Page:Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay (1870).djvu/411



TO THE BRAZILIAN FRONT. 381

quasi-military dress. But the arming and fighting of 4000 " Amazons " ended there. I should have been strongly- tempted by the remembranee of " our mothers/^ the Ama- zo]is of Dahome,, to have raised — when the guerilla stage of the war began — a corps d'armee of some 25^000^ and to have fallen upon Asuncion and other half-defended posts. I would also have been answerable for the success of the movement.

The Commander-in-Chief ended with an offer of horses and sundry courteous expressions. I then proceeded to the tent occupied by the Chief of Staff and a relative of the Marshal^ Brigadier- General Joao de Souza da Fonseca Costa. He was a handsome soldier-like man of thirty-eight or forty, with slightly greyish hair and sympathetic expression; his aquiline features and plain uniform gave him the look of a United States officer. He told me of the affair which, as the booming of the guns proved, was actually going on. The Brazilians were clearing the tete de pont, a straight cur- tain with cunettes that defended the neck of the Albardon or land-point projected from the right bank of the Tebi- cuary river. Here is the main pass which leads across the stream to the Estancia of San Fernando, where the President of Paraguay, after quitting Humaita, established his headquarters in March, 1868. The Brazilians succeeded (August 28) with a total ioss of 203 officers and men killed and wounded. Marshal-President Lopez sacrificed on this occasion seven officers and seventy-four men killed, five officers and 105 men wounded, and three guns, of which one was rifled, without mentioning horses and cattle. He is not only a general a dix mille hommes par semaine, he seems to take a pride in this unmeaning, hopeless waste of life. Yet he cannot afford to expend a drummer-boy.

An orderly then led me to the tent of Lieutenant-Colonel R. A. Chodasiewicz, now in the Braziliaj) engineers. When^