Backlands (53 page)

They felt that they had come to understand the enemy and master his exceptional style of fighting. They were eager to face him down. They thought that the energy of the charge at Cocorobó would carry them to the center of Canudos, to the square where the churches stood. In spite of their losses they felt strong and hopeful. The plan of the day for the first column on the twenty-sixth is telling.

The order was given at Trabubú, as they were going through the mountain pass. As terse as it is, it says a lot. The order to attack was enthusiastically welcomed by the soldiers. It was phrased in a few simple, courteous words:

The meeting that was so fervently anticipated did not take place in the village. It happened outside it, with a full-scale enemy attack.

To the general surprise of the second column, whose eyes were trained on Mount Favela, expecting to see the battalions of the first column descend the north slopes, a
sertanejo
appeared, saying he had been sent by the commander in chief to request their immediate aid. This was shocking news. It looked like an enemy trick. The man was held until a second emissary arrived to confirm it. He did not take long. It was an honorary sublieutenant who had joined the engineering commission. The commanding general of the expedition was making an urgent call for help. When they received the second message, General Savaget changed his plans and, instead of sending a brigade with a supply of munitions while the rest held their position, he turned left and went with his entire force to the top of Mount Favela. They arrived about eleven o’clock, in time to free the troops who were trapped there.

The entire campaign plan had been disrupted and it seemed that all the effort made on the marches from Rosário and Jeremoabo had been to no avail.

Now that the columns were together, they could send a detachment for the supply train that had been stuck at the rear of the severed first column. This task was given to Colonel Serra Martins, who immediately headed out with the Fifth Brigade. It was a dangerous mission in the middle of two battles. He made for Umburanas and got there in time to prevent the decimation of the Fifth Police. He saved part of the contents of the 180 pack trains that had been littered along the roads and damaged by the
jagunços.

This fortunate intervention did not alter the dire straits of the troops. The situation remained critical. A series of desperate misfortunes followed.

The plan of the day for June 28 described it as a “day stained by horror but full of glory.”

The truth is that it was clearly a reversal.

History is not deceived by the rhetoric of the defeated. The “victorious army,” as it was described in the official reports, which were written to whitewash the army’s failure, looked like a mob of refugees. They were conquerors who did not dare set foot out of the position they had secured. The campaign had reached a critical point. The troops’ courage and confidence had been sapped in futile skirmishes. Dubious victories that looked like defeats drained their morale and their strength. They were now bound together by the external pressure of the enemy they thought they could so easily defeat. Heroism was forced on them. Their mood swung from courage to fear as they tried to ward off sheer terror. They were surrounded on all sides by the most unusual “beaten” enemy they had ever encountered. It was a merciless foe, who had locked them into an indefinite siege and had cut off all possible routes to desertion. Even if they lacked in courage, our soldiers had no way of getting out of this situation. Heroes and cowards were the same here.

Military history, often so full of drama and contradictions, is full of instances in which fear is glorified. The fury of the pursuing Persian army created heroes of the “ten thousand.” The cruelty of the Cossacks immortalized Marshal Ney.

Now we can add another dramatic chapter, which is like the others, although the events are on a smaller scale. It was the fierce tenacity of the
jagunço
that transformed General Arthur Oscar de Andrade Guimarães’s beleaguered battalions into heroes. They stayed together because the stone walls of the trenches made retreat impossible. They were heroes in spite of themselves because they were trapped by bullets in a hole in the ground.

The huddled brigades were not in anything that resembled a camp. They did not pitch tents, because there was no space. They did not organize themselves into fighting units. The troops, consisting of 5,000 soldiers with more than 900 dead and wounded, 1,000 cavalry and draft horses, and hundreds of pack trains, became an army without advance or rear guard, or flanks. It was completely disorganized. The first column had 524 men unfit for combat, which added to the 75 from the previous day totaled 599 losses. The second column, which was now with the first, had lost 327 men. The total number of victims was 926. This does not include the countless number of men who were crippled, exhausted, and weak from hunger or traumatized from the recent slaughter.

Among the dead were Thompson Flores, the doomed commander of the Seventh Infantry; Tristão Sucupira de Alencar, who was mortally wounded as he arrived with the second column; Nestor Villar, captain-commissary of the Second Regiment, who died with more than two-thirds of the officers in command of the artillery; Gutierrez, an honorary officer who in private life was an artist and who joined the campaign because he wanted to paint it; Souza Campos, who was briefly in command of the Fourteenth; and others of all ranks and units.

A long furrow carved out by the torrential rains ran the full length of this mountaintop ravine. Within this natural trough were more than eight hundred wounded who added their screams of agony to the confusion. A field hospital had been set up in this fold of the earth. It was an image of what had happened to the expedition, which had been split open from end to end. Looking at it, the strongest grew faint. Nothing could compensate such losses or explain why the campaign had come to this end. The combined force of the two columns was immobilized and impotent in the face of this reality. The orders of the day fell flat on their ears. Here they were in the center of the action but unable to take a step forward or, even worse, a step back. They had spent more than a million bullets, driven the enemy back in all their encounters with him, and yet he was all around them, more menacing than ever, cutting off their retreat after they had trounced him in open battle.

Everything pointed to a complete siege. The Fifth Brigade, in moving to the rear, had lost fourteen men. The Fifth Police lost forty-five. The march to the rear and return was marked by endless gunfire all along the roads guarded by the men in the trenches.

In the heart of rebel territory, the expedition was cut off from communication with its base in Monte Santo. The only possible route was the perilous Rosário road, which was a minefield of ambushes. They had retrieved their supply train, but it was greatly depleted with more than half the contents going to the
sertanejos
or having been destroyed by them. The troops therefore lost munitions that would have been very valuable in their present situation. Moreover, they had given the enemy a gift of four hundred thousand to five hundred thousand cartridges, which were enabling him to hold out indefinitely. To put it bluntly: They had equipped the enemy. The earlier expedition had bequeathed muskets to the
jagunços.
The current one was giving them the ammunition to put into the muskets. The “losers” thus were able to use the bullets on the foolish “winners,” who could not respond in kind.

Night was falling and there was no break in the fighting. There was not the slightest lull that might have allowed the troops to bring some order to the ranks. A bright moon helped the
jagunços
keep their targets in their sights. They kept up a steady fire at long intervals. It revealed that the backlanders were keeping their terrible watch.

Once in a while one or another soldier would break discipline and reply with a random shot in the air. The rest succumbed to fatigue. They slept stretched out on the hard ground, some with their heads on the packs scattered about, clutching their useless rifles.

On the night of June 28 a never-ending battle was launched.

From that date forward the troops would live in a permanent state of alarm.

This was also the beginning of a long string of torturous events. At dawn on the twenty-ninth it was determined that there were not enough rations for the men of the first column, who had already been on reduced rations for a week. The second column, although it was better provisioned, was not guaranteed subsistence for three more days, after sharing its food with the other. The result was that just as the battle was entering a critical phase, they had to use the last of their resources and slaughter the oxen that had pulled the heavy 32 cannon.

Meanwhile they were faced with the very difficult task of turning this pile of men and baggage into an army. They had to reorganize the battalions, reconstitute the brigades, treat hundreds of wounded, bury the dead, and clear the small area of the clutter of luggage and pack trains. The essential tasks were done but without any method, in a disorganized fashion and without any leadership. The commanding officers and their aides tried to assist by offering suggestions on the many things that could be done. The result was that everyone was bustling about, bumping into one another, and working at cross-purposes. They hurriedly dug trenches, took up random positions in a semblance of military formation, or cleared the space of packs and bodies, leading away the mules whose iron-shod hooves were a constant danger to the wounded lying on the ground below them.

Despair had not fully overtaken them, however.

Their spirit returned with the new day. In spite of what they had seen, they did not appreciate the fierce determination of the
sertanejos
. They were consoled by the thought of the bombardment that the artillery would soon direct at the town from its position on the heights. It was clear that an exposed village on the open plains could not hold out for long from the cross fire of nineteen modern cannons.

But the first cannonball that fell on Canudos had the effect of a rock tossed into a beehive. Until then the settlement had been relatively calm, but now, as on the previous evening, it was suddenly alight with rifle fire. Once more the soldiers understood that it was impossible to respond to the sweeping attack that circled around them. Since they were in a gulley and were firing upward at no specific target, their fire would have no effect and they would only waste their ammunition. The effect of the cannons was insignificant. The exploding grenades just ripped holes in the walls and roofs. They made a loud noise but they did not cause much damage because many fell intact without setting off their fuses. For this reason, the favored target was once again the new church, which stood like a rampart over the low cluster of huts. This is where the
jagunços
were to be found, behind the cornices of the main walls, crouched in the towers or at the windows farther down, or lying flat along the ground level, which was lined with small circular vents.

The Whitworth 32 would have been expected to demolish the walls of the church. However, the cannonballs whistled over the roof and fell into the huts below. One fell into the churchyard and nicked the facade of the building. The other shot missed. This terrible debut of the colossal weapon was due primarily to the haste with which it was fired.

It was a crazy obsession. The huge piece of equipment, the mascot of the chase, had become a great fetish that stoked primitive urges. Panting with disappointment, soldiers from all of the units crowded around it, barely able to suppress their disappointment when shots missed their mark. Finally, one of the spectators, a surgeon by the name of Alfredo Gama, could not contain himself and asked to lend a hand in firing it. He was killed. The gas escaping from the badly loaded cannon set fire to a powder keg nearby. It exploded, burning Dr. Gama to death, along with Sublieutenant Odilon Coriolano and a few privates.

This incident illustrates how the army was handling the battle.

The engagement was pointless. The loud but ineffective bombardment became a tribute to the courage of the
sertanejos
.

Night came and nothing had been gained by this long-range attack. The rifle fire surrounding them gave the clear message that this was a siege, even though the enemy lines were spread out in a random fashion all over the hillsides. An army unit might remove them from the clearings in between the trenches or subdue them with a bayonet charge. But the minute the troops went on the march again, they would be faced with the lurking enemy who seemed to rise up from the ground, moving around them, and attacking them from their flanks, restricting their movements. The consistent tactics of the
jagunço
were most clearly apparent when he was in retreat and taking cover in whatever shelter the earth provided. It was a battle between the sinuous anaconda and the mighty bull. Coiled around its prey, the snake would then uncoil itself, awarding a freedom of movement that would be exhausting to his adversary. Then it would recapture its prey within those coils, squeeze him, and again relax its hold to allow him to tire himself once again by pawing at the earth with hoof and horn. This process of approach and withdrawal, and luring on, would continue until the victim was drained of strength.

Here there was a reversal of roles. On the one side were men who had at their fingertips all the modern equipment needed for war and were materially well endowed. From the mouths of their cannons they could hurl tons of steel at the rebels. Their adversaries, on the other hand, were crude warriors who had only the experience and wiles of backwoodsmen. They handed meaningless victories to their enemy but just as a lure. Even as the “victor” paved the ground of the brushlands with bullets and raised his flag to the sound of his drumbeats, the backlander answered the victor’s song with a whine of bullets from his rifles.