But
The Mere Fact That The Soldiers Had Cut The Throat Of Their Officer
Surprised No One; It Was A Common Thing In The Case Of A Defeat In
Those Days For The Men To Turn Upon And Murder Their Officers.
Nor was
throat-cutting a mere custom or convention:
To the old soldier it was
the only satisfactory way of finishing off your adversary, or prisoner
of war, or your officer who had been your tyrant, on the day of
defeat. Their feeling was similar to that of the man who is inspired
by the hunting instinct in its primitive form, as described by Richard
Jefferies. To kill the creatures with bullets at a distance was no
satisfaction to him: he must with his own hands drive the shaft into
the quivering flesh - he must feel its quivering and see the blood gush
up beneath his hand. One smiles at a vision of the gentle Richard
Jefferies slaughtering wild cattle in the palaeolithic way, but that
feeling and desire which he describes with such passion in his _Story
of My Heart_, that survival of the past, is not uncommon in the hearts
of hunters, and if we were ever to drop out of our civilization I
fancy we should return rather joyfully to the primitive method. And so
in those dark times in the Argentine Republic when, during half a
century of civil strife which followed on casting off the Spanish
"yoke," as it was called, the people of the plains had developed an
amazing ferocity, they loved to kill a man not with a bullet but in a
manner to make them know and feel that they were really and truly
killing.
As a child those dreadful deeds did not impress me, since I did not
witness them myself, and after looking at that stain of blood on the
grass the subject faded out of my mind. But as time went on and I
heard more about this painful subject I began to realize what it
meant. The full horror of it came only a few years later, when I was
big enough to go about to the native houses and among the gauchos in
their gatherings, at cattle-partings and brandings, races, and on
other occasions. I listened to the conversation of groups of men whose
lives had been mostly spent in the army, as a rule in guerilla
warfare, and the talk turned with surprising frequency to the subject
of cutting throats. Not to waste powder on prisoners was an unwritten
law of the Argentine army at that period, and the veteran gaucho
clever with the knife took delight in obeying it. It always came as a
relief, I heard them say, to have as victim a young man with a good
neck after an experience of tough, scraggy old throats: with a person
of that sort they were in no hurry to finish the business; it was
performed in a leisurely, loving way. Darwin, writing in praise of the
gaucho in his _Voyage of a Naturalist_, says that if a gaucho cuts
your throat he does it like a gentleman: even as a small boy I knew
better - that he did his business rather like a hellish creature
revelling in his cruelty. He would listen to all his captive could say
to soften his heart - all his heartrending prayers and pleadings; and
would reply: "Ah, friend," - or little friend, or brother - "your words
pierce me to the heart and I would gladly spare you for the sake of
that poor mother of yours who fed you with her milk, and for your own
sake too, since in this short time I have conceived a great friendship
towards you; but your beautiful neck is your undoing, for how could I
possibly deny myself the pleasure of cutting such a throat - so
shapely, so smooth and soft and so white! Think of the sight of warm
red blood gushing from that white column!" And so on, with wavings of
the steel blade before the captive's eyes, until the end.
When I heard them relate such things - and I am quoting their very
words, remembered all these years only too well - laughingly, gloating
over such memories, such a loathing and hatred possessed me that ever
afterwards the very sight of these men was enough to produce a
sensation of nausea, just as when in the dog days one inadvertently
rides too near the putrid carcass of some large beast on the plain.
As I have said, all this feeling about throat-cutting and the power to
realize and visualize it, came to me by degrees long after the sight
of a blood-stain on the turf near our home; and in like manner the
significance of the tyrant's fall and the mighty changes it brought
about in the land only came to me long after the event. People were in
perpetual conflict about the character of the great man. He was
abhorred by many, perhaps by most; others were on his side even for
years after he had vanished from their ken, and among these were most
of the English residents of the country, my father among them. Quite
naturally I followed my father and came to believe that all the
bloodshed during a quarter of a century, all the crimes and cruelties
practised by Rosas, were not like the crimes committed by a private
person, but were all for the good of the country, with the result that
in Buenos Ayres and throughout our province there had been a long
period of peace and prosperity, and that all this ended with his fall
and was succeeded by years of fresh revolutionary outbreaks and
bloodshed and anarchy. Another thing about Rosas which made me ready
to fall in with my father's high opinion of him was the number of
stories about him which appealed to my childish imagination. Many of
these related to his adventures when he would disguise himself as a
person of humble status and prowl about the city by night, especially
in the squalid quarters, where he would make the acquaintance of the
very poor in their hovels.
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