Albert Sanchez Pinol - Victus - The Fall of Barcelona

Throughout the siege, the Red Pelts were consumed with the idea of maintaining calm among the populace. They’d ordered Barcelonans to fill balconies and windows with lamps and candles at nightfall, so the streets wouldn’t be as dark. Turning around, you’d be presented with a lit-up Barcelona. During those Christmas nights, there were more lamps than ever, and the shades were made of red, yellow, and green glass, making the city streets wink and glitter like a nocturnal rainbow.

1714 arrived, and everything carried on as it had been. Three, four, five more months passed, and still the same. Spring burst upon us, and everyone, including me, was becoming fed up with the siege. There was nothing to contend with, only the tedium, the occasional skirmish, and the fatigue that affected the free citizens-turned-soldiers. In Bazoches terms, any siege lasting so long would be considered a failure. More than that: an outright aberration, a complete departure from the very definition of a siege. Pópuli would have needed to sweep us aside within a week, yet there we were, and not an Attack Trench in sight.

Anyway, what I mean is that, in the spring of 1714, I’d had nearly all I could take. Everyone had, save one man: Don Antonio de Villarroel. Among my many tasks, one of the most demanding was accompanying him when he was inspecting positions. One bastion, another, the curtain walls covering the stretches between the bastions; Don Antonio was never satisfied. More soldiers were needed here, more cannons there; and over there, that old breach hadn’t been closed up entirely. On May 19 that year, I was taking the brunt of one of his tirades when we were interrupted by a heavier than usual artillery bombardment.

Silent explosions could be seen coming from the enemy cannons. Then you’d hear a faint whistling sound, followed, with a sonorous crrrack , by the impact of cannonball on ramparts. But it was different on this occasion. They were aiming high, and the cannonballs sailed over the walls and came down inside the city, on the roofs or west faces of civilian buildings.

“Lunatics!” I shouted. “Here, we’re here! Are you using your rectal holes to aim with?”

The cannonade continued, more and more off-target shots. I was raging. Don Antonio made me be quiet — he’d understood what was happening long before I had. “They know precisely what they’re about,” he said.

“But Don Antonio,” I protested, “they’re missing us by miles.”

He turned and went over to the command post. I followed behind. The light finally turned on in my head: They were shelling the city itself!

Years studying in Bazoches to learn how to storm a stronghold with minimal casualties, and here was Pópuli, the butcher, aiming his cannons at civilian houses rather than at the ramparts! It was a feat so unusual, such a departure from the Bazoches precepts, and from the slightest glimmer of human civility, and so flagrant, sordid, and brutal, that I didn’t want to believe it was happening. As we ran through the streets, an enormous cannonball landed on a four-story building. The facade crumbled, and as the stones and beams came crashing down, I heard amid the noise the wailing of a child. The sound of a child in pain will always stir up all-consuming hatred. I briefly went back up to the top of the bastion. I remember taking out a telescope and scanning the Bourbon positions. Casting around the fajina parapets, among which their cannons were concealed, my lens came to rest on a man standing still between all the smoke and the to-ing and fro-ing of the gunners. He, too, was looking through a telescope. We were looking at each other. He raised an arm in greeting — mockingly, mocking our agony. And then I recognized him: It was Verboom, that utter swine.

The high command, including Costa, were immediately called together in an emergency meeting. Everyone aside from Costa was unsettled; chewing a sprig of parsley and speaking in his usual dispassionate monotone, he seemed almost not to care: “They’re using long-range cannons. But even with them, they can’t reach all the neighborhoods, only the one nearest the walls, the Ribera barrio. It’s only a three-gun battery.”

I couldn’t help myself from making a selfish comment: “And as luck would have it, Ribera is where my family lives.”

Some of the officers called on Don Antonio to send out a couple of battalions against the battery. Others thought the cannonade was an attempt to provoke a large sortie that was doomed to fail. Still others argued for a missive to be sent to Pópuli, threatening the execution of prisoners if the shelling was not called off. Our resident parsley-chewer came up with a simple but brilliant solution: We needed to take our most accurate cannons, the shorter-range ones, closer to the enemy positions, and from there destroy their battery. How? Sallying forth from the city with one whole battery of our own.

“But,” I objected, “that will also put the enemy in a position to fire on our cannons.”

His answer was very much that of a gunner: “What is infantry for if not to provide cover for artillery?”

You could never tell if Costa was being serious. He fished around in his pouch and looked crestfallen to find himself out of parsley. “Give me and my Mallorcans ten minutes to carry out our own bombardment,” he said, looking up. “That’s all we’ll need.”

When it came to it, five minutes was more than enough. Don Antonio sent out two full battalions, and these attacked the cordon in ostentatiously well-ordered ranks, with twenty drummers announcing the onslaught. The Bourbons sent twice their number to tackle them, falling for the trap. Making the most of the diversion, Costa set out with six cannons. Our cannonballs landed right on the heads of that poor Bourbon battery. The Mallorcans hooked the light cannons back onto the carriages and fell back into the city. This was mud in Pópuli’s eye — outmaneuvered, and three cannons down.

Infuriated, he brought together all his cannons and pushed the cordon a little closer to the city — close enough to put the whole of Barcelona within range, save the seafront. The attack of May 19 was nothing next to what was about to befall us. The bombardment of the whole urban district commenced. An uninterrupted and systematic barrage, raining down upon us night and day for months.

Such military terror as that has a great fondness for destruction on a grand scale. The tall defiles formed by the city’s buildings, along with the narrow streets, were too great a temptation. Missile upon missile they hurled, with all the glee of a child stamping on ant nests. I can still see streets thick with fleeing civilians as the walls around them erupted like pus-filled pimples.

To all Barcelonans, this was the inferno; for Pópuli, a calculated measure. His reasoning being that, in the face of such terror, the people would pressure its government to open the city gates. In a sense, putting all emotion aside, it was the right move from Pópuli. Would it be worth us paying with our homes and our cathedrals, our very lives? The army defending Barcelona was made up of militia fighting to defend their families. Now, with those loved ones coming under fire, if they were going to be killed anyway, where was the sense in continuing the resistance? But Pópuli had acted in anger, and he had miscalculated. The people didn’t think along the lines he’d expected. Quite the opposite.

Nor even did Martí Zuviría, an engineer trained in coolheaded decision-making. Precisely because I knew how barbarous the enemy was, and that they would stop at nothing, it was my duty to plead for the white flag to be shown. Why did I not? I don’t know. Perhaps we’d gone too far for that. In spite of what I’d learned at Bazoches, beyond its walls, the reality of war was altogether different. The marquis’s rationale was not equal to the changes being wrought in the world at that time.