Their captain shook his head, his only concession being to mutter at me in his islander accent: “Ses ordres.” Orders.
There was a considerable stretch of ground between the end of their trench and the bastion because, as per good old Zuvi’s modifications to Verboom’s plan, the third parallel had been dug as far from the ramparts as possible.
I later learned that it had never been Don Antonio’s plan to take back the first barricade. Jimmy was too strong there, it would only have been a bloodbath, so Don Antonio was content to delay them. He waited until the last possible moment before launching his counterattack, anticipating some pause in the assault. Then and only then did he give an order, one that just three officers had been let in on.
Lowering the telescope, he called out in that booming Castilian voice of his: “Do it!”
A flare went up, turning red the thick smoke on and around the bastion and ramparts. The moment he saw this, Costa gave his signal, lowering an arm. I wasn’t nearby, but I believe I heard him shout something as well, and within an instant, each and every cannon and mortar began pounding the trenches, creating a barrier of flames.
We saw the explosions hitting the Bourbon lines, and the next two troops charging out from the garrison, one from the left and one from the right. (The arrows on the plate below indicate their trajectories.)
Two hundred previously selected men, under Lieutenant Colonel Tomeu and Colonel Ortiz, attacked each flank. And my God, what a mad dash that was.
They hurtled out alongside the third parallel, exposing themselves to fire from the trenches. Those four hundred had to be very fast to make the most of Costa’s barrage. They converged on the cut, some jumping down inside and others tipping the fajina parapets onto the heads of the enemy. Like this:
Ortiz was in charge of blocking off the cut on the side of the Bourbon encampment with the fajinas, and Tomeu’s men did the same on the city side, trapping the enemy in between.
This was one of the swiftest and most exact maneuvers I’ve ever seen carried out from a besieged position. If Costa hadn’t been a superior artilleryman, his cannons and mortars would have been the death of that four hundred. We watched as, having reached the cut, they shot their rifles down into it, annihilating the surprised Bourbons. I still have trouble banishing the memory of that underground wailing.
By the time Jimmy found out, it was too late. With Ortiz blocking the cut, there was no longer any use sending reinforcements.
As for the Bourbons already on Saint Clara, they saw what a sticky position they were in, with Tomeu behind them. And that was when the three cannons manned by the Mallorcans came into play: A large section of the first barricade sank, the brickwork beneath it pummeled so hard that it buckled inward and down.
With cannonballs coming from one side and rifle bullets riddling them from the other, the Bourbons scattered, leaping down into the moat below and sprinting past Tomeu’s position, trying to reach the trench. It goes without saying that Ortiz’s and Tomeu’s men mercilessly gunned them down at close range. The volleys from the rifles up on the Saint Joan tower also intensified, prompted by the sight of the stampede. And then the order came for those of us on the second barricade to charge the first and, finally, unopposed, retake it.
Such is war. In the time it takes to crack your knuckles, the tables turn, and a seemingly hopeless battle that was going nowhere turns into a rout for your enemy. More than four hundred French never made it back to their lines. No prisoners were taken.
I managed to make out a French official through the smoke, standing with his body half out of the third parallel, using his telescope to try to discern what was happening, clearly incredulous at the way the assault had just crumbled. Ballester happened to be next to me, and he was scanning around for a target.
“Give me that!” I said, grabbing his loaded rifle, aiming it at the officer with the telescope, and firing at that reckless figure. The bullet went through his neck, blood gushing out the other side. The man’s arms went up, like a pagan hailing an idol, and he fell backward into the trench. I remember the way his telescope, which he’d inadvertently flung upward, twirled around and around in the air. A not insignificant shot: The man I’d taken down was none other than Dupuy.
Still I shudder to think: In all of a yearlong siege, I fired one bullet, just one, and it turned out to be at Dupuy.
Seeing his troops coming pouring back, Jimmy was livid. He lowered his head and contained himself for a moment before exploding. The officers and commanders around him were made aware, in no uncertain terms, of how incompetent they were.
He stormed back into Mas Guinardó with his retinue behind him. He was even angrier than in the critical moments at Almansa.
“The position must be regained!” he howled, shaking his fists. “Even if it means losing the entire army! Or do we want Europe to hear how mighty France has been overturned by a group of rude civilians?”
His generals tried to calm him down, but Jimmy cursed them all. “Silence! I want a report from the horse’s mouth. Send me Brigadiers Sauvebouef and Duverger! And Marquis de Polastron!”
Not possible, they said: Sauvebouef and Duverger had both been lost during the assault. Of Polastron there was no word. Well, that was soon to come: Men of the Coronela, still in a frenzy, had decapitated poor Polastron, rammed his head down inside a cannon, and fired him at Mas Guinardó. Hearing that noise, everyone present hung his head. All except Jimmy, who went out on the balcony, there finding Polastron’s blackened, smoking head revolving on the balcony floor like a spinning top.
A number of officials appeared whom Jimmy had greater respect for, including Lieutenant Colonel La Motte. Injured, he hobbled in, face soiled and uniform in tatters. “Your Excellence,” he argued, “regaining a foothold on Saint Clara would cost us our best troops, a crippling number of casualties and sacrifices. Without reinforcements from France, we’ll gain no more than a few feet, and the cost will be terrible. . The filthy rebel canaille are up on the ramparts as we speak, their generals and magistrates are whipping them up, and they mock us with singing and jibes.”
All true. The regained positions were teeming with men and women and even some musicians, celebrating the victory. With very little decency, also true. A great display of bare buttocks turned in the direction of the enemy lines.
Even so, it took a report of the losses to change Jimmy’s mind. Numbers have the power to cool the most burning passion. In the Saint Clara attack alone, fifteen hundred men had been lost, making a total of five thousand since the beginning of work on the trench: the kind of figures that could no longer be argued away. Most disconcerting of all was the account of officers down. Among them, none other than Dupuy — though, as it turned out, he had survived my bullet through the neck. And there was something further, something Jimmy grasped all too well.
Unlike field battles, in any contest for fortified positions, men have stone and brick to protect them. In Barcelona, thousands upon thousands of bullets were fired, but few ever reached their marks, the bodies of the enemy. The artillery of either side, for their part, were constrained by having to avoid hitting their own men. This meant that bayonet charges were the prime cause of death — which shows, better than any speech ever could, how determined the “rebels” were. There was nothing to suggest that a further assault would be any less bloody or have a different outcome: Breaches stopped, the filthy rebel canaille again taking to the rampart tops to sing mock songs.