Page:Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay (1870).djvu/478



448 AT AND ABOUT ASUNCION.

The Allies knew nothing about the plans or position of Marshal-President Lopez. He might have been at his pro- visional capital Pirebebm, the " light skin/^ east of the Pirajii terminus of the railway ; or at Cerro Leon, south-east of the Ypacaray Lake, whilst others placed his actual camp at Asciirra, further to the north-east. All these are places on the Cuchilla or ridge communicating with the main rangC;, and between ten to fifty miles distant. Of the geo- graphical features, only the names were known. Some declared that the Paraguayan position could be surrounded, which is not probable ; others that Ascurra is a table-land, upon which cavalry attacking from the river could operate. None could explain what there was to prevent the enemy retiring into the mountain fastnesses.

Marshal-President Lopez, on the other hand, was perfectly well informed by his many spies of all that happened in the Allied camp. A certain Hungarian Colonel (in the Para- guayan army), Wisner de Morgenstern, who printed his family arms upon his card, and who had become a great landowner in the Republic, had been imprudently allowed to reside at Asuncion. This is the individual who is said, in conjunction with Madame Lynch and the Coadjutor Bishop Palacios, to have tempted the Marshal -President to attack his neighbours, and, as chief military engineer, to have laid out the absurd entrenchments of Humaita. He was made prisoner by the enemy in due time, and he kept a small pulperia at the street corner, where officers came for their periodical dram, and visited a pretty daughter, who was reported to reward important intelligence. The Brazilians also confided unduly in two chief officers of the rebel Para- guayan Legion, Colonels Iturburu and Baes. The latter was a man of the kill-you-and-eat-you order. He had re- peatedly volunteered to set out with a few troopers under pledge to capture and to capouize the arch-enemy. All,