CHAPTER XXI
On reaching this point in my story, I beg the reader to pardon me if Ido not give the dates exactly of that which I relate. In this periodof horror, lasting from January 27 to the middle of the next month,the successive events are so confused, so mixed up, so run togetherin my mind, that I cannot distinguish days and nights, and, in someinstances, I do not know whether certain skirmishes of those I recalltook place in daylight. It seems to me that all happened during onelong day, or in one endless night, and that time was not then markedby its ordinary divisions. Many sensations and impressions are linkedtogether in my memory, forming one vast picture where there are nomore dividing lines than those that the events themselves offer,--thegreater fright of one moment, the unexplained panic or fury of another.
For this reason I cannot tell exactly on what day that took place whichI am going to relate now; but if I am not mistaken it was on a dayafter the fight at Las Monicas, and somewhere, I should say, betweenthe thirtieth of January and the second of February. We were occupyinga house in the Calle de Pabostre. The French were in the one next toit, and were trying to advance through the inside of the block to reachthe Puerta Quemada. Nothing can compare with the incessant activitygoing on there. No kind of warfare, no bloodiest battle on the openfield, no sieges of a plaza, nor struggles in a street barricade cancompare with the succession of conflicts between the army of an alcoveand the army of a drawing-room, between the troops that occupy onefloor and those which guard the one above it.
Hearing the muffled blows of the picks at various points, not knowingfrom what direction the attack might come, caused us some alarm. Wewent up into attics; we descended into cellars, and glued our earsto partition walls; we tried to learn the intentions of the enemyaccording to the direction of the blows. At last we noticed that thepartition wall was being violently shaken near the very place wherewe were standing, and we waited fire in the doorway, after heaping upthe furniture as a barricade. The French opened a hole, and presentlybegan leaping over beams and broken fragments, showing an intentionof driving us from the place. There were twenty of us, fewer of them,and they evidently did not expect to be received in such fashion,and retreated, returning soon with such reinforcement that we werein great danger, and obliged to retire, leaving five comrades behindthe furniture, two of them dead. In the narrow passage we ran againsta stairway up which we hurried without knowing where we were going,and presently found ourselves in a garret,--an admirable position fordefence. The stairway was narrow, however, and the Frenchmen who triedto come up it died inevitably. So we remained for some time, prolongingthe resistance, and encouraging one another with huzzas and shouts,when the partition at our backs began to resound with loud blows, andwe saw immediately that the French, by opening an entrance throughthere, would catch us between two fires without means of escape. Wewere now thirteen, as two had fallen in the garret, severely wounded.Tio Garces, who was in command, shouted furiously: "By heaven, thedogs shall not catch us! There's a skylight in the roof. Let us go upthrough it to the tiles of the roof. Go on firing at whoever comes upto try and cut through it! The rest of you enlarge the hole. Away withfear, and viva the Virgin del Pilar!"
It was done as he commanded. This was to be a well-ordered retreat,according to the rules of war; and while part of our army waspreventing the onward march of the enemy, the rest were occupiedin facilitating the retreat. This able plan was put into executionwith feverish activity, and very soon the hole of escape was largeenough for three men to pass through at once, without the Frenchgaining a single step during the time that we were employed in thisway. We quickly got out on the roof. We were now nine. Three hadbeen left in the garret, and another was wounded in trying to getout, falling still alive, into the hands of the enemy. On findingourselves outside, we leaped for joy. We cast a glance over the roofsof the quarter, and saw at a distance the batteries of the French.We advanced on all fours for a good distance, exploring the lay ofthe land, leaving two sentinels in the gap to pop off a gun at anyone who should seek to slip up by them. We had not gone twenty paceswhen we heard a great noise of voices and laughter which seemed to usto be French. And so it was; from a broad balcony those rascals werelooking at us and laughing. They were not slow in firing upon us, butprotected behind the chimneys, the angles and corners which the roofafforded, we answered them shot for shot, and replied to their oathsand exclamations by a thousand other invectives with which the livelyimagination of Tio Garces inspired us. At last we retreated, jumping tothe roof of the next house. We believed it to be in the hands of ourown men, and we entered by the window of a little upper room, supposingthat the descent from there to the street would be easy, and thatthere we should be reinforced for the conclusion of the adventure thathad carried us through passages, up stairways, through garrets, andover roofs. But we had scarcely set foot there, when we heard in theapartment below us the sound of many blows on the wall.
"They are beating in there," said Tio Garces, and in a second theFrench whom we had left in the house next us had passed to this one,where they met comrades.
"Cuerno! Recuerno! Let us get out of this! The whole creation's downbelow there."
We passed on into another garret, and found our way to a ladder leadingdown to a large interior room, from whose doorway came the livelysound of voices, chiefly those of women. The noise of the fight seemedmuch further off, and we decided it must be at some distance. So wedropped down the ladder and found ourselves in a large room filledwith old men, women, and children who had all sought refuge here.Many, lying upon rude mattresses, showed in their faces traces of theterrible epidemic, and one lifeless body lay on the floor, breathevidently having left it but a few moments before. Some were wounded,suffering cruelly and groaning unrestrainedly; two or three old womenwere weeping and praying. Occasionally voices were heard begging,"Water, water!" From where we entered, I saw Candiola at the end ofthe room, carefully depositing in a corner a quantity of clothes andkitchen utensils and crockery. With an angry gesture he drove away thecurious children who wished to look over and handle the poor stuff.Anxious, eager only to heap together and guard his treasures withoutlosing a fragment, he was saying,--
"I have already lost two cups. And I have no doubt whatever as to whathas become of them. Some one of these people has taken them. Thereis no security anywhere; there are no authorities to guarantee to acitizen the possession of his property. Out of here, you unmannerlyboys! Oh, we are hard pushed! Cursed be the bombs and the one whoinvented them! Soldiers, you have come in good time. Can you not havetwo sentinels placed here for me to guard these treasures which I havebeen able to save only with great trouble?"
My comrades laughed at such pretension, as may readily be believed. Wewere just about to go, when I saw Mariquilla. The poor girl was sadlychanged from lack of sleep, much weeping, and the constant alarms. Butthe trouble of her brow, and that which looked forth from her eyes,only added to the sweetness of expression of her beautiful face. Shesaw me, and immediately came eagerly up to me, showing that she wishedto speak with me.
"And Augustine?" I asked her.
"He is down there," she replied in tremulous tones. "They are fightingbelow. We who took refuge in this house have been apportioned todifferent rooms. My father came this morning with Do?a Guedita.Augustine brought us something to eat, and put us in a room where therewas a mattress. Suddenly we heard blows on the partition walls. TheFrench were coming. The troops entered, and made us leave, carrying thesick and wounded to an upper room. They shut us all in, and then thewalls were broken through. The French met the Spaniards then, and beganreal fighting. Yes, Augustine is below."
She was saying this when Manuela Sancho came, carrying two pitchers ofwater for the wounded. The poor wretches threw themselves from theirbeds, disputing even to blows over the water.
"No pushing, no scrambling, se?ors!" said Manuela, laughing. "There iswater enough for all. Our side is winning. It has cost a little laborto drive the French from the alcove, and now they are di
sputing half ofthe hall, having gained one half of it. They do not wish to leave us akitchen or a staircase. The whole place is filled with the dead."
Mariquilla turned pale with the horror of it.
"I am thirsty," she said to me.
I immediately tried to get some water for her from Manuela; but as thelast glass she had was in use, quenching soldiers' thirst, as she wentfrom mouth to mouth with it, I took, in order to lose no time, one ofthe cups which Candiola had in his pile.
"Eh, you meddler," he said, shaking his fist at me, "leave that cuphere."
"I am getting it to give water to the se?orita," I answeredindignantly. "Are these things so valuable, Se?or Candiola?"
The miser did not reply, but did not oppose my giving his daughter adrink. After her thirst was quenched, a wounded soldier reached out hishands eagerly for the cup, and, lo! it began to go the rounds also,passing from mouth to mouth. When I went to wait upon my comrades, DonJeronimo followed me with his eyes, and watched with bad grace theforced loan that was so slow in returning to his hands.
Manuela Sancho was right in saying that our side was winning. TheFrench, dislodged from the main floor of the house, had retired tothe one below, where they continued their defence. When I descended,all the interest of the battle was centred in the kitchen, disputedwith much bloodshed, but the rest of the house was in our power. Manybodies of French and Spanish covered the gory floor. Some soldiers andpatriots, furious at not being able to conquer that dismal kitchen,whence such a fire was pouring, hurled themselves forward into it,defending themselves with their bayonets; and although a goodly numberof them perished, their courageous act decided the matter, for behindthem others could come, and then all that the room could hold.
The Imperial soldiers, panic-stricken with this violent assault, lookedquickly for a way out of the house which had been taken room by room.We pursued them through passages and halls whose confused arrangementwould craze the best military topographer. We finished them wherever wecould find them, and some of them escaped, dashing in desperation outthrough the court-yards. In this manner, after reconquering one house,we reconquered the next one, obliging the enemy to restrict themselvesto their old positions, which were the first two houses of the Calle dePabostre.
Afterwards we removed our dead and wounded, and I had the sorrow offinding Augustine Montoria among the latter, although the gun-wound inhis right arm was not of a serious nature. My battalion was reducedone-half that day. The unfortunates who had sought refuge in theupper room now wished to make themselves a little more comfortable inthe lower rooms; but this was not thought practicable, and they wereobliged to leave the place and look for an asylum further from danger.
Every day, every hour, every instant, the increasing difficultiesof our military situation were aggravated by the sight of the greatnumber of unburied victims of battle and of the epidemic. Happy athousand times those who were buried in the ruins of the underminedhouses, as happened to the valiant defenders of the Calle de Pomar,close to the Santa Engracia! The most horrible thing was a great numberof the wounded piled up together, so that nobody could get at themto help them. There was no medical aid for a hundredth part of them.The charity of women, the zeal of patriotic citizens, the multipliedactivity of the hospitals, really availed nothing.
There came a time when a sort of impassibility, a dreadful apathy,began to take possession of the besieged. We became used to the sightof a heap of dead bodies, as if they were so many sacks of wool. Wewere accustomed to see, without pity, great numbers of the woundedcreeping and tottering to the houses, each one caring for himself asbest he could. In the keenness of our sufferings, it seemed as ifthe usual necessities of the flesh had gone, and that we lived onlyin the spirit. Familiarity with danger had transformed our natures,infusing them apparently with a new element,--absolute contempt ofthe material, and indifference to life. Every one expected to die atany moment, without the idea disturbing him in the least. I rememberhearing described the attack on the Trinitarios convent, made in thehope of snatching it from the French, and the fabulous exploits, theinconceivable rashness of that undertaking seemed to me natural andordinary.
I do not know whether I have said that next to the Convent de lasMonicas was that of San Augustine, an edifice of good size, with alarge church, spacious cloisters, and vast transepts. It was inevitablethat the French, now masters of Las Monicas, should show greatperseverance in the effort to gain possession of this monastery, inorder to establish themselves firmly and definitely in that quarter.
"Since we have not the luck to be in Las Monicas," said Pirli to me,"we will, to-day, give ourselves the pleasure of defending untildeath the four walls of Saint Augustine. As the Estremadurans are notsufficient to defend it, we are ordered in, too. And how about rank,friend Araceli? Is it true that we two young gentlemen have beenpromoted to be sergeants?"
"I don't know anything about it, friend Pirli," I answered; and it wastrue that I was ignorant of my elevation to the hierarchical altitudeof a sergeant.
"Yes, indeed, the general says so; Se?or de Araceli is first sergeant,and Se?or de Pirli is second sergeant. We have worked hard enough forit. It's a good thing we have enough of our bodies left to hang theepaulets on. I heard that Augustine Montoria has been made a lieutenantfor his gallantry inside the houses. Yesterday, at nightfall, thebattalion of Las Pe?as de San Pedro was reduced to four sergeants, alieutenant, a captain, and two hundred men."
"Let us see, friend Pirli, if we cannot earn two more promotions apieceto-day."
"All that we have to do is to keep our skins whole," he answered. "Thefew soldiers of the Huesca battalion who survive think that they areall going to be made generals. There is the call! Have you anything toeat?"
"Not much."
"Manuela Sancho gave me four sardines. I will divide them with you. Howwould you like a dozen of these roasted peas? Do you remember how winetastes? I ask, because it is so many days since they have given us adrop. They will give us a spoonful when the battle of San Augustine isover. Here you are! It would be too bad if they should finish us offbefore we know what color the stuff is which they are going to passaround to-night. If they would follow my advice, they would give it tous before the fight, so that those who drop off would get a taste. Butthe committee of supplies has evidently said, 'There is very littlewine; if we give it out now there will scarcely be three drops to aman. We will wait until evening, and as it will be a miracle if afourth part of those who defend San Augustine are alive then, therewill be at least one swallow apiece for the rest.'"
He followed this criticism with a general discourse upon the scarcityof provisions. We did not have time to indulge ourselves much on thattopic, for we had scarcely joined the Estremadura men at the monastery,when a loud report warned us to be on our guard; then a friar appeared,shouting,--
"My sons, they have blown up the middle walls on the side towards LasMonicas, and they are already in the building! Run to the church.They must have seized the sacristy; but that makes no difference. Ifyou go in time, you will be masters of the nave, of the chapels andthe choir. Viva the Holy Virgin del Pilar, and the battalion of theEstremadura!"
We marched serenely into the church.
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