Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 214 - The War of the Triple Alliance Part 5: I Die With My Country

Episode Date: June 27, 2022

The conclusion to the war of the triple alliance. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys Sources: Leuchars, Chris. To the Bitter End: Paraguay and the War of the Triple Alliance Kolinski, Charles. Independence or Death: The story of the Paraguayan War Whigham, Thomas L. The Road to Armageddon: Paraguay versus the Triple Alliance, 1866–70.

Hey everybody, Joe here from the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. If you enjoy what we do here on the show and you think it's worth your hard-earned money, you can support the show via Patreon. Just a $1 donation gets you access to bonus episodes, our Discord, and regular episodes before everybody else. If you donate at an elevated level, you get even more bonus content. A digital copy of my book, The Hooligans of Kandahar, and a sticker from our Teespring store. Our show will always be ad-free and is totally supporter-driven. We use that money to pay our bills, buy research materials that make this show possible, and support charities

like the Kurdish Red Crescent, the Flint Water Fund, and the Halo Trust. Consider joining the Legion of the Old Crow Led by Donkeys podcast. I'm Joe and with me is Liam. Yay Liam, how you doing bud? Oh, I'm terrific bud. I was telling you about my day off air. It'll be fine. Everything's going to be fine.

Whatever. Now you're just going to make people concerned. I'm good. Everything's fine. You never have to reassure someone that it's going to be fine. Don't worry about it. If it's actually going to be fine. It's going to be fine.

It's going to be fine. Speaking of things being fine, a lot has happened since we've started recording this series. It's the longest series that you've been a part of. And this is the final episode, part five. I could have gone six. We almost did it to you. Yeah, and I did something that I never do, which is like I abridged myself.

I edited myself down and said, no more than five. Wow. Are you Gokasavian? Normally that only happens when I have a contractual agreement with an editor that tells me to shut the fuck up. At least they can stop. I don't know. One time they let me come out with a book that was like 600 pages long.

I don't know what the fuck they were thinking. That'll never happen again. Stephen King can do it. I mean, the stand is like 1100 pages. Yeah, I don't know what the fuck they were thinking. That'll never happen again. Stephen King could do it. I mean, the stand is like 1,100 pages. Yeah, I can't afford that much coke. I think it was coke he was on. I know it was a lot of alcohol, but I think it was also coke. Yeah, it was coke.

It would certainly explain some of the scenes in it. Yeah. One scene in particular. Yeah, the preteen gangbang. Yeah, no, no, no. Not a preteen gangbang. It no no not a preteen gangbang it was a train and it was in a sewer

oh I gotta tell you at 13 I was just getting ready for my bar mitzvah they certainly age quicker in Maine when you're being attacked by evil clowns don't they whomst amongst us doesn't have some sewer sex when being chased by Pennywise the Clown.

Anyway. Moving swiftly on. Speaking of not Pennywise the Clown, when we left you last time, Francisco Solano Lopez, the president of Paraguay. And I'm going to say this again because I've clearly made a lot of people mad. The self-proclaimed emperor of the plate. Me saying plate made people upset. And I will explain why I've said plate and not plata. And that is because in the earliest English translations

from Spanish to English, they used plate. P-L-A-T-E, not plata. You would not pronounce the word plate as plata. Therefore, plate. I am aware that in spanish it is plata as in silver i get it okay now leave us alone dickheads come at me don't come at me leave me alone um now he was chased from his capital as the allied armies of argentina brazil and uruguay a lesser extent Uruguay,

under the command of the Iron Duke of Brazil stormed through his defenses. However, because this is part five, it should become as no surprise that Lopez was too dumb to quit or even think his plans all the way through before attempting them. Actually, that was probably pretty evident in the last four episodes. Yeah, this guy's not a thinker. Yeah, he sure thinks he is, though. Philosophical warrior monk.

If Solano Lopez is alive today, he would work for like Turning Point USA and debate college kids. Oh, I was going to say he'd be a crypto bro. I mean, that's the same guy. Yeah, that's true. Now, he was aware that seven ironclads of the Brazilian Navy still remained near Porto Elisario, and he judged that these would not be in a high state of alert, being that they were considered safely at port. And he figured that because they would not be at a heightened state of alert, they would be easy to attack and capture. Remember, Paraguay never really had much of a navy, a riverine navy.

They were all retrofitted, like, river steamboats. And these are purpose-filled military ships. Hold the fleet. This baby can fit so many Paraguayans, it just sinks. His fleet was one step above, like, a swan-shaped boat that you would rent if you were at, like, a tourist destination. All aboard for love canals. Just like a 50 cow mouth and on a swan boat.

Honestly, that would probably be better than some of the shit that he had. Do we need to talk about the canoes again? Actually, we are going to talk about the canoes again. Of course we are. Why wouldn't we do that? He had no way of moving his ships down to like attack them while they were at port in a proper naval engagement.

And even if he did, the ironclads would have fucking eaten them alive. So he figured the best way to solve this problem would be to crank that crazy dial to 11 and try something deeply weird. Okay. I always like that sentence. This is the part of him that I can actually respect.

There's a lot of generals or military leaders or self-proclaimed emperors, whatever, who try some wild ass shit. And when you roll the die, occasionally you're going to win. And those are the ones that we remember. He rolls snake eyes like 10 times out of 10. So, yeah, I can't respect him for that part. Wow.

He called his four best captains, Suspettus, Genis, Bernal, and Vera, and ordered them to select his 200 best swimmers that they knew about in the army, which is not what you want to hear. Now, his idea was that they strap themselves. Oh, this speaks a third verse Italian. That's right. Now, his idea was they strap themselves full of weapons, swim down river, board the iron clads, take them over, which, remember, are manned by hundreds of people, and then hijack them and bring them back. All right. Now, the captains immediately realized, like, wow, this is fucking stupid, even by the emperor standards here. So they pointed out that, sir, this is a great idea and all. You're a true genius.

However, the current is simply too strong and anybody who attempted to swim in the river would fucking die. So he actually listened to that and he's like, okay, so let's do it with canoes. So on March 1st, in the darkness, this canoe-based expedition set off. And the first attempt was, as you can imagine, a complete disaster. One of the canoe crews, seeing another canoe of the hodgepodge form of Paraguayan Navy in the darkness, got scared, seeing that it might be a Brazilian ship, despite the fact that they were well aware that they were all using these canoes so seeing this he figured oh fuck missions off jumped into the river and tried to swim to shore and immediately fucking died um so that bam one crew down right off the beginning that's not going well okay another canoe was caught in a whirlpool which led to them again bailing out of their canoe and dying boom two crews down going great come on the following night they tried again

this time their canoes were tied together in pairs this helped them you know not get scared at their own shadows or get lost in the river itself and it evolved their tactics with that being that they could drift on either side of an enemy vessel the rope would catch the enemy boat and then they would just bang against the side effectively you know being able to board it so okay

good idea problem it's not a good idea so the men crouched down at the bottom of their canoes holding up branches and vegetation as a form of camouflage, hoping that they would look like floating islands, which getting some real Metal Gear Solid vibes here of like Solid Snake hiding in the box. But if it works, it works. However, it didn't work. It turned out the guards on the fleet were pretty goddamn suspicious of the sudden appearance of these islands.

I can't believe the floating islands, boy. The old reliable didn't work. Like, look, man, I've been on guard for a really long time. But were those islands there before? No, I don't think so. Now, the canoe still managed to get close enough because remember, this is a pretty fast moving river and where a few attackers boarded two of the ships, the Limabaros and the Cabral. They even killed the captain of the Limabaros. Imagine writing that letter home.

Dearest widow, I regretfully write to you to tell your husband died in a very stupid, acme-ass, canoe-borne naval assault. Condolences. condolences. Once on the boats, the attackers assumed like they actually had before, when they did have naval battles before, that the sailors would run out, sally forth out of the ship and fight off the people who have boarded

them. But these were ironclads. They didn't have to do that. Instead they just left the deck and locked themselves in the armored quarters. And that effectively killed the entire Paraguayan plot. They couldn't get in. Alright, time to

go. Well, didn't the Japanese have kamikaze frogmen or something? I don't know. It wouldn't surprise me. I don't know, though. They had plenty of other kamikaze shit. That's what you gotta do. What about resort to suicide bombing? Yeah, that honestly

probably would have worked uh this is one of the few problems in history that could be solved with suicide bombers i mean to be to be fair paraguay also tried suicide bombers a couple episodes ago and that didn't work great so you know that didn't that didn't work suicide bomb drawing board that's right these armored quarters were strong enough to you know be resistant to gunfire so they couldn't just shoot the doors open the raiders got mad yelling and swearing at the sailors to come out and fight them without actually being able to get inside and take over the ships so like that's a formidable house right yeah i got it they just kind of paced around outside getting madder and madder like come on pussies come shoot at us no fuck

all right now the other two canoe groups totally missed their targets floated downstream and while the rest of the brazilian navy pulled up to support the other two ships remember all the attackers are trapped on the open deck so the attackers just had to pull up and start shooting at them with small arms, which worked. A lot of the Paraguayans died on deck, but a lot more tried to jump overboard and swim the shore, which killed them. Of the 200 men they sent out,

there were only 50 survivors. They captured zero ships. Outstanding work, boys. At this point, Lopez and what remained of his army were squirreled away in the middle of the woods near San Fernando. And the president was losing what remained of his sanity. Despite the fact that his country is being held on for five episodes. That's not bad.

Arguable. I'll say it held on for the first episode when he came to power. Yeah. All right. Fair enough. Is that I mean, even his war plan itself was a little unhinged. Suicide box. I mean, we've talked about suicide canoes charging into cacti and the Navy destroying itself.

So, low bar here. Now, despite the fact his country was being slowly eaten away by a war of his own creation, he believed the biggest threat to him and his God-given mission were, would you guess it, the people in his immediate surrounding. Oh. We're doing that. We're doing the paranoid spiral now. Oh, yes. The doctor's plot.

Yes. Particularly his immediate family, his generals, and even the diplomatic community. Uh-oh. Because at this point, he took his entire government with him. This included diplomatic ministers. So like the U.S. Ministers like hanging out in the middle of the jungle with him because like that's his job.

Hey, guys. He accused his family, all of his favorite generals, and even the U.S. Minister of conspiring against him. The reason why he accused the U.S. Minister of conspiring against him. The reason why he accused the U.S. minister of conspiring against him is because he's like, hey, President Lopez, you should possibly end the war. He's like, traitor! I'll show you ending the war.

Now this, the only thing that probably saved the U.S. minister was shooting him would be a bit of a bad idea. But that didn't save anybody else. His paranoia resulted in hundreds of trials out in the middle of the woods, without judges, juries, but plenty of

executioners. Virtually everybody that looked at him the wrong way got the wall. Yeah, fair enough. Elsewhere, what remained of the Paraguayan organized defense was rapidly shitting in its own mouth. Not entirely...

Shitting in its own pants from disease. Tomato, tomato. The disease was largely... The defense was largely crumbling. The disease was not crumbling. That's one thing. The disease is gaining strength, actually. That shit is foundational at this point.

There is more disease in the army than soldiers. Now, remember, the last episode, their main fort fell. So a lot of their organized defense was organized around that. Not to mention a word of the Capitol being shelled and the government running off into the jungle to self-destruct and shoot one another is bad for morale. Though the commanders of the Paraguayan army were trying to make sure that withdrawal away from these areas to consolidate their forces was organized so they could, you know, save their fighting force for later.

Unfortunately for them, this involved in a best case scenario, marching tired, starving, and very very sick men. Horrible humidity, heat, ever-present sucking mud that like sucked. Some of these guys didn't have boots, but the ones that did have boots lost their boots in the mud. The mud, yeah, sure.

A lot of the guys who did have boots did not wear them, walking barefoot through the jungle, cutting their feet up, or were probably already cut up from their shitty boots, leading to infections. And, you know, we know where that goes. Shit disease swamp. Shit disease swamp, yeah. Operation shit disease swamp. don't want to go there in candy land all of this had to occur this like a horrible march over unspeakably brutal terrain without any potable water or salt so if you were one of the few men that were not wracked with disease you were dying of dehydration. There is nothing to drink.

Not a goddamn thing. And for people who aren't aware, you can use salt to stave off dehydration. At this point, one of the things Lucia's book points out is like, Paraguay had no salt left. Like in the entire country. This causes a ton of problems, obviously for preserving meat, but also for staving off dehydration if you're fighting a war at other points it's meant crossing rivers without boats

to get for guys uh making graphs out of whatever they could find like the few unexploded trees in the area from shell fire or at one point they stole an entire church roof and floated it, which works. As you do. They must have been huge fans of Burzum. Now... Oh! That's right. Whole army of corpse paint wearing, guys. Dude, I'm seeing candle masks

on Friday. Another thing is a lot of the rafts they had to build sucked. Remember, you'd have to cut trees down, lash things together. All these dudes are super, super weak and sickly. So like they're the quality of their labor is rock fucking bottom. A lot of these boats just took these guys to their deaths. Lapped together.

If that. And even if this went off without a hitch, the Brazilian Navy was alive and well, like doing circles of the nearby Chaco River, just doing like systematic drive-bys constantly. So even if they're like, oh, we found all of these good trees to make rafts out of, oh, fuck, here comes the fleet again, right? When this went badly, Lopez arrested the nearby commander's wife because the commander himself had surrendered. He's like, well, I can't shoot that guy, but I can shoot his family. Yeah. After the allies became aware of the little fortress of doom in the woods, Lopez was forced to break camp once again, fleeing, forcing his government in exile and everybody else to come with him. When the allies marched into the San Fernando campsite, they found very little,

but they did find the remains of 350 people that Lopez had executed. Uh-oh. Lopez had scampered off so quickly while telling so few people that when the allies were standing around surveying the area, a Paraguayan soldier who had just showed up for their guard post was, like,

standing there confused, like, uh-huh, are you saying that I don't have to go to work today and he just walked into the middle of the kid they just like well uh you're captured now and that guy was like oh thank god sweet all right cool where's the camp you want me to walk myself

or unfortunately for him most Paraguayan prisoners of war were immediately forced back into service under the Uruguayan flag oh yeah then as lopez and his shrinking inner circle which uh as well as the haunted remains of his army marched north they put the countryside to the torch what was left of it i should point out he demanded a total scorched earth campaign burning and stealing everything that he thought that could be used by the enemy. If they couldn't carry

it with them as they marched, it had to be destroyed. Torched. Yeah. If anybody, like any civilian, and one of the few people still alive were like working the fields or the crops or whatever, attempted to like, hey man, what the fuck are you doing? Immediate death sentence. Now, unlike before when the allies would advance,

win, and then sit on their ass for weeks, months, or a couple times a year, the Iron Duke continued the ally defensive. He would not give Lopez the time to build any of his defenses anymore, though they would occasionally be slowed down by constant river crossings, which were a logistics nightmare. The Iron Duke solved a lot of logistics problems within the uh the allied mostly brazilian army at this point however there was a lot of problems he wasn't able to solve like communications and like quartering and supplies so everyone's like oh uh sir we lost like a thousand people to uh the cholera's nah fuck him who cares all right at the beginning of october 1868 the two armies faced each other on either side the pasacuri river on either side of lopez positions he had another river and a swamp making it another death funnel as we've spoke about he's

very good at building defenses i will give him that yeah well it's a bitch to get him out of there it's hard to do with you know i... I will sack the courts as his ramparts. It would be easier than making his half-dead soldiers dig, to be fair. Just use the guys who are dropping dead. Peek it out from what used to be your buddy. Like, ah, ah, can't hit me, can't hit me. In front of him, he had ordered his soldiers to dig two different dikes, which flooded the area with water that was about chest fucking high.

So any advance into this was going to be awful. And I should point out, it was also awful to defend because you can't flood all this area without also flooding your own trenches, which he did. So he had about 18,000 men all sitting at like waist high water and muddy trenches dying of malaria staring off into the distance. This sucks. I want to go home. Now, Lopez who had fought plenty of other very dumb allied commanders up until this point

they're like, ah, he has no choice but to attack straight into my death funnel. This is going to be great. And the Duke had about 30,000 men. And if he would have ordered them in there, it would have been a fucking bloodbath. So, the Iron Duke took one look at this and he's like, I'm not

doing that. That's fucking stupid. So he simply ordered his army around Lopez's right flank and up the river. Where, would you have guessed it, Lopez had not even bothered to protect himself in any way. Oh, no death funnels? Oh, that's a shame. Now, this was a little bit more of a nightmare than it sounds it is very uh very simple movement on paper not in reality remember this is unbroken wilderness in most places so moving an army of

that size along with their cannons and supplies they would need to you know conduct a military offensive required him to build an entire fucking road system, which actually would be the most complete road system in Paraguay outside the capital. It was used specifically to kill Lopez. He had to order his engineers to build a road system so his army horses and carts could move through the thick brush.

The road, which would have to be 30 miles long, would include five bridges fortified redoubts and telegraph lines to make sure he could communicate it required the cutting down of more than 8 000 trees all done with hand tools remember this is no easy way to do this he doesn't have a lot of pack animals either this is all being done by hand that fucking sucks yeah this is the worst fucking job I've ever heard of in the army. Even during this war, I would rather just charge into the fucking swamp and die. They're all being mangled by disease, too.

I cannot underline that enough. At any given time on this road system, there's a thousand men working. And he made sure that this was a shift system. So night and day, day four months thousands of men were working up to their waists in water in the hot fetid atmosphere of a tropical jungle played by mosquitoes

and insects and you know all of the awfulness that comes with this no goddamn thank you oh and jaguars they'd occasionally be picked off by fucking jaguars nope like imagine you're cutting down trees and you're gonna turn to your buddy and you see him getting like right up a tree yeah there's no like good numbers on how many of them died per day the best i could find from

three different sources on average is about a dozen it's probably higher though yeah because you have to think for every dozen that drop dead there's another two or three or four dozen that are half dead or on like one foot in the grave from disease or in you know i shot of a hungry wild animal the construction took months and the road was complete the allies began slowly moving their men and supplies into position to attack. And that did not begin until December. On December 5th, 15,000 Allied soldiers had made it up the road and crossed another river and landed miles behind Lopez's line. Though, despite all of this, they did fuck up.

This is not a pure genius move on behalf of the Iron Duke. Now, to complete this movement, the Allied forces would have to cross a nearby bridge, which they thought by virtue of being so far away from Lopez's known defenses that it would be secure. So they didn't even post anybody to guard it. Right. Lopez kind of figured this and ordered

General Caballero and 8,000 of his... It could be Caballero or Caballero. Either or. Whichever one. You're going to be mad at me anyway. I don't care. And 8,000 of his soldiers to advance. Those sucks. I agree. Begin the mutiny.

So him and 8,000 of his men were ordered to advance up to that position and lay a trap for the main force that he knew would be coming. To make matters worse for the Allies, this bridge, which remember was built very recently by largely unskilled hands, was very, very narrow. That meant despite outnumbering the defenders by 10,000, this force could only cross it very slowly, densely packed together, and two or three guys wide. Not conducive to, say if you got ambushed and defend yourself on it when caballero caballero whichever launched his attack there were 16 000 men packed onto this bridge and just behind it oh boy now confusion was caused by the front ranks because like say they opened fire the front ranks immediately pause in place like what the fuck is going on this starts a chain reaction of this human snake everybody pushing up against one another people though they hear gunshots they're not sure where they're

coming from the people in front are getting shot they're trying to pause they're trying to run away they're running back into the guys behind them and they're so densely packed together they can't get through them other guys had fucked this and jumped into the river where they were then swept away and died and then eaten by jaguars yeah the jaguars are waiting by the side like grizzly bears trying to get salmon but just like scooping soldiers up meanwhile the paraguayan sat there nice and cushy off in the bush firing into this like roiling mass of confused soldiers. Now, this was a problem. The Iron Duke was on the far side of the bridge. He hadn't

crossed yet, sitting with his cavalry, and realized if things didn't change, they would just get picked apart until the Paraguayans ran out of fucking ammo. Right. The best way to break an ambush is assault directly through it. That is true as it was in the 1800s as it is today. And he knew that.

However, due to all of the confusion, which had effectively formed a human crush in the middle of a bridge, he could not order the forward units to fucking move. There was no chain of which he could pass an order up there other than

common sense to get the fuck off the bridge. And some people had managed to get off on the other side, but there was no force. There's no organization. It was a complete clusterfuck. Sure. So he realized, I have to give these guys no goddamn choice because all of these soldiers trapped on the bridge are trying to get off the bridge, meaning run away from battle. Like, well, can't have that. He ordered his cavalry with him at the head to charge forward

across the bridge this gave his men two choices run forward away from the horses or die it worked he kind of was like you know when you roll a tube of toothpaste up, he kind of did that to his own army. Hey, man, if it works, if it works and it's stupid, then it's not stupid. Yeah. He was 64 years old, unsheathed his sword and at the head of his cavalry stampeded across his own army. Now, like I said, this worked. It forced the vast majority of his surviving military to get the fuck off of the bridge running forward or to a lesser extent jumping off there wasn't a whole lot of people that

actually got ran down by him but it was you know more than one right which is guys yeah this did break the paraguayan ambush because remember they're outnumbered by literally tens of thousands and they fucked off and nobody's entirely sure of the casualty count here um it's thought at least 1200 paraguayans died were killed or wounded but being wounded at this point is virtually a death sentence and uh an easy estimate for uh the allied forces is double uh or even like 2.5 times that it was a lot it was a fucking lot but i mean in the grand scheme of things doesn't really mean anything. The Paraguayans lost 1,200 men

that they cannot replace. The Allies lost, let's say, 3,000 men. They're like, yeah, whatever. Alright. Like, who gives a shit? Now, one of the wounded men on the Brazilian side, interestingly enough, was Deodoro Fonseca, who would eventually come president of Brazil.

However, in the same attack, three of his brothers died. So... Whoops. That's a shame. Well, Deodoro Fonseca would have kind of ended up being a bastard, so I don't feel too bad about it. Alright. Haha, I'm glad your family's dead. Yeah, eat that, motherfucker. Lopez thought that

kind of like before, that this punch in the face, this bloody lip to the allies would slow them down. But it would make them sit around for a couple months, a year, a couple weeks, get angry at one another, bicker and argue and try to blame one another

for whoever caused this, but that wasn't the case anymore. The Iron Duke was in 100% total unquestioned command of the advanced. People were upset, but he was like, shut the fuck up. And they're like, all righty. There's a reason why he got his nickname. Because of this, Caballero wasn't able to make it back to the main Paraguayan position.

Because remember, before, it's very easy to move and withdraw back to lines if you're not being fucking chased, which he was. Right. The Iron Duke had a good idea. He was like, well, clearly that's not the main Paraguayan military, but we could kill the rest of them. And that would take away from the defenses, which hypothetically would be a slow attack. And he was goddamn set on doing that, which led to the Battle of Ave. This didn't necessarily have to go this way because Caballero only had 5,000 men left. And he was arrayed against an army of 20,000.

He told Lopez, like, hey, but I'm kind of fucked over here. Can I get some reinforcements or something? And Lopez is like, nah. It's a plot. It's a plot. All right. Well well it's been good and Caballero did not order a withdrawal in any way

he had no genius plan he had no ambush he didn't even bother to secure his flanks he knew the mission that he was given by his president was a suicide mission so he simply lined up his 5,000 men and prepared to fucking die that's loyalty you're a moron well I wouldn't

go loyalty. We'll get there. Fair enough. For all of the problems of the Paraguayan military, discipline and loyalty was largely not one of them. If you ordered them to stand, fight, and die, they'd be like, alright. Well, you say so. You need more than that to win.

In the long term, the only thing you're doing now is killing your country. But whatever. I never went Civ, but that's fine. Yeah. He's going for the wonder victory. Culture victory. Culture victory.

So he arrayed his 5,000 men up and squared off against 20,000 people. And because he didn't even have enough people to really secure his flanks, he immediately got assaulted by cavalry uh attacked on both sides thankfully for him you know the hellite military wasn't great either but to make things worse it began to storm like not a trickle a goddamn downpour which using their own like shitty flintlock muskets meant that uh they weren't a whole lot of use. You could still fire them sometimes. It was his hit and miss. Sure. But that did not slow them down.

Somehow the Paraguayan still held strong, and one of the guys with a working gun managed to blow off Brazilian General Manuel Osorio's fucking jaw. Oh, that's... You're not coming back for that one one of he didn't die one of the eyewitnesses said it was like largely hanging on by a thread thank you joe thank you

yeah though this didn't even knock the man off of his horse what fucking what it's like that's fine it's fine i'm fine you guys you guys know that Kanye West song through the wire. That's what we're going to do. Let's do it. He held his shattered face in one hand and a sword in the other and kept attacking until he finally blacked out from blood loss. Okay. Well, I'll be taught anybody. Jesus.

The man is a Warhammer 40 K orc of some kind, but yeah, attacked from the front and the left by two entire Brazilian corps. The defenders formed a large square, which resisted almost literally until the death. Soaked by the rain with ammunition that had largely become useless. The square had to face not only the cavalry, but master ranks of allied infantry whose newer weapons, which we talked about before, worked better. I won't say they worked flawlessly because they still sucked, but they were better than flintlock muskets in this particular

situation. Despite all of this, this battle went on for three fucking hours. Only 50 Paraguayan soldiers managed to escape the battle back to the main lines. Now, one of them was General Caballero, Paraguayan soldiers managed to escape the battle back to the main lines. That's terrible.

Now, one of them was General Caballero, who did not escape unscathed. He had been ran through his neck by a goddamn sword. Jesus. And he's like, I'm fine. These dudes are fucking intense. Yeah, like, soldiers were just built

differently back then, man. Like, my feet hurt after a march and I didn't want to go out again. Stab me with the sword. I was gonna call you mean names, but you beat me to it. Nah, man, I'm completely honest with how big of a wuss I am. If someone ran a sword through my neck, I'm like, alright, alright, fine, fine, fine. I'm just gonna

sit down. You win. Bye. Bye. You can have whatever you want. Just leave leave me alone you want this piece of dirt how about this shrub meanwhile caballero's riding back bleeding from a gaping neck when packing mud into it or something i don't know that's not that's not don't do that it's fine it's it's antiseptic mud it's not antiseptic but i don't advise this enough he was watching tiktok and filled it with his own piss because some chiropractor told him it's a good idea oh that explains that infection now while the allies rested after this battle preparing for their

final attack on lopez's rear phrasing lopez desperately tried to get something in position remember his main line was kind of useless at this point and it was abandoned. He sent everyone running west to start frantically digging defenses at the top of two hills to prepare for this new advance on him. But by this point, no matter how hard his soldiers

fought, they were shells of men. They were weak and starving and diseased. They lacked... Things have not gone well for our boys. Yeah yeah our brave boys are fucked uh they lacked the strength to even dig positions down far enough where they could even hide behind them like they dug trenches down to like their knees like look boss this is all we got as far as going buddy which again of course look at these poor bastards my mom had a client once who uh was who had suffered some sort of workplace injury and the judge asked him to raise his right hand and he raised it sort of halfway the judge thought he was being mocked it was like i said raise your right hand and the guy turned to

him and goes that's as far as it fucking goes in an energy i can respect now the duke had or originally planned to launch his final assault on Lopez's headquarters on the 19th, but again, it stormed. Heavy downpours made the attack impossible, and it wasn't until the 21st that he moved his army closer to the Paraguayan positions. As they got closer,

Allied soldiers and the Duke himself heard constant gunfire coming from Lopez's headquarters, and they weren't exactly sure what it was. They weren't being counterattacked. No, no, no. It was more mass executions. Hey,

third host of the podcast mass execution. We now go, we actually have to break for advertisements for today's sponsor, Hiring Squads, brought to you by the state of don't know, state of Arizona. I feel like they probably still do that. What's up, gamers?

This is the state of Arizona. We're about to execute a man who we can't actually prove did anything wrong. Now we go live to the execution chamber where we're using gas for some fucking reason, like it's Nazi Germany. But don't worry. They backlit the execution chamber with gamer lights. Oh, RGB. God damn it.

This execution chamber brought to you by Tesla. I was going to say Corsair, but... Don't worry, they used one of their tunnel machines to make it more effective to get the prisoner to the death chamber or something. Great. His victims included two of his favorite generals, Barrios and Burgess, as well as his former foreign minister and Lopez's own brother, who he forced his sisters to watch get killed. As soon as a warning.

Now, as the first salvo of allied artillery open at the battle would become known as Lomas Valentinas. It also has other names. I'm going with that one. On December 21st, 1868, the Duke sent over 19,000 men to assault the last

and final bastion of Lopez, which was only held by 3,000 at this point, who were mostly dead on their feet. The garrison was more malaria than man. Ah, corpse army! Which sounds like an X-Man, like I have the power of pestilence, I don't fucking know.

Yeah, it sounds great, but actually it's bad. Despite the insane numerical disadvantage, the Paraguayans fought over every inch of soil on the hill without budging. The Brazilians were eventually able to overwhelm every position by sheer force of numbers, but would do so after having to kill every single man in it. If only one soldier was left alive, they would keep shooting at them or stabbing at them or in one case, throwing rocks. I'm kind of sad we didn't get the fighting ear warfare.

You know what? I'm going to go to a limb here and assume that happened. Yeah, someone definitely bit someone. Yeah, someone got bit. Like rocks, knives, fucking punches and kicks. Someone got bit. Someone definitely got bit. At one stage, the advancing Brazilian infantry had to go within a few hundred yards of Lopez's headquarters.

Now, Martin McMahon, who was the new American minister, and I do need to point out, was very pro-Lopez. He really liked him. Seems foolish. All right. Yeah. He witnessed this battle at close quarters because, like I said, Lopez brought his entire government with him. McMahon noted that if the allies had deployed in normal infantry lines, they would have

been able to just sweep back the small group of men who were resisting them and they probably would have captured the headquarters with lopez inside instead what they did it was advancing columns i try not to like talk about military tactics too much in here because it's like boring nerd shit right so to explain this easier hamburger not hot dog right sure yes they deployed in columns not lines so long not wide right so and mcmahon was a civil war veteran of the union and had been awarded the medal of honor so he knew a little something about warfare of the era right so i'm willing to say that he probably had a point right uh now the allies kept advancing in their columns, which was very easy to slow down because the head of these columns would become under fire from the defenders and would not be able to redeploy. They would slow down, bog down, slowly get picked off from the side.

And like in a lot of other battles, it was very hard to command these columns to move as one. So it was like fighting with action movie ideas of one at a time getting picked apart. McMahon watched as the weight of their numbers pushed the columns on and saw Paraguayan officers, including those of the general staff, come out of their headquarters

and take their place in the line to fight them off. Oh, this is some Russian invasion of Ukraineraine shit now this did not however include lopez yeah i bet it did did it that's that's funny how that works lopez like well time to get the fuck out of here and he ran bye this was the first time he was in legitimate danger, and it turned out he was not a very big fan of that kind of shit. Despite this and being outnumbered like crazy, the headquarters didn't fall and the allies had to hold back and reorganize after losing 4000 men. Come on, come on. Skirmishing would continue along the line until December 17th, when the Duke decided to finally launch the final assault. Like McMahon points out, the Duke was good, but the Iron Duke was a much better military commander than the people that came before them.

But he still fucking sucked. Right. He lost more people in the period. I mean, any attack up a hill is going to lose significantly more people than the defenders will every time um however right it's not this bad uh there's very little reason why this uh this should have happened other than it's what we call a good old-fashioned oops but you know he had more men where that came from so he launched another attack i feel like you never want a good old-fashioned oops have you ever had an oops that killed 4000 people?

Are you a general officer? I've had diarrhea. I mean, now the Brazilian army at this point was quite exhausted from that first assault. So he switched them out for fresh and rested Argentine troops. And during this assault, the Paraguayans, who could not switch out their troops, broke. But so did the Argentines. Ah, this is like the second period where you let your opponent switch because it means you can switch too. Period of the long change.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Doing line switches like in Mighty Ducks. Yeah, it's a hockey match. No, this is how my tiny fucking ape brain works. Except this is like when you're playing an NHL game and you just don't pay attention to the endurance of anybody and everybody's like red and you just want to keep cycling out your stars. Yeah. The Paraguayans had no reserves, so they were already exhausted.

The Argentines were all rested, but badly trained and led. So they broke upon one another. The two lines completely collapsed with very little trained and led. So they broke upon one another. The two lines completely collapsed with very little command and control to small groups of men fighting over rocks and ditches without leadership, all trying to murder one another with anything they could get their hands on.

At this point, a 15-year-old American nurse named Ramona Martinez, who Lopez had enslaved, grabbed a sword and began slashing at the oncoming allies. Okay, what the fuck? Now, seeing this, the wounded that she was caring for took up arms again and ran back

into battle at her side. She's 15. She needs help. She became such an icon for her defense of her patients that a Paraguayan newspaper called her the american joan of arc i i will give it to her uh that's pretty sick but also probably violates some sort of convention oh those didn't exist yet yeah i know you're fine fucking asshole i mean she was a slave uh but you that's lopez's fault you made a joke off of my name's joe joe casapian so you get so you get i have hearing damage

by midday it was all over for the cost of 400 more allied soldiers the paraguayan army was annihilated though l Lopez and General Resquin as well as Caballero all survived, escaping into the jungle once again. Though this is the first time that Lopez admitted to the Paraguayan public of whom I'm not even sure who

he could actually communicate with at this point anymore that they had lost the battle. This is the first time he'd been losing a battle when he's about to lose the entire war. He made camp at Cerro Leon where slowly the battle's survivors trickled in.

One of these groups is led by Guillermo Gonzalez, who was despite the fact he was 16 years old, had been promoted to battalion commander on the merit that everybody else was dead. He got promoted the starship troopers way. You know, I'm doing my part.

He'd pull up his bootstraps, but his feet had long since rotted off. Now, the last Paraguayan stronghold of Angostura? Angostura? I tried. Like the bitters, Joe. Had heard of Lopez's defeat and

the commander of this garrison assumed when he got word of Lopez's defeat it was like, well, the war has to be fucking over. I'm surrendering. This is stupid. And he surrendered. Now, a week later, the Iron Duke's forces marched into the Paraguayan capital and captured it without a fight.

There was nobody left to fight them. While the Argentine soldiers were ordered to stay on the outskirts of the city, the Brazilian soldiers began a looting spree unlike anything yet seen in the war. Now, there wasn't a lot of food or livestock. What is there to loot? Dude, they ransacked like doors and shit like oh yeah yeah you're gonna you're gonna show that off in your house just like ah i have two doors in my living room why you may ask now you fucking peasant you only have one look at these two that's why they call you one door bobby you simple bitch like it was said that not a pane of glass nor a mirror nor a lock

remained untouched uh like happy to announce my new architectural salvage uh enterprise please don't ask where it started it was uh more of a principal thing like an outburst of anger though there was a lot of rumors that on his way out that Lopez and his inner circle had buried the wealth of the Paraguayan state somewhere in the capital. I'll always do that. He had stolen it.

He had it with him. Yeah. That guy knew he wasn't coming back. He sure hoped he was, but oh boy, he is not. But that did not mean that the idea of this rumor did not spread through

the entire Allied force. So thousands of soldiers, when they got done stealing window glass and human beings, because that happened, they were all digging. The entire capital was pockmarked like it had been hit by an artillery barrage

by a whole bunch of people looking for buried treasure. There was none. There fucking was none. Embarrassing. Little was done to control this outburst of violence, mostly because the Duke, who had controlled the army

the best of anybody so far, wasn't there because he had fallen ill with God knows how many diseases at this point and had to be shipped home. Meanwhile, Lopez is about 30 miles away attempting to raise another army.

He sent out death squads to chase down deserters or people had survived one of the other battles and just went home assuming the war was over. Right now, by May, he had managed to gather 18 guns and around 12,000 men, though I use the word men very loosely here. Many of them were not men. None of them were soldiers. They were described as, quote, invalids and cripples and boys as young as 12. But don't worry,

they also had men 60 and over. Real Volkstrom energy here. Yeah. And to this end, nobody is sure why he kept fighting. He could have very easily just skipped over the border of Bolivia,

who was open to this idea of living in exile in Bolivia and live that the rest of his life, because him and his mistress had robbed the country blind of its treasury when he ordered the capital's evacuation. Or he could have believed some foreign power was going to intervene, which

was definitely not going to happen. While the US, and for a lesser extent the British supported him, the most that they were willing to do was kind words. They weren't going to fucking get involved here, especially not the United States. Remember, this is like 1868.

The Civil War just got over. We're doing reconstruction. Leave us alone. Badly. And not to mention the British... I'm not saying the British wouldn't get involved in a pointless over we're doing reconstruction leave us alone badly and not to mention the british you know i'm not saying the british wouldn't get involved in a pointless war on the other side of the world but it had to have some upside to them and there really wasn't here like uh brazil and argentina and uruguay is really a non-factor here it's not like they were like haha once we win and take over paraguay we'll never trade with the british. The British were like, eh, we don't really give a shit here.

Whatever. Nobody had any other skin in this game other than fucking Lopez. And the millions of people he dragged down with him. Just sat on my balls. Thank you. You were telling me about a guy with half his jaw hanging off his face earlier. Shut the hell up. The most fanciful, I'll say,

and least likely option is that he was truly a man of the cause. Not a man for himself, but the cause that he said this was for, which was fighting for the right of a smaller nation to defend themselves from their larger neighbors.

And remember, I cannot say this enough, he started this war. Yeah. Yep. This would be like Adolf Hitler sitting in Berlin like, I cannot believe imperialism has come for me. I'm being victimized. Like, I'm simply the victim here, you know?

But regardless of the reason, he kept at it. Now, his camp and the, I guess, exile capital, he began to do weird shit. Like he ordered his men to have group readings of Chateaubriand's genius of Christianity. Don't know why. And talk about what it meant to them personally. We're doing a fucking book club right now. Exactly. Imagine you're horribly wracked with disease and more than one untreated wound i've got diarrhea coming out of my mouth i have not seen a solid turd in years

and you want me to read a fucking but not to mention there's a fair amount of his soldiers are just fucking illiterate because remember it's not that long ago that like school was illegal but there there's also a weird weird episode where Lopez would just like sit down next to officers and ask their opinions on certain things, which remember, he never cared about. In fact, opinions on things that were not Lopez's opinions were largely illegal. Right. He would ask them if they would have done things differently. And of course, virtually everybody's like, this is fucking bait. No, Mr. General.

Of course not, Mr. General. Now, there was one case I could find where someone said that was not the case. It was a captain, a young guy who's older, all young or very old, mostly older, dead by this point. Right, right. And he's like, actually, sir, this is it's gone very badly. I'm going to be quite honest with you. And Lopez said it was impossible for him to do anything wrong because

he had God's mandate. Right? All right, motherfucker. That's not very helpful. And the captain pointed out that actually the only person who can do no wrong is God. And he was demoted and nobody ever saw him again. So owned with facts and logic debate

me in the field of logic, as a black bag is shoved over his head. Don't engage the debate, bros. While this weird book club was going on, the Allies began to march again. With the Duke half dead in Brazil, the army now came under the command of Count Louis-Philippe-Marie-Ferdinand-Guestin,

which, yeah, the Brazilian emperor's son-in-law. And he was also the nephew of the previous French king, Louis-Philippe. Monarchies love to fuck one another. Oh, they sure do. Yeah. Not to mention these guys are all mostly like Portuguese and French and British. Like, none of these guys are actually Brazilian.

He spent the rest of the war not doing much of anything other than hating the Iron Duke for the simple fact that he believed that he should be in command because he was the prince. Now, his appointment was a win-win for Emperor Pedro of Brazil. The war was pretty much over, so Gaston really couldn't fuck anything up, anything too important, right? He wasn't going to lose so badly that, I don't know, Lopez is going to march on Brazil anytime soon.

Again, anyway. And it had the benefit of Gaston would shut the fuck up and stop bugging him about being in command. Though there was another problem that the emperor in Brazil was facing. And it was a foundational one, which would immediately lead to his government failing when the war was over. Amongst other things. It's not that simple. Sure. War is fucking expensive. Amongst other things. It's not that simple. War is fucking

expensive, and this war was particularly expensive and getting unpopular. Since the Allies had collapsed to a pile of infighting in the occasional civil war, Brazil was 99% of the Allied force at this point. So anything other than winning this war,

complete victory, which ended in Lopez's death, I should mind you, which was their agreement, was political suicide. Furthermore, the stress of the war was causing the country to smash right into the growing unpopularity of the Brazilian imported imperial system, which wasn't Brazilian. It was Portuguese. Now, the elections, which were very stilted and defrauded, were becoming violent as people bucked under the system and the growing middle class were getting pretty tired of this shit. And there was still another more important problem. Brazil had hemorrhaged themselves in this war nearly as badly as Paraguay had.

They simply had a larger population and country. They had chewed through their armies and their reserves until they were freeing slaves just so they would go and fight, which is anybody who could probably already figure out where this is going leads to the problem of what do you do with all these freed slaves if the armies were sent home? This made people pretty fucking mad. the entire Brazilian system ran on slavery, mostly because there were still other people enslaved. And soon the slave owning class was pretty worried about sending all these combat hardened and trained freedmen back home would lead to revolt. Cause it probably fucking would like, Hey, freedom's pretty great y'all. Uh,

and now we know how to use these things called guns. Uh, that meant despite the war being, like I said, Freedom's pretty great, y'all. And now we know how to use these things called guns. That meant despite the war being, like I said, for all intents and purposes over, it was in Brazil's imperial government's best interest if the army stayed in the field for as long as possible, even if they didn't need to. Yeah. There was also the problem of the Allied Army in general. The Uruguayans had all been knocked from the war and the Argentinians completely just distrusted the Brazilians and stayed in the war mostly to spy on them because they believed that they were next. Brazil was going to sweep through them as well, which definitely not. And they wanted a seat at the table when it came to stripping Paraguay down to the studs when it was finally over.

Sure. All of this didn't stop them from launching the Winter Campaign of 1869, though. And the day of truly organized Paraguayan resistance was the thing of the past even more than it was before this. I know I've said those words a few times, but there are still trenches and stuff involved.

Throw that out the window. And the Allied armies were constantly harassed by guerrilla attacks and raids and it didn't take the allies long to get sick of just trying to set the bush on fire they were trying to literally burn out the guerrillas and it didn't work what they did start doing was capturing outlying towns many of whom were still like had functioning foundries in them that were cranking out guns, ammo, and cannons somehow for Lopez's war effort. This offensive had brought something new to the field, however.

The Paraguayan Legion, manned by anti-Lopez dissidents and also a lot of press-ganged POWs, and commanded by Lopez's political opponents, many of whom former generals who managed to not get shot. This went along with the Paraguayan provincial government handpicked by Brazil, much like it had done in Uruguay. Oh, this sounds like it's going to go great. And one of the government's first acts was to name Lopez a traitor.

Yeah, that's fun. This caused Lopez already barely holding onto a string of sanity to completely lose his mind. Whenever he heard reports about a part of his army, even a handful of soldiers, an officer, a fort, whatever, would surrender and switch sides, he would send loyalists in to murder them before they were to get to allied lines. This included an entire town at one point. In another case, when one of his commanders heard that a nearby family might leave camp to move closer to the Allies, he ordered them all murdered. Okay. As for Paraguay itself, it, for lack of a better term, was also being murdered.

Towns and villages were abandoned, either by orders of the government to move towards a gathering of war material or being wiped out by disease and famine. There were no livestock, as it had already been killed and fed to the armies. And due to this shift in war production, as well as the general decorative properties of widespread starvation combined with massive losses and disease, there was literally nobody left to sow the fields like they were either dead or too weak to farm. Jesus. The picture painted by eyewitnesses is best described as post-apocalyptic. Like they were either dead or too weak to farm. Jesus. The picture painted by eyewitnesses is best described as post-apocalyptic. Yeah, that tracks.

Quote, Paraguayan civilians wandered among the roads devoid of purpose, picking up scraps from the soldiers, emaciated, almost skeletal, dressed in rags and often partly or totally naked. Their eyes were sunken through hunger, lay deep in disease-ridden faces, and those who could not go on simply died by the roadside. They are untended and unburied. Great. Yeah, he did this. Like, this is Lopez's doing. He did this to his entire country.

The soldiers the Brazilians found themselves fighting during this winter offensive were mostly starved children and old men. They captured the Paraguayan base at Sierra Leone, commanded by Major Riviolla, who surrendered, switched sides, and became the new provincial government. Glow up, if you will. Now, many of the strong Paraguayan positions had to be abandoned shortly after any combat began

simply because the soldiers were too exhausted, too hungry, or simply unable to continue fighting. Yeah, that tracks. How many times do you drag a 12-year-old out to fight before you have no 12-year-olds left? Right. July 24th was Lopez's Saint's Day, and he celebrated by joining the procession that carried the statue of St. Francis

up the slope of the Azacora Ridge. His eldest son, Pancho, swore that he saw the incline of its head and its eyes move. The statue, that is. Okay. So Lopez did the most sane thing he could do. Execute everybody.

He called his generals together to ascertain whether this was a miracle. They decided, sure. Whatever you say, boss, it was a miracle. I don't want to get executed. Yeah, exactly. Whatever you say, boss. It was a miracle. I don't want to get executed. Yeah, exactly. I've made it this far.

I can do whatever I need to do to get through this. And Lopez decided that he was God's chosen messenger to. You think you think you're God's chosen messenger after the fucking award you just had? And he was willing them on towards victory. Like he was one step away from calling himself jesus yeah in reality he had maybe 2 000 soldiers and another 10 000 civilians packed into a tiny town that now acted as his capital he did not even have enough soldiers left to man the only trench that they had managed to dig. On the morning of the 12th, Allied artillery placed in the hills that overlooked the town opened fire, and at 8.30am,

20,000 soldiers advanced from the north and east and south in unending waves that crossed the river and swept through the Paraguayan trenches in little more than half an hour. The fighting was vicious and confusing, as civilians, mostly women, ran into the fighting with whatever weapons they could find, slashing and beating Brazilians as they poured over their defenses. One person said they saw a man who was probably pushing, 80 years old, standing in the middle of all of this, calmly taking shots with his rifle as if he was at a firing range. rifle as if he was at a firing range. Though an even greater number of civilians once all this kicked off dropped everything they were doing and ran

towards the allies desperately begging for them to take them in as Lopez had been forced them to live in this tiny overcrowded disease ridden starvation camp that killed people literally every day. Again, Lopez's army was destroyed hardly without a fight,

and he ran away once again. I love stealing it. Yeah, it's the only thing he does consistently well. Though this time he had run away so quickly he had to leave behind all of his luxury goods, which... Oh, not his luxury goods.

He had been lugging this entire time, including his mistress's grand fucking piano nice you have no food or water or salt but god damn it you're dragging this piano through the woods you better believe it priorities baby the allies also captured a nearby arsenal i've been churning out cannons to the tune of three per week melting down whatever metal they could find that could not be used for other gun reasons the people working there were mostly slaves many of them foreigners that had come there originally to help paraguay build up its industrial bases advisors and then

when this war started like you're mine bitch you can't leave oh no the allies were shocked at the state of how they found these guys there's about like 70 to 100 of them while they were working there as the brazilian army log related quote the most pitiful spectacle women little children and old men whose only food was flour extracted from palm they looked like walking skeletons and had reached their last stage of weakness and anemia before death i don't even if you could get flour from palm, but alright. Sounds awful. I wouldn't want to live on it. Necessity being the mother of invention, I guess.

It sounds like you can't live on it, which is part of the problem, right? Lopez fled further inland. His forces marched for another three days without water, which I should point out that Lopez had food and water. He was never wanting for anything. His men had no food.

Like, he left it to Caballero to scrape together another fighting force, which ran into problems immediately as the allies began to chase him because he had to go into what was effectively the allied zone of control to find more people. And he had scraped together around 4,000

people for his army. Though, when he was caught by the Allies in the open attempting to get across a river, only about 1,000 of his soldiers escaped the battle, leaving 3,000 dead or wounded and all of their supplies behind. Christ almighty, dude.

Yeah, and it gets worse. I said the thing. Fine, fine. This battle is known as the Battle of Campo Grande, but it is also referred to as the Battle of the Children due to the fact that outside of a few officers, the entire Paraguayan military was made up of literally boys in their preteens. Jesus wept.

Lopez retreated again, taking with him a gaggle of child soldiers and starving civilians, all of whom were unable to escape the threat of death, making him Paraguayan Joseph Coney, I guess. Oh. It's not like escape was an option for these people. If they

went running off into the jungle, they would have died. If they ran away from the Paraguayan military, he would order them killed. And there's also not a small chance, uh, that if they ran into the allies, it would also kill them.

So they just went with Lopez where they rampant disease and starvation killed them. And you know, the allies marched quicker and starvation killed them and you know the allies marched quicker and quicker to chase them down they outran their supply lines causing them to also die everybody's bad here it sucks jesus fuck dude supplies were irregular and dried up all together and soldiers were forced to go foraging in the woods for food now these guys were not from these areas. They were not survivalists of any strength. They had no idea

what fruits or plants or whatever out there was poisonous. A lot of them died. Others were forced to eat a food called Karuru. I'm sure I pronounced that flawlessly. Nailed it. And it gave them explosive diarrhea, which

combined with dehydration also killed them. That sentence, yep. Now, their life sucked so badly that many assumed that they were going to die anyway, so they just started shooting themselves. Yeah, fair enough. And Gaston, the man who, remember, had begged for years to be in command of a military

to fight Lopez, begged and pleaded with Emperor Pedro just to end the fucking thing. And let them go home. Oh. That's what's up with your shitting out of your own mouth. Huh? It seemed the only people. Who wanted the war to continue.

Were Emperor Pedro. And President Lopez. And Lopez was starting to worry. That someone in his camp. Might just fucking shoot him. To bring the entire thing to an end, which, yeah, of course they would. And there does seem to have been a genuine, if half-hearted plot to kill him at one point, but he decided the best way to fix this was more mass executions. Yeah, I bet he did.

Yeah. My boy loves him. One colonel named Rosario finally managed to bring his exhausted unit of a few dozen kids back to Lopez's camp after outrunning the allies, only for Lopez to assume they took so long to show up because, you guessed it, he was a spy. Lopez rolled his eyes, handed over his sword, walked himself over to the firing squad, and waited his turn to die. Jesus. Lopez even arrested more of his own family and eventually killed them too in front of the ones he did not kill yet like remember this is all like a marching army so it's literally like a parade of insanity through the jungle and uh then more jaguars showed up yeah that happened again while still others died they also found a sweet jungle fruit that gave them dysentery so there you go there's

always something worth following terrific when they got to a river lopez swam across it while his men and the civilians attached him all weak and dying could barely pull themselves across on a boat like he swam across it as like, look how strong I am, men. Little fingers in the air, yeah. Finally, they made it to Cerro Cora where they made camp and this would be the last stand of the Paraguayan Napoleon. And by Napoleon, I mean Napoleon III, the bad one. The bad one, sure.

It didn't take long for the allies to find this position and send soldiers in. Lopez's army numbered only 400, so the 4,000 allied soldiers made pretty short work of them this time. There was little or no defense. It's hard to tell if they're even physically capable of it at that point. And Lopez, again, tried to do a runner. He was pretty quickly cornered and refused to surrender when allied cavalry were on him. He was stabbed by a man with a nickname that translates into english

as frank the devil which is fun i like that i like it but it's fun like sounds like like a mafia extra frank left lopez on the ground to die with a pretty gaping stab wound in his chest figuring he was done for but he was found again by a different group of allied soldiers and was still alive and again he refused to surrender and got shot this one finally killed him his last words supposedly were quotes i die with my country which yeah he did that he did you did kill your country good job you're not wrong yeah and uh there is reports like his uh mistress saved his body from being pretty maliciously uh mangled and uh yeah whatever i don't care mr walter raleigh's widow carried around his head in a bag for the rest of her days after he was beheaded neat

no one knows where oliver cromwell's head is except for two people i think because they're afraid people will desecrate it it's uh It's actually in the studio with me here, and I do desecrate it. Ah, yes, Oliver Cromwell. Pisshole. I believe in public gender-neutral bathrooms, which is why we should all piss at Oliver Cromwell. Now, by the end of the war,

Paraguay was destroyed, LA incomplete, and utter ruins. Casualty numbers are hard to come by and are all over the map. It's widely reported that 90% of the population of Paraguay died. There is no evidence of that, however. The number does not mean the number is that high. The most supported numbers are just as crazy. It is thought at least 70 percent of the entire population died and 90 percent or more of the

male population died as a direct result from the rest this is mostly disease and starvation of course right with the fewest number dying from direct combat now but that's disease and starvation was a direct result of military conflict. This means proportionally to its population, this is the most destructive war in human history. Right. Outside of some apocryphal notes from histories that we can't fully confirm of entire civilizations being wiped out. Right. Because Paraguay obviously still exists.

This is the most destructive war in human history that we know of and can prove. Entire civilizations being wiped out. Because Paraguay obviously still exists. This is the most destructive war in human history that we know of and can prove. And the remaining parts of the civilization were not assimilated into neighbors and etc, etc, etc. Now, death was so widespread that after the war, because they were occupied by Brazil for some time. There's a provisional government, etc. And people were trying to figure out a way to have paraguay rebuild um or discover a new normal whatever you want to call it and they found that even if they were trying to restart anything that resembled a food supply was effectively impossible there wasn't even enough children left to fill the labor gap. Jesus fuck. So many people were dead.

That child labor was not a viable option for relief. The destruction of the war was systemic and institutional. The state simply ceased to exist anymore. Not to mention the various bits amounting to a quarter of its entire land mass was taken by victors after the war. It would take generations for the country to do anything resembling rebuilding and it incurred so much debt that it could never pay it off. Brazil simply forgave it in 1943.

Brazil would occupy Paraguay for about a decade. The war would also cause, indirectly slash directly, the downfall of the Brazilian Empire and the imperial system, leading to the establishment of the First Republic, which thankfully remains a very normal country to this day where nothing bad ever happens. Moving on. Argentina collapsed into a pile of revolts for some time, but eventually did end with the government centralizing so that it didn't happen quite so often. Again, a country where nothing bad ever happens ever again. As for who is at fault here, everybody,

but to be more exact, Solano Lopez, without a doubt, the fault should rest solely on his shoulders. Everybody else simply gets an assist. So this is what the part where I get to tell you, of course, he's championed as a hero by Paraguay to this day.

After having his image rehabilitated by genocidal military dictator Alfredo Strassner who was an enthusiastic supporter of Operation Condor. Right. Yay! Don't you love a story with a happy ending? Fuck.

No. Yeah. Strassner's a fucking lunatic and quite honestly we might have to go back to Paraguay for a different series at some point. I had to cut off the ending of this episode and series because the more I read about Strassner, I was like, Oh, Oh God.

Oh Jesus. Jesus Christ, dude. He was, if Solano Lopez was malicious. Oh no. Yeah. And also,

would you guess a very close ally of the United States? Of course he was. Of course he fucking was. I'll do it again. Liam, that is the War of the Triple Alliance. One of the most

requested series that we've ever done. Honestly, one of my favorites in a long time. It's rare you find a story that you're like, this can't get any worse. This can't get possibly dumber. What it does is it gets worse. It always gets worse. I didn't even mean for that to become a bit, but it's fucking true.

So, we do a thing on the show called Questions from the Legion where you support the show, you ask us a question, we answer it on air. Today today's question is what do you guys do to relieve stress i was told i can't say masturbate of course everybody does that that's just that's a that's a normal thing yeah i can't imagine anybody who jerks off and gets more stressed out that'd be weird it would be weird although i'm sure some people are doing uh no, the big thing I do is go for walks. I journal sometimes.

But yeah, going for walks, getting out of the space where I'm stressed is very helpful to me. That's the big one. Yeah, I find myself having a really hard time to do that because all of my work is on my computer. I rarely tell like, Liam, you're aware of this. I know Nate's aware of this. I never take a day off. Whether it be writing or researching for the podcast, writing or editing a book,

whatever I'm doing. I'm in grad school. So I really have no time. And I do a lot of this to myself. Admittedly, I'm self-sabotaging here. This weekend, for the first time, and honestly, I can remember, I took the whole weekend off.

I've gotten into emulators, so I can play old, chill RPGs. I can start playing Wild Arms 3. It's delightful. And it really helps me do something completely unrelated to anything else that I have to do, and it is nice. And of course, I work out a lot, and I encourage other people to do that too.

Uh, but yeah, I just, I'm, I'm slowly learning, um, how to not kill myself via stress and overwork. So it's lovely.

Yeah. I'm, I'm trying to drink less shockingly. Yeah. That's every, the doing more that's never going to help. Um, anyway,

Liam, thank you for joining me for the last five weeks of war happy to um everybody thank you so much for listening I hope you like what we do here if you do consider throwing us a dollar or

more on patreon you get like discord access bonus episodes episodes early stickers discounts and stuff and if I mean if you don't cool to your money do whatever you want um but if if you don't want to

do that leave us a review those are free they help us algorithms and the like um yeah and until next time uh don't go in the shit swamp. Don't don't eat whatever that flower was. Yeah, don't don't eat dysentery.