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Reviewed by:
  • I Die with My Country: Perspectives on the Paraguayan War, 1864–1870
  • Matthew Hughes
I Die with My Country: Perspectives on the Paraguayan War, 1864–1870. Edited by Hendrik Kraay and Thomas L. Whigham. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005. ISBN 0-8032-2762-0. Maps. Photographs. Illustrations. Pp. x, 257. $69.95.

The War of the Triple Alliance (or, as it is titled here, the Paraguayan War) was the bloodiest interstate conflict in South America: Uruguay, Brazil and Argentina versus Paraguay in a long war that killed up to 60 percent of Paraguay's population. As a result, Paraguay was largely inhabited by women—plus a Brazilian army of occupation—after the war although, as this volume shows, this did not lead to a fundamental change in traditional gender roles. Like the American Civil War, the Paraguayan War was, arguably, one of the first "total" wars. And, yet, like so much South-American military history—the Chaco War between Bolivia and Paraguay (1932–35) being another example—it is poorly served by the English-language historiography.

This volume is the result of one of the SMH panels at the 2001 Calgary conference. With the addition of some extra papers, the conference panel has been transformed into an impressive edited collection that, while not [End Page 242] being a complete study, provides stimulating, scholarly perspectives that develop existing themes and open up new avenues of enquiry. While there is not the wealth of personal material on the Paraguayan War that is available for, say, the U.S. Civil War (or the world wars), the essays in this collection use a wide variety of secondary and primary sources. The chapters range in subject area from economic and military mobilization, the experience of women, soldiers' experiences, politics and the war, images of the war, to the postwar situation. However, while the chapters in the volume examine all of the protagonists, some of them (such as Argentina) are dealt with in essays in which broader themes can get a little lost in a mass of specialist text.

The origins of the war lay in complicated political clashes—never fully explained in the book's introduction—over the Río de la Plata and Uruguay region, leading to tiny Paraguay's strategically bizarre decision to attack three opponents simultaneously. There then followed an invasion of Brazil and Uruguay by Paraguay that, once checked, led to a counter-offensive in which Uruguay, Argentina, and Brazil closed in on the Paraguayan capital, Asunción. With Brazil increasingly taking up the brunt of the fighting, the Triple Alliance armies struggled to get past the Paraguayan river fortress of Humaitá defending the capital—echoes here, of course, of the Vicksburg campaign. A "heroic" narrative of the war ascribes Paraguay's prolonged defense of Humaitá and its capital to national will; the reality is that the invading armies were poorly organized and supplied, and found the protracted siege of Humaitá a daunting task. The volume under review deals with the question of mobilization—so important in modern, "total" wars—but the reader is still left wondering how a small, landlocked, industrially backward country such as Paraguay could have held out for so long. One answer is that Paraguay's mobilization was remarkable and complete, especially compared to its opponents who never had to utilize all of their resources. Another answer, perhaps, is that much of the war was static and "primitive," involving little of what we would see as modern maneuver warfare. By the war's end, with their capital occupied, the Paraguayans carried on the struggle with an army of children and old men in the forested hills east of Asunción. To make themselves seem tougher and older, the children wore fake moustaches. While the war left Paraguay a nation of widows and under occupation, it soon recovered and revived as an independent country in the late 1870s. Moreover, the protracted defense and suffering of the war forged a national legend that has significant resonance in contemporary Paraguay.

While by no means the last word on the subject, this interesting, well-written (if rather expensive) set of essays is a welcome addition to the corpus...

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