Albert Sanchez Pinol - Victus - The Fall of Barcelona

The second parallel was reached. This enabled the Bourbons to install artillery that could then attack the ramparts side-on and from far closer. Costa could do little against so many. At this point, they began employing the “Ricochet,” a technique invented by none other than Marquis de Vauban himself.

Essentially, the Ricochet meant charging a cannon with only two thirds of the necessary gunpowder. Then the missiles wouldn’t punch into or embed in the walls but, rather, skim along like stones over the surface of a stream. It’s useful for clearing out cannons installed on ramparts. The missile would run the length of the bastion deck, flattening everything in its path. You’d see the cannonballs, the size of very large watermelons, almost seeming to gambol along and against the stoneworks. Each impact produced a horrifying noise, indifferent to human life. The Ricochet technique converted men into ants and bastions into trodden-on anthills. Hefty stone orbs bouncing, crunching, along the ground.

Left, right, and center they came — and from in front — and at times from all directions at once — and there were constant cries of: “ A terra! ”

If you did get down in time, it was unlikely that the weight of the cannonball would strike you dead — possibly landing on a soft part of your body, break a few ribs, at most. But they were deceptively quick, and their flight was mutilating. If you didn’t see one coming, it could tear off a limb and carry on past, impassively bouncing along the cobblestones. The sight of men chopped to pieces is a primordially terrifying one.

The battalions with orders to take their turn up on Portal Nou or Saint Clara would pause before ascending, and kneel down and pray. But they would go up. I’d do anything not to have to order men to occupy the entrances to the bastions. It would have been like supervising an execution of honorable men.

I believed that writing this book would unburden my memory. To let my treachery drain onto the pages, to liberate myself by speaking truth. I thought — oh, vanity — that deploying ink to honor the men and women who fought against all odds, for their liberty, would make me less miserable. But I now see it’s an impossible task. Why? Because of our concept of the heroic, which is so elusive, and so degenerate.

Our prototypical hero is proud Achilles. We see him standing victorious over Hector, sword raised. But how can we possibly extol the epic qualities of a filthy group of men when everything they do, their daily functions, is perfectly common? A single act doesn’t make a hero; constancy does. It isn’t a single bright point but a fine line, indestructibly modest: this ascent up onto inundated ramparts day after day after day. Leaving home and walking into the inferno, then returning home, and in the morning, joining in with death again. And given that so many heroic deeds were constantly being carried out, no one was seen as a hero. But this itself was what made them truly great. Heroes, like traitors, grow old. Those who sacrifice themselves remain; to them goes the glory. It’s impossible to live on in glory; only death has the power to confer the stamp of immortality.

Soon the third parallel was under way. I wept to see it, crouching down in a rubble-filled corner of one of the bastions, my hands covering my face, Ballester and his men standing around me. They didn’t understand my desolation, and at the same time, they intuited, knew, that my tears pertained to a superior knowledge, something beyond them. The Miquelets hid their feelings, always, and perhaps for that reason admired any open show of emotion.

The third parallel meant the beginning of the end. Goethe once asked me about Vauban’s philosophy. I summarized as best I could the basic principle of encircling a place with a trench comprising three large parallels. Goethe thought about it, then said: “It’s just as Aristotle said: All dramas consist of three acts.” I’d never thought of it like that before.

And on they came. The end of the third parallel would be the end itself. All they had left to do was create the cut that would come through the moat. Then put in place parapets (known as “the gentlemen,” in engineering parlance) and, next, to unleash the final assault, using fifty thousand well-drilled assassins.

The Attack Trench was a labyrinth by now, many thousands of feet long, zigzagging, turning corners, contorting in countless directions. Far to our left, we could see Montjuic, shrouded in smoke so that its peak resembled a flying mountain. All my Bazoches faculties were required, just to have a sense of what was going on a few feet in front of my nose. During one of the bombardments, I came to a particularly painful realization.

I was squatting down on the Portal Nou bastion at the time. I felt desperate seeing the breaches widening by the day, as the enemy cannons continued their work, and knowing there was nothing to be done now to plug them. Next to me was a soldier whose name I didn’t know. Like me, he was sheltering, just about, from the artillery, one hand gripping his rifle, the other clamping his hat down over his head. He was a nobody. A man dressed in poor, tattered clothes, covered in the dust of the battle. At one point, sneaking a look out through one of the many gaps in the battered wall, he said: “What utter whoreson could have come up with something so twisted?”

Perhaps it was this that dragged me to the edge of true torment: feeling myself to be playing a part in our downfall. Then one day I saw a sign for which I’d been hoping for a long while: buckets being passed over the top of a parapet. They were bailing water from the trench.

I’d designed the trench lines to go near the sea, hoping they’d flood. Jimmy’s sappers, trying to dig, suddenly found themselves inundated with salt water. Seeing the buckets, I exploded with glee. I stood up above the rampart and shouted: “Have that! Drown, you rats!”

Ballester yanked me back down. “Lieutenant colonel!” he said, railing at me once I had taken cover again.

I remember that being an extraordinary moment. Why? Because of what I saw in Ballester’s eyes: myself.

Until that moment he’d viewed me as someone reliable but lacking in spirit, skittish, and overly cautious. That day saw the culmination of an insane transmutation in each of us. Ballester, a responsible person, in pay of the government, and Lieutenant Colonel Zuviría, a machine, immersed in our murderous task. Yes, the look we shared then lasted a good few moments.

But if the days were hellish, words cannot describe the nights. Once the third parallel had been established, we were sent out on night sorties more often, and they were bloodier than ever. How could I possibly not take part? I knew every nook and cranny of my trench. My presence was crucial in guiding my fellow soldiers. Combat in the pitch black is always a muddled thing, nothing more so, with grenades, knives, and bayonets in a maze of a thousand ditches and branches.

Yes, the night skirmishes were fought with unprecedented ferocity. We’d set out just as it grew dark or, for variation, before dawn. At first I thought Ballester would be in his element in this kind of encounter. Under cover of dark, he could enact the lowest instincts of man, which consists of killing and then running away. The opposite turned out to be true. Those nights ennobled Ballester to the same extent that they made a savage of me.

Swiftness and time efficiency are key in any sortie. The assault squad’s only aim was to push as far into the trench as possible, then to dig in and hold off the enemy, while, at their back, a second wave sabotaged other parts. Then they’d both fall back, trying to lose as few men along the way as they could.