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By Root 1997 0

The jagunços were already upon them, among them, behind them, in front of them, shooting them, knifing them, stoning them, piercing them with spikes, biting them, tearing away their guns, their cartridge belts, tearing out their hair, their eyes, and above all reviling them with the strangest curses they had ever heard. First a few of them, then others managed to make their escape, bewildered, driven mad, petrified by this sudden insane attack that seemed beyond the human. In the shadows that were falling in the wake of the ball of fire that had just sunk behind the mountaintops, they scattered, one by one or in groups, amid those foothills of O Cambaio that they had climbed with such effort all through the long day—running in all directions, stumbling, falling, getting to their feet again, ripping off their uniforms in the hope that they would not be noticed, and praying that night would finally come and be a dark one.

They might all have died, there might not have been a single officer or infantryman left to tell the world the story of this battle already won and then suddenly lost; every last one of these half a thousand vanquished men running about aimlessly, driven hither and yon by fear and confusion, might have been pursued, tracked down, hemmed in if the victors had known that the logic of war demands the total destruction of the enemy. But the logic of the elect of the Blessed Jesus was not the logic of this earth. The war that they were waging was only apparently that of the outside world, that of men in uniform against men in rags, that of the seacoast against the interior, that of the new Brazil against traditional Brazil. All the jagunços were aware that they were merely puppets of a profound, timeless, eternal war, that of good and evil, which had been going on since the beginning of time. Hence they allowed their adversaries to escape, as in the light of oil lamps they recovered their dead and wounded brothers who lay on the plateau or on the slopes of O Cambaio with grimaces of pain or of love of God etched into their faces (provided the enemy’s machine guns had spared their faces). They spent the entire night transporting the wounded to the Health Houses of Belo Monte, and taking dead bodies, once they had been dressed in their best clothes and placed in coffins hastily nailed together, to the wake that was held for them in the Temple of the Blessed Jesus and the Church of Santo Antônio. The Counselor decided that they would not be buried until the parish priest from Cumbe could come say a Mass for their souls, and one of the women of the Sacred Choir, Alexandrinha Correa, went to fetch him.

As they waited for him, Antônio the Pyrotechnist prepared a fireworks display, and there was a procession. On the following day, many jagunços returned to the site of the battle. They stripped the soldiers and left their naked corpses to rot. Once back in Canudos, they burned the troops’ tunics and trousers and everything in the pockets: paper money issued by the Republic, cigars, illustrated cards, locks of hair of wives, sweethearts, daughters, keepsakes they frowned upon. But they put the rifles, the bayonets, the bullets aside, because Abbot João, Pajeú, the Vilanovas had asked them to and because they realized that they would be indispensable if they were attacked again. As some of the jagunços still insisted they should be destroyed, the Counselor himself had to ask them to place all the Mannlichers, Winchesters, revolvers, boxes of gunpowder, cartridge belts, cans of grease in the care of Antônio Vilanova. The two Krupp cannons were still at the foot of O Cambaio, in the emplacement from which they had bombarded the mountain. All the parts of them that could be burned—the wheels and the caissons—were set afire, and the steel barrels were hauled to Canudos by mule team so that the smiths could melt them down.

In Rancho das Pedras, which had been Major Febrônio de Brito’s last camp, Pedrão’s men found six hungry, disheveled women who had followed the soldiers, cooking for them, washing their clothes, and sleeping