in order to collect their pay…when there was pay. However, I have to say that it was a widespread practice, and in Bragado’s favor we can say two things: He never refused to help soldiers in need, and he personally had twice proposed Diego Alatriste’s promotion to squad leader, though both times Alatriste had declined.
As to the esteem in which Bragado held my master, I need say only that four years earlier at White Mountain, when General Tilly’s first assault and second attack under the orders of Count Bouquoy and Colonel don Guillermo Verdugo failed, Alatriste and Captain Bragado (and Lope Balboa, my father, right along with them) had climbed shoulder to shoulder up the slopes, fighting for every foot of corpse-strewn terrain. Then a year after that, on the plains of Fleurus, when don Gonzalo de Cordoba won the battle but the Cartagena
It was raining in Flanders. ’Pon my word, it rained pitchforks and anvils that accursed autumn and through that whole accursed winter, turning to pure mud the flat, shifting, swampy land that was crossed in every direction by rivers, canals, and dikes that seemed to have been laid out by the hand of the devil himself. It rained for days, for weeks, for months, until the gray landscape of low clouds was completely erased. It was a strange land with an unfamiliar tongue, populated by people who despised and at the same time feared us; a countryside denuded by the season and the war, lacking any defense against the cold, the wind, and the water. There were no peaches in that land, or figs, or cherries, or peppers, or saffron, or olives, or oil, or oranges, or rosemary, or pines, or laurels, or cypresses. There was not even any sun, only a tepid disk that moved indolently behind a veil of clouds. The place our iron-and-leather-clad men had come from, men who plodded on though their bodies yearned for the clear skies of the south, was far away, as far as the ends of the earth. And those rough, proud soldiers, now in the lands of the north repaying the courtesy of a visit received centuries before at the fall of the Roman empire, recognized that they were very few in number and a great distance from any friendly country.
Niccolo Machiavelli had already written that the courage of our infantry grew out of necessity. As the Florentine writer acknowledged, quite against his pleasure, for he could never bear the Spanish, “Fighting in a strange land, and seeing themselves, absent the possibility of fleeing, forced to die or conquer, makes them very good soldiers.” Applied to Flanders, that is absolutely true: there were never more than twenty thousand Spaniards in that land and never more than eight thousand together in one place. But that was the impetus that allowed us to be masters of Europe for a century and a half: knowing that only victories kept us safe among hostile peoples and that if defeated we had nowhere we could reach on foot. That was why we fought to the end with the cruelty of our ancestors, the courage of men who expect nothing, the religious fanaticism and insolence that one of our captains, don Diego de Acuna, expressed better than anyone in his famous, passionate, and truculent toast:
As I was telling Your Mercies, the morning that Captain Bragado made an inspection visit to the advanced posts where his
“Warm a little wine,” Alatriste said to the woman at his back.
He said it in an elementary Flemish—
The grayish light sifting through the window accentuated the scars and hollows on Diego Alatriste’s unshaven face, making the fixed clarity of his eyes even colder. He was in his shirtsleeves, with his doublet thrown over his shoulders and two harquebus cords knotted below his knees to hold up the legs of his cobbled leather boots. Without moving from the window, he watched as Captain Bragado got off his horse, pushed open the door, and then, shaking the water from his hat and cape, came inside with a pair of oaths and a “By the good Christ,” cursing the rain, the mud, and all of Flanders.
“Go on eating, men,” he said, “since you have something to eat.”
The soldiers, who had half-risen, went back to their meager rations, and Bragado, whose clothing began to steam as he neared the stove, accepted the piece of hard bread and bowl with the last of the cabbage offered him by Mendieta. The captain studied the woman closely as he accepted the jar of warm wine she put into his hands, and after warming his fingers on the metal, he drank with short sips, casting sideways glances at the man who had not moved from the window.
“By God, Capitan Alatriste,” he ventured after a bit. “You are not badly quartered here.”
It was extraordinary to hear the captain of the unit address Diego Alatriste as
“I bring orders,” Captain Bragado said, “for an incursion along the Geertruidenberg road. Without too much killing. Only to pry loose a little information.”
“Prisoners?” asked Alatriste.