Backlands (51 page)

There were no preliminary orders. There was no attempt to impose the traditional formations or classical battle strategies on this crude battleground. The conditions of the campaign were well understood as they should have been from the beginning. These men grasped that textbook theories were completely inappropriate to this type of backwoods warfare. Here the tactics were limited and savage and everything depended on spur-of-the-moment decisions.

For the first time the troops were prepared for the
jagunço
and his particular brand of fighting. They were subdivided into independent, compact, but efficient mobile units. They were able to react quickly to surprise attacks and face the one thing that they should expect in this new kind of warfare that has no set rules: the unexpected. The three brigades were agile, flexible, and stable. They had their own supply trains, which did not slow them down. They were now free to move in the supple manner of the guerrillas themselves and in harmony with the terrain. The mass formation of the division was broken up. Instead of relying on numbers, emphasis was given to speed and strength in circumscribed arenas of conflict. They eliminated the artillery fireworks, which were impressive but useless under these conditions.

The Fourth Brigade was in the lead, composed of the Twelfth and Thirty-first battalions under the commands of Lieutenant Colonel Sucupira de Alencar Araripe and Major João Pacheco de Assis.

Colonel Carlos Telles was in command of this brigade, which was the best military organization our army has had in recent history.

He was a perfect specimen of those extraordinary leaders that come out of Rio Grande do Sul, made from the mold of the soldier-chieftain Andrade Neves. He was brave, good humored, and strong willed. He managed to be at the same time innovative and conservative, fearless and cautious, impetuous and objective. He did not hesitate to fight next to his men in the most heated battle after he had made sure to plan carefully for the operation.

The federalist campaign in the South had made his reputation. He had won his enviable laurels in the heroic siege of Bagé. The Canudos campaign was bound to increase his renown. He had the warrior intuition of the gaucho and understood the variable conditions of warfare as few others of his peers did. He was a striking figure: tall and imposing, with a clear, unwavering gaze.

He led his brigade, traveling alone, to Simão Dias. They arrived on May 4. He had shaped his detachment into a small corps that was well adapted to the conditions of the conflict. He made it lighter and more flexible. He trained his men. Although he could not give them the practical knowledge that he had acquired on the battlefields of Rio Grande, he did the best he could to make them swift and strong in charging the enemy. He selected sixty skilled horsemen from the Thirty-first, who were not suited to the slow pace of the infantry. He made them into a lance squadron under the command of a sublieutenant. This innovation at first seemed to be a mistake. The “cold silent weapon” of Damiroff, designed for cavalry charges on the steppes and pampas, seemed at first to be completely inappropriate for the rugged, brambly soil of the
sertão
. Later, the importance of this decision was made clear.

These new lancers were skilled riders used to jumping across the “bull pits” of the southern pampas. Now they took on the pits and gullies of the northern backlands. Later on, when the columns were reassembled on the desert of Mount Favela, the lance turned into a cowboy’s prod to round up the stray cattle that became the only source of food for the starving troops.

The lancers thus had a dual function. They kept the line of march clear for General Savaget’s division as they moved from Jeremoabo to Canudos. A few days before the division set out, a few soldiers from the squadron had reconnoitered the road all the way to the outskirts of the settlement. As a result, the road was clear as far as Serra Vermelha, where the foothills of the Cocorobó range start. At a pace of five miles a day, the column went by the settlements known as Passagem, Canabrava, Brejinho, Mauari, Canché, Estrada Velha, and Serra Vermelha. They reached this place on June 25, certain they would find the enemy near. For the first time, the government troops were not taken by surprise in the backlands.

Cocorobó is the name of not just one but a number of hills. The area recalls the remains of ancient canyons, erosion valleys or ravines that were carved out by the Vaza-Barris in remote ages when the great force of its waters overflowed from a huge lake covering the rugged plain of Canudos. The mass of waters was then contained by the huge block of hills that ripple away from Favela to Caipã, to the southwest and northwest. From Favela they reached to the northeast and then, contained by the highlands of Poço de Cima and Canabrava, had no other course but to overflow eastward into narrow, trenchlike troughs.

The topographical features of this region invite us to recall the region’s geological history. Here the highlands are fragmented into steep mountain passes and jagged, saw-toothed inclines. The general appearance is that of a dike that has been severely eroded by floodwaters. The slopes seem to have been carved out of the plain. Even though they are very irregular, they allow a mental reconstruction of the original features of the land. They are the fossil remains of a mountain. The same Silurian layers are exposed here as elsewhere. The earth’s core is revealed at ground level in the proportion that the torrential waters have eroded the more recent sedimentary formations. The primitive mountain is revealed out of this process of excavation. It exhibits the pronounced hypsometric curves, which are telling signs of the strength of the natural forces that have lashed it for ages. As in the case of Mount Favela, the tough
caatinga
dies off at the foot of the mountain, leaving the sides completely barren. Its sides are sometimes encrusted with boulders and other times fall straight down in sheer walls, with a few stunted orchids growing out from the crevices in the rock. They can jut up in the form of reefs or cliffs whose surfaces are a series of folds that fan all the way to the summit. There they form a tight row of peaks that contrast with the flat land below, not just in form but in underlying structure.

Whoever undertakes the trip from Canudos to Jeremoabo will find an unusual passage—it is the deep gap through which the Vaza-Barris flows east on its winding course. The river becomes the real road here. After following along its bed for a few yards the sensation is of having gone through a narrow door. The mountain notch comes to an end, the steep slopes along its sides quickly flatten out, and one enters a huge, arching amphitheater. The earth is still rugged and another cluster of hills is a point of focus in the center of the semicircular space. The original passage splits. On the right it rounds the bend of the Vaza-Barris. These two gorges of varying width narrow in places to a span of about twenty yards and then continue to follow a slow curve drawn by two outlying mountain spurs. After separating for a short distance, they join again to form another single slope, which leads out to the Jeremoabo highway. Before they join, each is bordered by slopes—the hills in the center face the larger mountain defiles on the opposite side. These are ridged with steep cliffs, in random formations or clustering in terraces like stairs, reminiscent of a giant coliseum.

The slope of the Cocorobó range gives us a notion of how rough the terrain is in this region.

Its funnel-shaped extremities divide into two forking canyons that are almost impassable. The road follows this difficult divide, which in the rainy season is flooded by the waters of the Vaza-Barris, the hills in the center now islands, until when the two paths meet again, they emerge on the plain where the Jeremoabo highway cuts through and stretches on to the east.

If one comes from the opposite direction, or eastward from Jeremoabo, a similar split occurs. The traveler must choose one or the other of the two paths, the right or the left, until he reaches the single exit at the other side. When the winding gorge ends there is no level plain. Here the soil is similarly rugged. The Vaza-Barris twists and turns between the rows of hills. The uneven road, which skirts the river or follows its bed, is full of obstacles and detours around the slopes and spurs of countless hills. It continues to the valley of a seasonal stream called the Macambira, named after a backwoods chief who had a house here. From this place it continues to follow the river all the way to Canudos, five miles off.

The advance troops halted about five hundred yards on this side of the barrier, just before noon on June 25. The lancer squadron had seen the enemy. They caught a brief glimpse of him as they galloped by the
jagunços’
rough trenches. When the
jagunços
fired, wounding two of the squadron, they returned at full tilt to the head of the column. The Fifth Brigade sent one of its battalions, under Major Nonato de Seixas, to the site. It broke up into small sharpshooting detachments. The other two battalions, the Thirty-fourth and Thirty-fifth, stayed back as reserves. General Savaget was alerted about the incidents. He accompanied the Fourth Brigade and positioned it four hundred yards from the front, to wait for the Sixth, the artillery division, and the supply train, which were about two miles behind. While this was under way, the advance detachments consisting of about eight hundred men under Colonel Serra Martins, initiated a full-fledged attack. The dispersed shots of the marksmen mixed with the steady supporting fire of the platoons, which had moved forward and were responding to the enemy fire. The
sertanejos
met their attack staunchly. The commanding officer described them as “daring and tenacious . . . they had the additional advantage of positions with a good view of the plain and the road. They did not yield an inch. To the contrary, they vigorously repelled our attack. They kept up a relentless fire against our men. The result was soon evident with the mounting numbers of dead and wounded.”

The events of Mount Cambaio and Mount Favela were being repeated here. It was an identical setting, and the
sertanejos
were reenacting the same crude, deadly, and monotonous drama in which they were the invisible actors. Their method never varied because it worked well for them. From their mountain parapets they could fire with impunity on our men, who were a perfect target on the flat and unencumbered plain below. Their bullets were beginning to thin the closest ranks. First the sharpshooters fell, and then the supporting detachments succumbed to a spray of fire, until finally their distant fire knocked holes in the last rows of the rear guard and the entire column was in their sights.

They wasted no ammunition. They did not rely on quantity of fire but on accuracy of aim. They were careful with their cartridges and kept close count of them so they would not be wasted. After a short time their well-placed volleys produced a thundering reply of eight hundred army rifles. The chaos that they let loose reached alarming proportions.

The Fifth Brigade showed amazing discipline and stood up to enemy fire for two hours from their position in the bushes on the banks of the Vaza-Barris. Our troops did not advance one step in this entire time. It was too risky to attempt a direct attack because of the two gorges ahead of them. They would have had to make their way in small groups along the sides of the ravines, and there was no way to get around them. This would have required a flanking movement along rows of hills to the right and the left, under the wary eye of the enemy, which would have left them exposed and without sufficient men at decisive moments in the battle.

General Savaget was aware of all these conditions when he assessed the situation confronting his troops. Until the present, his eight superbly equipped battalions had the upper hand. Their safety had been assured by effective reconnoitering, which decided the day and place where they would meet the enemy. However, for the last two hours his men, unable to act, had lost their lives to rifle fire from a band of backwoodsmen who attacked without repercussions. The situation required him to improvise a quick and effective plan. It seemed that all they could do for the time being was to risk everything and hold their position under the savage bombardment. The advance guard was reinforced, and the artillery came forward with one of the Krupps and established a position near the front lines.

They began to bombard the mountain. Fired from close range, the grenades and case shot pounded the mountainside or ricocheted. The air was raining with bullets, iron splinters, and debris from the slopes. The cannons burst open boulders, dislocated and toppled them, sending them crashing down the mountain like a caving wall. They appeared to be stripping the camouflage from the enemy positions. This did not lead to any positive results and only goaded the enemy to a ferocious counterattack. It was all they could do to hold out. With their thinned ranks, the two supporting battalions began to throw themselves into the battle with more losses. The rest of the column, spreading a mile and a quarter from front to rear, was immobilized. It looked like a defeat.

After three hours of fighting, the attackers had not advanced even a foot. At a distance of only five hundred yards they had not seen a single man from the enemy lines. They had no way of estimating how many there were. The tallest hills, which jutted out in a buttress-shaped spur over the plain, seemed deserted. The blazing sun beat down on them. Every detail of the physical environment around them was clearly visible. It was possible to count the boulders scattered about on the hillsides, some swaying as if ready to fall or piled in gigantic mounds. Scattered between them were the stalks of tough bromeliads, caroas, and
macambiras
with their long, straight multicolored spathes, gleaming like swords in the light. There were a few sparse cacti. In the distance was a jumble of peaks that also had the same desolate appearance.

From this utter solitude and devastation issued sustained fire. General Savaget’s plan of the day remarks that it was “as if an entire division of infantry were stationed there.”