The Pirates of the Levant by Arturo Pérez-Reverte Read Free Book Online Page B

unhappy Spain. At that moment,I recalled some lines from a play I had seen a couple of yea before in Madrid. They had shocked me then, but now I understood:
    I, a soldier, on bended knee
    Surrender my embattled blade;
    I can no longer stand to be
    Both brave and badly paid
    'Can you imagine,' the Captain suddenly said to Copons, 'Yndurain salaaming to Mecca?' He gave a kind of half-smile.
    Copons gave an identical smile, only briefer. They were sceptical, entirely lacking in humour, the smiles of old soldiers with no illusions.
    'And yet,' replied Copons, 'when the drum rolls, we never , lack for swords.'
    This was very true, as the passage of time would continue to- prove. However abandoned, neglected and poverty-stricken these North African garrison towns were, there was rarely a. shortage of men available to defend them when the need arose. And this was done without payment, without help and without glory, out of desperation, pride and concern for reputation. And so as not to end up as slaves. I know of what I speak, as you, dear reader, will learn from this story. There has always been a certain kind of man for whom, at the final moment, paying dearly for his life has brought some degree of consolation. Among Spaniards, this was a familiar story, and so it went until, one by one, those towns, forgotten by God and by the King, fell into the hands of Turks or Moors.
This had already happened in Algiers in the previous century, when Barbarossa attacked El Penon. One hundred and fifty Spanish soldiers were blocking the entrance to the harbour there, and what happened? Spain abandoned them to their fate and they waited in vain for help to come. 'The Emperor,' according to his chronicler Father Prudencio de Sandoval, 'had more important matters to deal with at the time.' The soldiers fought like the men they were, and, after sixteen days of artillery fire that demolished the redoubt stone by stone, the Turks took only fifty prisoners who were battered and wounded. Barbarossa, enraged at such fierce resistance, had one of the prisoners, Captain Martin de Vargas, beaten to death with sticks. As for Larache, a few years after the events I am describing, it was attacked by twenty thousand enemy troops, who were repelled by a mere one hundred and fifty Spanish soldiers and fifty ex-soldiers who all fought like demons. The loss and recovery of the so-called Tower of the Jew was particularly fiercely fought — all to defend six thousand feet of city wall.
Oran, too, had honourably withstood various assaults; indeed, one provided the inspiration for Don Miguel de Cervantes' play The Brave Spaniard. We also owe to Cervantes — he was not a veteran of the Battle of Lepanto for nothing — two sonnets written in memory of the thousands of soldiers who died fighting, abandoned by their King - a very Spanish custom. The poems, which he included in Don Quixote, recall the defenders of the fort of La Goleta, opposite Tunis, who were killed after resisting twenty-two attacks by the Turks and killing twenty-five thousand of the enemy, so that, of the few Spaniards who survived, not one was captured unscathed.
'Life failed before valour did,' says one of those sonnets, and the second begins:
From this battered, sterile land From these clods of earth brought low Three thousand soldiers' holy souls Rose, still living, to a better home. Having first, in vain, spent all The strength and effort of their arms, Until, at last, so few, so weary, To the enemy's blade they gave their life.
As I said, all this sacrifice was futile. After Lepanto, which marked the extreme point of the collision between the two great Mediterranean powers, the Turk had turned his interest more to Persia and Eastern Europe and our Kings had turned theirs to Flanders and the Atlantic. Philip IV showed no interest either, discouraged by his minister, the Count-Duke of Olivares, who disliked ports and galleys (not that he ever visited such places; the stench, he said, would give