Victus

by Albert Sanchez Pinol

  To give you an idea of my distress, I shall describe to you the entire roster of the Fifth Battalion.

  First company: attorneys-at-law. (And they didn’t even know how to take care of my case! How could we expect them to fire a rifle or man a bastion?)

  Second company: blacksmiths and tinkers.

  Third company: market gardeners.

  Fourth company: potters, upholsterers, and makers of pots and pans. (At least these latter are easier to understand: When the hunger sets in, there will be empty pots and pans aplenty.)

  Fifth company: belt-makers.

  Sixth company: butchers. (Another group who’ll be out of work before long.)

  Seventh company: cobblers.

  Eighth company: silk weavers and dyers.

  Ninth company: students of theology, medicine, and philosophy. (A fine graduation awaits them.)

  And with this, we had to face dragoons and grenadiers trained through experience in a thousand battles: with companies of coopers, innkeepers, and velvet-makers; booksellers, glovers, rope-makers, grooms, tailors, stevedores, legal clerks. As I recall, the Sixth Battalion had an entire company made up of people who resold things. Yes, you read that right, they weren’t people who sold things; they resold them. What could they have been thinking when they signed them up? Reselling to the quartermaster the bullets that had been used by the enemy?

  The total came to fewer than six thousand armed men. Fewer than six thousand against forty thousand. Some of those forty thousand were tied up trying to hold back our Miquelets from the interior, but even if there were only thirty thousand, the math didn’t lie: As far as troops were concerned, for each defender of Barcelona, there were five Bourbons. To complicate matters still further, our problems began before the siege had even been formalized.

  The only scenario in which the running of a military dictatorship is permissible, indeed necessary, is in a city under siege. It isn’t a matter of politics but common sense. Because the worst position for a military stronghold is trying to face an attack while under a split command. And that was precisely what happened to us.

  Villarroel was supposed to be the commander in chief of all the pro-Austrian troops remaining in Spain. But as I have already explained, the problem was that the vast majority of the soldiers belonged to the Barcelonan militia, under the control of the council. Furthermore, Don Antonio always bore the burden of having been named commander in chief by the Catalan government, who considered him a general there to do their bidding. Villarroel insisted that his position be ratified by Vienna, which finally happened in November 1713. But this only made matters worse, because according to the terms of the Treatise of Evacuation between the Two Crowns and the Allies, imperial troops were not allowed to remain in Spain. The Red Pelts considered him a foreign subordinate; to the enemy, he was a rebellious Castilian.

  The Red Pelts always guarded their prerogatives very jealously, and Don Antonio had to ask their permission if he even wanted to transfer the company of the Impedits, made up of former soldiers who had lost limbs. Going to war with people missing an arm or half a leg might seem a little absurd, but I can assure you, they were tremendously useful fellows. They had experience and extremely high morale. I remember one of them, with one leg that went down only as far as the calf of the other, raising his crutch as Don Antonio walked past, exclaiming: “General! I shall not retreat, I give you my word!”

  During a siege, garrison work is a terrible drain on troops. Even if a system of rotation is used on the bastions, tiredness, bombardments, and sickness lead to a trickle of losses that we couldn’t allow to happen. The Impedits would be useful covering bastions and stretches of walls that were not under the most severe threat, allowing those being relieved a bit of rest.

  There were disgraceful scenes. Don Antonio in a council of war with the Red Pelts, screaming his head off—flushed with rage—demanding, protesting, that they allow him a hundred men? Even fifty? Pitiful. A commander in chief being denied the right to move a handful of cripples. All we needed at that point was for Villarroel’s aide-de-camp to be one Martí Zuviría, a fellow universally known for his diplomacy. More than once—and more than twice—I nearly smashed in some councilor’s spectacles. It was infuriating. More than infuriating, because in certain situations, stupidity can come to resemble pure treason.

  Let us recall that when it all began, in that ominous summer of 1713, the enemy was approaching Barcelona at a forced march. The Allies’ garrisons were handing the keys to our cities to the killer. Deceived, disconcerted, with no authority giving them orders and all taken completely by surprise, it had never occurred to the Miquelets scattered around the countryside that such a stab in the back was possible. They came down from the mountains and, from one day to the next, found friendly sites occupied by Bourbon troops. There was nothing they could do but remain on the horizon watching the fires, the looting, the executions. The final uproar.

  In those circumstances, some drastic decisions were essential: extending the Crida right across the country, proclaiming the legitimacy of Barcelona’s government, and bringing together disparate fighters under a single banner. They had to prevent more towns and cities from falling into Bourbon hands. And for this, it was inescapable, desperately urgent, to show some symbol that would unite those who were longing for a voice to lead them. Villarroel ordered a military delegate to leave the city immediately with the silver mace and the banner of Saint Eulalia and travel across the country proclaiming that the struggle was not over.

  “Take the sacred banner of Saint Eulalia beyond the Barcelona walls?” The Red Pelts were not sure. “That is most unusual. This will require a debate first.”

  They weren’t joking! Solemnly, they gathered in council. Was it fair and fitting within the law and tradition that the sacred banner should be taken outside Barcelona’s walls? What honorable escort would accompany it? As for the few noblemen who were still in the city, were their titles sufficiently worthy for them to carry the pole and its braids? The debate stretched on; it was resumed the following day and then the next, and the next, without arriving at a definitive legal conclusion. Villarroel was absolutely incensed. By the time they had decided, the enemy would have taken control of all of Catalonia, with the exception of Barcelona and a few isolated sites like Cardona, those places where the most determined native commanders had refused to comply with the imperial orders.

  Let us now examine the fortifications of Barcelona, which so often used to make me turn away, unwilling to judge them so as not to relive my past as a student in Bazoches.

  The first order Villarroel gave me, his first commission, was to produce a report on the general condition of the defenses. I obeyed. I walked around the whole site. I cried. And when I say that, I am not, to my shame, speaking rhetorically.

  As well as being an engineer, I happened also to be a Barcelonan. And when you examine the walls of your own city, knowing with certainty that they are going to be attacked by armed men ready to burn down your house, kill your children, and rape your wife, you see things somewhat differently. According to le Mystère, I ought not to feel emotion. A Maganon without a cool head is not a Maganon or anything at all. To justify my dismay, however, I should tell you that what I found was a complete and utter disaster.

  Comparisons can be useful. Look at the next illustration. Put it in the place where it’s supposed to go, or you can forget that you and I ever met, you fat old magpie.

  If by any chance, destiny had seen good old Zuvi commissioned to fortify Barcelona, this would have been the optimal result.

  As you can see, the city walls and the inner bastions are protected by a series of staggered half-moons or ravelins, perfectly arranged and three meters deep. Each one would have to be taken in separate attacks, without this ever affecting the main line of defense. By the time Jimmy managed to reach our final redoubt, the number of his dead would form such a tall mountain that the top ones could be buried on the moon. In fact, and following Vauban to t
he letter, the very existence of such fortifications would discourage any assault. Jimmy was a sly fox and would have graciously declined the honor of leading a siege of such complexity. And if not Jimmy, who else could vanquish us?

  Now compare the previous plate with the sad reality, on the following page.

  Devastating. Incongruous. Dislocated jaws, a heap of shapeless lumps. Or, as Vauban would have defined it technically, more circumspectly, a “composite fortress”; that is, an ancient site that has been patched up to meet the demands of modern warfare.

  The old city walls had been supplemented with a few pentagonal bastions. There was no small number of them, and each had its own name, its own story; in themselves, they were real characters who were dear to the Barcelonans. But all those bastions had been built in different periods, with no overall plan and as though merely patched up. A few stretches of the wall were so long that the gunfire from one bastion could not serve as backup for the next, being too far apart. As for the dry moat that had to stretch around the outside of the fortifications, the less said about that, the better. It was so full of waste and debris, and so shallow, that you could see the ears of the pigs that grazed in it. A bankrupt government would find it hard to allow for whole squads of cleaners. The sieges at the end and beginning of the century had damned whole stretches of the perimeter. Amazing as it may sound, nobody had bothered to repair the holes. That is the position we found ourselves in. And now we had the barbarians ad portas. A devastating military machine, ignited by a hatred toward the “rebels” and trained through their experience in a long decade of campaigns. In under two weeks, they would be pitching camp outside Barcelona.

  One might want to formulate this entirely legitimate question: If war came to the peninsula in 1705, and between that date and 1713 there were eight long years to fortify the city, how was it possible that the Catalans, who had their own government, never took care of the defenses of their city? This is one of my private torments, an argument that fills my nightmares and the distress of my wakeful hours. What could have happened? You should never have recourse to an “if . . . ”; that “what if . . . ?” can kill. Because the answer, curiously, is neither political nor military. It doesn’t even have anything to do with matters of engineering.

  Vauban was indeed the greatest military engineer of all time. But he was also French. In his study, using only ink and paper, he could create fascinating systems of defense, optimal and perfect, overwhelming in their geometric beauty. There was one problem with Vauban’s system of fortification and one only: It cost a lot of money.

  Human imagination can develop at no cost, right up until the point at which it comes into contact with contractors. Tons of material, thousands of stonecutters, carpenters, and laborers, dozens of local specialists—or, more frequently, foreign ones, charging astronomical fees. Suppliers cheat, swindle, and defraud the government’s finances. The work drags on, the budget increases by a factor of three or four. And once the work has begun, how can it be suspended? A site that has been half-fortified is more useless than a half-built cathedral. You can praise God in a potato patch, but you cannot defend the city until the very last échauguette has been erected, humbly proud, on the point of the bastions. Even the most slow-witted of vegetable sellers understands that a wall needs to be closed up. Progress on a wall is in plain view of everybody, which puts considerable pressure on those in charge. They resign themselves to corruption. Opportunist agents in league with the technicians, the former supplying inadequate shipments and the latter signing for the receipt in exchange for an illegal “commission.” Money, always money. Themistocles was already saying as much: War is not a matter of weaponry but of money—whoever is the last person holding a coin. (All right, maybe it wasn’t Themistocles, it might have been Pericles, I don’t remember, but really, what difference does it make? Put any name you like to that quote. Anyone but Voltaire!)

  There was another significant reason for this utter defenselessness. In 1705 there was every indication that the war would be over in a matter of months. After their troops had landed at Barcelona, the Allies would advance on Madrid, they’d depose Little Philip, and Charles would become the king of all Spain. Castile would learn, at last, that it was not the cock of the walk, and the Catalans would make Spain a confederate kingdom, modern and prosperous, with an English parliament, a Dutch fleet, and a bourgeoisie competent to hold the reins of the finances. But it didn’t happen like that. The war dragged on. Charles, from his base in Barcelona, asked for more and more loans from the Catalan authorities to defray the costs of his multinational army. Wars are won in attack, not in defense, and the government gave in. The ultimate result of this was the drama of 1713 and 1714.

  I did my calculations that very night. An unusual calm reigned at home. Nan and Anfán were playing together, strangely pacific, next to the fireplace, in which we were roasting peppers and green tomatoes. Next to them, in a rocking chair, Peret was reading by the light of the fire. He had never learned to read in his head, and he was muttering aloud like a monk. They were lines of verse by Romaguera, and they were shockingly bad, and they seemed worse given our situation. Perhaps that is why I remember them.

  She envies you, the butterfly,

  For being happy so,

  For her love’s destined soon to die

  While yours can live and grow . . .

  Amelis was more affectionate than usual. She wanted to set aside the calculation tables, the paper and inkwell, and take me to bed. I brushed her away with a burning feeling under my skin. They hadn’t realized what was awaiting us; they didn’t want to, as though ignoring the future might make it disappear.

  According to my most optimistic calculations, the city would be able to resist exactly eight days of actual siege conditions. Not a day longer. And after that, blackness.

  12

  The weeks immediately preceding the arrival of the Bourbon army were very useful ones. The Coronela companies paraded up and down the Ramblas—more than anything, to raise the people’s morale—and did shooting practice. The conscripts took it all as a terrifically fun exercise, revelry that was hardly military at all. They got hold of two large dolls of semi-human shape, filled with straw, behind which they erected a three-meter-high wooden barricade. They called one of them Lluís and the other Filipet, Bourbon scum. Every day a hundred rifles would shoot at them ten times. Without that much success, if I’m honest. To the question of how accurate they were, all I need to tell you is that the surrounding windows were boarded up.

  It is impossible in such a short space of time to transform companies of tinsmiths and tanners into professional units. That was not the aim. The bonds that hold men together are much more important than the quality of their marksmanship. And that camaraderie, in turn, has to be knitted together with confidence in the officers. In this regard, Don Antonio was unique. Nowadays an insurgent France is scattering an endless supply of revolutionary generals right across the world; from one day to the next, they have gone from wearing a tavern apron to a marshal’s sash. But in my day, the senior officers were quite different. In my ninety-eight years, I have encountered dozens of colonels and generals who knew nothing of their regiments but the color of their coats.

  Don Antonio was a real soldier, a man of battle and trench. His love for the army came from his family. In fact, Don Antonio having been born in Barcelona was an accident, as I’ve told you, since around that time, his father was posted in the city. I’m telling you: a man with a destiny. Because to the Red Pelts, he never stopped being Castilian and, as such, an intruder, while the Bourbons did not even recognize his status as Catalan. Years later, Jimmy showed me a copy of the list of the main players to be arrested once the city had fallen. (He did it to persuade me that he’d had nothing to do with the repression, as they had been detained after he left Barcelona. He was lying. If he didn’t give the order, neither did he prevent it, well aware of what would happen.) By Don Antonio’s name, they had not written “Castilian�
� but, very significantly, “not Catalan.”

  The thing was, Villarroel quickly realized that this army was not like other armies. The Coronela was a collection of armed civilians, and the usual conventions could not be applied to them. He would get much further with encouragement than with strict discipline.

  I’ve never seen a commander in chief who spent so much time among his troops. He would show up all of a sudden and unannounced at some post or other on the walls, then another, then another. He was in the habit of calling the soldiers “my boys,” which they loved. On one occasion when most of the armed citizens surrounding him were his own age or older, he corrected himself in the middle of his sentence: “My boys—I mean, sorry, I meant to say, my brothers . . . ”

  The soldiers burst out laughing. And the old codgers among them were allowed to pat him affectionately on the back! In any other army, that would have cost you fifty lashes.

  This would have been all well and good were it not for the fact that, since I was so young, in public he would call me fillet. That is, “son.” It must have been the only Catalan word he ever learned, the stubborn old thing. What’s more, he pronounced it wrong, which I think he did on purpose, because instead of fillet, he would pronounce it fiyé, emphasizing his Castilian accent, which the soldiers found hilarious.

  Decades later, I served under that Prussian, Frederick. And—my God—the difference between Barcelona’s conscripts and the regiments of Prussia! To Frederick, a soldier was less than a dog. Much less! I can assure you—and this is no exaggeration—that any German soldier would have jumped for joy to be treated like a dog. Just one detail: When the Prussian regiments were on the move, in order to prevent desertions, the soldiers were forbidden from getting more than six meters away from the formation; this was surrounded by horsemen armed with carbines, with orders to shoot to kill. Can you imagine the Prussian tyrant addressing a soldier as “my brother”? Please! That was the difference, the big difference, between our army and any other. Don Antonio was a real military man, but he was able to see the nub of the truth: that the Coronela was made up of free men defending their freedom, and you cannot lead men like that by watering down the principles that drive them.