The young soldier went back over to the troop, and Bassons couldn’t help but sigh condescendingly. “Youth, always so impatient!” This he said as though my rank somehow meant I wasn’t also young.
“Storm,” I know, is very overused as a description for battle, but there can be few better ways to describe the situation we were in. Clouds of ash and stone chips came tumbling from the bastions as the cannonballs continued to fall. In our positions just below the ramparts, pulverized fragments rained down on our heads. I didn’t want to imagine what it was like inside Saint Clara. With a little luck, I thought, I’ll be forgotten about. Ha! I should have been so lucky! One of Villarroel’s officers came rushing over: “Zuviría! Is it right you’ve been up on Saint Clara? You’re to show Captain Bassons the way—the students are going as backup for Bastida. Tell them they must hold until further reinforcements arrive!”
I didn’t even have time to patch together an excuse.
“Got that?” cried the man. “Hold the position! Hold, or all will be lost!”
I wanted to say no, no, he couldn’t send a collection of rosy-cheeked infants to Saint Clara, that the Bourbons would brush them aside in seconds, and it would be of no practical use in the defense of the city. But that would have been to offend Bassons and his hundred or so bluecoats, who were already trotting over. Very enthusiastic about getting themselves killed!
What else could I do but take them to Saint Clara? We crossed the narrows of the gullet, we hurried up the infernal steps. And dear Lord, what a scene we found!
Compared with the deck on Saint Clara at that moment, Golgotha would resemble an English country garden. The surface of that irregular pentagon was entirely carpeted with dead and wounded bodies. A great many of them were close to death, unable to raise an arm to ask for help. All those writhing bodies made me physically sick. Fishermen keep their buckets full of dozens of worms, and you see them squirming around, waiting for the hook to be stuck through them. It was like that.
The Bourbons had taken the first barricade, which we’d erected to encircle the breach, and as a place from which to fire at the invaders when they began slipping through. Take another look at the plate. Now that they were installed there, they were firing on the second barricade, where the small numbers of survivors from Bastida’s swordsmiths and cotton dealers were positioned. Twenty or thirty out of the original two hundred remained, and they were firing and reloading ceaselessly, unable to do anything about the fallen men between the two barricades. They’d held off the Bourbon assaults, and had even carried out a number of counterattacks, retaking the first barricade several times. Two hundred versus a thousand, perhaps two thousand!
As the students deployed themselves behind the second barricade, I caught sight of Bastida, who was down. His adjutant, who had propped him up against the battlement wall, was weeping. There was nothing he could do but dab his commander’s cheeks with a sponge. Bastida was gazing up at the sky, his eyes half vacant and his mouth open. Kneeling down beside him, I counted six bullet wounds on his body.
I know I can be mean-hearted from time to time, but in that moment, I can assure you, I felt awful at having sidled off. I’d had dealings with Bastida before and found him an honest, decent man. And now here he was lying on the floor with six bits of lead swimming around inside him. Taking his hands in mine, I whispered to him: “Jordi, Jordi, Jordi . . . ”
He tried to speak, but I couldn’t understand. He gurgled incomprehensibly, the din making everything difficult to hear anyway. It was a miracle he was still breathing.
“Why hasn’t he been taken to the hospital?” I yelled at his adjutant.
“He didn’t want to be taken, sir!” was the answer. “He gave express orders! There are so few of us that unless we all bear arms, we’ll be overrun.”
“The student company has come,” I said. “Now take him!”
Bastida grabbed my left wrist. His eyes bulged, and the look he gave me—one of stunned lucidity—will stay with me to the day I die. I put my ear to his lips. If he wanted to curse me, I deserved it. His chest contracted, and instead of words, red bubbles cascaded from his mouth. I felt the warmth of his blood spilling over my ear and stood back. He was carried off. He died early the next morning in Saint Creu hospital, after long struggles.
The men on the barricades, separated by that groaning mass of bodies sprawled across the cobbles, continued to exchange fire. More and more of the Bourbon soldiers gathered on the beachhead of the bastion. Once there were enough of them, they would come charging against the baby-faced student company, the bastion would be theirs, and with it, the city.
People unfamiliar with the art of engineering wouldn’t have seen that outcome so clearly. The students would load their rifles squatting behind the parapet, turn and aim a single shot over the top, and then kneel back down with a ramrod in one hand and the pouch of gunpowder in the other, again loading their rifles. In their minds, as long as they applied themselves diligently, the result of the battle would not be in doubt. The good Lord would guide their bullets in the same way He did their studies, rewarding constancy, effort, and dedication with a deserving triumph. They failed to understand that behind the small semicircular barricade the enemy was controlling, Jimmy was sending in more and more reinforcements, entire battalions making their way along the trenches from the back. A devastating pool of energy that, at the drop of a hat, would overwhelm anything and everything in its way.
I ought to be clear that, at the time, finding myself at the center of proceedings, I didn’t have a clear sense at all of what was going on. Over the following days, I managed to form a general idea.
Jimmy had attacked the bastions of Portal Nou and Saint Clara at the same time. As I’ve said, he planned to take them, and after that, the city would beg for mercy or else be put to the sword. Siege over. That was if everything went exactly according to plan. When the resistance turned out to be more determined than expected, Jimmy went out onto his balcony at Mas Guinardó and stood by for the messengers to brief him on where things had gotten to.
The first reports perturbed him. The news wasn’t bad, it was disastrous: Incredibly, the push for Portal Nou had been repelled.
Jimmy felt annoyed, he felt inconvenienced, but he did not feel discouraged. He had meditated at length on the attack, had an alternative strategy, and proceeded to put it into effect.
In reality, Jimmy didn’t need to take control of two bastions—as per les règles, one was enough. Portal Nou hadn’t gone well, so he decided to throw everything he had at Saint Clara. Where good old Zuvi was, in other words, cowering behind the second barricade.
While Jimmy gave the order for the reserve battalions—all of them—to make their way to Saint Clara, Dr. Bassons continued going back and forth along the parapet, exhorting his students. Seemingly oblivious of the danger, strolling around with his hands clasped behind his back as though it were daisy chains rather than bullets flying around, and spouting phrases in Latin. Don Antonio had ordered him to contain the Bourbons, and his lads were making an excellent job of precisely that. He saw no further; the calculated, catastrophic forces about to be unleashed were beyond his comprehension. Coming in my direction and seeing me kneeling close up against the battlement, keeping my head well down, Bassons stopped and, uncritically, more as a suggestion than as a recrimination, pointed out: “Lieutenant Colonel, officers are supposed to set an example.”
“Dr. Bassons!” I cried. “Get down!”
According to Bassons’s rudimentary military understanding, an officer had to stay on his feet in the face of enemy fire. Truly, he didn’t want for courage, the ignoramus. But we engineers always put staying alive above honor. Our lot was to build fortresses, the point of which was to provide protection, not leave people exposed, and unlike in open battles, in sieges anyone who doesn’t hide is a fool. Therein one of the unending sources of mutual disdain between engineers and soldiers.
Zuvi himself had designed and led the construction of
the barricades on the Saint Clara yard. High enough to provide protection from enemy fire, but at the same time, with gaps to allow rifles to be poked between the stockades and fired, and low enough that men could get back over in case of a counterattack. Bassons wasn’t a tall man, quite the opposite, but his head—upon which, absurdly, he still wore a wig—was visible over the top. That large, round head was a perfect target for any sniper, and we were in the midst of a firefight as constant as it was chaotic.
“Please, Dr. Bassons!” I again begged him. “Take cover!”
But I was wrong: My warning merely encouraged him to draw his students’ attention. Quite a sight: a lieutenant colonel down on his knees, Captain Bassons pontificating on the superiority of intellect and civic pride. He declaimed between bursts of gunfire: “Our grandfathers’ grandfathers, and their grandfathers before them, and as far ago as five generations past, lived on the Pyrenean peaks. And they lived like beasts, herding together without order, and without God.”
“What are you going on about?” I said, trying to cut him off. “Enough of the sermons!”
He paid me no mind. He was possessed by culture in the same way the preachers are filled by the Holy Spirit. “But then a day came,” he said, undaunted by the cascades of bullets flying by, “and they saw a rich country spread out beneath them, a prosperous place for anyone who knew how to work the land, valleys and plains perfect for human civilization. Our ancestors repelled the Moors—that foul-smelling bunch! And it took them generations to do it, establishing their laws, religion, and customs in a new land they named Catalonia.”
What nonsense was this? Plus the fact that his rapt students had slowed their firing in order to listen to him. Jumping to my feet, I barked out the order: “Maintain fire! Shoot, load, and shoot!” They didn’t listen; my authority was nothing next to that of Marià Bassons, their beloved professor.
Bassons the buffoon carried on with his discoursing: “They created a new order, settling Catalonia and going on to liberate Valencia and Mallorca, populating the lands with our people. And they did not suppress the natives, as is usual in conquered territories, and as is Castile’s approach. Rather, they established sibling kingdoms, which, as such, were forever to be our equals and beloved by us. A shared religion, a shared tongue, a shared common law, and each with its own parliament. And what was that law, supreme, absolutely free, and unshakable? Always to serve the king who serves his people.” He suddenly became excited, shaking a fist in the air. “And now some French pretender to the Spanish throne wants to trample a thousand years of Catalan liberty because of what some Castilian wrote in his will! Are we going to let them? Oi que no, nois?” Not a chance, right, lads?
I remember the way he shouted while shaking his fist, as though rattling a tambourine. I had to bellow to make myself heard over the din: “Dr. Bassons, would you mind getting down?”
I’ll never know whether the buffoon heard. He was near enough that I was able to grab him by the tails of his jacket to force him to take cover. But too late. In that instant I saw a white line score the sky, a little comet’s tail of smoke behind it. A concave slice of metal, the size of a serving tray, flew toward us and into the side of Bassons’s head, embedding in it as though his cranium were soft cheese.
Where had this projectile issued from? No one will ever know. Most likely, it was the remains of a cannonball that had shattered upon impact with the Saint Joan tower behind us to the right. The fragments had flown off in all directions, and the largest nestled in Bassons’s head.
He toppled onto me, his head a bloody mess. His body spasmed briefly and then was still. His dead hands were clenched, pawlike. My face was splashed with so much blood, it must have looked like I had measles. I pushed Bassons off me, and before his body hit the ground, almost all of his hundred students, it seemed, had come and crowded around. “Dr. Bassons!”
Panting, I wiped the blood from my face and tried to recover from that sudden death. As I puffed and gasped, they congregated around their professor and me. A collective sobbing started up.
“This is war,” I said, trying to console them. “Return to your positions.”
The students loved Bassons with that especial, fanatical love that exists between student and teacher. In their shock, they were close to insubordination.
“To your positions,” I ordered them, shoving them back, “spread out along the barricade, and fire, damn it, maintain fire! If you let up, they’ll gather and charge!”
Now, look, I’ve never been one to glorify military actions—partly because I’ve seen so few that have been glorious. Most great military feats are little more than rats being corralled, blind panic. When it comes to battle, men kill to avoid being killed, and that is all. Then a poet shows up, or a historian, or a historian of a poetic bent, and takes that thrusting, thrashing frenzy and puffs it up, imbues it with ideas of valor, calls it glory. And yet, and yet: What happened that day belied my whole logic.
Grief became hate, a repeated cry of “You bastards!” starting up as they fired, loaded, and fired. But to load a rifle, you need a calm head, and their blood was boiling. One among them, the most upset, lost patience; his hands trembled in rage, and the powder poured everywhere apart from down the barrel of his rifle. He let out a strange, female-sounding cry and was suddenly mounting his bayonet and vaulting over the barricade.
I had time only to shout after him: “Eh? Where are you going? Get back here!”
But he wasn’t listening. Maddened, he went screaming toward the Bourbon barricade, bayonet at the ready.
“That’s it, at them!” some imbecile shouted, encouraged by the mad student’s example. “Avenge Don Marià!”
And after him they went! The whole hundred or so of them, following in their comrade’s footsteps. Naturally, I tried to hold them back: “Don’t, don’t! You’ll be slaughtered, the lot of you!”
It wasn’t just compassion that made me try to stop them. I would have to be the one to tell Don Antonio, our good shepherd of soldiers, that I’d lost the sheep in my care, that they’d gone wandering into a mass suicide. Insults, threats, physically trying to hold them back, all useless. They went over the top, every last one of them. Not me, clearly. I stood with my back against the battlement for a few moments, head in my hands. The only person left was me, me and the body of Bassons the buffoon. Mon Dieu, quelle catastrophe!
I turned to watch the massacre through a chink in the barricade. And to this day, I cannot believe the sights I saw.
Spurred on by a very intimate rage, the students covered the distance in the blink of an eye. The Bourbons didn’t even have time to unleash an organized volley. There was a scattering of shots, and three or four of the students went down. When they were halfway across, one shouted out the old Barcelonan students’ harangue: “Stone them! Stone them!” And that same student stopped in his tracks, striking a flint and putting it to the fuse of a sack full of grenades, before launching it over the top of the enemy barricade. And there we have it: The more loutish a civic tradition, the more use it is to a patriot.
The grenades sent up a cluster of bodies on the other side of the ramparts. The mad youth leading the charge hadn’t even stopped to light his grenade but ran on, hoarse from yelling, bayonet out in front. The others followed him, and when they reached the barricade’s first wall, they scaled it and began firing and thrusting their rifles into the bodies of the men they found below them.
Beyond, hundreds of Bourbon soldiers were awaiting the order to begin the assault. An attack from the defenders—that was the last thing they were expecting. They were so tightly crammed together that the majority couldn’t free their arms to bring out their rifles and fire back. Over the students went, sinking their bayonets into the heads, chests, and backs of their enemies. They were so crazed, and the Bourbons so vulnerable, that the latter panicked and fled. They plunged pell-mell into the moat and back in the direction of the cordon, with the demented, braying students hard on their heels.
/> Once this impossible victory had become reality, I, too, followed after them, crouching low. In the stretch of the bastion between the barricades, my feet crunched over dead and wounded bodies; you couldn’t move for them. As I say: To this day, I fail to understand how a handful of scholars could make a thousand or so French grenadiers turn and flee.
I managed, thank heavens, to stop the students from continuing and trying to take on the whole Bourbon encampment. I was helped by the exhaustion that took hold of them, the plumbing of the depths of body and spirit that follows a life-or-death charge. The sound of orders from an officer brought them to their senses again. The first barricade had been taken, and now they needed to man it, reestablishing the situation as it had been before the Bourbon attack. They came meekly back up. Perhaps, as I’ve suggested elsewhere, because he who returns from a place of madness is more surprised than any by the aberration committed.
I had seen things before then that called into question the teachings at Bazoches. But the students’ charge went further: It utterly negated reason. Vauban never would have tolerated such an action, for the inevitable loss of life, and for the fact that it was bound to fail. And yet, and yet, incomprehensible as it was, there was I, standing on a mound of dead French grenadiers and giving orders to the babes who had killed them.
The lad who had initiated the charge had survived. He stood there with a very faraway look in his eyes. The front of his uniform was soaked in blood, top to bottom, and he was gawping at his bayonet, also stained red. He seemed not to understand, as though all the bodies had just appeared and were nothing to do with him. I shook him by the shoulders: “Noi, noi, are you all right?”