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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.”