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On 17 August the Battle of Yatay was fought. Receiving news that Duarte’s column, which operated on the right side of the Uruguay (3,220 Paraguayans against 8,500 allies, of which 1,450 were Brazilian) had been completely destroyed, Estigarribia tried to pull back by way of the Itaquy road, but with Canavarro’s division having closed the pass he did not dare to attack it. That very day (19 August) Flores, who was still in Correntino territory, made the first offer of capitulation to him, which, although honorable, was rejected. From the 25th on, with Flores’s and Pauneros’s troops, as well as Tamandaré’s fleet, having arrived, the siege begins to tighten in the presence of Porto-Alegre, who takes command of the Brazilian army.
On 2 September the allied generals renew their proposition offering Estigarribia free escape for him and his officers with all the honors of war and liberty to go wherever they want, and on the 5th Estigarribia responds in the manner of Leonidas at Thermopylae: “All the better; the smoke of the artillery will give us shade.” The motives for this second proposition were that the allies wanted to avoid destroying Uruguaiana by bombardment, not to mention the fear that Estigarribia could be aided by the Paraguayan army if the siege was prolonged. The forces at our disposal were still not enough for an assault on the enemy trenches. A little while later (10 September) Ferraz and General Mitre (with whom Tamandaré, having gone to Concórdia in search of more infantry, returned) arrive, as does the emperor the following day. The situation of the besieged was desperate: they could not expect aid from Paraguay; they lacked provisions, were beginning to suffer hunger, and were under the fire, from land and from ships, of 54 cannons.
The military forces brought together by the three nations, that allied army which the emperor of Brazil looked over, must have seemed even greater than it really was in the eyes of those 5,000 some men, wearied, poorly equipped, starved, besieged, and in an unfamiliar country, the final remains of the army of Itapúa and Candelaria. And even the compensation of making the ultimate sacrifice, the only thing to which they could aspire, depended on the generosity of the enemy, since the enemy could reduce the intensity of their attacks, and defeat them through starvation.Read More »
