(^332) THE WEALTH AND POVERTY OF NATIONS
and industrial plant (most important, an iron foundry.and a forge-
arsenal). The purchases were paid for with scanty natural exports
(mostly yerba mate, a tealike, mildly addictive herbal) and the
modest loans of a London shipbuilder and purveyor. A start was
made on a railway and a telegraph network, but rail-line construction
proved painfully slow, a few kilometers a year until the approach of
war speeded the effort. Some two hundred European technicians
were hired, but these were hardly the best. Needless to say, these
rudimentary installations were not doing work of export quality; but
they found outlets in the army and the native Indian population, cut
off as these were from foreign imports.^39
At the same time, the Paraguayans bought European arms,
generally old, small, and discarded, and built fortresses against the
likelihood of war. One in particular, located at Humaita on a U-bend
in the Parana River, closed the waterway at will to foreign vessels,
including those of riverine Argentina. (Turnabout is fair play.) These
neighbors in turn, warned by words and incidents, began arming
themselves. The Brazilians in particular began buying ironclad ships,
with an eye to forcing the Parana passage if necessary.
Who started what is not easy to say. That is the way of war.^40 But
certain it is that Paraguay did not hang back from combat. It had its
share of casus belli, and boundaries in this region were dubious. Petty
formalities, like having to get permission to cross neutral territory
(going through Argentina to get at Brazil and Uruguay), were
simply brushed aside. That was the last straw: in May 1864, Brazil,
Argentina, and Uruguay joined forces to crush the pest. Paraguay,
with its universal service and reserve classes, actually had far more
men under arms than the three together; but the allies had a much
bigger reservoir of potential conscripts, to say nothing of superior
materiel. Time was on their side.
For three years, however, their efforts were blocked by the fortress
of Humaita, garrisoned by thousands, bristling with cannon,
equipped with its own foundry and forge—" 'that military marvel,
that impregnable bastion,' that Sevastopol of the South."* Finally
- One must not exaggerate: one witness says that under a third of the cannon were
operative; and one or two guns went back to the seventeenth century—Meyer, The
River and the People, pp. 65-67. Meyer relies here on the publications of contempo
rary observers, among them Richard F. Burton (him of The Arabian Nights), Letters
from the Battlefields of Paraguay (London, 1870); and on the novel Humaita, the sec
ond of a "historical trilogy, written in novelistic fashion" by Manuel Galvez, entitied
Escenas de la guerra del Paraguay.