The Road to Armageddon

The War of the Triple Alliance (1864–70) remains the largest interstate conflict in South American history. Its casualty rates and the number of people mobilized are impressive even by twentieth-century standards. The Road to Armageddon focuses on the destruction of the Paraguayan army, which led to the death of the country's dictator, Francisco Solano López, and much of its civilian population. The book is part of Thomas Whigham's career-long research on the war era. Extensive use of local newspapers and the diaries of combatants, politicians, and diplomats is the book's major contribution to the historiography. Yet excessive detail, which could not be fully developed even in the volume's 600-plus pages, too often compromises the text's fluidity and obscures overarching ideas.Whigham approaches this multifaceted subject with a detailed narrative centering on an important question: “How [Paraguayans] kept up the fight while their country was tumbling down around them” (p. 7). Experts will note new insights. But the study's conclusions are not substantially different from those reached by Luc Capdevila and Francisco Doratioto: Paraguayans circled the wagons when their territory was invaded because they feared for their fate at the invaders' hands, their resistance springing not from state coercion or innate barbarism but rather from established beliefs that reinforced their desperate struggle for nationhood against a powerful alliance.The War of the Triple Alliance occurred during the bloody 1860s, contemporaneously with the American and Mexican civil wars and the German and Italian wars of unification. It was a decade when warfare was rooted in romantic views of nationhood redolent of the 1848 revolutions. The author, however, makes only limited efforts to connect the Platine tragedy to events in North America and Europe, treated as complementary to his narrative rather than as parallel historical processes of warfare and nation building. Take his comparison of the Marquis of Caxias's conduct in late 1868 to Ulysses Grant's and George McClellan's during the American Civil War (p. 324). Despite similarities of “mood” and “initiative,” the Marquis of Caxias and the Union commanders faced different tactical options. Nor can López's resolution to keep fighting against all odds be attributed to the example of Emperor Maximilian in Mexico (p. 209). While Europeans may have admired Maximilian's resolve, in the Americas, as Erika Pani has shown, his debacle was seen as a successful defense of national sovereignty against foreign interventionism.Although not central to the book's argument, a number of errors appear with respect to Brazilian matters. For example, the name of a leading historian of the period is misspelled: it is Lilia, not Liliana, Moritz Schwarcz (p. 420). The Marquis of Caxias is characterized as a professional “in every sense,” despite the fact that he was scion to a military dynasty prominent in conservative politics, which led military engineers—Benjamin Constant was one—to describe his methods as unprofessional (p. 149). Whigham argues that the war stimulated the most modern sectors of Brazil's economy, especially the construction of rail and port facilities, although this notion was contested by contemporaries, including José Fernandez Pereira Júnior, and by such historians as Divalte Garcia Figueira (p. 422). More serious errors are analyses of Brazil's war efforts that disregard the complications attending the transfer of national guard soldiers to the professional army, a task executed with success in earlier conflicts but dramatically contested in much of the country in 1866–68. In addition, important issues of Argentine politics are covered too quickly for general readers. We are told that Argentine Federalists were able to check President Bartolomé Mitre's leadership, but their reasons for obstructing the war effort remain obscure. Whigham's vision of caudillismo is still too close to the traditional stereotype created by Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, paying little attention to caudillismo's role in state-building processes in the River Plate basin and the rich Argentinean historiography produced in the last two decades by Noemí Goldman and Ricardo Salvatore, among other historians, who depict these local leaders as bearing alternative proposals for statehood.Grand narratives such as James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom (1988), on the American Civil War, contribute to spreading knowledge of historical processes and discussions of war and mobilization to larger audiences. Unfortunately, this volume falls short in this regard. Whigham revisits events leading to the war's initial stages, a question he addressed in a previous 2002 account conceived as the first volume of an unfinished series. Treatments published in Paraguay in 2011 and 2013 seem to be fused together in this volume, but not in a reader-friendly manner. The author's inclusion of seemingly every military detail and discussions of the internal politics of each country are often tedious. Specialists will find the material to be familiar. That said, readers new to the subject will no doubt be impressed by the human tragedy of Paraguay's “Armageddon,” and for that they can be grateful

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