The Sun Over Breda - By Arturo Perez-Reverte Page 0,3

of victim but of witness and, at times, of precocious executioner. But I have already told Your Mercies, on a different occasion, that those were times when a life, even one’s own, was worth less than the steel used to take it. Difficult and cruel times. Hard times.

I was telling you that we had reached the square of the city hall, and we stayed there awhile, fascinated by the fire and the dead Englishmen, many of whom were blond or red-haired and freckled, piled up naked by the doors. From time to time we came across Spaniards laden with booty or groups of terrified Hollanders watching from the columns of the square, huddled together like sheep under the watchful eyes of our comrades, who were armed to the teeth. We went over to take a look. There were women, old men, and children but few adult males. I recall a youth about our age who looked at us with an expression somewhere between sullen and curious, and blond, pale-skinned women who stood wide-eyed beneath their white headdresses, their blue, fearful eyes observing our dark-haired soldiers. Our men were not as tall as the Flemish men, but they had full mustaches, heavy beards, and strong legs. Each had a musket over his shoulder and a sword in his hand, and each was clad in leather and metal stained with grime, blood, gunpowder, and mud from the dike. I will never forget the way those people looked at us Spaniards, there in Oudkerk as in so many other places: the blend of hatred and fear when they saw us enter their cities and march past their houses, covered with the dust of the road, bristling with iron, and ragged as urchins, boisterous at times but more dangerous when not. Proud, even in misery, as Bartolomé Torres Naharro wrote in his Soldadesca.

In war, come what may,

there is this much I can say,

if a man has two hands

gold will surely roll his way.

We were the loyal infantry of the Catholic king: volunteers, all of us, in search of fortune or glory; men of honor but often also the dregs of the Spanish empire; rabble given to mutiny, who demonstrated flawless iron discipline but only when facing enemy fire. Dauntless and terrible even in defeat, the Spanish tercios, a training school for the best soldiers Europe had produced in two centuries, comprised the most efficient military machine anyone had ever commanded on a field of battle. Although at that time, with the age of the great assaults over and with artillery taking the fore, the war in Flanders had become one long succession of sieges, of mines and trenches, and our infantry was no longer the splendid military force our great Philip II had put his faith in when he wrote his famous letter to his ambassador to the pope:

I do not plan, nor do I wish, to be the lord of heretics. Yet if the situation cannot be remedied as I would have it, without resorting to weapons, then I am determined to take them up, and neither the danger in which I place myself nor the ruin of those lands, nor of the rest of those still mine, can prevent me from doing what a Christian, God-fearing prince must do in His service.

And that, pardiez, is how it was. After long decades of crossing swords with half the world without achieving much more than icy feet and hot heads, very soon there would be nothing left for Spain than to watch her tercios die on fields of battle like the one at Rocroi, faithful to their reputation—lacking anything else—taciturn and impassive when their lines formed into those “human towers and walls” the Frenchman Bossuet wrote of with such admiration. But yes, there is this: We fucked them good and hard. Even though our men and their generals were no equal to those in the days of the Duque de Alba and Alejandro Farnesio, Spanish soldiers continued to be Europe’s nightmare for some time: they who had captured a French king in Pavia, triumphed in San Quintín, sacked Rome and Antwerp, taken Amiens and Ostend, killed ten thousand enemies in the attack on Jemmigen, eight thousand in Maastricht, and nine thousand in Sluys, wielding steel in water up to their waists. We were the very wrath of God, and it took only one glance at us to understand why: We were a rough and rowdy horde from the dry lands of the south, fighting