Bolivar: American Liberator (52 page)

Following behind them were the Rabonas—hardy Indian women who accompanied the soldiers and provided for their needs, dietary to sexual. They washed, mended, scavenged, minded the pack animals, lit fires, cooked, cut soldiers’ hair. Infested with lice, burned by wind and sun, they endured greater misery than most men. What a sight they must have been, with their pots and pans clanging as they hurried over that terrain, far more acclimated to it than any soldier.

For all its idiosyncrasies, it was
a brilliantly prepared army, and
Bolívar gloried in the sight of its
nine thousand disciplined soldiers—fully clad and armed—snaking over that harsh land. Some were
from as far away as Caracas or Buenos Aires or Liverpool, and had fought in Boyacá, or Maipú, or the Battle of Moscow. Long columns of Indians trooped behind, shouldering supplies. After them, for as far as the eye could see, an undulating mass of
six thousand cattle. It was a solid war machine—trained, equipped, maintained. To Sucre, it seemed
the finest patriot force that had ever fought in America. To Bolívar, who
delighted in sitting with his officers at mealtimes and freely toasting their exploits, it was an army he loved with all his heart.

On the other side of Cerro de Pasco, wholly unaware of Bolívar’s approaching army, was the Spanish general Canterac.
His two thousand
men—half cavalry, half infantry—were garrisoned in the lush, peaceful valley of Jauja. Exceptionally
well regimented, well armed, and well paid, they had had little to fear from the patriots. Most were native Peruvians; indeed, of more than twelve thousand who made up the royal army,
only six hundred—a mere five percent—were Spaniards. As Bolívar’s liberating army streamed down the promontories of Cerro de Pasco looking for a fight, it had yet to meet the enemy and truly know who they were. The irony was that in Peru the defenders of the king were largely sons of the soil; the freedom fighters were largely foreigners. But General Canterac, too, had yet to meet his enemy; and the one he thought he knew was hardly worth worrying about. Proud, French-born, a brilliant tactician, Canterac had won every battle he had ever fought against the ill-organized seekers of independence. As far as he was concerned, he possessed the superior army: a mighty force that had stymied San Martín, bested Santa Cruz, and taken the city of Lima twice in the past six months. Canterac’s fellow general, the fearless Jerónimo Valdés, had persuaded him of their preeminence in a letter
assuring him that Bolívar was no threat: The Liberator was a coward, a third-rate military man hated by his troops, a tin-hat general who had won no battles apart from the easy one in Quito. As
Sucre’s minions swarmed through the nearby villages collecting provisions and securing safe houses for the patriot crossing, Canterac had not lifted a finger to thwart them. It was as if he wasn’t concerned in the least, as if he had
fallen into a great slumber.
Clearly, he was confident that nothing the bumbling patriots could do would put them at an advantage.

On the crisp, clear morning of August 2, Bolívar
reviewed 7,700 troops
on a towering mesa near Cerro de Pasco. To their west were the snowcapped mountains over which they had just labored; to the east, barren leviathans that ran all the way to Brazil; to the south, the stone forest of Huayllay, its bristling rock reaching up like quills of a mythic porcupine. Directly below, the emerald waters of Lake Chinchaycocha and the marshland of Junín. The view was spectacular, mirroring the high hopes of all who beheld it. As Bolívar inspected the ranks that had followed him far and joined him in many battles, he made the uplifting call:

Soldiers! You are about to complete the greatest task heaven can commend to man—saving a world from slavery.

Soldiers! The enemies you are about to destroy pride themselves in fourteen uninterrupted years of victory. They are worthy of measuring their weapons against yours, which have gleamed in a thousand battles.

Soldiers! Peru and America look to you for Peace. . . . Even liberal Europe contemplates you in awe, for freedom in the New World is the hope of the universe. Will you let it slip away? No, no! You are invincible!

The air was filled with deafening shouts. Viva! Viva! rising into the vault of sky. Two days later, as Bolívar’s cavalry made the long descent, riding mules and leading their horses down steep escarpments, they caught
a glimpse of one of Canterac’s divisions winding through an open valley. Patriot voices filled the air once more, sounding ferocious war whoops. The horsemen of the pampas and llanos were
quivering for a fight, eager to pit their legendary skills against the royalist cavalry.

General Canterac finally emerged from slumber on August 6 to ride out on
reconnaissance with thirteen hundred troops. He had heard,
with the chill of surprise, that the entire patriot army had crossed the Andes under his watch and was headed for the town of Jauja. By then,
Bolívar and nine hundred horsemen had already descended to the rim of the lake,
looking to provoke the Spanish general to battle. When Canterac spied them on the other side,
he decided to circle the lake and attack the patriots in the rear, but the instant he started south, Bolívar hurried to meet him. They finally joined in
battle at five o’clock that afternoon on the marshy flats just south of the lake.

The Battle of Junín was fierce and fast,
fought entirely with swords and lances. Not one shot was fired; not one cannonball expended. The terrible silence was punctuated only by the sound of steel against steel, wood against wood, the odd bugle call, the pawing of horses, the grunts of men, the thuds and cries of the fallen. At first, when the royalist cavalry loosed a mighty charge across the plain, it seemed they had the advantage. But as combat continued, they drove too far into patriot lines, exposing their own flanks. Bolívar
directed the veteran general
Miller to attack those flanks, called for a rush against their rear guard, and ordered his plainsmen to execute their hallmark about-face—a fast retreat, a sudden whirl, a furious charge—and it was here that the royalists began to hesitate, lose ground. Heartened, the patriots ratcheted up the offensive, calling in the Colombian lancers. A horseman’s
lance was fourteen feet long and, handled nimbly, it could easily outreach any royalist weapon, slamming into a man with such force that it lifted him several feet from his saddle. The stampeding thunder of Bolívar’s plainsmen, wrote young Colonel O’Connor, now
“made the earth tremble.” By dusk—which began to
darken the sky an hour later—the patriots had control. Canterac’s troops began a swift, disordered retreat, abandoning weapons as they went, marking a path south toward Jauja. Exhausted, suffering
the effects of high-altitude combat, the patriots
could not have gone on much longer. But just as the sun tipped over the horizon, two colonels rode back from a heated chase shouting,
“Victory!” Bolívar took no chances: He
sent squadrons of sharpshooters after Canterac, riding two to a mount. Night fell on a plain littered with dead and wounded; riderless horses wandered the battlefield in confusion. The royalists had lost nearly four hundred men, and one hundred more had been taken prisoner. The patriots had lost 145.

That night, Bolívar and his officers made their beds on a grassy knoll by the battlefield.
José Palacios, the loyal manservant who had followed Bolívar to every battlefield since Angostura, produced a fortifying meal of cold beef, which he pulled from his saddlebag and handed all around. With that first victory in hand, the men were content to rest on that hard, fiercely won ground, awaking the next morning with frost on their mustaches.

“The brilliant skirmish of Junín,” as Bolívar later referred to it, had a powerful psychological effect on both sides, far outweighing the military magnitude of the conflict. Peruvians were suddenly made to realize that the invincible Canterac was not invincible after all: his cavalry had been routed; his infantry had suffered shocking desertions in their mortified retreat—first to Jauja, and then all the way back to the Spanish stronghold in Cuzco. Indeed Canterac confessed to have genuinely been shaken by his experience at Junín, that the rebels under Bolívar were not just a band of beggars after all, but a skilled fighting force. He
reported to the governor of Callao that a number of Bolívar’s most important officers had been killed in battle, that Bolívar himself had been wounded in the hand—much of his information blatantly wrong—but he did manage to get one thing right:
“Our losses may have been few in number,” he told the governor, “but they have been overwhelming in spirit.” The Spanish governor, terrified to read such words from his fearless general,
shut himself up in the fortress of Callao, leaving Lima to the caprices of its patriot population.

THE FORCES OF INDEPENDENCE NOW
had the rich, fertile fields of Jauja to themselves. Bolívar took the opportunity to renew the army, strengthen its military prowess, and learn all he could about the territory. As he passed through Jauja, he
collected all the equipment the royalists had discarded in their frenzied flight to Cuzco. The royalists had lost more than two thousand men; but they also had abandoned seven hundred guns, a wealth of munitions, livestock, and horses. As Bolívar soon learned, they
had burned whole villages during their occupation,
executed hundreds—even those convalescing in hospitals—whom they suspected of republican tendencies.
“They were Caligula; we were Caesar,” as Santander once boasted about the patriots. But as Bolívar headed south, he, too, was not above rough justice. Even as he
installed municipal governments and imposed legislation,
he threatened to shoot councilors, doctors, and civil servants who didn’t do their job.
Soldiers who looted and raped peasants were dragged to main squares and executed in public, their bodies drawn and quartered as a lesson to any who would flout the law.

In a further effort to impose order, Bolívar delegated Sucre to join the rear guard, retrace the course of the liberating army, and bring in all the patriots who had been lost or wounded. Sucre balked at the indignity, but complied with the Liberator’s orders. At the end, he announced that the experience had been humiliating—that his cohort had laughed at him—and that he was tendering his resignation as a result. Bolívar, who loved Sucre like a son, rushed to make it up to him.
“You’re out of your mind if you think I meant to offend you. I assigned you a job I myself wanted to do, because I believed you could do it better;
it was proof of my esteem, not of your humiliation. . . . If you want to come and put yourself at the head of this army, I’ll go to the rear, and then the world can see for itself the destiny I have in mind for you.” Before long, he would make good on that promise.

Bolívar traveled tirelessly in the next few months.
There was no town in the area he didn’t visit. In the course of the next fifty days,
while his army rested, he rode through
dozens of villages—studied the topography, familiarized himself with the inhabitants—seldom spending more than a day in each stop. Eventually, Manuela Sáenz joined him, having followed him over the freezing cordillera for months. Although there was little time for love,
she settled for a while in a comfortable old house in the pretty little town of Jauja. Bolívar was on the move, dictating a steady flow of letters, directing the government in Lima, even trying to manage his navy from that two-hundred-mile remove. But as September became October, the weather began to change.
The rain came earlier than usual. By mid-October, the heavens over Jauja and Huancayo had opened and streams that had been easy to cross now became gushing torrents strong enough to fell trees. There was no point in trying to mobilize the army. The land was impassable by man or beast. It wasn’t long before Bolívar decided he would return to Lima until the rains abated. There was much to do: establish the capital, win back Callao, receive an influx of foreign troops, govern the newly expanded republic. On October 6, he entrusted the command of the army to Sucre and, along with his aides and secretaries, began the long, rugged ride toward the coast.

When he reached Huancayo on October 24, he was handed yet another reason to descend the cordillera. It was a letter from the Colombian congress in Bogotá, revoking the law that had granted him extraordinary powers. In it, the Liberator was advised that, as of three months before, on July 28,
he had been stripped of all his powers. The rationale, described only thinly, was that in accepting the dictatorship of Peru, he had rescinded Colombia’s presidency and its military command. Those responsibilities now belonged to Santander. In a subsequent dispatch, Santander was even more stern. He ordered Bolívar to hand over command of all Colombian troops in Peru to Sucre. It was
an absurd directive, a rude affront. The men of the military understood—even if their politicians did not—that the liberation of Peru had been undertaken for the greater good and glory of Colombia. That had been the motive in their war on Pasto, the assault on Quito; it had been the understanding in Guayaquil. Santander might have tried to stop congress from taking such harsh actions, but Bolívar could see that his vice president’s hand was in them. The trusted
“man of laws,” as Bolívar called him, had shown his colors. There was no question that long-held jealousies—of Bolívar, of Bolívar’s preference for Sucre—had quickened Santander to the task.

When all was said and done, the leadership in Colombia, eager to get on with the business of governing the newly forged and unwieldy republic, had tired of Bolívar’s southern campaign. Bolívar’s insistence on more and more troops to bolster Peru, more equipment for the army, more horses, had worn thin. Even as Bolívar worked to build military might in Trujillo, Santander had written:
“Without a law expressly passed by Congress, I can do nothing, because I have no real power apart from laws, even if the republic ends up going to hell in the process.” From the perspective of Bogotá, the ongoing war seemed endless, accruing nothing so much as spiraling expenditures.
Some congressmen had even begun to object about soldiers’ salaries; others proposed that the government stop issuing uniforms for troops at home and abroad.