Jimmy never forgave Don Antonio for humbling him at Saint Clara that day. Having been denied victory, Jimmy now looked to point the finger. Verboom was called in. The Antwerp butcher knew the reason for the summons and began his defense before any attack could come. “I did say that the trench required further tweaking,” he said, “and that it meant the assault would be premature.”
But Verboom was wrong if he thought Jimmy would be the one to cross-examine him. The next person to speak was Dupuy, who had entered immediately after Verboom: “A bad engineer always blames his trench,” he said.
Dupuy was very weak due to the loss of blood, and he had large swathes of bandages around his neck. It was the fifteenth wound he’d suffered in war. Had my bullet entered half an inch to the right, it would have been the last.
With some effort, Dupuy lowered himself into a chair. He opened a rolled-up document he was holding. “Just so you know, I plan to spend my convalescence studying these plans.”
For one engineer to appropriate another’s plans was beyond bad manners. “Those plans are of my trench!” protested Verboom.
“Yours?” said Dupuy. “Are you quite sure? If so, you’re going to have to take responsibility for it.” In spite of his wound, he spoke with a Bazoches voice, clear and precise. “Water has been found in the trenches; half the days have been spent digging at the earth, half bailing water. Then there is the fact that we have been losing between twenty and thirty dead and wounded a day to artillery fire, an unsustainable figure, and all of them highly trained — that is to say, irreplaceable — sappers. And the reason why? Because, sir, the parallels are excessively wide, and they are insufficiently deep, giving the enemy all the more to aim at. The losses are intolerable.”
Verboom’s attempts at protest fell on deaf ears.
“I could go on,” said Dupuy, “endlessly, in fact, as to the malign subversions contained in these plans. To top it off, the very height of ridiculousness, the cuts between the third parallel and the ‘gentlemen’ beneath Saint Clara are so long, it’s as though they’ve been designed expressly to invite a sortie against their flanks. You, sir, have created a trench that is akin to the Lord God creating man with the neck of a giraffe, so long and thin that the tiniest nick will mean decapitation.” He threw the documents across the floor. “Sir! If you are the author of this trench, it can mean one of only two things: One, you are a negligent hotspur undeserving of the title of engineer, a man who, by some strange twist of fate, is in over his head. Or, even more criminal, if you are the author of this trench, then you are an enemy of the Two Crowns and in service of the archduke. You choose.”
Verboom gave Jimmy a pleading look. In such cases, Jimmy’s answer was to open his ruthless eyes very wide, not move his body, and let an ominous little smile spread across his lips. A smile, as I can say from experience, that would have made Genghis Khan turn pale. Instead of speaking, he said nothing, giving the floor to his victim to deliver an impossible justification.
“Perhaps. .” stuttered Verboom, livid, cornered, “. . perhaps some imposter has meddled with the design!”
“Ho!” said Jimmy, applauding. “Now I’ve heard it all. The kidnapper was kidnapped!” Jimmy could spit words like icicles when he chose to: “Out of my sight now, dullard.”
In private, Jimmy and Dupuy were quite informal with each other. All hierarchy was forgotten.
“He’ll be hanged, then?” asked Dupuy.
“No,” said Jimmy, casting his gaze out over the embers of the battle. “Philip has already poured twenty million into this siege. Having his chief engineer killed would be too much. But — and you have my word on this — that man will never cross the Pyrenees again. He’ll have to make do serving the maniac they’ve put on the throne in Madrid. Torment enough.”
Words that condemned Verboom. Jimmy himself didn’t know the extremes of cruelty his sentence would lead to. Thus, the Antwerp butcher, who had always sought to be beloved of his superiors and adored by the soldiery, spent the rest of his days miserably seeking the protection of a mad king against the rank and file, who thought of engineers as bricklayers and meddlers. This was his reward. Well, also, I later went after him and killed him — oh, I’ve already said?
Dupuy looked over Verboom’s (my) plans, smiling and shaking his head.
“What are you smiling at?” said Jimmy scaldingly. “We’ve had a hiding, and you look as though you couldn’t be happier.”
Still looking at the paper, Dupuy said: “He was educated by my cousin. What did you expect?”
Jimmy exploded. “I expected that you would alter all the stunts hidden in that trench!”
“And I would have,” said Dupuy, “if you’d given me time. In that, Verboom was right: A little self-restraint wouldn’t have gone amiss in you. But Martí knew that was the one thing you’d lack, that you’d want a swift victory. Again Vauban trumps Coehoorn. And now we have only two options: Either we suspend the trench works, accepting that defeat as well, or we push on and correct the errors that have been made. And you know very well the lives that will cost.” Again he tossed down the plans. “This is no trench, it’s a labyrinth.”
“No,” said Jimmy, giving voice to his thoughts. “It’s a knot.”
13
Jimmy elected to take an ax to it, like the Gordian knot it was. This was Jimmy to a T. He’d been overhasty in unleashing the assault, spurred on both by his Coehoornian spirit and by political expedience. But he was prepared to rectify the situation. Vauban? Coehoorn? In this instance, he was going to follow neither.
He lined up over a hundred cannons to crush any and every stone that lay in his way. His idea, doing away with any semblance of the art of siege warfare, consisted of flattening what was left of Barcelona’s ramparts and bastions, paving the way for the Army of the Two Crowns to march in in battle formation, as in a battle in open country. It would take longer than the initial forecast, but did Jimmy mind that? He had all the time in the world. Saint Clara prompted him to renounce his designs on the throne of England. His place was in London, vying to be king, and yet here he was, his future in ruins because of a city that refused to play along.
There was nothing to be done in the face of such an onslaught; the principles of engineering became meaningless. It was the first time I saw Costa, our stoical parsley-chewing chief of artillery, lose hope. We ran into each other one day, and hunkering down as the walls detonated around us, he grabbed hold of my sleeve, imploring and accusatory, and bellowed in my ear: “I swore I’d hold them off as long as we were three against five. Now they’ve got nine cannons to every one of ours! For the love of God, what more do you want from us?”
I extricated myself without giving an answer. The Mallorcans carried on working miracles to the end. They’d fire their mortars and, before the enemy had time to pinpoint where the shots were coming from, change position before taking aim once more. They destroyed several Bourbon cannons daily. The shells would go off on the French and Spanish gunners’ toes, making a hash of their bodies and lifting the cannons themselves to Babelian heights.
How grand, how majestic a sight: that of heavy artillery tossed in the air! We saw ten-foot iron or bronze barrels twirl through the sky, along with their crews. We saw parabolas of gun carriages lovelier than Jacob’s wheel. Up on his balcony, watching with his telescope, being the aesthete he was, Jimmy couldn’t have cared less whether they came to land on the broken-down farmhouses of Catalonia, or if they ended up lodged in the sun over France.