The Sun Over Breda

like demons along the bulwarks, stabbing and shooting anything that moved. At the same time, my companion and I, having put the bridge out of commission, were sliding down the chains when a hoarse roar erupted from the shore of the dike: the cries of a hundred and fifty men who had spent the night in the fog, in water up to their waists, and who now emerged shouting “Santiago! Santiago! Spain and Santiago!”—the traditional battle cry in praise of their country and their patron saint. Resolved to work off the paralyzing cold with blood and fire, they swarmed up the embankment with swords in hand, ran along the dike toward the drawbridge and the gate, occupied the bulwark, and then, to the terror of the Dutch who were scattering in all directions like crazed geese, entered the town, killing right and left.

Today the history books speak of the assault on Oudkerk as a massacre. They mention the “Spanish fury” at Antwerp, and maintain that the Tercio Viejo de Cartagena acted with singular cruelty that day. Well, no one said that to me, because I was there. It is true that those first moments were marked by pitiless carnage, but will Your Mercies tell me how else, with only a hundred and fifty men, one could take a fortified Dutch town with a garrison of seven hundred? Only the horror of an unexpected and merciless attack would so quickly break the spine of those heretics, so our men applied themselves to the task with the professional rigor of experienced soldiers. The orders of Colonel don Pedro de la Daga had been to start the raid with many deaths in order to terrify the defenders and force them to a swift surrender but not to begin the sacking of the town until victory was assured. So I will spare you further details and say only that the scene was a chaos of harquebus shot, yelling, and flashing swords, and that no Dutch male over fifteen or sixteen who encountered our men in the first moments of the assault—whether fighting, fleeing, or surrendering—lived to tell of it.

Our colonel was right: The enemy’s panic was our best ally, and we did not lose many men—ten or twelve, at most, counting both dead and wounded—which is, pardiez, few enough when compared to the two hundred heretics the town was to bury the next day, and bearing in mind how smoothly Oudkerk fell into our hands. We met the strongest resistance at the city hall, where some twenty Englishmen were able to regroup in some order. The English had been allied with the rebels ever since our lord and king had refused their Prince of Wales the hand of our Infanta Maria, so when the first Spaniards arrived in the town square with blood dripping from daggers, pikes, and swords, and the English welcomed them with musket volleys from the balcony of the city hall, our soldiers took it very personally. With gunpowder, tow, and tar, they set fire to the hall with the twenty Englishmen inside, then shot and knifed every one of them as they came out—those who did come out.

Then began the sacking. According to military custom, in cities that did not surrender according to the proper stipulations or that were taken by assault, the victors were entitled to enter and sack. Thus, fired with greed for booty, each soldier fought as if ten and swore for a hundred. And as Oudkerk had not surrendered—the heretic governor had been shot in the first moments and the burgomaster simultaneously hanged at the door of his house and, furthermore, as the town had been won, in a word, through pure Spanish bollocks—no one had to sign a formal order allowing us Spaniards to break into any houses we deemed promising—which was all of them—and make off with anything that took our fancy. This, as you may imagine, resulted in some painful scenes. The burghers of Flanders, like anywhere else, tended to be reluctant to be relieved of their belongings, and many had to be convinced by the tip of a sword. Soon the streets were filled with soldiers carrying a colorful variety of spoils through smoke, trampled draperies, smashed furniture, and bodies, many of which were barefoot or naked, and whose blood formed dark pools on the cobbles, blood the soldiers slipped in and the dogs lapped up. Your Mercies can imagine the picture.

There was no violation of women, at least no tolerated violation; nor was there drunkenness among the troops, for often, even in the most disciplined soldiers, the latter gives way to the former. Orders in regard to this matter were as clean-cut as the edge of a Toledo blade, for our general, don Ambrosio Spinola, did not want to antagonize the local populace still further; it was enough to be slashed and sacked without the added outrage of having their women molested. So on the eve of the attack, to make things perfectly clear—and because a lesson is always better than a lecture—two or three soldiers who had been convicted for crimes against the gentle sex were hanged. No unit and no company is perfect. Even in Christ’s, which was one he had recruited himself, there was one who betrayed him, another who denied him, and yet another who failed to believe him. The fact is that in Oudkerk, the preventative warning worked wonders, and except for an occasional isolated case, inevitable when dealing with soldiers drunk with victory and booty, the virtue of the Flemish women, whatever it may have been, remained intact. For the moment.

The city hall burned right down until there was nothing left but the weathervane. I was with Jaime Correas, both of us happy that we had saved our hides at the gate of the bulwark and that we had carried out our assigned mission to the satisfaction of all, except, of course, the Dutch. In my knapsacks, recovered after the fight and still stained with the blood of the Dutchman with the blond mustache, we stowed everything of value we could find: silver cutlery, a few gold coins, a gold chain we had taken from the corpse of a burgher, and a new and magnificent pair of pewter jugs. My companion had donned a handsome plumed morion that had belonged to an Englishman who no longer had a head on which to display it, and I was strutting around in a fine silver-trimmed red velvet doublet I’d found in an abandoned house we had ransacked at our pleasure.

Jaime, like me, was a mochilero, that is, a lowly aide or soldier’s page, and together we had lived through enough exhaustion and hardship to think of ourselves as good comrades. For Jaime, the booty and the success of events at the drawbridge, which don Carmelo Bragado, the captain of our company, had promised to reward if all went well, was consolation for having been disguised as a girl; we had drawn lots for that, but it had nonetheless left him somewhat embarrassed. As for me, by this point in my Flanders adventure I had decided that I wanted to be a soldier when I reached the required age, and all the excitement had induced a kind of vertigo, a youthful intoxication tasting of gunpowder, glory, and exaltation. That is how, ’fore God, a lad the same age as the number of lines in a sonnet comes to witness a war when the goddess Fortuna decrees that he will not play the part of victim but of witness and, at times, of precocious executioner. But I have already told Your Mercies, on a different occasion, that those were times when a life, even one’s own, was worth less than the steel used to take it. Difficult and cruel times. Hard times.

I was telling you that we had reached the square of the city hall, and we stayed there awhile, fascinated by the fire and the dead Englishmen, many of whom were blond or red-haired and freckled, piled up naked by the doors. From time to time we came across Spaniards laden with booty or groups of terrified Hollanders watching from the columns of the square, huddled together like sheep under the watchful eyes of our comrades, who were armed to the teeth. We went over to take a look. There were women, old men, and children but few adult males. I recall a youth about our age who looked at us with an expression somewhere between sullen and curious, and blond, pale- skinned women who stood wide-eyed beneath their white headdresses, their blue, fearful eyes observing our dark- haired soldiers. Our men were not as tall as the Flemish men, but they had full mustaches, heavy beards, and strong legs. Each had a musket over his shoulder and a sword in his hand, and each was clad in leather and metal stained with grime, blood, gunpowder, and mud from the dike. I will never forget the way those people looked at us Spaniards, there in Oudkerk as in so many other places: the blend of hatred and fear when they saw us enter their cities and march past their houses, covered with the dust of the road, bristling with iron, and ragged as urchins, boisterous at times but more dangerous when not. Proud, even in misery, as Bartolome Torres Naharro wrote in his Soldadesca.

In war, come what may,there is this much I can say,if a man has two handsgold will surely roll his way.

We were the loyal infantry of the Catholic king: volunteers, all of us, in search of fortune or glory; men of honor but often also the dregs of the Spanish empire; rabble given to mutiny, who demonstrated flawless iron discipline but only when facing enemy fire. Dauntless and terrible even in defeat, the Spanish tercios, a training school for the best soldiers Europe had produced in two centuries, comprised the most efficient military machine anyone had ever commanded on a field of battle. Although at that time, with the age of the great assaults over and with artillery taking the fore, the war in Flanders had become one long succession of sieges, of mines and trenches, and our infantry was no longer the splendid military force our great Philip II had put his faith in when he wrote his