John Masters (28 page)

June 10:
Captain Witham has fought a duel with Lieutenant Burleigh ... to decide which is the biggest coxcomb of the fortress? The infantry battalions are changed about regularly, so that after a time in the front they spend a time in peace, except from the gunboats, at South Barracks or Windmill Hill. We of the artillery are always facing the enemy. We are the best gunners in the world. Practiced preparing and firing red-hot shot yesterday. Sergeant Major Ince's gallery proceeds slowly with much blasting and noise.

June 12:
It is said the enemy are preparing great pumping engines with miles of hose and will soon undermine the foundations of Gibraltar with continuous powerful streams of water.

June 17:
Another 60 enemy transports into the bay, with Frenchmen. The Spanish General Alvarez, who replaced General Mendoza, is himself dismissed and his place taken by the Duc de Crillon, a Frenchman in the Spanish service. The Duc was the capturer of Minorca.

June 19:
It is universally rumored that the enemy are going to assault on August 25. They have ceased bombarding us altogether, as though saving their ammunition. Smugglers report that civilians are coming from all over Europe to watch the spectacle. All the inns and houses that can see Gibraltar, to a distance of twenty miles, are booked up. We'll give 'em their money's worth, the sergeant says. Captain Witham admits now he has no notion what the enemy are preparing in Algeciras. A sailor I met says they are making more gunboats, but bigger. He says there are now 14 admirals' flags flying in the enemy fleet.

June 20:
The 97th have put their first picket in the field! Improper and lustful dreams of Abigail continue to trouble my sleep. Emily says I am in love with someone and she can guess who. She has a sharp eye and knows everything, though only 20. She has been a strumpet here since twelve.

July 4:
Sergeant Major Ince's gallery is now 82 feet long. It is 8 feet high and 8 feet wide. They blast rock with powder, clear out the rubble, and so the same again. They also crack the rock with fire and water. Lieutenant Kohler has invented a gun carriage that can be loaded, aimed, and fired quickly at great depressions, which is the way ours are mostly fired.

July 15:
The enemy fired a few shells and hit a small expense magazine. Sergeant Major Ince's gallery advances a yard a day. They are going to blow a hole out toward the cliff face now, because there is much delay whenever they fire a charge from the smoke and fumes that linger long after in the gallery. The hole will cause the fumes to be blown away and thus speed the work.

July 25:
A band of Corsicans have arrived, being volunteers to help in our defense. Complaints of lazy and ignorant surgeons increase on all sides. The sergeant says if we ever let him get into a surgeon's hands he will cut our ***** off. More experiments with gun carriages and shell charges. The enemy are reported to be filling a thousand giant balloons with poison gas. When the wind is favorable, the balloons will be launched over Gibraltar and the poison released to kill us all.

August 16:
The Governor was here when I awoke, his visage very grim. When I looked down, I understood why. The Spanish have performed a miracle under our very noses. In the space of a single night—in barely six hours of darkness—they have built a wall of sandbags some 1,500 feet long, about 10 feet high and as thick. Beyond this there is another wall, made of what appear to be casks, presumably filled with earth or sand. That is much longer, near three quarters of a mile, and 6 feet high. The sergeant says it is to give protected passage from the rear to the new works. He is so awed he has forgotten to swear. The Governor's aide-de-camp says there must be half a million sandbags in the first wall and as many casks in the second. All this less than 1,000 yards from the North Face. The aide-de-camp also says that they must have put out several thousand infantry in front of the working parties, even closer to us, as protection in case of another sortie. Captain Witham is very subdued, and with reason: last night
he had the batteries.

August 17:
A deserter says the French king's brother, the Comte d'Artois, and his cousin, the Duc de Bourbon, are come to watch our annihilation. The sergeant says two Mounseer princes aren't going to p*** us away through hoses nor poison us with their f**ts, because Old Von B. will b***** them both before breakfast and do as much for the Duc de Crillon afterwards. We have many sick, and some dead, of the grippe. It is said that the enemy are preparing 10,000 cork horses in Algeciras and their cavalry will use these, instead of their flesh-and-blood mounts to charge upon us. With so great a force and so wily an enemy as the French, one must expect anything.

August 20:
The Comte d'Artois has sent the Governor a rich present of food. The governor has sent an even richer one back, which will make the enemy wonder whether we are as close to starvation as they think. The two French princes spent an hour on board one of their battleships, moored 100 yards offshore, but then had to be taken ashore from seasickness. All the civilians have gone from New Jerusalem to Europa in fear of the assault. Some strange ships crept out of Algeciras Harbor, fired back at the land on that side, then returned to harbor. No one can make head or tail of them. It is very hot and dry, and the air is dense, day and night, with a purple-gray pall of smoke from Spain, where the peasants are burning the heather and gorse off the hillsides. At night the fires make strange signs—crosses, circles, animal heads—in the sky. I have seen it every year, but this year, so close to the day of reckoning, it turns land, sea, and sky into different parts of a ghostly and menacing inferno.

August 25:
Midnight. The day has come and gone. Nothing happened. Sergeant Major Ince's gallery is 165 feet long.

August 28:
Have been working three days to replace all our guns along the seafront with guns captured from Spanish men-of-war. A useless waste of time and sweat.

August 30:
We all, except gun sentries, went to watch the sailors practice infantry drill, for the Governor has ordered that since our ships are blockaded the sailors shall form a special brigade under Captain Curtis. We laughed till we thought we would do ourselves a mischief as they rolled about the parade ground out of step, in no lines, bellowing, "Belay there,"

"Avast,"

"Steer two points more a-lee," and the like. The Governor has inspected Sergeant Major Ince's gallery and says that the ventilation holes will also make good gun positions. We are to drag guns up there tomorrow. Captain Witham says the guns on the sea front were changed so that when the enemy ships fire at the batteries there, we can recover the balls and fire them back, since they will be of the same sort and caliber. It is not wise to doubt the Governor, however unreasonable his orders may seem.

August 31:
Sat up late talking to the sergeant, who asked a thousand questions about the Jews. Did we eat Christian babies? Did we drink blood in the synagogue? And many others as ridiculous. He asked because he could not believe such things of me, whom he has come to know. I told him of the strictness of our laws and observations and tried to explain what it means to be a Jew. I believe I made him see that our punishment is usually in ourselves, for the Jewish conscience never sleeps. A Jew can destroy himself where none other has been able to.

September 1:
Captain Witham called the battery together and told us that the Governor has long had intelligence about what the enemy are preparing in Algeciras. It is a sort of floating battery, a ship which has been stripped and cut down so that it can fire to only one side. On that side wooden armor has been added, some of it 5 feet thick. Layers of sand lie between layers of timber, and there is a system of water pipes to water any part of the armor and so douse any red-hot shot that might penetrate. They have sails but can move only slowly. They are unsinkable and unburnable, and at this time they have built 10 or 12. It is these that we saw last week, firing their guns for the first time. I cannot see how we can protect ourselves against such hellish devices. The men look a little anxious, but the Governor will think of something to save us.

September 4:
Dreamed that I watched Abigail undress and bathe herself.

September 6:
Today the floating batteries are moored off the Orange Grove. We saw crews going aboard. With the spyglass the sergeant shouted he could see they were being escorted by marines with fixed bayonets. If the vessels are impregnable, why are they afraid?

September 8:
All our northward batteries fired red-hot shot on the new works which the enemy put up so secretly last month. They soon caught fire, and we did great execution as the enemy tried to repair the damage and put out the fires. The sergeant says the only good Mounseer or Don is a dead one, but the gunners down there are very brave fellows, and it is a mark of man's stupidity more than his wickedness that we have to kill them.

September 9:
Heavy fire against us all day. The Governor came up early and told Captain Witham to plot the exact position of each gun now unmasked. The Governor peered a long time through his telescope and said, "There is the duke, and those must be the two princes beside him. That explains this foolish bombardment." The sergeant began to lay a gun on where the duke and the princes were standing, but the Governor said very coldly, "That will do, Sergeant. Gentlemen do not snipe at each other like assassins." Spoke to Abigail through a window as I was passing. She has asked me to come soon. I cannot resist any longer.

September 10:
Ten enemy battleships sailed up and down off the front today, bombarding all our positions from the North Face to Europa Point. We set one of them on fire, but it limped back to Algeciras. Our battery had to send a detachment to man some guns below Windmill Hill and then back here later; but the Governor came here in the evening, rubbing his hands, and said, "They have shown us another card. A poor whist player, the duke, I think."

September 12
: I have counted 150 enemy warships of all sizes in the bay. The sergeant says there are 35,000 soldiers in the enemy camp, and a deserter says there are 35,000 sightseers on the hills of the Campo. We shall have a very public funeral—or triumph. The palisadoes protecting the approaches to the Main Gate were burned last night.

September 14:
Yesterday will go down in history. It began at dawn, when the sergeant called us all to arms. In the dim and smoky light we saw 10 floating batteries sail slowly from the Orange Grove toward us. They anchored about an hour later in an irregular line 1,000 yards off the town and opened fire. We heard our seafront batteries return the fire. The cannonading became steadily heavier, but without any signs of damage to the ships. Near 11 o'clock I was sent down with the sergeant and 20 others to help the seafront batteries. We found the gunners and matrosses there suffering from heat and exhaustion more than from the enemy's actions, though I saw some wounded men, and blood splashed over a gun, and several big pieces of facing stone had been dislodged. A lieutenant said that our hot shot was having no effect. "They are unsinkable," he added. The Governor was passing close, unknown to him, and rebuked him sharply, saying, "Sir, another word like that and you shall face a firing squad. Our shot are not hot enough yet." It was true, and we piled more driftwood and timbers on the fires, which we were burning furiously in the angles of destroyed houses and walls, to make the shot white hot. The floating batteries fired steadily, overturning one of our guns, but I noticed that only two were in a position to hit us. The others were either too far to the south, and so not opposite any of our positions, or appeared to be fast on a sandbank and out of range to the north. This led us to concentrate our fire on those two, and what a cheer arose near 3 o'clock when we saw smoke coming out of the sloping roof of one of them—this was an hour after the shot were pronounced hot enough to use. Enemy sailors ran out on the roof to put out the fire, but the smoke continued. Small boats came from Algeciras later, and some went back heavily loaded with men from the batteries. But I at least—and I suppose every one of us—was awaiting with the customary mixture of dread and expectation for all the other enemy to join in the action. For there was the huge fleet, there were the 35,000 men—our palisadoes were gone, our men scattered and tired. Yet by nightfall, still, of all that vast force bent on our destruction, only two of the floating batteries had engaged us. Then we could no longer see the targets and stood down in the gun positions. I drank water from the buckets we had been sponging out the guns with and had never tasted anything so delicious. I slept until we were awakened after midnight. I saw then that several of the floating batteries were burning like torches. We reopened fire with furious energy. The flames grew until the ships were outlined by fire, and at last they seemed to be made of fire. For an awful moment I thought I saw men, hundreds of tiny dark figures in silhouette against the flames, and heard their pitiful screaming; but I closed my eyes and served my gun the harder. The sergeant shouted like a madman every time we fired, "Walk up, walk up, any more for the show?" About 3 o'clock all our sailors came running from the south under Captain Curtis and became sailors again, setting out in small boats to rescue whom they could from the burning ships. Shortly before dawn the powder magazines began to blow up in each ship with dreadful explosions and a rain of wood and iron upon us all. As light began to spread after the most awesome 24 hours of my life, I saw Captain Curtis's boat coming toward shore. Some of the sailors rowed like mad men, for the boat was very low in the water, while others, were stuffing rolled jackets and shirts into two large jagged holes below the waterline. A dozen naked Spaniards sat dazed and numb in the water in the bottom of the boat. Captain Curtis, white and handsome, sat in the stem, a sailor lolling dead in the crook of his left arm, and in his right, waving in the reddish light, the Royal Standard of Spain. He came wearily up the steps and gave the standard to the Governor, saying, 'This was to fly over Gibraltar, sir." The Governor said, "Let it... under our own, there!" And it was done at once. The light soon began to reveal other more dreadful sights—the hulks of the enemy ships sticking out of the water, some still burning; the surface of the sea foul with wreckage and litter; and close below us, hundreds of corpses rolling along the rocks—some clothed, some naked, some smiling, some contorted in agony, some mangled, some whole, some white, some charred. The sergeant danced on the parapet shaking his fist across the bay and crying, "Roll up, roll up. Plenty of empty seats!" Being released from duty for a few hours, I went to the synagogue, gave thanks for my preservation, and said prayers for the dead.