Page:Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay (1870).djvu/152



122 MONTEVIDEANS :

" The tale of the world is nought but this, In such a year died such a one, another and another."

At Moute Video the refrain is_, " in 18 â€” such a body shot or stabbed such a body/' Higher up stream it will be such a body (feminine) lives with such a body (masculine), or M. un tel is master to Mdme. une telle. Everywhere, however, bloodthirstiness is the rule. Even Creole children, all except the usual good boy who talks theology or philoso- phy, revel in chat about wounds and death ; and these sons of Europe are said to be worse, to degenerate better even than the Gaucho. An acquaintance pointed out to me an officer of rank, who, during the last affair, meeting a friend on the other side of politics, answered the outstretched hand by a sword through the body, and wiped the blade upon his victim's coat-tails. Another tall personage walks about with impunity, although he directed the murder of Colonel Leandro Gomez at Paysandu, and he is more than sus- pected of having aided to assassinate General Flores. These things are told to me by Englishmen, in a painful whisper, as if they were talking politics in Rome or in Paraguay. It makes me blush to see them so cowed, but the fact is man's life is never safe, at the best of times, and in troublous times it is eminently unsafe.

Another imminent danger is from the soldier. You know him by his dark -blue kepi, tunic, and pants, the whole with red facings. He is almost always a negro ; the Orientals and Argentines got rid of the " irrepressible " by enlisting him to fight their civil wars, and the Brazil is being driven by philanthropists to adopt a similar system of extirpation. Approaching barracks, even by day, you must stand and ask leave to advance, or the anthropoid will charge bayonet blindly as a mad bull. And on all occasions it is his great delight to shoot or stab a white man, especially a foreigner, whom he calls ^' Gringo animal." The Brazil, you will