Don Antonio said he was in full agreement with them on every count. The next thing was that he sent them packing, using very florid language. They couldn’t have been happier.
Jimmy was a true Coehoornian. I couldn’t believe he’d taken so long to begin the assault. The trench wasn’t complete, sure enough, but what did that matter to someone who followed Coehoorn’s principles? In his hands, the Attack Trench (as my stay in the Mas Guinardó had told me) was nothing but a political instrument. The ramparts had been breached; he had a large, well-disciplined army at his disposal; and he scorned the “rebels,” scoundrels, for the larger parts, with very few trained troops among them.
So I failed to understand why the assault was taking so long to begin. My thoughts in designing the trench had been informed in large part by Jimmy’s tendencies. A premature attack would put us at an advantage. And there he was, to my dismay, holding his troops back. A strange duel because, even while Jimmy’s cannonballs were raining down, even as I was flinging myself to the ground to shelter behind the battlements, I was begging him: “Come on Jimmy, come on. Attack at last.”
The night of August 11, one of the hottest I can remember, found me behind the walls of Portal Nou. The majority of the militia went bare-chested. I made my way to the most forward position, where the remains of a wall stood like a gigantic corroded tusk, from there looking out at the Bourbons. I had a Coronela man with me, sent by the bastion commander to protect me.
“Quiet!” I said. “Do you not hear that?”
A hammering — thousands of mattocks and hammers. My Bazoches-sharpened hearing meant I could make them out, in spite of them covering the tools with cloth to muffle the sound.
I dashed back to the rearguard, not stopping until I found Don Antonio. I was gasping, having sprinted all the way.
“Carpentry, Don Antonio,” I said. “We’ve heard carpentry from their front line. They’re putting in the assault platforms, there’s nothing else it can be.”
Don Antonio showed no sign of emotion. I remember how he nodded, as though hearing happy news about an old friend. He looked me in the eye, seeking confirmation of the news. Still panting, I said: “They’re coming. It’s the general assault.”
11
To help form an idea of the battle that took place on the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth of August, I here include a group of illustrations.
The below is the Saint Clara bastion and the large breach that had been opened by Jimmy’s cannons. The moat, full of rubble dislodged by the shelling, would be easy to traverse. The advance guard was just across from us, positioned on the “gentlemen.”
All we could do was create a line of defense inside the bastions themselves. Protecting this exposed line would be suicide, so ten feet or so behind the breaches, we erected barricades. These were of stone and cement, as solid as we were able to make them, and up to chest height.
One of Saint Clara’s few advantages was the Saint Joan tower, a tall, narrow construction behind and to the right of the bastion. Two light cannons had been stationed on it throughout the siege — light but very precise. The height of the tower gave it an excellent shooting angle. Saint Joan harrowed the Bourbons endlessly as they went about their trench works. They developed a loathing for the tower and sent endless cannonballs up at it.
To help people understand the violence of the fighting, I here include three prints of the Saint Joan tower. The first shows what it was like originally, and the second what state it was in on the eve of August 12. (It was so damaged that we’d had to remove the two cannons a few days earlier, as it was on the verge of collapsing.) The last plate is a re-creation of what was left of the tower after the siege.
The artist took considerable license. The tower, for example, wasn’t square but round, and at this point in the siege, the ramparts were in a far worse state. The prints may not be totally accurate, but they’re instructive all the same.
At dawn on August 12 I was up on Saint Clara. The imminent attack meant I hadn’t had a moment’s sleep. Those sons of whores, knowing that we knew something was afoot, spent the whole steamy night setting off false alarms. And it was my job to raise the men when the real attack came.
A fine task! Raising the alarm in the city was no easy job. Men were not so much worn out as utterly exhausted. And some officer pissing his pants, rousing the garrison for no good reason, was the last thing they needed. Consider, too, that ours wasn’t a professional army but a bunch of civilians with rifles slung over their shoulders. Any alarm would wrench them from their homes, from their beds and their wives’ embraces. Jimmy’s idea was exactly this: to unnerve the defenders. As I say, the night was one long series of ruses: suddenly, in the pitch dark, trumpet blasts and drumming, and you thought an entire army was pouring down on your head. But nothing happened. Nothing. A few minutes later, there would be a pointless volley of rifle fire. But, counter to expectation, no battalions of grenadiers emerged out of their trenches, no infantry with bayonets mounted, no one. No one. I spent the night gauging the tiniest sounds and thinking of Bazoches: “As long as you are alive, you must pay attention. And as long as you pay attention, you’ll stay alive.”
At around seven in the morning, a silence came down, a calm so absolute that the absence of noise itself was suspicious. I dashed over and vaulted the first barricade. Then, creeping forward, I dropped down and poked my head over the breach. And what I saw, for all that it was the height of summer, chilled me to the bone.
Hundreds of men were emerging from the “gentlemen.” French grenadiers were chosen for their stature, and these were the very tallest of that class of soldier. In place of their usual weapons, unreal sight, they were wearing metal breastplates and brandishing twelve-foot pikes. Just behind this armored urchin came grenadiers, hundreds and hundreds of grenadiers. Ten full companies, at the very least, making their way to the Saint Clara and Portal Nou bastions.
The moat became an ant run of white uniforms, clambering over the rubble in perfect formation. The slope gave way so easily under their feet that it also put you in mind of a herd of elephants parading over gravel.
“This is the end,” I said to myself. The cream of the French army was upon us, and all we had to take them on were two Coronela companies, the swordsmiths and the cotton dealers. Fewer than two hundred men, all told.
I ran back the way I’d come, hurdling the barricade. I went and found the commander of the bastion, Lieutenant Colonel Jordi Bastida. “It’s the general assault, Bastida!” I cried. “They’re lining up!”
Just then we heard an explosion over to our left. The ground trembled. A column of black smoke mushroomed up over the neighboring Portal Nou. The Bourbons had exploded a mine.
“Don Antonio must be informed!” I said, agitated.
Bastida shook me off with disdain. “Well, you’d better go and tell him, then!”