Albert Sanchez Pinol - Victus - The Fall of Barcelona

Such is war. In the time it takes to crack your knuckles, the tables turn, and a seemingly hopeless battle that was going nowhere turns into a rout for your enemy. More than four hundred French never made it back to their lines. No prisoners were taken.

I managed to make out a French official through the smoke, standing with his body half out of the third parallel, using his telescope to try to discern what was happening, clearly incredulous at the way the assault had just crumbled. Ballester happened to be next to me, and he was scanning around for a target.

“Give me that!” I said, grabbing his loaded rifle, aiming it at the officer with the telescope, and firing at that reckless figure. The bullet went through his neck, blood gushing out the other side. The man’s arms went up, like a pagan hailing an idol, and he fell backward into the trench. I remember the way his telescope, which he’d inadvertently flung upward, twirled around and around in the air. A not insignificant shot: The man I’d taken down was none other than Dupuy.

Still I shudder to think: In all of a yearlong siege, I fired one bullet, just one, and it turned out to be at Dupuy.

Seeing his troops coming pouring back, Jimmy was livid. He lowered his head and contained himself for a moment before exploding. The officers and commanders around him were made aware, in no uncertain terms, of how incompetent they were.

He stormed back into Mas Guinardó with his retinue behind him. He was even angrier than in the critical moments at Almansa.

“The position must be regained!” he howled, shaking his fists. “Even if it means losing the entire army! Or do we want Europe to hear how mighty France has been overturned by a group of rude civilians?”

His generals tried to calm him down, but Jimmy cursed them all. “Silence! I want a report from the horse’s mouth. Send me Brigadiers Sauvebouef and Duverger! And Marquis de Polastron!”

Not possible, they said: Sauvebouef and Duverger had both been lost during the assault. Of Polastron there was no word. Well, that was soon to come: Men of the Coronela, still in a frenzy, had decapitated poor Polastron, rammed his head down inside a cannon, and fired him at Mas Guinardó. Hearing that noise, everyone present hung his head. All except Jimmy, who went out on the balcony, there finding Polastron’s blackened, smoking head revolving on the balcony floor like a spinning top.

A number of officials appeared whom Jimmy had greater respect for, including Lieutenant Colonel La Motte. Injured, he hobbled in, face soiled and uniform in tatters. “Your Excellence,” he argued, “regaining a foothold on Saint Clara would cost us our best troops, a crippling number of casualties and sacrifices. Without reinforcements from France, we’ll gain no more than a few feet, and the cost will be terrible. . The filthy rebel canaille are up on the ramparts as we speak, their generals and magistrates are whipping them up, and they mock us with singing and jibes.”

All true. The regained positions were teeming with men and women and even some musicians, celebrating the victory. With very little decency, also true. A great display of bare buttocks turned in the direction of the enemy lines.

Even so, it took a report of the losses to change Jimmy’s mind. Numbers have the power to cool the most burning passion. In the Saint Clara attack alone, fifteen hundred men had been lost, making a total of five thousand since the beginning of work on the trench: the kind of figures that could no longer be argued away. Most disconcerting of all was the account of officers down. Among them, none other than Dupuy — though, as it turned out, he had survived my bullet through the neck. And there was something further, something Jimmy grasped all too well.

Unlike field battles, in any contest for fortified positions, men have stone and brick to protect them. In Barcelona, thousands upon thousands of bullets were fired, but few ever reached their marks, the bodies of the enemy. The artillery of either side, for their part, were constrained by having to avoid hitting their own men. This meant that bayonet charges were the prime cause of death — which shows, better than any speech ever could, how determined the “rebels” were. There was nothing to suggest that a further assault would be any less bloody or have a different outcome: Breaches stopped, the filthy rebel canaille again taking to the rampart tops to sing mock songs.

Jimmy never forgave Don Antonio for humbling him at Saint Clara that day. Having been denied victory, Jimmy now looked to point the finger. Verboom was called in. The Antwerp butcher knew the reason for the summons and began his defense before any attack could come. “I did say that the trench required further tweaking,” he said, “and that it meant the assault would be premature.”

But Verboom was wrong if he thought Jimmy would be the one to cross-examine him. The next person to speak was Dupuy, who had entered immediately after Verboom: “A bad engineer always blames his trench,” he said.

Dupuy was very weak due to the loss of blood, and he had large swathes of bandages around his neck. It was the fifteenth wound he’d suffered in war. Had my bullet entered half an inch to the right, it would have been the last.

With some effort, Dupuy lowered himself into a chair. He opened a rolled-up document he was holding. “Just so you know, I plan to spend my convalescence studying these plans.”

For one engineer to appropriate another’s plans was beyond bad manners. “Those plans are of my trench!” protested Verboom.

“Yours?” said Dupuy. “Are you quite sure? If so, you’re going to have to take responsibility for it.” In spite of his wound, he spoke with a Bazoches voice, clear and precise. “Water has been found in the trenches; half the days have been spent digging at the earth, half bailing water. Then there is the fact that we have been losing between twenty and thirty dead and wounded a day to artillery fire, an unsustainable figure, and all of them highly trained — that is to say, irreplaceable — sappers. And the reason why? Because, sir, the parallels are excessively wide, and they are insufficiently deep, giving the enemy all the more to aim at. The losses are intolerable.”

Verboom’s attempts at protest fell on deaf ears.

“I could go on,” said Dupuy, “endlessly, in fact, as to the malign subversions contained in these plans. To top it off, the very height of ridiculousness, the cuts between the third parallel and the ‘gentlemen’ beneath Saint Clara are so long, it’s as though they’ve been designed expressly to invite a sortie against their flanks. You, sir, have created a trench that is akin to the Lord God creating man with the neck of a giraffe, so long and thin that the tiniest nick will mean decapitation.” He threw the documents across the floor. “Sir! If you are the author of this trench, it can mean one of only two things: One, you are a negligent hotspur undeserving of the title of engineer, a man who, by some strange twist of fate, is in over his head. Or, even more criminal, if you are the author of this trench, then you are an enemy of the Two Crowns and in service of the archduke. You choose.”

Verboom gave Jimmy a pleading look. In such cases, Jimmy’s answer was to open his ruthless eyes very wide, not move his body, and let an ominous little smile spread across his lips. A smile, as I can say from experience, that would have made Genghis Khan turn pale. Instead of speaking, he said nothing, giving the floor to his victim to deliver an impossible justification.

“Perhaps. .” stuttered Verboom, livid, cornered, “. . perhaps some imposter has meddled with the design!”

“Ho!” said Jimmy, applauding. “Now I’ve heard it all. The kidnapper was kidnapped!” Jimmy could spit words like icicles when he chose to: “Out of my sight now, dullard.”