Backlands (69 page)

Their questions were pointless. They were done for. They were not our guards; they were our prisoners. They wouldn’t leave here the way the other expeditions did. They would soon suffer terrible misfortune and go blind and be condemned to stumble around the hills. Her rant was accompanied by rude and unrestrained gestures.

This was irritating. She was a dangerous shrew and should have no consideration from the warriors. When she exited the tent, a sublieutenant and a few privates seized her.

That woman, that devil in skirts, who was putting a hex on them just as victory was within reach, was beheaded.

The meek ones were usually spared but were considered inconvenient baggage. This was true of an old woman who, along with her two grandchildren who were about ten years old, was housed near the slope where the cavalry detachment was located. The children were so malnourished that they could no longer walk and they had to crawl. They cried from hunger. The desperate grandmother went from tent to tent begging for food. Then she would rush back and wrap them in the remnants of old shirts and try to rock them to sleep. She cared for them tirelessly. She went here and there, searching for a discarded shirt, a cracker that had fallen out of a soldier’s pocket, a bit of water. Bent with old age and shaking with a tubercular cough, she staggered about, coming and going. She was a sight to move even the hardest heart. She was like a ghost reminding everyone who saw her of their sins.

Decapitation was more practical, the men insisted. This was not a campaign; it was a slaughter. It was not a question of law, but vengeance. A tooth for a tooth. The ashes of Moreira César demanded that others burn. The decapitated body of Colonel Tamarindo demanded that other heads roll. Revenge had two forms: fire and the knife. They rationalized all of this. Colonel Carlos Telles had once spared a captured
sertanejo
. He later paid for that unpardonable lapse of a good deed. The man escaped and he was the one who fired the shot that took the colonel out of action. They believed these stories. They made them up, trying to find absolution before committing their crimes. Sometimes they deliberately exaggerated. Martyred friends had fallen into the enemy’s snares and been murdered. The
jagunços
had made sport of their bodies and hung them like scarecrows along the road. Their own impious acts of cruelty were transformed into pity for their dead companions, acts of remembrance. Shedding tears, they washed themselves in blood.

They did not have to fear the weighty judgment of posterity, for history would not venture to this place. It would have no time for this crude slaughter pen. It was more interested in the majestic ruins of big cities, great coliseums, and the glory and gore of classic battles and great invasions.

The
sertão
is home to the criminal. Whoever travels on these trails and sees a cross by the side of the road does not stop to investigate the crime but tips his hat and moves on. There would be no investigation here by public authorities. In this case the crime was perpetrated by the government. Its chief representative in Monte Santo was complicit with it and kept it quiet. The perpetrators knew they would get away with it. The result was that men who were paid to kill and armed to the teeth fell upon the wretched backlands population.

It was fitting that Canudos was circled by a ring of mountains. It was a parenthesis, a vacuum. It did not exist. After scaling that mountain chain, no man could sin any longer.

The clock of time was set back several centuries. As one descended the slopes and saw the enormous bandit hideout clustered there, it was easy to imagine a bloody Stone Age drama was taking place there. The setting was suggestive. The actors on both sides—Negro,
caboclo
, white, and yellow—carried on their faces the imprint of many races, which had in common their baser instincts. A primitive bestiality that had been erased by civilization was being revived here in its original form. The skein was being unraveled. Replacing the stone hatchet and the bone harpoon were the sword and the rifle. The knife was a reminder of the sharp dagger of ancient flint. The killer had nothing to fear, not even the remote judgment of the future.

Let this simple passage be read in the bright light of the future. It is not brilliant. It is not written in elevated language, because the subject is depressing. It is a blunt and angry cry of protest against the dark stain of bloodshed that we have seen being committed on this battlefield.

The battle of the twenty-fourth was the precursor to the denouement. Our attack closed in on the north and was followed by another equally vigorous advance from the south the next day. It was a pincer maneuver. The two Pará battalions and the Thirty-seventh were called up from Mario’s Hill, where they had been camped in a protected neck of the hill behind the Seventh of September Trench. They did this on their own, without orders from headquarters.

They had serious motives. It seemed to them that the fall of Canudos was imminent. From the heights of their camp, at a reentrant angle of the slope, they had an unobstructed view of the settlement below. They could see the siege lines drawing in as the fires continued to spread. It was a desolate scene. The village was being reduced to the large open space of the square. This was usually empty because the fighting men were afraid to expose themselves there. Nearby was the artillery parapet issuing the loud fire that was a stimulus to action. Below them was a constant pop of rifles and incessant shooting. They were sitting by uselessly. Even the stray bullets ignored them, whizzing inoffensively over their heads.

It would all be over soon. There would be nothing for them to do but to return home without any honors. Their swords would be untouched, their banners intact, and they would have earned no medals. The commander in chief had made it clear that he did not want to waste any more lives when the surrender was just a few days off. This clearly communicated intention was both practical and humane. But it threatened the reputation of those who had not taken part. They felt that fate had dealt them a bad hand by forcing them to accept, unearned, the laurels that their doting mothers, wives, lovers, and sisters were preparing for them in their home states. They were unable to stop themselves and they clattered down the slopes.

A skirmish began that was less of a surprise to the enemy than to our own men. It broke out along the Cambaio slopes, where it was reinforced by Colonel Olympio da Silveira’s artillery. In a brief time it spread with extraordinary intensity.

As it later came out, the impatient heroes, led by Colonel Sotero de Menezes and Lieutenant Colonel Firmino Rego, intended to take the settlement. They would race down to the river, fight their way across, and burst into the empty square. Scattering in several directions, they would continue with a bayonet charge down the alleys, cleaning them out, jumping over the smoking garbage and trampling the backlanders. Then they would continue to the northern trench and its dumbfounded garrison to the cheers of their comrades.

It was an audacious move, but they underestimated the backlanders. The
sertanejos
put up a stiff fight. They brought them to a halt. They hamstrung them. After a while they foiled the attempt completely. Without being aware of it, the
jagunços
had their revenge. There was something insolent and irritating about the blustering military braggarts, all of them healthy, well dressed, well fed, well armed, and well trained, seeking to undo an adversary that had been starving for three months, subjected to constant fire, his homes burned, his strength faltering, his blood draining away, his courage waning, as every day he sank deeper into exhaustion. They might give the death blow to a dying man or do him a kindness by shooting him, but they would not become famous for such a prank. The siege lines were narrowed but the results did not justify the sacrifices. The troops suffered about eighty casualties, including Colonel Sotero de Menezes, who was wounded, and Captain Manoel Batista Cordeiro, from the Pará Regiment, who was killed.

The enemy’s losses were huge—hundreds dead, and hundreds of houses captured. The section of the settlement that was still controlled by the
jagunços
was now restricted to the northern rim of the square and the huts around the church. Eleven battalions, more than twenty-five hundred men, had in the past few days taken almost two thousand houses and were pushing the
sertanejos
up the south slope where the Old Ranch House stood and up against eight battalions and the Fifth Police to the east. This amounted to about five thousand soldiers, excluding those who were guarding the camp and the Monte Santo highway.

The embattled settlement was now surrounded by a tight circle of twenty battalions instead of a loose siege line. They were crowded into five hundred huts in and behind the church at the bend of the river. Even this area was being shrunk by the fires. While the houses had little wood, they were steadily being consumed. Heavy clouds of stifling gray smoke filled the air. It rolled over the roofs and darkened the sky, making the scene even more desolate than it usually was. The artillery was almost silent now. Great care was required when aiming because the slightest deviation would send projectiles over their own men.

In spite of this the square remained empty. No one tried to seize the houses that bordered it on the north, in a line perpendicular to the arbor. These dwellings and those beyond them, next to the church, sheltered the last of the
jagunços.
The most daring of them still fought from positions in the collapsed church, under the command of leaders of no special fame. These anonymous heroes were preparing their people for death. They ran back and forth, goading them on to incomprehensible resistance, taking whatever measures were necessary to prolong the defeat.

From the twenty-sixth on, these men took turns leaving the trenches to perform other duties that were more important.

They were preparing their last stronghold next to the Sanctuary. It was a wide, rectangular pit. They were digging their own grave. Surrounded on all sides, these undaunted warriors intended to fall back, yard by yard, inch by inch, into their own tomb.

Searching for water, of which they were in dire need, they dug deep wells. The women and children, the old and the sick, helped with this backbreaking task. The ground was so hard they could not get deeper than about six feet in their effort to reach the last trickles of groundwater. Once in a while they found traces of water, only to see the wells sucked dry by the spongelike action of the exsiccating air. Thirst became the worst torture for them, with their exertions in the burning heat.

Battle became a gruesome distraction that took their mind off their greater misery. They fired in a random fashion up and down the line, without the careful aim of former days and with an expenditure of ammunition that could deplete the best-stocked arsenal. The men stationed in the new church continued to raze the hilltops with their fire while others a few paces away faced the battalions that had fought their way into the labyrinth of huts. Brutal fighting broke out. The field of action was so reduced and the alleys were so narrow that any kind of maneuver was impossible even for a small detachment. The struggle was now down to hand-to-hand combat. Some of the officers would unbuckle their belts and cast aside their swords as they began to fight with knives.

In the end, things became very hard for the attackers. The
sertanejos
were confined to the houses in a narrow strip of the town. The huts were packed with them and they put up a stiff fight. When the enemy did give in at one point or another, the soldiers were given shocking surprises. Even now the
sertanejos
were up to their old tricks.

This happened after the troops had captured a hut that had been fiercely defended. The soldiers rushed in and found their way barred by a heap of corpses. Undeterred, they would enter the dark room and one of them would get a bullet in the back, fired at close range from the pile of bloody rags. Stunned, they would spin around and someone else would get a bullet in the chest. As they cowered there they would see the phantom fighter leap off. He had fought them off from behind a wall of dead bodies.

The slow advance of the siege was again stalled. The vanquished fighters brought it to a halt for the last time. The situation did not require much effort. Victory would come on its own. All they had to do was to hold their positions. With all exits closed and access to the water pits along the riverbanks blocked, the surrender of the settlement was inevitable and would take two days at most. In this heat it was doubtful that the besieged could hold out that long with no water.

But the resistance continued for another week. The circle of side-to-side battalions was being broken occasionally by the
sertanejos
after dark.

On the night of the twenty-sixth there were four violent attacks; on the twenty-seventh, eighteen. On the following days there was just one each night because they continued without interruption from six in the evening until five in the morning.

They were not trying to tear open a break in the circle so they could escape. They crowded into the southern section of the settlement; they expected that the water pits and stagnant pools of the Vaza-Barris would soon be off-limits to them. While most of their companions were fighting and luring most of the soldiers into the core of the settlement, a few brave men without weapons, carrying empty pouches, advanced cautiously to the riverbank. They filled their leather bags in the small pools and would return at a run, bending under the weight of their precious cargo.

This endeavor, difficult at first, little by little became impossible.

When the sole motive for the attacks was discovered, the troops aimed their fire at the water pits from positions along the riverbank. They were small dark disks shining in the moonlight, reflecting the sparkle of the stars in the shadows.