Letters from the Battlefields of Paraguay. Richard Francis Burton

      Preface

       Table of Contents

      The principal object of these letters is to tell a new tale of modern Paraguay, to place before the public simple, unvarnished sketches and studies of what presented itself to one visiting the seat of a campaign which has, in this our day, brought death and desolation into the fair valleys of the Paraguay and the Uruguay Rivers. In no case, let me say, has distance better displayed its effects upon the European mind. Returned home, I found blankness of face whenever the word Paraguay (which they pronounced Parāgay) was named, and a general confession of utter ignorance and hopeless lack of interest.

      Many in England have never heard of this Five Years' War which now appears to be an institution. Even upon the Paraná River I met an intelligent skipper who only suspected a something bellicose amongst the “ nebulous republics” because his charter-party alluded to a blockade.

      It speaks little for popular geography when we read year after year such headings as “ Hostilities on the River Plate,” whereas the campaign was never fought within 300 miles of the Rio de la Plata. The various conflicting accounts scattered abroad, with and without interest or obligation to scatter them, make the few home-stayers that care to peruse South American intelligence accept as authentic, and possibly act upon, such viridical information as that for instance supplied by the following clipping :—

       Telegram received at the Brazilian Legation in London.

      The war is over. (No!) Lopez has either fled to Bolivia, (No!) or is concealed at Corrientes. (Impossible!) The execution of his brothers (?) Burgos (?) the bishop (?) and prisoners (?) is confirmed. (No!) The Paraguayan population was returning to Assumption (Never I) which has been occupied by the Marquis de Caxias.

      And lastly, M. Elisée Reclus, in the “ Revue des Deux Mondes,” can term Paraguay with the impunity of impudence, “ état pacifique par excellence,” when her every citizen was a soldier, and when even during the rule of the Jesuit, the tiller of the ground was also a man-at-arms.

      The war still raging upon its small theatre of action is a spectacle that should appeal to man's sympathy and imagination. Seldom has aught more impressive been presented to the gaze of the world than this tragedy; this unflinching struggle maintained for so long a period against overwhelming odds, and to the very verge of racial annihilation; the bulldog tenacity and semi-compulsory heroism of a Red-skin Sparta, whose only vulnerable point, the line of her river, which flows from north to south, and which forms her western frontier, has been defended with a stubbornness of purpose, a savage valour, and an enduring desperation rare in the annals of mankind.

      Those who read, dwelling afar, see one of the necessary two phases. Some recognise a nation crushed by the mere weight of its enemies; drained of its population to support the bloody necessities of a hopeless war; cut off from all communication with the world outside, yet still as ever fired with a firm resolve to do and die before submitting to the yoke of the mighty power that is slowly but surely crushing it. Others again behold nothing but a barbarous race blotted out of the map, an obscure nationality eaten up, as the Kafirs say, by its neighbours; a rampant tyranny whose sole object is self-aggrandisement, a conflict of kites and crows, the slaves of a despot, of an “ American Attila,” fighting at the despot's nod, for the perpetuation of a policy of restraint which a more advanced state of society cannot tolerate, and of an obsolete despotism which the world would willingly abolish.

      Those who write have in almost all instances allowed their imaginations and their prejudices to guide their judgment, and mostly they have frankly thrown overboard all impartiality. The few “ Lopezguayos” or “ Paraguayan sympathizers ,” the “ thick and thin supporters” of the Marshal President, make him the “ Liberator of South America;” the “ Cincinnatus of America;” the “ King Leopold of the Plate;” they quote the names applied to him by his subjects, Great White Man (Caraï guazú ) and “ Big Father.”

      Paraguay is to them another Poland in the martyrology of peoples, a weak, meek inland Republic to be strangled, after an “odious struggle of three to one,” in the huge coils of the Imperial Anaconda. They accuse the Brazil of the most interested views, they charge her with boundless profligacy and the “ most hideous vices,” as if these had aught to do with the subject; they declare that no nation has a right to impose upon a neighbouring and independent people a government not of its own choice ; they irrelevantly predict terrible crises when the Negro question and that of the great feudal domains shall demand to be settled, and they even abuse “ l'Empire Esclavagiste” because she has not madly freed her slaves, or rather because she has freed them to enslave her free neighbours.* Many there are who term the Marshal President, alias the “ Tyrant of Paraguay,” the “ Monster Lopez,” a “ Vandalic and