Due to the head of the northern army, Justo Arteaga not accepting advice from anyone except his sons, Vergara spent his time studying the area and deducing a plan of operations.

Vergara was secretary to Minister Rafael Sotomayor and after the landing he offered to lead a force of explorers that had to reconnoitre the surroundings of the only railway line that ran from Pisagua to Agua Santa.

The reconnaissance found food stores, fodder, wells and water pumps and locomotives in operation that allowed the disembarked army to survive the time necessary to establish the supply by its own means.

[6] On November 19, 1879, the Battle of San Francisco took place, in which Vergara imposed his strategic criteria on that of Colonel Emilio Sotomayor Baeza, brother of the Minister.

For that matter, Gonzalo Bulnes quote from a personal page Vergara: 8 Everything advised me to return and to terminate my military career and to make it in order I took cover with the Ordinance asking for permission to leave the service, which was not difficult for me to get.

Seven months later he returned taciturn and disconsolate as the vanquished of destiny, thinking about the insufficiency of human abilities that are not enough most times to help the vehement desire to do something useful, even if a tenacious will and a work carried out to achieve it is put.

Thus I came to my country and my home in December 1879, considering my conceptions of patriotism and the moral sense of men as failed, and for always ending my public life that had begun so disastrously for my soul.

[7]Vergara Echevers left immediately but stayed for a short time in Viña del Mar however, since according to what he tells his son Salvador, who was in Geneva, on January 26, 1880, that he is returning to the frontlines.

The offensive should have been taken a long time ago, but nothing is done, due to a lack of aptitude in the bosses and the inactivity that characterizes Minister Sotomayor, who still remains in his post.

[8][9]After the sudden death of Rafael Sotomayor Baeza during the Tacna and Arica campaign, José Francisco Vergara assumed the position of Minister of War and Navy on July 15, 1880, unleashing a wave of indignation in the Army.

Manuel Baquedano wrote to President Pinto: The appointment of Don José F. Vergara as Minister of War has caused the effect of a bomb explosion on the Army and has profoundly disturbed the tranquility that we were enjoying.

Diego Barros Arana describes him as: It places him in the rank of the most illustrious sons of this Chilean homeland, to whose glory and whose prosperity he consecrated all the intelligence of a privileged head and all the integrity and all the activity of a great character.

His breadth of mind was simply astonishing, his aptitudes ranging from the clever businessman to the strategist, from the mathematician to the writer of powerful literary temperament, from the finest sensitivity to the most impetuous push of the will.