Letters from the Battlefields of Paraguay. Richard Francis Burton
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O barbaro do Paraguay :”
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" Revue des Deux Mondes," of February 15th, 1865, and August 15th, 1868, by M. Elisée Reclus: November 15th, 1865, by M. J. de Cazane, and September 15th, 1866, by M. Duchesne de Bellecourt. The ignorance of fact paraded in these papers is to be equalled only by the animus which pervades them.
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they hold his military republico-despotism a hornets' nest, a thorn in the side of the progressive Brazil, and they look upon the long campaign as the battle of civilization, pure and simple, against the Japanese isolation and the Darfurian monocracy which are erroneously dated from the days of Dr. Francia.
It is hardly necessary for me to declare that
Tros Tyriusque mihi nullo discrimine agetur,
or to hope for immunity from the pains and penalties which attach to the purely neutral. My sympathies are with the Brazil, as far at least as her " mission" is literally, not liberally, to unlock the great Southern Mississippi; to “keep open and develop the magnificent water system of the Paraguay-Parana-Plate,” and to sweep away from the shores of its main arteries the Guardias and Piquetes, the batteries and the ridiculous little stockades which served to keep its waters comparatively desert, and to convert a highway belonging to the world into a mere monopoly of Paraguay. I have spoken somewhat harshly of the Brazilian army: here hablar fuerte, the sermo brevis et durus is the duty of a writer. Its personnel as a rule, admitting many brilliant exceptions, imperfectly represents the noble Brazilian people; its successes have been hailed with an enthusiasm run frantic, and its spare merits have been commended with an exaggeration whose consequences, operating upon public opinion, may do the country much real harm. The Brazilian freeman, as his history shows, may court comparison with the bravest of soldiers. The case is not the same with the freed man and the servile fresh from the hoe.
On the other hand, I cannot but admire the wonderful energy and the indomitable will of Marshal President Lopez and his small but sinewy power, which will never be forgotten nor want admirers as long as history shall endure. In many actions one-third of the number engaged was placed hors de combat, and often of a battalion numbering 400 men only 100 returned.
The Paraguayans have indeed fought for their altars and their fires, fought for the green graves of their sires, their God, their native land, for the “vindication of their outraged honour, the guarantee of their threatened existence, and the stability of their wounded rights.”
As regards the “atrocities of Lopez” — to quote another popular heading — his “unheard-of and fiendish cruelties, his extorting by torture the testimony required from foreign employés, his starving to death prisoners of war; flogging to death men, women, and children; his starving and killing the wounded, and his repeatedly shooting and bayoneting, amongst others, his brothers, his sisters, and the bishop, the reader will, I venture to assert, do well to exercise a certain reservation of judgment, like myself. Truth seems to be absolutely unknown upon the banks of the Plate. After the most positive assertions and the most life-like details concerning the execution of some malefactor (or victim) in high (or low) position have been paraded before the world, a few days will prove that the whole has been one solid circumstantial lie. The fact is that nothing about Paraguay is known outside the country, and of its government very little is known even inside its limits. The foreign employés themselves must generally speak from hearsay, and some of them have not failed to supplement their facts by fancies, theories, and fictions. The most trustworthy will own that in the case, for instance, of a whole corps being decimated, they remained, though almost upon the spot, in ignorance of the executions till two years afterwards.
The war in Paraguay, impartially viewed, is no less than the doom of a race which is to be relieved from a self-chosen tyranny by becoming chair á canon by the process of annihilation. It is the Nemesis of Faith; the death-throe of a policy bequeathed by Jesuitism to South America; it shows the flood of Time surging over a relic of old world semi-barbarism, a palæzoic humanity. Nor is the semi-barbaric race itself without an especial interest of its own. The Guarani family appears to have had its especial habitat in Paraguay, and thence to have extended its dialects, from the Rio de la Plata to the roots of the Andes, and even to the peoples of the Antilles. The language is now being killed out at the heart, the limbs are being slowly but surely lopped off, and another century will witness its extirpation.
This Crimean Campaign,
Si licet in parvis exemplis grandibus uti,
abounds in instances of splendid futile devotion. It is a fatal war waged by hundreds against thousands; a battle of Brown Bess and poor old flint muskets against the Spencer and Enfield rifles; of honeycombed carronades, long and short, against Whitworths and Lahittes; of punts and canoes against ironclads. It brings before us an anthropological type which, like the English of a past generation, holds every Paraguayan boy-man equal, single-handed, to at least any half-dozen of his enemies. It is moreover an affair which, whilst testing so severely the gigantic powers of the Brazil and threatening momentous effects to its good genius—democratic imperialism, has yet been prosecuted with so many laches, with an incuriousness, an inconséquence, and in many cases with a venality which, common as are such malpractices in the non-combattant ranks of all semi-disciplined and many disciplined armies, here presents an ethnographical study.
Nor is the subject without its sensational side. These pages will offer details concerning places and persons whose names are more or less familiar to the public ear : Asuncion, the capital of this “inland China;" Humaitá, the “Sebastopol of the South,” that gigantic "hum" whose "grim ramparts" (wretched earthworks) appeared even in the London Times as “the Gibraltar, or more properly the Mantua, of South America;” the Amazonian corps raised by “Mrs. President Lopez,” the mysterious Madame Lynch, en personne; the Marshal President, who though separated by half a world from our world, must ever command a sufficiency of interest; the conspiracy that has been so fiercely asserted and denied, the new Reign of Terror, called by some the Reign of Rigour, and the executions which, if they really took place, can be explained only by the dementia preceding destruction, or by the most fatal of necessities. In the purely military sketches the most interesting details are those concerning the much talked-of earthworks, a style of defence becoming in these days of breech-loading and couchant drill, more and more necessary as the means of offence shall improve, and calling for as much practical information as we can collect.
The Paraguayan campaign is essentially a war of entrenchments as opposed to the siege and the pitched battle, and entrenchments have now taken a high position in strategics.
I made two visits to the seat of war. The first, from August 15th to September 5th, 1868, led me to the mouth of the Tebicuary River, when the Paraguayan batteries of San Fernando were being stormed. The second began on April 4th, lasted till April 18th, 1869, and showed me the curtain rising upon the third act of the campaign—the Guerilla phase preceding the conclusion. During a residence of some three and a half years in the Brazil, the Paraguayan question was the theme of daily conversation around me, and where my personal experience failed it was not difficult to turn to account that of others.
In making up the map, the trustworthy and satisfactory labours of Captain Mouchez of the French Imperial navy, which have been adopted by the Allied Armies in the field,* have of course been taken as a base. The northern part of the republic is borrowed from Colonel du Graty, whose geography, whatever may be his politics, is, in this portion, better than that of any other traveller. The whole has been corrected by the map illustrating the work on the Paraguayan War, by Lieut.-Col. George Thompson, of whom more presently.
I have not yet had leisure to reduce to writing the printed documents of the Brazilian War-office, obligingly supplied to me by the enlightened Minister H. E. the Burão de Muritiba. He, however, who would produce a detailed and connected study, a complete and satisfactory account of a four years' campaign, interesting even after Custozza, Sadowa, and Lissa, and certainly the most complicated, topographically and strategically, that has been fought since 1850, must have more time and better opportunities than I possess. He should have access to the private as well as to the