Page:Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay (1870).djvu/410



380 TO THE BRAZILIAN FRONT.

Amongst the Arabs of Chivalry^ the Hadiyah^ a young girl of good family and chosen for courage, rode her dromedary in the front of war, " stigmatizing the cowards and making braver the brave/' Indeed, the Virgo bellatrix or Vira belli, has always been an institution amongst semi-barba- rous peoples. The ladies of Sienna did not disdain to assume the uniform. The Iberian peninsula has supplied some select heroines, witness the Padeira of Aljubarrota and the artil- leryman^'s widow, known to history as the Maid of Saragossa. In South America the sex had often imitated the example of the Chilian Araucanians, whose ranks when cleared of males, were refilled by their wives and sisters. In Peru, the adjutant of a certain corps summoned at roll-call the women of Cochabamba, who were headed by the Governor's spouse. "They are dead upon the field of honour !" re- plied a Serjeant. D. Juana Azurduy, wife of D. Manuel Asencio Padrilla, took at Laguana, with her own hands, the Spanish banner. In England we have heard of the heroine concerning whose captain it was sung,

" And he made her first lieutenant Of the gallant Thunder-bomb."

In the Brazil the case of Maria da Ponte and of many others, proves that popular enthusiasm would have produced, if encouraged, a copious crop of feminine volunteers.

The Paraguayan woman has always been the man of the family ; she tilled the ground and she got in the crop. Enthusiastically patriotic, and devoted to the cause of the Marshal-President, the ladies of Asuncion even gave up to him their jewels, just as the Santiageilas, in 1818, stripped themselves voluntarily of all their plate as an offering to the safety of their country. As young women in Prussia have lately learned to tend the wounded campaigners, so possibly their sisters in Paraguay formed, when men began to be scarce, an army- works corps, and perhaps they adopted some