by Leo Perutz
One of our pickets challenged me at the first bend. I put in to the bank. First-Lieutenant von Froben appeared, recognized me — much to his surprise — and inquired my purpose and destination. I told him no more than I deemed necessary.
I learned that our outworks were only sparsely manned, the bulk of the troops having retired within the walls. The revolt had assumed dangerous proportions, and the colonel was being hard-pressed by large numbers of insurgents in the centre of the town.
"Let's hope the guerrillas leave us in peace tonight," Froben added anxiously, peering through the darkness at the valley where Saracho's men lay encamped.
Monjita understood no word of our conversation save one: the colonel's name. At that she raised her head and looked at me inquiringly. I rowed on.
"Will we be there soon?" she asked.
"Soon enough," I replied.
"But where are you taking me?" she said, growing uneasy. "Look, I can see the camp-fires of the Serranos." (The Spanish townsfolk called the guerrillas Serranos or "highlanders".)
I thought it time to tell her the truth.
"I have brought you here, Monjita, to place you under the protection of an enemy officer."
She gave a faint cry of surprise and consternation.
"And the colonel?"
"You will never see him again."
She stood up, causing the skiff to rock violently.
"You deceived me!" she cried, so close that I could feel her breath on my cheek.
"I had no choice. You'll resign yourself in the end, I'm sure. I have the highest opinion of your intelligence."
"Take me back or I'll call for help!"
"Do so by all means, but you'll call in vain. The sentries will not let you past the gate."
Despairingly, she broke into a flood of threats, entreaties and lamentations, but I stood firm. An idea had taken root in my mind: by carrying off Monjita in my skiff, I was lifting a curse from the regiment and the town. It was for her sake that we had given Bolibar's first and second signals, just as it was her fault that we had quarrelled with Günther, and that he now lay dead or dying in Eglofstein's room. If she saw the colonel again, she could not fail - to his detriment and ours — to disclose the true nature of our secret.
She ceased to plead and lament when she saw that it was futile, and I heard her quietly praying. Sobs mingled with her fervent supplications. Then she fell silent and I heard nothing more from her, just a gentle sigh and a low, lingering moan.
By now I had come to the second bend in the river. Great heaps of brushwood blazing on either bank turned its entire surface into a watery inferno of colour. Shadows flitted hither and thither on the shore. Then a voice hailed me, a shot rang out, and a bullet struck the water close beside my skiff.
I let go of the oars, hurriedly lit the lantern at my feet in the bottom of the boat, and swung it to and fro with one hand while waving a white handkerchief with the other. The skiff drifted into the bank. Guerrillas came running from all sides with lanterns, hurricane lamps and torches. There were now more than a hundred of them awaiting me at the water's edge, and among them, to my joy, I saw the scarlet cloak and white panache of a British officer in the Northumberland Fusiliers.
I leapt ashore with the handkerchief held high, strode up to this officer without heeding the others, and, with a dozen musket barrels levelled at my head, explained the reason for my presence.
He listened to me in silence, then made for Monjita, presumably intending to help her out of the skiff. I was about to follow when I felt a hand grip my shoulder and turned to find myself confronted by Colonel Saracho.
I recognized the Tanner's Tub at once. He was leaning on a stick, his massive legs swathed in strips of rag. Stuck in his red sash were knives, cartridges, pistols, several heads of garlic, and a lump of bread. Around his neck he wore a thong arrayed on which, like rosary beads, were pieces of biscuit.
"First and foremost," he growled, "you're my prisoner. As to the rest, we shall see."
"I came under a flag of truce," I protested.
Saracho chuckled gleefully.
"You drifted ashore like a rotting fish," he said. "And now, surrender your sword."
I hesitated, gauging the distance between the skiff and the spot where I stood. Before I could act, however, the British officer came over to me.
"Your commanding officer sends strange gifts," he drawled. "That girl is dead."
"Dead?" I exclaimed, and darted toward the skiff. Quick as I was, Saracho got there first. He bent over Monjita and shone his lantern on her face.
"She's dead, sure enough," he croaked. "What are we to do with her? Did you bring her here that we should sing a Miserere for her, say an Office for the Dead, a De profundis, a Requiescat, a rosary?"
Before I could reply he gave a startled exclamation like the snarl of an infuriated cat. Straightening up, he gave me a long, hard stare.
"So that's it," he said in an altogether different tone of voice. "The knife has returned to its owner, eh? Very well, mark this!"
He drew a double-barrelled pistol from his sash. I reached for my sabre, thinking it was meant for me, but he fired both barrels in the air, one after the other, and whistled shrilly between times.
I knew that guerrilla's signal: it was a call to arms.
Saracho's bulky frame was still obstructing my view of the skiff and Monjita, but all at once I caught sight of his right hand. It was holding the dagger whose ivory hilt bore a representation of the Virgin with Christ's corpse across her knees: Bolibar's third signal!
The ground lurched beneath my feet. The men, the torches, the trees around me slowly swayed and revolved. My eyes discerned nothing but the knite and the drop of blood adhering to it: a drop of Monjita's life-blood. They followed that drop as it trickled down the blade, slowly, steadily and relentlessly, as if in obedience to some terrible, irrevocable law. And all at once I saw Monjita before me as I had seen her for the very first time. "Come here, you of the burning eyes!" The colonel's words rang in my head, and there she stood beside his armchair with the firelight upon her, and an infinity of sorrow and despair overcame me at the thought that she was dead. But now a voice cried out within me — a stranger's voice, not my own.
"That was the third signal!" it cried with angry vehemence. "The third signal, and you gave it!"
Then another voice spoke, seemingly from a great way off. I awoke from my dreamlike state to find myself alone on the river bank with Saracho and the British captain.
"Inform the one who sent you," the Tanner's Tub was saying, "that a quarter of an hour from now ..." He broke off. "It's you, by all the saints and angels! Or is it? This time I'm truly unsure."
He drew back, held his lantern close to my face, and began to laugh.
"It seems to me I saw this gentleman only lately, wearing morocco shoes and silken hose. How say you, Captain?"
The British officer smiled.
"It delights me to recognize you despite your disguise, My Lord Marquis. As I have had the honour to assure you once before, sir, yours is not a face one readily forgets."
"The Señor Marques has done his work well," Saracho growled contentedly. "If the townsfolk have risen in revolt, La Bisbal is as good as ours. We shall storm it a quarter of an hour from now."
And the singular thing was that in me, Lieutenant Jochberg of the Nassau Grenadiers, those words aroused the feeling that I was indeed the Marquis of Bolibar, and for the space of a second I experienced his pride and exultation at having given the third signal and completed his task.
And then that momentary delusion left me: I recovered my wits and became my wretched, despairing self again.
Transfixed with horror, I knew that I must return at once, warn my comrades, raise the alarm . . . I was into the skiff in a trice.
"Where are you off to?" the British captain called after me. "Stay here with us, your work is done!"
"Not yet!" I cried, and the skiff, aided by the current, sped downstream.
CATASTROPHE
My memory has retained but little, thank heaven, of those doom-laden hours in which the Nassau Regiment and the Crown Prince's Own fought their last terrible and unavailing battle. The events of that last night have become compressed in my mind into a shadowy phantasmagoria of fire and blood, whirling snow and clouds of powder-smoke. Captain von Eglofstein I never saw again. As for Brockendorf, he appeared to me only in a dream. One rainy night at home in Germany many years later, I was abruptly wakened by a nightmare. I had seen Brockendorf - seen him quite plainly in my sleep as he burst from a blazing house with four Spaniards in pursuit. He wore neither shirt nor tunic, and I could see the curly black hairs on his barrel of a chest. He was wielding his sabre with one hand and fending off sword-thrusts with the other, which had his cloak wound round it. Three or four blows he delivered; then he dropped his sabre and fell to the ground. A small, fat, bearded man carrying a lantern bent over him and took possession of the cloak.
While the little bearded fellow was inspecting his prize and weighing it in his hand, there came a shot — a shot that made no sound — and he collapsed with Brockendorf's cloak draped over him. A full moon slowly emerged from behind the clouds, and the wind buried both corpses beneath a mound of driven snow.
Was it only a nocturnal hallucination, a belated nightmare, that wrested me from my uneasy slumbers, or did I really witness Brockendorf's death, and had the tumult of the time so completely erased that spectacle from my mind, like so many others, that I forgot it until a distressing dream retrieved it from the depths of oblivion many years after the event? I cannot say.
I did, however, see the colonel fall with my own eyes, as well as Donop and the rest, because I came too late to warn them: the third signal and Saracho's assault sealed their fate.
I leapt ashore and burst through the willows on the bank to find myself among some fleeing grenadiers who had abandoned our forward positions. The guerrillas were hot on their heels and gave them no respite. Each man ran for his life, though many fell, never to rise again. Swept along by the turmoil, I came at last to the outskirts of the town.
Here I overtook First-Lieutenant von Froben, who had been badly wounded and was reeling along the wall of a house like a drunken man. I eventually managed to persuade a handful of the fugitives to make a stand, and for a while we held the guerrillas off. Then came a sudden rumour that the rebels had outflanked us and were firing on us from the rear. There was no holding the men after that. They jumped up and fled down the street, and I with them.
Panic and confusion reigned on all sides. Everyone jostled and yelled and shoved. Bricks, earthenware pitchers, billets of firewood, iron implements, shingles, spits, tin cans, cooking pots and empty bottles rained down on our heads from every window. In the entrance of one house, at the top of some stairs leading down to the cellar, a young woman big with child stood firing a double-barrelled pistol into the street, reloading again and again. A man beside me paused and took aim at her. Then the moon disappeared behind the clouds and I saw no more. We ran on in the gloom, hearing cries of encouragement and despair all around us.
"My horse has gone! Where's my horse?"
"Courage, men! Wait till they come within range!"
"Where to, where to? All I can see is snow."
"Dragoons! Sons of France! Stand fast and club your carbines!"
"My knapsack!"
"On your feet, man! Pull yourself together, we must press on!"
"Ready, aim, fire!"
"Here I am, over here!"
"I'm hit, I can't go on."
"They're coming!"
"Forward, forward!"
Someone knocked me to the ground. All I felt for a moment was wet snow against my face and a stabbing pain in the back of the head. What happened to me then I cannot recall. Although I did not lose consciousness for an instant, my recollection of the next few minutes is a dark void.
When I came to myself I was being half supported, half dragged along by two grenadiers. I felt thirsty. My left arm was aching badly, as were my head and both shoulders. I fired my pistol twice, but at whom I cannot remember.
There were seven of us. All but two had discarded their weapons and nearly all were wounded.
And then we came in sight of the marketplace, which was brightly lit and thronged with men. We shouted for joy and embraced each other, thinking ourselves safe at last, when we found it held by three companies of grenadiers drawn up in defensive squares with the colonel sitting his horse in their midst.
It seemed that the regiment had been split in three at the very outset of the fighting. One group held out for a while near the presbytery and another took cover behind the trees and hedges of the hospital garden, which was later stormed by guerrillas and insurgent townsfolk. The three companies in the marketplace were still in good shape, however, and the plan was that we should try to fight our way through to the river.
Only snatches of the ensuing battle linger in my memory. Donop was standing beside me at one point. He spoke to me and offered me a drink from his canteen. Later I remember kneeling behind a baggage waggon, firing my carbine into a close-packed mass of attackers while a grenadier beside me drank cold soup from an earthenware bowl.
I could see the windows of my billet from where I knelt. They were lit up, and I glimpsed the shadowy forms of unknown intruders flitting to and fro behind them. It occurred to me as I pulled the trigger that I had left some books lying on my table — French romances and a volume of German pasquinades.
The air was filled with a symphony of hisses, roars and whistles, rattling musketry, shrill screams, shouted orders, and the Spaniards' incessant "Caraxo! Caraxo!" Castel-Borckenstein was carried past me unconscious with blood welling from his boots. His servant followed behind, angrily shaking his empty musket at the enemy. Across the way, brightly illumined by torchlight outside the door of the "Blood of Christ" inn, St Antony held his stone arms aloft and continued to testify, amid the din and pother of battle, that Mary's conception was immaculate.
Immediately after Castel-Borckenstein was wounded came the order to retire. A half-company led the way in close order along the Calle Ambrosio with the colonel bringing up the rear.
Suddenly I saw him sway in the saddle. Two men sprang to his aid and held him up. He was past speaking, it seemed, but he gestured fiercely in the direction of the guerrillas. I lost sight of him in the press soon afterward. Donop called loudly, two or three times, for a litter.
All discipline was lost from then on. I was swept along by a tide of humanity and found myself in the Calle Geronimo, which seethed with running, shouting men, all striving to be the first to reach the bridge and the river bank. For some reason I never discovered, most of them later turned about and ran back again. Donop was still close beside me. While running — such is the picture of him I preserve to this day - he staunched a sabre-cut on his cheek with a piece of cloth torn from the lining of his tunic.
I dimly recall a brief mêlée near the nailsmith's forge, which had been destroyed by fire. Another of my memories is of a cascade of boiling water that landed just short of my feet. A few drops splashed my hand.
We found, when we came to the river, that the guerrillas had occupied the bridge. Some of our men tried to reach the farther bank by wading and swimming. They fought the current shoulder-deep, but the icy water numbed their limbs and they sank below the surface one by one. Meanwhile, the guerrillas poured case-shot into our ranks from the bridge.
We ran back the way we had come, keeping close to the walls. None of us now had any thought of safety or escape. There was neither hope nor despair in our hearts, just a mute determination to defend ourselves to the last. We sought no way out of our predicament, merely a spot where we could fight to the death bare-handed, man against man.
We entered a steep, narrow street in which I had never set foot before. This was where Donop fell. I made to help him up, thinking that he had slipped on the frozen ground, but a musket ball had lodged
in his throat. He reached for my hand and gave me all his belongings: a silver fob-watch, two packets of letters, two bank-notes, a few gold Napoleons, a translation of Suetonius which he himself had begun, a small silver tablet adorned with mythological figures in relief, and a half-empty bottle of wine. A grenadier stooping under the weight of his pack, to which he had tied his boots, a copper kettle and a silver punch-bowl, interrupted his flight long enough to cast a covetous glance at the coins in my hand. I pocketed the things Donop had given me, but most of them I lost within minutes. All that I still have today is the little silver tablet portraying Venus and the Hours.
While hurrying on we heard a shrill whistle, which was answered from two directions. Almost simultaneously, we came under fire from our front. We halted and looked around in search of cover.
The door of the house beside us was quickly broken down with a musket butt. Beyond it lay a winding wooden staircase dimly lit by an oil-lamp burning in a niche below the image of some saint or other. The room at the head of the stairs appeared to be the store-room of a baker or confectioner. It contained sacks of flour, baskets filled with chestnuts and walnuts, a barrel of eggs packed in oaten straw, and a box of chocolate with the words "Pantin, rue Saint-Anne à Marseille" inscribed in black on the lid.
We left the door open, loaded our carbines, and took cover behind a stout table. We did not have long to wait, for footsteps could already be heard on the stairs.
A head came into view - a bony face surmounted by short, bristly hair. I recognized it at once as belonging to the spice merchant on the corner of the Calle de los Carmelitas. I raised my pistol, but someone behind me was quicker and fired first. Other figures appeared and rushed at us, shots rang out, an axe came hurtling across the table, powder-smoke filled the room.
We were alone when the air cleared, but only four of us were still standing. Our attackers could be heard blundering and tumbling down the stairs. We reloaded all our fire-arms including those of the two dead and laid them ready on the table in front of us.