Page:Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay (1870).djvu/17

 was placed hors de combat, and often of a battalion numbering 400 men only 100 returned.

The Paraguayans have indeed fought for their altars and their fires, fought for the green graves of their sires, their God, their native land, for the “vindication of their outraged honour, the guarantee of their threatened existence, and the stability of their wounded rights.”

As regards the “atrocities of Lopez” — to quote another popular heading — his “unheard-of and fiendish cruelties, his extorting by torture the testimony required from foreign employés, his starving to death prisoners of war; flogging to death men, women, and children; his starving and killing the wounded, and his repeatedly shooting and bayoneting, amongst others, his brothers, his sisters, and the bishop, the reader will, I venture to assert, do well to exercise a certain reservation of judgment, like myself. Truth seems to be absolutely unknown upon the banks of the Plate. After the most positive assertions and the most life-like details concerning the execution of some malefactor (or victim) in high (or low) position have been paraded before the world, a few days will prove that the whole has been one solid circumstantial lie. The fact is that nothing about Paraguay is known outside the country, and of its government very little is known even inside its limits. The foreign employés themselves must generally speak from hearsay, and some of them have not failed to supplement their facts by fancies, theories, and fictions. The most trustworthy will own that in the case, for instance, of a whole corps being decimated, they remained, though almost upon the spot, in ignorance of the executions till two years afterwards.

The war in Paraguay, impartially viewed, is no less than the doom of a race which is to be relieved from a self-chosen tyranny by becoming chair á canon by the