The Sun Over Breda

At our backs, behind the pikes, rippled the shot-shredded crosses of St. Andrew. The Hollanders were right upon us, an avalanche of frightened or terrible eyes and blood-covered faces. Large, blond, courageous heretics were attempting to bury their pikes and halberds in us or run us through with their swords. I watched as Alatriste and Copons, shoulder to shoulder, dropped their harquebuses to the ground and unsheathed their Toledo blades, planting their feet firmly. I also watched as Dutch pikes penetrated our lines, and saw their lances wound and mutilate, twisting in bloody flesh. Diego Alatriste was slashing with sword and dagger among the long ash pikes. I grabbed one as it went by me and a Spaniard beside me plunged his sword into the neck of the Hollander holding the far end; his blood streamed down the shaft onto my hands. Now Spanish pikes were coming to our aid, approaching from behind us to attack the Dutch over our backs and through the spaces left by the dead. Everything was a labyrinth of lances and a crescendo of carnage.

I fought my way toward Alatriste, pushing through our comrades. When a Hollander cut his way through our men with his sword and fell at the captain’s feet, locking his arm around his legs with the intention of pulling him down as well, I gave a loud shout, pulled out my dagger, and sprang toward him, determined to defend my master, even if I was cut to pieces in the process. Blinded by my madness, I fell upon the heretic, flattened my hand over his face, and pressed his head to the ground. Alatriste kicked and pulled to be free of him and twice plunged his sword into the man’s body from above. The Hollander rolled over but was not yet willing to give up the ghost. He was a hearty man, but he was bleeding from his mouth and nose like a Jarama bull at the end of a corrida. I can remember the sticky feel of his blood—red and streaked with gunpowder— and the dirt and blond stubble on his white, freckled face. He fought me, unresigned to dying, whoreson that he was, and I fought him back. Still holding him down with my left hand, I tightened my grip on the dagger in my right and stabbed him three times in the ribs, but I was so close to his chest that all three attempts slid across the leather buffcoat protecting his torso. He felt the blows, for I saw his eyes open wide, and at last he released my master’s legs in order to protect his face, as if he were afraid I would wound him there. He moaned. I was blinded by fear and fury, deranged by this mongrel, who so obstinately refused to die. I stuck the tip of the dagger between the fastenings of his buffcoat. “Neee…srinden…Nee,” the heretic murmured, and I pressed down with all the weight of my body. In less than an Ave Maria he spat up one last vomit of blood, his eyes rolled back in his head, and he lay as still as if he had never had life.

“Spain!…They’re pulling back!…Spaaaain!”

The battered rows of Dutch were withdrawing, treading heedlessly on the corpses of their comrades and leaving the grass seasoned with dead. A few inexperienced Spaniards made as if to pursue them, but the greater number of soldiers stayed where they were. As the men of the Cartagena tercio were nearly all old veterans, they were too practiced in war to break from their lines and risk a flank attack or an ambush. I felt Alatriste’s hand grab the neck of my jerkin and turn me around to see whether I was hurt. When I looked up I saw only those gray-green eyes. Then, without a further word or gesture, he yanked me right off my dead Dutchman, who was now nothing but cold meat. The arm that held his sword seemed to be almost too exhausted even to sheathe the blade he had wiped clean on the buffcoat of the dead man. He had blood on his face, on his hands, and on his clothing, but none of it was his. I looked around. Sebastian Copons, who was searching for his harquebus among a pile of Spanish and Dutch corpses, was covered with his own, bleeding from a gaping wound on his temple.

“Zounds!” the Aragonese blurted, dazed, feeling the two-inch flap of scalp hanging loose over his left ear.

He held the severed skin between a thumb and index finger blackened with blood and powder, not knowing quite what to do with it. Alatriste took a clean linen from his pouch and, after laying the skin back in place as best he could, knotted the cloth around Copons’s head.

“Those blond toads almost got me, Diego.”

“That will be another day.”

Copons shrugged his shoulders. “Another day.”

I stumbled to my feet; the soldiers were falling back into line, moving aside the fallen Dutch. Some seized the opportunity to search the corpses, divesting them of any valuables they found. I saw Garrote rather routinely using his vizcaina to cut off fingers, stuffing the rings they’d held into his pockets, and Mendieta was able to provide himself with a new harquebus.

“Close ranks!” bellowed Captain Bragado.

A hundred paces away, the Dutch reserves were forming up, and among them shone the breastplates of their cavalry. The Spanish soldiers temporarily put aside stripping bodies and again lined up elbow to elbow as the wounded crawled away, escaping the field however they could. We had to pull away our own dead to make room for the formation. The tercio had not yielded an inch of terrain.

That was our amusement for the morning, and we lasted till midday, taking the Hollanders’ charges without giving way, calling out “Santiago!” and “Spain!” as they came toward us. We removed our dead and bandaged our wounded where they had fallen, until the heretics, convinced that this wall of dispassionate men did not intend to budge one inch, began to attack with less enthusiasm. My supplies of powder and musket balls had run dry, and I had turned to requisitioning them from corpses. At times, between attacks when the Dutch were farthest away, I would run a good distance out onto open ground and strip what I needed from their fallen harquebusiers, and more than once I had to come running back like a hare with their musket balls whirring past my ears. I had also used up the water I had brought for my master and his comrades—war raises a devilish thirst—and I made trip after trip to the canal at our backs. That was not a pleasant excursion because I had to pick my way among the wounded and dead we had dragged there, a blood-chilling panorama of appalling mutilations, bleeding stumps, laments in all the tongues of Spain, death rattles, prayers, blasphemies, and Salanueva’s limping Latin as he went back and forth among the soldiers, his hand weary from administering extreme unctions, which, once the oils were exhausted, he gave using only saliva. These fools who prate of the glory of war and majesty of battle should remember the words of the Marques de Pescara: “May God grant me one hundred years of war and not one day of battle.” They should walk where I walked that morning if they are truly to know the scene: the spectacular stage machinery of banners and bugles, the tall tales invented by the braggarts of the rear guard, the ones whose profiles adorn coins and who are immortalized in statues though they have never heard a shot whistling past their ears, or seen their comrades die, or stained their hands with the blood of an enemy, or run the risk of having their tackle blown off by a musket ball to the groin.

I used the trips back and forth to the canal to take a quick look at the road from the Ruyter mill and Oudkerk to see if help was on the way, but it was always empty. From there I could also see the whole of the field of battle, with the Dutch pushing toward us and our two tercios blocking passage on both sides of the road; Spaniards on my left and Soest’s contingent on the right: an infinity of glinting steel, musket fire, gunpowder smoke, and banners amid a thick forest of pikes. Our Walloon comrades were playing their part well, and theirs, it is true, was the most difficult, squeezed as they were between the heretics’ harquebusiers and brutal charges of Light Horse. Each time they held against a new assault there were fewer pikes in their squad, and although Soest’s soldiers were men of great honor and integrity, they were inevitably losing strength. The danger was that if they gave way, the Dutch would be able to cross their terrain, flank the Cartagena tercio, and gain the advantage. And the Ruyter mill and road to Oudkerk and Breda would be lost.

I went back to my own company with those thoughts playing uneasily on my mind, and I was not encouraged