The War of the End of the World

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  The general completes his calculations. “It’s worse than I had supposed, gentlemen,” he says to the fan of silhouettes. He has a tight feeling in his chest, and can sense how anxiously the officers are waiting. “One thousand twenty-seven casualties! A third of our forces! Twenty-three officers dead, among them Colonel Carlos Telles and Colonel Serra Martins. Do you realize what that means?”

  No one answers, but the general knows that all of them are perfectly aware that such a large number of casualties is tantamount to a defeat. He sees how frustrated, angry, astonished his subordinates are; the eyes of a number of them glisten with tears.

  “Going on with the attack would have meant being completely wiped out. Do you understand that now?”

  Because when, alarmed by the jagunços’ resistance and his intuition that casualties among the patriots were already heavy—along with the tremendous shock to him of the death of Telles and of Serra Martins—General Oscar ordered the troops to confine themselves to defending the positions they had already taken, the order was greeted with indignation by many of these officers, and the general feared that some of them might even disobey it. His own adjutant, First Lieutenant Pinto Souza, of the Third Infantry Corps, protested: “But victory is within our reach, sir!” It was not. A third of the troops hors de combat. An extremely high percentage, catastrophic, despite the eight blocks captured and the damage inflicted on the fanatics.

  He puts the Pyrotechnist out of his mind and sets to work with his general staff. He dismisses the field officers, aides, or representatives of the assault corps, repeating the order to hold the positions already taken and not fall back a single step, and to strengthen the barricade, opposite the one that stopped them, which the troops had started to erect a few hours before when it became evident that the city was not going to fall. He decides that the Seventh Brigade, which has remained behind to protect the wounded on A Favela, will move forward to reinforce the “black line,” the new front, already well established in the heart of the rebellious city. In the cone of light from the oil lamp, he bends over the map drawn by Captain Teotônio Coriolano, his staff cartographer, on the basis of reports that he has received and his own observations of the situation. A fifth of Canudos has been taken, a triangle which extends from the line of trench works at Fazenda Velha, still in the hands of the jagunços, to the cemetery, which has been captured, thus allowing the patriot troops to occupy a position within less than eighty paces of the Church of Santo Antônio.

  “The front is no more than fifteen hundred meters long at most,” Captain Guimarães says, making no attempt to conceal his disappointment. “We’re far from having them surrounded. We haven’t occupied even a quarter of the circumference. They can come and go and receive supplies.”

  “We can’t extend the front until the reinforcements arrive,” Major Carrenho complains. “Why are they leaving us stranded like this, sir?”

  General Oscar shrugs. Ever since the ambush, on the day they arrived in Canudos, as he has seen the death toll among his men mount, he has kept sending urgent, justified pleas for more troops, and has even gone so far as to exaggerate the seriousness of the situation. Why don’t his superiors send them?

  “If there had been five thousand of us instead of three thousand, Canudos would be ours by now,” an officer says, thinking aloud.

  The general forces them to change the subject by informing them that he is going to inspect the front and the new field hospital set up that morning along the ravines of the Vaza-Barris once the jagunços had been dislodged from there. Before leaving the Pyrotechnist’s shack, he drinks a cup of coffee, listening to the bells and the Ave Marias of the fanatics, so close by he can’t believe it.

  Even at the age of fifty-three, he is a man of great energy, who rarely feels fatigue. He has followed the development of the attack in detail, watching through his field glasses since five this morning, when the corps began to leave A Favela, and he has marched with them, immediately behind the battalions of the vanguard, without halting to rest and without eating a single mouthful, contenting himself with a few sips from his canteen. Early in the afternoon, a stray bullet wounded a soldier who was marching directly alongside him. He leaves the shack. Night has fallen; there is not a star in the sky. The sound of the prayers is everywhere, like a magic spell, and drowns out the last bursts of rifle fire. He gives orders that no fires be lighted in the trench. Nonetheless, in the course of his slow tour of inspection via an itinerary full of twists and turns, escorted by four officers, at many points along the winding, labyrinthine barricade hastily thrown up by the soldiers, behind which they are lined up, their backs against the inner brick facing of the wall of debris, earth, stones, oil drums, and all manner of implements and objects, sleeping one against the other, some with enough high spirits still to be singing or poking their heads over the wall to insult the bandits—who must be crouching listening behind their own barricade, a mere five yards distant in some sections, ten in others, and in still others the two practically touching—General Oscar finds braziers around which knots of soldiers are making soup with scraps of meat, heating up chunks of jerky, or warming wounded men trembling with fever who are in such bad shape that they cannot be evacuated to the field hospital.

  He exchanges a few words with the leaders of companies, of battalions. They are exhausted, and he discovers in them the same desolation, mingled with stupefaction, that he feels in the face of the incomprehensible things that have happened in this accursed war. As he congratulates a young second lieutenant for his heroic conduct during the attack, he repeats to himself something that he has told himself many times before: “I curse the day I accepted this command.”

  While he was in Queimadas, struggling with the devilish problems of lack of transport, of draft animals, of carts for the provisions, which were to keep him stuck there for three months of mortal boredom, General Oscar learned that before the army and the office of the President of the Republic had offered him command of the expedition three generals on active duty had refused to accept it. He now understands why he was offered what he believed in his naïveté to be a distinction, a command that would gloriously crown his career. As he shakes hands and exchanges impressions with officers and soldiers whose faces he is unable to see in the dark, he reflects on what an idiot he was to have believed that his superiors wanted to reward him by removing him from his post as commanding officer of the military district of O Piauí, where he had so peacefully put in his almost twenty years of service, so as to allow him, before retiring, to lead a glorious military campaign: crushing the monarchist-restorationist rebellion in the backlands of the state of Bahia. No, he had not been entrusted with this command in order to compensate him for having been passed over for promotion so many times and in order to recognize his merits at last—as he had told his wife when he announced the news to her—but in order to ensure, rather, that other high-ranking army officers would not get bogged down in a quagmire like this. Those three generals had been right, of course! Had he, a career officer, been prepared for this grotesque, absurd war, fought totally outside the rules and conventions of a real war?

  At one end of the wall they are barbecuing a steer. General Oscar sits down to eat a few mouthfuls of grilled beef amid a group of officers. He chats with them about the bells of Canudos and those prayers that have just ended. The oddities of this war: those prayers, those processions, those pealing bells, those churches that the bandits defend so furiously. Once again he is overcome with uneasiness. It troubles him that those degenerate cannibals are, despite everything, Brazilians, that is to say, essentially the same as those attacking them. But what he—a devout believer who rigorously obeys the precepts of the Church and who suspects that one of the reasons he has not advanced more rapidly in his career is that he has always stubbornly refused to become a Freemason—finds most disturbing is the bandits’ false claim that they are Catholics. Those evidences of faith—rosaries, processions, cries of “Long live the Blessed Jesus”�
��disconcert him and pain him, despite the fact that at every Mass in the field Father Lizzardo inveighs against those impious wretches, accusing them of being apostates, heretics, and profaners of the faith. Even so, General Oscar cannot keep from feeling ill at ease in the face of this enemy that has turned this war into something so different from what he was expecting, into a sort of religious conflict. But the fact that he is disturbed does not mean that he has ceased to hate this abnormal, unpredictable adversary, who, moreover, has humiliated him by not falling to pieces at the very first encounter, as he was convinced would happen when he accepted this mission.

  During the night he comes to hate this enemy even more when, after having inspected the barricade from one end to the other, he crosses the stretch of open terrain beyond on his way to the field hospital alongside the Vaza-Barris. At the halfway point are the Krupp 7.5s which have accompanied the attack, firing round after round of shells, without respite, at those towers from which the enemy causes so much damage to the troops. General Oscar chats for a moment with the artillerymen who, despite the lateness of the hour, are digging a trench with picks, reinforcing the cannon emplacement.

  The visit to the field hospital, on the banks of the dry riverbed, stuns him; he must master himself so that the doctors, the medical aides, those who are dying will not notice. He is grateful that the visit is taking place in semidarkness, for the lanterns and campfires reveal only an insignificant part of the spectacle at his feet. The wounded are even more exposed to the elements than at A Favela, lying on the bare clay and gravel, still in the same groups in which they arrived, and the doctors explain to him that, as a crowning misfortune, all during the afternoon and part of the evening a strong wind has been blowing clouds of red dust into open wounds that they have no way of bandaging or disinfecting or suturing. On every hand he can hear screams, moans, weeping, delirious raving from fever. The stench is overpowering and Captain Coriolano, who is accompanying him, suddenly retches. He hears him burst into apologies. Every so often, the general stops to say a few affectionate words, to pat a wounded soldier on the back, to shake a hand. He congratulates them on their courage, thanks, them in the name of the Republic for their sacrifice. But he remains silent when they halt before the bodies of Colonel Carlos Telles and Colonel Serra Martins, who are to be buried tomorrow. The former received a fatal bullet wound in the chest at the very beginning of the attack, as he was crossing the river; the second was killed in hand-to-hand combat as darkness was falling, leading his men in a charge against the jagunços’ barricade. He is told that the colonel’s dead body, pierced through with dagger, lance, and machete wounds, was found with the genitals, ears, and nose lopped off. In moments such as this, when he hears that a valiant, outstanding officer has been mutilated in this way, General Oscar tells himself that the policy of slitting the throats of all Sebastianists taken prisoner is a just one. The justification for this policy, as he sees it in the light of his conscience, is twofold: in the first place, these are bandits, not soldiers whom honor would bid them respect; and secondly, the lack of provisions leaves no alternative, since it would be more cruel to starve them out and absurd to deprive the patriots of rations in order to feed monsters capable of doing what they have done to this colonel.

  As his tour of the field hospital is ending, he halts in front of a poor soldier whom two medical aides are holding down as they amputate one of his feet. The surgeon is squatting on his knees sawing, and the general hears him ask them to wipe the sweat out of his eyes. He must not be able to see much in any event, since the wind has come up again and is making the flames of the bonfire flicker. When the surgeon stands up, he recognizes Teotônio Leal Cavalcanti, the young man from São Paulo. They exchange greetings. As General Oscar starts back to his headquarters, the medical student’s thin, tormented face accompanies him. A few days ago this young man, whom he did not know, presented himself before him, stood at attention, and said: “I’ve killed my best friend and wish to be punished.” The general’s adjutant, First Lieutenant Pinto Souza, was present at the interview, and on learning who the officer was whose suffering Teotônio, out of compassion, had ended by putting a bullet through his temple, the lieutenant had turned deathly pale. The scene made the general tremble with emotion. His voice breaking, Teotônio Leal Cavalcanti explained the state that First Lieutenant Pires Ferreira had been in—blind, his hands amputated, a broken man in body and spirit—the officer’s pleas to be put out of his misery, and his own gnawing remorse at having done so. General Oscar has ordered him not to say one word about the matter and continue to perform his duties as though nothing had happened. Once the operations in the field are over, the general will decide his case.

  Back at the Pyrotechnist’s shack, he has already lain down in his hammock when Lieutenant Pinto Souza, who has just returned from A Favela, arrives with a message. The Seventh Brigade will be arriving at dawn to reinforce the “black line.”

  He sleeps for five hours, and the following morning he feels restored, brimming with energy as he drinks his coffee and eats a handful of the little cornmeal biscuits that are the treasure of his private rations. A strange silence reigns on the entire front. The battalions of the Seventh Brigade are about to arrive, and to cover their advance across the open terrain the general orders the gun crews of the Krupps to bombard the towers. Since the very first days, he has asked his superiors to send him, along with the reinforcements, those special steel-tipped 70 millimeter shells that were manufactured in the Rio Mint to pierce the deck plating of the rebels’ boats during the September 6 uprising. Why do they pay no attention to this request? He has explained to the High Command that shrapnel and gas grenades are not sufficient to destroy those damned towers carved out of living rock. Why do they keep turning a deaf ear?

  The day goes by with only sporadic gunfire, and General Oscar spends it supervising the disposition of the fresh troops of the Seventh Brigade along the “black line.” During a meeting with his staff, it is decided that another attack is definitely out of the question until the reinforcements arrive. They will fight a holding action, while trying to advance gradually on the enemy’s right flank—which at first glance would appear to be Canudos’s weakest—in small-scale attacks, without exposing all the men at once. It is also decided that an expedition will be sent to Monte Santo, to escort those wounded in good enough condition to withstand the march.

  At midday, as they are burying Colonels Silva Telles and Serra Martins, down by the river, in a single grave with two wooden crosses, a piece of bad news is brought to the general: Colonel Neri has just been wounded in the hip by a stray bullet as he was answering a call of nature at a crossarm in the “black line.”

  That night the general is awakened by heavy gunfire. The jagunços are attacking the two Krupp 7.5 cannons in the field and the Thirty-second Infantry Battalion is hastening to reinforce the artillerymen. The jagunços breached the “black line” in the darkness, under the sentries’ very noses. It is a hard-fought engagement for two hours, and casualties are high: there are seven dead and fifteen wounded, among them a second lieutenant. But the jagunços have fifty dead and seventeen taken prisoner. The general goes to see them.

  It is dawn; the hills stand out against a bluish iridescence. The wind is so cold that General Oscar wraps a blanket around him as he strides across the open terrain. Fortunately, the Krupps are intact. But the violence of the fighting and the number of their comrades left dead and wounded have so incensed the artillerymen and the foot soldiers that General Oscar finds the prisoners half dead from the blows dealt them. They are very young, some of them just children, and among them are two women; all of them are skeleton-thin. General Oscar thus sees firsthand evidence of what all the prisoners confess: the great scarcity of food among the bandits. The men explain that it was the women and the youngsters who were doing the shooting, for the jagunços’ mission was to try to destroy the cannons with picks, maces, crowbars, and hammers, or to clog them with sand. A good sign: thi
s is the second time that they have tried, so the Krupp 7.5s are doing them a great deal of damage. Both the women and the youngsters are wearing blue headcloths and armbands. The officers present are revolted by this unimaginable barbarism: that the jagunços sent women and children out to fight strikes them as the height of human degradation, a mockery of the art and ethics of war. As he is leaving the scene, General Oscar hears the prisoners shouting “Long live the Blessed Jesus” on learning that they are going to be put to death. Yes, the three generals who refused to come knew what they were doing; they had a premonition that waging a war against women and children who kill and who therefore must be killed, who die hailing the name of Jesus, is something that would not make any soldier happy. The general has a bitter taste in his mouth, as though he had been chewing tobacco.

  That day passes uneventfully on the “black line,” inside of which—the commanding officer of the expedition thinks to himself—it will be the usual routine till the reinforcements arrive: scattered gunfire from one or the other of the two dark, glowering barricades challenging each other, tourneys of insults flying back and forth above the walls without the objects of the insults ever seeing the insulters’ faces, and the salvos of cannon fire against the churches and the Sanctuary, brief now because the shells are running out. The troops’ food supplies are nearly gone; there are barely ten animals left to butcher in the pen erected behind A Favela, and they are down to the last few sacks of coffee and grain. The general orders the troops’ rations reduced by half, though they are already meager.