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The group disperses. A few of the men walk off with Queluz, and one of them throws a towel over him, while others climb down the steep clay bank to cool off in the Itapicuru. Pires Ferreira rinses his face off in a bucket of water that his orderly brings over to him. He signs the report indicating that he has administered the punishment. Meanwhile, he answers Lieutenant Pinto Souza’s questions; the latter is still obsessed by his report on Uauá. Were those rifles old ones or ones recently purchased?

“They weren’t new ones,” Pires Ferreira says. “They’d been used in 1884, in the São Paulo and Paraná campaign. But it’s not because they’re old that they’re defective. The problem is the way the Mannlicher is built. It was designed and developed in Europe, for a very different climate and combat conditions, for an army with a capability for maintaining them that ours doesn’t have.”

He is interrupted by the sound of many bugles blowing, in all the camps at once.

“Officers’ assembly,” Pinto Souza says. “That’s not on the order of the day.”

“It must be the theft of those hundred Comblain rifles. It’s driving the senior officers mad,” Pires Ferreira says. “Maybe they’ve discovered who the thieves are and are going to shoot them.”

“Or maybe the Minister of War has arrived,” Pinto Souza says. “His visit’s been announced.”

They head for the assembly area of the Third Battalion, but on arriving there they are informed that they will also be meeting with the officers of the Seventh and Fourteenth; in other words, the whole First Brigade. They run to the command post, set up in a tannery on the Itapicuru, a quarter of a league upstream. On their way there, they notice an unusual hustle and bustle in all the camps, and the bugles have set up such a din now that it is difficult to decipher what the calls are. In the tannery they find several dozen officers already assembled. Some of them must have been surprised in the middle of their afternoon siesta, for they are still putting on their blouses or buttoning their tunics. The commanding officer of the First Brigade, Colonel Joaquim Manuel de Medeiros, standing on top of a bench, is speaking, with many gestures, but Pires Ferreira and Pinto Souza are unable to hear what he is saying, for all around them are cheers, shouts of “Long live Brazil” and “Hurray for the Republic,” and some of the officers are tossing their kepis in the air to show their joy.

“What’s happening? What’s happening?” Lieutenant Pinto Souza asks.

“We’re leaving for Canudos within two hours!” an artillery captain shouts back at him euphorically.

[II]

“Madness? Misunderstandings? That’s not enough. It doesn’t explain everything,” the Baron de Canabrava murmured. “There has also been stupidity and cruelty.”

He had a sudden image of the kindly face of Gentil de Castro, with his pink cheeks and his blond sideburns, bending over to kiss Estela’s hand on some festive occasion at the Palace, when he was a member of the Emperor’s cabinet. He was as dainty as a lady, as naïve as a child, good-hearted, obliging. What else besides imbecility and wickedness could explain what had happened to Gentil de Castro?

“I suppose they’re what lies behind not only Canudos but all of history,” he said aloud, grimacing in displeasure.

“Unless one believes in God,” the nearsighted journalist interrupted him, his harsh voice reminding the baron of his existence. “As they did up there. Everything was crystal-clear. Famine, the bombardments, the men with their bellies ripped open, those who died of starvation. The Dog or the Father, the Antichrist or the Blessed Jesus. They knew immediately which of the two was responsible for any given event, whether it was a blessing or a curse. Don’t you envy them? Everything becomes easy if one is capable of identifying the good or the evil behind each and every thing that happens.”

“I suddenly remembered Gentil de Castro just now,” the Baron de Canabrava murmured. “The stupefaction he must have felt on learning why his newspaper offices were