mochileros as we walked along the dike toward the nearby plain. The subject was being discussed from every viewpoint, and commands occasionally shouted by the sergeants were not enough to quiet the men.
Jaime, walking beside me, was carrying two short pikes, a brass helmet weighing twenty pounds, and a musket from the squad he served. I myself had Diego Alatriste’s and Mendieta’s harquebuses, a calfskin pack stuffed to the top, and several flasks of powder. Jaime was bringing me up to date as we walked along. It seems that in light of the need to fortify Oudkerk with bastions and trenches, regular soldiers had been asked to do the job, digging sod and carrying fascines (bundles of sticks to aid fortification) for the battlements, with the promise of pay that would remedy the poverty in which, as I have said, they all found themselves because of wages owed and scarcity of provisions. Put a different way, wages to which they were entitled but had not received could be earned a second time by those willing to put shoulder to the wheel, and at the end of each day’s labor they would receive the agreed-upon stipend. Many in the tercio accepted this means of improving their situation, but some spoke up, saying that if there was good coin to be had, their back pay should come first and then the fortifications and that they should not have to work to earn what was already owed them by rights. They said they would rather go without than resort to this remedy, forcing hunger to compete so vilely with honor, and that an hidalgo—for every soldier called himself that—deserved more and that it was better to die of misery and maintain their good name than to owe their well-being to spades and hoes.
In the midst of all this commotion, groups of men had been milling around and trading words amongst themselves, when a sergeant from a certain company mistreated a harquebusier from the bandera of Captain Torralba. This soldier and a comrade, short-tempered despite recognizing by his halberd that the aggressor was a sergeant, jumped into the fire, and, wielding their swords a little too freely, they gravely wounded their offender, only a miracle preventing them from dispatching him to his reward. So it was expected that the colonel would make a public example of the guilty parties and that, with the exception of those on watch, he wanted the entire tercio to witness it.
In these and related discussions we mochileros made our way along with the troops, and even in the squad of Diego Alatriste I heard different views about the affair: Curro Garrote being the most stirred up and, as usual, Sebastian Copons the most indifferent. From time to time I shot uneasy looks at my master to see if I could read his opinion, but he was walking along without a word, as if he heard nothing: sword and dagger in his belt, and the tail of his short cape swinging to the rhythm of his steps. He was tight-lipped when anyone spoke to him, and his face was unreadable beneath the wide brim of his hat.
“Hang them!” said don Pedro de la Daga.
In the eerie silence of the esplanade, the colonel’s voice sounded sharp and cold. The companies were aligned to form three sides of a great rectangle with the banner of each in the center: pikemen and coseletes (soldiers so called because of the armor they wore) lining the sides and detachments of harquebusiers at each corner. The twelve hundred soldiers of the tercio were so quiet and motionless that a botfly could have been heard among the rows. Under different circumstances it would have been a beautiful sight: all those men lined up with such precision, not sumptuously dressed, it is true— their clothing was covered with patches that at times were no more than rags, and they were even more poorly shod—but their weapons were oiled in accord with regulations, and their breastplates, helmets, pike heads, and harquebus barrels had been conscientiously cleaned and polished. Mucrone corusco, “with shining sword,” the chaplain of the tercio, Padre Salanueva, would undoubtedly have said, had he been sober. Every man was wearing or, rather, had sewed onto his doublet or buffcoat, as I had, the faded aspa, the crimson cross of Saint Andrew, also known as the cross of Burgundy, an insignia that allowed Spaniards to recognize a fellow soldier in combat. And on the fourth side of the rectangle, next to the flag of the tercio itself, surrounded by his principal officers and the six German halberdiers of his personal guard, was don Pedro de la Daga on horseback, his proud head bare, lace collar white against his tooled cuirass, cuisses of good Milanese steel, damascened sword at his side, antelope gloves, right hand on his hip and reins in his left.
“From a dead tree,” he added.
Then, with a flick of the reins, he made his mount rear and wheel to face each of the twelve companies of the tercio, as if defying any inclination to discuss his order, which added to a dishonorable death by hanging the insult that the adjudged would not swing from a leafy green branch. I was with the other mochileros, close behind the troop formation, keeping our distance from the women, the curious, and the rabble watching the spectacle from afar. I was a few paces behind Diego Alatriste’s squad, and I could see some of the soldiers in the last rows, Garrote among them, mumbling under their breath when they heard de la Daga’s words. As for Alatriste, his eyes were fixed on the colonel, and his face was as emotionless as ever.
Don Pedro de la Daga must have been about fifty, a small man from Valladolid, with bright eyes, a quick wit, and long experience in the military, though little esteemed by his troops. It was said that his sour temperament came from bilious humors, that is, a constipated nature. A favorite of our General Spinola and with influential patrons in Madrid, de la Daga had made his reputation as a sergeant-major in the Palatinate campaign and had been granted command of the Cartagena tercio after a falconet ball blew off don Enrique Monzon’s leg in Fleurus. Jinalasoga was not a nickname someone dreamed up out of nowhere; our maestre was one of those men who, like Tiberius, chose to be despised and feared by his men, using such means to impose discipline. That he was courageous in battle was indisputable. He scorned danger as he did his soldiers (you recall that his personal escort consisted of German halberdiers), and he had a good head for strategy. He was close-fisted with money, sparing with favors, and cruel with punishment.
When the two prisoners heard the sentence, they showed little reaction; they already knew the outcome of the affair; not even they could get away with running through a sergeant. The rules of the game were clearly established. The two men stood in the center of the rectangle, guarded by the chief bailiff of the tercio, both bareheaded and their hands tied behind their backs. One was older and had many scars, gray hair, and an enormous mustache; he was the one who had made the first move against their victim, and seemed the calmer of the two. The second was somewhat younger, thin, heavily bearded, and while the elder man kept looking up to the sky, as if none of this had anything to do with him, the thinner one showed more signs of dejection, looking down at the ground, then toward his comrades, then at the hooves of the colonel’s horse only a short distance away. But, like his companion, he comported himself well.
At a signal from the bailiff there was a drum roll, and don Pedro de la Daga’s bugler blasted a few notes to seal the matter.
“Do the adjudged have anything to say?”
A shiver of expectation ran through the companies, and the forest of pikes seemed to tilt forward, the way the wind bows grain, as those holding them leaned in, trying to hear. Then we all watched the bailiff, who had approached the prisoners, tilt his head to one side and listen to something the elder of the two was saying. He looked toward the colonel, who nodded assent, not out of benevolence but because it was the traditional protocol. Then those of us on the esplanade heard the gray-haired man say that he was an old soldier and, like his comrade, a man who had performed his duty up to the present day. Dying went with the profession, but to die of rope fever —whether from a green or dead or devil-may-take-it limb didn’t matter, pardiez—was an unfitting insult to soldiers like themselves who had always put their legs into their breeches like true men. So, seeing that they were to be shuffled off this coil, he and his comrade were asking if it could be by harquebus ball,
