Page:Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay (1870).djvu/494



464 AGAIN TO THE ALLIED FRONT.

the Brigadier- General D. Emilio Mitre, to whom we car- ried letters from President Sarmiento, and from his dis- tingnished brother, D. Bartholome. I was astonished to find that officer in proximity with the Brazilians, the Saturday Review, usually so well informed, having lately " virtually dissolved the triple alliance of the two Plate (sic) Republics with the Empire."

The Argentine camp lay north-west of the comercio. The site was a pleasant slope facing eastward, where stood the lines of the several corps, most of the tents being bushed in with branches of orange trees mercilessly hacked down. Altogether you could hardly imagine a more pleasant place for a picnic in fine weather — in rain it must be hideous. There was an unmistakeable improvement in the aspect of things ; the men were cleaner ; their uniforms were more uniform ; they did not look discontented ; and their foul tents of hides had been exchanged for canvas. Still, however, almost all those we saw, officers excepted, were foreigners : Frenchmen, Germans, and Spaniards, and not a few who wore the easily-detected look of the runaway British seaman, completed the '^ collection of human zoology.'^ After the late events at Loma Valentina, there has been even less of entente cordiale between the Allies than before ; and the Argentines smart under the conviction that they had been robbed of their credit by the Generalissimo Caxias. I heard of but one Englishman, Colonel Fitzmorris, who bore a commission, but doubtless there are others.

We gave our cards to a sentinel who was pacing in the perfumed shade of the naranjal, and an aide-de-camp pre- sently led us up to where D. Emilio was sitting in uniform upon his easy-chair. Near him rose his small campaigning tent, and opposite it stood a carriage-bed, a kind of four- gon, somewhat like the old waggon of the Suez road, cap- tured from Marshal-President Lopez, after the flight from