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Back at the Pyrotechnist’s shack, he has already lain down in his hammock when Lieutenant Pinto Souza, who has just returned from A Favela, arrives with a message. The Seventh Brigade will be arriving at dawn to reinforce the “black line.”

He sleeps for five hours, and the following morning he feels restored, brimming with energy as he drinks his coffee and eats a handful of the little cornmeal biscuits that are the treasure of his private rations. A strange silence reigns on the entire front. The battalions of the Seventh Brigade are about to arrive, and to cover their advance across the open terrain the general orders the gun crews of the Krupps to bombard the towers. Since the very first days, he has asked his superiors to send him, along with the reinforcements, those special steel-tipped 70 millimeter shells that were manufactured in the Rio Mint to pierce the deck plating of the rebels’ boats during the September 6 uprising. Why do they pay no attention to this request? He has explained to the High Command that shrapnel and gas grenades are not sufficient to destroy those damned towers carved out of living rock. Why do they keep turning a deaf ear?

The day goes by with only sporadic gunfire, and General Oscar spends it supervising the disposition of the fresh troops of the Seventh Brigade along the “black line.” During a meeting with his staff, it is decided that another attack is definitely out of the question until the reinforcements arrive. They will fight a holding action, while trying to advance gradually on the enemy’s right flank—which at first glance would appear to be Canudos’s weakest—in small-scale attacks, without exposing all the men at once. It is also decided that an expedition will be sent to Monte Santo, to escort those wounded in good enough condition to withstand the march.

At midday, as they are burying Colonels Silva Telles and Serra Martins, down by the river, in a single grave with two wooden crosses, a piece of bad news is brought to the general: Colonel Neri has just been wounded in the hip by a stray bullet as he was answering a call of nature at a crossarm in the “black line.”

That night the general is awakened by heavy gunfire. The jagunços are attacking the two Krupp 7.5 cannons in the field and the Thirty-second Infantry Battalion is hastening to reinforce the artillerymen. The jagunços breached the “black line” in the darkness, under the sentries’ very noses. It is a hard-fought engagement for two hours, and casualties are high: there are seven dead and fifteen wounded, among them a second lieutenant. But the jagunços have fifty dead and seventeen taken prisoner. The general goes to see them.

It is dawn; the hills stand out against a bluish iridescence. The wind is so cold that General Oscar wraps a blanket around him as he strides across the open terrain. Fortunately, the Krupps are intact. But the violence of the fighting and the number of their comrades left dead and wounded have so incensed the artillerymen and the foot soldiers that General Oscar finds the prisoners half dead from the blows dealt them. They are very young, some of them just children, and among them are two women; all of them are skeleton-thin. General Oscar thus sees firsthand evidence of what all the prisoners confess: the great scarcity of food among the bandits. The men explain that it was the women and the youngsters who were doing the shooting, for the jagunços’ mission was to try to destroy the cannons with picks, maces, crowbars, and hammers, or to clog them with sand. A good sign: this is the second time that they have tried, so the Krupp 7.5s are doing them a great deal of damage. Both the women and the youngsters are wearing blue headcloths and armbands. The officers present are revolted by this unimaginable barbarism: that the jagunços sent women and children out to fight strikes them as the height of human degradation, a mockery of the art and ethics of war. As he is leaving the scene,