Page:Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay (1870).djvu/14



Telegram received at the Brazilian Legation in London.

The war is over. (No!) Lopez has either fled to Bolivia,  (No!)  or is concealed at Corrientes. (Impossible!) The execution of his brothers  (?)  Burgos  (?)  the bishop  (?)  and prisoners  (?)  is confirmed. (No!) The Paraguayan population was returning to Assumption  (Never I)  which has been occupied by the Marquis de Caxias.

And lastly, M. Elisée Reclus, in the “ Revue des Deux Mondes,” can term Paraguay with the impunity of impudence, “ état pacifique par excellence,” when her every citizen was a soldier, and when even during the rule of the Jesuit, the tiller of the ground was also a man-at-arms.

The war still raging upon its small theatre of action is a spectacle that should appeal to man's sympathy and imagination. Seldom has aught more impressive been presented to the gaze of the world than this tragedy; this unflinching struggle maintained for so long a period against overwhelming odds, and to the very verge of racial annihilation; the bulldog tenacity and semi-compulsory heroism of a Red-skin Sparta, whose only vulnerable point, the line of her river, which flows from north to south, and which forms her western frontier, has been defended with a stubbornness of purpose, a savage valour, and an enduring desperation rare in the annals of mankind.

Those who read, dwelling afar, see one of the necessary two phases. Some recognise a nation crushed by the mere weight of its enemies; drained of its population to support the bloody necessities of a hopeless war; cut off from all communication with the world outside, yet still as ever fired with a firm resolve to do and die before submitting to the yoke of the mighty power that is slowly but surely crushing it. Others again behold nothing but a barbarous race blotted out of the map, an obscure nationality eaten up, as the Kafirs say, by its neighbours; a rampant tyranny whose sole object is self-aggrandisement, a conflict of kites and crows, the slaves of a despot, of an “ American Attila,”