Albert Sanchez Pinol - Victus - The Fall of Barcelona

By the time I reached them, the priest’s horse was a wreck. I was sweating horrors and distress, and I didn’t climb down from the horse’s back so much as dropped onto the thin yellow grass. And there I stayed, lying there gasping like a dying fish.

“Here’s the little engineer,” said Don Antonio by way of greeting, entirely indifferent. “We thought you’d disappeared, you know.”

My hair was on end after the shock. Someone poured the contents of a jug of water over Don Antonio’s hands, and he gave them a cursory wash and said: “Right, off we go.”

“I’ve only just arrived!” I protested. “Even the shadow of my soul is weighing me down!”

He shrugged. “Very well, stay if you’d rather.”

“What about all the stragglers?” I protested again. “Back in Toledo, there are dozens of soldiers getting massacred. Why are we abandoning them?”

“Because they’re layabouts.”

At once he was back on his splendid white horse. One of Don Antonio’s officers spoke for him: “With Vendôme upon us, you really think the whole fucking army is going to sit and wait for a handful of drunkards? They had their chance. Things like this are useful for purging the troop of its undesirables.”

Yes, this from Don Antonio de Villarroel Peláez. And to think I believed he might replace the mastery of a Vauban!

Criticisms aside, if you ever want to know whether a general is one of the good ones, don’t even think about blood-soaked victories — tell him to lead a retreat; if you want to make it even more difficult, a retreat in winter. It’s much easier to defeat than to defend; it’s easier to attack than to retreat in an orderly fashion. A retreat never brings laurels or decorations.

An army in flight can come dangerously close to panic, threatening to disintegrate. We find ourselves in enemy territory, which is the main reason for keeping our ranks closed. As I’ve said, the Castilian countryfolk did not exactly love the Allied troops. If a soldier left formation, worn out, if he fell asleep under a tree, thwack! he would end up with his gullet sliced through with a sickle. Our flanks were surrounded by gangs of irregular killers, and behind us we had the Duc de Vendôme, the old marshal whom France’s Beast had sent to Spain to help his idiotic grandson. The whole Allied army was a single body, pressed together as tightly as a frightened herd, meeehhhh . .

And the cold! That winter, 1710, was the coldest of the century. Just picture this: One day I stopped my horse at the foot of a solitary tree, looking at a branch that had frozen in the frost. The weak sun was reflected in it with the rich colors of a rainbow. Then I heard plop, plop, plop hitting the ground very nearby. They were birds, dozens of them, falling from the branch, frozen.

The Allied army was transformed into the largest gathering of chilblains ever. My fingers were constantly purple; my lips were a maze of cracks. Since I had fled Toledo in whatever clothes I happened to be wearing, I needed to find some way to get something warmer: gloves, hat, blanket. Comradeship among soldiers? Ha! Débrouillez-vous , more like! I stole it all. And a scarf — old, but long enough to go three times around my neck and even covering my nose like an emboscado .

What followed was an interminable march across an endless landscape. Not just level but absolutely, perfectly flat. Not just dry, arid. In spite of the winter cold, neither the mist nor the rain managed to dampen it. God, how hard the Castilian soil is; there’s not an invader’s boot that can soften it up. We crossed distances that went on forever; towns would emerge like atolls on an ocean horizon. What is Castile? Get a big expanse of wasteland, plant a tyrannical regime upon it, and there you have Castile.

Vendôme was a great soldier. The Bourbon army was pursuing us relentlessly, with no hesitation, no letup, always in search of the perfect moment to destroy the Allied army, but also in no hurry. If you ask me, the only thing that spared us any unpleasant surprises, including getting ourselves completely surrounded, was Don Antonio’s cavalry.

Villarroel made no exceptions. I might have been nominally an engineer, but I had to ride, patrol, and fight like anyone else. I tried to make claims for my special expertise.

“We’re short of men” was his reply.

“Not least because we abandoned them in Toledo after they’d had one drink too many!” was mine.

“It’s only that lack of men that prevents me flogging you.” He handed me the reins. “Get on your horse.”

It was during that terrifying retreat that good old Zuvi became an expert horseman. Not through any love of horses but out of the strongest imperative that exists: You learn or you get killed.

But I’m not being fair to Don Antonio. You might not believe me, but that apocalyptic retreat from a hostile Madrid to Barcelona — the Retreat, as we veterans would come to call it — taught me to respect him, then to admire him, and eventually to love him.

He censured my manners, never my opinions. I was no more than a mouthy lad, and he was a proper general forged in cauldrons of iron and gunpowder. Who was I to argue with him? At the time, I couldn’t see the vast tolerance he extended to me. In his eyes, I was exempt by virtue of my youth and my office. No other general would have been so indulgent.

His motto was the same thing I’d been taught at Bazoches: Know what you need to do, and be where you need to be. He worried about his troops. Actually, that was the only thing that guided him. Vauban saved lives by means of numbers; Villarroel, by example. If you will allow me to simplify a little, I would say that to me, Vauban was theory and Villarroel was practice. Even during mobile wars, there are many things for an engineer to do: Find the best place for a ford when the bridges are inaccessible, build pontoons or provisional defenses. It was only then that I was able, as it were, to make use of my studies. And with this I earned the great general’s respect.

I suggested that we leave a small provision of dragoons to our rear, in some one-horse town that had a few battlements standing. When Vendôme approached, he would be forced to stop the whole army, to consider whether to attack the place, besiege it, or surround it. Our dragoons would mount their horses and race out under cover of night. Yes, the following day, the Bourbons would discover that the place was empty, but by then the Allied army would have gained a day’s marching on them.

The next trick from the Bazoches list was really rather cruel. We gathered all the inhabitants from down in Villabajo and sent them up to Villarriba — these were two settlements located on the north-south axis separating us from the army we had in pursuit. Simultaneously, another Allied squadron would force the inhabitants from Villarriba to head down to Villabajo. It often happened that the two populations would meet — amazed — on their way, bringing their goats, wagons, and chattel with them. The ill feeling between these unfortunate people illustrated the scale of our disgrace. The fact was, the Bourbon scouts wouldn’t spare the horses to notify Vendôme: “Marshal, the inhabitants of Villabajo have been moved up to Villarriba!”

From which Vendôme would deduce that the Allies were divesting themselves of mouths to feed as they converted the place into a center of resistance. Then another group of scouts would come to him saying the exact opposite: “Marshal, the inhabitants of Villarriba have been moved down to Villabajo!”

What was going on? Things became clear only when the Bourbons, having taken many precautions, entered the town square of each of the two villages and found, hanging on the door of the town hall, a polite note, written in perfect French, from good old Zuvi.