Albert Sanchez Pinol - Victus - The Fall of Barcelona

They could then tunnel under the bastion and, once underneath, pack the tunnel with an enormous explosive charge. Boom! The bastion would come down with the defenders inside; the rubble would plug the hole beneath and create a mound for the attacking force to scale. The defenders could always come back with countermines, but with the enemy a mere sixty feet away, who could be sure they had not opened two, three, or even four different underground galleries? In any case, the other option, and the commonest conclusion to a siege, was a grenadier attack.

Grenadiers! My God, the very word brings shivers. The French had the best grenadiers of all; they were, very simply, killing machines.

For the French grenadiers, sixty feet was nothing. They were select men, chosen for being the strongest and, more than anything, the tallest men in the realm. In certain armies, instead of the normal tricorn hat, they wore their traditional brimless cap. Their uniform was spotless white. Trench warfare converts soldiers into an army of ragdolls, but they never let the slightest speck onto that Bourbon white.

And now consider the effect of this: Each side has become a band of scarecrows, faces black with smoke and soot, all military neatness gone. And you, at the top of the bastion, your hands covered in sores from all the carrying and firing, fed up with pissing down the cannon chamber to cool it, half-starved to death because all you’ve been brought to eat is rancid cabbage soup, your eyes red from tiredness and the gunpowder, half deaf from the explosions, you suddenly see a hundred giants dressed in brilliant white emerging shoulder to shoulder, with astonishing aplomb, from the enemy trench. It’s conceivable that, for all your officer’s bawling, you, rather than pulling the trigger, will let your jaw drop. For half a minute, at least — the half a minute it takes the grenadiers to line up at the edge of the trench.

One or two, or five or six, or even twenty or thirty, will naturally go down under the concentrated, desperate fire turned on them by the soldiers in the bastion. But these, these stay as still as statues and react only to the voice of their capitaine . He gives the orders:

One: Attention! And they stand up even taller, for all that the bullets whistle by. Zip, zip!

Two: Grenade! They put their hands to the grenades in their pouches — a kind of iron and bronze ball, incredibly heavy in relation to its size, and with a short fuse.

Three: Au feu! They light the fuse and hold the grenade behind their head, ready to throw.

A terrifying sight — particularly when viewed from the summit of a half-destroyed bastion. All those flickering sparks, suspended in the air, apparently so harmless. . One may be tempted to stand watching, like the rabbit with the serpent, to see what happens. But if you find yourself at such a point, believe me: Forget Honor, forget King and Country, all such nonsense, and run, run for all you’re worth!

Fourth and final order: Lancez! A hundred or more black balls curving through the air toward you, landing directly upon the defenders’ heads.

Next, a pretty carnival of screams and flying human limbs. Then a bayonet charge, sweeping aside the wounded and any crying out for mercy. Or do you imagine those who have been providing the others with targets to practice on will feel all at once forgiving? Just because the others raise their little hands? No. They will bayonet their livers, they will split them head to behind and move onto the next. As the first to enter a now defenseless city, one that had the chance to surrender and obstinately refused, they are well within their rights to ransack houses, churches, and storerooms, slit civilians’ throats, and amuse themselves with the womenfolk.

The problem any defensive perimeter faces is that a chain of fortifications is only as strong as its weakest link. An assailant force need not take the rampart’s whole perimeter, just a toehold on a single bastion, just one. Control one bastion, and the city will be yours for the taking. The city has fallen. This is why, once the attack reaches the third parallel, the defenders usually concede. A trumpet will sound, asking to discuss the terms of the surrender. With a rampart destroyed and the enemy trench a few paces away, any sensible garrison opts to negotiate an honorable way out. I have seen surrenders that were majestic in the way they were enacted.

A trumpet from the besieged calls for a truce. The firing dies down. The tumult of war becomes expectant silence. A few minutes later, the garrison commander steps forward in his best regalia, sword in belt, at the center of the breach — which the cannons have made look altogether like a stage in a theater. He is not at risk; to shoot him now would be too dishonorable. The two armies look at him: the besieger in the trenches and those remaining on the fortifications. Should he be a man with a talent for declamations, he will stand proud and tall before proclaiming with a dignified wave of the hand, “ Monsieur l’ennemi! Parlons. ”

And they agree terms.

It is not a military manual I’m writing here, so I won’t go into the technical aspects (which I had coming out of my ears in Bazoches), measures, countermeasures, appeals, stratagems, and all manner of imponderables that might arise during a siege. But in a nutshell, these were the rules of the game.

Vauban was not the only one to set out a general method for besieging. When he was young, his great rival was Menno van Coehoorn, a Dutchman with a face more elongated than a cucumber.

Vauban and Coehoorn settled their disputes many years before Longlegs Zuvi was even born. In fact, it was already history when I came to Bazoches, with both men nearing the ends of their lives. But two distinct schools of thought came to be named after them, two entirely opposed ways of conceiving a military siege.

The system Coehoorn devised, it might be said, was the obverse of Vauban’s. For Vauban, storming a fortified place was a rational undertaking, informed by almost all the disciplines with which humankind has shaped the world. For Coehoorn, it was a stunning act of extreme violence.

Coehoorn is said to have compared the siege to removing a molar — painful but quickly over, the quicker, the better. According to the Dutchman, the besieger ought to concentrate on the weakest, or least well defended, point in the fortifications. Once this had been identified, hurl everything at it and break through it in one savage onslaught. At night, if possible, using the element of surprise, exploiting any weakness the besieged side has failed to take into account. Nothing else mattered.

Theorists across Europe divided into two camps, and impassioned arguments ensued: the supporters of the attack à la Vauban and those who preferred it à la Coehoorn. Needless to say, I was on Vauban’s side; unavoidably, intellectually, we become our teachers’ children. And my view has always been that, at root, there isn’t much to take from the Coehoorn school. The idea that what the enemy needs is a good cosh to the head — any thug could come up with that. Hard-line Coehoornians would come back with the argument that war is simple, radically simple. In reply, I would say this is to negate two thousand years of developments in the science of war. A humanist edifice was constructed upon Vauban’s foundations; Coehoorn merely encouraged rashness.