Albert Sanchez Pinol - Victus - The Fall of Barcelona

“One other thing,” I said. “If you agree to subordinate yourself to the imperial army, from this moment you have a duty to rank and to discipline. I am a lieutenant colonel and the aide-de-camp to our commander in chief, and you must obey any orders you are given. Without exception.”

He gave a little smile, which always looked ghoulish in that face with such a thick beard and such black bushy eyebrows. “I said to you in that masía that if we met again, I would send you flying.”

He closed his hand into a fist and brought it with all his strength into the middle of my chest. I hadn’t yet put my feet into the stirrups, so I was flung from the saddle and landed on my back. It was just as well that I fell on some tall rosemary bushes that cushioned my landing. All the same, it was quite a punch.

When I looked up, Ballester and his men had already gone. Out of the undergrowth came the skinny gentleman and the tiny one, who helped me to my feet.

“Holy Mother of God!” they exclaimed, while my hands tried to alleviate the pain in my kidneys. “You’re alive. And Ballester on his way to Barcelona. What did you have to give him?”

“Something those people have always been denied,” I replied. “The truth.” They looked at me, hoping for more details, and I added: “I gave them my word that we were all going to be killed.”

And so we come to July 25, 1713. The enemy will be arriving any day now. The work of building and repairing the city walls was not finished, very far from it. After talking to Don Antonio, we decided to stop it all, apart from the work on the palisade.

When there is time to anticipate a siege in advance, the garrison will surround the fortified enclosure with a screen of sharpened stakes pointing out toward the besieger, immediately outside the moat, the first line of defense of the walls and bastions.

There is another interruption from that bag of lard by the name of Waltraud. She tells me that from what she’s learned so far, a palisade would seem to be a useless measure. Artillery fire would certainly destroy a few simple wood contraptions sticking out in front of the walls. So why waste time sticking in more and more and more rows of stakes?

A palisade makes it harder for an infantry to advance, and it intimidates the enemy. A forest of thousands and thousands of pointed stakes constitutes a quite considerable obstacle. At least if you look at it from the point of view of someone who has to cross it while being shot at from all sides. Officers need a lot of authority if they are to drive their men against a sharpened barrier.

All right, so the artillery bombardments will smash most of the stakes into splinters. But even that is not as decisive as it might appear. The stakes are two or three meters long. They are sunk very deep into the ground, at an acute angle, and with a buttress at their base. So that only a meter or a meter and a half is sticking out. The grapeshot and the bombs will indeed destroy them, but even if only a few inches are left, that is enough to injure feet and calves. The same explosions help to break and sharpen the points. A thick forest of solid spikes is no small matter to contend with. When the attackers advance en masse, it breaks up their formation, injures hundreds, and slows down the assault. And then they have the moat awaiting them, and the walls. Sometimes the simplest defenses are the most effective.

What I will not deny is the great transformation to the landscape that a palisade implies. The city, our ancient, frivolous Barcelona, suddenly seems to be surrounded by a halo of prickles, hostile and grim. The perimeter of a fortress can be vast, and I have seen enclosures circled by eighty thousand stakes. This static wood, worked by hands that wish to cause somebody else pain, is an announcement of death. When it is soaked by the rain, it is even more dismal than when it is covered in snow. When it is somewhere as sunny as Barcelona, its intention to cause harm is laid bare.

In our stores, we had sixteen thousand stakes. According to my calculations, we needed a minimum of forty thousand. We didn’t have them. Well, what was I to do? Go sit in a corner and cry? Débrouillez-vous! I focused on covering the most exposed areas.

At least we were not short of enthusiastic help. The government could not pay for all the work that needed to be done, but thanks to the prevailing civic fervor, we were joined by six thousand volunteers. I spent long hours with them, out on-site, where the work was being undertaken. I showed people how they ought to be digging in more deeply, anchoring the foot of the stake well for when the sticking-out part is blasted into the air by the effect of the artillery fire; I made sure they were leaning out at an angle of forty-five degrees; that the end was well sharpened, all of that. We were short of the stakes, tools, workers, and above all, time we needed to transform Barcelona into a hedgehog-city.

I was spending that July 25 supervising the works on the palisade when Ballester and his men came past. They were leading their horses behind them, and they were happy and flushed with wine. A lot of the whorehouses that were best supplied with the strongest liquor were outside the walls, waiting for travelers before they entered or left the city. They were doubtless returning from just such a brothel. It wasn’t hard to understand. There was an end-of-the-world mood in those establishments. When the Bourbons showed up, the party would stop.

It was four days since they’d arrived, and they had become famous for how profligate they were in taverns and brothels. And for their fistfights with the guards. Each time I heard news of them, I shook my head, disappointed. Perhaps recruiting them hadn’t been such a good idea after all.

When I saw them, I addressed their leader. “Ah, Captain Ballester,” I said, not thinking, prompted by the urgency of the situation. “Leave off what you’re doing and help us with these stakes. We need all the hands we can get.”

I should have seen his answer coming. They all burst out laughing, saying they had come to fight, not to work. This was bad, as their refusal to comply forced me into a confrontation.

I had told Ballester quite clearly that if he was joining an organized defense, he consequently had a duty toward discipline. If I allowed him to ignore me once, and in front of everybody, I would never have his respect again. I was in my shirtsleeves because of the heat. It was not the ideal attire for intimidating a gang of killers. Yes, this was bad. To make matters worse, when they recognized Ballester, the workers who were closest put down their tools and waited expectantly, holding in a gasp of fear. All the same, Longlegs Zuvi walked up to the Miquelets and said: “That’s an order. Here everyone works.” And pointed a finger all the way down their line. “Everyone.”

“Really?” Ballester answered. “Because I don’t see any Red Pelts here sticking in stakes.”

“We’re not out in the field now. Here we fight differently.” I took a few steps back and took one of the workers by the arm, a very young girl. I tugged her over and showed her open palms to Ballester. “Look at the blood flowing on her hands. These scratches are decorations every bit as worthy as any you can earn from some heroic deed in war.”

Ballester moved his face close to mine and, with barely contained hatred, whispered: “If what you wanted was manual laborers, why the hell did you ask us to come?”

“When are you going to understand,” I replied in the same tone, “that all of this is not for me but for the common good?”

“What I am beginning to understand,” said Ballester, “is that war is a good excuse for the Red Pelts to subjugate us even more than they used to.”