Victus

by Albert Sanchez Pinol

  Still I shudder to think: In all of a yearlong siege, I fired one bullet, just one, and it turned out to be at Dupuy.

  Seeing his troops coming pouring back, Jimmy was livid. He lowered his head and contained himself for a moment before exploding. The officers and commanders around him were made aware, in no uncertain terms, of how incompetent they were.

  He stormed back into Mas Guinardó with his retinue behind him. He was even angrier than in the critical moments at Almansa.

  “The position must be regained!” he howled, shaking his fists. “Even if it means losing the entire army! Or do we want Europe to hear how mighty France has been overturned by a group of rude civilians?”

  His generals tried to calm him down, but Jimmy cursed them all. “Silence! I want a report from the horse’s mouth. Send me Brigadiers Sauvebouef and Duverger! And Marquis de Polastron!”

  Not possible, they said: Sauvebouef and Duverger had both been lost during the assault. Of Polastron there was no word. Well, that was soon to come: Men of the Coronela, still in a frenzy, had decapitated poor Polastron, rammed his head down inside a cannon, and fired him at Mas Guinardó. Hearing that noise, everyone present hung his head. All except Jimmy, who went out on the balcony, there finding Polastron’s blackened, smoking head revolving on the balcony floor like a spinning top.

  A number of officials appeared whom Jimmy had greater respect for, including Lieutenant Colonel La Motte. Injured, he hobbled in, face soiled and uniform in tatters. “Your Excellence,” he argued, “regaining a foothold on Saint Clara would cost us our best troops, a crippling number of casualties and sacrifices. Without reinforcements from France, we’ll gain no more than a few feet, and the cost will be terrible . . . The filthy rebel canaille are up on the ramparts as we speak, their generals and magistrates are whipping them up, and they mock us with singing and jibes.”

  All true. The regained positions were teeming with men and women and even some musicians, celebrating the victory. With very little decency, also true. A great display of bare buttocks turned in the direction of the enemy lines.

  Even so, it took a report of the losses to change Jimmy’s mind. Numbers have the power to cool the most burning passion. In the Saint Clara attack alone, fifteen hundred men had been lost, making a total of five thousand since the beginning of work on the trench: the kind of figures that could no longer be argued away. Most disconcerting of all was the account of officers down. Among them, none other than Dupuy—though, as it turned out, he had survived my bullet through the neck. And there was something further, something Jimmy grasped all too well.

  Unlike field battles, in any contest for fortified positions, men have stone and brick to protect them. In Barcelona, thousands upon thousands of bullets were fired, but few ever reached their marks, the bodies of the enemy. The artillery of either side, for their part, were constrained by having to avoid hitting their own men. This meant that bayonet charges were the prime cause of death—which shows, better than any speech ever could, how determined the “rebels” were. There was nothing to suggest that a further assault would be any less bloody or have a different outcome: Breaches stopped, the filthy rebel canaille again taking to the rampart tops to sing mock songs.

  Jimmy never forgave Don Antonio for humbling him at Saint Clara that day. Having been denied victory, Jimmy now looked to point the finger. Verboom was called in. The Antwerp butcher knew the reason for the summons and began his defense before any attack could come. “I did say that the trench required further tweaking,” he said, “and that it meant the assault would be premature.”

  But Verboom was wrong if he thought Jimmy would be the one to cross-examine him. The next person to speak was Dupuy, who had entered immediately after Verboom: “A bad engineer always blames his trench,” he said.

  Dupuy was very weak due to the loss of blood, and he had large swathes of bandages around his neck. It was the fifteenth wound he’d suffered in war. Had my bullet entered half an inch to the right, it would have been the last.

  With some effort, Dupuy lowered himself into a chair. He opened a rolled-up document he was holding. “Just so you know, I plan to spend my convalescence studying these plans.”

  For one engineer to appropriate another’s plans was beyond bad manners. “Those plans are of my trench!” protested Verboom.

  “Yours?” said Dupuy. “Are you quite sure? If so, you’re going to have to take responsibility for it.” In spite of his wound, he spoke with a Bazoches voice, clear and precise. “Water has been found in the trenches; half the days have been spent digging at the earth, half bailing water. Then there is the fact that we have been losing between twenty and thirty dead and wounded a day to artillery fire, an unsustainable figure, and all of them highly trained—that is to say, irreplaceable—sappers. And the reason why? Because, sir, the parallels are excessively wide, and they are insufficiently deep, giving the enemy all the more to aim at. The losses are intolerable.”

  Verboom’s attempts at protest fell on deaf ears.

  “I could go on,” said Dupuy, “endlessly, in fact, as to the malign subversions contained in these plans. To top it off, the very height of ridiculousness, the cuts between the third parallel and the ‘gentlemen’ beneath Saint Clara are so long, it’s as though they’ve been designed expressly to invite a sortie against their flanks. You, sir, have created a trench that is akin to the Lord God creating man with the neck of a giraffe, so long and thin that the tiniest nick will mean decapitation.” He threw the documents across the floor. “Sir! If you are the author of this trench, it can mean one of only two things: One, you are a negligent hotspur undeserving of the title of engineer, a man who, by some strange twist of fate, is in over his head. Or, even more criminal, if you are the author of this trench, then you are an enemy of the Two Crowns and in service of the archduke. You choose.”

  Verboom gave Jimmy a pleading look. In such cases, Jimmy’s answer was to open his ruthless eyes very wide, not move his body, and let an ominous little smile spread across his lips. A smile, as I can say from experience, that would have made Genghis Khan turn pale. Instead of speaking, he said nothing, giving the floor to his victim to deliver an impossible justification.

  “Perhaps . . .” stuttered Verboom, livid, cornered, “ . . . perhaps some imposter has meddled with the design!”

  “Ho!” said Jimmy, applauding. “Now I’ve heard it all. The kidnapper was kidnapped!” Jimmy could spit words like icicles when he chose to: “Out of my sight now, dullard.”

  In private, Jimmy and Dupuy were quite informal with each other. All hierarchy was forgotten.

  “He’ll be hanged, then?” asked Dupuy.

  “No,” said Jimmy, casting his gaze out over the embers of the battle. “Philip has already poured twenty million into this siege. Having his chief engineer killed would be too much. But—and you have my word on this—that man will never cross the Pyrenees again. He’ll have to make do serving the maniac they’ve put on the throne in Madrid. Torment enough.”

  Words that condemned Verboom. Jimmy himself didn’t know the extremes of cruelty his sentence would lead to. Thus, the Antwerp butcher, who had always sought to be beloved of his superiors and adored by the soldiery, spent the rest of his days miserably seeking the protection of a mad king against the rank and file, who thought of engineers as bricklayers and meddlers. This was his reward. Well, also, I later went after him and killed him—oh, I’ve already said?

  Dupuy looked over Verboom’s (my) plans, smiling and shaking his head.

  “What are you smiling at?” said Jimmy scaldingly. “We’ve had a hiding, and you look as though you couldn’t be happier.”

  Still looking at the paper, Dupuy said: “He was educated by my cousin. What did you expect?”

  Jimmy exploded. “I expected that you would alter all the stunts hidden in that trench!”

  “And I would have,” said Dupuy, “if you’d given me time. In that, Verboom was right: A little self-restraint wouldn’t have
gone amiss in you. But Martí knew that was the one thing you’d lack, that you’d want a swift victory. Again Vauban trumps Coehoorn. And now we have only two options: Either we suspend the trench works, accepting that defeat as well, or we push on and correct the errors that have been made. And you know very well the lives that will cost.” Again he tossed down the plans. “This is no trench, it’s a labyrinth.”

  “No,” said Jimmy, giving voice to his thoughts. “It’s a knot.”

  13

  Jimmy elected to take an ax to it, like the Gordian knot it was. This was Jimmy to a T. He’d been overhasty in unleashing the assault, spurred on both by his Coehoornian spirit and by political expedience. But he was prepared to rectify the situation. Vauban? Coehoorn? In this instance, he was going to follow neither.

  He lined up over a hundred cannons to crush any and every stone that lay in his way. His idea, doing away with any semblance of the art of siege warfare, consisted of flattening what was left of Barcelona’s ramparts and bastions, paving the way for the Army of the Two Crowns to march in in battle formation, as in a battle in open country. It would take longer than the initial forecast, but did Jimmy mind that? He had all the time in the world. Saint Clara prompted him to renounce his designs on the throne of England. His place was in London, vying to be king, and yet here he was, his future in ruins because of a city that refused to play along.

  There was nothing to be done in the face of such an onslaught; the principles of engineering became meaningless. It was the first time I saw Costa, our stoical parsley-chewing chief of artillery, lose hope. We ran into each other one day, and hunkering down as the walls detonated around us, he grabbed hold of my sleeve, imploring and accusatory, and bellowed in my ear: “I swore I’d hold them off as long as we were three against five. Now they’ve got nine cannons to every one of ours! For the love of God, what more do you want from us?”

  I extricated myself without giving an answer. The Mallorcans carried on working miracles to the end. They’d fire their mortars and, before the enemy had time to pinpoint where the shots were coming from, change position before taking aim once more. They destroyed several Bourbon cannons daily. The shells would go off on the French and Spanish gunners’ toes, making a hash of their bodies and lifting the cannons themselves to Babelian heights.

  How grand, how majestic a sight: that of heavy artillery tossed in the air! We saw ten-foot iron or bronze barrels twirl through the sky, along with their crews. We saw parabolas of gun carriages lovelier than Jacob’s wheel. Up on his balcony, watching with his telescope, being the aesthete he was, Jimmy couldn’t have cared less whether they came to land on the broken-down farmhouses of Catalonia, or if they ended up lodged in the sun over France.

  And yet, and yet, in the end the skill of the Mallorcans would all be for naught. The Bourbons had inexhaustible resources, of machinery as much as of men. Whereas every one of the Mallorcan gunners we lost was irreplaceable. They were peculiar folk, the Mallorcans, and never said a single word about their dead.

  Jimmy resorting to that firestorm took the situation one step closer to the absurd. The siege was no longer a duel between thinking minds but, rather, a steady stream of devastation. I received the order from Don Antonio to withdraw from the front line, and he was quite right: The enemy’s new strategy rendered any technical course of action useless. We had gone beyond the civilized and rational. “Perfection can be reached only by going beyond the merely human dimension,” Don Antonio had said. Certainly Jimmy’s approach, all powerful and at the same time atavistic, destructive, and simply berserk, was dragging the situation beyond all limits. And here is a thing worthy of note: On the first day I was away from the point of attack, I felt a sickness settle on me, as though I were in need of the pain that had been racking me.

  So, being of no use to those battered ramparts, I moved back inside the city. We hadn’t checked in on the enemy’s mining endeavors for a long time. I’d always had a strong dislike for mines. Vauban had no truck with them, and whether we want to or not, we take on the likes and dislikes of our teachers. The marquis saw mines as decoys and therefore ungentlemanly. According to him, the enemy must be beaten head-on; underhand tactics were not acceptable. On top of which, to a mind as supremely rational as his, a moyen si incertain was intolerable.

  Mines have their fair share of proponents. Should the besieging army succeed in drilling a tunnel underneath the enemy walls and packing it with explosives, the battlements will fall—by surprise, and avoiding all risks. The hardships usually associated with a siege, over in an instant. And in a thundering, apocalyptic manner—not subject to appeal. I’ve known Maganons who dreamed of packing fifty thousand pounds of explosives into a mine. Proof that even the most exact science can go overboard; were they looking to blow the walls or the entire city, or what?

  You can understand the fervor of those who argue for mines. A mine is employed with the certainty of saving time and lives. In practice, and according to what I’ve seen, this is never the case. Drilling a subterranean tunnel consumes all manner of resources, and without fail, some of those must be taken from the Attack Trench works; in an effort to save time, you only cause delays. Then there is the fact that the besieged will take their own measures. As Vauban put it: on the road to glory, there are no shortcuts.

  There was one other reason why Longlegs Zuvi loathed mines. That reason being, of all the ways humans have devised to end one another’s lives, there are none more sinister or terrifying than underground combat.

  You’d smell miners before you saw them. They spent such long periods underground that their skin gave off a warm stench; you didn’t need your senses honed in Bazoches to detect them. They were known as Los Cucs—The Worms. What was their brigade leader called? Buggered if I can recall.

  Los Cucs hadn’t had much success. We knew the enemy was working on a large mine and that it was aiming between Saint Clara and Portal Nou. Knowing Jimmy, if they did reach their destination, the explosion would make that of the night of August 15 seem like a tiny spark off a flint. I asked to be brought up to speed by the captain of Los Cucs. What was his name? Strange, the things we forget. His men looked haggard and hollow-eyed, and to be presented with reinforcements was a great lift to them.

  The objective of countermines is to identify the position of the enemy mine and disable it. Underground labyrinth warfare, this, with far more recourse to fire, smoke, and daggers than rifles and bullets. Los Cucs had initiated several tunnels but not yet managed to hit the Bourbon’s primary gallery.

  “Don’t you worry about digging any more galleries,” the captain said to me. “Going and sounding out the walls will be more than sufficient. If you find something, you come and let us know. We’ll see to the rest.”

  Men with experience have always commanded my respect—far more than the bookish kind. I nodded and went and spoke with Ballester and his men.

  “You come behind me,” I said. “Every man is to bring one grenade, a dagger, and two loaded pistols, that’s all.”

  The entrance to our mine was located inside a house that had been blown up, just inside the city walls, the idea being to avoid the prying eyes of any Bourbon spies. The captain of Los Cucs—I simply cannot recall that man’s name—had readied some equipment for us. Very valuable material, and we would need to take care of it. Ignorant Ballester laughed when he saw it. “You’re going down there with eight canes and . . . what are those? Plates? Four plates with holes in the middle?”

  “These aren’t canes and plates,” I said, not looking at him. “These are sounding lines, and these are plugs. And extremely valuable they are too.”

  Down in the narrow confines of the mine, silence was essential. Before descending, I gathered Ballester’s men and tried to teach them the rudiments of the sign language of engineers. I could not. I was so afraid that my fingers trembled, and I had to give up on the idea. Very embarrassing. The men, in a circle, regarded me, expecting some kind of instruction that would enable them
to face whatever inferno we were about to go down into. I was their most direct line of authority; I was supposed to be showing them the way to return to the world of the living. I looked at that vertical black shaft, and my mind was filled with all the things we might encounter down there: a trench, but mazelike, and beneath the earth, with all kinds of nooks and crannies. And Bourbons who would show no mercy, infinitely more numerous and experienced in underground combat than we were. And even perhaps fifty thousand pounds of gunpowder, ready to go up the very moment we reached the chamber. The thought of it made me shudder violently.

  After that time, never have I set foot in a mine or a countermine again. Once, in the Barcelona of 1714, was enough. And that time, in front of those manly Miquelets, I wept like a child. But would you like to guess what happened?

  The Miquelets were incredibly good about it. And it wasn’t mere tolerance for my bleak view of things—sincerity was far more important to them than any authority. They thought I was afraid because I didn’t trust them, and they responded like remorseful children.

  “Captain Ballester and I will go first,” I said, feigning enthusiasm. “Then the rest of you. Got it?”

  Down we went. A ladder, which, to save wood, had been made with fewer rungs than it needed, led us down into the gallery.

  All the manuals say that the primary tunnel ought to be wide enough for two miners to move along side by side: one carrying the tools, the other a lamp and a pistol, lighting the way and protecting the other if need be. Manuals! A lot of help they are! The tunnel was so narrow, it pressed against your shoulders. Ballester had to walk behind, with me carrying the tools and the lamp. We shuffled along forty or fifty feet. Feeling stifled, struggling to breathe as if on the gallows once more, I halted.