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“The soldiers are right on top of us,” Jurema screamed. “Heaven help us, what’s going to become of us?”

He shrugged and took up his position behind the parapet again. Should she leave this trench, go back to the other side of the slope, flee to Canudos? Her body would not obey her, her legs had gone as limp as rags, if she stood up she would fall down. Why didn’t the soldiers appear with their bayonets, what were they waiting for if they’d spied them only a few yards away? The jagunço moved his lips again, but all she could hear was that buzzing in her ears and now, too, metallic sounds: bugles?

“I can’t hear a thing, not a thing,” she shouted at the top of her lungs. “I’ve gone deaf.”

The jagunço nodded and motioned to her, as though indicating that someone was moving off. He was a young man, with long kinky hair tumbling out from under the brim of his leather sombrero with a greenish tinge, and wearing the armband of the Catholic Guard. “What?” Jurema shouted. He gestured to her to look over the parapet. Pushing the two dead bodies aside, she peeked out of one of the openings between the stones. The soldiers were now lower down on the slope. It was they who were moving off. “Why are they going off if they’ve won?” she wondered, watching them being swallowed up by the swirls of dust. Why were they moving off downhill instead of climbing up the hill to kill off the survivors?

When Sergeant Frutuoso Medrado—First Company, Twelfth Battalion—hears the bugle command to retreat, he thinks he is going mad. His squad of chasseurs is at the head of the company and the company at the head of the battalion as they launch a bayonet charge, the fifth one of the day, on the western slopes of Cocorobó. The fact that this time—when they have taken three-quarters of the mountainside, flushing out, with bayonet and saber, the English from the hiding places from which they were sniping at the patriots—they are being given orders to retreat is simply beyond all understanding as Sergeant Frutuoso sees it, even though he has a good head for such things. But there is no doubt about it: there are now many bugles ordering them to withdraw. His eleven men are crouching down looking at him, and in the windblown dust enveloping them Sergeant Medrado sees that they are as taken aback as he is. Has the field commander lost his mind, robbing them of victory when only the heights remained to be cleared of the enemy? The English are few in number and have almost no ammunition; glancing up toward the crest, Sergeant Frutuoso Medrado spies those of them who have managed to escape from the waves of soldiers breaking over them, and sees that they are not shooting: they are simply brandishing their knives and machetes, throwing stones. “I haven’t gotten myself my Englishman yet,” Frutuoso thinks.

“What are your men waiting for? Why aren’t they obeying the order?” the commanding officer of the company, Captain Almeida, who suddenly materializes at his side, shouts in his ear.

“First squad of chasseurs! Retreat!” the sergeant immediately yells, and his eleven men dash down the slope.

But he is in no hurry; he starts back down at the same pace as Captain Almeida. “The order took me by surprise, sir,” he murmurs, placing himself on the officer’s right. “What sense is there in retreating at this point?”

“It is not our duty to understand but to obey,” Captain Almeida growls, sliding downhill on his heels, leaning on his saber as though it were a cane. But a moment later he adds, without trying to hide his anger: “I don’t understand it either. All we had to do was to kill them off—mere child’s play.”

Frutuoso Medrado thinks to himself that one of the few disadvantages of this military life that he relishes so is the mysterious nature of certain command decisions. He has taken part in the five charges on the heights of Cocorobó, and yet he is not tired. He has been fighting for six hours, ever since his battalion, marching in the vanguard of the column, suddenly found itself caught in a cross fire early