Bolivar: American Liberator (37 page)

Indeed, life in the liberating army was the very
essence of privation. Often, a foot soldier made long marches in the scorching heat, obliged to hunt game as he went, and to drink from muddy rivers. His official diet was meat—no salt, no accompaniments—and that, only if he was fortunate enough to be in a company driving cattle. Each soldier received
two pounds of beef per day, no more. Páez’s horsemen were accustomed to this austere life, and
openly disdained the others, especially the British, who called themselves warriors but couldn’t break a horse, fight a crocodile, or swim a rushing river. If meat were available, the horsemen were driving it, and they routinely issued the foot soldiers the inferior parts. But even if cattle were close at hand, there were days when no one ate, since
vultures or campfire smoke could easily betray their position.

Bolívar took great pains to bring in supplies from Angostura when he could—salt for meat, flour for bread, medicines for the surgeons, tobacco for his officers. Most important, it seemed, were spare shoes for the British, who, unlike the pardos and Indians, were singularly incapable of marching in bare feet. His letters during that time show
a commanding general obsessed with details: the precise pattern of horseshoes, the specific soft iron to make them, the way ammunition should be packed for transport, the exact kind of gunpowder. In February, he had left Angostura well stocked with arms and ammunition—even a few uniforms—but food and medicine were rare. The paltry clothes sent by the British were all too easily spotted by the Spaniards, filling them with no little indignation that Bolívar had managed to enlist their former allies.
“For the first time,” a miffed General Morillo reported to the war ministry in Spain, “we are seeing rebels, suited from head to toe like Englishmen; and even some of the horsemen of the Apure have been seen wearing feathered caps and sitting in British saddles.”

IT WAS NO SECRET THAT
Bolívar wanted to take his war to the rest of South America. He had said as much in
a promise to Granadans, published months before. But time was slipping away, and the skies were
issuing a steady drizzle of rain, miring the plains in mud. If the Spaniards had thought Bolívar would try to fulfill his promise of moving the revolution west, they certainly did not think he would do it now. Caracas was still under royalist rule. He had not succeeded in taking it; indeed,
he hadn’t really tried. Why would he go to New Granada at such a crucial juncture? Only a fool would attempt that journey in the rain, when rivers became seas, valleys disappeared under lakes, and the Andes grew slick with ice, impassable. Bolívar had said nothing to the congress at Angostura about his plan, but now he put it forward to two of his most trusted generals—those he considered essential to the enterprise—Páez and Santander. He swore them to secrecy, insisting that the element of surprise was critical.
“This is for your eyes and your eyes only,” he wrote Santander.
Páez had already said yes.

On May 23, as he and his infantry were making their way west along the Apure, Bolívar called his officers, including Soublette, Pedro Briceño Méndez, James Rooke, José Antonio Anzoátegui, and several others to a council of war. They met in a ramshackle hut in the deserted little village of Setenta. There was no table at which to sit, no chairs. They perched instead on the skulls of cattle—picked over by condors, bleached white by the sun. Although the officers, indeed the entire patriot army, had
assumed they would be wintering close by, the Liberator explained that it would be foolish to remain during the rains, when food would be scant, malaria and yellow fever rampant. He confided his plan to take the entire army over the Andes, surprise the enemy on the Granadan side, and astound the world by shifting their campaign from one theater of war to another.

Anzoátegui, Soublette, and a few more important colonels enthusiastically approved the proposal; others took more persuading. But when Páez was presented with unanimous assent, he changed his mind, began to drag his feet. His men wanted to stay on the plains, near what they knew, he insisted; they had no desire to fight in distant lands or imperil their horses in mountainous terrain. He made excuses, hemmed and hawed, then rejected Bolívar’s plan altogether. When Bolívar pressed him to provide troops and horses anyway, Páez detached one small corps of horsemen and sent an additional two hundred
“scrawny and mangy mares.” The Liberator made no effort to hide his fury, but one simple fact remained: he needed Páez. In time, he found a way to make the Lion of the Apure fit his plan. Páez was to ride with his horsemen to Cúcuta, which was easily accessible from the plains, and prevent the Spaniards from moving westward. In the east, Bermúdez and Mariño
would keep the pressure on Caracas, with constant forays to Calabozo, where Morillo was quartered. Vice President Zea was to command all other matters, including continuing to seek help overseas.

Bolívar started toward the mountains on May 26, on the very day when the
rains began to pelt down in earnest. The soldiers had not been told where they were headed—first, in order to keep the operation fully secret, but just as important, because Bolívar
feared they would desert if they knew the perilous direction of their march. As they poured into the town of Guasdualito, the army was finally told, as was the government in Angostura. Bolívar’s tight
force of 2,100—four infantry battalions and three cavalry squadrons, accompanied by medics, auxiliary forces, women, children, and a herd of cattle—was now poised to undertake one of the most remarkable feats in military history.

On June 4, Bolívar’s army crossed the Arauca River and passed into Casanare, where the rains were torrential,
savannas flooded, and creatures adrift as far as the eye could see. His soldiers constructed boats of cowhide to transport the ordnance and keep it as dry as possible. They marched with mud sucking at their feet, or wading through waist-high water, or—when floods rose to their highest point—swimming. If they had families, they used their threadbare blankets to shield women from the cold and damp; if they didn’t, they used them to protect guns and ammunition. Hungry, weary, drenched through to the skin, they traversed a landscape such as they’d never seen. Men on horseback were no better off than those on the ground.
Hooves grew soft in the bog and swamp, rendering animals lame. Feet swelled to such tender misshape that riders could no longer use their stirrups. The army carried on anyway,
marching for more than a month, lured by trees that floated like promises of dry earth in those vast inland waterways. The frail were soon sick; the rugged, wounded; the unfortunate, at the mercy of tiny,
flesh-eating fish that could strip limbs to bone in seconds.
Horses and cattle fell into deep water, never to rise again. Cargo became too heavy to carry; reins too shriveled to use. At night, they camped wherever they could—
sleeping in standing water, or on their horses—only to be set upon by mosquitoes, sand flies, and stinging gnats. They finally reached hard land at Tame, where Santander’s troops awaited; and there, at long last, the army of liberation gained a measure of relief in dry beds, eating
bananas,
potatoes, barley, and salt. In the distance, whenever a strong wind cleared the clouds away, they could see
the forest of San Camilo, whose tangle of green lined the lower cliffs of the towering Andes.

After a week’s rest, on July 1, they were off again, bound for the mighty cordillera—a snowbound, airless barrier of rock and cliff. The patriots,
bolstered by Bolívar’s enthusiasm, staggered up those slopes, with nothing but dreams of glory. As they rose into thinner air, the icy wind and hyaline numbed some minds, clarified others. Many of Páez’s horsemen, who had slogged unhesitatingly twenty miles a day through mud and flood, decided the vertiginous heights and unstable rock were too punishing for their horses.
Some gave up on the expedition, deserting the revolution in favor of their afflicted animals. Few beasts would survive the five days’ march over the dizzying Páramo de Pisba.

The rain was ceaseless, the cold unrelenting. Within a few days, the remaining livestock were gone: a string of carcasses marked their trail.
“The harshness of the peaks we have crossed would be staggering to anyone who hasn’t experienced it,” Bolívar reported to his vice president. “There’s hardly a day or night it doesn’t rain . . . our only comfort is the thought that we’ve seen the worst, and that we are nearing the end of the journey.”
Often, the streams they crossed were swift and fierce, and travelers had to negotiate them in solid lines, moving hand in hand, until every last person had been dragged through the white water. To traverse ravines, they lassoed trees on either side, then pulled travelers on leather ropes, over the plummeting abyss, suspended in improvised hammocks. Bolívar carried soldiers who were too weak to stand, or the women who had dutifully followed them.
“He was,” according to one British observer, “invariably humane in his attentions to the sick and wounded.” Slipping and sliding over the wet, icy rock, the army kept on the move, ascending to thirteen thousand feet, knowing that to stop and lie down at those bone-chilling heights was to give up and die. By the time they had scaled the Páramo de Pisba, their shoes had no soles, their clothes were in shreds; hundreds had died of hypothermia. Many of the surviving officers, a witness later wrote,
“had no trousers, and were glad to cover themselves with pieces of blanket, or whatever they could procure.”
A full quarter of the British contingent perished in that crossing. Yet there were scenes of extraordinary strength and courage. The
patriot women, mistresses or wives, were indispensable medics: tending wounds, giving hope to the ill, evincing an admirable fortitude. Some proved even more sturdy than the men. On the night of July 3, as the army huddled at the very heights of the crossing, Bolívar’s aide-de-camp was told that a soldier’s wife was there among them, giving birth.
The next day he saw her marching along behind her husband’s battalion, a strapping newborn in her arms.

On July 6, survivors began to straggle down the other side of the mountain. Weak, famished, in tatters, it was all they could do to pick their way down the steep escarpments. At Socha, jubilant Granadans rushed out to meet them with food and drink, horses and weapons. The village women, filled with sympathy for the half-naked soldiers,
set to work, making them shirts, trousers, underwear, and jackets—sewn from their own clothes. Bolívar had chosen the route well, for there was no one to challenge the patriot presence. The Spaniards had
dismissed the Páramo de Pisba as too difficult a crossing: there were no guards in the area, no enemy garrisons for miles. The expedition would have precious time to recover.

Over the next few days, while the army rested, the British legion trickled into Socha, lugging the liberating army’s trunks and ammunition. Most of it had been badly damaged. Bolívar didn’t waste time fretting about the loss. He busied himself organizing supplies, raising troops, making sure the sick were minded and the hungry fed, as well as gathering intelligence on royalist movements. Granadans, who had suffered three years of harsh rule under their tyrannical viceroy, now rushed to enlist in Bolívar’s effort, as one village after another welcomed him with open arms. The young Granadan general Santander later wrote of Bolívar’s efforts:
“Here is where this man distinguishes himself above all the rest, exhibiting extraordinary resolve and energy. In three days, he remounts and arms the cavalry, musters ammunition, reassembles the army; then sends out patrols, energizes the citizens, and plans an all-out attack.”

THE LIBERATION OF NEW GRANADA
came quickly only days after the last of Bolívar’s soldiers descended the snowy heights of Pisba. It was a measure of Bolívar’s genius that his army had met with no resistance; the
test now would be to spring that army into a winning war. At dawn on July 25, one day after his thirty-sixth birthday, Bolívar’s soldiers met the Spaniards in a battle at Pantano de Vargas, a hill-rimmed swampland about 120 miles northeast of Bogotá. Brigadier José María Barreiro and his royalists had all the advantages: higher ground, more troops, better arms and training. But just when all seemed lost for the patriots—a blistering fire on all sides, their forces surrounded—Bolívar shouted to the horseman Rondón, who had been the hero at Queseras del Medio,
“Colonel! Save the republic!” The fearless cowboy led his plainsmen in a furious charge up the hill, and, swinging machetes and spears, managed to drive the Spaniards from that promontory. The patriots, elated, now fought with renewed zeal. Rattled by this reversal, the royalists shrank in alarm, then rushed to withdraw, especially
as rain began to spill from the darkening heavens.
Santander would later say that the battle at Pantano de Vargas was won by the horsemen’s intensity and a British calm, and because Bolívar, like some mythic war god, seemed to appear everywhere at once. The patriots had more advantages than that: the core of Bolívar’s troops—seasoned, challenged, culled to an able few—were
a well-honed fighting force now. The Spaniards, terrified by the Liberator,
by his legendary war to the death, by his startling appearance on their side of the Andes, simply lost their nerve. Barreiro’s army may have had the numbers, the equipment, the spangled uniforms, the peninsular training, and certainly
the optimism of Barreiro himself, but, as Bolívar understood, they had a distinct—and crushing—disadvantage:
they were afraid.

The determining Battle of Boyacá was fought a few days later, on August 7. But by now, the
balance of power had shifted. It was no longer the Spaniards who were trying to block Bolívar from marching to Bogotá; it was Bolívar trying to block the Spaniards from reuniting with their viceroy and collecting badly needed reinforcements. By mid-morning of that fateful day, the Liberator’s army had taken a position near the bridge at Boyacá, on a hill that oversaw the road to the capital, Bogotá. At two in the afternoon, the royalist army appeared. Brigadier
Barreiro sent out a vanguard, assuming that the row of patriots he saw on the far bluff was merely a band of observers. He ordered his second in command, Colonel Francisco Jiménez, to scare them off
so that the main body of his troops—three thousand strong—could pass. But Bolívar accelerated the patriot march, and before long his entire army coursed over the hill, wave after wave of roaring soldiers. Rondón’s horsemen, in galloping charge, plunged like a knife into the royalists’ tidy formation, dispersing them like a flock of sheep. General Anzoátegui then fell upon the same soldiers with his hardened veterans; Santander flew after their vanguard and overtook them. By four o’clock, it was done. The Spanish commander, in desperation, tried to retreat to a hillside to regroup his forces, but by then his army had been devastated—two hundred lay dead in the open meadow, the rest were in disarray. When Anzoátegui’s cavalry charged up that hill with bloodied lances, the Spaniards laid down their arms.
Sixteen hundred royalists were taken prisoner that afternoon. The battle had taken all of two hours.