I decided to go there.
53
THE DEFENCE OF Curupayty owed everything to a young English railway engineer called George Thompson. He was only eighteen when he arrived in Paraguay in the late 1850s, to work with Whytehead. He was ambitious and eager to learn, and when the war started, he, like the other fifty-odd English contractors, chose to stay: ‘My personal motive for taking part in the War was not however so much political as physical. I wanted a change of air …’
Even before the war began, Thompson had earned the trust of López, and as the storm clouds gathered, he was given the task of fortifying Humaitá. Work had already begun under that purpled fop, Baron von Morgenstern, but at the first crack of powder the old Hungarian had succumbed to one of his mysterious wartime illnesses. He was indisposed for the duration of the conflict, and so Thompson took over.
It didn’t seem to matter that he knew nothing about military engineering. He bought the best textbook on the subject, Macaulay’s Field Fortifications, and sprawled its exotic jargon all over the swamps of Humaitá: enfilades, epaulments, embrasures, berms, breachings and the jangly-named re-entering angles. Even the chain across the river had been his idea.
I’d heard of Thompson before leaving London, and sought him out at the Royal Geographical Society, where he’d been a fellow. There, on the shelves, was a copy of his book, The War in Paraguay. It had been donated to the Society by the author himself, and under his name was his full title: ‘Lieutenant Colonel of the Engineers in the Paraguayan Army, ADC to President López, Knight of the Order of Merit of Paraguay et C’. The author was barely thirty.
Although the book was dashed off before the war was over and after Thompson had been branded a traitor by his paymaster, it was written with luminous candour. The characters are fresh and the events still steamy and grotesque and Thompson’s own decisive role is trotted out with airy nonchalance. In places, the strategies of López simply fall apart under thoughtful analysis (and even those of the Allies are steeped in disunity and torpor). Elsewhere, Thompson is a boy again, regarding the war with refreshing detachment as if it was indeed just ‘a change of air’. ‘During the bombardment,’ he wrote at Curupayty, ‘the Brazilian fleet threw about 5,000 bombs. They fired some very beautiful one-pounder Whitworth rifled balls and percussion shells. These were so pretty that it would be almost a consolation to be killed by one.’
But for all his wonder, Thompson kept his head down. His brilliant fortress was elaborately reproduced in the maps in his book. Every star-fort and jungle, every redan and every lagoon is exquisitely recalled in skipping curlicues and copperplate. I photocopied the lot and stuffed them in my pack.
In Humaitá, I showed the maps to the Chief of Police, who was weeding the path of the comisaria. It was Sunday and his hair stood up like silver pins and his check trousers were worn at the knees. When he saw the maps, the air rushed out of him in astonishment. He flip-flopped back through the weeds and retrieved his own notes of the events of 1866. A thick brown finger followed Thompson’s dotted track into Humaitá, past the church and then on – south – stopping abruptly just before the curly words ‘Thick jungle’.
‘This is Curupayty,’ he said, consulting his notes. ‘Forty thousand men died here.’
On the map there was a dense weft of revetments and banquettes. I asked him if I could go there. He whistled.
‘Maybe. It’s about fifteen kilometres away.’ He then drew me a little map of thick, ugly gates and ponds. ‘Perhaps someone will lend you a bicycle.’
‘Does it get many visitors?’
‘Hardly any now. It’s got overgrown and people don’t like the snakes.’
Then he remembered something else. ‘A lad turned up with one of those metal detectors last year. That was interesting.’
‘What did he find? Lots of musket-balls, I imagine.’
‘Yes, those,’ said the Chief. ‘And three bottles of champagne.’
Micawber was less than enthusiastic about lending me one of his fossilised bicycles. ‘These are good bikes,’ he blubbered. After a cold pail of scepticism, he tried again. ‘I’m keeping them safe for my grandchildren.’
The man in the bicycle shop shrugged helplessly over his disembodied stock.
I asked an old lady digging manioc if she had a bicycle. To my surprise she had a mountain bike and I paid her a day’s wages to let me ride it out to Curupayty. It had flabby tyres and no brakes and along the main strut were the words ‘Real Wild Stuff Buddy’.
I didn’t go straight to Curupayty. With Thompson’s maps over the handlebars, I set off down the track that led to the eastern revetments of the village. I was soon alone with the sand gushing through the spokes. After a few kilometres I stopped. The swamps were softly globulating with life; there were grebes and crakes and a family of pigletty capybaras, all slicked with ooze. I don’t know how long I stood there, fascinated. A vermilion fly-catcher zig-zagged past like a brilliant spark. Then, suddenly – out of nowhere – a sad, shrivelled cowboy was at my shoulder astride a very small chestnut mare. He wore a wide straw hat that made a ludicrous grin above his head.
‘Do you know where the trincheras are?’ I asked him.
He hardly spoke Spanish. But, he knew what I meant: the trenches.
‘Here,’ he said, pointing ahead at a little fold in the road. ‘And there! In the montes.’
On each side of the fold were shallow creases leading off into the distance, each densely colonised with thorn trees and palms. The miniature horseman clicked his tongue and was gone.
These were Thompson’s trenches all right. Over a century of tropical rain had merely blunted their angles. I scuffed my boot in the sand. Thick shards of green glass broke the surface, and then a brass button. It was grey and crusty and had sheared violently from its mounting. I now keep it on my desk, a reminder of the suddenness of momentous events.
I returned to Humaitá and took the track that led out to Curupayty. I passed the spot where the villagers dumped their dead dogs. They lay in the dust, stiff-legged and barrelled, like furniture knocked over. A giant kingfisher eyed them thoughtfully, and then gathered his wits and flopped away across the lagoon.
I furrowed on, along the thin ridge that led through the swamps. Twice I passed pairs of cowboys, floppy-hatted and nestled in sheepskin saddles. They regarded me with unadorned curiosity – a strange pink man booting an iron skeleton through the sand. I wanted their horses. The ‘road-kill eagle’ wanted us all, conveniently dead. I was alone again, with the enervating heat and the endless barbed wire and the breath roaring in my chest. Then I wasn’t alone. There were waiters in the swamps in white tuxedos. Not waiters. Jabiru storks, ankle deep in mire and jolly tragedy. This was the third most massive bird in the world and all it could do was mimic the servants. I was tired already, and almost out of water.
After ten kilometres, there was a small rise to the left, a monte crowned with a rosy clump of lapacho blossom. It had the only view for miles around. Thompson had marked it on the map as ‘Head Quarters’. I got off my bicycle and wheeled it up into the orange grove. I’d arrived at Paso Pucú, the presidential bunker.
President López’s psychological state was becoming ever more scribbly. Even Thompson, who had – until then – naively admired his bloated commander, began to sense that López was unthreading. But it was Washburn, the American Minister – now dizzy with contempt – who provides us with the most animated description of the President:
His teeth, were very much decayed, and so many of the front ones were gone as to render articulation somewhat difficult and indistinct. He apparently took no pains to keep them clean and those which remained were unwholesome in appearance, and nearly as dark as the cigar that he had almost constantly clamped between them.
Whilst López could steady the pain from his rotting gums with hefty draughts of port, his paranoia was harder to soothe. He was terrified of his subjects and terrified of the war he’d started. He passed a law that prevented him
from ‘exposing his own precious life in times of war’, and tried to make himself less conspicuous. His ‘Monkey-heads’ lost their fancy brass hats and the sentries were forbidden from presenting arms. The President even abandoned his natty uniforms near the action, wearing his golden saddle cloth inside out and shoving his fat head into a straw hat. At all times, his carriages were to be harnessed up, ready to bolt at a sniff of trouble.
‘He possessed a peculiar kind of courage,’ recalled Thompson drily. ‘When out of range of fire, even though completely surrounded by the enemy, he was always in high spirits but he could not endure the whistle of a ball.’
This was not an impressive quality on a battlefield that was now permanently raining metal. Thompson built the bunker at Paso Pucú to insulate the President from the sounds and splinters of war. It was covered with nine feet of earth and protected on each side by embankments eighteen feet thick. López lived in there like a mole.
But it was still not enough to calm him. Even when Thompson visited him, he demanded that his visitor write out exactly what the sentries had asked him. Thompson obliged and solemnly set out the sergeant’s questions:
Does Queen Victoria always wear her crown when she goes out for a walk? Would Sir still wear his Paraguayan uniform when he returned to England?
López had the sergeant shot anyway, and gave the rest of the guard a hundred lashes each.
Apart from the cackle of firing squads, life at Paso Pucú was surprisingly humdrum. The President spent much of the day in his hole, walloping down port and playing draughts with the bishop.
He entertains friendly feelings for no one [said Thompson], as he has shot all those who have been most favoured by himself, and who have for years been his only companions. He is a great smoker and lover of table; he eats enormously; after dinner, when in good humour, he occasionally sings a short song. He has a very large stock of good claret, of which he is very fond, and which no one at his table used to drink but himself – not even Mrs Lynch or the Bishop …
Whilst her brave knight sloshed his way through songs and claret, Mrs Lynch made herself at home. She planted the geraniums on the casements and unpacked some gilt furniture. When the British Minister called by, she baked him a fine plum pudding and provided frothy English ale for his escort. She gave bomb-proof dinner parties which were described by one guest as ‘capital’ affairs. Another marvelled at her capacity: ‘She could drink more Champagne without being affected by it than any other woman I have ever met.’
If it hadn’t been for the little matter of the war, Paso Pucú might have been a breezy little break before the storms that lay ahead.
*
I left my bicycle at the gate of Paso Pucú. As I clambered up into the orange grove, a squall of parrots rose from the fruit and crashed away across the grasslands. There was a quinta in the clearing with a yard of rammed earth and cow-skin hammocks hanging from the eaves. The old farmer rose to greet me with watery eyes and a glint of gold tooth. A flotsam of chickens and puppies bobbed along in his lurching wake.
Of course I could see the casements. He ordered his son to take me, and a younger man emerged from the carcass of a car, wiping his hands.
‘There’s not much to see now,’ he said apologetically.
Under the banana trees the ground was lumpy and uneven. It was deliciously cool and the grass swayed with blue flowers. After its evacuation, López had ordered Paso Pucú to be levelled, wiping out every trace of his architectural cowardice. There was nothing left but an ugly white bust of López, gloriously erected on the orders of another bloater, His Excellency President Stroessner.
We picked our way back to the farm yard.
There was a 70lb Whitworth shell lying in the earth. I tried to imagine its strange journey from the foundries of the English Midlands, across the Atlantic to Brazil, transhipped by ironclad up the Paraná and then lobbed 7,000 yards through the air at Paso Pucú. Perhaps, on its last journey, it had killed. Perhaps it had simply cuddled itself into the soft Paraguayan soil.
‘We get lots of this,’ said the father. He poured a little handful of musket-balls and buttons into my palm. ‘Keep them. Take them back to your country.’
His daughter-in-law was grinding up chipa with a knotty wooden stump. Here, the intervention of the modern world had been brief and inconceivably violent.
And then it was gone again.
On 12 September 1866, the warring parties squandered their last opportunity of peace. Mariscal López agreed to meet the Argentine commander, Mitre, in the swamps of no-man’s-land. His American carriage hauled him out of Paso Pucú and back to the track I’d cycled down. It turned left and through a huge breach in the earthworks, and then descended into the estero. López had dressed himself in a new uniform frock-coat and kepi, grenadier boots and a scarlet poncho lined with vicuña and trimmed with gold. As he neared the enemy, he steadied himself with a powerful draught of brandy and clambered on to a white charger.
Mitre was waiting for López down in the swamps, dressed in an old hat. The two men greeted each other and toasted the health of their nations with further draughts of brandy. Mitre set out the Allied terms of withdrawal: López must go into exile. López stoutly refused. The men argued for five hours and then parted, exchanging riding-whips in remembrance of the day.
For López, it had been a day in which he’d showed his mettle. For Mitre, it had been a wasted morning with a fat old drunk in fancy dress.
Ten days later, the Allies threw themselves across the swamps at the earthworks of Curupayty.
It was cooler now, and I got back on the bicycle and passed through the breach in the escarpment. I turned right and followed the police chief’s smudgy scrawls through the gates and ponds along the edge of the drop. On Thompson’s map, I was skirting the southern limits of the Paraguayan defences and heading for Curupayty. Around the gates there were a few shacks with their meat ovens and ox-carts and then the track hooked over the top of the escarpment and on to great whispering grasslands. I looked back, over the green slime of the estero Bellaco – where Mitre and López had met – and then set my course five kilometres north through the dry, sandy grass.
Despite the emptiness of the horizon, the grass was busy. It seethed in the wind, and owls and oven-birds flapped and bickered among the tussocks. As I cranked along, billowing sand, two rheas – or South American ostriches – rose from the straws in panic. In their walnut-sized confusion, they high-kicked along beside my bicycle for several hundred yards. I found the energy to keep pace with them: two ballerinas tiptoeing over hot bricks, whipped along by a cyclist riding silvery bones. There was then a spark of self-preservation and the birds burst away at a tangent, whirring themselves off into nothing. For all her feathery frivolity, the rhea is said to have a glimmer of insight. The locals said that in grass fires, ñandu-guazú dunks herself in water and then sprinkles her soggy feathers over her eggs to protect them from the heat. Before hatching, every tenth egg – el diecma – is smashed and the yolk is farmed for maggots, to feed the new chicks.
The track passed through several desiccated copses. The oven-birds had their fortresses here, red concrete nests plastered on to tree stumps – a labyrinth to intruders. This little chatelaine, a russet creature like a thrush, is held in much affection by the Paraguayans, who call him Alonzo García; he mates for life and sings like an angel; he works all day and every day except, they say, Sunday – for he is a bird of deep convictions. Unafraid of man, the oven-birds often flew close to my bicycle before the appalling, grinding sight became too much and they fluted away. I heaved myself onwards, towards the battlefield.
I now had no more water and my mouth was cloyed with dust. Sensible voices were urging me to turn back, and I was about to give in when I spotted something arising from the grass: a thick, crumbling obelisk with the date of the battle, 22 September 1866. Beyond it was a massive rampart of earth – Thompson’s greatest work – split by a narrow breach. I cycled through this channel and paused at
the edge of the swamps which stretched out towards Argentina.
The Argentine troops had been so confident of success that they’d even brought their saucepans with them across the estero. They expected to sup that night in Humaitá.
They hadn’t counted on Thompson’s preparations. He’d moved some two hundred cannon from Humaitá and concentrated them at Curupayty. The angle of the berms was calculated down to minutes of a degree. He’d even adjusted the standard formulae to take account of his firepower’s impotence. There were chain cables to emasculate the enemy cavalry and interlocking enfilades to send a stiff shower of missiles into the enemy’s unprotected infantry.
As the Argentines closed in, the ramshackle artillery pieces opened fire.
The sky was filled with earth and the grasslands turned to thick grey cloud. The air was bent and stretched by the boom of powder and ears filled with blood. Parrots rained into the river and the water boiled with ashy foam. Horses were caught by whirling scimitars of metal and frankly chunked and charred. The Paraguayan artillery blasted on. They fired 7,000 rounds that midnighted morning. Their commander, a carnivorous maniac called General Díaz, went wacko in the heat and noise and ordered his musicians to play huge, drowning reveilles. He urged his men to redouble the bloodshed and then double it again.
The Argentines never even got near the trenches. They were mown down like partridges and their bodies thrown quivering into the bog. When the barrage stopped, Díaz ordered his men out into the swamps to bayonet the wounded. They did so with unembellished pleasure (the previous year, the Argentines had maltreated their captives – a dreadful mistake – and they now paid for this in agony). Only six Argentines were taken prisoner; 9,000 perished. The Paraguayans lost a mere fifty-four men. It was one of the most unequal slaughters in modern military history, and for the Paraguayans, their greatest victory – and almost their last.
At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig Page 24
