Albert Sanchez Pinol - Victus - The Fall of Barcelona

To help people understand the violence of the fighting, I here include three prints of the Saint Joan tower. The first shows what it was like originally, and the second what state it was in on the eve of August 12. (It was so damaged that we’d had to remove the two cannons a few days earlier, as it was on the verge of collapsing.) The last plate is a re-creation of what was left of the tower after the siege.

The artist took considerable license. The tower, for example, wasn’t square but round, and at this point in the siege, the ramparts were in a far worse state. The prints may not be totally accurate, but they’re instructive all the same.

At dawn on August 12 I was up on Saint Clara. The imminent attack meant I hadn’t had a moment’s sleep. Those sons of whores, knowing that we knew something was afoot, spent the whole steamy night setting off false alarms. And it was my job to raise the men when the real attack came.

A fine task! Raising the alarm in the city was no easy job. Men were not so much worn out as utterly exhausted. And some officer pissing his pants, rousing the garrison for no good reason, was the last thing they needed. Consider, too, that ours wasn’t a professional army but a bunch of civilians with rifles slung over their shoulders. Any alarm would wrench them from their homes, from their beds and their wives’ embraces. Jimmy’s idea was exactly this: to unnerve the defenders. As I say, the night was one long series of ruses: suddenly, in the pitch dark, trumpet blasts and drumming, and you thought an entire army was pouring down on your head. But nothing happened. Nothing. A few minutes later, there would be a pointless volley of rifle fire. But, counter to expectation, no battalions of grenadiers emerged out of their trenches, no infantry with bayonets mounted, no one. No one. I spent the night gauging the tiniest sounds and thinking of Bazoches: “As long as you are alive, you must pay attention. And as long as you pay attention, you’ll stay alive.”

At around seven in the morning, a silence came down, a calm so absolute that the absence of noise itself was suspicious. I dashed over and vaulted the first barricade. Then, creeping forward, I dropped down and poked my head over the breach. And what I saw, for all that it was the height of summer, chilled me to the bone.

Hundreds of men were emerging from the “gentlemen.” French grenadiers were chosen for their stature, and these were the very tallest of that class of soldier. In place of their usual weapons, unreal sight, they were wearing metal breastplates and brandishing twelve-foot pikes. Just behind this armored urchin came grenadiers, hundreds and hundreds of grenadiers. Ten full companies, at the very least, making their way to the Saint Clara and Portal Nou bastions.

The moat became an ant run of white uniforms, clambering over the rubble in perfect formation. The slope gave way so easily under their feet that it also put you in mind of a herd of elephants parading over gravel.

“This is the end,” I said to myself. The cream of the French army was upon us, and all we had to take them on were two Coronela companies, the swordsmiths and the cotton dealers. Fewer than two hundred men, all told.

I ran back the way I’d come, hurdling the barricade. I went and found the commander of the bastion, Lieutenant Colonel Jordi Bastida. “It’s the general assault, Bastida!” I cried. “They’re lining up!”

Just then we heard an explosion over to our left. The ground trembled. A column of black smoke mushroomed up over the neighboring Portal Nou. The Bourbons had exploded a mine.

“Don Antonio must be informed!” I said, agitated.

Bastida shook me off with disdain. “Well, you’d better go and tell him, then!”

Jordi Bastida was one of our heroes. In 1709 he’d been responsible for repelling the Bourbon assault on Benasque, a small settlement in the Pyrenees. If he’d been in my shoes, have no doubt, he would have interpreted “Well, you’d better go and tell him, then!” to mean, send a messenger; Bastida never would have considered abandoning his post, least of all when a mine had gone off, sending shock waves through the entire city. But I, of course, was not Bastida, and off I ran. And as I ran, I felt sure I’d never see the man alive again.

The Bourbons came at Saint Clara and Portal Nou simultaneously. The latter had just as few men defending it, the tailor and the cup maker companies. But overall, Portal Nou hadn’t had it as bad as Saint Clara; it could count on covering fire from either side, and its breaches were not so severe. As for the subterranean mine, it hadn’t been well positioned: It took out the forward edge of the pentagon, whereas if the Antwerp butcher had calculated properly and placed it a little farther forward, the entire fortification would have been blown sky-high. Imagine that — could someone possibly have fiddled with the numbers and distances in the plans?

Portal Nou was under Colonel Gregorio de Saavedra y Portugal. (I imagine he was Portuguese, with a surname like that.) For a few long minutes, his tailors and cup makers found themselves blinded by a thick cloud of black smoke. It rained clods of earth and rubble. They must have thought the world had come to an end. But the error in the calculations meant that the vast majority would come away unscathed. And Saavedra, who was a veteran officer, promptly sent his men into the gap.

Which bright Bourbon spark came up with the idea of returning to the time when pikemen were in force, I don’t know. (Years later, Jimmy assured me it hadn’t been him, but bearing in mind the disaster that took place, and his tendency to never tell the truth, his wanting to deny responsibility would make sense.)

Militiamen from each bastion converged in the breaches and began firing their rifles dementedly. They had covering fire from the ramparts above and were camouflaged by the screen of smoke from the exploded mine below. And the attackers came so thick and fast that they just needed to shoot into the mass of them. The first to fall, logically enough, were the men with the pikes. They were the most strapping men, and their armor was too heavy, and as they went rolling back down the slope they took dozens of others with them.

In the first part of this book, I said a little about the horror of a grenadier attack. I didn’t think it necessary to specify at that point that one doesn’t need to be a grenadier to use a grenade, and that in Barcelona, we had thousands upon thousands of grenades. A deluge of those black balls now came pouring down on the attackers. That the opposition was so tightly packed together made it many times more effective. At certain points, some of the defenders simply lit a single fuse to one of the grenades in a sack and threw the whole thing. But in spite of the carnage, the Bourbons still made headway.

Meanwhile, good old Zuvi sprinted to find Don Antonio again. I didn’t have to go far to find him. He was behind the area under attack, with officers and intermediaries bustling around him. There was nothing I could tell him that he didn’t already know, which I found somewhat humiliating.