling of revulsion and sharpened his sense of loss at leaving the fazenda.

By the time he was fourteen, Antônio Paciência was doing the work of an adult, for which he was praised by the senhor barão himself. "I was not wrong in listening to Rabelo. You are a good worker. God willing, Antônio, when you are older, you may be an overseer at Itatinga."

Seven months later, Antônio Paciência was given fifty lashes for running away from Itatinga. Eighteen months later he was a fugitive for forty-seven days until he was caught at São Paulo.

Antônio's second flight had been planned with two other slaves. He had wanted Policarpo to go with them, but the Mozambican refused: "The risk is too great."

"We'll go to São Paulo; perhaps to Rio de Janeiro. We won't be found among thousands in the cities."

"Perhaps you'll be lucky."

"Come with us, Mossambe!"

"And lead them to you?"

"We won't be caught."

Policarpo had lowered his head, exposing the deep scar. "Like the mark on a beast," he had said. "Any man who sees it will know: 'Mossambe-withthe-broken-head' - the property of the barão de Itatinga. I cannot go with you, Antônio."

The three slaves had fled Itatinga at the onset of winter 1863. One of Antônio's companions died of pneumonia in a crude shelter they had erected in a forest seventy-five miles southwest of Itatinga. The other had been caught at a senzala. Antônio had been waiting in trees on a hill behind the slave quarters of a fazenda thirty miles from São Paulo. He had heard a commotion as the fugitive was seized by those from whom he sought food. Without waiting to learn what happened, Antônio had run from the hill. He was the only one of the three to reach São Paulo, but he had been in the city only three days when he was arrested as a vagrant.

The senhor barão himself had stood on the far side of the senzala to witness the lashes given the young mulatto under the supervision of head overseer Eduardo, whom the slaves called "Setenta" (Seventy) for the number of lashes he most favored: "Neither too many nor too few" were Setenta's sentiments. "I should sell you to an other fazendeiro, Antônio Paciência," Ulisses Tavares had said, "but I'm not a man to pass on my mistakes to others. You came to me as a child and your bad ways were learned at Itatinga. However long it takes, here, too, we will teach you to be a good slave."

But Ulisses Tavares had changed his mind about keeping Patient Anthony. One morning in February 1865, Antônio and five others condemned as lazy or rebellious by the overseers had been lined up in front of the mansion to be told by the senhor barão that they were leaving Itatinga.

"You have not served me well," Ulisses Tavares had said. "You've earned more lashes than the rest of the slaves together. May Jesus Christ, who forgives all, help each one of you! Be loyal! Be trustworthy! Be proud of the service for which you are chosen! Above all, slaves - be brave!"

Ulisses Tavares was donating the six slaves to Emperor Dom Pedro's army. Though careful to select a group of malefactors whom he considered incorrigible, the senhor barão had made this gesture out of noblest patriotism. Many other slave owners picked out a few blacks or browns for the war against Paraguay, but only because these were accepted as substitutes in lieu of service by themselves or their sons. The senhor barão had a mighty contempt for cowards unwilling to fight for Brazil, and in this he was justified, for when the ninety-two voluntários of Tiberica had left the town square, his grandson had ridden at the head of the column.

Included in the column, marching three abreast, had been twenty-seven slaves from fazendas in the district. Some had tramped along with bewildered looks, for they feared this service for which their masters had volunteered them; some had stepped forward elatedly as the townsfolk cheered them. Antônio Paciência had been among the latter, and beside him marched Policarpo Mossambe, one of the six chosen from Itatinga as voluntários da patria.

Itapiru, April 1866, Candido Lopez

Colección Museo Histórico Nacional, Buenos Aires

As the sun rose on the Upper Paraná on the morning of April 10, 1866, Antônio and Policarpo had started down the hill toward their camp. They could hear the sounds of battle from the sandbank opposite the Paraguayan battery at Itapiru. Through the thin tree cover, to the left and right of them, were others who had climbed up for a view of the battle. As in the camp below, and wherever the Brazilian army was gathering for the invasion of Paraguay, the scene held a certain incongruity.

This was South America, but here were thousands of Africans massed for battle. The number of African slaves enlisted in Dom Pedro's army by April 1866 was no fewer than ten thousand; mulattoes and other mixed breeds swelled the number of slave soldiers to fifteen thousand. And as popular enthusiasm for the war waned with the dimming prospect of swift victory, another group of voluntários had had to be compelled to serve their emperor: In the sertão of Pernambuco, the Bahia, and other provinces, recruiters were rounding up the landless class, chaining them together and marching them down to the coast for shipment to the Plata.

This morning, shortly after Antônio and Policarpo reached the camp, the guns at Itapiru fell silent. Firmino Dantas was away at the headquarters of First Corps commander General Manuel Luís Osório, and his two camp attendants had the morning to themselves. They had gone to the riverbank above the assembly point of the invasion flotilla when the first news came of the fight on the sandbank.

"The Paraguayans are defeated!" a boatman had shouted. "The island is ours!"

"Viva! Viva! Viva! Viva Dom Pedro Segundo! Viva Brasil!" A tremendous cheer rose from the men on the bank.

Policarpo seized Patient Anthony in a fierce embrace. "At last, the battle can begin! We can cross the Paraná to drive the Paraguayans to Asunción! We can cross the river, Antônio Paciência, to freedom. Freedom!" Policarpo believed the circulating rumors that slaves who fought for the emperor in Paraguay were to be freed.

"It's only a rumor, Policarpo - the hope of all slaves," Antônio Paciência cautioned.

"Remember, Antônio, I have seen the emperor riding in his carriage at Rio de Janeiro. A great monarch! A wise man! When we defeat his enemies, he will say to us, 'From this day, you are free, my Brasileiros.'"

On April 15, 1866, ten thousand men of the Brazilian First Corps under Manuel Luís Osório boarded eleven steamers and canoes and floating piers towed by the ships. Another force of seven thousand Allies, mostly Argentinians, was assembled for embarkation immediately news came of a successful landing by the Brazilians. A Brazilian fleet of seventeen ships in three squadrons rode off the Paraguayan banks, along three points from Tres Bocas to a position fifteen miles away, close to the town of Paso la Patria, the headquarters of Marshal López.

The company of Tiberica volunteers were being transported on one of the three floating piers towed by the steamer carrying General Osório. By 7:00 A.M. on April 16, this vessel was heading directly toward a channel between Itapiru and the sandbank where the Brazilians had been victorious five days ago. "Isle of Redemption," the spit of land had been called, though there had been no deliverance for eight hundred men killed there.

Firmino Dantas da Silva was aboard the steamer with Osório and his staff. He stood at the starboard bulwarks with other officers of the voluntários, feeling an intense nervous excitement as explosions from shells fired by the heavy guns of the naval escort tore up the riverbank, knocking trees to splinters and setting the forest ablaze. The Itapiru battery responded with a continuous grumble, the water rising like a geyser when the Paraguayan shot burst in the river.

Firmino had waited fourteen months for this moment, months during which he'd thought often of returning to Itatinga. At the garrison of Bagé, where the company had been trained, Firmino had not impressed the regular army officers, with whom he had little in common. "O Pensador" ("The Thinker"), his fellow officers had nicknamed him.

At last, the company had been sent to the northwest of Rio Grande do Sul, and Firmino had discovered an unoccupied ranch beside a tributary of the Rio Uruguay where they could camp during the bitterly cold, wet winter. Daily patrols scoured the riverbank, as much to look for Paraguayans as to forage for food. Slave soldiers like Antônio Paciência and Policarpo were set to planting corn, manioc, and other crops. Firmino dispatched regular reports to the Bagé garrison, but, though he received routine acknowledgments, it seemed that the Tiberica company had been forgotten.

Some of the voluntários resented the inactivity and blamed Firmino Dantas, who could have appealed to Bagé to have the company transferred but seemed perfectly content to stay at the old ranch house reading books he had brought with him. O Pensador, thinking, dreaming, waiting for the war to come to him! Inevitably, others had another explanation for Firmino's apparent willingness to sit out the war far from the battlefront: "The barão de Itatinga's grandson is frightened."

Finally ordered south, the company headed for the camp near the port of Corrientes; there Firmino Dantas found his cousin, the artillery captain Clóvis da Silva, at Lagoa Brava. Clóvis, who had already fought against the Paraguayans in Corrientes province, was also critical of Firmino Dantas's inaction since leaving Tiberica.

"The barão didn't encourage you to volunteer for so miserable a post," Clóvis da Silva said that first night as they dined together at the Hotel Riachuelo, one of many establishments flourishing at Corrientes with the influx of thousands of troops and camp followers.

"I'm not a professional soldier, Clóvis."

"Good God, man, that's not the issue. As the grandson of the barão de Itatinga, you can do better than sit in camp for eight months. Ulisses Tavares expects more than this, Firmino Dantas."

After that meeting, Clóvis da Silva had arranged for Firmino to be made liaison officer with Osório's headquarters. The promotion had brought him into contact with the command of the First Corps and offered good prospects for rapid advancement. Still Firmino Dantas had been a reluctant participant, carrying out his orders efficiently but without the show of spirit to win the attention of his superiors.

Firmino dearly longed to be back at Itatinga, where he could continue his experiments with the coffee mill. Where he could see the girl about whom he had dreamed all these months! Since the night of the baronesa's ball, Firmino's passion for the golden-haired Renata had grown. Before marching away, he had gone to August Laubner's shop in Tiberica and asked the apothecary to put together a personal medical kit for his campaign. There he had seen Renata Laubner. Firmino had gazed into those brilliant blue eyes as she talked with him, and had openly revealed his admiration - his adoration! The moment August Laubner went to the back of the shop in search of something, Firmino had suddenly taken hold of Renata's hand and pressed it to his lips.

His commitment to Carlinda troubled him. He knew also that his betrothed's fiery-tempered ally, Teodora Rita, would oppose any breach of promise. But, as the months passed, Firmino had built up hopes of a relationship with the Swiss beauty that went far beyond what could be justified by one touch of his lips to her hand. "Oh, my love, Renata," Firmino would whisper to himself "I'll fight this war and return to Tiberica, where you await me."

Now, as Firmino stood on the deck of the steamer leading the invasion flotilla toward Itapiru, the thunder of war bursting around him, with an ironclad off to starboard, her flame-belching Whitworths unleashing destruction against the enemy, his nervous anticipation gave way to elation.

Firmino glanced toward General Osório, who was fifty-eight years old, gray-haired, with alert, genial eyes, a bona fide officer and gentleman. Osório had been nineteen when he fought in his first battle in the Banda Oriental in 1827, and had gained a legendary reputation as a lancer.

When Firmino first met the general at his headquarters, where he had gone as battalion liaison officer, Osório had remarked that the name of Ulisses Tavares da Silva ranked high among those who had made King João's conquest of the Banda Oriental in 1817. "Show half the spirit of the barão on that campaign, Firmino Dantas, and you'll make the old Paulista a proud man." Firmino Dantas had promised to do his best. Alone, he had felt his deep dread of failure in battle against the Guarani, whom Ulisses Tavares, like His Majesty Dom Pedro, considered a worthless enemy.

But Firmino's apprehension vanished as the invading force rode forward. The Paraguayan gunners were finding their mark now, and scored hits on a nearby ship and a floating pier. But as the range closed, with the steamers still several hundred yards off the Isle of Redemption, the lead ships of the flotilla began to turn to port. One after the other, with the floating piers in tow and the canoes keeping in the lee of the transports, the ships began to move down the Upper Paraná toward Tres Bocas: The landing had been planned not at Itapiru but at a point about half a mile beyond Tres Bocas on the Rio Paraguay itself.

Itapiru, April 1866, Candido Lopez

Colección Museo Histórico Nacional, Buenos Aires

"Macacos . . . macacos . . . macacos."

General Juan Bautista Noguera intoned the epithet with a deadly calm as he watched the river armada draw near the low-lying banks where the Rio Paraguay fell into the Paraná.

Four thousand soldiers were in position along the banks of the Upper Paraná, the majority between Itapiru and Paso la Patria. An invasion by the Allies had been accepted as inevitable for months, and the Paraguayan High Command had seen little hope of effectively resisting a landing by the enemy's overwhelming numbers. Cacambo had been among the few to protest this; he agreed with Marshal López's English engineers, Colonel George Thompson and Lieutenant Hadley Tuttle, who had argued that Paso la Patria, Itapiru, and other possible landing places should be defended with every gun that could be brought down from Humaitá garrison.

Marshal López had rejected this plan. He accepted the fortification of Humaitá as Paraguay's key defense. The riverside batteries provided tremendous firepower, and almost a year after the victory at Riachuelo; the Brazilian fleet had not yet dared make passage toward Humaitá. But more than the guns of Humaitá awaited an enemy: There were the esteros, a natural defense every bit as daunting as the man-made works at Humaitá. The "Place of the Damned," Marshal López called it.

Behind the carrizal, situated between two parallel streams - Bellaco Norte, just below one line of outworks of Humaitá, and Bellaco Sur, about three miles to the south toward the Upper Paraná - lay the esteros. A dense forest of Yatai palms grew on heights thirty to eighty feet above the swamps, which were clogged with rushes and three to six feet deep. For an invading force, few fields of operation could be worse than that toward which the Allied troops were heading this morning of April 16, 1866.

Just past 8:30 A.M., Cacambo and his company were in a palm grove two hundred yards from the Rio Paraguay. Behind them was an extensive morass; in front of them, a narrow strip of open, firm ground, which for the past twenty minutes had been plowed up in a continuous bombardment by the enemy.

"Macacos . . . macacos . . . macacos."

War steamers, transports, flat barges, and canoes as far as the eye could see. And to challenge them, Cacambo with two hundred men and boys, most of them carrying flintlock muskets and machetes. Cacambo had sent three men to a Paraguayan detachment two miles to the east, behind the morass and below Itapiru, but he knew it would take his messengers at least an hour to get through the marshes.

The palm grove stood on low-lying ground and provided the scantiest cover for Cacambo's force. Men had thrown up small earthworks where they sheltered, but the Brazilian barrage was relentless and deadly. In fifteen minutes, Cacambo's company lost fifty men, and in the fire- storm between the palms, many more were deafened by the blasts. Only a few stood firm as the majority backed off into the morass.

Paraguayan soldier

Cacambo saw how bad it was. He did not curse those who fled. The company flag bearer, a boy of eleven, stood near him. Cacambo stared at the red, white, and blue banner of the Republic of Paraguay. "Go!" he said. "Carry our flag to safety."

The boy was a Guarani from Cacambo's town. He shook his head.

"Go! Go!" Cacambo said. "You can do nothing here. Take our colors to Marshal López. Tell him, Cacambo -" A shell whistled into the palm grove, exploding close by. "Go!" he shouted. The young Guarani ran for the morass.

The Brazilian guns stopped firing. In the palm grove, trees cracked and thudded to earth; wounded men cried out; and on the ground beyond, where dust and smoke drifted, silence. But the stillness was soon broken by voices as three floating piers and two canoes of the enemy approached the bank of the Rio Paraguay.

With six men remaining, General Juan Bautista Noguera stormed toward the invaders. His comrades ran ahead of him, for he had not much wind left, this old Guarani who long ago should have taken his rest with those elders who lay in their hammocks. He stumbled a few times, almost losing his footing as he skirted the craters from the enemy cannonade. He had unsheathed his sword and was wielding it with both hands.

The men in the floating piers saw the six front-runners bunched close together, their red blouses offering easy targets. Fusillades from two crowded piers stopped the six Paraguayans in their tracks.

"Macacos . . . macacos . . . macacos."

Cacambo ran on. His gaze was on the lead canoe. He saw a great macaco there, standing insolently in the prow, wearing a white kepi and blue poncho and carrying a silver-plated lance.

Cacambo was twenty yards from the edge of the riverbank when four Minit balls struck him. General Juan Bautista Noguera stumbled forward a few feet and then fell.

"My Guarani . . ." he wept, with his last breath.

The man in the white kepi was the first Brazilian to set foot on Paraguayan soil: General Manuel Luís Osório, who would be honored for this triumphant moment with the title Barão de Herval.

Thirty-eight days after the landings near Tres Bocas, the exhilaration Firmino had experienced during the invasion was gone.

On the push through the carrizal east from the low banks at Tres Bocas toward Paso la Patria, Brazilian troops had skirmished with Paraguayans deployed around the lagoons and morasses. The Tiberica contingent had reached Paso la Patria on April 21 without firing a shot other than rounds spent by nervous voluntários blazing away at noises in the jungle.

Firmino began to pay the price for the months in which he had kept to himself: utter loneliness, no fellowship at all with other officers or the men of his company. Even with Clóvis da Silva, whom he saw often at Paso la Patria - now a sprawling base for the Allied bridgehead - Firmino found it difficult to make conversation. The artilleryman's confidence left Firmino feeling totally inadequate. He recognized the major - Clóvis had been promoted since the landings - as exactly the kind of soldier Ulisses Tavares expected Firmino to be.

To make matters worse, listening to Clóvis and the others, with their boisterous, passionate, jocular talk of combat, only intensified Firmino's feeling of isolation. He looked at dead Paraguayans beside the route of march and imagined himself a corpse; he spoke with survivors of the May 2 attack on the vanguard, which had lost sixteen hundred men, and was certain he would run from such an onslaught. These anxieties grew until he could contemplate little else, not even the command of Ulisses Tavares, who had sent him south to uphold the heroic name of the da Silvas of Itatinga.

On May 24, 1866, thirty-eight days after the landings, the Allies' forward positions were along a three-mile front at Tuyuti, an area of higher ground with palm forests just north of the stream of Bellaco Sur and on the southern fringes of the swamps and morasses. Thirty-five thousand men had moved up here from Paso la Patria, with more than one hundred field guns. The Brazilian divisions held the left flank, the Argentinians the right. There were nine hundred Uruguayans, all that remained of the battalions led by the Colorado general Venancio Flores. The Allies were still under the overall command of the Argentinian president, General Bartolomé Mitre, and General Osório led the Brazilian army.

On May 24 at Tuyuti, General Mitre ordered a reconnaissance in force into the esteros. Firmino Dantas and the Tiberica company were with a division near the rear of the Brazilian left flank. General Antônio Sampião, a veteran infantryman from the northeast province of Ceará, commanded these battalions of Paulista, Carioca, and Cearense voluntários holding positions in support of an artillery regiment - the Bateria Mallet - with twenty-eight Whitworth and La Hitte cannons. Major Clóvis da Silva served with these batteries, which were led by and bore the name of the French-born Emilio Mallet, who had come to Brazil as a mercenary in the 1820s and had risen to be the best gunner in the imperial army.

Late morning, along the Allied lines, the battalions chosen to reconnoiter the esteros were awaiting orders to penetrate the marshes. The atmosphere was hot and humid, the sky cloudless, and as the reconnaissance forces were mustered, sweat-drenched men cursed impatiently; they didn't expect the probe into the esteros to amount to much.

Firmino Dantas and his men were with other voluntários three hundred yards to the left of the Bateria Mallet. The company's position was on an elevation covered with Yatai palms. Below the slight slope, the ground leveled out toward an open morass extending from the reed-clogged esteros. A wide, deep ditch had been dug in front of the twenty-eight field guns, and the earth that had been removed from this trench spread out in front of and behind it so that from the edge of the esteros the long pitfall would not be visible.

At precisely 11:55 A.M., a Congreve rocket tore into the air and burst above a patch of jungle to the left of the Brazilian positions. Here and there a bugle sounded, a whistle shrilled, as officers quickest to react brought their men to orders.

A few minutes after the rocket explosion, a Brazilian skirmisher came running out of the jungle:

"Camarada! Camarada! Os Paraguaios! Os Paraguaios!"

From the jungle on the left came eight thousand infantry and one thousand cavalrymen, who had had to dismount and lead their horses in single file through the dense undergrowth. Sweeping down on the right toward the Argentinian flank, thundering out of the cover of a palm forest, came seven thousand cavalrymen with two thousand foot soldiers running up behind them. Pouring directly from the estero in a frontal assault on the Bateria Mallet were five thousand infantrymen, with four howitzers. Altogether some 23,000 men, the bulk of Paraguay's army.

By noon of May 24, 1866, five minutes after the Paraguayans' rocket signal to commence the attack, the battle of Tuyuti raging along the whole line of the Allies.

Tuyuti, May 1866, Candido Lopez

Colección Museo Histórico Nacional, Buenos Aires

The Tiberica company was in position with its battalion between the Yatai palms, firing down the slope toward the enemy at the edge of the esteros seven hundred yards away. The Paraguayans were closely bunched together as their front ranks sploshed through the morass toward the firm ground in front of the Bateria Mallet and in the direction of the heights with the palm forest. Colonel Mallet's twenty-eight guns went into action with a thunderous oration, but the deluge of fire and iron did not break the red-bloused wave rolling toward the Brazilians.

"Fogo!" Clóvis Lima da Silva commanded the men at the four brass La Hittes, with the earth quaking beneath his feet and bullets whistling and singing over his head.

Colonel Emilio Mallet himself moved among his gunners, with only one order for the line: "They shall not enter here!"

"Fogo! Fogo! Fogo!" came the command, and three hundred yards from the roaring guns, Tiberica's voluntários blazed away at the Paraguayans.

Firmino Dantas was thirty feet behind his men, taking cover at the base of a Yatai palm. With the utmost effort, he manipulated hands that trembled, fingers that seemed frozen as he took out cartridges and caps.

Bayonets flashed and gleamed as the Paraguayans advanced resolutely through the morass. Those up front charged the instant they hit firm ground: The rapid fire from the Bateria Mallet cut them down in bunches, but the gaps were quickly filled.

Firmino Dantas's feelings plunged from terror to hopelessness as he glanced around for a safer place and saw none.

No matter. Within seconds, screaming at the top of their lungs, several hundred Guarani horsemen broke through the extreme end of the Brazilian left flank and came thundering toward the Yatai palms.

Tuyuti, May 1866, (detail) Candido Lopez

Colección Museo Histórico Nacional, Buenos Aires

Antônio Paciência was no less afraid than Firmino Dantas. He and Policarpo Mossambe and seven voluntários had taken up a position behind a group of low rocks that gave far less protection than the men hugging the earth behind them imagined.

"Load, Antônio! Fire, Antônio! Load, damn you!" Policarpo growled when he saw the young mulatto paralyzed behind a big stone. Antônio obeyed. Mechanically, he pointed his weapon and fired at the mass of men at the edge of the esteros. Then he waited motionless again, his mouth open as he stared at the enemy.

"Baioneta, Antônio! Baioneta!"

Antônio heard Policarpo's command, but he did not obey. Like others, he was transfixed with horror as he saw the Guarani cavalrymen.

Heavy rifle fire from the voluntários brought down the front riders and sent several ponies crashing to the ground. But the voluntários had no time to reload and no place to hide before the thundering, yelling, snorting stampede was upon them, slashing with saber and machete.

With a bloodcurdling yell, a Paraguayan rode at Policarpo, swinging his machete. There was a clash of iron as Policarpo warded off the blow with his bayonet; then he jabbed upward with his weapon, the razor-sharp triangular bayonet biting into the Guarani's cheek, and the man's horse tore away with its screaming stricken burden. A second cavalryman came, and he fell from his saddle as he lunged for Policarpo, who bayoneted him.

But there were few kills like Policarpo's. One hundred voluntários lay dead or wounded beneath the palms; many more had fled toward the Bateria Mallet. The Paraguayans rode on, too, to cover the three hundred yards to the guns, but their ponies stormed into a solid wall of rifle fire from troops massed by General Sampião.

Antônio Paciência looked up shamefacedly at Policarpo. "Oh, Mossambe, I did nothing!" When the cavalry struck, Antônio had clung to the earth behind the rocks.

The Mozambican held out his hand to help Antônio to his feet. "It was the first fight," he said.

Firmino Dantas lay at the palm tree. His face was streaked with blood, his jacket stained crimson. He heard the continuing thunder of battle, but it seemed far away; he heard voices of troops coming up to fill the breach in their lines, but made no effort to appeal for help. Firmino looked at his fingers, which he had pressed against his side. He moaned softly.

A Paraguayan cavalryman lay six feet away. Mortally wounded, this enemy had been hurled from his horse, his body smashing into the palm, splattering Firmino Dantas with blood.

On the Allied right flank, detachments of the seven thousand Paraguayan cavalrymen clashed with a mounted Argentinian regiment, cutting them up and scattering them. Four hundred Paraguayan chargers did not stop, for the rout of the enemy horsemen had cleared the way to a twenty-gun battery. They raced for the guns, with canister and grape emptying their saddles at such speed that only half their number reached the canyon, killing or putting to flight the men who had stayed beside their pieces. The Paraguayans were busy turning the field guns in order to drag them over to their own side when Argentinian cavalry reserves suddenly appeared. Numbers of Paraguayans immediately dismounted to maneuver the guns - they refused to abandon their prizes - and to a man, they were slaughtered.

The Argentinian battery was brought back into action, adding to the cannonade all along the three-mile front.

Nowhere along the Allied line was the Paraguayan assault as ferocious and sustained as against the guns of Emilio Mallet and Antônio Sampião's division supporting the artillery. Wave after wave of the five thousand Paraguayans who had crossed the esteros stormed the Brazilians, breaking to the left and right as they made for the battery or the troop positions at the Yatai palms.

For the Twenty-fifth Paraguayan Battalion - new recruits called to rebuild Marshal López's army - the price of valor was high: The rapid fire from Emilio Mallet's guns was devastating. The next company sent forward discovered that the quagmire had been filled in with the bodies of the men of the Twenty-fifth.

But those troops who broke to the right were able to join up with infantry from the column of nine thousand foot and horse soldiers who had come through the jungle east of the Brazilian positions. The combined infantry made three charges against the Brazilians, driving them deeper into the palm forests. Three times the Brazilians rallied and hurled the Paraguayans back toward the esteros. After almost four hours of fighting, Antônio Sampião himself was critically wounded and one thousand of his men, both regulars and voluntários, were dead or injured. By 3:00 P.M., news of the perilous situation of the surviving defenders was carried to the Brazilian army chief, Manuel Luís Osório.

Osório was known to his men as "The Legendary," a title as well deserved as any baronetcy his emperor chose to bestow upon him. Gathering every man he could detach from his post, Osório hurried to assist Sampião's battered division.

The main body of Paraguayans were in the open between the Yatai palms and the esteros, mustering for another assault on the Brazilian positions. When Osório and his force began to advance, the Paraguayans blasted the front ranks with volleys of musket fire that felled men all along the line.

"Avançar, Brasileiros! Avançar!" Osório commanded, his poncho blowing in the wind, his hand gripping the silver-plated lance he favored as weapon even when afoot.

A bugler running next to Osório was shot dead. Out of the corner of his eye, Osório saw a soldier pick up the cornet. "Sound it, voluntário! Blow!" Osório shouted.

The soldier held his rifle in his right hand; with his left, he raised the bugle to his lips and blew what sounded like the advance.

Spurred on by The Legendary, the Brazilians tore into the Paraguayans with an almighty rage. In fifteen minutes, hundreds of Paraguayans were shot down at point-blank range or bayoneted.

Osório's infantry charge smashed the Paraguayans in this sector. By 4:30 P.M., all along the front, the Allied cannons began to fall silent.

When it was over, General Osório saw the man who had picked up the bugle walking back to camp:

"What is your name, voluntário?"

"Policarpo Mossambe, my General, from Tiberica."

"Take note of it," Osório told an aide. Policarpo had lost his forage cap and Osório noticed the deep dent in his skull. "Where did you get that wound, Policarpo Mossambe?"

"It was before the war, my General. I am the slave Policarpo."

"I saw you fight today, Mossambe," Osório said. "Go back to your company. Tell your commander General Osório says you earned your promotion on the battlefield of Tuyuti. You are to be corporal."

"Thank God you're alive!" Major Clóvis da Silva found Firmino Dantas sitting at the edge of a field of wounded.

Firmino had been slow to accept that he had been splattered by the blood of the Paraguayan cavalryman and not his own. The survivors of the battalion were being regrouped when Firmino had dragged himself to his feet. General Antônio Sampião himself had been there as Firmino returned dazedly to his men. "I'm not hurt," he had said in response to the general's concern. But, seeing the state he was in, Sampião had ordered him to join a reserve company guarding a munitions dump in the rear of the line.

Clóvis, knowing nothing of this, looked respectfully at Firmino Dantas's bloodstained uniform. "If only Ulisses Tavares could see you now, Firmino!" he said, beaming. "You have done him proud!"

Antônio Paciência walked unsteadily beside Corporal Policarpo.

"My Corporal, I was like a worm," Antônio admitted. "I crawled into the earth to escape the enemy. But you saw me, Corporal Policarpo." How he loved the very sound of his friend's new rank. "When they came a second time, I fought."

"Like a young lion, Antônio Paciência!"

It was the day after the battle. Policarpo and Antônio had been drinking cachaça at the wagon of a trader before going back to their encampment.

Antônio saw smoke rising in front of the Allied lines. "What is it?" he asked.

"I don't know," Policarpo replied, frowning. "I heard no gunfire."

They hurried forward, and saw the cause of the fires.

"Ai, Jesus Christ! How terrible!" Antônio cried. "Some are so small and thin, there's nothing to burn!"

The Paraguayan dead were being heaped up in alternate layers with wood, in piles from fifty to one hundred, and set on fire. Of 23,000 sent into battle, six thousand were dead and seven thousand injured. The Allied losses were four thousand. The Place of the Damned had reaped its first harvest.

Parguayan War Dead

Museo Mitre, Buenos Aires

The night was incredibly dark as seven canoes glided swiftly down the Rio Paraguay. Four craft were lashed together in pairs and heavily laden, their gunwales four to five inches above the water. One of three dugouts escorting them rode ahead, two to the rear, the shapes of their crews just distinguishable. It was nearing midnight, August 20, 1866.

"Steady, men. Steady. Let her run with the current," said an officer in the lead canoe.

The craft had come down from a marshy inlet near Curupaiti, an advance battery on the east bank of the Rio Paraguay six miles below the fortress of Humaitá, and were headed toward another earthwork, Curuzu. With thirteen guns in a sunken battery and 2,500 men, Curuzu was the first Paraguayan river defense above Tres Bocas.

All eyes were on the officer in the lead canoe. Before the great war, Capitán Angelo Moretti, former master of the paddle wheeler La Golconda, had navigated the Paraguay under every condition. La Golconda had made her last trip six months ago, with her boilers cold, her machinery irreparable. Towed by the Tacuari, one of three war steamers remaining in service, La Golconda had ended her days in a channel in sight of Curupaiti battery, where she was sunk to impede the enemy's passage.

With his livelihood sitting on the bottom of the Rio Paraguay, the Italian capitán had offered his services to the navy, joining almost one thousand men of a dozen nationalities serving the forces of Marshal López, the majority paid technicians and artisans working day and night to supply war materiel from Asunción's arsenal.

Besides Moretti, there were three other officers with the forty men in the canoes. One was Ramos, a young Paraguayan who had spent several years in England, where he had trained as a munitions expert. Another was a Pole named Michkoffsky, who had arrived penniless at Asunción before the war and had had the good fortune to marry a cousin of El Presidente.

The fourth officer sat amidships in one of the two pairs of canoes lashed together. Lucas Kruger had given scant attention to the navigation of the river. With a big straw hat pulled down low over his forehead and his shoulders hunched, he mostly dozed as the unwieldy craft shot forward, and looked up only when the sailors warned of a rough stretch of water ahead.

The itinerant tinkerer from Pittsburgh, who had promised Francisco Solano López that he could make the Rio Paraguay a damnable passage for the enemy, had done exactly that. Just four months ago, sixteen wooden-hulled steamers and four ironclads of His Imperial Majesty Pedro's navy had sailed up the Paraguay from Tres Bocas for about ten miles, and there they sat, twenty powerful warships kept at bay by Luke Kruger, master torpedoman of Paraguay.

Luke's torpedoes were of two kinds: explosive devices planted in pattern in the channels between the islands and high sandbars from Humaitá to beyond the battery of Curuzu; and those dropped into the river to be carried down to the enemy's ships by the current. Varying in size from 50-pounders to a monster boiler-plated 1,500-pounder, the stationary weapons were anchored so that they drifted four to five feet below the surface; those sent downstream floated attached to barrels or demijohns.

Since the outbreak of the war, Luke had continued his attempt to devise an accurate self-propelled torpedo, but with no success. Three hundred torpedoes were anchored in the river by May 1866, when the Brazilians had finally entered the Paraguay; thereafter, Luke and his men had made regular trips downriver to release floating charges.

The Brazilian warships were guarded by boats that carried long lines with grappling irons to hook the float of a torpedo, which they then towed ashore. They were on station day and night, the night watches the worst as they rowed across the river with only flickering lanterns to help them spot the menace drifting toward them. Young Ramos had recently confused the Brazilians with a diabolical scheme he himself had proposed: sending countless demijohns and barrels bobbing downriver weighted with leather bags filled with nothing more lethal than stones.

On the night of August 20, the seven canoes racing toward the Brazilians carried ten torpedoes in the dugouts that had been lashed together. About a mile and a half above the enemy's anchorage, four islands divided the waters of the Rio Paraguay, with two high, narrow strips of land near each bank and two islands close to the middle of the river. In the dry season, the inner islands were connected by a marsh, which was now flooded.

This was the first time they had used this approach; previously they had re leased torpedoes in the channels to the left and right of the inner islands. Repeatedly the canoes came up against a wall of rushes, a solid, impenetrable mass of vegetation. The sailors waded into the rushes, wrenching them out of the mud by their roots, working a passage through them foot by foot. Mosquitoes and flies and a myriad other pests swarmed around the men, biting and stinging; birds nesting in the rushes scattered; larger creatures, possibly capybara, the great water rats, broke noisily into deeper cover.

It took an hour to break through the rushes. Kruger and Michkoffsky themselves had to climb out to help lighten the craft and drag them through the soft mud. Moretti, who had had the idea of this approach, sat high and dry in his canoe humming to himself as he waited for them.

"Moretti, next time you'll be first over the side," Luke said.

Moretti greeted this with a huge, toothy grin. "I will, Luke?"

"Damn right! With your fancy pants, silver buttons, and all, my lord Admiral!"

Unlike Luke, whose shabby appearance had elicited complaints from none other than Marshal López himself, but who had done nothing to improve it, Moretti wore navy whites and blue jacket adorned with silver buttons bought from a soldier who had stripped the body of an Argentinian colonel killed at Tuyuti.

"I think not," Moretti said. "Our next stop will be opposite the Brazilians."

"Angelo, I hope you're right," Luke said.

Moretti laughed. "Use your paddles quietly now, men," he told his crew. "Not a sound."

Luke gave the same order. His canoe dropped back as Moretti left the open, inundated area for a narrower passage between the rushes.

Fifteen minutes later, Moretti's crew took their paddles out of the water. The dugout rode forward gently, coming to a stop behind a stand of rushes. One after the other, the rest of the squadron came up, drifting slowly near Moretti's canoe.

Through the rushes, the torpedomen could see the lanterns of the boats on guard duty in front of the Brazilian ships.

"Have I ever misled you, Luke?" Moretti asked softly.

Luke Kruger did not reply. He was already directing the off-loading of the first torpedo and float. Before the first pair moved off, other men swam to the opening to check for hazards - a log caught below the surface, for instance, against which a torpedo could strike. After crisscrossing the area several times, the men reported it all clear.

"Easy, boys. Easy now," Luke said. He glanced to the left through the reeds at the distant lanterns flickering like tiny fireflies. "Ramos," he said. "What do you think?"

"Maybe we'll be lucky tonight. Sink one son of a bitch," he said, mimicking Luke.

In the open river behind the rushes, the current was running at three knots, carrying the torpedoes swiftly toward the fleet. A lieutenant with seven oarsmen in a guard boat shouted an alarm when he spotted a float.

A minute later, the lieutenant swung out a line with a heavy grappling hook. The iron claws banged against the side of the barrel float; then the hook plopped into the water. The lieutenant jerked the line; the grappling iron slammed against the torpedo, striking the piston.

A brilliant flash lit up the river behind the rushes. "Mother of God!" Ramos cried. "Luke!"

"It was a guard boat."

"They work! The torpedoes work, Luke!"

"Sooner or later, Ramos," he said laconically.

Curuzu, August 1866, (detail) Candido Lopez

Colección Museo Histórico Nacional, Buenos Aires

On August 27, 1866, one week later, Luke Kruger and young Ramos were prepared for another night raid on the Brazilian fleet. Paraguayan scouts operating in the carrizal below the Curuzu battery and toward Tres Bocas reported numerous transports steaming up behind the fleet - indication of an imminent assault against the defenses at Curuzu and Curupaiti.

Luke's plan of attack was different tonight and involved one boat, eight men, including Luke and Ramos, and one five-hundred-pound torpedo. The boat was a forty-foot steam launch that had been captured during the Paraguayan invasion of Mato Grosso in December 1864. The Paraguayans had called this prize "Yacaré" - "Alligator" - but Angelo Moretti had his own name for her: "Lucky Luke."

Moretti was to have gone on this mission, but he'd been summoned to Asunción.

"What for?" Luke asked.

"Perhaps they want to talk about La Golconda.

Luke saw no chance of Moretti being compensated for the steamer that had been scuttled by the navy. "You're wasting your time, Angelo. They did you a favor taking her off your hands."

"It isn't true."

"I worked on her engines -"

"Then you know: They ran like new."

"No, Angelo. It was a miracle you cleared Asunción Bay, but go to Asunción, Angelo. Go. I'll take Ramos."

Luke Kruger shared Moretti's view that the struggle by 525,000 Paraguayans against three nations with a combined population of twelve million was a battle for the very existence of Paraguay.

"López's enemies say they make war on him alone, but the Paraguayans know this is a lie," Luke had said on one occasion. "Buenos Aires has many a score to settle with Asunción. I can accept this. But Pedro of Brazil, who sends his slave horde into battle claiming it's to free Paraguayans from López? Pedro, whose armies slaughter Guarani by the thousands?

"Pedro knows his own future will be decided on the battlefields of Paraguay. If Paraguay defeats Pedro's armies, the Braganças won't last six months. Six months and Brazilian republicans will follow the example of Juarez in Mexico."

"There will be more than an end to Bragança rule," Moretti had suggested. "Emperor Pedro and his slaveholding barons know that your Civil War has doomed that institution in the Americas. To lose the war in Paraguay will be as devastating to the empire as the Confederate defeat. A republican Brazil will not tolerate the continued enslavement of three million people."

This evening of August 27, Luke was alone in the one-room house he shared with Moretti. He had spent most of the day on the Yacaré preparing the steam launch for this night's mission, which he'd modeled on William Cushing's attack on the Confederate iron-plated ram Albermarle in October 1864. The Yacaré would steam for a Brazilian ship with the torpedo lowered into the water. By means of a cable leading back from the spar, the torpedo would be released to float below the ship's hull; backing off, the Yacaré's crew had only to pull a second line to fire the weapon.

As he lay back on his cot, with smoke curling from a cigar, Luke thought of Angelo Moretti on his way to Asunción. He did not believe the Italian's story about being called to discuss compensation for La Golconda. Luke laughed to himself. Truth is, you would rather sail with the devil than set foot in Lucky Luke tonight! Can't say I blame you.

Puffing on his cigar, Luke realized with a jolt that his journey could end here in Paraguay. He had come through many scrapes on his travels, though at no time had he placed himself in as hazardous a position.

A half-hour before he had to leave to join Ramos aboard the launch, Luke got up from his cot and lit a lantern. The yellowish light revealed a sparsely furnished room: two cots, a table, two chairs. All Luke's things were in one trunk at the side of the room. Neatly stacked on top of the trunk were his most treasured possessions - his collection of books. He took up his Bible and carried it to the table. He thumbed through the pages seeking the passage he knew by heart but found more powerful still when read aloud:

"The Lord is my shepherd . . ." He spoke in a strong, resonant tone, and his voice rose as he reached the last verse: " . . . and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever."

Then Luke Kruger stood up. He took his straw hat from Moretti's bed and stuck it on his head. He blew out the lantern and stepped outside, walking briskly toward the bank of the inlet and the mooring of the Yacaré.

The forty-foot launch was painted black to make her less visible to the enemy. Luke heard young Ramos call out that they were ready. Luke waved in acknowledgment, but nearing a plank walkway between the bank and the side of the boat, he glanced toward the Yacaré's prow. Jutting out in front of the launch was a sixteen-foot spar that was hinged to the bow and could be raised or lowered by a windlass; secured near the end of this iron beam was a five-hundred-pound torpedo.

"Cast off, Ramos!" Luke commanded the instant he stepped aboard.

Drifting clouds intermittently obscured a sliver of moon. Ramos conned the launch out of the inlet and into the channel that lay closest to the east bank of the Rio Paraguay on their left. This route passed the batteries of Curupaiti and Curuzu and had not been strewn with anchored torpedoes. If the enemy captains were foolhardy enough to steam up this way, their ships would come under direct fire from the fifty-eight guns at the two earthworks.

Ten minutes after leaving the inlet, the launch was throbbing forward in the lee of Curupaiti battery. Luke stood with Ramos, leaning back against the side of the boat. Ramos had the Yacaré heading steadily down the channel, keeping her in midstream. Two sailors were tending her firebox and boiler; the others were sitting on the deck, checking their rifles - new Enfields taken from Allied soldiers killed in battle.

The Yacaré was passing below the thirty-foot sand-and-clay cliff at Curupaiti when Ramos, who had been talking incessantly since leaving the inlet, said, "I'm happy Angelo Moretti was summoned to Asunción."

"Why, Ramos?"

"I would've stood there watching you leave with Moretti."

"You may yet change your mind."

"No, Captain Luke! I want to be there when you get your son of a bitch -" Young Ramos died with the epithet on his lips.

Riding swiftly down the dark channel with the five-hundred-pound torpedo se cured to her spar, the Yacari smashed into the wreck of La Golconda, her stack submerged by the rise in the river. Angelo Moretti would have known of this deadly hazard.

Six crewmen were blown skyward by the blast.

And what had been just a passing thought for Lucas Kruger a short while ago became reality. His journey did end here on the Rio Paraguay.

On September 1, sixteen Brazilian ships began to thread their way up the channels of the Paraguay, steaming slowly north toward Curuzu. A smaller squadron provided cover for the transports, which began to land fourteen thousand men on the edge of the carrizal below the Paraguayans' first river defense work. At noon, with most of the fleet within range of Curuzu, an artillery duel commenced between the ships and shore batteries, which lasted seven hours.

At dawn, September 2, the cannonade was resumed. The Brazilians fired more than two hundred shells an hour at the sunken battery of Curuzu, without doing much damage and in return taking only light punishment from the defenders' thirteen guns.

Among the Brazilian ships that had been hit was the Rio de Janeiro. Launched in February 1866, the new ironclad, with four-and-a-half-inch plate and six guns, was one of the fleet's most powerful warships; in the vanguard, she had taken a pounding from the guns of Curuzu, losing a 68-pounder and suffering other damage to her decks. But her commander kept her on station, fighting back gallantly

At 2:00 P.M., the Rio de Janeiro blew up. An anchored torpedo had blasted her poop, and a second had blown a gaping hole near her bow. Within minutes she began to sink.

Master torpedoman Luke Kruger had got his ironclad.

On September 22, the flags of the Allies flew above the earthworks at Curuzu, which had been taken on September 3. With the fall of Curuzu, Curupaiti battery, three thousand yards to the north, was the only obstacle preventing the Allies from attacking the Paraguayan trenches at Humaitá.

For seven hundred men of the Paraguayan Tenth Battalion who had held the trenches on the left of Curuzu, the burden of defeat was terrible. The Tenth had been so outnumbered that they broke rank, leaving only their commander and a few officers, who had been killed. Back at Humaitá, Marshal López had ordered the men of the Tenth to fall in on the parade ground, at attention. When they were assembled, every tenth man in the rank was told to step forward, and the soldiers thus selected were shot in front of their comrades.

At Curuzu, General Bartolomé Mitre ordered an assault on Curupaiti on the morning of September 22. The Allied commander-in-chief's plan of attack involved eighteen thousand men - eleven thousand Brazilians and seven thousand Argentinians -- who would approach Curupaiti from three directions, the bulk of the Brazilian divisions taking the only road between the two positions.

For three days and two nights, torrential downpours had flooded the carrizal, turning the simplest camp duties into feats of endurance. There were guns to be moved up for the attack, and with one hundred men harnessed like beasts to a piece and wallowing up to their knees in mud as they hauled on the drag ropes; there were rearguard trenches to be dug, and companies of sappers worked day and night against tons of earth that slid back into the ditches; there were passages to be slashed through patches of inundated jungle. Just last night, September 21, the rain had finally stopped, and the fleet had been signaled that the attack was on, its preliminary bombardment to commence at 7:00 A.M.

The rolling fire of the guns brought the great army to its feet. The men were tired and hungry and walked stiffly in damp, dirty uniforms, but they reacted quickly enough to the shrieking whistles and bugle blasts. The sun rose; a light breeze carried with it the sweet perfume of the thorny aromitas; the sound of guns played in the background.

The slave soldiers Antônio Paciência and Policarpo, two of forty-seven volunteers remaining from the Tiberica contingent, were attached to a battalion consisting mainly of Pernambucans, Bahians, and other men from the northeast provinces, which were contributing a disproportionate number of volunteers, both slaves and free men. The Tiberica volunteers had been in action once since the battle of Tuyuti, when the Paraguayans again attacked the Allied left flank, in July 1866, an indecisive engagement, but the thousands of Allied soldiers either killed or wounded at Potrero Sauce had brought to an end the days of glory that followed the great victory of Tuyuti.

Firmino Dantas da Silva was not with the Tiberica company. Three weeks after Tuyuti, Second-Lieutenant da Silva had been posted behind the lines at Itapiru on the Upper Paraná, where he joined the quartermaster-general's staff. The slaves from the fazenda of Itatinga - three of the six had been killed - had not seen or heard a word about Firmino Dantas since his taking leave of them.

At Curuzu on September 22, Corporal Policarpo's squad was attached to a section under a caboclo sergeant, Mario Bomfim, whose family were vaqueiros in the Pernambucan sertão north of the Rio São Francisco.

Antônio had told Sergeant Bomfim all he could remember about Jurema, which was not much. "Senhor Heitor Batista and his son, João Montes, sold me to a slaver when I was a child."

"Coronel Heitor Baptista Ferreira and his family? I know the Ferreiras, boy," Bomfim, a scraggy, yellow-faced man in his forties, had responded. "If you cross Coronel Heitor Baptista himself or another poderoso of the family, any one of their hundred armed capangas will make your throat sing like a violin!"

"I can't forget Mãe Mônica," Antônio had said. "I will go back for her."

"Boy! If you set foot on Ferreira lands, know what you're doing: Coronel Ferreira isn't a man to tamper with!"

"My mother is an old slave with not many years left. Why would Coronel Ferreira want to keep an extra mouth to feed?"

Late this morning of September 22, 1866, Sergeant Bomfim and his section were about halfway along the Brazilian column and had to wait ten minutes after the first battalions had started up the road near the riverbank before they themselves began to move forward.

They had covered three hundred of the three thousand yards to Curupaiti, when a deafening barrage drowned the noise from the guns of the Brazilian ironclads. The Paraguayans had forty-nine guns at Curupaiti, thirteen along a concave cliff facing the river, thirty-six covering the land approaches from the direction of Curuzu.

At fifteen hundred yards, Sergeant Bomfim and his section had not lost a man, but were finding it difficult to advance in close order. They went forward a hundred yards or so, through smoke spreading like fog over the carrizal, with the fearsome sounds around them, until they came to a place in the road where a Paraguayan shell had exploded. They broke to the left and the right to pass the corpses heaped up there, and tramped on resolutely.

At one thousand yards, the order came down to move into the carrizal to the right, the snap and crack of reeds and rushes and the oaths of men indicating that hundreds were already pushing through the water-logged marshes to reach positions opposite the enemy's earthworks.

"Right! Keep to the right! Forward! Forward!" officers moving along the advancing lines shouted into the reeds.

"Oh, my God!" Sergeant Mario Bomfim cried when he got his men to the trees.

Two hundred yards away, beyond a broad stretch of earth cleared of trees, was Curupaiti's first defense lines. The felled trees had been piled up along the front of the Paraguayans' earthworks to make an abatis - a twenty-foot-wide, eight-foot-high mass of thickly entwined tree trunks and boughs, every projecting limb fashioned into a sharp stake. Behind the abatis, the earth sloped toward the thirty-six guns mounted on raised platforms to give them the broadest possible range. Their crews used this to great advantage, raking the Allied columns with canister and grape as they came out of the carrizal.

Two Brazilian battalions had come through the morasses to a narrow strip of forest at the edge of the clearing in front of the abatis. To the left, the clearing was strewn with men who had marched ahead of them and had charged toward the abatis; groups of soldiers who had made it across were pinned down behind the wall of tangled timber. To the right, an Argentinian battalion was advancing across the clear ing, its officers on horseback, riding between the infantry and rallying them forward. The voluntários saw the Argentinian commanding officer and his horse hurled to earth when a shell burst next to them. Four men immediately went to the colonel's aid and began to carry him back toward the carrizal.

Another shell exploded, leaving a swirl of smoke and dust and no sight of the wounded officer and his four rescuers.

Fifteen minutes later, a colonel with sword in hand gave the order for the battalion to advance: "Forward, Brasileiros! Forward, voluntários!"

Corporal Policarpo Mossambe broke out of the trees and ran forward, with Antônio Paciência close on his heels. Policarpo dodged between stumps and charred undergrowth, shouting for his squad to follow him.

"Up, Brasileiros! Up!" shouted officers to any who dropped behind stumps to escape the storm. "Viva Dom Pedro!" they yelled.

A shell plowed up the earth within thirty feet of Antônio Paciência. The screams of the men caught there mingled with an insane cacophony of shrieks and roars and the hiss and hum of musket balls, the volleys rising in deadly accompaniment to the thunder of the guns.

When Antônio and Policarpo got to the tangled mass of timber, Sergeant Bomfim was already there, with perhaps five hundred others spread out along several hundred yards of the abatis. Some voluntários found places where they could fire at the enemy through the abatis, but a curtain of dust and smoke in front of the trench made it impossible to see the effect of their shots. Some were assaulting the abatis itself with axes, trying to open a passage for a charge against the enemy.

A soldier standing on a log as he swung his ax suddenly dropped the implement:"O Mary, Mother -" He fell back on the ground beside Bomfim, a ball in his chest.

Policarpo Mossambe stepped up to the log. He seized the ax and swung it, sending chips of wood flying like bullets.

"At it, Corporal! At it!" Sergeant Bomfim shouted.

When Policarpo had chopped through a thick limb, Bomfim and the others dragged it away. Policarpo kept swinging at the timbers, tearing off smaller branches with his hand, ignoring the bullets singing over the abatis.

Sergeant Bomfim soon saw how little progress Policarpo was making against the great barrier. "We won't get through this way!" he said. "Set fire to it!"

Policarpo had worked his way about six feet into the abatis. He didn't react immediately to the sergeant's words but continued swinging the ax.

"Policarpo!" Antônio shouted. "Come down! We'll burn it!"

Policarpo had his back to Antônio; he nodded his head affirmatively but raised the ax for one last swing. He froze, with the blade held high.

An instant later, the shell exploded at the front edge of the tangle of trees, hurling Policarpo Mossambe high into the air.

Antônio was stunned by a chunk of flying timber and fell to the ground. "Oh, God!" he gasped, rocking his body, as a shattering pain shot through his head. He opened his eyes: Sergeant Mario Bomfim was lying ten feet away, his brains scooped out and spread on the ground beside him.

"Policarpo?" Antônio mumbled. "Mossambe?"

Policarpo lay at the edge of the abatis, one eye glaring lifelessly, the other mashed in with the flesh and bone of a wound at the side of his face.

A bugler close by was blowing the Retreat. Antônio saw voluntários all along the abatis start back toward the trees. The gunfire from the Paraguayans was intermittent, desultory, but a new sound came from that direction. Maddening to men who had survived the slaughter: the sound of music from Paraguayan bands behind the parapet - saluting the gunners of Curupaiti.

"Fall back!" an officer shouted, running toward Antônio. "Back, voluntário! Save yourself!"

Patient Anthony joined the stampede to the trees and the carrizal beyond.

Curupaiti, September 1866, (detail) Candido Lopez

Colección Museo Histórico Nacional, Buenos Aires

The full extent of the Paraguayan victory was not immediately known; they could count only fifty-four casualties among their gunners and infantry. When the routed Brazilians and Argentinians were lost from sight in the carrizal, thousands of Paraguayans left their trench, climbing over the abatis and swarming into the clear ing. For hours they worked, bayoneting the wounded enemy, stripping the dead, rejoicing in the gold coin so many macacos carried. When it was over, the Paraguayans left five thousand corpses in the clearing. And two thousand wounded were being carried through the marshes, altogether more than one-third of the Allied army.

"Tu- ru -tu-tu . . . Tu- ru -tu-tu . . ."

The ululation of the turututu horns was a response to the ineffectual bombardment from ten Brazilian ironclads that steamed upriver within range of both Curupaiti and Humaitá. After the rout at Curupaiti, the Allied offensive had bogged down beside the esteros, the first major advance coming nine months after the disaster, with an encircling movement of thirty thousand troops to positions north-east of Humaitá.

Hadley Baines Tuttle, the young Londoner, found the sound of the turututus ominous: After three years of hard service, Hadley Tuttle saw no end to the sacrifices that were being asked of the Paraguayan people. Humaitá and the esteros, reeking with the smell of death, increasingly reminded him of that dire winter of 1854/1855 outside Sevastopol.

Tuttle had been promoted to major and had served these past three years under Colonel George Thompson, the former British army officer whom López had made responsible for the defenses of Humaitá. With seven hundred shovel-wielding men in their engineering battalions, Thompson and Tuttle had directed the construction of 75,000 yards of earthworks - altogether forty-two miles of trenches and fortifications. At Humaitá, eight riverside batteries with sixty-eight guns now flanked the brick-and-stone Bateria de Londres. With Curupaiti battery and artillery positions on Humaitá's outer earthworks, the total firepower was 380 guns, mortars, and rocket stands.

For the two armies ground to a halt amid the steaming jungles and swamps just below Capricorn, summer was murderous: Forty-two miles of Paraguayan trenches either baked in the sun or were raked by torrential downpours; cholera raged, a minimum of fifty men a day carted off to the garrison hospital, and on some days, more than fifty carried out of the wards to mass graves at the cementario.

Hunger was another problem. The scouring of the countryside for new recruits after the carnage at Tuyuti was stripping Paraguay's small farms of labor. The ordinary soldier was in rags, considering himself lucky if he held onto a tattered poncho. And with the dwindling rations, he was growing emaciated. But his eyes still flashed boldly, and when the turututus sounded, he cheered. No matter how great the privation and sorrow to be endured, so long as the marshal-president lived and commanded, the soldier could believe in the ultimate success of Paraguay's cause.

Hadley Tuttle was present at an affair one evening in late October 1867 , during which Francisco Solano López was praising the spirit of his soldiers:

"Listen," López said, holding up a hand for silence from those seated near him. The marshal's face was flushed from the brandy he'd consumed after dinner. "Listen." In the distance, the turututus answered a shell from the Brazilian squadron. "Blow, my brave trumpeters!" he declaimed. "Blow, my sons, like the valorous three hundred of Gideon, champion of farmer warriors. Let the Brazilians hear you! May they tremble out there!"

The group with López this night were gathered in the house of Madame Eliza Lynch, who maintained a separate residence in the garrison at a respectable distance from her lover's quarters. She was seated at a table with three other ladies at the far end of the room playing whist, a game at which she excelled.

Eliza Lynch

Framcisco Solano Lopez

As Hadley Tuttle sat with the marshal, Colonel George Thompson, and two other guests, he occasionally glanced toward the card table with a look of adoration at the young woman on Madame Lynch's right - Luisa Adelaida.

Hadley Tuttle had married Luisa Adelaida in May 1865. López and Eliza Lynch were present because of Madame Lynch's fondness for Luisa Adelaida's mother, Dona Gabriel - one of the few to befriend La Lynch when she arrived at Asunción from Paris in 1855, already pregnant with her lover's child. "They are not worth your tears," Dona Gabriel had said once in response to Eliza Lynch's misery at being scorned by the ladies of Asunción. "They reject you because they envy your beauty and intelligence."

After Luisa Adelaida's marriage to Tuttle, Madame Lynch had often invited the couple to her entertainments, for they were a lively and handsome pair. Of course, Major Hadley, like other officers present this night, was beginning to show the strain of three hard years. His uniform was clean but shabby, with a patch on one arm and a tear that had been stitched by Luisa Adelaida; and his face was scorched by the sun and revealed lines of worry and weariness as he listened to the marshal.

Three times already, López had sought peace: On the eve of the battle of Curupaiti, the marshal-president had met with Mitre of Argentina; early in January 1867, López had agreed to accept an offer by the United States to mediate an accord; this past August, a British diplomat from Buenos Aires had found López amenable to a peace settlement. Each attempt had failed, for the Allies' demand was totally unacceptable to López: "We will not discuss peace until Francisco Solano López is off Paraguayan soil."

When he met the British diplomat from Buenos Aires in Humaitá this past August, Tuttle had given him letters for his family in south London: Writing to his brother, Ainsley, who had served with him at the Crimea, he had given his impressions of the situation:

Since the start of the war, the enemy has said its belligerence is a crusade in the name of humanity to free Paraguay from a tyrant who rules by terror alone. López is a man to be feared. God knows, I have been within earshot of Asunción jail more times than I want to remember, when the secret police were torturing some unfortunate enemy of El Presidente. But the enemies' claim that the destruction of López is their only objective must be doubted. Their own hands are red with the blood of political opponents they have butchered.

The terms of the treaty signed by Brazil, Argentina, and the Colorados of Uruguay are well known here, including the secret clauses that guarantee Brazil and Argentina thousands of square miles of Paraguayan territory. The Paraguayans believe the enemies' real objective is nothing less than the extermination of their race.

The Paraguayan peasant, unlike his counterpart in Brazil, owns his small parcel of land or rents it from the state at a low price; his children are being educated at schools established in every pueblo; his health is protected with mass campaigns of inoculation against smallpox and with other measures instituted by the English doctors. He sees all this as coming from the despot who rules him and whom he esteems as passionately as his ancestors did the black robes of the reductions. As long as the marshal-president is there, the Paraguayans will continue the struggle, even if their beloved fatherland is left in ashes.

Like his commanding officer, Colonel Thompson, and most of the foreigners paid by López, Hadley Tuttle had chosen to remain in Paraguay, though not without increasing concern for the safety of his wife.

Luisa Adelaida and Dona Gabriel had been at Humaitá for six months, staying with Hadley in a house near Madame Lynch's quarters. Eliza Lynch herself had asked them here to assist in organizing a women's corps. Several hundred mothers and daughters served in the hospital, cleaned the barracks and campgrounds, and cultivated field crops. Madame Lynch was often seen in the uniform of a colonel of the Paraguayan army when she went among the women, who had their own captains and sergeants; they had sent deputations to the marshal-president asking to be drilled as soldiers and allowed to fight, but López had turned down these requests.

At Eliza Lynch's house this October night, Marshal López still believed the enemy could be driven off Paraguayan soil with one more hammer blow like Curupaiti.

López was planning to strike that blow with another attack against Tuyuti, where the Paraguayans had suffered their worst defeat. Tuyuti, now the main supply base for the Allied divisions deployed northeast of Humaitá, could be seen from watchtowers along Humaitá's outer earthworks. López intended to send eight thousand men - sixteen battalions of infantry; six regiments of cavalry - against Tuyuti. "We failed last year because surprise was lost. This time we will cross the esteros at night and be in position before dawn. We will avenge the slaughter at first Tuyuti," López promised.

The guns on the Brazilian ironclads had stopped firing, and the turututus had been laid aside, when the Tuttles left Eliza Lynch's quarters. The silence that followed the bombardment was pierced by the scream of the cicada. Sentinels in the trenches and watchtowers saw the enemy camps and ships frozen in the moonlight, but for most at Humaitá, late night brought a false but welcome peace.

Hadley held Luisa Adelaida tightly on the short walk from Madame Lynch's house to their own place, for they had only a few hours together: In the morning, Luisa Adelaida and Dona Gabriel were returning to Asunción.

Alone in their room, Hadley and Luisa Adelaida spoke in whispers, for the simple interior had makeshift partitions plaited with reeds and thick grass. They made love, knowing that they would have to cherish these moments through months of separation.

The next morning, Hadley escorted Luisa Adelaida and her parents to an embarkation point near Humaitá to board a steamer for the voyage north. A regimental band played as the paddle wheeler that had come down from Asunción arrived at the landing. It was crammed with new recruits. A few were pure Guarani; a few, mulattoes; the majority, of mixed Guarani-Spanish descent. Some were in rags, but most wore their best shirts and trousers or chiripas, loose-fitting gear of a square of cloth draped from the waist and between the legs. A few sported red shirts, white trousers, and military caps - uniforms home-sewn or inherited from fathers and brothers who had not returned. What was common to every recruit, from the tall ones who looked older to little fellows having trouble keeping up, was youth: The youngest of these new soldiers was nine years old; the oldest warrior-to-be, thirteen.

By the spring of 1867, the Allied generals chose their words carefully when speaking of the foe. "I expect to do a thing or two," said Field Marshal Luís Alves de Lima e Silva, marquês de Caxias, who served Dom Pedro Segundo as minister of war and took command of the Brazilian forces after the disaster at Curupaiti. Caxias was sixty-four years old when he got to Paraguay in November 1866, boasting a reputation as a skillful tactician and organizer who had not lost a battle since graduating from the military academy at Rio de Janeiro at the age of eighteen. With the Brazilian fondness for grandiose sobriquets, the field marshal was called "O Pacificador" in honor of his triumphs, especially in suppressing revolts against the empire. Gray-haired, with a bristly white mustache, slightly hooded eyes, and sharp features; Caxias was endowed with a strong, spare physique and the stamina of a man twenty years younger. The field-marshal had need of all his energy for the tasks he found awaiting him upon landing in Paraguay at the end of 1866.

After Curupaiti, where thousands were slaughtered, the heartsick survivors had slogged back through the carrizal with the wounded. Their demoralization had swiftly spread to every quarter of the Allied front.

Among the fifty thousand men waiting below the miasmal Bellaco esteros were thousands of "voluntários" here against their will, both those who had come as slaves and the wretched of the sertão herded out of the caatinga in irons. Many would have deserted but for the fact that thousands of miles separated them from their hometowns.

There was another sinister aspect to the malaise that was wearing down the Allied army: Brazilians and Argentinians were stationed along different sections of the front, but word of insolence from either group and bloody fights erupted between them, the streets of Paso la Patria not infrequently a battleground for mobs of violent Brazilians and Argentinians.

Above all, there was the loathsome terrain occupied by the Allied army. The river below the morasses, Bellaco Sur, had become a torrent in the rainy season; the water table of the marshes had risen; campsites had been engulfed.

Inevitably, there was sickness. Cholera and typhoid fever became the true enemies. Early in 1867, the daily toll was three hundred. By May, no fewer than thirteen thousand men were in hospitals.

The Allied command was in theory still shared by Bartolomé Mitre, president of Argentina; Venancio Flores, the Uruguayan, who had only a few hundred men left under his command; and, now that he had taken over the Brazilian forces, the marquês de Caxias. In practice, Caxias was virtually supreme commander, for Mitre was suffering most of the recriminations for the losses at Curupaiti, and Venancio Flores was called back to Montevideo to deal with one of the perennial disturbances between Blancos and Colorados.

Field-Marshal Caxias spent six months reorganizing the army, which was now predominantly Brazilian. Base camps like Tuyuti were cleaned up and their fortifications improved; telegraph lines were laid and buried below earth; a serious attempt was made to map the enemy's positions.

Caxias restored discipline and improved morale, and by July 22, 1867, had thirty thousand men ready to move for the encirclement of Humaitá by land. General Manuel Luís Osório, who had led the initial landings in Paraguay, commanded a newly formed Third Corps. For three months, Osório's men slogged northward, cutting almost fifty thousand yards of trenches and establishing batteries all along their twenty-eight-mile route. By late October 1867, they had swung toward the west and were in sight of the Rio Paraguay. On November 2 they captured Tayí, a small riverside post fifteen miles north of Humaitá.

But November 2 was also the night Marshal López chose to send eight thousand men through the esteros to destroy the Allied First Corps at Tuyuti.

Marques de Caxias

November 2 was a Saturday, All Souls' Day. Morning Masses at Tuyuti offered prayers for those in Purgatory, but by nightfall the dead were forgotten amid a carnival atmosphere around the comércio, where sutlers plied the ranks with cachaça and other promises of blessed oblivion and escape from the drudgery of duty in the trenches and redoubts.

Tuyuti's High Command kept sedately to their quarters, playing cards or relax ing with their brandies and port. Another group of Brazilian and Argentinian officers, at peace with each other this night, were gathered in an open-sided mess tent at camp headquarters. Young men and old; regular army, Guarda Nacional, and voluntários - this crowd's behavior was anything but sedate, with garrafas of liquor passing quickly from one hand to another. Smoke from a battery of thick black cigars lay banked up in the yellowish glare from oil lamps.

Firmino Dantas da Silva - Capitão Firmino Dantas - and his cousin, gunner Clóvis Lima da Silva, were among the officers in the tent. They sat next to each other at a table to the right of a dance area where twin sisters, Sabella and Narcisa, morena girls from the Bahia, were performing. They had wavy brunette hair, ruby lips, green eyes that laughed, teased, invited; their cinnamon flesh was warm as the tropical night. They wore V-necked white lace blouses, which scarcely contained their full breasts; their dark red satin skirts swirled against their swinging hips.

Two black soldiers, their khaki drill uniforms soaked, sat to one side, their hands a blur above the drums they played in accompaniment with three guitarists. A lancer from Rio Grande do Sul rose and joined the morenas in dance.

The girls laughed and exchanged bawdy quips with the lancer as they moved their bodies to the beat of the drums. A procurer of prostitutes at Salvador had trans ported them here a year ago.

Clóvis's eyes followed the girls across the dance floor. Firmino Dantas melancholy gaze was more reserved.

Firmino had returned to Tuyuti in July 1867, a few weeks before the Second and Third Corps' drive to the north and west. Firmino still served on the staff of the quartermaster-general and had been promoted to captain, for he had done good work at Itapiru's stores.

Firmino had a packet of letters now from his fiancee, Carlinda, and from Ulisses Tavares. "Come back to Itatinga," the barão had written this past April. "You have done your share, Firmino. Come home, to the honors you deserve!" That Ulisses Tavares should make this appeal had come as no surprise to Firmino. His grandfather's expectation of a swift, victorious campaign against a barbarous foe had to seem lunacy now viewed within the slow murderous reality of a conflict claiming thousands of Brazilian lives and costing the empire sixty million dollars a year.

Earlier tonight, Firmino and Clóvis had gone for a walk along the perimeter of the citadel. Major Clóvis had been at the base since May 1866, commanding a battery to the right of Tuyuti's first and second lines of trenches.

Stocky, muscular, his Tupi heritage discernible in his broad face, Clóvis da Silva was imbued with the brazen spirit of his bandeirante ancestors.

"The Guarani still hear the Jesuits preaching about devils from São Paulo. I don't know how long their resistance will last. Whatever it takes, however great our sacrifice, in the end, we will conquer them."

"Conquer, Clóvis? Or exterminate?"

"Either way, cousin . . . either way, Brazil will triumph."

Firmino had not doubted, when Brazilian territory was invaded, the just cause of the war, but talk of exterminating the Paraguayans made him wonder if this conflict was to bring honor or shame to Brazil.

Firmino agonized over such concerns. Yet, his anxieties over a protracted war and his own personal fear of combat had not driven him away from Paraguay. Ulisses Tavares had called him home, but still he remained.

For the first time, Firmino Dantas found himself free of the patriarch who had ruled his life since childhood. Free to daydream about his inventions, to indulge his musings about technology, to fantasize about the Swiss girl, Renata Laubner.

Firmino had even considered confessing to the barão his passion for Renata, but after several attempts at writing to Ulisses Tavares, he had thought better of it and kept his love a secret.

Firmino had been less discreet with Clóvis da Silva. "When I return to Tiberica, she'll be mine," he had said to his cousin.

"Carlinda Mendes will be there, Firmino." "I'll be honest with Carlinda."

"Dream all you want, Firmino, but when you go back to Itatinga, you'll take Carlinda Mendes in your arms and be happy with your bride."

In the mess tent, as they watched Sabella and Narcisa, Clóvis suddenly turned to Firmino: "Why so sad, cousin? Sick with longing for your princess? Jewels flutter before you, but do you see them? You're blind, Firmino, stricken with the old sickness."

"And what may that be?"

"Ah, such a malady! The sickness that's raged like an epidemic ever since the Portuguese came to Brazil: our craving for El Dorado!"

"But Renata Laubner is there, Clóvis. She sleeps this very hour at Tiberica, her crown of golden hair upon a satin pillow."

"Yes - at Tiberica! And here, Firmino - tonight? With one of these jewels fluttering between your fingers?"

"One jewel? Compared with the treasure I seek?"

"Ah, dreamer, a drink, then. To your golden princess, cousin Firmino - El Dorado of your heart!"

At daybreak on November 3, 6,500 Paraguayan infantry and fifteen hundred cavalrymen who had crossed the Bellaco esteros in the dark fell upon Tuyuti base. The first line of trenches, manned by Paraguayan exiles, deserters, and prisoners compelled to serve the Allies, fell to the attacking brigades in minutes. At the second, defended by Argentinians and Brazilians, the few companies who stayed at their posts were slaughtered and the mass of defenders hurled back toward the comércio.

Major Clóvis da Silva was at a redoubt to the right of the trenches to which he had returned the early hours of November 3. The artillerymen were taken by surprise: At the alarm, seven hundred Paraguayan cavalrymen leapt from their ponies and were on the earthworks with swords drawn as the gunners poured out of their tents and shelters in total confusion. At 6:30 A.M., half an hour after the Paraguayans had left the esteros, the redoubt surrendered; twelve officers and 249 men were taken prisoner.

By 7:00 A.M., Tuyuti base lay beneath a pall of smoke from blazing stores and destroyed powder magazines. Hundreds of Allied soldiers fleeing with the horde of camp followers did not stop running until they reached the banks of the Upper Paraná, three miles to the south. Others streamed into the citadel, where they sheltered behind the earthworks, waiting for the next enemy onslaught.The attack did not come immediately, for the Paraguayans had halted at the comércio.

They went berserk there, plundering the wagons and stores, swilling garrafas of liquor, stuffing their mouths with handfuls of sugar, fighting one another for dainties they had not seen before, gnawing at raw artichokes and rock-hard English cheeses.

The rampage cost the Paraguayans dearly, for it gave the battered garrison an opportunity to regroup. At 8:00 A.M., Brazilians and Argentinians counterattacked from the citadel and other positions, engaging the Paraguayans in ferocious hand-to-hand combat.

By 9:00 A.M. the second battle of Tuyuti was over. The Paraguayans streamed back through the esteros, leaving twelve hundred dead and the same number wounded. The Allies claimed victory, but they had lost two thousand men and their garrison was a smoldering ruin. The Paraguayans took fifteen Allied guns back to Humaitá and many captives, including Clóvis da Silva.

Firmino Dantas da Silva relived every agony of his first battle. He rushed like a madman toward those very Yatai palms where he had cowered during the earlier battle. One hundred yards from the trees, he was cut down by Paraguayan soldiers, two bullets buried in his flesh, a machete wound in his shoulder.

Firmino Dantas was carried back into the citadel, among hundreds of wounded, and, miraculously, survived. But his trials in Paraguay were not over.

TO PART THREE: THE PARAGUAYAN WAR

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