The Rebellion of the Hanged

by B. TRAVEN

  Among the groups of rebels who had joined the men of La Armonía after the killing of the Montellanos and their foremen were a dozen Wild Men. Some of them had heard of the rising from old fellow-workers. Others, surprised to see the workers suddenly abandon a whole district, leaving logs where they had fallen and their work unfinished, used all their astuteness and, taking endless precautions, slipped up to one of the offices. There they sometimes met men preparing to leave or came upon the corpses of foremen, eloquent explanations of what had happened.

  La Armonía was one of the most important groups of camps of the region, and furthermore was situated right on the roads that led to the big river. It was natural, therefore, for the Wild Men to go to La Armonía.

  When they arrived, none of the rebels asked them questions. They were received as brothers. They met men they knew, former working companions in the camps from which they had fled, friends who welcomed them happily as forerunners of the rebellion. The fact that they had had the courage to run away and live beyond the power of the oppressive laws testified sufficiently to their revolutionary spirit.

  Three of these Wild Men—Onofre, Nabor, and Isaías—had arrived on the evening of the departure. After recognizing and greeting some friends and brothers of their own tribes, they wandered around in the hope of finding others they knew. During their wanderings they came to the huts where the artisans were held as carefully guarded prisoners. They stopped to chat with the guards, who offered them cigarettes, and they asked: “Why in hell are you looking after those spies?”

  “So that they don’t get away and go to denounce us.”

  “Who gave you orders to watch them?” Onofre asked.

  “The Professor.”

  “What idiots you are!” replied Nabor. “If I were on guard here, my watch wouldn’t last long. There’s a better and surer way of taking care of these bastards, and that’s to send them once and for all where they couldn’t do any more damage.”

  During this conversation Isaías had ambled around the huts, which, having no doors, revealed many artisans squatting on the ground playing cards, while others, stretched full length on the earth outside, snored peacefully. Others, their heads in their women’s laps, were having themselves deloused. Some of the other women were cooking.

  Isaías, casting his eyes over this spectacle, suddenly uttered a loud cry of surprise: “Hey! Come here, quick! Look who’s over there, of all people!”

  His two companions ran to where he stood.

  “Well, I’m damned! Who’d have believed it? Our little friends El Poncho and La Ficha!”

  The men in charge of the prisoners came forward full of curiosity. “Do you know them, little brothers?”

  Onofre laughed ironically. “Oh yes, we know them. These sons of bitches are the cruelest, most ferocious ass-kissers, the most contemptible abortions, that hell ever rejected. They’re the ones to whom we owe having become Wild Men. They’re the ones who, helped by a pack of others like them, tried to hunt us down in the forest. These swine are more bloodthirsty than animals, more repulsive than snakes. Even a jaguar might feel the pity they lack. Hey! Poncho, Ficha—come here!”

  The two whose names had been called raised their heads from the game of cards they were playing with other artisans. When they recognized the Wild Men, they turned pale, and the cards fell from their hands.

  “Well now,” Onofre went on, “you don’t seem to be badly off here. You can still pass the time sitting around with your old women and your kids, getting fat as pigs.”

  El Poncho tried to smile and replied in a scared voice: “Not so fat.”

  “We’ve thought for a long time that you were cultivating your cornfields and had got married,” added La Ficha, also trying to smile and not succeeding.

  The three men turned their backs on the two foremen and returned to the camp, followed by some of the sentries.

  “How long have those two foremen been at La Armonía?” inquired Isaías.

  “I don’t know. I don’t belong at La Armonía—I’m from Palo Quemado. Are they foremen?”

  “The most cruel and brutal you could find anywhere.”

  “We killed all our foremen, and the men of La Armonía did the same. If those men are foremen they shouldn’t be here.”

  Nabor let himself go, cursing with the usual energy of cart-drivers, and when he felt satisfied he added: “God damn it! What has happened to you? You act like old women—yes, like old gossips! With you we won’t get far. We need to join up with real rebels, not with old women. But even the most stupid old women wouldn’t think of fattening torturers and protecting their asses so that the jaguars won’t eat them.” Then, changing the tone of his voice, he asked the guards: “What time do you have to go to supper?”

  “We ought to be eating now. We’re very hungry. But we have to wait to be relieved.”

  “Relief be damned! Who knows what time the relief will come?” said Isaías, laughing. “Go off now and take the time to fill your bellies till they burst. You don’t have to die of hunger—we’ll take your places here.”

  The men did not wait for Isaías’s offer to be repeated.

  “All right, then, we’ll leave them with you. The truth is that we’re fed up looking after those spies, seeing them drinking their paunches full and making love to their old women and passing the time playing cards for beans and tobacco.”

  “You’re not joking? Tobacco and liquor for these pigs? They never gave us a leaf of tobacco! How about you?”

  “Give us anything? Bah! And if you want me to tell you something, comrades, I’ll say that it’d be better to finish off all these vermin completely. We ought to treat them exactly as we treated the foremen. What’s bad is that it’s not us who give orders here. And if the Professor, Andrés, and Celso give orders, we have to obey them.”

  “Good!” said Isaías. “Go and eat in peace, brother. Hurry! Don’t let the others eat it all up! They’ve roasted a brown deer and two boars. Enjoy them. Don’t hurry. We’ll take charge of the guarding here. We won’t let a single one escape. Tell the General to send our relief at ten o’clock.”

  “All right, then,” said the men. “We’ll tell the General that you’re on guard. After all, what does it matter to him who looks after them? I think to him it’s all the same.”

  “Leave us your machetes, comrades.”

  “Sure. Take them. We’ll ask for new ones at the store. Why don’t you have any? Have you just arrived?”

  “Yes. We’ve been Wild Men for six months. When we ran away, we took our machetes with us, but one got broken, another fell into a swamp and we couldn’t get it out, and the last one got left behind the day when the foremen set the pack of dogs on us and left us no time to pick it up. We might have been able to steal a machete from some of the workers, but you know that the poor devils would have had to pay for it. And when we decided to raid a store, we found that the rebellion had broken out.”

  “You’ll find everything you want here, fellows. You only have to ask for it. If you want tobacco, we’ll leave you ours. When we get back to the store, we’ll get more.”

  The relief appeared at ten o’clock as had been agreed. The men who arrived to act as guards found the three Wild Men squatting around the fire.

  “Everything looks very peaceful here,” one of the new arrivals remarked. “As a rule you can hear them bawling and grunting, heated up with alcohol. They still have lots of bottles buried and hidden, enough for them all to get drunk—men, women, and children. The Professor has advised us to let them stupefy themselves with alcohol.”

  “Don’t worry, friends,” said Isaías. “Tonight they’ve drunk more than a barrel, and they’re so full, so bloated, that they won’t say a word. Your watch will be easy. You can even go to sleep if you feel like it. Not a single one of them will escape. You can be sure of that. Good night, comrades!”

  “Good night.”

  The watch was changed three times more before daybreak. The men did not know
each other, nor did they try to find out who came to take their places. What was important was that the watch be kept.

  When the first rays of the sun began to shine, one of the new guards observed: “God damn it! They must have been fixed right last night. Not one of them is moving a finger.”

  Then he approached one of the huts and looked into it from behind a tree trunk. He shouted: “Hey, guys! Come here! The aguardiente they drank last night was as red as a tomato.”

  “They killed them all, even the kids!”

  “Let’s look in the other huts.”

  In the other huts the spectacle was the same: men, women, and children lying stretched out among bottles, splashed with red. It was impossible to mistake what had happened.

  One of the men rushed off to the main camp to report what had taken place.

  The General, the Professor, the Colonel, Celso, Andrés, Matías, Fidel, Santiago, Cirilo, Pedro, Valentín, Sixto, and some other rebel chiefs were seated in a group discussing the final details of the departure of the first company, which was due to set out before eight o’clock.

  The guard gave an account of what had happened in the artisans’ huts.

  “Are you quite sure of what you say?” asked the Professor.

  “Absolutely sure. Not one of them is alive.”

  “God be thanked that the filth is finished,” Celso commented.

  “It wasn’t necessary to destroy them,” said Andrés. “They weren’t doing us any harm, and they could have been allowed to live.”

  “No need to think about the matter,” Matías answered. “It’s all over. What use would that scum be?”

  “You’re right, little brother. Now we don’t have to watch them and let them grow fat. The truth is that this business of carrying a crowd of spies on our shoulders was not pleasant.”

  The Professor raised his hand and said: “Why go on talking about it? They were smashed like lice, and they deserved what they got.” Then, looking around at his helpers, he added, speaking to Fidel: “Take a dozen of the men and set fire to all the huts. Everything must burn. Nothing must remain if we don’t want the stench to be unbearable by noon. And when everything is reduced to ashes, throw a few shovels of earth over them.”

  19

  Of course, the first company was not ready to set out at the hour agreed on. In those remote regions no caravan has ever been ready to march at the hour fixed in advance. This is not the fault of the guides or the organizers of the group but of a thousand incidents and uncontrollable mishaps that always upset even the most carefully prepared plans. In the jungle, as in deserts far from civilization, even the most elaborately constructed plans are useless. It has been decided, for example, that ten mules will be required for the group. The mules are all ready the evening before, but on the following morning three that have broken loose during the night are missing. As there are no walls or fences, it is not easy to find them. If they are tethered securely, the animals cannot look for food or escape from the attacks of wild animals. On the eve of leaving, all the harnesses, the saddles, and the other trappings are in perfect condition, but during the night voracious rats gnaw leather straps through. In the evening the drivers and guides are in perfect health, but during the night a scorpion or a snake bites one of them in the foot, and two or three others suffer an attack of malaria.

  On the eve of departure the sun is still shining splendidly, and there is not a cloud in the sky. But suddenly, in the middle of the night, a cloudburst lets loose, inundating paths and tracks, soaking packs, boxes, and harnesses. The night before, everything is well packed, but at the moment when loading is about to begin, it becomes clear that some repacking is required, because the cases weigh more than they should.

  At a council of war the preceding afternoon it had been decided that the departures of the groups would be spaced at intervals of one day. Even in the dry season it would have been difficult to lead a numerous caravan through the forest, but in the height of the rainy season it had become a gigantic undertaking.

  The troop, which had been increasing without interruption, now consisted of five hundred men and more than one hundred and fifty pack animals—mules, horses, and burros.

  To the animals belonging to La Armonía had been added those of the camps formerly administered by Don Acacio and those the men of neighboring camps had brought in with them.

  It had been decided to abandon the oxen, which could find sufficient pasturage to keep them alive until the day when they themselves would be able to move along the paths back to the fincas whence they had come. They would know how to follow the right road without any difficulty.

  Furthermore, their number was reduced every day because the men sacrificed two or three of them daily to prepare reserve rations. It was Andres who had thought of taking this precaution. The meat was cut into strips and then dried and salted, producing big enough quantities of dried beef to last for the entire journey.

  The whole group was divided into small sections of about fifty or sixty men, each of which was assigned a drove of fifteen animals. Only the first company would consist of eighty men and would take twenty animals, all mules and horses. This company would be the advance guard in charge of preparing encampments for the night. The encampments would be in the full jungle, in an open place between a river and the slopes of a hill, or sometimes even in the bottom of a gorge.

  The leaders always had to bear in mind that the animals required pasturage for food and that it might not always be possible to find enough in any one place for one hundred or one hundred and fifty animals at a time. But during the rainy season the grass grows up again with extraordinary speed, even between the departure of one company and the arrival of another, often in less than twenty-four hours. And should there not be enough, all they had to do was press a short way ahead into the undergrowth to find the fodder needed. This, after all, was a minor difficulty. It was the state of the softened soil, converted into mud by the rains, that made it necessary to divide the troop into small groups separated from one another by an interval of one day’s march.

  The first hundred men would be able, with great difficulty, to make slow progress. But the second would begin to sink in the tracks left by the first, to slide on the sloping places, dragging after them mounds of mud, branches broken from the trees, and loose roots and rocks. For the third group the tracks and paths would be impassable. On the other hand, if the troop was divided into small groups, their tracks would not be so deep and the earth would have time to become firm again in the space of twenty-four hours. The rains certainly would continue without a break, but on sloping paths the water would run off quickly, which could not happen if hundreds of feet sank into the muck, starting erosion that would convert the paths into arroyos.

  By the plan finally chosen, the first company would have already made twelve days’ progress by the time the last would be ready to leave the main camp.

  As soon as the first village outside the jungle was reached, the companies would halt to await the arrival of all the others, until the whole troop was reunited in one place. The first care of those marching in front would be to see that nobody from the village should run to give the alarm to the finqueros established on the road to Hucutsin or Achlumal or to the rural police or federal soldiers of the nearby garrisons. Sooner or later they would not be able to avoid meeting armed forces. But the rebels wanted to reach Hucutsin or Achlumal before confronting soldiers or the police for the first time.

  According to the season and the nature of the terrain, mounted caravans usually covered between four and nine leagues daily—that is, from ten to twenty miles. A day in which nine leagues were covered was a heavy one, possible only with a light load. The average day’s journey was seven leagues in normal times, and that required tremendous effort.

  On the first day out, the leading company could advance only three leagues, and when the men reached the first possible camping place they realized the hardships and penalties in store for them in this unde
rtaking. On this first day they had plowed ahead without a halt, sinking into the mire up to their knees.

  Naturally, the other companies were unable to cover even the three leagues achieved by the first.

  The General had ordered that each of the companies should spend the night in the encampment prepared by the first. But when they realized that the other companies could not maintain the pace of the first, they deliberated, and the General, in agreement with them, ordered the march of the first company reduced to three hours only. Clearly they could not stop exactly at the end of three hours, because it was essential that they stop in a place suitable for the preparation of an encampment, that it supply drinkable water and pasturage for the animals.

  Later they were able to see that the idea of dividing the march, not into leagues, but into hours was really magnificent. In this way the first company had enough time and could throw up good shelters for the night. Moreover, men and animals arrived at the encampment without weariness.

  Clearly, only the first company could enjoy this advantage, but on it depended the success of the entire expedition. Three hours’ march for the first company without regard to the amount of ground covered was a small matter. For the companies following it, three hours represented the distance to be covered between one encampment and the next. No doubt the three hours would become four for the companies following the first, and the General therefore took care that the three hours should be shortened rather than prolonged. Despite this precaution, the last company had to struggle for eight or nine hours with obstacles along the way in order to get from one encampment to another.

  Every five days the whole army rested. Men and animals could recoup their strength, at the same time giving the paths and tracks time to harden a little, thus making passage across them less painful.