Backlands (36 page)

The certainty of danger quickens these instincts, and the certainty of victory represses them.

Everyone was positive that the expedition would be successful. The awareness of danger would have resulted in rapid mobilization and a surprise attack on the enemy. Overconfidence immobilized the troops for two weeks of idleness in Monte Santo.

Let’s look at what happened. The commander of the expedition had left most of his munitions in Queimadas so as not to delay the march and allow the enemy to strengthen its position. It was his intention to make a lightning attack. Frustrated by the difficulties he encountered, including an almost complete lack of means of transportation, he was inclined to move immediately to the insurgent camp, even though all he had was the ammunition the men carried in their cartridge pouches. This did not happen, however, and his quick departure from one place was offset by pointless delay in the other. The layover would have been productive only if he had made use of the time to assemble his equipment, especially by ordering his supply trains to be dispatched from Queimadas. The setbacks of the long halt would have been outweighed by the gains. He would have traded speed for strength, and he would have substituted a more secure plan of attack for a direct assault. But he did not do this. In fact, he did exactly the opposite. After the long period of inactivity in Monte Santo, the expedition set off even less equipped than it had been when it arrived two weeks earlier, leaving behind, once again, part of its already reduced supply of provisions.

In the meantime, information was coming in that contradicted the forecasts of an early victory. There were disputes about the number of fanatics and the resources they had available. Some claimed that there were no more than five hundred at most; others insisted there were ten times as many, or around five thousand all together. It might have been possible to estimate a figure but this was not done. Moreover, all the whispers and rumors were leading to suspicions of treason. Certain local authorities with connections to the Counselor were strongly suspected of giving him aid with supplies and information on the slightest movements of the troops. Moreover, it was known that the enemy’s clever spies would precede and accompany the troops regardless of army security. In fact, as it was learned later, many of them were in the town itself, mingling with the troops. In Canudos they would certainly have found out well ahead of time which road had been selected for the line of operations so they could fortify its most difficult stretches, and the battle of Uauá would be reenacted with a preliminary engagement on the highway before the attack on the settlement. It was a mistake for the troops to leave their base of operations the way they did. In fact, the expedition started out on its mission as if it were returning from a campaign. Once again abandoning part of its munitions, it moved on even more undersupplied to Monte Santo than it had been at Queimadas, with the illusion of resupplying itself in Canudos. This amounts to saying that the troops disarmed themselves as they approached the enemy. They were going to face the unknown with the fragile armor of their impulsive bravery, so typical of our people.

Defeat was certain.

These lapses of judgment were compounded by others, revealing their total ignorance of the basics of warfare. The plan of the day with regard to the organization of the attacking forces is an example.

Cryptic as are most orders for distribution of detachments, there was not the slightest information as to the deployment, formation, or maneuvers of the combat units. There was not one word about the certainty of ambush. There was nothing, either, about the distribution of units to respond to the special characteristics of the enemy and the terrain. The commanding officer of the expedition borrowed a few principles of Prussian tactics as if he were leading a small army corps through some meadow in Belgium. He went about dividing his troops into three columns, preparing to go into battle with a traditional formation of infantry and supporting detachments. That was it, orders coming out of a mindless adherence to obsolete formulas of warfare. They were completely inappropriate for the current situation.

According to von der Goltz, any military organization should reflect national character. On the one extreme are rigid Prussian tactics that stress the mechanical precision of fire. On the other side of the spectrum is the nervous swordplay and chivalry of the Latin. We, on the other hand, have been accustomed to dangerous sparring with stealthy fighters whose strength is in their weakness, in their pattern of strike and flight, and where the enemy escapes by disappearing into a landscape that hides him. In such conditions charging troops and discharging weapons were equally useless. Against such enemies and on such ground any kind of battle line was impossible to consider. It was not even possible to wage a battle in the technical sense of the term. This conflict, or to put it bluntly, this brutal manhunt beating through the brush for the target at Canudos, was going to be reduced to a series of fierce attacks, agonizing delays, and sudden skirmishes. It was ludicrous to think that a classical battle would take place with an opening volley of violent gunfire and a wild epilogue of bayonet charges. Given the nature of the land and the people, this war should have been in the more capable hands of a guerrilla warfare strategist—someone who could innovate on the spot. This war would present situations that most military operations experience as distinct moments—at rest, on the march, and in battle. Here the marching troops had to be ready for the enemy at every turn of the road; they might find him lunging at them from within their own ranks, and they had to be ready for action even when at ease.

The command gave no thought to these conditions. The commander simply formed his three columns and put himself in front of them. He was placing the brute force of three clumsy columns of men against the finely honed skill of the
jagunços.
Now, it stands to reason that a military leader should know something about psychology. However disciplined a solider might be—a bundle of muscle, bone, and nerves trained to react without will or thought to the bugle call—he will become another creature entirely when subjected to the stresses of war. This march through the backlands would put the emotions of these soldiers to the most arduous test. Marching along unfamiliar ground, surrounded by a parched and savage landscape, our soldier is normally brave when facing an enemy, but he becomes a fearful coward when his invisible adversary reveals his palpable presence by lying in wait in ambush. While in normal warfare an advance-guard skirmish warns the following troops, it is dangerous in these conditions. The terrified detachments break ranks in confusion and instinctively head back for the rear.

These contingencies should have been taken into account. The units should have been widely spread out even though it would have left them completely isolated. It would have helped morale to know that their comrades would promptly reinforce them by attacking the enemy from the other side. This would have averted panic and made it easier to manage the men. A decentralized command would have allowed the leaders of smaller units to act on their own initiative in response to the circumstances of the moment. The way to fight this war was to mimic the enemy’s free style of fighting, by running a formation parallel to his but with better discipline. This was the only way to minimize the chances of defeat and to counteract the effects of sudden ambush. The only way to win this war was through a series of successive attacks.

To summarize, the expeditionary force should have fanned out from the start of its march and gradually closed in on the fanatics as it regrouped in Canudos. It did just the opposite. It mindlessly set out in unified columns, in mass formation, by brigades. It would be broken up soon enough in Canudos.

It was under these poor conditions that they set out for Canudos on January 12, 1897. They took the Cambaio road.

This is the shortest and the roughest route. At first it is deceptive, as it follows the Cariacá valley, a band of fertile land shaded by thickets that are a sign of the dense forests ahead. After a few miles, the harsh terrain becomes evident. The rocky trail narrows and becomes more and more impassable as it approaches the Acarú Range. From here it curves eastward, climbing three successive slopes to the site of the Lagem de Dentro farm, at an altitude of a thousand feet.

It took them two days to reach this point. The artillery held up the march. They painfully dragged the Krupps up the incline while the sappers went ahead to clear the road of stumps and debris and to open up winding paths in an attempt to avoid the steeper trails. Although their success depended on their mobility, the troops were paralyzed by having to move those huge masses of metal.

After passing Lagem de Dentro and after crossing the divide between the banks of the Itapicurú and Vaza-Barris rivers, the road begins a descent. The march becomes more difficult because of the complicated terrain where the seasonal tributaries of the Bendegó start. The Bendegó catch basin is soon in sight. It links the arms of the Acarú, Grande, and Atanásio ranges, which join here in a huge curve. The expedition entered the trough of this deep valley, until they reached another farm, Ipueiras, where they set up camp. This was a mistake. The site was surrounded by rocky cliffs, which made them a target on all sides if the enemy should appear on the hilltops. Fortunately, the
jagunços
had not made it there yet. The next morning, the troops headed north for Penedo, having by dumb luck escaped grave danger.

They had now come halfway. The roads were getting worse. The hills were striated with trails that wound around them in serpentine coils, rising steeply and then plunging down into great open canyons, where there was no shade.

The sappers continued to clear the way for the cannons as far as Mulungú, five miles beyond Penedo. Their progress was hampered by the lumbering pace of the artillery division.

Speed was imperative. The landscape started to show signs of the enemy: The embers of fires along the road and dwellings burned to the ground revealed his presence. That night, in Mulungú, the camp became alarmed. The faces of sentries had been seen hidden in the dark shadows of the night. They had caught no more than a glimpse but the soldiers slept with their weapons. And the next morning, the seventeenth, the expedition was stuck in the mountains, still far away from their destination, which should have been reached in just three days’ march. They were now about to experience a terrible torture.

Their provisions had run out. The two remaining oxen had to be slaughtered to feed about five hundred men. This alone was the equivalent of a defeat, before even a single shot was fired. To reach Canudos had now become a fight for their lives.

To make matters worse, the pack drivers they had hired in Monte Santo disappeared during the night. Under the pretext of going back in search of munitions, the commissary of that town took off for an unknown destination and never returned.

One man, however, upheld backlands honor, the guide Domingos Jesuíno. He led the troops forward to the Rancho das Pedras, where they set up camp.

Now they were about five miles from Canudos.

Looking north from the camp at night, an observer might have seen a few flickering lights in the distance, now gleaming and then extinguishing intermittently. They were very high up, like bright stars in the clouds. They marked the enemy positions.

The next morning they would be not only visible but ominous.

The rock formations of Mount Cambaio loomed in front of them. They were random formations cut in deep trenches or rising up in a series of terraces that looked like huge beams in a fortress built by giants.

The image is perfect. In this part of the backlands the landscape takes on extreme appearances. It is what inspired those tales of “enchanted cities” in Bahia. The backlands imagination has led to serious scholarly research. We should not accuse these simple backlanders of exaggeration. The natural formations have excited the interest of learned societies. Objective observers have traveled across the strange valley of the Vaza-Barris only to stop in awe to gaze, in Lieutenant Colonel Durval de Aguiar’s words, at the “mountains of stone in natural formations that look like fortresses and are of such perfection that they are like works of art.”

Sometimes this illusion is amplified.

Vast cities of the dead arise. These hills, with their sharply pointed edges and heaps of stone, their capriciously hewed ridges, indeed appear to be giant necropolises. The backlander gallops fearfully past them, digging his spurs into his horse’s flanks, imagining a silent city of the dead.

The “little houses” that one sees in the area of the Aracati range are like this—near the Jeremoabo highway that leads to Bom Conselho. There are others throughout the region and they give these sad landscapes a mysterious aura.

The Cambaio range is one of those hulking monuments. Certainly no one will find geometric architectural features, such as parapets or redans surrounded by fosses. These crude outcrops reflected the character of those who stood watch here. From a distance, the rock ledges and gullies formed from the ravines would not be visible. The general impression would be of successive terraces stacked up the slope, looking like the crumbling walls of old castles that had suffered waves of assaults and were now just piles of stone in huge semicircles or rows of truncated plinths, towers, and pilasters looking like great toppled columns.

Cambaio is a mountain in ruins. It towers as a misshapen mass, splitting apart under the periodic punishment of sudden storms and searing suns, hacked apart and disjointed. It is undergoing a centuries-old disintegration.

The road to Canudos does not go around the mountain. It goes straight up its side, along a steep trail flanked by cliffs, submerging finally into a tunnel-shaped pass. It was through here that the troops had to make their way.