Saragossa: A Story of Spanish Valor

by Benito Pérez Galdós

My battalion was now one with that of the Estremadura, and indeed what was left of both was scarcely three companies. Augustine Montoria was captain, and I was promoted lieutenant on the second. We did not return to service in Las Tenerias. They sent us to guard San Francisco,—a vast edifice which offered good positions for our guns against the French, who were established in the Convent of Jerusalem. Very short rations were now dealt out to us; and those of us who were counted among the officers ate in the same mess with the soldiers. Augustine kept his bread to give to Mariquilla.

After the fourth day, the French began mining towards the hospital and San Francisco, in order to take it; for they knew well that it would be impossible in any other way. In order to hinder them we countermined, intending to blow them up before they could blow us up. This toilsome labor in the bowels of the earth can be compared to nothing else in the world. We seemed to ourselves to have left off being men, and to be converted into another kind of creatures, into cold inhabitants of caverns, without feeling, far from the sun and the pure air and the lovely light of day. We built long galleries, working ceaselessly like the worm that builds his house in the darkness of earth, shaping it like his own body. Between the blows of our picks, we heard, like a muffled echo, the picks of the French. After having been beaten and destroyed on the surface, we expected momentarily to be exterminated in the dreadful night of those sepulchres.

The Convent of San Francisco had vast subterranean wine-cellars under its choir. The edifices which the French occupied farther down had these also, and it was unusual for a house not to have a deep cellar. In these many of our enemies perished, sometimes by the falling in of floors, sometimes wounded from afar by our balls, which penetrated into the most hidden places. The galleries opened by the spades of both sides met at last in one of these cellars. By the light of our torches, we saw the French, like fantastic goblin figures engendered by the reddish light and the sinuosities of the old Moorish dungeon. They did not see us, and we began firing at them; but as we were provided with hand-grenades, we hurled these also, putting them to flight, following them afterwards at arms-length the whole distance through their galleries. All this seemed a nightmare,—one of those dreadful struggles which at times we all wage with the abhorrent figures that people the terrible caverns of our dreams. But it was not a dream, though it repeated itself at many points.

In this pursuit, we showed ourselves frequently; and at last emerged in the Coso,—the central place of reunion, and at the same time, park, hospital, and general cemetery of the besieged. One afternoon (I believe it was the fifth), we were in the gateway of the convent, with several boys of the battalion of Estremadura and San Pedro. We were talking about the way the siege dragged along, and all agreed that resistance would very soon be impossible. Our group was constantly enlarged. Don José de Montoria came up, and, saluting us with a sad face, seated himself upon a wooden bench near the doorway.

"Do you hear what they are saying here, Don José?" I said to him. "They believe that it is impossible to hold out many days more."

"Don't get discouraged, boys," he answered. "The Captain-General says truly in his proclamation that a good deal of French gold is in circulation in this city."

A Franciscan who had come to nurse several dozen of the sick took up the word, and said,—

"It is painful to hear them. They do not talk of anything but surrender here. It does not seem as if this is Saragossa any longer. Who could believe it of a people tried in the fire of the first siege?"

"Your reverence is right!" exclaimed Montoria. "It is shameful; and even those of us who have hearts of bronze feel ourselves attacked by this weakness, which spreads faster than the epidemic. In casting up the accounts, I don't know how to reckon for this novelty of surrender, when we have never done it before, porra! If there is something to come after this world, as our religion teaches us, why should we worry about a day more or less of life?"