That day I found out about the sheer sickening perversity that underlies all war. The deputy, emerging at one point from his musings, looked up and, with eyes full of hope, said: “Well, if that were to happen, at least the peasantry, stripped of menfolk and places to live, would join our side.”
The other men there seemed not to notice. Dalmau because he was concentrating on the maps on which he was explaining his plan, and Shitson because he was Shitson. But the words made a strong impression on me.
Politics are bad; war is evil. There’s only one thing worse than these two: a hybrid known as war policy. I’d been educated in a world where engineers were the hinges separating politics and war. A world based on the idea that politics merely shadow the armed forces: following behind, defining the outer edges. Coming into the new century, however, the noxious fumes of war took over the whole corpus. And here were the consequences: the overall thrust of our elevated mission being to protect citizens’ lives and homes. Turning the moral principle on its head, for Berenguer, the enemy burning and killing was no bad thing as people’s helplessness and feelings of revenge would play into our hands.
It goes without saying that Dalmau was extremely fed up with the deputy, his senile speeches, his constant gas from the other end, and this was another reason behind his proposal. Dalmau wanted to see what he could achieve on his own. I implored him to let me be in his column, but he refused.
“When we get back, Don Antonio will want an account of things,” he argued. “And without me around, the only reliable witness is you. Or do you think we should leave it to Shitson?”
The following weeks and months are a whirlwind of images in my memory, always the same, always changing. The Army of the Two Crowns hounding us. Us fleeing, attacking, counterattacking. March, countermarch, nights out in the open. Rain. Sun. Mud. Always on guard. Towns for us, towns against us, towns being put to the torch. The landscape there became a kind of cement in which past and present merged, as one’s senses were dulled by the sheer monotony of repeated cruel acts. We’d retrace our steps and find yesterday’s supportive town had become today’s ashy ruins. Mud. Sun. More rain. Sleet and hail, we’d make our way into ravines and hidden paths, later emerging in a forest. To our right, seven trees, each bearing three hanged men. Hadn’t we been there the day before? No, the day before it had been three trees, each bearing seven men. Change of direction; the scouts as our antennae, the column shuffling along like a thousand-legged insect. We were being defeated by a paradox: There was no way for us to recruit new troops because we were constantly fleeing, and we were constantly fleeing because of our inability to raise recruits.
Nor would I wish to suggest that it was the same everywhere, with each and every inhabitant prepared to make sacrifices for the constitution and Catalan liberties. Far from it! Many were the instances of betrayal, debility, and self-serving behavior. War also allows man’s most atavistic instincts to flourish.
I found myself at the vanguard of our unit one day, riding with the cavalry, when we came under fire from a hillside strewn with boulders. We could hear our assailants calling out encouragement to one another, and they were talking in Catalan. I thought it must have been one of these lamentably regular cases of mistaken identity you get in war. “It’s local militia,” I said to myself, “they’ve mistaken us for French or Castilian troops.” I gave the order to the other riders not to return fire, and moved forward, waving my hat to greet them. But the firing only intensified. As I moved closer on my horse, I could make out one of their men loading his rifle up on the top of a boulder.
“What the. . What are you doing?” I cried. “We’re with the Army of the Generalitat!”
To which the man said nothing. His elbow moved frantically as he thrust the ramrod up and down, and then I could see it in his eyes: He was just praying that my confusion would last long enough for him to have an easy shot at me.
When the Allied army disembarked at Barcelona in 1705, a great many municipalities declared themselves supporters of Charles. But it wasn’t unanimous. It wasn’t at all unusual for two neighboring towns to have opposing sympathies. Why? Because the priest had said God favored Little Philip? Not at all! They’d simply plump for whichever side their detested neighbors had not. Everyone must know stories about eternal disputes over rights to a well, or ownership of a windmill, anything. While Charles had been on the up, they’d kept quiet, said nothing. But now, with the Army of the Two Crowns occupying almost all of Catalonia, enthused, they took up arms and had no qualms about gutting one of their neighbors and using their political affiliation as an excuse.
As for the peasants shooting at us from the hillside, they couldn’t have cared less about constitutions, Austrian monarchs, Bourbons, and the like. The global war gave them a chance to institutionalize local conflicts. Europe’s apocalypse, to these people, became a story on which to hang the one thing they did ardently believe: that the next town along was a pack of whoresons. Catalonia’s freedom, the future of the land, the necessity of shrugging off the yoke of foreign tyrants, all was secondary to the noble calling of going and bashing in your neighbor’s head and, while you were at it, his son’s as well.
It’s as I say: War was the fire beneath the boiling pot, unleashing those atavistic fumes, pulling back that slight and insecure lid called civilization. Rousseau was right: Savagery isn’t without, it’s underneath; savagery isn’t to be found in far-off exotic places but in our own recondite depths. At the slightest excuse the savage in us will come storming to the fore, bowling down the civilized part like a cannonball.
Not that Voltaire ever understood, that insufferable dandy!
Deputy Berenguer was becoming less and less physically able. But his mental faculties were as good as ever: He could see that we hadn’t recruited very many men, certainly not enough to attack the Bourbon cordon with. But that didn’t stop him from sending letter after letter to Barcelona. Something about this made me sick. The Two Crowns army was closing in around us. To get through their net, we had to send some of our best riders — their loyalty had to be beyond question — and they’d be laying their lives on the line, trying to break through to the coast. Coordinating their arrival with that of a ship secretly sailed in from Barcelona made it triply dangerous. And what for? So Berenguer could send missives saying there was nothing to say.
An impasse had been reached, impossibly disheartening. The 1705 insurrection had begun in a place called Vic, a little over thirty miles north of Barcelona. We had to overcome many obstacles and make many detours to reach it. Quite the saga, for the Bourbons pursuing us were growing daily in number, and it took considerable maneuvering to get our unit to its destination intact. At least we were sure to have a warm welcome, given that Vic had been the first place to rise up in support of Charles. That’s what I thought then — I laugh to remember it!
They wanted nothing to do with us. Their elders urged us to turn around and leave the very same day, so as not to compromise them. “Bear in mind that, because we were the first to side with the emperor, we’re bound to receive the harshest punishments.”