us instances of cannibalism among these starving people, and our
traveler was shown a woman in Asuncion who had eaten a portion of her
sister to allay the pangs of hunger.

The effect on the allies of this frightful course was to compel them to
pay a fabulous price for provisions and for their transportation to the
army. Another effect was that at times, in the heat of the pursuit of
Lopez's forces, after an engagement the bodies of the soldiers who had
been killed in the battle were left to rot where they fell, as there
were no civilians to bury them. On one occasion, after a heavy skirmish,
two or three hundred slain Argentines remained unburied, the army having
marched forward in pursuit of the retreating Paraguayans. The horrors of
this campaign were relieved by one prosaic fact, which in itself bridges
the chasm between the terrible and the ridiculous: this was, that the
allied troops were accompanied amid all these scenes of carnage by a
poor Italian organ-grinder, carrying his organ on his back, who played
during the halts in the march while the Brazilian soldiers danced to his
music.

When the war ended with the death of Lopez at Cerro Cora, women, even of
the richest and most influential families, returned to their homes
nearly naked: the large majority made their reappearance in a still more
forlorn plight. The population of the republic, which had numbered about
one million three hundred thousand at the beginning of the conflict, had
dwindled to two hundred thousand or two hundred and fifty thousand.
These were mainly women and children, for the men were nearly all dead,
and of the few male adults in the population the majority have
immigrated to the country since the war. The national army, which under
Lopez was sixty thousand strong, comprised at the time of M. Forgues's
visit two hundred and fifty youths of fifteen or sixteen years of age,
clad in the cast-off uniform of the French mobiles of 1870 and 1871. Of
the Paraguayan children made orphans by the war, hundreds now live in
Argentine families, either as adopted children or as servants. They were
picked up by the Argentine soldiers during the flight of their parents
to the mountains, their mothers having perished of fatigue or hunger,
and Lopez's horsemen having spared them through pity or indifference to
continued slaughter.

The sequel of the resistance of Lopez surpasses in gloomy details almost
any similar struggle recorded in history. It has alr