Albert Sanchez Pinol - Victus - The Fall of Barcelona

I found myself at the vanguard of our unit one day, riding with the cavalry, when we came under fire from a hillside strewn with boulders. We could hear our assailants calling out encouragement to one another, and they were talking in Catalan. I thought it must have been one of these lamentably regular cases of mistaken identity you get in war. “It’s local militia,” I said to myself, “they’ve mistaken us for French or Castilian troops.” I gave the order to the other riders not to return fire, and moved forward, waving my hat to greet them. But the firing only intensified. As I moved closer on my horse, I could make out one of their men loading his rifle up on the top of a boulder.

“What the. . What are you doing ?” I cried. “We’re with the Army of the Generalitat!”

To which the man said nothing. His elbow moved frantically as he thrust the ramrod up and down, and then I could see it in his eyes: He was just praying that my confusion would last long enough for him to have an easy shot at me.

When the Allied army disembarked at Barcelona in 1705, a great many municipalities declared themselves supporters of Charles. But it wasn’t unanimous. It wasn’t at all unusual for two neighboring towns to have opposing sympathies. Why? Because the priest had said God favored Little Philip? Not at all! They’d simply plump for whichever side their detested neighbors had not. Everyone must know stories about eternal disputes over rights to a well, or ownership of a windmill, anything. While Charles had been on the up, they’d kept quiet, said nothing. But now, with the Army of the Two Crowns occupying almost all of Catalonia, enthused, they took up arms and had no qualms about gutting one of their neighbors and using their political affiliation as an excuse.

As for the peasants shooting at us from the hillside, they couldn’t have cared less about constitutions, Austrian monarchs, Bourbons, and the like. The global war gave them a chance to institutionalize local conflicts. Europe’s apocalypse, to these people, became a story on which to hang the one thing they did ardently believe: that the next town along was a pack of whoresons. Catalonia’s freedom, the future of the land, the necessity of shrugging off the yoke of foreign tyrants, all was secondary to the noble calling of going and bashing in your neighbor’s head and, while you were at it, his son’s as well.

It’s as I say: War was the fire beneath the boiling pot, unleashing those atavistic fumes, pulling back that slight and insecure lid called civilization. Rousseau was right: Savagery isn’t without, it’s underneath; savagery isn’t to be found in far-off exotic places but in our own recondite depths. At the slightest excuse the savage in us will come storming to the fore, bowling down the civilized part like a cannonball.

Not that Voltaire ever understood, that insufferable dandy!

Deputy Berenguer was becoming less and less physically able. But his mental faculties were as good as ever: He could see that we hadn’t recruited very many men, certainly not enough to attack the Bourbon cordon with. But that didn’t stop him from sending letter after letter to Barcelona. Something about this made me sick. The Two Crowns army was closing in around us. To get through their net, we had to send some of our best riders — their loyalty had to be beyond question — and they’d be laying their lives on the line, trying to break through to the coast. Coordinating their arrival with that of a ship secretly sailed in from Barcelona made it triply dangerous. And what for? So Berenguer could send missives saying there was nothing to say.

An impasse had been reached, impossibly disheartening. The 1705 insurrection had begun in a place called Vic, a little over thirty miles north of Barcelona. We had to overcome many obstacles and make many detours to reach it. Quite the saga, for the Bourbons pursuing us were growing daily in number, and it took considerable maneuvering to get our unit to its destination intact. At least we were sure to have a warm welcome, given that Vic had been the first place to rise up in support of Charles. That’s what I thought then — I laugh to remember it!

They wanted nothing to do with us. Their elders urged us to turn around and leave the very same day, so as not to compromise them. “Bear in mind that, because we were the first to side with the emperor, we’re bound to receive the harshest punishments.”

The deputy, always indulgent with his own, went easy on them. Not me. “Given that they were the first to go on the attack,” I said, “that ought to make them the last to quit the defenses.”

Ordered to hold my tongue, I obeyed. It was pointless anyway. We still weren’t to know at that point, but it was the most futile of discussions. During the meeting, we later learned, Vic’s representatives had sent some namby-pamby local official, one Josep Pou, to ask for clemency from Little Philip’s army. Fabulous! The ones who had struck the match, accusing us of arson.

In the end, it became as though all our to-ing and fro-ing was merely to keep Deputy Berenguer from falling into Bourbon hands. Coordinating ourselves with the other columns — which were moving around as constantly as we were — and with Barcelona, too, was no easy task. A large number of our messengers never came back. Each time one galloped away, I found it hard to hold back the tears. If they were caught, they’d be tortured to death — itself a useless act, as the messages were written in a code that only Berenguer knew. The one thing he could be praised for, the clod.

It was a most ingenious code, with numbers standing in for letters or symbols. So, A was 11, M was 40, and E was 30. Other numbers stood in for whole things—70, for example, meant Barcelona; 100, bombs; 81, Philip V; 53, grenades; 54, Pópuli; and 87, Miquelets.

A rumor went around among the men that Deputy Berenguer kept the message hidden deep inside. The Bourbons would never decipher the code, because the numbers and letters were all nothing but a ruse. In fact, Deputy Berenguer would fart holding a cylinder to his behind. The implement didn’t, in reality, decipher written signs but, rather, the whistling sounds made when the cylinder’s top lifted.

Well, mob humor never has been that refined.

One day, early in the morning, the sentries sounded the alarm. Everyone scrabbled to arm himself, thinking it was a dawn attack by the Bourbons. No. To our relief, it turned out to be compatriots of ours — Ballester and his men, to be precise.

The sight of Ballester returning to us was one of the few happy ones during the whole expedition. I ran over and embraced him. I’m sure now that Ballester did appreciate my effusiveness, even though he couldn’t show it at the time. I put my arms around him; his stayed pinned to his sides. I didn’t mind. I could tell by his bewildered expression that he was having feelings he had no way to express.

Looking him in the eye, taking him by the shoulders, I said: “I knew you wouldn’t abandon us. I knew it.”

He pushed me away. “You were the ones who abandoned us. Don’t you remember?”

Looking around, I saw that only seven of his nine men were with him. “What about Jacint and Indaleci?” I asked.

“What do you think?”

We both fell silent for a moment. I was the next to speak. “And in spite of everything, you’ve come back?”

“It’s you who have come back,” he said, pointing behind him. The Miquelets had been scouting ahead of a far larger body of men: Dalmau’s whole troop. Plus three thousand men newly joined! Dalmau had recruited them himself, addressing the matter very differently to Deputy Berenguer. Not so strange, if you think about it. They were two poles: Deputy Berenguer’s apathetic moralizing and Dalmau’s levelheaded enthusiasm couldn’t have been more different. For Deputy Berenguer, the homeland meant the past, and protocols; for Dalmau, the future, and people’s rights.