Page:Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay (1870).djvu/349



humaitA. 319

sisted of seven twisted together, passed diagonally through a kind of brick tunnel. On this side it was made fast to a windlass supported by a house about 100 yards from the bank. Nearer the battery stood a still larger capstan : the latter, however, wanted force to haul taut the chain.

Crossing by one of three dwarf bridges the little nullah Arroyo Humaita somewhat below the Presidential " palace,^' we come upon the Bateria Londres, that Prince of Humbugs. M. Elisee Reclus, whose papers in the Deux Mondes (October 15, 1866, and August 15, 1868) are somewhat imaginative, makes the London battery deliver fire, even as he carries in his pen the railroad to Villa Rica. It was built for the elder Lopez by a European engineer. The walls were twenty-seven feet thick, of brick (not stone and lime). It was supposed to be rendered bomb-proof by layers of earth heaped upon brick arches, and there were embrasures for sixteen (not twenty-five) guns. Of these ports eight were walled up and converted into workshops, because the artil- lerymen were in hourly dread of their caving in and crumbling down.

The third battery is the Tacuary of three guns. Then comes the Coimbra mounting eight bouches a feUj and directed by the Commandante Hermosa. The three next are the Octava or Madame Lynch, with three guns en barbette ; the P esada, five guns, and the Itapirii, seven guns — all partly revetted with brick. Being the western- most and the least exposed to fire they have sufifered but little. Lastly, at the Punt a de las Piedars stands the Humaita redoubt, armed with a single eight-inch gun.

Beyond this point begins the entrenched line running south- south-west along the Laguna Concha, alias Amberi- caia, and then sweeping round to the east with a gap where the water rendered an attack impossible. The profile is good simply because defended by impenetrable bush. The guns