"It must be so," said Montoria; "because the house los Duendes belongs to Candiola. The damned Jew knew very well the passage-ways and hiding places of that building. Señors, let us go to see the Captain-General. Is it believed that the Coso can still be defended?"
"Does it not have to be defended?" said a soldier. "After all, it is only a trifle which has happened, a few more dead. We will try to regain the church of San Francisco."
We all looked at that man who spoke so serenely of the impossible. The sublime terseness of his expression of perseverance seemed like a jest, and in that epoch of the incredible, similar jests were wont to end in reality.
Let those who hesitate to give credence to my words open the history, and they will see that some few dozens of men, wasted, famished, barefooted, and half-naked, some of them wounded, held out all that day in the tower. Not content with holding it, they went out over the roof of the church, opening here and there many places in the roof, and paying no attention to the fire directed upon them from the hospital, they began to throw hand-grenades upon the French, obliging them to abandon the church when night came. All of the night was passed in attempts by the enemy to regain it; but they could not accomplish it until the following day, when the riflemen on the roof retired, passing to the house of Sástago.
CHAPTER XXIX
Will Saragossa surrender? Death to him who says it!
Saragossa will not surrender. She will be reduced to powder. Of her historic houses, let not one brick remain upon another! Let her hundred temples fall, the ground beneath her open, pouring out flames; let her foundations be hurled into the air; let her roofs fall into the pits that are opened,—but among the fragments and the dead there will always be one tongue left alive to say that Saragossa will never surrender!
The moment of supreme despair came. France was not fighting now, but mining. It was necessary to destroy the soil of the nation in order to conquer it. Half the Coso was hers, but Spain retreated only to the opposite pavement. By Las Tenerias and in the suburb on the left they had obtained some advantages; and their little mines did not rest for an instant.
At last—it seems like a lie—we became accustomed to the explosions, as before we had become accustomed to the bombardment. At worst we heard a noise like that of a thousand thunder-claps all at once. What has happened? Nothing, the University, the Chapel de la Sangre, the Casa de Aranda, such a convent or chapel exists no longer. It was not like living on our peaceful and quiet planet. It was like having the birthplace of thunderbolts for a dwelling-place, like being in a disordered world, where everything was heaving up and unhinging. There was no place to live, because the ground was no longer ground. Under every shrub or plant a crater was opening. And yet those men went on defending themselves against the crushing horrors of a never-stilled volcano and a ceaseless tempest. Lacking fortresses, they had used the convents; lacking convents, the palaces; when the palaces failed, the humble houses. There were still some partition walls. They did not eat now. Of what use, when death was expected from one moment to the next? Thousands of men perished in the explosions, and the epidemic had risen to its height of horror. One might go by chance unharmed through the shower of balls, then on turning a street corner, dreadful chills and fever would suddenly take possession of his frame, and in a little while he would be dead. There were no longer kinsfolk or friends; men did not even know one another, their faces blackened by smoke, by earth, by blood, disfigured, cadaverous. Meeting one another after a combat they would ask, "Who are you?"