The Sun Over Breda

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  “Close ranks!…Close ranks!”

  There had been sun in the sky for two hours, and the tercio had been fighting since dawn. The forward lines of Spanish harquebusiers had held their ground, inflicting considerable damage to the Dutch until, harassed by musket balls and pikes and skirmishes with cavalry, they disengaged, never turning their backs to the enemy as they moved back to join the tercio, where, along with the pikemen, they formed an impenetrable wall. With each charge, each round of fire, the empty spaces left by fallen men were filled by those still standing, and each time the Hollanders attempted to approach, they encountered a barrier of pikes and muskets that had already driven them back twice.

  “And here they come again!”

  You would have said that the devil was vomiting heretics, for this was the third time they had charged us. Their lances were close upon us again, the pike tips gleaming through the thick smoke. Our officers were hoarse from shouting orders; Captain Bragado had lost his hat in the fracas, and his face was black with gunpowder, but the Dutch blood on his blade ran red and had never had time to dry.

  “Pikes at the ready!”

  In the forward lines of the squad, less than a foot apart and well protected in their breastplates and helmets of copper and steel, the coseletes took up their long pikes. After rocking the pike in his left hand, the coselete would grasp it with his right and bring it to a horizontal position, ready to trade thrusts with the enemy. Meanwhile, our harquebusiers along the flanks were making serious inroads among the Dutch. I found myself in the midst of them, keeping close to my master’s squad and trying not to get in the way of the men who were loading and shooting. I ran back and forth, bringing this person a supply of powder, that one lead balls, handing another the flask of water I had tied to my bandolier. All the smoke from the muskets hampered both my vision and my sense of smell, filling my eyes with tears. Most of the time I had to fight my way almost blindly among the men who were shouting for me.

  I had just delivered a handful of balls to Captain Alatriste, who was running short. I watched as he dropped several into the pouch he wore hanging over his right thigh, put two in his mouth and another into the muzzle of the harquebus, rammed it home, and then poured loose powder into the pan. He then blew on the cord rolled around his left wrist, placed it in the hammer of the lock, and raised the weapon to his cheek to aim at the nearest Hollander. He performed all those actions almost unconsciously, never taking his eyes from his target, and when the shot sped away I saw a hole open in the iron breastplate of a pikeman wearing an enormous helmet, and the heretic fall backward, disappearing among his comrades.

  To our right, pikes clashed with the pikes of heretic coseletes who had joined the attack on us. Diego Alatriste leaned over the hot barrel of his harquebus, spat a ball into the muzzle, coolly repeated his routine, and fired. Traces of his own burned powder covered his face and mustache with gray, making him seem older. His eyes, reddened and encircled with powder residue that accentuated his wrinkles, focused with obstinate concentration on the advance of the Dutch lines, and when he picked out a new target to aim at, he watched his mark as if he feared he would fade from sight, as if killing him and no other were a personal matter. I had the impression that he chose his prey with great care.

  “They are here!” shouted Captain Bragado. “Hold!…Hold fast!”

  To do that, to hold, God and the king had given Bragado two hands, a sword, and a hundred Spaniards, and it was time to use them to the fullest, because Dutch pikes were coming toward us with lethal intent. Through the roar of shots I heard Mendieta curse with that fervor we Basques are capable of, because the lock of his harquebus had been sheared off. At that moment a lead sparrow flew past my ear, whirrr…pock, and a soldier close behind me went down. On our right the landscape was a forest of entangled Spanish and Dutch pikes, and, with an undulation of steel, part of that line, too, was swinging around to engage us. I saw Mendieta whip his harquebus over and grab it by the barrel to use it as a club. Everyone hastily discharged his last ball.

  “Spain!…Santiago!…Spain!”

  At our backs, behind the pikes, rippled the shot-shredded crosses of St. Andrew. The Hollanders were right upon us, an avalanche of frightened or terrible eyes and blood-covered faces. Large, blond, courageous heretics were attempting to bury their pikes and halberds in us or run us through with their swords. I watched as Alatriste and Copons, shoulder to shoulder, dropped their harquebuses to the ground and unsheathed their Toledo blades, planting their feet firmly. I also watched as Dutch pikes penetrated our lines, and saw their lances wound and mutilate, twisting in bloody flesh. Diego Alatriste was slashing with sword and dagger among the long ash pikes. I grabbed one as it went by me and a Spaniard beside me plunged his sword into the neck of the Hollander holding the far end; his blood streamed down the shaft onto my hands. Now Spanish pikes were coming to our aid, approaching from behind us to attack the Dutch over our backs and through the spaces left by the dead. Everything was a labyrinth of lances and a crescendo of carnage.

  I fought my way toward Alatriste, pushing through our comrades. When a Hollander cut his way through our men with his sword and fell at the captain’s feet, locking his arm around his legs with the intention of pulling him down as well, I gave a loud shout, pulled out my dagger, and sprang toward him, determined to defend my master, even if I was cut to pieces in the process. Blinded by my madness, I fell upon the heretic, flattened my hand over his face, and pressed his head to the ground. Alatriste kicked and pulled to be free of him and twice plunged his sword into the man’s body from above. The Hollander rolled over but was not yet willing to give up the ghost. He was a hearty man, but he was bleeding from his mouth and nose like a Jarama bull at the end of a corrida. I can remember the sticky feel of his blood—red and streaked with gunpowder—and the dirt and blond stubble on his white, freckled face. He fought me, unresigned to dying, whoreson that he was, and I fought him back. Still holding him down with my left hand, I tightened my grip on the dagger in my right and stabbed him three times in the ribs, but I was so close to his chest that all three attempts slid across the leather buffcoat protecting his torso. He felt the blows, for I saw his eyes open wide, and at last he released my master’s legs in order to protect his face, as if he were afraid I would wound him there. He moaned. I was blinded by fear and fury, deranged by this mongrel, who so obstinately refused to die. I stuck the tip of the dagger between the fastenings of his buffcoat. “Neee…srinden…Nee,” the heretic murmured, and I pressed down with all the weight of my body. In less than an Ave Maria he spat up one last vomit of blood, his eyes rolled back in his head, and he lay as still as if he had never had life.

  “Spain!…They’re pulling back!…Spaaaain!”

  The battered rows of Dutch were withdrawing, treading heedlessly on the corpses of their comrades and leaving the grass seasoned with dead. A few inexperienced Spaniards made as if to pursue them, but the greater number of soldiers stayed where they were. As the men of the Cartagena tercio were nearly all old veterans, they were too practiced in war to break from their lines and risk a flank attack or an ambush. I felt Alatriste’s hand grab the neck of my jerkin and turn me around to see whether I was hurt. When I looked up I saw only those gray-green eyes. Then, without a further word or gesture, he yanked me right off my dead Dutchman, who was now nothing but cold meat. The arm that held his sword seemed to be almost too exhausted even to sheathe the blade he had wiped clean on the buffcoat of the dead man. He had blood on his face, on his hands, and on his clothing, but none of it was his. I looked around. Sebastián Copons, who was searching for his harquebus among a pile of Spanish and Dutch corpses, was covered with his own, bleeding from a gaping wound on his temple.

  “Zounds!” the Aragonese blurted, dazed, feeling the two-inch flap of scalp hanging loose over his left ear.

  He held the severed skin between a thumb and index finger blackened with blood and powder, not knowing quite what to do with it. Alatriste took a
clean linen from his pouch and, after laying the skin back in place as best he could, knotted the cloth around Copons’s head.

  “Those blond toads almost got me, Diego.”

  “That will be another day.”

  Copons shrugged his shoulders. “Another day.”

  I stumbled to my feet; the soldiers were falling back into line, moving aside the fallen Dutch. Some seized the opportunity to search the corpses, divesting them of any valuables they found. I saw Garrote rather routinely using his vizcaína to cut off fingers, stuffing the rings they’d held into his pockets, and Mendieta was able to provide himself with a new harquebus.

  “Close ranks!” bellowed Captain Bragado.

  A hundred paces away, the Dutch reserves were forming up, and among them shone the breastplates of their cavalry. The Spanish soldiers temporarily put aside stripping bodies and again lined up elbow to elbow as the wounded crawled away, escaping the field however they could. We had to pull away our own dead to make room for the formation. The tercio had not yielded an inch of terrain.

  That was our amusement for the morning, and we lasted till midday, taking the Hollanders’ charges without giving way, calling out “Santiago!” and “Spain!” as they came toward us. We removed our dead and bandaged our wounded where they had fallen, until the heretics, convinced that this wall of dispassionate men did not intend to budge one inch, began to attack with less enthusiasm. My supplies of powder and musket balls had run dry, and I had turned to requisitioning them from corpses. At times, between attacks when the Dutch were farthest away, I would run a good distance out onto open ground and strip what I needed from their fallen harquebusiers, and more than once I had to come running back like a hare with their musket balls whirring past my ears. I had also used up the water I had brought for my master and his comrades—war raises a devilish thirst—and I made trip after trip to the canal at our backs. That was not a pleasant excursion because I had to pick my way among the wounded and dead we had dragged there, a blood-chilling panorama of appalling mutilations, bleeding stumps, laments in all the tongues of Spain, death rattles, prayers, blasphemies, and Salanueva’s limping Latin as he went back and forth among the soldiers, his hand weary from administering extreme unctions, which, once the oils were exhausted, he gave using only saliva. These fools who prate of the glory of war and majesty of battle should remember the words of the Marqués de Pescara: “May God grant me one hundred years of war and not one day of battle.” They should walk where I walked that morning if they are truly to know the scene: the spectacular stage machinery of banners and bugles, the tall tales invented by the braggarts of the rear guard, the ones whose profiles adorn coins and who are immortalized in statues though they have never heard a shot whistling past their ears, or seen their comrades die, or stained their hands with the blood of an enemy, or run the risk of having their tackle blown off by a musket ball to the groin.

  I used the trips back and forth to the canal to take a quick look at the road from the Ruyter mill and Oudkerk to see if help was on the way, but it was always empty. From there I could also see the whole of the field of battle, with the Dutch pushing toward us and our two tercios blocking passage on both sides of the road; Spaniards on my left and Soest’s contingent on the right: an infinity of glinting steel, musket fire, gunpowder smoke, and banners amid a thick forest of pikes. Our Walloon comrades were playing their part well, and theirs, it is true, was the most difficult, squeezed as they were between the heretics’ harquebusiers and brutal charges of Light Horse. Each time they held against a new assault there were fewer pikes in their squad, and although Soest’s soldiers were men of great honor and integrity, they were inevitably losing strength. The danger was that if they gave way, the Dutch would be able to cross their terrain, flank the Cartagena tercio, and gain the advantage. And the Ruyter mill and road to Oudkerk and Breda would be lost.

  I went back to my own company with those thoughts playing uneasily on my mind, and I was not encouraged when I passed by our colonel, who was positioned with other mounted officers in the middle of the squad. His armor had stopped a Dutch musket ball, though it had already traveled such a long distance that it left only a fine dent in his tooled Milanese steel breastplate. Except for that, our colonel seemed in good health, unlike his bugler, who had been shot in the mouth and now lay on the ground at his horse’s hooves, with no one giving a fig whether he was bugling or not. I saw that don Pedro de la Daga and his cadre of officers were observing the Walloons’ badly compromised lines with furrowed brows. Even I, inexperienced as I was, understood that if Soest’s tercio collapsed, we Spaniards, with no cavalry to shield us, would have no recourse but to retreat to the Ruyter mill if we were to avoid being flanked. The ruinous effect would be that when the Dutch saw the tercio retreat, they would move on toward Breda. The respect and fear an enemy entertains when it encounters a wall of resolute men is very different from its attitude when it perceives that those men are looking less for a quarrel than for their own continued good health, and even more so at a time when we Spaniards were as renowned for our cruelty in attacking as we were for our pride and imperturbability in the face of death. Until then almost no one had seen the color of our backs, not even on canvas, and our pikes and our reputations were equally esteemed.

  The sun was reaching its zenith when the Walloons, having served their king and the true religion with great dignity, finally collapsed. A charge of horse and the pressure of the Dutch infantry finally shredded their lines, and from our side of the road we watched as, despite the efforts of their officers, one section of troops withdrew toward the Ruyter mill and the other, more complete, surged toward us, seeking refuge in our formation. With them, surrounded by officers trying to save the standards, came their maestre, don Carlos Soest, like a condemned man, with his helmet missing and both arms broken by harquebus fire. They rushed toward us in such disorder that they nearly broke up our tercio. Even worse, however, was that right behind them, almost within reach, came the Hollander Horse and Foot, eager to accomplish their task by wiping out two regiments in one fell swoop. To our good fortune, they came straight from their first assault—their lines were ragged, and they were testing their luck to see whether we would come apart in all the confusion—but as I have said, the men of the Cartagena tercio were battle-wise and had seen everything. Almost without receiving orders, after allowing a reasonable number of Walloons to pass, the lines of our right flank closed as if they were made of iron, and harquebuses and muskets loosed an awesome round of fire that dispatched—two for the price of one—a good portion of the tag ends of Soest’s tercio along with the Hollanders pursuing them from the rear.

  “Pikes to the right!”

  Without hurrying and with the sangfroid their legendary discipline implied, the rows of coseletes on our flank veered to face the Dutch. They drove the butt end of their pikes into the ground, firmed the mud around it with a foot, and pointed the blade end to the front, holding the shafts in their left hands as they unsheathed their swords with their right, preparing to cripple the horses racing toward them.

  “Santiago!…Spain and Santiago!”

  It was as if the Dutch had hit a solid brick wall. The collision with our right flank was so brutal that long pike shafts buried in the horses broke into pieces, and defenders and attackers were entangled in a muddle of lances, swords, daggers, knives, and harquebuses-turned-clubs.

  “Pikes to the front!”

  The heretics were also charging the forward side of our square formation, again emerging from the woods but now with the cavalry leading and the coseletes behind. Our harquebusiers again performed their task with the composure of veteran infantry, loading and firing in perfect order with no trace of agitation. Among them I saw Diego Alatriste blow on a slow match, cheek his weapon, and aim. The volley left a large number of Hollanders on the ground, but the main body of soldiers remained, far too many for our own good, and our detachments of harquebusiers, and I with them, were forced to take cover among
the pikes. In the confusion I lost sight of my master, and the only one of his comrades I could see was Sebastián Copons—the bandage on his head calling to mind the kerchiefs of his native Aragon—as he put hand to his sword with resolve. A few flustered Spaniards deserted, fleeing past their comrades toward the rear (Iberia did not always give birth to lions), but most stood their ground. Harquebuses blasted, and all around me musket balls dug into flesh. I was showered with a spray of pikeman’s blood as he fell atop me, invoking the Madre de Deus in Portuguese. I slipped from beneath him, freed myself from his lance, which was caught between my legs, only to find myself jostled in the ebb and flow of the battle, immersed in smells of rough, grimy clothing, sweat, powder, and blood.

  “Hold!…Spain!…Spaaain!”

  At our backs, behind the tightly knit rows protecting the standards, the drums beat on relentlessly. More musket balls whirred and more men fell, and each time the rows closed over the gaps they had left, while I stumbled over the armored bodies that lay scattered about me. I could see almost nothing of what was happening in front of me, and I rose to my tiptoes to look over the shoulders of men in buffcoats and leather, steel breastplates and helmets. I was suffocated by the heat and by the smoke of powder. My head was spinning, and with my last shred of lucidity I reached behind me and pulled out my dagger.

  “Oñate!…Oñate!” I yelled with all my soul.

  An instant later, with a crack of pike shafts, screams of wounded horses, and clash of swords, the Dutch Light Horse was upon us, and only God could recognize His own.

  6. ATTACK WITHOUT QUARTER

  At times I look at the painting, and I remember. Not even Diego Velázquez, despite everything I told him, was capable of portraying on canvas—it is barely insinuated in the clouds of smoke and gray fog of the background—the long and deadly road we had to take to compose such a majestic scene, or the lances that lay along that road and would never see the sun rise over Breda. I myself was yet to encounter the blood-dripping steel of those same lances in charnel houses like Nordlingen and Rocroi, which were, respectively, the dying rays of the Spanish star and a terrible sunset for the army of Flanders. And of those battles, like the one that morning at the Ruyter mill, I remember especially the sounds: the cries of the men, the crack of crossed pikes, the clash of steel against steel, the distinct notes of weapons ripping clothing, entering flesh, shattering bones. Once, much later, Angélica de Alquézar asked me in a frivolous tone if there was anything more sinister than the cur-rrunch of a hoe cutting into a potato. Without hesitating I replied, “The cur-rrunch of steel splitting a skull,” and I saw her smile as she stared at me with those blue eyes the devil had granted to her. And then she reached out and with her fingertips touched my eyelids, which were wide open as I again beheld the horror, and then she grazed the mouth that so many times had shouted my fear and my courage and the hands that had gripped steel and spilled blood. She kissed me with her full, warm lips and even smiled as she did it and drew back from me. And now that Angélica is as dead and gone as the Spain I am writing about, I still cannot erase that smile from my memory. It was the same smile that appeared on her lips every time she did something evil, every time she put my life in jeopardy, and every time she kissed my scars, for some of them, pardiez, as I have written elsewhere, were caused by her.