Albert Sanchez Pinol - Victus - The Fall of Barcelona

And the game would begin again, the fallback still viable. The attackers would have succeeded in taking only an outcrop — at a cost of hundreds of dead. What resources could they call on to resume the attack? Moons, half-moons, ravelins, pincers. . an endless variety of defensive architecture that does not bear describing to the uninitiated. In any case, anyone who wants to can look up the technical details of a fully equipped armature.

Undeniably, the fortified architecture of our time has a certain charm. Ours is the art of making the useful beautiful. Geometric lines, clear-cut and clean. Formally ascetic, they conceal nothing. They are what they are: defenses. And all the beings in this trifling universe of ours seek security in a hostile world. In peacetime, civilians may stroll beneath them, happy and safe, secure in the feelings offered by these bastions with their angular defiles, these colossi crouching like immutable sentinels. It is not that the Vaubanian fortification tends toward beauty but, rather, that beauty approaches its forms, yielding to them. Because when we contemplate them, that doubtful principle appears before our eyes, that unfounded faith: that there is order in the world, an order of goodness.

And in the following print, if this careless windbag puts it in the right place, allow me a poetic detail.

See the little sentry box at the top of the bastion, which looks like a figurehead? In French, this is called the échauguette . It is a sentry nest, safe from the elements. Beyond the purely functional, military engineers are not unaware of the aesthetic value of their work. And the échauguette is something like the cherry on the cake. The sole detail into which the designer could allow some vain expressiveness. Sometimes it would be delicately conical roofs with black or red slate tiles; at others, ramparts decorated with intricate stone carvings. I was passionate about a great many of them; their artistic value was far from negligible. I knew a Hungarian engineer who drew wonderfully well and whose hobby was sketching these échauguettes . And he was quite good at it.

What, when the enemy nears, is the first defensive measure to be taken? You blow up the échauguette with gunpowder, to deprive the enemy artillery of a reference point.

This always caused me a unique, inexpressible, ambivalent kind of pain. A city prepares to defend the homes contained within it, and what’s the first act? The sacrificing of the most exposed point of beauty.

A city before a siege is like an anthill that has been stepped on. Annibal ad portas! The churchbells ring out in warning. Farmers from the neighboring countryside come to take shelter, with family and livestock in tow. The garrison has soon taken up position. Munitions are distributed, the covers taken off the cannons, gunpowder deposits safeguarded.

But even in the midst of this uproarious tumult — when the duty officer shouts out for people to stand clear, that the échauguette is about to blow — every time, and I mean every time, the same happens: Everybody stops. Misty-eyed looks in the direction of the échauguette —the silence such that you could hear a match being lit. And then, boom! An instantaneous shift from the state of peace to the state of war. This boom is to a siege as Genesis is to the Bible. We Point Bearers (and, with heavy Miss Waltraud’s assistance, I’ll come directly to the meaning of the Points) had to be a cut above — we couldn’t be like other people. I hated the blowing of the échauguettes , but at the same time experienced the joy, the pleasure of the pain, to come.

Bazoches’s great error was to believe that the task of the warring Maganons could be dignified — elevated, even, to the saintly status of civilian art. Vauban’s belief was that by making war more technical, lives would be saved. Now, with the time that has passed, a great many massacres later, this altogether puerile notion seems sordid. But the marquis believed in it. Truly he did. I can’t blame him.

Coming to the end of our stroll, on which he related the history of Byzantium, he asked me a question. We had passed through green secluded meadows, wet with rain, on the outskirts of Bazoches. Crows squawked above our heads. Vauban stopped. “And you,” he said, “in this never-ending war, which side are you on? Are you for cannon or for bastion?”

“ Monsieur , I do not know,” I replied, surprised. After hesitating for a moment, I added: “I suppose I am for whoever’s cause is just.”

He took hold of my right hand and turned it over as if about to tell my fortune, and then rolled up my sleeve. “Tell the Ducroix brothers they are to give you your first Point.”

I have summarized a good amount of Vauban’s teachings, but please do not think they were limited to one single walk in the country. In reality, there were many meetings, with him stopping in from time to time when I was in lessons or me being called to his study when he had a free moment or felt like enlarging on something or other. In any case, most of my learning was left to the Ducroix brothers to instill. They composed the text; Vauban applied the finishing touches.

Let us go back a little. These Points bear explaining. (At least my German mammoth seems to think so; chatterbox cockatoo that she is, she interrupts and demands that I go back to the mention of the first Point.)

The twins announced my first Point once I had made substantial progress. I stretched out my right arm on a table, palm up, and they applied the tattoo using irons — these seemed part scalpel, part torture instrument. They placed the first Point on my wrist, just where hand and forearm meet. “Point” is one way of putting it. The first was precisely that, a simple circle of indelible ink, dark violet in color, the application of which hurt like anything. The next, an inch higher up my forearm, was more sophisticated, like a plus sign but with the points joined by lines, like a weathervane. The third was a pentagon. Each Point was more elaborate than the last. From the fifth onward, the outline of a bastioned fortress began to take shape. If an engineer reaches perfection, the idea is to have ten Points, covering the whole of the forearm up to the crook of the elbow.

To get in ahead of the curious reader: No person on earth has ten Points. That is, no person is a Ten Points, to my knowledge. Which is not to say there is no person deserving— merely that the circle of Maganons was so small, so specialized and select, that anyone who might confer the ranking had been dead for decades. Well, I’m still going, a Nine Points. So what? I’m old enough to take on pupils by now. As if that were not enough, the Paris revolutionaries of today, the ones my insufferable Waltraud so admires, are even changing the traditional ways of waging war. On which I would say a few words.

At the beginning of my century, armies were made up of career soldiers (or mercenaries, whatever you prefer). Given that no such king had endless wealth, armies had relatively few men. This was why bastioned fortresses were so important, for they blocked invasion routes. If, instead of attacking them, an army chose to go around, putting the fortress at their rear, their lines of communication might be severed, and they would be caught in another kind of cross fire: between the enemy army and the garrison at the fortress, which would come out to attack from behind.