To the soldier, wounds are but misery,adding nothing to his true fame,nor does serving add glory to his name:naught but a chimera to warm his reverie….
Although, what can I say about these things, esteemed captain, that Y.M. does not recognize to the fullest extent.May God keep you in his care always, my friend.Yours,Fran. de Quevedo Villegas
P.S. You are sorely missed on the steps of San Felipe and at performances of Lope’s plays. I also forgot to tell you that I received a letter from a certain lad whom you may remember, the last of an unfortunate family. Apparently, after attending, in his way, to unfinished matters in Madrid, he was able to make his way to the Indies under an assumed name. I imagined that you might be pleased to hear that news.
3. THE MUTINY
Later, after the bull had bolted from the pen, there was great tattle and prattling about whether anyone had seen it coming, but the pure truth is that no one did anything to prevent it. The spark that set everything off was not the Flanders winter, which was not especially severe that year. There was no frost or snow, although the rains were a major hardship aggravated by the lack of food, the diminished population in the villages, and our responsibilities around Breda. But those things all come with the profession, and Spanish troops could endure the travails of war with patience. Wages, however, were a different matter. Many veterans had known poverty following their discharge and the reforms brought about by the Twelve Years’ Truce with the Dutch; they knew in their bones that service in the name of our lord and king demanded a high price when it came to dying and offered little reward when it came to surviving. And I have already noted on this subject that more than a few soldiers, whether they were old, mutilated, or with long campaign records stashed in the tubular containers they carried, had to beg in the streets and squares of our mean-spirited Spain, where again and again the same people amassed wealth while those who had given their health, blood, and life to preserve the true religion, the estates, and the wealth of our monarch remained buried and forgotten. There was hunger in Europe, in Spain, and in the military. The tercios had been waging war against the entire world for a long century and were beginning to not know precisely why, whether it was to defend indulgences or to enable the Court of Madrid to continue believing, amidst its balls and soirées, that it still ruled the world.
These men no longer had even the comfort of considering themselves professional because they weren’t being paid, and there is nothing like hunger to undercut discipline and conscience. So the matter of arrears complicated the situation in Flanders; for if that winter some tercios, including those of allied nations, twice received half their wages, the Cartagena tercio never saw so much as an escudo. The reasons for that are not within my ken, although at the time it was attributed to bad administration of the finances of our colonel, don Pedro de la Daga, and to some obscure affair of lost or appropriated monies. The reality is that several of the fifteen Spanish, Italian, Burgundian, Walloon, and German tercios maintaining the tight circle around Breda under the direct supervision of don Ambrosio Spínola had some incentive, some hope, but ours, scattered in small advance postings outside the city, counted itself among the troops placed on a long financial fast by the king. It was creating a dangerous atmosphere, for as Lope wrote in El asalto de Mastrique (“The Attack on Maastricht”):
As long as a man is not yet deadalways give him drink and bread;is there naught but plodding onendlessly, with all hope gone?I have honored that tattered banner,But no man should suffer in this manner,So, for God or king, hear what I say,I’ll not go hungry another day!
Add to that the fact that our deployment along the banks of the Ooster canal was in the closest position to the enemy, and therefore the most vulnerable to attack. We knew that Maurice of Nassau, general of the rebellious estates, was raising an army to come to the aid of Breda, within which another Nassau, Justin, was holding out with forty-seven companies of Hollanders, French, and English. These latter nations were, as Your Mercies are aware, always right in the thick of things when the opportunity arose to dip their bread in our stewpot. Indisputable was the fact that the army of the Catholic king was walking on the edge of a very sharp sword, twelve hours’ march from the nearest loyal cities, while the Dutch were but three or four hours from theirs. The Cartagena tercios’ orders were to thwart every attack that sought to approach our troops from the rear, thus assuring that our comrades entrenched around Breda would have time to prepare for any onslaught and not be forced to withdraw in shame or be drawn into an unequal battle. That placed a few squads in the scattered alignment that, in military jargon, was called the centinela perdida (the assignment of “forlorn hope”), advance units whose mission was to sound the call to arms but whose chances of surviving were summed up nicely by the pessimistic phrase in the line of duty. Captain Bragado’s bandera had been chosen for that task, as they were long-suffering, experienced in the misery of war, and capable—with or without leaders or officers—of fighting on a small stretch of land when the odds were stacked against them. But perhaps too much was riding on the patience of a few, and I must, in all justice, say that Colonel don Pedro de la Daga, maliciously called Jiñalasoga, was the one who precipitated the conflict with his imperious behavior…highly improper in a man well born and commander of a Spanish tercio.
I well remember that on that fateful day there was some sun, though it was Dutch sun, and that I was busy making the most of it. I was sitting on a stone bench near the gate of the house and reading, with great pleasure and benefit, a book Captain Alatriste used to lend me so that I could practice. It was a worn first edition, with countless signs of mold and rough treatment, of the first part of El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha. It had been printed in Madrid during the fifth year of the century—only six years before I was born—by Juan de la Cuesta. It was a wondrous book by the good don Miguel de Cervantes, who was an inspired genius and ill-starred compatriot. Had he been born English, or one of those accursed Frenchies, the cock would have crowed a different tune for this illustrious one-armed man during his lifetime, and not just to give him posthumous glory, a fate that a begrudging nation like ours tends to reserve for good and decent people, especially in the best of cases. I was fascinated by the book, its adventures and happenings, and moved by the sublime madness of the last caballero andante, the gallant Don Quijote, and also by the knowledge—Diego Alatriste had apprised me of this—that during the most exalted moments the centuries had ever seen, when galleys laden with Spanish infantrymen confronted the fearsome Turkish armada in the Gulf of Lepanto, one of the valiant men who fought with sword in hand that day had been don Miguel, a poor and loyal soldier of his country, of his God, and of his king, as Diego Alatriste and my father later became, and as I myself proposed to be.