Page:Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay (1870).djvu/474



444 ASUNCION.

conveniences are nowhere; the streets are wretched ; drainage has not been dreamed of; and every third building, from the chapel to the theatre, is unfinished. The shops were miserable stores, like those of the '^ camp-towns '^ in the Argentine Republic. The post-office consisted of two small rooms in a private house. The barracks and churches, the dungeons, and the squares for reviews, are preposterous. Every larger house belongs to the reigning family Lopez. The lieges, if not in the caserne or the violon, must content themselves with the vilest ranchos, lean-tos, and tiled roofs supported, not by walls, but by posts. Nor may they dis- play their misery : it must be masked from the eye of opulence by the long dead brick walls that connect palace with palace. A large and expensively-built arsenal, river- side docks, a tramway, and a railway, have thrown over the whole affair a thin varnish of civilization ; but the veneer- ing is of the newest and the most palpable : the pretensions to progress are simply skin-deep, and the slightest scratch shows under the Paraguayan Republic the Jesuiticized Guarani.

I had expected to find Asuncion the last of the many little Moscows by which the Marshal-President marked the line of his retreat. Possibly, in their overweening national self-confidence, the Paraguayans e^spected, despite all dis- asters, soon to come to their own again. Even the railway had not been pulled up, and was allowed to save the Allied Army some two months' work. Farewell !