Aztec Rage

by Gary Jennings

  Instead of frightening the people of Spain into submission, when news of the atrocities swept over the nation, a spirit of defiance rose. The dates themselves—dos de mayo and tres de mayo—became rallying cries of resistance. Across the nation, in cities, towns, and villages, the common people of Spain faced the invaders not as a population intimidated by the French troops but as citizen-warriors ready to fight and die for their country.

  Like everyone else in the city, María had heard of the atrocities committed by the French not only in Madrid but throughout Spain as the people rose against the invaders. French soldiers attacked homes, churches, and convents, torturing and murdering the occupants for their valuables and raping the women. Cities that tried to close their gates were attacked and ravaged. French generals loaded onto their personal transport the national treasures of the Spanish nation and its great cathedrals.

  While the stories frightened her, they also fueled her anger and determination. And the presence of the violent invaders had unleashed something else in her as it had in most of the common people of the country: a fiery passion to drive out the enemy.

  Coming out of the gate, an unseasonable north wind, El Cierzo, bit at her exposed hands and face. She put down her head and crouched low to get to the artillery battery where her lover was stationed. As she approached the unit, she stopped and gasped. The battery was silent. Her lover was on the ground, dead. The entire crew that manned the cannon were either dead or stricken with serious wounds.

  She dropped the provisions and ran to her lover. As she did, musket shots sang past her ears. With the artillery battery silenced, a column of French troops advanced on the exposed gate, firing in the traditional one-two-three order as they advanced. The outgunned Spanish troops and irregulars kept their heads down.

  One of her lover’s comrades on the gun crew, unable to talk because of his wounds, gestured at the “match” used to fire the cannon. The piece of metal with a wood tip was lying on the ground next to him. María grabbed the match and lit the end of it in a coal brazier kept glowing for that purpose. With musket balls smacking the ground around her, she ran for the cannon and put the match to the powder charge.

  The cannon was primed with powder and loaded with iron horseshoe nails. When it fired, a lethal hail of the nails cut down the advancing column, lined up twenty men wide and forty deep, like a scythe. The shrapnel had blown a big hole in the ranks of the French column, The cannon had annihilated much of the front of the column, killing or wounding ten deep. By the grace of God and Lady Luck, it had been a perfect shot that mowed down the French ranks.

  The noise, concussion, and buck of the cannon as it rocked back knocked María off her feet. She got off the ground and to her feet as the smoke cleared. In a daze, hardly conscious of what she was doing, she picked up a heavy musket. She didn’t know how to load one or even if the one she grabbed was loaded.

  “We have to fight!” she yelled at the Spanish soldiers who had been hiding their heads. She stepped forward, advancing alone toward the French column. All around her, Spanish soldiers stood up and followed her lead.

  “You’re telling me that a young woman rallied the men at the Portillo Gate and led the fight that saved the city?”

  General Palafox, commander of the Spanish troops and irregulars who were defending Zaragoza, stared at his adjutant.

  “It was a miracle,” the aide said. “God willed it.”

  “Another miracle,” Palafox muttered. “The city is a place of miracles, not the least of which is that the French haven’t managed to take the city and kill us all.”

  He had been met with the news as he came out of church. Now he walked away from the church, his aide keeping step with him.

  “I wish I could leave the defense of the city to God,” he grumbled at his aide, “but I’ve learned that God expects us to fight our own battles.”

  Palafox had been wounded and unhorsed in an earlier fight against the French when he tried to stop them in an open battle as they advanced on the city. But he was a man of indomitable spirit and took up the defense of the city despite his wound. He was one of a small group of Spanish generals in the nation who had put together makeshift armies to face the invaders. He cringed at the thought of the regular army troops of Madrid who had stood by and let the French butcher people. Outnumbered a dozen to one, they were under orders to stand down, but they never should have permitted French troops to kill civilians.

  Leaders who failed to resist the invaders were no longer in command. All over Spain, the people had risen up and deposed—or killed—leaders who were too timid with the French or who sided with them.

  Prior to Spain, Napoleon had pitted his troops against the professional armies of other monarchs and characterized the wars as a crusade to spread the gospel of revolution. In Spain, they encountered mass resistance from the very people Napoleon claimed they were “liberating.”

  Few Spanish career officers of high rank had joined the people’s war against the invaders. Most of the regular troops that fought the French were the junior officers and common soldiers. The insurgents had drafted Palafox himself when they rose up in fury after the royal family had abandoned Spain. To combat the French, the common people of Zaragoza—mostly students, small merchants, and the working classes—had thrown out the city’s administrators. The upper classes had accommodated the invaders, in exchange for which they were allowed to keep their wealth, power, and privileged positions.

  Two other miracles also occurred before the Portillo Gate incident: one nearly two thousand years before. The city’s name of Zaragoza derived from a corruption of its Roman name, Caesar Augusta. Not long after the Crucifixion—at a time when the Roman Empire was at its glory and Christianity was at its lowest ebb—the Apostle James had a vision in Zaragoza of the Virgin Mary descending from the heavens. She stood on a marble pillar. She disappeared when the pillar touched the ground, but the pillar remained.

  The pillar was now enthroned in the city’s main cathedral, the Basílica de Nuestra Señora del Pilar—Church of Our Lady of the Pillar. The people commonly referred to the church simply as “the Pilar.”

  The second miracle had occurred shortly before the French besieged the city. During a daytime mass at the Pilar, people claimed that a “royal crown” appeared. Palafox had not been present, but some people told him that the vision materialized out of a cloud above the cathedral, while others said it appeared above the altar. In any event, the vision had a profound effect on the city. Rebels and anti-Bonaparte clergy said that the crown was a sign from God that He supported Ferdinand for the crown of Spain. Some people even claimed that the crown bore an inscription that read: “God Supports Ferdinand.”

  Insurgents went into the streets, attacking the military governor’s residence, taking him hostage and seizing the castle of Aljaféria, which contained a supply of arms. The demonstration of anti-French, national unity ended at the house of Palafox with a demand that he take charge of the defense of the city.

  As Palafox had listened to the news that the heroics of a young woman had stopped the French at the Portillo Gate, a surge of pride shot through him. But he knew that stopping the French here and there was not enough to save the city. If they didn’t breach that gate, with their professionally trained and equipped troops and artillery, they would soon breach the city’s defenses somewhere else.

  As he entered his headquarters, a panicked messenger rushed in with news that the French army, after pounding the city unmercifully with forty-six cannons, had broken through at the Carmen Gate and was pouring into the town. Praying for another miracle, he went to the battle front to rally the defenders. The defenders resisted, making the French pay dearly for every foot they advanced.

  Over the next days, the battle for the city was fought street to street, building to building. Day after day, the street battles were ferocious. Every house had to be taken, often with the family who lived there fighting to the last, with women and children joining the fight along
side the raw recruits that composed most of General Palafox’s army.

  Palafox’s frustrations at defending a large city against Napoleon’s well-trained troops with his ill-equipped, poorly trained volunteers were legion. He had put together a defense with superhuman effort. That their foe had brought most of Europe to its knees was psychologically intimidating.

  Immediately after the siege had begun, Lefebvre-Desnouettes, a French general, had attacked and taken Monte Torrero. By deploying his batteries on that commanding height, Lefebvre-Desnouettes could rain shot and shell on the city. Palafox was so enraged by the failure of his Monte Torrero commander, he had the man hanged in Zaragoza’s public square.

  When nearly half of the city was taken after the breach at the Carmen Gate, the French general, Verdier, who had assumed command of the siege, sent a messenger under a flag of truce of General Palafox, bearing one word: surrender. Palafox stared at the word scribbled on a piece of paper. Taking a quill and ink, he scribbled his reply: Guerra a cuchillo.

  When General Verdier read Palafox’s reply, he shook his head and asked the messenger, “What does he mean, ‘war to the knife’?”

  “No surrender,” the messenger said. “No quarter asked or given. The fight will be to the death.”

  Once more the fighting erupted, with the people of Zaragoza attacking the French literally en masse. No quarter was shown, and blood ran in the streets. Men, women, and even children cried “Viva María del Pilar!” as they charged the French musket-and-cannon fire or threw stones and hot water from upstairs windows and rooftops. They were urged on by priests who often led counterattacks. The French cried “Vive l’empereur!” to proclaim the omnipotence of their emperor.

  Finally, exhausted, dispirited, awed at the bravery of city people who fought them to the knife, the French withdrew. Verdier, angry at the defeat, bombarded the city ruthlessly with the last of his artillery munitions before he left.

  French General Lannes wrote Napoleon: “The siege of Zaragoza in no way resembles the type of war that we have waged in Europe until now. It is a craft for which we need great prudence and great strength. We are obliged to take one house at a time. The poor people defend themselves there with a desperate eagerness that one cannot imagine. Sire, it is a horrific war . . .”

  LORD BYRON’S ODE TO THE MAID OF ZARAGOZA

  LORD BYRON WAS in Spain during part of the Spanish war against the French. After he heard the story of how María Agustine had saved the city by leading an impromptu attack after she found her lover dead, he wrote of María, “the Maid of Zaragoza,” in his autobiographical poem, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage:

  Ye who shall marvel when you hear her tale,

  Oh! had you known her in her softer hour,

  Mark’d her black eye that mocks her coal-black veil,

  Hear her light, lively tones in Lady’s bower,

  Seen her long locks that foil the painter’s power,

  Her fairy form, with more than female grace,

  Scarce would you deem that Zaragoza’s tower

  Beheld her smile in Danger’s Gorgon face,

  Thin the closed ranks, and lead in Glory’s fearful chase.

  Her lover sinks—she sheds no ill-timed tear;

  Her chief is slain—she fills his fatal post;

  Her fellows flee—she checks their base career;

  The foe retires—she heads the sallying host:

  Who can appease like her a lover’s ghost?

  Who can avenge so well a leader’s fall?

  What maid retrieve when man’s flush’d hope is lost?

  Who hang so fiercely on the flying Gaul,

  Foil’d by a woman’s hand, before a batter’d wall?

  Yet are Spain’s maids no race of Amazons,

  But form’d for all the witching arts of love . . .

  FIFTY-FIVE

  Andalusia, Southern Spain, December 1808

  IN THE RUGGED Sierra Nevada mountain region of Andalusia, in Spain’s southern region, a priest paused along a road to pray. Before him, from a low-hanging bough the French had hung an entire family—a man, woman, and their two teenage sons—in retaliation for the killing of a French courier. Napoleon’s troops had not hanged the family because they attacked the courier but because they were . . . available. The French forces retaliated against such targets of convenience with routine ruthlessness.

  Seven months after Dos de mayo, the battle for Spain had become a war of attrition, with death and retribution on both sides the order of the day. In Pamplona, the French summarily shot three Spanish patriots who they discovered had been secretly making weapons in a church, hanging their bodies where the town’s people would have to see them. The next morning, the French commander found three of his men hanging with a sign notifying him: YOU HANG OURS; WE HANG YOURS.

  Not to be outdone, the commander hanged fifteen priests.

  And so it went: war to the knife.

  After praying for the family, the priest moved on. He didn’t cut the bodies down and bury them, because the French would find another family to replace them in the tree if he had.

  A few hours later he joined a guerrilla group hiding in the high rocks above a mountain pass. The men and women awaiting him were common people: peasants, small farmers, and village clerks. Now they were a military unit, an unorthodox one that no officer educated at a war college would have recognized.

  Nearly the end of 1808, much had happened in the months following Madrid’s dos de mayo uprising. Napoleon had declared his brother, Joseph Bonaparte, king, but Joseph fled weeks later after the French army suffered battlefield and siege reversals from one end of Spain to the other. In Catalonia, Andalusia, Navarre, Valencia, Aragón, Castile, León and everywhere else in Spain, the Spanish forces had beaten the French back, forced them to hide behind fortress walls or to flee back to France. Both sides had perpetrated horrors, but the French were the invaders, bloodying the soil of another people, allies whom they’d betrayed.

  Under names like partides, guerrillas, somatenes, and corso terretres—land pirates—the Spanish waged a war to the death with Napoleon’s armies. Outmanned and outgunned by the well-armed enemy troops, the guerrillas avoided open battle. Instead they hid behind rocks, crouched in gullies, and lay in wait in thick foliage. They practiced ambush, assassination, sabotage, hit-and-run. When the enemy least expected it, they annihilated smaller units or inflicted hit-and-run damage on large ones. As soon as their ammunition or advantage ran out, they melted back into their hiding areas to await the next set of French troops.

  Their tactics terrorized the French military, who had never faced “ghost brigades.” The French generals had forgotten the lessons of their own revolution less than twenty years earlier, when the citizens of Paris stormed Versailles and the Bastille.

  Early in the afternoon, the target of the priest’s group—a French military unit—came down the mountain. They expected a French courier escorted by thirty dragoons. Instead the unit was much larger: about two hundred hussars. The hussars were light, fast-moving cavalry. The dragoons were slower and more heavily armed.

  The priest studied the hussars through a spyglass. He had nearly three hundred guerrillas, but they were untrained soldiers and poorly armed, lacking everything but courage. He was their commanding officer, but seven months earlier he had been their parish priest. The French had come to his town, robbed his church of its silver and gold icons, fed their horses at his altar, raped women, and killed every father, brother, and husband who objected.

  The priest had once baptized their children and forgave their sins. Now their kill rate was more important than their souls.

  He had bloodied his own hands, pulling an officer off a thirteen-year-old girl and breaking his neck. He fled the town and hid in the rocky hills. As the months went by, men and women from the nearby towns and villages joined him, some on the run from the French, others just anxious to fight back. He had been their leader in peace, in times of need and plenty, and now he had
become their leader in a war of liberation.

  At the moment he had to decide what to do about the French unit that was approaching.

  “We can’t risk a fight,” Cipriano said, “they are too many.” He had been a shoemaker before he became second in command of a guerrilla unit.

  “Then we won’t risk a fight with all of them.” The priest laid out his plan, scratching terrain and troop movements in the dirt. “We still have that cannon we bluffed with before.” The “cannon” was nothing more than six feet of foot-thick oak tree trunk that had been painted black and mounted on a pair of wagon wheels.

  “We’ll put ten men on the road, here, and they’ll pretend they are hauling the cannon.”

  The maneuver would allow the French to spot the cannon in a ravine while the guerrillas hid on both sides. “The commander’s mission is to escort the courier, but he won’t be able to resist capturing a rebel cannon. He’ll send some of his hussars, maybe forty or fifty to kill the rebels and take the cannon. We’ll be waiting. When they come charging into the ravine, we’ll fire and run.”

  “Run” meant to melt into the rocks and hilly terrain where the mounted hussars wouldn’t follow them.

  They might get a dozen with the single volley he ordered and more than that in dead horses. It was often harder for the French to replace trained war horses than men. The losses to the French would not win the war, but it would be another bloody nose for them.