Hell Hath No Fury (19 page)

López, a psychopathic, lecherous, and ugly dwarf who modeled himself on Napoléon III, to whom he had been presented in 1854, began his rule by declaring a suicidal war on Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay over access to the sea. This heaped misery on the wretched population of Paraguay and provided Lynch with greater opportunities to enrich herself. She acquired at scandalously low prices more than thirty-two million hectares of land, looted Paraguayan women of their jewels (ostensibly to fund the war effort), and stashed many thousand dollars' worth of Paraguayan gold in European bank accounts. While tens of thousands of her lover's soldiers, among them many women and children, starved and died in the meaningless conflict, Lynch toured their ramshackle camps resplendent in silk and velvet, grand piano in tow. While she dined off gold plate, the soldiers starved.

During López's disastrous war, over half the population of Paraguay died. At the Battle of Piribebuy (1868), after the ammunition had been exhausted, some six hundred Paraguayan women made their final stand hurling sand, stones, and bottles at the enemy before perishing under a hail of gunfire.

Having wrecked his country's economy and halved its population—it would take three generations for the population to recover—López launched a reign of terror. Convinced of a conspiracy to overthrow him, he ordered the torture and murder of those who had the questionable fortune to be left standing. He was, at least, egalitarian and included among his victims his brothers, sisters, and brothers-in-law. He even ordered the assassination of his own mother. He met his own death at Cerro Corá (1870), the last battle in the war and in effect little more than a glorified skirmish in which, having refused to surrender to the Brazilians, he was cut down and his body mutilated. Lynch was allowed to bury López and their eldest son, Panchito, who was also killed at Cerro Corá, with her own hands. But López's corpse was dug up during the night and subjected to more abuse. Lynch buried López for the second time the following morning.

With her assets frozen and a trial for war profiteering looming, Lynch left Paraguay in the summer of 1870 to live in London and Paris. But with her fortune dwindling, she returned to Paraguay in 1875 in a bold but fruitless attempt to recover some of her ill-gotten gains. She was sent packing and lived out her days in Jerusalem and Paris as a respectable widow of modest means. She died of stomach cancer and was buried in Père-Lachaise Cemetery.

Her life was subsequently mythologized, and Lynch was transformed from tyrant to martyr. A century after fleeing the ruined Paraguay, she was proclaimed a national heroine—“surpassed by none in her courage, her selflessness, and her loyalty”—and her remains returned to Asunción in a bronze urn wrapped in the tricolor.

Reference: Sian Rees,
The Shadows of Elisa Lynch,
2003.

MATA HARI

Margaretha Geertruida MacLeod, Nee Zelle, Dutch Dancer, Courtesan, and Spy, b. 1876, d. 1917

In Mata Hari's heyday, her name was a byword for mystery and exotic glamour. At the end of her life she was stigmatized as a spy and executed by a French firing squad. In truth Mata Hari was an adventuress of striking imagination but limited intelligence, with a scant grasp of the dangerous game she was playing.

She was the daughter of a prosperous hatter and originally trained as a teacher in the Dutch city of Leiden. In 1895 she married a fellow countryman of Scottish descent, Rudolph MacLeod, a much older man and a soldier serving in the Dutch East Indies, where she lived for several years before returning to Europe and divorcing in 1906.

By then the former Mrs. MacLeod had moved to Paris and, after living for a while as “Lady MacLeod,” had reinvented herself as “Mata Hari” (eye of the dawn), a Far Eastern erotic dancer descended from the British aristocracy. She made her debut in 1905 at the Museum of Oriental Art, performing a tasteful striptease before a small audience. Clad in a metal brassiere of her own design and a fetching array of diaphanous veils, she was an instant sensation. Critics dismissed her, but she rapidly became an early exemplar of modern celebrity, “famous for being famous,” courted by rich and powerful men and capable of inducing a skeptical public to accept her on her own extravagant and fraudulent terms. Even her now-bankrupt father attempted to get in on the act by writing a kiss-and-tell biography of his celebrated daughter.

By 1914, however, the European public was beginning to tire of Mata Hari. At thirty-eight, she was aging, thickening at the waist, and had been supplanted by rivals such as Isadora Duncan. The outbreak of war cast a shadow over her ambitions. In July 1915, while she was performing in Spain, British intelligence obtained information that Mata Hari was a German secret agent. Her return sea journey, via neutral Holland, was interrupted at the British port of Falmouth, where she was detained and taken to London for questioning. In London she claimed that she was indeed a spy, but for Britain's allies, the French, who had suggested that she seduce Crown Prince Wilhelm, son of Kaiser Wilhelm II.

Mata Hari was returned to Spain, where she is known to have had an affair with the German military attaché in Madrid, Major Kalle, who sent a signal, intercepted by the French, that Agent H-21 (later supposed to be Mata Hari) had proved valuable. In February 1917, shortly after her return to Paris, Mata Hari was arrested and put on trial for espionage before a closed tribunal. The evidence she gave in her defense was contradictory and confusing, as was the identity of Agent H-21, who might well have been a figment of the French secret service's fertile imagination.

All sources agree, however, that the war was going badly for France, and that the execution for spying of a now-notorious figure like Mata Hari would boost national morale. The corrupt courtesan would be contrasted with Marianne, the incorruptible symbol of France. A propaganda sacrifice, Mata Hari was found guilty and executed by a twelve-man firing squad on October 15, 1917. She refused a blindfold and was gallantly blowing kisses at her executioners when the shots rang out.

It seems likely that Mata Hari was the victim of her own fantasies and the machinations of the French secret service, but the image of the femme fatale that she called into being has long survived her and now has a life of its own.

Reference: Sam Waagenaar,
The Murder of Mata Hari,
1964. The best of many cinematic evocations of the Mata Hari legend is the 1931
Mata Hari,
starring Greta Garbo.

ROYAL NAVY

Great Britain, Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries

In the heyday of sail, a few women went to sea with the Royal Navy, either officially or unofficially. Some officers took their mistresses with them. When a squadron touched at Newfoundland in the summer of 1693, a settler bought one of “the officers' misses” for one hundred pounds and married her.

The marines aboard the navy's ships followed military practice and allowed three men in every company to marry “on the strength,” and take their wives and children to sea. The practice continued throughout the eighteenth century, although the presence of the women and children was not officially recognized and they had to make their own arrangements for food with the ship's purser. It was thought that the wives of warrant and petty officers older than the young men who made up the bulk of the ship's company would exercise a steadying influence. They supported themselves by washing, sewing, and looking after the children.

In port, a captain's wife and children might live aboard a guard ship. If the men did not have leave to go ashore, they were also permitted to have women on the ship. In the West Indies, slave women often came aboard in search of a square meal. Admirals were usually hostile to these practices but sometimes turned a blind eye. The order book of HMS
Indefatigable
prescribed regulations for “the women belonging to the ship.” Officially, however, the only women on board were those “married on the strength” of foot regiments serving as marines.

At the Battle of the Nile (1798), a crushing victory over the French secured by Admiral Horatio Nelson, one woman aboard
Indefatigable
was killed, several were wounded, and a baby was born. Four of the nineteen men killed in the action left widows on the ship, which suggests that there may have been as many as one hundred women on board during the battle. After the battle, the four destitute widows were entered by Captain Foley in the ship's books as “dressers” (i.e., nurses), a device to provide them with some support. Some Frenchwomen captured during the battle were put ashore at the nearest port.

A few women disguised themselves and served in the Royal Navy as seamen. At an 1807 court-martial, in which an officer was sentenced to death for sodomy, one of the principal witnesses was a young woman who appeared in court dressed as a seaman. In another undisputed example, William Brown, the highly regarded black captain of the main top of the warship
Queen Charlotte,
served in the navy for eleven years before it was discovered in 1805 that she was a woman.

Reference: Dudley Pope,
Life in Nelson's Navy,
1997.

SOLDADERAS

“The Women of the Soldier,” Mexico, Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

The
soldaderas
reflected several significant aspects of warfare in Mexico from the days of the Spanish conquest to the twentieth century. Ostensibly at war to provide food and female services, they frequently proved themselves soldiers as valiant as their men.

Traditionally, armies in Mexico did not feed their soldiers but provided meager pay that could be used to forage, a function performed by the
soldaderas,
the large numbers of camp followers who accompanied an army on the march and who were often referred to as a
chusma
(mob). Mexican generals of the nineteenth century were often hostile to the
chusmas
and petitioned for their abolition. However, it was pointed out that without their presence, many Mexican soldiers would desert rather than face starvation (see
Camp Followers,
Chapter 5, and
Vivandières,
Chapter 5).

A vivid picture of the
chusma
that followed the army of General Santa Anna in 1841 was painted by writer Frances Calderón de la Barca. She observed

various masculine women with…large straw hats tied down with coloured handkerchiefs, mounted on mules or horses…. Various Indian women trotted on foot in the rear, carrying their husbands' boots or clothes. There was certainly no beauty amongst these feminine followers of the camp, especially among the mounted Amazons, who looked like very ugly men in a semi-female disguise.

At the start of the 1841 march, Santa Anna's army numbered some six thousand men while its accompanying
chusma,
consisting of “numerous children, women, herb healers and speculative merchants,” was more than fifteen hundred strong. However, it was rapidly reduced by disease and starvation to no more than three hundred. Despite this, the populations who lived in the path of the
chusma
feared its depredations more than those of the soldiery, likening it to a swarm of locusts.

In the nineteenth century, Mexicans defeated the Spanish, clashed with the Americans, thwarted French colonial ambitions, and endured perpetual infighting among their own factions. All the armies involved in these conflicts, including those of the French and the Americans, made use of the
soldaderas,
who were by no means exclusively women of low status confined to menial tasks. Large numbers fought alongside their menfolk. Others, like Augustina Ramirez, worked on the battlefield as nurses. Ramirez, who served in the 1857–60 war between the liberal and conservative elements in Mexico, cared for the wounded. She lost her husband and several of her thirteen sons in this conflict. In recognition of her courage she received a small pension, which lasted only a few years. She died in poverty on February 14, 1879, days before she was about to be honored as a shining example of Mexican motherhood.

Pancho Villa had an ambivalent attitude toward the
soldaderas.
While respecting bravery in battle, whether shown by men or women, he regarded the camp followers as a hindrance to mobility. On occasions he visited harsh summary punishment on those
soldaderas
whose loyalty he considered questionable. Regular soldiers and military administrators, too, regarded
soldaderas
with deep suspicion. In 1925,
soldaderas
were banned from federal barracks by the minister of war, General Joaquín Amaro, who observed that they were “the chief cause of vice, illness and disorder.” This did not stop women from following federal and rebel armies; nor did it prevent the formation, in 1926, of the Feminine Brigades of St. Joan of Arc, whose principal tasks were the manufacture and distribution of ammunition. The Feminine Brigades played an important role in the Cristero rebellion.

In the 1930s,
soldaderas
who had fought were eligible for small pensions; these benefits were not awarded to the camp followers. By the end of the 1930s, the term
soldaderas
had come to signify little more than the female relatives of a male soldier. Behind them lay a history of hardship and great courage, often borne with characteristic Mexican stoicism. Manuela Quinn, the mother of the movie actor Anthony Quinn, who had followed her lover into the army of Pancho Villa, recalled that while her menfolk believed that the revolution would usher in an earthly paradise, service as a
soldadera
meant for her “the smell of gunpowder and the crying of the wounded. I saw no romance in it. We were just poor people fighting for our stomachs; the talk of brotherhood and the flag-waving came later, from our suffering.”

Reference: Elizabeth Salas,
Soldaderas in the Mexican Military: Myth and History,
1990. The 1966 Mexican movie
La Soldadera,
directed by José Bolaños, paints a compelling picture of life as a
soldadera.
In contrast, Sam Peckinpah's
The Wild Bunch
(1969) conveys a wholly fanciful portrait of a Villaista junior officer called Si Si Chiquita.