«Under siege?», the captain shouted, and his voice seemed to make the whole city tremble. «Yes, the absolutist troops have surrounded us». «So that was their plan!»
For months, we remained under siege. The absolutists, certain that our men would eventually surrender, didn’t make our lives any harder than they had to by military obligation. Sometimes, it was them who, in the backs of their officers and for small bribes, brought us the supplies necessary to our survival. They saw us as rebellious but not necessarily dangerous children whose mischief they tolerated and even condescended with.
However, time would prove them wrong to think that our will would be easily broken. Nor guns, nor hunger nor the lack of conditions could sway those whose cause was the only just one. We had come to win or die, but never to surrender at the hands of the absolutists. Realizing that, our enemies grew impatient, and against those they had thought harmless, they now used measures so harsh as if our army was the hardest to defeat in History.
Our communication with the rest of the country became increasingly harder and the miguelites did not hesitate to have their own soldiers executed if they were suspected of any kind of relation with us. Some of our men, deprived of food and water, fell dead. But those were actually the lucky ones, for there were others who lost their minds. Some, in desperation, tried to sneak out of the siege. Most ended in a pool of blood in the middle of the city. Some, however, did make it.
Sometimes, almost a week went by without more than two small chunks of bread to eat or a sip of water to drink. To me, it was thirst that made me suffer the most and there were days when I was even delusional. I thought I saw my Mother who came to take me and I would smile at her, but Diogo, although also weak from deprivation, was stronger spirited and kept me from following her. «It’s not your Mother that you’re seeing», he’d say as he shook me as if to awaken me. «Your time has not come yet. You have to react!»
And I did react as if instinctively; as if it was the voice of an older brother whom I dared not disobey.
Our army seemed to have been transformed into a ghost army. Only the stronger ones survived and even those were but a shadow of what they had been when we arrived.
In the end of July 1833, rumours started according to which the Count of Vila Flor, now Duke of Terceira, was preparing to invade Lisbon and take the capital from the enemy forces. Since they needed to reinforce their defences around that city, the absolutists were forced to loosen the siege and the escapes from our side became more successful. Diogo and I eagerly waited to be sent on one of those escapes, not so much to get away from the deprivation of the siege which was starting to lift up anyway, but because there were now new places of action and it was there that we wanted to be, helping our men to conquer victory.
Once again, it was the Duke of Terceira that led us to actively participate in the struggle against the oppressive power of the miguelites.
From all corners of the country, entire unites were answering the Duke’s call to join him and help him snatch the capital from the enemy’s grasp.
When Diogo and I left Oporto, with some hundred and fifty other men, the siege had not yet been officially lifted, and although the enemy forces could no longer control all our movements, it wasn’t without some difficulty that we got out of the city.
But the greatest hardships would come during the march to Lisbon. Not only we had to deal several times with small groups of absolutists – militaries and civilians – but we also witnessed the desolation that the war was causing throughout the country. Harvests destroyed out of hatred and revenge, families apart, houses looted and devastated, simple men, women and children abused or even murdered... All that we saw as we passed.
I remember a small village and a little house where we found a woman with her child of maybe seven or eight years old, crying over of the dead body of their husband and father, respectively. I forgot where exactly that took place, but I could never erase from my memory the grief on their faces. At times like that, I just wished we had arrived a little sooner to stop such tragedies from happening. I wanted to comfort them, but I was now experienced enough to know that the words of a stranger – even a stranger fighting for the cause that would bring justice to that kind of cruelty – was of little comfort to those who had just lost the people they loved the most.
When they saw the destroyed village, the doors broken down, the dead bodies scattered in the streets, the men who formed the small army of which Diogo and I were a part looked around in horror. From what we heard from the people, a group of absolutist civilians had massacred the village because they were convinced the inhabitants were hiding liberal prisoners. It wasn’t the first time we came across that kind of scene but there are things to which the human sight never gets used to. That’s when, in the middle of the sickly silence that had took over that village, we heard the desperate crying of the woman and the little boy, weeping for his dead father. The windows in the house had been shattered and the door broken down, and so we could see them. I noticed then two tears rolling down my friend’s face. «Are you ok?», I asked. «Thirteen years ago, I was that little scared boy...»
For a moment, the whole army stood silent and motionless. It was impossible not to feel that we should help the people bury the victims, take care of their wounded, protect those who had lost a roof over their heads, but we knew it would be impossible to assist them all and that it would be more useful for us to be on our way and destroy the absolutist power before it made more victims.
When on July 24 of that same year, the Duke of Terceira was marching on Lisbon, we were already among his troops and it was under his command that Diogo and I lived the rest of the war.
During the time we were in campaign, Diogo and I made new friends and lost new and old friends, we fought under rain and intense heat, we knew great victories and bitter defeats, we witnessed the destruction and the horrors of war. Most times, there was nothing we could do, but whenever circumstances allowed for it, we tried to bring a word of comfort to the victims, or at least, helping them bury their dead.
Under the Duke’s command, we beat the absolutists in several points of the country, while in other locations, other great military leaders, such as the Duke of Saldanha, were doing the same.
But the war was starting to cause in me a profound transformations and it was ever harder to control the nausea that assaulted me whenever I was forced to see human blood being shed, especially if it was the blood of innocents. Countless civilians from both sides had already lost their lives and those for whose rights I was fighting ended up suffering the most.
I started feeling that perhaps that whole war was useless and that maybe the people for whom I was standing up would be better off if the war had never began.
Sometimes, in the battlefield, all I wanted was to run away and scream with all my might to free my chest from the strange oppression that had taken over it.
Once, Diogo said to me that I should learn how to cry but at that time, my pride stopped me from showing any signs of weakness, even when I was alone.
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