Albert Sanchez Pinol - Victus - The Fall of Barcelona

“This is war,” I said, trying to console them. “Return to your positions.”

The students loved Bassons with that especial, fanatical love that exists between student and teacher. In their shock, they were close to insubordination.

“To your positions,” I ordered them, shoving them back, “spread out along the barricade, and fire, damn it, maintain fire! If you let up, they’ll gather and charge!”

Now, look, I’ve never been one to glorify military actions — partly because I’ve seen so few that have been glorious. Most great military feats are little more than rats being corralled, blind panic. When it comes to battle, men kill to avoid being killed, and that is all. Then a poet shows up, or a historian, or a historian of a poetic bent, and takes that thrusting, thrashing frenzy and puffs it up, imbues it with ideas of valor, calls it glory. And yet, and yet: What happened that day belied my whole logic.

Grief became hate, a repeated cry of “You bastards!” starting up as they fired, loaded, and fired. But to load a rifle, you need a calm head, and their blood was boiling. One among them, the most upset, lost patience; his hands trembled in rage, and the powder poured everywhere apart from down the barrel of his rifle. He let out a strange, female-sounding cry and was suddenly mounting his bayonet and vaulting over the barricade.

I had time only to shout after him: “Eh? Where are you going? Get back here!”

But he wasn’t listening. Maddened, he went screaming toward the Bourbon barricade, bayonet at the ready.

“That’s it, at them!” some imbecile shouted, encouraged by the mad student’s example. “Avenge Don Marià!”

And after him they went! The whole hundred or so of them, following in their comrade’s footsteps. Naturally, I tried to hold them back: “Don’t, don’t! You’ll be slaughtered, the lot of you!”

It wasn’t just compassion that made me try to stop them. I would have to be the one to tell Don Antonio, our good shepherd of soldiers, that I’d lost the sheep in my care, that they’d gone wandering into a mass suicide. Insults, threats, physically trying to hold them back, all useless. They went over the top, every last one of them. Not me, clearly. I stood with my back against the battlement for a few moments, head in my hands. The only person left was me, me and the body of Bassons the buffoon. Mon Dieu, quelle catastrophe!

I turned to watch the massacre through a chink in the barricade. And to this day, I cannot believe the sights I saw.

Spurred on by a very intimate rage, the students covered the distance in the blink of an eye. The Bourbons didn’t even have time to unleash an organized volley. There was a scattering of shots, and three or four of the students went down. When they were halfway across, one shouted out the old Barcelonan students’ harangue: “Stone them! Stone them!” And that same student stopped in his tracks, striking a flint and putting it to the fuse of a sack full of grenades, before launching it over the top of the enemy barricade. And there we have it: The more loutish a civic tradition, the more use it is to a patriot.

The grenades sent up a cluster of bodies on the other side of the ramparts. The mad youth leading the charge hadn’t even stopped to light his grenade but ran on, hoarse from yelling, bayonet out in front. The others followed him, and when they reached the barricade’s first wall, they scaled it and began firing and thrusting their rifles into the bodies of the men they found below them.

Beyond, hundreds of Bourbon soldiers were awaiting the order to begin the assault. An attack from the defenders — that was the last thing they were expecting. They were so tightly crammed together that the majority couldn’t free their arms to bring out their rifles and fire back. Over the students went, sinking their bayonets into the heads, chests, and backs of their enemies. They were so crazed, and the Bourbons so vulnerable, that the latter panicked and fled. They plunged pell-mell into the moat and back in the direction of the cordon, with the demented, braying students hard on their heels.

Once this impossible victory had become reality, I, too, followed after them, crouching low. In the stretch of the bastion between the barricades, my feet crunched over dead and wounded bodies; you couldn’t move for them. As I say: To this day, I fail to understand how a handful of scholars could make a thousand or so French grenadiers turn and flee.

I managed, thank heavens, to stop the students from continuing and trying to take on the whole Bourbon encampment. I was helped by the exhaustion that took hold of them, the plumbing of the depths of body and spirit that follows a life-or-death charge. The sound of orders from an officer brought them to their senses again. The first barricade had been taken, and now they needed to man it, reestablishing the situation as it had been before the Bourbon attack. They came meekly back up. Perhaps, as I’ve suggested elsewhere, because he who returns from a place of madness is more surprised than any by the aberration committed.

I had seen things before then that called into question the teachings at Bazoches. But the students’ charge went further: It utterly negated reason. Vauban never would have tolerated such an action, for the inevitable loss of life, and for the fact that it was bound to fail. And yet, and yet, incomprehensible as it was, there was I, standing on a mound of dead French grenadiers and giving orders to the babes who had killed them.

The lad who had initiated the charge had survived. He stood there with a very faraway look in his eyes. The front of his uniform was soaked in blood, top to bottom, and he was gawping at his bayonet, also stained red. He seemed not to understand, as though all the bodies had just appeared and were nothing to do with him. I shook him by the shoulders: “ Noi, noi , are you all right?”

He didn’t recognize me. His mouth opened and shut, and his gaze was otherworldly. “Dr. Bassons,” he said. And throughout the rest of the day, he was in another world, and kept on calling me after his departed professor.

Jimmy, of course, reduced the human tragedy to numbers. And for a marshal, a number, so long as it is limited to an amount he can justify to his superiors, remains nothing but a number. He could absorb those initial losses, he reasoned, and the next morning, he began the assault again. He threw everything at the battered Saint Clara bastion.

For him, installed on the balcony of his Guinardó country house, watching the battle was no hardship. For the poor beetles of each army fighting over control of Saint Clara, it was like a recurring nightmare: Not twelve hours had passed since the charge of the students, and the situation was exactly as it had been previously, the Bourbons sheltering behind the first barricade, which they had retaken, and our forces behind the second.

Throughout August 13, there was a succession of attacks and counterattacks across the bastion yard. We were one step from the abyss; one step back, just one, and Saint Clara would be in Jimmy’s possession. And once he had the bastion, the entire city would inevitably fall. Being the sly fox that he was, Jimmy sent false attacks at other points along the ramparts. They were obviously nothing but feints, but they still meant Don Antonio had to disperse his forces — precisely Jimmy’s aim. The key position was protected by no more than a thin screen of men. The city was depending on this handful of combatants, worn out and choking on rifle smoke.

At the very center of the bastion was a small cabin, a munitions store whose construction I myself had overseen. Usually, a good bastion will have gunpowder storerooms underground, but Saint Clara was a woeful bastion, irregular and precarious, and had no basement. In the uproar of battle, prodigious quantities of gunpowder would be spilled. Obviously, the slightest scrap of anything alight would mean catastrophe. Even professional soldiers have trouble reloading a rifle with utter accuracy, and civilian militia more so. To point out the dangers to them, to insist they not rush as they loaded and reloaded, would have been as absurd as asking a child playing with a vase not to break it. This was why I thought it important to build this shelter, to protect the munitions from any stray sparks, and the consequent disaster. If you take a moment to flick back a few pages, you’ll see the said cabin on the plate depicting the battle map.