In the early days, what a terrifying man commander Villarroel seemed to me, a veritable tyrant on horseback. Cavalry was his great strength; he would take his squadrons out to the outskirts of Toledo, and “Off we go, lads!” riding more often, and better, than the Macedonian royal guard. As an engineer, I managed to avoid most of the exercises, though not all. Hup-hup! Up and down, down and up, till your rump was square-shaped from the saddle. He was more like a sheepdog than a general. Whenever a rider strayed, there the general was, woof woof!, barking and bothering the dimwit who had gotten out of formation. And as the dimwit in question tended to be good old Zuvi, I did get some tremendous tellings-off.
“I’ve got a contract as an engineer, not a dragoon!” I protested one day, wobbling about on my saddle.
“And what do you expect me to say to that?” he shouted. “Accept it! God made you for a monk rather than for a soldier, just give thanks you haven’t been promoted any higher!”
Don Antonio drank only one little glass of wine at lunchtime. He was satisfied with a dish of half-cooked pap and wasn’t interested in any women but his own wife. On the nights when he didn’t sleep in his marital bed, which were about three hundred and sixty-four nights a year, he preferred a wooden board to a mattress. How could good old Zuvi possibly get on with such a man?
Engineers have never felt comfortable in the structures designed for military types. Those martial salutes, that respect for hierarchical superiors, I never took to any of this myself. I sneaked away from the pack whenever I could. Toledo was so dull that when I got drunk there, it was no longer to satisfy my vice but because I had nothing better to do. Once I was called to a meeting of the general’s staff officers, to which I reported late and jollier than usual. Don Antonio gave me one of his looks, silent and incredibly fierce.
They were arguing about the situation as a whole, which was dark with storm clouds. While the Allies sat rotting in Toledo, Little Philip was gathering thousands of recruits for his army. As if that were not enough, the Beast had sent him French reinforcements under the command of the Duc de Vendôme. Villarroel shared his fears that Toledo was being transformed into a giant trap. He asked my opinion: Could the city survive a siege?
The wine laughed for me. “Ha ha ha! What a silly question, Don Antonio — I mean, General. Heh heh heh, if the Bourbons besiege Toledo, there won’t be any siege. Supplies getting cut off, the people taking against us, the city walls becoming so rotten that even the stones have maggots in them. Hee hee hee, bearing in mind that they are likely to exceed our number by three to one, it would be best to quit now while we still can, ho ho ho. . ”
I was locked up in the cells for a week, on bread and water. And not because he disagreed with my opinion but because I had said exactly what he thought, but said it rudely. I thought my dungeon would be so deep that they’d have to send my food by catapult. No. The truth was, the incarceration was not too tough — apart from the diet, which purged me.
During my brief incarceration, something of relevance also took place: Charles fled Toledo, and Castile, and made a discreet return to Barcelona. The fact that he had gone before the army tells you everything you need to know about his confidence in a military victory. He left before anybody else, to hell with us all. The road to Barcelona was riddled with Castilian irregulars ready to cut his balls off, which meant that he had to travel surrounded by an escort so strong that it weakened the army further. A heroic example!
As for the Castilians, he had only complaints and recriminations: “I found many people in Madrid who asked me for things, and nobody to serve me.”
What did he expect? Castile and Catalonia were at war; being king of the Catalans excluded him from reigning over the Castilians. He of all people should have known this. And he did, in fact.
While he was in Castile, he drank milk only from goats that had been transported from Barcelona. His bread was baked from Catalan wheat, and even the sugar in his confectionary had been brought over from Catalonia. All his supplies were watched over by the regiment of the Royal Catalan Guard, an elite corps made up entirely of staunchly pro-Austrian Catalans, fanatics so fanatical that you could hear a “Carlossssss” when they broke wind. I scarcely exaggerate.
When he crossed the border from Castile to Catalonia, he alit from the royal carriage, exclaiming, “I am back in my own kingdom at last.”
He was loved by as few people in Castile as Philip was in Catalonia. If he had faced facts, he might have negotiated an end to the conflict. An end to the war. And if things had gone that way, I would have had at least one country in which to bury my bones. But no, His Majesty King Karl, our meringue-faced Charles, needed to rule over an empire and couldn’t settle for less. He did get his empire in the end! Though not as we expected, and through a stroke of chance and at the expense of his Mediterranean subjects. I will tell you of that anon. Let me first explain what happened on the final day of the Allied occupation of Toledo and the retreat, the painful retreat, to the land of the Catalans.
Good old Zuvi got out of his cell. If you will allow me at this point to make a confession: The very mildness of the punishment made me reconsider the man who had imposed it upon me.
What little experience I had with Don Antonio told me he was a good general, firm but fair. He had done the right thing, locking me up, absolutely the right thing. Vauban would have treated me just the same, as he should. Thanks to that incarceration, I became aware of how dulled I had become since leaving Bazoches. Perhaps Don Antonio was a kind of walking Bazoches.
Once I was out of my dungeon, I reported to him. He noticed the change he had wrought in my spirit, and his behavior toward me softened a little.
The thing is, with Villarroel, you always ended up paying for your failings, one way or another. And the last one, the last sin of youth that I committed while under his command, very nearly cost me my life.
I wanted to celebrate my newfound liberty with whores, and the binge lasted so long that I awoke late, worse for the wear, and not in the barracks.
“The archduke’s army! They’re finally off!” cried the whore who woke me. “They left at night so they could slip away unnoticed. Long live King Philip!”
The whole fucking army was returning home, and me rubbing the sleep from my eyes! Even though, at Bazoches, I’d been taught to remain alert even in my sleep, the notification hadn’t reached me because I’d spent the night outside the barracks. I got dressed so quickly that at first I tried to put my shirt on over my legs.
The Allies were not exactly beloved in Toledo, and as soon as I was outside, I could see that the atmosphere was warming up. As the news spread and neighbors began to wake, their bitterness awoke, too. You could already see small groups shouting: “Long live King Philip! Viva!” and brandishing improvised weapons above their heads. God, anything could happen now.
I hastened toward the citadel. I thought there might be some reserve battalion left behind that I might join. What I found was a little band of drunkards, so drunk that even the most imperious orders hadn’t been able to get them out of their bunks. There was a bit of everything: some Englishmen, Portuguese, Dutch. . Alcohol makes no distinction between origins.
“What are you still doing here? They’ve all left for Barcelona!” I cried. “The Toledo mob is going to kill us!”
It was useless — they didn’t respond at all. I felt as though I were at the bottom of a monstrous Atlantic whirlpool, with the only ship that could save me, the Allied army, receding farther and farther into the distance. No sooner had I left the citadel than I began to hear shouting and gunshots. People were looking for the last stragglers, and there were plenty of them. At the end of the road, I saw an Englishman on his knees, being kicked and stabbed by a yelling crowd of men and women. It was as though people had lost their reason.