"Villeta Variations", a story by Robert Wexelblatt

            Le patient à qui l’on pose trop de diagnostics est aussi mal informé que celui
             qui n’en a reçu aucun.
                                                            Aldéric Floquet

1. Stipulations
            All the historians acknowledge General Juan Pablo Galeano’s victory at the Battle of Villeta as a brilliant upset.  All agree that his single division was not at full strength and that he had at his disposal half the number of field guns of his opponent who also fielded three divisions of infantry.  There is no dispute either about the tactics by which the general achieved his victory.  His plan was to concentrate his forces not against the enemy’s strong center, as one would expect, but against his adversary’s left wing.  He ordered the attack be made from the flank rather than by direct assault.  He formed his infantry on a narrow front, in ranks of only ten men, and plowed into the surprised enemy.  The first rank fired then quickly gave way to the next.  The pressure of this continuous fire drove the enemy’s left toward the center, sowing confusion and disrupting communications.  The enemy’s officers argued over who was in command; contradictory orders were issued, and panic began to spread.  At the pivotal moment, Galeano ordered his cavalry to charge.  These were tough, skilled horsemen, cattle herders from the south, along with a sprinkling of youthful, glory-seeking aristocrats.  The charge also came from the flank rather than head-on, further pushing the enemy troops into one another so that they could not fire their muskets.  Galeano then ordered in his small reserve of marksmen. As they picked off officers and troops on the right flank, the enemy scattered.
            On all this, the historians concur.  They also agree on the disaster that followed two days later when the enemy, having regrouped to the north, attacked in force at dawn, decimating Galeano’s troops and killing the general himself.  The sharpshooters who had received orders to seek out the general aimed carefully.  He was struck by four balls while his horse remained uninjured.  All the historians acknowledge that this catastrophe determined the fate of our nation for a century.

2. Puzzle
            Juan Pablo Galeano earned his reputation for audacity in the campaign that culminated at Villeta.  He excelled at training raw volunteers and was known to be a strict disciplinarian.  He took a keen interest in the sciences which were making great strides in his time, including military science.  At the age of eleven, Galeano followed his father into exile in Spain, to Cueta, where he enrolled in the Royal Military Academy whose curriculum was modeled on that of the esteemed Academy in Barcelona.  Galeano and his father returned at the summons of the Committee that ran the rebellion.  Galeano was given command of a small force and quickly demonstrated his ability.  A few months later, owing to his successes, he was given overall command of the rebel forces.  These consisted chiefly of volunteers, tough men from the provinces, with only a handful of veterans, all deserters. The best that could be said of his men was that they were brave, bordering on reckless.  Galeano made all the veterans non-commissioned officers and tasked them with carrying out a rigorous training program.  He wasted no time imposing discipline, issuing rules and requiring close drills.  He especially stressed practice in handling weapons.  He shortened by almost half the time it took his men to load their muskets.  Galeano was known to take great care in disposing his forces.  He always kept some in reserve and preserved his mounted troops by using them sparingly, but, as at Villeta, decisively.
            Given all this, it is no wonder that historians have been perplexed by the pair of obvious blunders made by Galeano after his spectacular victory.  First, he neglected to pursue the enemy when they were most vulnerable, withdrawing in disarray.  This failure was compounded by not advancing to take the high ground, Cerro Tacuapo, the small mountain which would have provided an ideal defensive position in the otherwise flat terrain around Villeta.  Galeano’s first error made a counterattack likely; the second led to its success.
            Why did Galeano simply stay put?  Morale was at a peak.  His men were tired but more exhilarated than exhausted.  The high ground was only two kilometers away and his reserves, having seen little action during the battle, could have been detailed to establish positions on Tacuapo.  Galeano even had some experienced engineers at his disposal who could have overseen the digging of trenches and the construction of revetments.
            The consequence of Galeano’s reversal at Villeta was a hundred years of backwardness, a century when the country was so stuck in the status-quo as to be almost without history.  Perhaps it is to make up for this hiatus that generations of historians have lavished so much time, research, imagination, and invention on solving the puzzle of Juan Pablo Galeano’s inertia at Villeta.
           
3. Answers
            Decades ago, when he was in his early twenties, Carlos Figueroa, now emeritus professor of history at our foremost university, proposed an explanation in his first published article.  It appeared in the Journal d’Histoire de l'Amérique du Sud.  The French editors might have been intrigued or amused by Figueroa’s manuscript, and perhaps that is why they were not particular in requiring solid evidence.  According to the young Figueroa, General Galeano neglected to secure his victory because he was engaged in an “amour fou” with a woman he had met only days earlier.  Figueroa says she had accompanied her teenaged brother who was determined to volunteer his service in Galeano’s army.  Figueroa offers three candidates for the brother but none for the sister.  However, he quotes a ninety-year-old woman who claimed to have known the child of the daughter born to the general’s inamorata nine months after the Battle of Villeta.  Figueroa dismisses the absence of any record of the birth with the observation that one would hardly expect an unwed mother to want one.  He has a good deal to say about the beauty of the young woman and the passion of the general.  In these speculations his prose tends toward the purple, as if he were engaging in a fantasy of his own.  Professor Figueroa has never consented to an interview about this article, but neither has he renounced iy. In any case, his theory did not convince many of his colleagues, especially those with theories of their own.
            The Canadian military historian, Hugh Brower-Deshailles, finds two causes for Galeano’s dereliction, neither of which was a romantic dalliance.  He ascribes the blunders rather to overconfidence and misplaced piety.  In Strategy: A Study in Generalship, he devotes a lengthy chapter to overconfidence among commanding officers judging it the most common error and the one with the direst consequences.  He adduces famous examples to illustrate this point from Marcus Licinius Crassus and Franz Sigel to George Armstrong Custer.  He singles out Galeano’s case as unusual, though.  Overconfidence usually leads to reckless action, while Galeano’s resulted in imprudent inaction.  According to Brower-Deshailles, the general overestimated the conclusiveness of his stunning victory.  Galeano, he explains, had just witnessed the rout, the enemy’s panic, the dispersal of his forces, and concluded that he had not only won the battle but the war.  Therefore, he would have seen no need to do anything further than to rest his men then march them to the capital.  This misjudgment, Brower-Deshailles speculates, would have been reinforced by Galeano’s devout Catholic faith.  Like Constantine at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge—albeit without any crosses in the heavens—the general would have seen his miraculous victory as proof that God was on his side.  Brower-Deshailles cites a report ascribed to an adjutant that, as his cavalry plunged into the enemy’s center, Galeano mumbled the opening of Psalm 68: Let God arise, let his enemies be scattered; let those also who hate him flee before him.  While admitting the account may be apocryphal, the historian nevertheless concludes that, to General Galeano, a counterattack was impossible and defensive measures not just superfluous but sacrilegious.
            Dr. Francesca Squilibra, an Italian psychiatrist, studied for a time with Erik Erikson and was an admirer of his Young Man Luther.  Erikson’s method of analyzing a historical figure depends, like any biographer’s, on the careful gathering of textual evidence such as personal correspondence, legal documents, the memoirs of friends and family.  This information is strained, so to speak, through the mesh of psychoanalytical principles.  Freud himself initiated the practice in his studies of Moses, Dostoyevsky, and Leonardo.  In an article titled “Il Cane Nero del Generale Galeano,” published in Rivista di Psicologia di Bologna, Dr. Squilibra cites the letters of contemporaries who knew General Galeano, a newspaper interview given by his older sister Ines when she was very old indeed, and the memoir of Ramón Augustin Ramirez, one of his officers, who later served on the Supreme Court of Justice until he was removed for accepting bribes.  Dr. Squilibra notes that all these sources mention Galeano’s references to his perro negro.  While his elderly sister thought Galeano was referring to the Majorca shepherd the family owned when they were in Spain, the others say it was what the general called his spells of depression.  Dr. Squilibra notes that “black dog” is what both Samuel Johnson and Winston Churchill called their bouts of melancholia.  The word melancholia, she points out a little pedantically, is Greek for black bile which, owing to the authority of Hippocrates, was long considered the cause of depression.  Dr. Squilibra quotes ex-Justice Ramirez’s description of his commander in the two days prior to the battle: “The general was in a state of heightened excitement and extraordinary energy.”  Ramirez adds that during this period “the general did not sleep, but after our victory he became subdued, almost morose, and he slept for hours.”  Summing up this evidence, Dr. Squilibra confidently diagnoses bipolar disorder, also known as manic depression.  In her professional opinion, Juan Pablo Galeano was in a manic phase just before and throughout the Battle of Villeta but then, victory won, he crashed, falling into a depressive phase.  As he was in this negative state, his perro negro, it is not surprising that he failed to give the orders that would have secured his victory.
            The simplest answer to the puzzle was advanced about a dozen years ago by Héctor Zamudio.  At the time, Zamudio was known as the enfant terrible of our historiography.  The sobriquet conveyed both his appeal to the next generation and the resentment he evoked in the last one.  Zamudio delivered his opinion on Galeano as an obiter dictum in an interview aimed at promoting his iconoclastic Historia Occamica.  The theme of that book is that history is usually straightforward, and it is owing to the self-interest of academic historians that it is made to appear complex.  “I’ll give you an illustration,” he told the interviewer.  “Academics have been gushing for generations about General Galeano’s failure to follow up his victory at Villeta.  All sorts of theories have been put forward by scholars less concerned with Galeano’s motives than with their careers—putting another entry on their résumés, publishing to keep from perishing, straining to show their cleverness.  But really, it’s a simple matter.  After the enemy fled, the general joined his volunteers in celebrating with barrels of pisco and aguardiente.  Everybody was too exultant and too drunk to pursue the enemy after the battle and too hung over the next day to hike up a mountain and construct defenses.  See?  Quite a straightforward matter.  Full stop.”
            A similarly simple answer was provided, though at greater length, by the thoracic surgeon and amateur historian, Aldo Fuentes, in an article on Galeano published five years ago in Revista de Medicina Latina.  Fuentes points out that the general is known to have suffered from hemorrhoids and cites the records of Galeano’s personal physician.  “Now,” he writes, “the general had been in the saddle not only throughout the battle but also for the week leading up to it.  The agony he would have suffered in his rectal area, probably compounded by saddle sores, satisfactorily accounts for his inactivity after the engagement.”  According to Dr. Fuentes, “pursuing the fleeing enemy forces and supervising the construction of fortifications on the heights of Tacuapo would have compelled him to remount on his horse, which he would surely have found unbearable.”
            Of the many explanations of General Galeano’s inaction at Villeta, the earliest and most bizarre is that of Estefan De Escobar, one of our Enlightenment figures and a patriot.  While not exiled by the government, he spent a year studying in Königsberg where he met Kant and wrote about Galeano.  While primarily a physicist, De Escobar’s intellectual scope was broad.  He admired Galeano for being a hero but also for having many interests like himself.  Galeano was especially fascinated by the science of chemistry.  This avocation dated from childhood when it was encouraged by his father, like De Escobar one of our early adopters of the Enlightenment ideals.  Galeano Senior focused more on politics than science, and it was his espousal of liberal ideas that resulted in his exile.  While he was abroad, De Escobar investigated and thought about the general’s behavior at Villeta.  His research suggested that, on the very day of the battle, the general received among his dispatches the latest issue of Mémoires de l’Academie Royale des Sciences, a journal to which he subscribed and of which he was a faithful reader. This happened to be the issue of 1784 that included the full text of Lavoisier’s revolutionary “Reflections on Phlogiston.”  According to De Escobar, the general was flabbergasted as, like everyone else interested in the sciences, he considered phlogiston the fundamental explanation of combustion.  So shaken was the general by Lavoisier, De Escobar asserts, so preoccupied by the profound implications of what he read, that military considerations were driven from his mind.  The evidence he presented for this peculiar hypothesis is thin to the point of transparency; De Escobar nonetheless argues that his deduction is so logical that it could be rendered in a syllogism. In fact, he concluded his article with it:
                        General Galeano was a devoted advocate of phlogiston.
                        Antoine Lavoisier decisively exploded this dogma.
                        Therefore, upon reading Lavoisier, General Galeano was stunned into inaction.   

4. Conclusion
            Aldéric Floquet was not wrong yet not entirely right in saying that too many diagnoses are as good as none.  After all, one of them may be correct.