At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig: Travels Through Paraguay (Vintage Departures) by Gimlette John

Author:Gimlette, John [Gimlette, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307806529
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-09-21T00:00:00+00:00

(illustrations credit 3.1)

Behind came Mariscal López’s personal escort in dandy Parisian uniforms. They were known as the Ácá-carayá—“the monkey-heads”—because their leather helmets were topped with brass and trimmed with black monkey tails. López usually rode among them—until he became too fat to ride—in a spiffy royal-blue cloak embroidered with gold oak leaves. His men called him Taitá Guasú (“Big Daddy”) but he of course preferred to think of himself as Napoleon Bonaparte.

Although much imagination had gone into the soldiers’ uniforms, little thought had been given to their diet. Most men were unused to meat but were expected to survive on chaqui—strips of blackened, dry beef—and for many this simply brought on long, candid bouts of diarrhoea. Others tried to freshen up their diet by shooting whatever moved on the swamps—egrets, alligators, ducks and frogs. They devised a means of loading their weapons with nails and pieces of scrap, so that by the time the fighting started, there was hardly a gun left with any rifling.

The problem of food was partially solved by the cavalry, whose horses were so honey-combed with bone disease that—after the first pitiful lance charges—they were diced up and fed to the troopers.

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