Page:Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay (1870).djvu/350



320 humaitA.

stand in pairs, with a Paiol or magazine to every two, and they had been provided with 200 round of grape, shell, and case. The wet ditch is still black with English gunpowder ; some fine, mostly coarse.

The batteries were being rapidly dismantled ; the cade- nas and its two neighbours had been to a certain extent spared. The guns were all en barbette^ an obsolete system, showing the usual wilful recklessness of human life. Re- doubts and redans, glacis and covered ways, caponnieres and traverses, gorge works and epaulements, citadel and en- trenchment, were equally unknown, whilst embrasures were rare, although sods for the cheeks might have been cut within a few yards. Where the ramosia or abatis was used, the branches were thrown loosely upon the ground, and no one dreamed of wooden pickets. Though the stockade was employed, the palisade at the bottom of the cunette or ditch was ignored. Thus the works were utterly unfit to resist the developed powers of rifled artillery, the concentrated dis- charge from shipping, and even the accurate and searching fire of the Spencer carbine. The Londres work, besides being in a state of decay, was an exposed mass of masonry which ought to have shared the fate of the forts from Sumpter to Pulaski, and when granite fails bricks cannot hope to succeed. Had the guns been mounted in Monitor towers, or even protected by sand- bags, the ironclads would have suffered much more than they did in running past them.

Lieutenant Day (1858) gave to the eight batteries on his chart 45 guns ; to the casemate (Londres) 15 ; and to the east battery 50 ; making a total of 110. In 1868 the river and batteries had 58 cannons, 11 magazines, and 17 brick tanks (depositos de agua). The whole lines of Humaita mounted 36 brass and 144 iron guns : these 180 were increased to 195 by including the one eight-inch gun and