Still, you must never underestimate the Guarani soldier. He is there in the picture too, in dull-eyed ranks and rows, ever-advancing. Again and again, facing superior forces and overwhelming odds, the Paraguayan Indian outfoxes, outfights, outdies the combined enemy. His pants are blue and his coat is red. And he takes both off to fight in the swamp, which he knows and calls home.
He is sickened by the meat, though, as Milton tells it many years later. Not because the meat is rotten, though it is often rotten, but because these men are not used to eating such stuff – they only make it, or become it. In which case, there is plenty meat made in the five and a half years of the war. As the battles slowly creak into place, and one strategy slowly crunches into another, the Guarani Indian fights on; bilious, gripe-ridden, suffering from meaty breath and meaty wind; and there is no surrender. Ever.
Despite which, the story of the war is a story of retreat. Curupaiti held and lost. The cunningly double line of trenches at Curuzu, then back to the fort of Humaitá: three hundred and eighty guns, a mess of defences out front, the ground seething with twenty thousand boys and old men, because only boys and old men are left, now.
The stranglehold tightens around them and the names keep unscrolling in the painterly wind: on the river, the fearless Diaz floats in his fatal canoe; General Barrios makes a sortie, Paulino Álén shoots himself, in the face of defeat; Bernardino Caballero holds Acosta Nu – these are names that must be said out loud. As too must the names of the staunch ships who sailed in this war, the Tacuari, the Paraguart, the captured Brazilian steamship Marques de Olinda, the Ygurei, the Salto Oriental and the Pirabebé. Ships where men fought, and in which they burned; ships from which they drowned.
There is some comfort in listing the brave men of other wars: history is a litany, and all we are doing, here on this earth, is making lists of the dead.
So busy intoning, indeed, that we miss the three Brazilian boats as they cut the chains that have been slung across the river, then run the battery at Humaitá. They are the Barrosso, the Tamandaré and the Brasil: all monitors; blind-looking things of unnatural iron – even the deck is closed over, so that the men inside it are either safe or dead: there is no middle way and no romance to them either. Monstrous modernity, which chugs past the open mouths of two hundred and four guns – from the Curupaiti battery to the final array at Humaitá – as though they were going on a picnic. Then moves upriver to pound Asuncion.
And so there it is. The city is burning. Somewhere in the background, the ghost of Whytehead lays his hand on the bulge of a cold smelter, looking sad yet proud. So much for the remnants of the maiden Tacuari – they pale in comparison to the great names of this war, Spanish Creole and Guarani. At the very end of the canvas it is the gallant Captain Thompson who surrenders, finally, the fort at Angostura, because no Paraguayan knows how.
And where is Stewart? Was he brave? Low down, on a nameless piece of ground, he lifts some dying man by the shoulders, as though to help him face out of the picture. The man rolls his eyes. His last, trembling gesture is back towards Humaitá and the unlikely stallion on the high wall – my captain, Lopez. (Or is that Lopez himself, impossibly dying in Stewart's arms? With more beard, perhaps, and a different look in his eye?)
And where is Eliza in his hour of need? She is out of the picture. Her portrait would be hung on the opposite wall, endlessly looking. Trying to discover where it all went wrong.
She will not find it here. This is a heroic painting -one of the last such – and tenderly naïve. It is full of errors, of course, but that is a different thing. Stewart might have pointed out that the chains slung across the river were, for the duration of the siege, most beautifully clogged with water hyacinth. Every morning he wondered at the line becoming sharper – the water downstream becoming smooth as glass, as the river behind grew solid with vegetation. One morning the whole thing flowered and he had the greatest urge to walk the floating path from the near bank to the freedom of the other side.
He might, either, have complained about the lack of red – that most distracting colour. He might say the painter had failed to capture the various and romantic colours of blood, for example, from the dry rust first pointed out to him by Whytehead, to the liquid red of the river, soaked with light as the sun went down. It might be bougainvillaea shooting, from one day to the next, out of the rich mud beside his hut at Humaitá, or a man's shirt in full bloom just before he died, but Stewart's eye was punctured by red during the war, as his heart was sometimes pierced by the peculiar blue of the sky.
Most important, there would be nothing in such a picture of miasma, or of mud. There would be no mud-covered carrion, or living men covered in mud. Above all, there would be no women slathered with the stuff, or even women who, like Eliza, remained amazingly mud-free.
In fact, the fort at Humaitá was crawling with women. They detached themselves from the mud of the walls to approach in their mud-coloured dresses, and they opened their mud-coloured faces to show the wonderful, clean, inner red of their mouths, livid with teeth of yellow. And whatever they had to say, it was always a bother – a plea of some sort, for news of some man, for intercession over a scrap of cloth, or a scrap of roof to put over their heads, or, later, for food. They offered nothing in return, some of them, except the sight of their winning, female faces, or the prospect of leaving your sleeve alone. They might, either, offer some sexual service of great frankness, but their bargaining powers were in general poor, and they might switch from nothing to everything without seeming to tell between the two.