Page:Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay (1870).djvu/430



400 TO THE TEBICUARY RIVER.

from the south-west. Facing the Tebicuary, disposed at a right angle and connected with the former by rifle-pits_, was a second battery of three field-pieces ; whilst about 200 feet higher up the stream a ditch and a small earthen parapet defended the ford, where a landing might have been effected at low water. In the rear of each battery was a separate magazine, rough but useful. The quarters for the soldiers had been fired, and the ill-savoured hides that covered them were charred : the whitewashed walls had been pulled down by the captors, and the ruins were occupied by vermin. The mangrullo and the large- sized cross alone remained intact. Pots and pans, bones and bullock- skulls, strewed the ground, but not a gun had been left— not a cartridge had been wasted. These trivial defences, evidently the work of a few men, had been leisurely evacuated, probably a sign that Marshal-President Lopez now deemed it neces- sary to economize material.

Walking up the Paraguayan side we observed that here the stream above the confluence of the Tebicuary narrows to 300 yards, and its increased swiftness compels ascending ships to hug as usual the left bank, which is low and sub- ject to floods. Remnants of a boom, intended to delay the ironclads in the face of the battery, lay upon the ground : it was composed of huge hard- wood trunks, iron-bound and connected by bolts, rings, and shackles, and it was sufficiently resilient as it sagged down stream to yield before craft at- tempting the up-passage. Near it we found cut blocks of sandstone, intended probably for anchoring torpedoes. The material was a kind of coticular itacolumite from the upper bed : a little above Asuncion mica schist appears, and eighteen leagues from the capital granite, like that of the Brazil, was worked by the natives.

Still further up the left bank of the Paraguay, and connected by rifle-pits with the south-western work, was a third battery,