Heroic Spain Part 16

The city is ma.s.sively built, but it has a battered look, and no wonder.

During the French invasion, Gerona stood a siege as terrific as any in history, yet who of us has heard of it? In May, 1809, a French army surrounded the city where there were only three thousand soldiers for the defense, yet for seven months the town defied the invaders, and that with half a dozen breaches in the walls. The women shouldered guns and drilled in a battalion formed by Dona Lucia Fitzgerald; old men and children piled up the earth of the ramparts; cloistered nuns, at a higher call, left their convents to nurse the wounded to whom they gave up their cells, so many priests fell fighting on the walls that no services were held in the churches, there was only the burning of candles; no one bought or sold, for every shopman was a soldier. When a gallant English volunteer died on the ramparts, he exclaimed that he lost his life gladly in a cause so just for a nation so heroic.

The French drew closer and closer, and slowly the city starved. The hards.h.i.+ps endured were incredible. They ate rats and mice, yet no thought came of surrender. A hot August dragged by, in September the French attacked fiercely and on both sides the men fell like flies. Who was the soul of this indomitable fort.i.tude? The order and subordination told of a master mind, and Gerona had one, Don Mariano Alvarez de Castro, the inflexible governor. He it was who enrolled the women and children in the defense; his lofty spirit never wavered, and his force of character gave him so accepted an authority that he was able to direct a hopeless defense without recourse to cruelty. The siege of Gerona was not stained by any brutal act.

The blockade drew closer. By October literally all food was gone, and the people began to fall in the streets to a foe more terrible than bullets. Governor Alvarez stood like a rock of courage. When he pa.s.sed up the Cathedral steps where the heart-rending groups of the dying lay, his very presence gave hope: if there was a faint-hearted citizen in Gerona, he was more afraid of that iron man than of the French. Never would the governor have yielded, but toward the close of the year he fell ill in the infested air, and as he lay in delirium the city capitulated. With hundreds of dead bodies lying unburied in the streets, there was nothing else to be done.

Then followed a scene which did honor to the invader; it rings with the same chivalry that Velasquez painted in the "Surrender of Breda," where Spinola bends to meet the conquered Na.s.sau, the same spirit that made those Frenchmen of an earlier day carry a certain wounded knight, their prisoner, on a litter from Pamplona across the mountains to his castle of Loyola. The foreign troops marched into Gerona in a dead silence, with not a gesture of triumph, moved to awe by the corpses that covered the pavements and to reverence by the few hollow-eyed, living skeletons that met them. The moral victory lay with the conquered. When food was offered the starved people, even that was at first refused. Don Mariano Alvarez, taken prisoner on his bed, died mysteriously, poisoned, some say, in the fortress of Figueras not long after. And all this horror and heroism was only a hundred years ago!--we too walked the streets of Gerona in silent reverence.

Then once again on the train; more volcanic hills, more dry rivers that showed what the spring torrents must be like, and in a few hours Port-Bou, the Spanish frontier town, was reached. We stood at the car window looking out sadly on the last of Spain as the train swept round the blue inlets of the Mediterranean.

Farewell to this great Christian democracy where the simple t.i.tle of Don is borne by king and people alike, to the "nation least material of Europe," farewell to a grave, contented race, whose leaders left n.o.ble works as n.o.ble as their lives, whose writers were soldiers and heroes, where artists prepared for religious scenes by fasting and prayers, where mystics were not negative and inert, but emerged from their union with G.o.d with more power for practical life, whose women have by instinct the dignity of womanhood, untainted yet by luxury, a land that can boast the two first women of all ages and countries, an Isabella of Castile, and a St. Teresa.

Some may think I carry admiration too far. Carping criticism of Spain has been pushed to such an extent that it is time to swing to the other side: where there can be no joy, no admiration, there can be no stimulus. I like to take M. Rene Bazin's words as if addressed to me: "Vous avez raison de croire a la vitalite de l'Espagne. Elle n'a jamais ete une nation dechue, elle a ete une nation blessee."

A wounded nation but not one stricken to death. She is recovering. Let her but be patient and aspire slowly; disciplined, tried in the fire and purified, by living without the ceaseless upheavals of the past century, by industry, by commerce, with no enc.u.mbering colonies to drain her blood, with the Catalans calling the Castilians "_paisanos_," she will get back her former strength and _brio_. Her literature, her art, are lifting their heads.

My prayer for Spain in her rehabilitation is, that she may not diverge from her national spirit and traditions, may modern ideas not change her unworldliness and her stoical endurance, "_su esencia inmortal y su propio caracter_." May she guard her faith, her glory in the past and her aspiration for the future, the faith of the Cross that has struck deeper root here than in any spot on earth, but remembering always that her own greatest saint warns her: "In the spiritual life not to advance is to go back." May she never lose the virile independence of character that so distinguishes her people, the pride of simple manhood that looks out of the eyes of her honorable peasantry and makes their innate courtesy. No nation was ever formed so completely by the chivalry of the Middle Ages as Spain. May she always be _Espana la heroica_!