The world is crazy, and it's always the same shit. I can't keep this down, here, laying and agonising in a dreadful room; far from a ungrateful and ignorant country-mine.
The last decades' battle wounds are only getting worse this old body, ravaged by Vienna's moisture, but those ain't my heavier scars, as my own people and king left a much deeper scar, impossible to heal....and that's because my people in unable to learn, doesn't want to. It has been fifteen years since Waterloo and the same is happening again. It's now, in this situation and under great duress, that I remember more those troubled times, full of disagreements and betrayals, in 1792.
I was only fifteen when I got out of the Escuela Naval of Sevilla, for Guardia Marina duties in the frigate Garzota, armed with thirty cannons and fast as a bat out of hell. Good years where we didn't stop pelting with shot and making things hard for the English invaders in Menorca, and not only the English we did hunt, but also the treacherous Berbers tasted Spanish iron and lead...in fact, even in this painful moments I remember with remarkable clarity some of the small skirmishes against those damned dogs from the foggy "Pérfida Albión".
One night we found an English ship, name unknown to us, docking in a Berber base with the hope of building an small military agreement, with us as the mutual enemy. I think the ship was, as Englishmen call it, a "Third Rate", with more than seventy cannons that could knock us out with one single volley...we had to plan on the run, as every worthy Spanish can do. Some dunes to the west of the port gave us natural concealment, so most of the crew was ordered to disembark there. Those crewman were split in two groups, one would advance on foot and another using rowboats along the coast. Hidden by the dunes and the night's darkness, we advanced on to the English frigate.
However, Antionio Figueiras, the incompetent Portuguese and his unnerving nose, couldn't shut the skipper's last shouts, so we readied to fight to the last. A son of Spain can die, but will take ten out with him out of spite. Inmediately, the air was full with the clash of sabers and falchions, of men attacking without rest at the right while we young Guardias Marinas worked on the left. It wasn't rare to see men getting disarmed and trusting full of desperation in their small pocket knives, intent of shedding blood over the wooden floor of that damned frigate.
We started making a path through the second battery's deck, when the Berber ship, aware of our presence, opened fire on the English frigate. Wary of the munitions dump blowing up due to cannon fire, we withdrew inmediatly to our rowboats to get back to the Garzota, which had sneaked by close to give some support, and just when we climbed aboard the English ship blew up. Few men were unscathed or unblooded among us.
It is a funny thing, how the ignorance and inexperience gets to us in combat; I remember the fear and chaos of my first fights, just flashes of chaotic events fruit of explosions and bloodletting. Against such desperation one tries to focus on what's at front, parrying and attacking. But, once some time passes and you know a bit more, those details you didn't want to see clearly to protect one sanity become crystal clear and help you to understand your surroundings: the splintering of the wood, the comrades' wounds, the sound of sharpnel cutting through the air...if it's true that the Devil is in the detail, then War is his home; and if the Devil knows more because of experience than because what he is, then we are his most representative servants. Maybe Hell is our destiny for all those who took part in that nonsense.
But nowadays...I don't even believe in Hell.
