Backlands (61 page)

The disabled soldiers, who were in daily contact with the people, had become the informal chroniclers of events. They were crude and imaginative in their way of telling the stories, but they were true, even if full of exaggerations. Strange episodes were spun from these tales. Now the
jagunço
became a fantastical being, half man and half monster. He broke all the laws of nature with his unbelievable powers of resistance. He made daring attacks on his enemy yet remained invisible, slipping through the brush like a snake. He would glide or tumble down the steep cliffs like a weightless ghost, lighter than his own musket. He was lean, a desiccated spritelike figure, weighing less than a child. His bronzed skin was stretched tightly over his skeleton and was tough as a mummy’s.

Popular imagination ran wild in a delirious binge of imagined events embroidered with fantasy. Some of the narratives were brief and blunt, offering a keen perspective on the irrepressible energy of these hunters of armies.

In one of the incidents that followed the assault on the settlement, a young Indian was taken prisoner. He would proudly answer every question with an indifferent “I don’t know.”

Finally, he was asked how he wanted to die.

“Shoot me!”

“Then I will kill you with my knife,” came the soldier’s awful reply.

And thus it was. The blade dug through the cartilage of his throat and, as his blood gushed out, his last cry was, “Long live the Good Jesus!”

There were other epic tales. On July 1, the son of Joaquim Macambira, a boy of eighteen, approached the cunning leader.

“Father, I want to finish off the Killer.”

The sly old warrior, a backwoods, copper-skinned witch doctor, looked at him without revealing any emotion.

“Ask the Counselor for his advice and go ahead.”

The plucky boy set off with eleven handpicked companions. They crossed the Vaza-Barris, which was divided into many pools; they climbed the long, undulating slope of Favela and glided through the bare
caatinga
like snakes. It was noon. The sun was sending its rays deep into the earth, sending its vertical, burning rays to the bottom of the deepest grottoes. There were no shadows anywhere.

In those parts, noon is more quiet and frightening than midnight. All the heat of the earth shimmers on layers of exposed rock, reflected by the empty plains and refracted by the hard, cracked earth. These columns of heat flow into space in rising plumes of unbreathable, incandescent air. Nature rests in an enervating quietude. There is not the slightest breath of air. Not a wingbeat disturbs the air. Its transparency is ruffled only by swift, bubbling waves of heat. The hidden wildlife of the
caatingas
takes its noonday rest. The withered branches, stripped of bark, hang limply.

The army was also taking its rest on top of the mountain, exhausted by the heat. Sprawled randomly along the slopes, their hats over their faces to keep off the sun, soldiers were sleeping or dreaming of home as they took advantage of the lull to regain their strength for the next round of the battle. Dotted over the opposite hills were tiny huts, crowded together in a jumbled fashion. They had no streets or squares. This was Canudos, as quiet and deserted as an abandoned farm overrun with weeds.

The army was at rest.

On a slope above the artillery, over the tangled bushes on the edge of a clearing, twelve faces with nervous, darting feline eyes scanned the area. They were the faces of twelve men hidden in the bromeliads. No one saw them; they could not be seen as they slowly stood, turning their backs with arrogant indifference on the twenty quiet battalions. Before them lay the coveted prey. Like a magical beast ready to spring, the Whitworth 32 was poised on its strong base. Its enormous roaring mouth, which had spit so many grenades on their sacred churches, was pointed at Belo Monte. The sun’s rays falling with full intensity on its shining black surface made it sparkle. The guerrillas stood and stared at it for a while. Then they jumped from the clearing and attacked it, trying to strangle it. One of them fell on it with a hand spike, which he raised in a quick gesture of assault.

The blow fell, hard and loud.

An alarm broke the silence that covered every living creature, a cry that echoed through the canyons and over the hills and valleys. It filled the backlands with a thunderous echo. It was a cry of exultation and destruction that shook the camp.

The detachments quickly fell into ranks and in a second the young
jagunços
were surrounded by weapons as they were battered with blows and bullets. Only one escaped, wounded and bruised, by running, jumping, and rolling through the legs of the agitated troops. Under a rain of bullets and a ring of bayonets he tore into the weeds and down the steep mountain cliffs, overlooking the dangerous chasms, finally free.

This and other incidents, exaggerating the most common occurrences, gave the campaign an aura of legend that mobilized the people of the old capital and the entire nation.

It was now urgent that the government take more energetic action. Recent catastrophes had raised the level of apprehension as well as the sense that little was known about the real situation. As always, opinions clashed. The majority was convinced that the rebels had strong support. It was obvious. According to the hyperbolic orders of the day, they had been defeated. But they were still free to retreat to the backlands of the São Francisco region. Instead they remained in the settlement, where all escape routes would be closed once the siege was fully enforced. It was baffling. People came to grave conclusions. Aside from the hypothesis that their superhuman devotion would lead them to mass suicide under the ruins of their holy temples, they must have formidable skills in warfare that stumped the strategists. The numbers still in Canudos were thought to have been reduced. But this was surely a trick to keep the army there while the rebels gathered their forces at other points for a final attack along the line, where the invaders would be trapped between two lines of fire.

There were other, more optimistic, opinions. Colonel Carlos Telles wrote a letter to the press stating that the
jagunços
had been reduced to two hundred men, who were possibly without any provisions. The fanatics must be running out of the supplies they had taken from previous expeditions. This optimism, however, had little effect. All the facts contradicted it, especially the daily influx of wounded men, which added to the general feeling of unease.

There were more, equally disastrous, events to come. Responding to General Arthur Oscar de Andrade Guimarães’s requests, the government quickly assembled an auxiliary brigade, which unlike other units of its kind would not be known by a mere number. Following a worthy practice not customary with our army, the brigade would have the name of a renowned commander—the Girard Brigade. It was under the command of General Miguel Maria Girard and was composed of three units assigned from the garrison of the federal capital: the Twenty-second, under Colonel Bento Tomas Gonçalves; the Twenty-fourth, led by Lieutenant Colonel Raphael Tobias; and the Thirty-eighth, under Colonel Philomeno José da Cunha. There were a total of 1,042 men and 68 officers, well equipped with a splendid supply of 850,000 cartridges to feed the insatiable appetite of the war.

However, through a series of circumstances that would take too long to explain, this “auxiliary force” turned out to be an encumbrance. It left Rio de Janeiro under Girard and reached Queimadas on July 31. It then departed from Queimadas on August 3, led by a colonel, and went to Monte Santo. It set off from Monte Santo for Canudos on August 10, under the command of a major. It had left a colonel and a few officers who had fallen ill, in Bahia. It then left a general, a lieutenant colonel, and a few more officers, who had fallen ill, in Queimadas. It left a colonel and a few more officers, also ill, in Monte Santo.

The brigade fell apart on the road. Men were requesting discharges at a rate more alarming than the disappearance of entire brigades. A strange virus had attacked the men, requiring not a good doctor but an astute psychologist. The truth was that fear had produced its own great men, who were so brave they were willing to tell the entire country that they were cowards.

As they left Queimadas for the front, these men had seen the lines of wounded men returning from battle and they were gripped with the fear of war. General Savaget, Colonel Nery, Major Cunha Mattos, Captain Chacha Pereira, and other officers had visited their camp at Contendas and been greeted with enthusiasm by officers and men who had lined up along the road to salute. After that their fervor cooled. After a three-day march, they began to suffer from lack of adequate rations. They were forced to share provisions with every band of wounded soldiers they met. By the time they reached Monte Santo they were exhausted and demoralized.

The brigade headed to Canudos, where they were anxiously expected, on August 10. The unit was totally bereft of the impressive hierarchy of senior officers with which it had started off. It was now under the command of the commissary of the Twenty-fourth, Henrique José de Magalhães, and the battalions were assumed by Major Lydio Porto and Captains Afonso de Oliveira and Tito Escobar. The march had been slow and demanding. From Queimadas on, they met with serious transportation difficulties. Their mules and draft animals, rejects they had picked up in Bahia with drivers who were forced into service, were lame and unfit. They held up the troops and slowed their progress. They arrived in this crippled state at Aracati, where they picked up a supply train that they were instructed to escort to Canudos.

In the meantime their ranks were decimated by smallpox. Two or three cases a day were being referred to the hospital in Monte Santo. Others, who were injured in the transition from the paved streets of the capital to the rugged backland trails, lagged behind and were lost in the rear of the line. They walked with the wounded, who were going in the opposite direction.

It was fortunate that they ran into the Fifteenth Infantry Battalion in Juetê on August 14. This was a battle-seasoned unit, which had been sent from Canudos to meet them. The next day, after they took a rest stop in Baixas to allow stragglers to catch up with them, they were brutally attacked at Vicar’s Farm. The
jagunços
hit their right flank with sustained fire from a trench overlooking the highway. The victims were a sublieutenant of the Twenty-fourth, with the advance guard, and another of the Thirty-eighth, in the rear. They also hit soldiers in the lines. Caught off guard and dumbfounded at the ferocity of the guerrillas, the soldiers became disoriented. Most of them started to shoot aimlessly. The bugles were sounded and their loud tones were mixed with confused shouts of command. The terrified draft animals broke loose and ran, and the oxen stampeded into the
caatinga
.

The Fifteenth Battalion, in the vanguard, guided the wavering fighters. The enemy was not repelled. The rear guard was also attacked when it reached the same point.

After this defeat, which is what it was, it is enough to say that of the 102 oxen in the convoy only 11 were left. At Angico the brigade was attacked again. They made a token bayonet charge in which not one soldier was lost. They finally made it to Canudos, where the veteran warriors, hardened by having lived under fire every day, greeted them with a new nickname, Pretty Boys. Later the action of brave officers would earn them the right to shed this name.

The news of the attack reached Bahia already blown up into the proportions of a lost battle, adding another shock to the general state of unbalance and more rumors to the buzz of conjecture. The government finally began to act with the sense of urgency that the situation required. Acknowledging the failure of the last reinforcements, it started to form a new division by assembling the last remaining battalions capable of rapid mobilization from the states around the country. The government decided to send one of its members to the scene of operations, to gain firsthand information on the crisis. The secretary of war, Marshal Carlos Machado de Bittencourt, left for Bahia in August, as fresh troops were being mustered around the country. The military effort suddenly escalated into a mass draft.

The troops came from the far north and the far south and their numbers were increased with police detachments from São Paulo, Pará, and Amazonas. They all gathered in the ancient capital, Salvador, Bahia—the Paulista, descendent of the adventurous
bandeirante
; the daring horseman from Rio Grande do Sul; the Indian from the Northeast, who is rivaled by none for endurance. They were men from the most diverse regions of Brazil, of many characteristics and temperaments, customs and ethnic backgrounds. The dark mestizo and bronzed
caboclo
marched next to the white man. They were bonded by a common mission.

The ancient capital, nestled behind its age-old bastions, prepared to greet with an ardent embrace her many progeny, sons who had been wandering for three centuries. After being dispersed for a long time, the many elements of our race returned to their point of origin. Now they were beautifully intermingled. Bahia made herself beautiful to receive them. She shed her usual apathy and became transfigured by the flux and reflux of the campaign, the casualties coming into the city and the new recruits departing for the front. The city reassumed its historical appearance of a battle fortress. Her ramparts had fallen into disuse and were crumbling like the houses that lined her streets. The trees growing from the cracks in the stones were cut down and reconstruction began. It recalled the time when long bronze culverins had thundered from those battlements.

The new arrivals were billeted in the old fortifications. These included the First Police Battalion of São Paulo, with 21 officers and 458 men, under Lieutenant Colonel Joaquim Elesbão dos Reis; the Twenty-ninth, Thirty-ninth, Thirty-seventh, Twenty-eighth, and Fourth Battalions, led by Colonel João César de Sampaio, Lieutenant Colonels José da Cruz, Firmino Lopes Rego, and Antônio Bernardo de Figueiredo, and Major Frederico Mara. These had, respectively, contingents of 27 officers and 240 men, 40 officers and 250 men, 51 officers and 322 men, 11 officers (all sublieutenants) and 219 men. This last battalion, the Fourth, had no captains or lieutenants. Finally, there were two additional police detachments: the Police Regiment of Pará, with 640 men, led by Colonel José Sotero de Menezes; and the Police Regiment of Amazonas, under the command of Lieutenant Candido José Marino, with 328 soldiers.