Albert Sanchez Pinol - Victus - The Fall of Barcelona

People unfamiliar with the art of engineering wouldn’t have seen that outcome so clearly. The students would load their rifles squatting behind the parapet, turn and aim a single shot over the top, and then kneel back down with a ramrod in one hand and the pouch of gunpowder in the other, again loading their rifles. In their minds, as long as they applied themselves diligently, the result of the battle would not be in doubt. The good Lord would guide their bullets in the same way He did their studies, rewarding constancy, effort, and dedication with a deserving triumph. They failed to understand that behind the small semicircular barricade the enemy was controlling, Jimmy was sending in more and more reinforcements, entire battalions making their way along the trenches from the back. A devastating pool of energy that, at the drop of a hat, would overwhelm anything and everything in its way.

I ought to be clear that, at the time, finding myself at the center of proceedings, I didn’t have a clear sense at all of what was going on. Over the following days, I managed to form a general idea.

Jimmy had attacked the bastions of Portal Nou and Saint Clara at the same time. As I’ve said, he planned to take them, and after that, the city would beg for mercy or else be put to the sword. Siege over. That was if everything went exactly according to plan. When the resistance turned out to be more determined than expected, Jimmy went out onto his balcony at Mas Guinardó and stood by for the messengers to brief him on where things had gotten to.

The first reports perturbed him. The news wasn’t bad, it was disastrous: Incredibly, the push for Portal Nou had been repelled.

Jimmy felt annoyed, he felt inconvenienced, but he did not feel discouraged. He had meditated at length on the attack, had an alternative strategy, and proceeded to put it into effect.

In reality, Jimmy didn’t need to take control of two bastions — as per les règles , one was enough. Portal Nou hadn’t gone well, so he decided to throw everything he had at Saint Clara. Where good old Zuvi was, in other words, cowering behind the second barricade.

While Jimmy gave the order for the reserve battalions — all of them — to make their way to Saint Clara, Dr. Bassons continued going back and forth along the parapet, exhorting his students. Seemingly oblivious of the danger, strolling around with his hands clasped behind his back as though it were daisy chains rather than bullets flying around, and spouting phrases in Latin. Don Antonio had ordered him to contain the Bourbons, and his lads were making an excellent job of precisely that. He saw no further; the calculated, catastrophic forces about to be unleashed were beyond his comprehension. Coming in my direction and seeing me kneeling close up against the battlement, keeping my head well down, Bassons stopped and, uncritically, more as a suggestion than as a recrimination, pointed out: “Lieutenant Colonel, officers are supposed to set an example.”

“Dr. Bassons!” I cried. “Get down!”

According to Bassons’s rudimentary military understanding, an officer had to stay on his feet in the face of enemy fire. Truly, he didn’t want for courage, the ignoramus. But we engineers always put staying alive above honor. Our lot was to build fortresses, the point of which was to provide protection, not leave people exposed, and unlike in open battles, in sieges anyone who doesn’t hide is a fool. Therein one of the unending sources of mutual disdain between engineers and soldiers.

Zuvi himself had designed and led the construction of the barricades on the Saint Clara yard. High enough to provide protection from enemy fire, but at the same time, with gaps to allow rifles to be poked between the stockades and fired, and low enough that men could get back over in case of a counterattack. Bassons wasn’t a tall man, quite the opposite, but his head — upon which, absurdly, he still wore a wig — was visible over the top. That large, round head was a perfect target for any sniper, and we were in the midst of a firefight as constant as it was chaotic.

“Please, Dr. Bassons!” I again begged him. “Take cover!”

But I was wrong: My warning merely encouraged him to draw his students’ attention. Quite a sight: a lieutenant colonel down on his knees, Captain Bassons pontificating on the superiority of intellect and civic pride. He declaimed between bursts of gunfire: “Our grandfathers’ grandfathers, and their grandfathers before them, and as far ago as five generations past, lived on the Pyrenean peaks. And they lived like beasts, herding together without order, and without God.”

“What are you going on about?” I said, trying to cut him off. “Enough of the sermons!”

He paid me no mind. He was possessed by culture in the same way the preachers are filled by the Holy Spirit. “But then a day came,” he said, undaunted by the cascades of bullets flying by, “and they saw a rich country spread out beneath them, a prosperous place for anyone who knew how to work the land, valleys and plains perfect for human civilization. Our ancestors repelled the Moors — that foul-smelling bunch! And it took them generations to do it, establishing their laws, religion, and customs in a new land they named Catalonia.”

What nonsense was this? Plus the fact that his rapt students had slowed their firing in order to listen to him. Jumping to my feet, I barked out the order: “Maintain fire! Shoot, load, and shoot!” They didn’t listen; my authority was nothing next to that of Marià Bassons, their beloved professor.

Bassons the buffoon carried on with his discoursing: “They created a new order, settling Catalonia and going on to liberate Valencia and Mallorca, populating the lands with our people. And they did not suppress the natives, as is usual in conquered territories, and as is Castile’s approach. Rather, they established sibling kingdoms, which, as such, were forever to be our equals and beloved by us. A shared religion, a shared tongue, a shared common law, and each with its own parliament. And what was that law, supreme, absolutely free, and unshakable? Always to serve the king who serves his people.” He suddenly became excited, shaking a fist in the air. “And now some French pretender to the Spanish throne wants to trample a thousand years of Catalan liberty because of what some Castilian wrote in his will! Are we going to let them? Oi que no, nois? ” Not a chance, right, lads?

I remember the way he shouted while shaking his fist, as though rattling a tambourine. I had to bellow to make myself heard over the din: “Dr. Bassons, would you mind getting down?”

I’ll never know whether the buffoon heard. He was near enough that I was able to grab him by the tails of his jacket to force him to take cover. But too late. In that instant I saw a white line score the sky, a little comet’s tail of smoke behind it. A concave slice of metal, the size of a serving tray, flew toward us and into the side of Bassons’s head, embedding in it as though his cranium were soft cheese.

Where had this projectile issued from? No one will ever know. Most likely, it was the remains of a cannonball that had shattered upon impact with the Saint Joan tower behind us to the right. The fragments had flown off in all directions, and the largest nestled in Bassons’s head.

He toppled onto me, his head a bloody mess. His body spasmed briefly and then was still. His dead hands were clenched, pawlike. My face was splashed with so much blood, it must have looked like I had measles. I pushed Bassons off me, and before his body hit the ground, almost all of his hundred students, it seemed, had come and crowded around. “Dr. Bassons!”

Panting, I wiped the blood from my face and tried to recover from that sudden death. As I puffed and gasped, they congregated around their professor and me. A collective sobbing started up.