The Great Paraguayan War of 1864–70 was the bloodiest conflict ever waged in South America, comparable in scale to the American Civil War. Indeed, in some ways it was worse: well over half the population of Paraguay was killed in battle or died of disease and starvation, and prisoners were regularly tortured or massacred. Great battles were fought with weapons ranging from flintlock muskets to modern breech-loading rifles that reinforced the lessons of the slaughter early on in the war—on September 22, 1866, for example, nine thousand Allied troops were killed or wounded in an assault on a much smaller Paraguayan force dug in at Curupayty. The last stages of the fighting saw the Paraguayans engage in a desperate guerrilla struggle reminiscent of the South African War of 1899–1901. What we see, then, is a conflict that might have been expected to figure highly in studies of nineteenth-century warfare, and...

You do not currently have access to this content.