The Sun Over Breda

Add to that the fact that our deployment along the banks of the Ooster canal was in the closest position to the enemy, and therefore the most vulnerable to attack. We knew that Maurice of Nassau, general of the rebellious estates, was raising an army to come to the aid of Breda, within which another Nassau, Justin, was holding out with forty-seven companies of Hollanders, French, and English. These latter nations were, as Your Mercies are aware, always right in the thick of things when the opportunity arose to dip their bread in our stewpot. Indisputable was the fact that the army of the Catholic king was walking on the edge of a very sharp sword, twelve hours’ march from the nearest loyal cities, while the Dutch were but three or four hours from theirs. The Cartagena tercios’ orders were to thwart every attack that sought to approach our troops from the rear, thus assuring that our comrades entrenched around Breda would have time to prepare for any onslaught and not be forced to withdraw in shame or be drawn into an unequal battle. That placed a few squads in the scattered alignment that, in military jargon, was called the

centinela perdida (the assignment of “forlorn hope”), advance units whose mission was to sound the call to arms but whose chances of surviving were summed up nicely by the pessimistic phrase in the line of duty

. Captain Bragado’s bandera had been chosen for that task, as they were long-suffering, experienced in the misery of war, and capable—with or without leaders or officers—of fighting on a small stretch of land when the odds were stacked against them. But perhaps too much was riding on the patience of a few, and I must, in all justice, say that Colonel don Pedro de la Daga, maliciously called Jiñalasoga, was the one who precipitated the conflict with his imperious behavior…highly improper in a man well born and commander of a Spanish

tercio.

I well remember that on that fateful day there was some sun, though it was Dutch sun, and that I was busy making the most of it. I was sitting on a stone bench near the gate of the house and reading, with great pleasure and benefit, a book Captain Alatriste used to lend me so that I could practice. It was a worn first edition, with countless signs of mold and rough treatment, of the first part of El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha. It had been printed in Madrid during the fifth year of the century—only six years before I was born—by Juan de la Cuesta. It was a wondrous book by the good don Miguel de Cervantes, who was an inspired genius and ill-starred compatriot. Had he been born English, or one of those accursed Frenchies, the cock would have crowed a different tune for this illustrious one-armed man during his lifetime, and not just to give him posthumous glory, a fate that a begrudging nation like ours tends to reserve for good and decent people, especially in the best of cases. I was fascinated by the book, its adventures and happenings, and moved by the sublime madness of the last caballero andante, the gallant Don Quijote, and also by the knowledge—Diego Alatriste had apprised me of this—that during the most exalted moments the centuries had ever seen, when galleys laden with Spanish infantrymen confronted the fearsome Turkish armada in the Gulf of Lepanto, one of the valiant men who fought with sword in hand that day had been don Miguel, a poor and loyal soldier of his country, of his God, and of his king, as Diego Alatriste and my father later became, and as I myself proposed to be.