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By Root 2212 0

silly things that pop into his head. He looks at Coríntio, limping along all hunched over, and remembers the day he first presented himself, as cool as you please, at the laundress’s hut: “Either you sleep with me, Florisa, or Coríntio will be confined to barracks every weekend, without visitors’ rights.” Florisa held out for a month; she gave in at first so as to be able to see Coríntio, but now, Frutuoso believes, she continues to sleep with him because she likes it. They do it right there in the hut or at the bend in the river where she goes to do her washing. It is a relationship that makes him feel as proud as a peacock when he’s drunk. Does Coríntio suspect anything? No, not a thing. Or does he simply let it pass, for what can he do when he’s up against a man like the sergeant, who, on top of everything else, is his superior?

He hears shots on his right, and so he goes looking for Captain Almeida. The order is to keep moving on, to rescue the first column, to keep the fanatics from wiping it out. Those shots are a tactic to distract them; the bandits have regrouped in Trabubu and are trying to pin them down. General Savaget has dispatched two battalions from the Fifth Brigade to answer the challenge, while the others meanwhile are continuing the forced march to the place where General Oscar is trapped. Captain Almeida looks so down in the mouth that Frutuoso asks him if something has gone wrong.

“Many casualties,” the captain says in a low voice. “More than two hundred wounded, seventy dead, among them Major Tristão Sucupira. Even General Savaget is wounded.”

“General Savaget?” the sergeant says. “But I just saw him ride by on horseback, sir.”

“Because he’s a brave man,” the captain answers. “He has a bad bullet wound in the belly.”

Frutuoso goes back to his squad of chasseurs. With so many dead and wounded, they’ve been lucky: except for Coríntio’s knee and the sergeant’s little finger, not one of them has a scratch. He looks at his finger. It doesn’t hurt but it’s bleeding; the bandage has turned a dark red. The doctor who treated him, Major Neri, laughed when the sergeant wanted to know if he’d be invalided out of the army. “Haven’t you noticed how many officers and men in the army are maimed?” Yes, he’s noticed. His hair stands on end when he thinks that they might discharge him. What would he do then? Since he has no wife, no children, no parents, the army is all of these things to him.

During the march, as they skirt the mountains that surround Canudos, the infantry, artillery, and cavalry troops of the second column hear shots, coming from the direction of the brush, several times. One or another of the companies drops back to launch a few volleys, as the rest go on. At nightfall, the Twelfth Battalion finally halts. The three hundred men unburden themselves of their knapsacks and rifles. They are worn out. This is not like all the other nights since they left Aracaju and marched to this spot via São Cristóvão, Lagarto, Itaporanga, Simão Dias, Jeremoabo, and Canche. On each of the other nights when they halted to bivouac, they butchered animals and went out searching for water and wood, and the darkness was full of the sound of guitars, songs, voices chatting. Now no one says a word. Even the sergeant is tired.

The rest does not last long for him. Captain Almeida calls the squad leaders together to find out how many cartridges they still have left and replace the ones that have been used up, so that all the men can leave with two hundred rounds each in their knapsacks. He announces to them that the Fourth Brigade, to which they belong, will now be in the vanguard and their battalion in the vanguard of the vanguard. The news restores Frutuoso’s enthusiasm, but knowing that they will be the spearhead does not arouse the slightest reaction among his men, who begin marching again with great yawns and without comment.

Captain Almeida has said that they will make contact with the first column at dawn, but it is not yet two o’clock in the morning when the advance units of the Fourth Brigade spy the dark bulk