The War Of The End Of The World (71 page)

At the foot of the slope, where there are infantrymen from companies trying to regroup, pushing and shoving each other about, troops trying to yoke the draft animals to cannons, carts, and ambulance wagons, contradictory bugle commands, wounded screaming, Sergeant Frutuoso Medrado discovers the reason for the sudden retreat: the column coming from Queimadas and Monte Santo has fallen into a trap, and the second column, instead of invading Canudos from the north, must now make a forced march and get them out of the trap they are caught in.

The sergeant, who entered the army at the age of fourteen, fought in the war against Paraguay, and in the campaigns to put down the uprisings that broke out in the South following the fall of the monarchy, does not blanch at the idea of withdrawing through unknown territory after having spent the entire day fighting. And what a battle! The bandits are courageous, he must admit. They have withstood several heavy cannonades without budging an inch, forcing the troops to rout them out with bayonets and fight it out in fierce hand-to-hand combat: the bastards are as tough as the Paraguayans. Unlike himself—he feels refreshed and ready for action again after a few swallows of water and a couple of pieces of hardtack—his men look exhausted. They are raw troops, recruited in Bagé in the last six months; this has been their baptism of fire. They have behaved well; he has not seen a single one panic. Can they be more afraid of him than of the English? He is a strict disciplinarian; at their first breach of conduct, his men have him personally to deal with. Instead of the regulation punishments—loss of leave, the stockade, floggings—the sergeant is partial to clouts on the head, ear-pulling, kicks in the behind, or a flying trip into a muddy pigpen. They are well trained, as they have proved today. All of them are safe and sound, with the exception of Private Coríntio, who has tripped over some rocks and is limping. A skinny little runt, he is walking bent over double beneath the weight of his knapsack. A good sort, Coríntio, timid, obliging, an early bird, and Frutuoso Medrado shows certain favoritism toward him because he is Florisa’s husband. The sergeant feels a sudden itch and laughs to himself. “What a hot bitch you are, Florisa—here I am, miles away in the middle of a war, and still you’ve made me get a hard-on,” he thinks. He feels like bursting out laughing at the silly things that pop into his head. He looks at Coríntio, limping along all hunched over, and remembers the day he first presented himself, as cool as you please, at the laundress’s hut: “Either you sleep with me, Florisa, or Coríntio will be confined to barracks every weekend, without visitors’ rights.” Florisa held out for a month; she gave in at first so as to be able to see Coríntio, but now, Frutuoso believes, she continues to sleep with him because she likes it. They do it right there in the hut or at the bend in the river where she goes to do her washing. It is a relationship that makes him feel as proud as a peacock when he’s drunk. Does Coríntio suspect anything? No, not a thing. Or does he simply let it pass, for what can he do when he’s up against a man like the sergeant, who, on top of everything else, is his superior?

He hears shots on his right, and so he goes looking for Captain Almeida. The order is to keep moving on, to rescue the first column, to keep the fanatics from wiping it out. Those shots are a tactic to distract them; the bandits have regrouped in Trabubu and are trying to pin them down. General Savaget has dispatched two battalions from the Fifth Brigade to answer the challenge, while the others meanwhile are continuing the forced march to the place where General Oscar is trapped. Captain Almeida looks so down in the mouth that Frutuoso asks him if something has gone wrong.

“Many casualties,” the captain says in a low voice. “More than two hundred wounded, seventy dead, among them Major Tristão Sucupira. Even General Savaget is wounded.”

“General Savaget?” the sergeant says. “But I just saw him ride by on horseback, sir.”

“Because he’s a brave man,” the captain answers. “He has a bad bullet wound in the belly.”

Frutuoso goes back to his squad of chasseurs. With so many dead and wounded, they’ve been lucky: except for Coríntio’s knee and the sergeant’s little finger, not one of them has a scratch. He looks at his finger. It doesn’t hurt but it’s bleeding; the bandage has turned a dark red. The doctor who treated him, Major Neri, laughed when the sergeant wanted to know if he’d be invalided out of the army. “Haven’t you noticed how many officers and men in the army are maimed?” Yes, he’s noticed. His hair stands on end when he thinks that they might discharge him. What would he do then? Since he has no wife, no children, no parents, the army is all of these things to him.

During the march, as they skirt the mountains that surround Canudos, the infantry, artillery, and cavalry troops of the second column hear shots, coming from the direction of the brush, several times. One or another of the companies drops back to launch a few volleys, as the rest go on. At nightfall, the Twelfth Battalion finally halts. The three hundred men unburden themselves of their knapsacks and rifles. They are worn out. This is not like all the other nights since they left Aracaju and marched to this spot via São Cristóvão, Lagarto, Itaporanga, Simão Dias, Jeremoabo, and Canche. On each of the other nights when they halted to bivouac, they butchered animals and went out searching for water and wood, and the darkness was full of the sound of guitars, songs, voices chatting. Now no one says a word. Even the sergeant is tired.

The rest does not last long for him. Captain Almeida calls the squad leaders together to find out how many cartridges they still have left and replace the ones that have been used up, so that all the men can leave with two hundred rounds each in their knapsacks. He announces to them that the Fourth Brigade, to which they belong, will now be in the vanguard and their battalion in the vanguard of the vanguard. The news restores Frutuoso’s enthusiasm, but knowing that they will be the spearhead does not arouse the slightest reaction among his men, who begin marching again with great yawns and without comment.

Captain Almeida has said that they will make contact with the first column at dawn, but it is not yet two o’clock in the morning when the advance units of the Fourth Brigade spy the dark bulk of A Favela, where, according to General Oscar’s messengers, he is encircled by the bandits. The sound of bugles blowing cleaves the warm night without a breath of wind, and shortly thereafter they hear other bugles answering in the distance. A chorus of cheers runs through the battalion: their buddies, the men in the first column, are there. Sergeant Frutuoso sees that his men are excited too, waving their kepis in the air and shouting: “Long live the Republic!”

“Long live Marshal Floriano!”

Colonel Silva Telles gives orders to proceed to A Favela. “It goes against the official rules of military tactics to leap into the lion’s mouth in unknown terrain,” Captain Almeida snorts to the lieutenants and the sergeants as he gives them their final instructions. “Advance like scorpions, first one little step here, then another and another, keep your proper distance apart, and watch out for surprises.” It doesn’t strike Sergeant Frutuoso as an intelligent move either to proceed like this in the dark since they know that the enemy is somewhere between the first column and their own. All of a sudden, the proximity of danger occupies his mind entirely; from his position at the head of his squad he sniffs the stony expanse to the right and to the left.

The fusillade begins all at once, very close, intense, drowning out the sound of the bugle commands from A Favela that are guiding them. “Get down, get down!” the sergeant roars, flattening himself against the sharp stones. He pricks up his ears: are the shots coming from the right? Yes, from the right. “They’re on your right,” he roars. “Fire away, boys.” And as he shoots, supporting himself on his left elbow, he thinks to himself that thanks to these English bandits he is seeing strange things, such as withdrawing from a skirmish that’s already been won and fighting in the dark, trusting that God will guide the bullets they are firing against the invaders. Won’t they end up hitting their own troops instead? He remembers several maxims that he has drilled into his men: “A wasted bullet weakens the one who wastes it; shoot only when you can see what you’re shooting at.” His men must be laughing like anything. From time to time, amid the gunfire, curses and groans can be heard. Finally the order comes to cease fire; the bugles blow again from A Favela, summoning them. Captain Almeida orders the company to hug the ground till he is certain that the bandits have been driven off. Sergeant Frutuoso Medrado’s chasseurs lead the march.

“Eight yards between companies. Sixteen between battalions. Fifty between brigades.” Who can maintain the proper distance in the dark? The Official Rule Book of Tactics also states that a squad leader must go to the rear of his unit during an advance, to the head during a charge, and to the center when in square formation. The sergeant nonetheless goes to the head of his squad, thinking that if he positions himself in the rear his men may lose courage, nervous as they are at marching in this darkness where every so often the shooting starts again. Every half hour, every hour, perhaps every ten minutes—he can no longer tell, since these lightning attacks, which last almost no time at all, which tell on their nerves much more than on their bodies, have made him lose all notion of time—a rain of bullets forces them to hit the dirt and respond with another just like it, more for reasons of honor than of effectiveness. He suspects that the attackers are few in number, perhaps only two or three men. But the fact that the darkness gives the English an advantage, since they can see the patriots while the latter can’t see them, makes the sergeant feel edgy and tires him badly. And what can it be like for his men if he, with all his experience, feels that way?

At times, the bugle calls from A Favela seem to be coming from farther away. The calls and the ones in answer set the cadence of the march. There are two brief halts, so that the soldiers may drink a little water and casualties may be counted. Captain Almeida’s company has suffered none, unlike Captain Noronha’s, in which there are three wounded.

“You see, you lucky bastards, you’re leading a charmed life,” the sergeant says to raise his men’s spirits.

Day is beginning to break, and in the dim light the feeling that the nightmare of the shooting in the dark is over, that now they’ll be able to see where they’re setting their feet down and where their attackers are, brings a smile to his lips.

The last stretch is child’s play by comparison to what has gone before. The mountain spurs of A Favela are very near, and in the glow of the rising sun the sergeant can make out the first column, some bluish patches, some little dots that little by little turn into human figures, animals, wagons. There seems to be vast disorder, enormous confusion. Frutuoso Medrado tells himself that this piling up of one unit on top of another is also scarcely what is laid down in the Official Rule Book. And just as he is remarking to Captain Almeida—the squads have regrouped and the company is marching four abreast at the head of the battalion—that the enemy has vanished into thin air, all of a sudden, out of the ground just a few steps away, amid the branches and bushes of the scrub, there pop up heads, arms, barrels of rifles and carbines all spitting fire at once. Captain Almeida struggles to remove his revolver from its holster and doubles over, his mouth gaping open as though gasping for air, and Sergeant Frutuoso Medrado, his thoughts racing in that big head of his, realizes almost instantly that throwing himself flat on the ground would be suicide since the enemy is very close, as would turning tail, since that would make him a perfect target. So, rifle in hand, he shouts to his men at the top of his lungs: “Charge, charge, charge!” and sets them an example by leaping in the direction of the trenchful of Englishmen whose opening yawns wide behind a little low parapet of stones. He falls inside it and has the impression that the trigger of his rifle is jammed, but he is sure that the blade of his bayonet has sunk into a body. It is now stuck fast in it and he is unable to pull it out. He tosses the rifle aside and flings himself on the figure closest to him, going for the neck. He keeps shouting “Charge, charge, fire away!” as he hits, butts, grapples, bites, and is caught up in a milling mass of men in which someone is reciting elements which, according to the Official Rule Book of Tactics, constitute a properly executed attack: reinforcement, support, reserves, cordon.

When he opens his eyes, a minute or a century later, his lips are repeating: reinforcement, support, reserves, cordon. That is the mixed attack, you sons of bitches. What convoy are they talking about? He is lucid. Not in the trench, but in a dry gorge; he sees in front of him the steep side of a ravine, cacti, and overhead the blue sky, a reddish ball. What is he doing here? How did he get here? At what point did he leave the trench? Something about a supply train rings in his ears again, repeated in an anguished, sobbing voice. It costs him a superhuman effort to turn his head. He then spies the little soldier. He feels relieved; he was afraid it was an Englishman. The little soldier is lying face down, less than a yard away, delirious, and the sergeant can barely make out what he is saying because the man’s mouth is against the ground. “Do you have any water?” he asks him. Pain stabs the sergeant’s brain like a red-hot iron. He closes his eyes and tries his best to control his panic. Has he been hit by a bullet? Where? With another enormous effort, he looks at himself: a sharp-edged root is sticking out of his belly. It takes him a while to realize that the curved lance has not only gone straight through him but has pinned him to the ground. “I’m run through, I’m nailed down,” he thinks. He thinks: “They’ll give me a medal.” Why can’t he move his hands, his feet? How have they been able to carve him up like this without his seeing or hearing? Has he lost much blood? He doesn’t want to look at his belly again.

He turns to the little soldier. “Help me, help me,” he begs, feeling his head splitting. “Pull this out of me. Unpin me. We have to climb up the ravine, let’s help each other.”