Page:Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay (1870).djvu/385



guayans at once returned to their guns, which had not been spiked, and poured in a shower of grape and canister. The Brazilians, who had six hundred men hors de combat^ did not " retreat with banners flying and bands in front, as though marching on parade/^ According to the Semanario the Paraguayan garrison received the gold cross of the Order of Merit.

The Commander-in-Chief had doubtless been influenced by the terrible check at Curupaity, and he with his troops naturally believed that so strong an outpost must cover a formidable bulwark. At any moment a simultaneous assault upon any three or four places would certainly have taken Humaita, with perhaps the loss of some 500 men. The eva- cuation, however, was allowed to be carried on in peace and quiet, and the camp story was, that a French baker — others say an Italian pedlar — was the first to enter the land side of the highly ridiculous "Sebastopol of the South." Simi- larly, we may remember how fifty Russians in Petropavlofsky drove oif a French and English admiral with a squadron of five ships ; and when a second attack was made by a com- mander of a different trempe, only three dogs, instead of a swarming garrison, were found in the place.

This part of the profile is very poor : an Irish hunter might scramble over it. The only outworks were the usual loose abatis of branches and brushwood defending a sloping trench nowhere five feet deep, with at most eleven inches of water. There were no inner defences but a shallow drain eighteen inches deep and four feet wide : the earthwork parapet barely four feet high, and not more than nine feet thick, was propped up by palm trunks and provided with a banquette. I need hardly say that to be safe against a coup de main the escarp should be about thirty feet tall, swept by the flanking tire of artillery, and defended in front by a high counterscarp. There is nothing of the kind

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