With a prosperity thus frugally marked, it is easy to conceive the circumstances of the adversity that was to come. To their credit be it said that the Uruguayans faltered not in the least in the face of the ultimate doom that must have appeared inevitable. As their ranks became steadily thinned, the invading hordes of Portuguese soldiers swelled in numbers, while the Buenos Aires attacks on the river provinces became yet more determined. Yet, wanting in everything, its more capable and intelligent officers prisoners of war, the Uruguayans fought on to the very end--gaunt, haggard men who gave back blow for blow, though their courage was often sustained by no other means than the chewing of strips of hide. One of the officers of a regiment of lancers, once the pride of the army, describes the condition of the men in the last days of the struggle. At reveille, on a chilly winter's morning, each trooper would supplement the loin-cloth that alone remained to him by a whole cowhide. Thus when their backs were turned as they retired to their quarters, the number of men could only be judged by the quantity of moving cowhides!
Even then the final hour might have been indefinitely postponed but for the revolt of Ramirez, one of Artigas's own chieftains. After a homeric struggle, Ramirez obtained the victory over his old leader, and pursued him relentlessly through the provinces of Corrientes and Misiones. It was by this incessant chase alone that the victor retained his superiority. For such was the popularity of Artigas that a few days' halt sufficed for a number of fresh Gauchos and Indians to join him. When he had escaped from his penultimate defeat, accompanied by only twelve men, his pursuer lost touch with him for a week. At the end of that time the veteran had collected over nine hundred men, and was besieging Cambay, one of Ramirez's strongholds. A division was sent off post-haste to the spot, and it was here that the old warrior fought his last fight. Artigas, leaving most of his men dead upon the field, fled northwards and passed into Paraguay.
The later years of Artigas present the strangest contrast to his early life. Received and sheltered after some hesitation by Francia, the dreaded tyrant of Paraguay, he was first allotted a dwelling in the north of the country, and was afterwards permitted to dwell in the neighbourhood of Asuncion, the capital. Here he lived in complete retirement and peace until his death occurred, at the advanced age of eighty-three. Both his time and the small pension allowed him by the Paraguayan Government were spent in relieving the wants of his neighbours, by whom he was regarded with affection and veneration. The keynote to the true Artigas undoubtedly lies in these last years, when in humble tranquillity he had leisure at length to practise the benevolence and charity that he had so often preached from a corpse-surrounded pulpit. Difficult as it is to withdraw the personality of Artigas from the sea of blood that flooded his age, he was surely a product of an anarchical period rather than of anarchy itself.