FIFTY-THREE

Madrid, Spain, May 2, 1808

AS PACO, A twelve-year-old street urchin, left his slum hovel and walked up the street, he gnawed at a small morsel of fatty meat on a bone, given to him by a neighbor whose chamber pots he emptied. His mother was dead, and he was mostly on his own. He lived with his father, who shoveled manure in a stable, but his father was at best an absentee one who often failed to return home after work. Paco was accustomed to going out in the morning to find his father sleeping off a drunk in the gutter.

The boy was tall and gangly for his age, almost as tall as most men, but rail thin because he rarely had enough to eat. As he walked toward the central plaza, the Puerta del Sol—Gateway of the Sun—people converged on it from all directions. From the plaza, the mass of people moved up Calle Mayor and Calle Arenal, streets that led toward the royal palace.

While Paco followed the flow of the crowds, he heard excited talk, heated words, as people lamented the seizure of the Spanish king, queen, and crown prince after Napoleon had invited them to France on a pretext and the next French move against Spanish sovereignty: the seizure and transport of a child-prince to France.

As he listened to the angry words swirling around him, Paco was unaware that he and those around him would soon initiate six years of brutal warfare on the Iberian Peninsula, warfare that would smash the dreams of an empire of one of the greatest conquerors in history.

Under the pretext of preparing for a joint invasion of Portugal, French troops had occupied Madrid and other key points throughout the country. Now the people’s passions blazed at French treachery. They jeered and booed General Murat, head of the French occupation of the city, as he entered the city in his golden coach. Murat had thirty-six thousand French troops under his command in the city, as compared to Spain’s three thousand. Moreover, the king’s administrators had ordered the Spanish army to stand down and not to oppose the French takeover.

“For shame, for shame,” people cried at the news that their army wouldn’t fight to defend their nation and that the royals had renounced their rights in return for generous pensions.

Spain’s wealthy grandees compounded the cowardice of the royals by also acquiescing in France’s conquest of the country, in part because Napoleon had promised them they could keep their assets, privileges, and power. Of Spain’s political institutions only the church, which Napoleon degraded and looted in other parts of Europe, strongly opposed French occupation.

“They’re taking our Paquitito!” the boy heard repeatedly.

Prince Francisco, the youngest son of King Charles, was housed at the royal palace. Word had spread through the crowd that the young prince was to be taken by coach to France. The nine-year-old prince was a particular favorite of the people of Madrid. He was called by an affectionate nickname: Paquitito.

Though he was called Paco by his father, the twelve-year-old street urchin, like the prince, was also actually named Francisco.

As Paco flowed with the angry crowd, he saw French troops, cavalry and infantry, moving into position along with a line of cannon. Although some people expressed fear at the sight of the soldiers, this day the impressive body of troops only inflamed the crowd’s wrath.

When he reached the square, Paco climbed atop a statue across from the palace to get a better look. To one side, lines of French troops deployed in musket squares, muskets at the ready, and a line of dragoons with their horses prevented the crowd from expanding. Behind the soldiers’ lines were cannons.

Coaches lined the front of the palace entrance. Shouts of “They’re taking Paquitito!” rang through the crowd. People near the coaches began to cut at the harnesses with knives. With no warning, the French squares opened fire, the front line of troops firing, then dropping to their knees to reload as the second and third lines followed the same pattern. The musket balls ripped into the crowd, a ball going through one person and then another and sometimes even killing a third. After all three lines had fired, the musketeers melted back behind the cannons.

French cannons thundered point-blank into the densely packed crowd, shrapnel and shell blasting people to pieces. Holding onto the statue, Paco froze, his mouth gaped. Blood, bone, and flesh of men, the blasted bodies of women and children lay spread across the cobblestones.

As quickly as the cannons quit firing, the musketeers stepped forward and fired another series of volleys, knocking down hundreds of people. When the last volley sounded, the cavalry surged forward, chasing the people as they ran in panic, cutting them down with their sabers, trampling those who fell.

After the mounted troops had passed his statue, Paco jumped down to make his way toward home through the panic and chaos. People on the street were bloodied, frantic men searched for their wives, women screamed for their children.

Soon, however, he saw another spirit rise from the masses: As the panic faded, a ferocious fury rose. Men and women came out of their dwellings wielding kitchen knives, axes, clubs, anything they could fight back with. Women and children stood on balconies and rooftops to rain street stones down on the advancing troops.

The boy watched in wonderment as people whom he recognized as bakers and store clerks, stable workers and barmaids, challenged the crack French troops with kitchen utensils, stones, and sometimes just their bare hands. Soon his wonderment turned to anger and horror as he saw people falling under the barages of musket fire and trampled by horses or cut down by the sabers of charging dragoons.

Paco followed a group that ran toward the barracks of a small artillery unit of the Spanish army. A Spanish captain met them, shouting at first that they were under orders not to engage the French in battle. As French cavalry stormed into the area, trampling and cutting everyone that got into their way, the Spanish captain relented and ordered five cannons directed at the advancing French troops. His cannon tenders sent off first one, then another volley that cut into the ranks of the attackers and sent them reeling back.

The Spanish cannons kept up the fire until a white flag of parley was raised by the French, and the Spanish captain was invited to talk. A senior French officer stood at the front of a detail of musketeers with bayonets at the ready and awaited the Spanish artillery commander. The commander, whom Paco recognized as a captain named Laoiz, went forward to discuss terms with the French officer. The French officer, a general, suddenly shouted a command. Musketeers with bayonets stabbed the Spanish officer to death, and French cavalry charged the Spanish cannon positions, catching the batteries by surprise.

Numb and in shock, Paco left the carnage at the artillery barracks and made his way toward the tenement where he lived with his indigent father. Even as fighting erupted all around him, civilians with crude implements and makeshift weapons were fighting the finest troops of the greatest military power on earth. As he neared the tenement, he heard another cry of outrage explode around him. Mamluks!

He stood rooted and gawked as they charged into the crowd, the infamous infidel troops whose very name sowed terror in Spanish hearts. The wild, murderous French Moslem troops from North Africa charged into the crowd, cutting people down with their curved scimitars.

Muslim troops attacking Spaniards! He had been raised to believe Moors were demons. Spanish kings struggled for seven hundred years to drive the infidels from the peninsula. Now the French were sending them to kill Christians.

Paco never went to school, but from street talk, he knew a little of the history of the infamous warriors, though he didn’t know that the word mamluk itself meant “slave” in an Arabic tongue. The original Mamluks were slave units that fought for the sultans and sometimes became their palace guards. Often they were Christians, captured and enslaved. Like the praetorian guards of the Caesars, the Mamluks eventually became the real rulers of the Turkish and Arabic kingdoms, and the sultans merely figureheads. Sometimes Mamluk generals even assumed royal thrones. Napoleon encountered the fierce fighters during his Egyptian campaign and eventually incorporated small units of them into his armies. However, the Mamluks were so fierce and uncontrollable he had never deployed them in force.

Paco watched as women on the rooftop of a house threw rocks down on the troops. Three Mamluks dismounted and invaded the house. Paco knew what would happen in the house: The women would be raped and murdered. It was the house of the woman who had given him the bone.

His eyes went to a kitchen knife in the gutter. He picked it up and shot into the house. On the stairway a screaming woman struggled with a Mamluk who tore at her clothing. A young man whom Paco recognized as the woman’s brother was crumbled at the bottom of the stairs, dead.

Paco ran up the stairs and aimed his knife-thrust at the infidel’s spine, the blade instead sinking into the wide leather belt around the Mamluk’s waist. He pulled the blade back as the Mamluk twisted around. Paco saw the cutting edge of the curved sword coming at him, just a flash of light off the blade before it connected with his neck.