00009 · Os Sertões
One of the strangest and most satisfying reads of my life, Os Sertões (also entitled Rebellion in the Backlands in its English translation), continues to haunt and inform me every time a giant military power thinks it can easily overwhelm a smaller force on its home turf.
Os Sertões tells the true story of the Brazilian army’s quest in the 1890s to put down a perceived rebellion led by a messianic leader named Antônio Conselheiro. It is an epic tale of a series of misperceptions and over-reactions, all building upon each other until a full scale war breaks out and the army lays waste to Canudos, the city at the center of the rebellion, deep in the high desert backcountry of Brazil.
The book opens with scores of pages about the harsh landscape. It’s a slog of a read, but well worth it, as the thorny and arid lands are just as much a character as any of the leaders and fighters. Battles are all about gaining ground, and when the ground itself fights back, the invaders are at a serious disadvantage. A series of three military expeditions to Canudos fail spectacularly, as the harsh journey itself consumes the army before they can reach a place and time of true battle.
The local cowboys—vaqueiros—knew the land intimately and had a lifetime of experience navigating it. They wore thick leather not only as chaps, but as entire outfits to safely travel through the tall and thorny brush. Their horses were similarly outfitted with front-facing leather skirts which enabled them to be invincible battle tanks through the cactus. The local guerrilla fighters needed only to sneak up and fire a few shots at the encamped or marching expeditions and ride off, and let the desert literally bleed the army to death as it gave chase.
The losses were humiliating to the newly formed government, and the fourth and final expedition was the definition of overkill. The army encircled the city of gathered religious followers and methodically blasted its way to the center. The book ends with the ridiculous scene an entire army encircling the final few holdouts, a force of hundreds shooting point blank cannon at a few old men and boys in a ruined building. Then silence as they realize there are no more citizens alive in the wasted city.
The book is an essential parable of how giant empires get sucked into wars against smaller forces, and enter into such campaigns almost casually. As always, they fail to realize that even a much smaller force will fight ferociously to save their own homes, and have the invaluable support of the population and land itself. Any citizen refusing to leave their own home becomes a combatant to be destroyed.
“We had to destroy the village in order to save it,” goes the Vietnam War saying. Even if the invading force “wins,” its prize is a decimated landscape and population. The author, Euclides da Cunha, accompanied the military on these campaigns. He was a journalist, sociologist, and engineer, and his writing is a strange mix of literature, reporting, and opinion. And while he both respects and looks down upon all parties involved, the book conveys firsthand the strange peculiarities of the War of Canudos, and the universal futility and inevitability of military escalation.
