Yes, the night skirmishes were fought with unprecedented ferocity. We’d set out just as it grew dark or, for variation, before dawn. At first I thought Ballester would be in his element in this kind of encounter. Under cover of dark, he could enact the lowest instincts of man, which consists of killing and then running away. The opposite turned out to be true. Those nights ennobled Ballester to the same extent that they made a savage of me.
Swiftness and time efficiency are key in any sortie. The assault squad’s only aim was to push as far into the trench as possible, then to dig in and hold off the enemy, while, at their back, a second wave sabotaged other parts. Then they’d both fall back, trying to lose as few men along the way as they could.
A signal would be given (something other than a whistle, which the enemy would hear), and we’d run out to the trench, trying to stay low to the ground and silent. Their third parallel was so close by now that it was relatively easy to reach. However watchful the enemy was, we’d be upon them in seconds. Inside the trench, the strangest kind of combat would then commence. First slitting the guard’s throat, then, within minutes, securing part of the trench. The darkness of the night, the depths in which we had to maneuver, and the narrowness of the trench, all made it impossible to see anyone, though there were voices aplenty—howls of entreaty and rage. Whistles being blown by Bourbon officers, five or ten different languages being spoken. Our aims on these lightning attacks were to destroy sapping machinery, flood the trench floor and wreck the cannons. And there was good old Zuvi, directing the destruction. Of the cannons, above all.
Our men would climb all over the cannons like monkeys. One would hold a foot-long nail against the fuse entry point, and the other would pound it with a hammer. The cannon would be immobilized; when the enemy retook the terrain, it would be useless. Where possible, we’d steal their tools. The second wave of men was to follow behind, and when they had gathered a good amount of ammunition, including shovels and mattocks, we’d retreat.
We’d occasionally surprise sappers in the trench, and they wouldn’t put up any resistance. They’d crowd together, down on their knees, hands raised imploringly to the sky, begging for their lives. The flashes of gunfire, the momentary radiance of grenade explosions here and there, lit up their eyes. The last thing they’d experience would be a typically nightmarish scene: fleeing through the night, boxed in by walls sunk in the earth, reaching a dead end. A pitiless enemy coming after them. The best thing was not to look them in the eye.
“Shoot, Ballester, and be quick about it!” was the order I gave. “Kill them and move forward!”
In August 1714, neither side was taking prisoners. What would be the point? The bitterness we felt overcame us all. Falling back, we wouldn’t be able to take our wounded with us. Anyone left behind would be knifed to death by the counterattackers. And in the early hours of the following day, the cadavers would be flung over the front of the trench, and from up on the ramparts, we’d watch them rot in the August sun. A mad time. Everything had grown so dark, we could no longer recognize ourselves.
Anyway, to put aside the darkness for a moment. As an example of le Mystère’s constant sense of humor, even when things were at their goriest, here is an anecdote from August 3 of that year.
I’d just gone in to see Don Antonio, my black hair whitened with ash and fragments of rubble. I was interrupted before I began my report, as in came a battalion of Black Pelts—senior priests, that is. They were there to present a Directive for the Assuaging of Divine Wrath.
The Black Pelts have always done a good line in sarcasm, so the only way to take it was as a not very funny joke. Read for yourselves the recipe they’d cooked up to bring about divine mediation and to liberate the city:
—Permanently put an end to street theater and comedies
Expel all gypsies from the city
Gather up the abandoned children which at this time swarm about in our streets
Do something about the profane, costly manners of the people of Barcelona
Bring back the veneration and respect of the temples
Hail Marys to be carried out in public places throughout the city
That Directive for the Assuaging of Divine Wrath plays in my memory as the perfect conjunction of all that is hypocritical and bizarre. The shelling had long since put an end to street theater, and no one had the energy to go and watch, or take part in, comedies. The poor gypsies, forever scorned, had seen the war as an opportunity to confront the stigma surrounding them: The majority of the drummers in the army had their dark faces. And if children were swarming the devastated streets, like my Anfán, it was because they were looking for food. As for “profane, costly manners,” what world were they living in? Our colorful, joyful city had for a long time been deformed and gray. On top of which, what possible link could there be between a siege in progress, divine favor, and silk skirts?
Don Antonio said he was in full agreement with them on every count. The next thing was that he sent them packing, using very florid language. They couldn’t have been happier.
Jimmy was a true Coehoornian. I couldn’t believe he’d taken so long to begin the assault. The trench wasn’t complete, sure enough, but what did that matter to someone who followed Coehoorn’s principles? In his hands, the Attack Trench (as my stay in the Mas Guinardó had told me) was nothing but a political instrument. The ramparts had been breached; he had a large, well-disciplined army at his disposal; and he scorned the “rebels,” scoundrels, for the larger parts, with very few trained troops among them.
So I failed to understand why the assault was taking so long to begin. My thoughts in designing the trench had been informed in large part by Jimmy’s tendencies. A premature attack would put us at an advantage. And there he was, to my dismay, holding his troops back. A strange duel because, even while Jimmy’s cannonballs were raining down, even as I was flinging myself to the ground to shelter behind the battlements, I was begging him: “Come on Jimmy, come on. Attack at last.”
The night of August 11, one of the hottest I can remember, found me behind the walls of Portal Nou. The majority of the militia went bare-chested. I made my way to the most forward position, where the remains of a wall stood like a gigantic corroded tusk, from there looking out at the Bourbons. I had a Coronela man with me, sent by the bastion commander to protect me.
“Quiet!” I said. “Do you not hear that?”
A hammering—thousands of mattocks and hammers. My Bazoches-sharpened hearing meant I could make them out, in spite of them covering the tools with cloth to muffle the sound.
I dashed back to the rearguard, not stopping until I found Don Antonio. I was gasping, having sprinted all the way.
“Carpentry, Don Antonio,” I said. “We’ve heard carpentry from their front line. They’re putting in the assault platforms, there’s nothing else it can be.”
Don Antonio showed no sign of emotion. I remember how he nodded, as though hearing happy news about an old friend. He looked me in the eye, seeking confirmation of the news. Still panting, I said: “They’re coming. It’s the general assault.”
11
To help form an idea of the battle that took place on the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth of August, I here include a group of illustrations.
The below is the Saint Clara bastion and the large breach that had been opened by Jimmy’s cannons. The moat, full of rubble dislodged by the shelling, would be easy to traverse. The advance guard was just across from us, positioned on the “gentlemen.”
All we could do was create a line of defense inside the bastions themselves. Protecting this exposed line would be suicide, so ten feet or so behind the breaches, we erected barricades. These were of stone and cement, as solid as we were able to make them, and up to chest height.
One of Saint Clara’s few advantages was the Saint Joan tower, a tall, narrow construction behind and to the right of the bastion. Two light cannons had been stationed on it throughout the siege—light but very precise
. The height of the tower gave it an excellent shooting angle. Saint Joan harrowed the Bourbons endlessly as they went about their trench works. They developed a loathing for the tower and sent endless cannonballs up at it.
To help people understand the violence of the fighting, I here include three prints of the Saint Joan tower. The first shows what it was like originally, and the second what state it was in on the eve of August 12. (It was so damaged that we’d had to remove the two cannons a few days earlier, as it was on the verge of collapsing.) The last plate is a re-creation of what was left of the tower after the siege.
The artist took considerable license. The tower, for example, wasn’t square but round, and at this point in the siege, the ramparts were in a far worse state. The prints may not be totally accurate, but they’re instructive all the same.
At dawn on August 12 I was up on Saint Clara. The imminent attack meant I hadn’t had a moment’s sleep. Those sons of whores, knowing that we knew something was afoot, spent the whole steamy night setting off false alarms. And it was my job to raise the men when the real attack came.
A fine task! Raising the alarm in the city was no easy job. Men were not so much worn out as utterly exhausted. And some officer pissing his pants, rousing the garrison for no good reason, was the last thing they needed. Consider, too, that ours wasn’t a professional army but a bunch of civilians with rifles slung over their shoulders. Any alarm would wrench them from their homes, from their beds and their wives’ embraces. Jimmy’s idea was exactly this: to unnerve the defenders. As I say, the night was one long series of ruses: suddenly, in the pitch dark, trumpet blasts and drumming, and you thought an entire army was pouring down on your head. But nothing happened. Nothing. A few minutes later, there would be a pointless volley of rifle fire. But, counter to expectation, no battalions of grenadiers emerged out of their trenches, no infantry with bayonets mounted, no one. No one. I spent the night gauging the tiniest sounds and thinking of Bazoches: “As long as you are alive, you must pay attention. And as long as you pay attention, you’ll stay alive.”
At around seven in the morning, a silence came down, a calm so absolute that the absence of noise itself was suspicious. I dashed over and vaulted the first barricade. Then, creeping forward, I dropped down and poked my head over the breach. And what I saw, for all that it was the height of summer, chilled me to the bone.
Hundreds of men were emerging from the “gentlemen.” French grenadiers were chosen for their stature, and these were the very tallest of that class of soldier. In place of their usual weapons, unreal sight, they were wearing metal breastplates and brandishing twelve-foot pikes. Just behind this armored urchin came grenadiers, hundreds and hundreds of grenadiers. Ten full companies, at the very least, making their way to the Saint Clara and Portal Nou bastions.
The moat became an ant run of white uniforms, clambering over the rubble in perfect formation. The slope gave way so easily under their feet that it also put you in mind of a herd of elephants parading over gravel.
“This is the end,” I said to myself. The cream of the French army was upon us, and all we had to take them on were two Coronela companies, the swordsmiths and the cotton dealers. Fewer than two hundred men, all told.
I ran back the way I’d come, hurdling the barricade. I went and found the commander of the bastion, Lieutenant Colonel Jordi Bastida. “It’s the general assault, Bastida!” I cried. “They’re lining up!”
Just then we heard an explosion over to our left. The ground trembled. A column of black smoke mushroomed up over the neighboring Portal Nou. The Bourbons had exploded a mine.
“Don Antonio must be informed!” I said, agitated.
Bastida shook me off with disdain. “Well, you’d better go and tell him, then!”
Jordi Bastida was one of our heroes. In 1709 he’d been responsible for repelling the Bourbon assault on Benasque, a small settlement in the Pyrenees. If he’d been in my shoes, have no doubt, he would have interpreted “Well, you’d better go and tell him, then!” to mean, send a messenger; Bastida never would have considered abandoning his post, least of all when a mine had gone off, sending shock waves through the entire city. But I, of course, was not Bastida, and off I ran. And as I ran, I felt sure I’d never see the man alive again.
The Bourbons came at Saint Clara and Portal Nou simultaneously. The latter had just as few men defending it, the tailor and the cup maker companies. But overall, Portal Nou hadn’t had it as bad as Saint Clara; it could count on covering fire from either side, and its breaches were not so severe. As for the subterranean mine, it hadn’t been well positioned: It took out the forward edge of the pentagon, whereas if the Antwerp butcher had calculated properly and placed it a little farther forward, the entire fortification would have been blown sky-high. Imagine that—could someone possibly have fiddled with the numbers and distances in the plans?
Portal Nou was under Colonel Gregorio de Saavedra y Portugal. (I imagine he was Portuguese, with a surname like that.) For a few long minutes, his tailors and cup makers found themselves blinded by a thick cloud of black smoke. It rained clods of earth and rubble. They must have thought the world had come to an end. But the error in the calculations meant that the vast majority would come away unscathed. And Saavedra, who was a veteran officer, promptly sent his men into the gap.
Which bright Bourbon spark came up with the idea of returning to the time when pikemen were in force, I don’t know. (Years later, Jimmy assured me it hadn’t been him, but bearing in mind the disaster that took place, and his tendency to never tell the truth, his wanting to deny responsibility would make sense.)
Militiamen from each bastion converged in the breaches and began firing their rifles dementedly. They had covering fire from the ramparts above and were camouflaged by the screen of smoke from the exploded mine below. And the attackers came so thick and fast that they just needed to shoot into the mass of them. The first to fall, logically enough, were the men with the pikes. They were the most strapping men, and their armor was too heavy, and as they went rolling back down the slope they took dozens of others with them.
In the first part of this book, I said a little about the horror of a grenadier attack. I didn’t think it necessary to specify at that point that one doesn’t need to be a grenadier to use a grenade, and that in Barcelona, we had thousands upon thousands of grenades. A deluge of those black balls now came pouring down on the attackers. That the opposition was so tightly packed together made it many times more effective. At certain points, some of the defenders simply lit a single fuse to one of the grenades in a sack and threw the whole thing. But in spite of the carnage, the Bourbons still made headway.
Meanwhile, good old Zuvi sprinted to find Don Antonio again. I didn’t have to go far to find him. He was behind the area under attack, with officers and intermediaries bustling around him. There was nothing I could tell him that he didn’t already know, which I found somewhat humiliating.
One of the officers awaiting Don Antonio’s orders was Marià Bassons, a law professor who had taken up the position of captain in the Coronela. A small man with a round head and his spectacles firmly in place, even there in the midst of battle, Bassons was one of these men who keep old age at bay by being phlegmatic, making observations on the world as though they themselves are not a part of it.
“Ah, Lieutenant Colonel Zuviría,” he said, peering at me through his little glasses. “Tell me, any developments on your legal tribulations? Did you sort it out with those Italians?”
I was out of breath from running, and above our heads, missiles of all calibers were flying to and fro, and Bassons wanted to know about my pending trial. Someone ought to have pointed out to him that most of the courts had been destroyed by the bombardment. I never quite worked out if he was senile or one of these stoic creatures that society props up, as long as there’s someone saying it’s possible to prop them up.
His company, made up of law students, was nearby, sheltering from stray bullets as they awai
ted orders. One came over and, both eager and respectful, asked Bassons: “Doctor, are we to attack?”
The law students’ company was easily recognizable. Since they were at university, that meant they all came from good families. When enlisting, they each bought themselves not one but two or even three of those uniforms with their long blue jackets. They’d get one dirty during a shift, then have another waiting for them, one of their servants having cleaned it. They struck up an agreement with the tailor company, who would patch their holes for them. I must admit, they never filled me with confidence. The only thing they were any good for was parades, because they scrubbed up so well in their immaculate uniforms with their wide yellow cuffs. The civilians, up on their balconies, found encouragement from seeing them, due to their tendency to confuse a pretty army with a hardened one. My qualms were based on the fact that war and the arts have never been happy bedfellows. “They’ll bolt as soon as the first shot is fired” was my view.
Bassons, who always acted like a father with his students, clapped the young soldier on the back. “Aviat, fill meu, aviat,” he said. Soon, my boy, very soon. “And remember: Nihil metuere, nisi turpem famam.” The only thing to be feared is ill renown.
Old Bassons had enlisted, like many of the people of Barcelona, almost without having to think. For them, war was part of your civic duty, somewhere between paying your taxes and taking part in carnival. Once the Crida went out, the students made it clear to the government that their professor was the only man they’d serve under. The Red Pelts, always very understanding (to the upper classes), made Bassons a captain. (Possibly they worried that if they did otherwise, the students would drag them out and stone them.) In return, Bassons couldn’t have felt more proud of the youngsters under his command. Mon Dieu, quel bon esprit de corps!
Victus Page 52
