The War Of The End Of The World - Mario Vargas Llosa [73]
When they arrived on the run to post themselves in the crevices and gullies and on the projecting rock slabs of the mountain that soldiers in red-and-blue and green-and-blue uniforms were trying to scale, there were already men who had died in combat. The jagunços posted by Abbot João in the pass that the main troops would be obliged to file through had seen them approaching while it was still dark, and while most of them stayed behind to rest in Rancho das Pedras—some eight cabins that had been razed by the arsonists—they saw a company of infantrymen, commanded by a lieutenant mounted on a piebald horse, marching toward O Cambaio. They allowed them to advance until they were almost upon them and then, at a signal from José Venâncio, rained down fire from carbines, blunderbusses, muskets, rocks, arrows shot from hunting crossbows, and insults—“dogs,”
“Freemasons,”
“Protestants”—on them. Only then did the soldiers become aware of their presence. They all turned tail and fled, except for three wounded, who were overtaken and finished off by young jagunços dodging bullets, and the horse, which reared and threw its rider, rolled down the mountainside amid the rough stones and broke its legs. The lieutenant managed to take refuge behind some boulders and began returning the fire as the animal lay there, neighing mournfully, for several hours as the shooting went on.
Many jagunços had been blown to bits by shells from the Krupps, which began to bombard the mountain shortly after the first skirmish, causing landslides and showers of rock shards. Big João, who was posted alongside José Venâncio, realized that it was suicide to stay bunched together, and leaping from one rock slab to another, waving his arms like the sails of a windmill, shouted at them to disperse so as not to offer such a compact target. They obeyed him, jumping from rock to rock or crawling along on their bellies as below them, divided into combat groups led by lieutenants, sergeants, and corporals, the infantrymen climbed up O Cambaio amid a cloud of dust and a flurry of bugle calls. By the time Abbot João and Pajeú arrived with reinforcements, they had gotten halfway up the mountain. Despite their heavy losses, the jagunços who were trying to drive them off had not given a foot of ground. The reinforcements who were equipped with firearms began to shoot immediately, accompanying the volleys with loud shouts. The ones who had only machetes and knives, or the sort of crossbows that men of the backlands used to hunt duck and deer, which Antônio Vilanova had had the carpenters of Canudos make dozens of, confined themselves to grouping themselves around those with firearms and handing them gunpowder or charging the muzzle-loading carbines, hoping that the Blessed Jesus would see fit to allow them to inherit a gun or get close enough to the enemy to be able to attack with their bare hands.
The Krupps kept bombarding the heights of the mountain, and the rockslides caused as many casualties as the bullets. As dusk was just beginning to fall and the figures in red-and-blue and green-and-blue uniforms were beginning to break through the lines of the elect, Abbot João convinced the others that they should fall back or they would find themselves surrounded. Several dozen jagunços had died and many more were wounded. Those able to hear the order and obey it began to retreat, slipping off via the plain known as O Taboleirinho toward Belo Monte; they numbered just over half as many men as had taken this route in the