“Fire!”
The accursed nightmare will not go, and torments me tonight as it did last night, bringing again before me that which I do not wish to see. It is better not to sleep. I prefer wakefulness to this. I shake off the lethargy, and dread my vigil as before I abhorred the dream. Always the same humming of the cannon. Those insolent brass mouths do not cease to talk.
Ten days pass, and Saragossa has not yet surrendered, because some madmen are still persistent in guarding for Spain that heap of dust and ashes. The houses go on falling; and France, after establishing one foot, wastes armies and quintals of powder in gaining ground on which to set the other. Spain will not give up as long as she has one paving-stone to serve as a lever for the immense machine of her bravery. I am almost lifeless. I cannot move. Those men I see passing before me do not seem to be men. They are languid and emaciated, and their faces would be yellow, if dust and powder had not blackened them. Eyes gleam under blackened eyebrows—eyes that do not yet know how to look without taking aim. Men are covered with unclean rags, and cloths are bound about their heads. They are so filthy that they seem like the dead raised from that heap in the Calle de la Imprenta, to show themselves among the living. From time to time among the smoky columns these dying ones come, and the friars murmur religious consolation to them. Neither the dying understand, nor the friar knows what he says. Religion itself goes half mad. Generals, soldiers, peasants, priests, and women are all overwhelmed. There are no classes or sexes. The city is defended in anarchy.
I do not know what happened me. Do not ask me to go on with the story, for there is nothing more to tell. That which I see before my memory does not seem real, the true things being confused in my memory with those dreamed.
I was stretched out in a gateway of the Calle de la Albarderia, shaking with cold, my left hand wrapped in a bloody, dirty cloth. The fever burned me, and I longed for strength to hasten to the front. They were not all corpses beside me. I reached out my hand and touched the arm of a friend who was still living.
“What is going on, Señor Sursum Corda?”
“It seems that the French are on this side of the Coso,” he answered me, in a feeble voice. “They have blown up half of the city. May be we shall have to surrender. The Captain-General has fallen ill with the epidemic, and is in the Calle de Predicadores. They think he is going to die. The French will enter. I rejoice that I shall die before I see that. How do you find yourself, Señor de Araceli?”
“Very bad off. I will see if I can get up.”
“I am alive yet, it seems. I did not think I should be. The Lord be with me, I shall go straight to heaven. Señor de Araceli, have you died yet?”
I got up and took a few steps. Leaning against the walls, I advanced a little and came to the Orphanage. Some military officers of high rank were accompanying a short, slender ecclesiastic to the door, who dismissed them, saying, “We have done our duty, and human strength can compass nothing more.” It was Father Basilio. A friendly arm held me up, and I recognized Don Roque.
“Gabriel, my friend,” he said to me, in deep affliction, “the city surrenders this very day.”
“What city?”
“This.”
As he said so, it seemed to me as if nothing remained in its place. Men and houses all ran together confusedly. The Torre Nueva seemed to draw itself up to flee also, and in the distance its leaden casque fell from it. The flames of the city no longer gleamed. Columns of black smoke moved from east to west. Powder and ashes, raised by the whirling winds, moved in the same direction. The sky was no longer the sky, but a leaden canopy, strangely agitated.
“Everything is fleeing; everything is going from this place of desolation,” I said to Don Roque. “The French will find nothing.”
“Nothing. Today they enter by the Puerta del Angel. They say that the capitulation has been honorable. Look, here come the spectres who defend the plaza!”
Indeed along the Coso filed the last combatants, one for every thousand of those who had faced the bullets and the epidemic. There were fathers without sons, brothers without brothers, husbands without wives. He who cannot find his own among the living is not at all sure of finding them among the dead, because there are fifty-two thousand corpses, almost all piled in the streets, the doorways, the cellars, the ditches. The French, on entering, halted affrighted at such a spectacle, and were almost on the point of retreating. Tears streamed from their eyes, and they asked whether these were men or shadows, these poor creatures who fled at sight of them.
A volunteer on entering his house stumbled over the bodies of his wife and children. A wife ran to the wall, to the trench, to the barricade to look for her husband; but no one knew where he was. The thousands of the dead did not speak; and could not tell whether her Fulano was among them. Many large families were exterminated, not one member was left. This saves many tears when death strikes with one blow the father and the orphan, the husband and the widow, the victim and the eyes that would have been forced to weep.
France had at last set foot within that city built on the banks of the classic river which gives its name to our peninsula.
They had conquered it without subduing it. On seeing the desolation of Saragossa, the Imperial army considered itself the gravediggers of the heroic inhabitants, instead of
