Albert Sanchez Pinol - Victus - The Fall of Barcelona

And it was quite some punishment: Before he left, he wanted to bid the troops farewell. Don Antonio de Villarroel, the perfect warrior, had to tell his men that he was abandoning them to the inferno while he sailed away to a palace somewhere. Hard as it would be, nothing in the world would prevent him from bidding that farewell, even if they were going to insult, condemn, and revile him.

We left his residence, and someone brought us horses. We both mounted up, and settling on his saddle, Don Antonio said: “Let’s go to it.”

Spoken like a martyr. I’m certain that what he wanted was a famous death, the chance to die taking part in some heroic action. Instead, fate had presented him with a pitiful exit through the back door. We rode side by side. As we approached the ramparts, and in breach of all protocol, I grabbed him by the forearm and said: “General, this isn’t necessary.”

Offended, he threw my hand clear. “Let me go! I have never in all my days fled an enemy. Am I to do so now, from my own men?”

He spurred his horse on, and I followed. I was consumed by worry — not for myself but for Don Antonio. Very few knew the straits he was in, leaving not out of fear but because there was no way for him not to.

We came to the foot of the ramparts. By some miracle, there was a pause in the fighting. Up on Saint Clara, Portal Nou, and the intervening wall, heads turned. At the sight of Don Antonio, they began to gather at the rear of the remaining fortifications. Once they were all there, crammed together and listening, Don Antonio tried to speak, but words failed him. Something in him broke.

His horse began rearing, and Don Antonio barely managed to steady it. Pinching the bridge of his nose as if to stifle the emotions, he again tried to speak. Again the words wouldn’t come.

At certain rare moments, time stands still. Up on the bastions and ramparts stood those hundreds of skeletal men, thinner than the rifles they were carrying. Gaunt faces and tricorns tattered and rent by bullets and grapeshot. Uniforms dull with soot and ash, sleeves only barely attached to the rest of their jackets. And the smell. Like long-dead carrion. Right down to the last drummer, they’d heard the news: Their commander was departing. What did he have to say? Hundreds of them, they all kept their eyes fixed on Don Antonio.

And after weeks and weeks in which the sun had beaten down mercilessly and not a cloud had been seen, fat drops of rain began to fall. A great crowd had gathered, and yet you could hear the raindrops land. The stones of the city, warmed by a year of artillery fire, smoldered in the downpour. Nobody blinked.

For the third time, Don Antonio tried to find the words. There was a moment when it seemed like the skin on his face would fall from it. Still mute, he exposed his head, lifting off his tricorn with his right hand, saluting the gathered men. His horse skittered nervously, its rider keeping his hat high in the air as the rain continued to fall. He said nothing; there was nothing more. The only thing left for Don Antonio was to depart. For the men of the Coronela, it was back to manning the walls.

Spurring his horse forward, Don Antonio rode along the interior of the ramparts. His hand still in the air, bearing his tricorn aloft, bidding farewell to the citizen army he’d led for so long. I decided to catch up with him. I rode on his right side, between him and the ramparts. Ridiculous, but I thought by putting my body between him and them, even if there were some soldier in deep despair, it might stop them from shooting the departing general from his saddle. What a difference between this and that long-ago battle of Brihuega in 1710, when Zuvi the rat rode with Don Antonio between him and enemy bullets.

I hadn’t quite caught him when a roar went up. I lifted my head.

The men of the Coronela, Castilians, Aragonese, Valencians, and Germans, all waving their rifles above their heads. And they weren’t cursing Don Antonio but cheering for him. A piecemeal clamor, formless, consisting of just his first name, repeated— Don Antonio! Don Antonio! Don Antonio! — that grew louder and louder. The rain intensified, and with it, the commotion. Don Antonio was overcome and spurred his horse on to escape the ovation. Catching up with him, I saw something I thought I’d never see in all my days: The man was crying.

Don Antonio crying! I thought oak trees would dance before it came to that! Noticing that I’d seen his tears, he tried to justify himself: “My one desire is to stay with them, but honor prevents me. I cannot act as commander to a defense that has moved out of the realms of bravery and become sheer recklessness. Nor could I ever forgive myself for putting so many innocent lives at risk.”

We left the ramparts behind. The rain continued to fall. Calming his horse with unhappy caresses, Don Antonio whispered to himself, seemingly unaware of me: “I hope those ships never come,” he said. “That way I might die shoulder to shoulder with these men, like any other soldier.”

Don Antonio bade his men farewell on the eighth, and between then and the eleventh, that dismal September eleventh, the rain fell nonstop, all day and all night.

What a contrast from the inferno that August had been. To begin with, it was a balm, refreshing and relieving us, bringing life where before there had been only the stifling heat. All exposed gunpowder dampened, the Bourbon shelling was briefly suspended. But the downpour also transformed our environment into one of mud and darkness, making the place all the more inhospitable.

The breaches in the walls were a sight to behold. There were five of them, each between a hundred and two hundred feet wide. As many as 687 men would be able to pass through them shoulder to shoulder (don’t be surprised at the exactitude of the 687, a Bazoches calculation); that is, roughly two regiments in battle formation.

And there was no way of plugging such gaps. We threw hundreds of spiked wooden bats down into them, spiked with six-inch nails. The workers threw them as far as they could, to try not to expose themselves to enemy fire, even if that meant the placing was not very exact. Thus we made spike-fields of the ground in the gaps.

Dripping wet, beneath dark skies, I continued giving instructions to the living dead manning the defenses. Everyone was worn out, which made it deeply unpleasant having to force them to carry on plugging the gaps. On the city side of each, we dug a ditch and stacked fajinas along it, and behind, another ditch, another fajina parapet, and another. We made a good number of these, all equally fragile. At certain chosen positions, we placed “organs,” which was the name for the invention of a certain local Archimedes.

Essentially, “organs” were wooden platforms with ten or fifteen loaded rifles lined up along them. A thin piece of string ran along all the triggers. A single yank — anyone could do it, even an ancient like Peret — and a synchronous volley would be fired into the invaded area. It was never likely to be very effective, but at that late stage, we had far more weapons remaining than we did men.

There was one final feat. With Don Antonio gone, I felt free to fight on my own account. I’d learned that, in the desperate defense of a city, everything, rocks, flesh, and even blood are brought to bear. Why not the very elements?

I took aside the workers who were in the best condition. We used the last reserves of wood to create a long canal, paving it with overlapping timbers. The rain meant well water didn’t have to be saved, and this aqueduct of ours ran from one of the largest municipal reservoirs out as far as the ramparts. We opened the sluices one night, and a torrent of water inundated the enemy’s forward positions. Water gushed over the “gentlemen,” and into the cuts, and then the trenches, taking people, fajina baskets, and armatures with it. A flood during the night is all the more fearsome. The Bourbons couldn’t have known what was going on; besides, what purpose could it possibly serve to shoot at a torrent of water?