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?”
He didn’t recognize me. His mouth opened and shut, and his gaze was otherworldly. “Dr. Bassons,” he said. And throughout the rest of the day, he was in another world, and kept on calling me after his departed professor.
12
Jimmy, of course, reduced the human tragedy to numbers. And for a marshal, a number, so long as it is limited to an amount he can justify to his superiors, remains nothing but a number. He could absorb those initial losses, he reasoned, and the next morning, he began the assault again. He threw everything at the battered Saint Clara bastion.
For him, installed on the balcony of his Guinardó country house, watching the battle was no hardship. For the poor beetles of each army fighting over control of Saint Clara, it was like a recurring nightmare: Not twelve hours had passed since the charge of the students, and the situation was exactly as it had been previously, the Bourbons sheltering behind the first barricade, which they had retaken, and our forces behind the second.
Throughout August 13, there was a succession of attacks and counterattacks across the bastion yard. We were one step from the abyss; one step back, just one, and Saint Clara would be in Jimmy’s possession. And once he had the bastion, the entire city would inevitably fall. Being the sly fox that he was, Jimmy sent false attacks at other points along the ramparts. They were obviously nothing but feints, but they still meant Don Antonio had to disperse his forces — precisely Jimmy’s aim. The key position was protected by no more than a thin screen of men. The city was depending on this handful of combatants, worn out and choking on rifle smoke.
At the very center of the bastion was a small cabin, a munitions store whose construction I myself had overseen. Usually, a good bastion will have gunpowder storerooms underground, but Saint Clara was a woeful bastion, irregular and precarious, and had no basement. In the uproar of battle, prodigious quantities of gunpowder would be spilled. Obviously, the slightest scrap of anything alight would mean catastrophe. Even professional soldiers have trouble reloading a rifle with utter accuracy, and civilian militia more so. To point out the dangers to them, to insist they not rush as they loaded and reloaded, would have been as absurd as asking a child playing with a vase not to break it. This was why I thought it important to build this shelter, to protect the munitions from any stray sparks, and the consequent disaster. If you take a moment to flick back a few pages, you’ll see the said cabin on the plate depicting the battle map.
So the day was spent vying for ownership of this insignificant shack halfway between the barricades, an outcrop in the center of the cobbled yard. Now the Coronela would make a push for it, now the Bourbon forces. Unlike Jimmy, Don Antonio was there on the front line, moving between the most perilous positions. The sight of him was a boost to the troops. I can still see him slapping men on the back, chatting with the soldiers, more like a father than a high-up military man.
“My boys,” he’d say, “the least of you is worth as much to me as a general. How fortunate I am to have been allowed to lead you.”
A moment came when I said to myself: “Enough now.” It was well, very well, for him to set an example of fearlessness and self-sacrifice, like generals from antiquity (of course, we saw neither hide nor hair of Casanova), but we hardly wanted our commander in chief to end up like Professor Bassons.
What I couldn’t understand was Don Antonio’s strategy. Jimmy had a foothold on Saint Clara, meaning the bastion system was no longer to our advantage. Hours passed, and Don Antonio would regularly relieve the half-annihilated forces manning the different outposts, but never initiate any counterattacks. This meant simply accepting the series of bloody clashes in which we’d always be on the losing end. Jimmy was in a position to send wave after wave of men along the trenches to Saint Clara, and to evacuate his wounded; slow and arduous, yes, and the toll considerable, but we were so hugely outnumbered that sooner or later, they would gather together enough men to overrun us.
All the officers, to a man, knew how close we were to the abyss and that time was against us. Lose the second barricade, and it would be good night. The attitude of these officers said everything about the atmosphere in the city: Not a single one was exhorting Don Antonio to try and discuss terms. Far from it! There was a group of captains and colonels constantly asking Don Antonio to sanction a sortie, to let them try and dislodge the Bourbons from the first barricade. From the Catalans, “si us plau, si us plau”; from the pro-Charles Castilians who had changed sides, it was “por favor, por favor”; and you’d even hear a few Germans with their “bitte, bitte, herr Ánton!”
I can still see myself, standing back as officers swarmed around poor Don Antonio, who rejected their ideas one after another. They knew how desperate our situation was. And yet there they were, begging permission to carry out a frontal attack on a position held by several battalions. It was all Don Antonio could do to keep them at bay.
And so it went on until nightfall. The skirmishes continued in the same ferocious vein. Across the city, the bells tolled the warning alarm and didn’t abate at sundown. The area where the attack was concentrated stayed brightly lit; we sent up flares so we could see what we were aiming at; the flashes of rifle fire also lit the darkness, like thousands of blinking glowworms. At around four in the morning, I left Saint Clara to go and discuss with Costa which cannons to bring to the bastion, as the embrasures were now in effect. A brief dialogue that saved my life.
I had ordered an old sergeant major, once the general assault was under way, to empty the munitions cabin at the center of the disputed yard. I thought the Bourbons were certain to make gains, and it was imperative that they not seize the contents. What I didn’t know was that the old sergeant major had been one of the first to fall. That is, he hadn’t lived long enough to gather a group of carriers, go and open the padlocked door with its small firebreak strip of water across the entrance, and empty the store.
I find it amazing when I think how long it took for the catastrophe to come. All day long, each side vied for control of a building they had no idea was brimming with gunpowder, grenades, bullets, and pots and tins containing grapeshot. And nothing had happened. Le Mystère must have had a good chortle on our account that day.
One of the survivors later told me the story. Just after I’d left, four in the morning and darkest night, a cry had gone up of: “Forward, for Saint Eulalia, forward!” The Barcelonan troops had held out all that time and resisted their desire to counterattack; in their frustration, a number of them took the prompt of this insane anonymous voice. For the hundredth time, they reached the cabin, repelled the Bourbons who had gathered around it, and then halted before pressing on to the first barricade.