A Make-Believe Spain--The Mountain Convoy--A Tough Road to
Travel--Spanish Superiority in Blasphemy--Short Essay on Oaths--The
Basque Peasants--Carlism under a Cloak--How Guerilla-Fighting is
Conducted--A Hyperborean Landscape--A Mysterious Grandee--An
Adventurous Frenchman--The Shebeen on the Summit--Armed
Alsasua--Base Coin.
And this is sunny Spain, the land of the olive and the vine. Spain it
certainly is in the absolute sense of the word in political geography,
but in no other. It is no more Spain than the Highlands are England. The
language, the race, the habits, the growths, are different. The
language, the Euscara, is known to only one man not born within the
borders, the polyglot Prince Lucien Buonaparte. A hackneyed legend runs
that the devil tried to learn it, and dislocated his jaw. The race is
the aboriginal Iberian, and has none of the languor of the south in
it--a stubborn, not a supple race. The habits of the people are
industrious. The growths are rather of the apple and the pine than the
olive and the vine.
There before us rises the wall of Nature's handiwork which shuts us out
from the true Spain.
In my boyhood I often gazed with admiration on a print of Napoleon
crossing the Alps. He was astride of a prancing white charger. I have
since learned to detest Napoleon, and to know more of mountain travel.
That masterful general, but cruel, dishonourable, bad man--demon-man
with genius undoubted and will unbendable, but with the most
unscrupulous of insatiate and insensate ambitions, and a leaven of
littleness--did not face the heights of St. Bernard on a mettlesome
steed, but on a patient mule, and the luxury of his apparel was
restricted to furs. Wrapped up in the thickest clothing I could find, I
watched the convoy forming outside the station at Beasain in the sunlit
cold.
The train from San Sebastian got in at nine in the morning, and before
ten a procession of six waggons, built after the massive, clumsy fashion
of the French diligence, was drawn up in line. Horses and mules,
generally in teams of five--three leaders and two wheelers--were yoked
to the ramshackle vehicles. The passengers, muffled in cloaks, rugs,
scarfs, shawls and comforters--for there was ice in the breath of the
keen air of the mountain--literally packed themselves in the narrow
"insides" of the old-fashioned coaches. There were five in the low,
narrow hutch upon wheels with myself, all males; we were as close as
sardines in a box. There were some ladies of the party. I trust they had
more space at their disposal. The luggage was piled on the roofs and
covered with tarpaulins, the drivers mounted the seats in front, whips
were cracked, and off we bounded at a pace that would rouse the
applause, or peradventure the envy, of the gentlemen who tool the
Brighton coach. Gaily our skinny steeds breasted the rise, sending a
curl of mist from their hides, and shaking merry music out of the
collars of bells round their necks as they clattered over the hard road.
For three miles we dashed along at express speed. How spirit-stirring is
rapid motion! I actually was warming into a wild joy, and praying that
we might encounter the Carlists, under the influence of this gallop in
the bracing morning atmosphere.
Suddenly there is a stop. The Carlists? No. But here the ascent begins,
and a body of mountaineers await us with a string of bullocks. The three
leaders are unharnessed and attached behind; and eight bullocks, two by
two, are yoked in front of the pair of mules who act as wheelers. The
same is done with the other waggons. I watch this process of yoking the
bullocks with much curiosity. A strong piece of board is run across the
heads of the pair who are coupled, and firmly tied in front of the
horns; a sheepskin is thrown over that, for what purpose I cannot tell;
and the ropes by which the bullocks drag us are fastened to the piece of
board afore-mentioned. They pull, not against the shoulder, but against
the horn. Their owners, muscular peasants, lightly clad, though it is
cold, walk beside them with long pointed sticks, and occasionally goad
them in the flanks. When that does not suffice, they push them, or rain
blows on their hides, or twist their tails, and when all other means
fail they swear at them. But the grave oxen move no quicker; they cling
to their own gait as if deeply convinced of the truth of the adage,
"Fair and easy goes far in the day." The peasants call one "demonio" and
another a cow; but the sleepy pair keep never minding, as they waddle
along with drooping heads, held closely together as if whispering
conspiracy.
At this early point in my experiences, the painful knowledge is forced
upon me that the Spaniards are highly accomplished in the art of
imprecation. If our army swore terribly in Flanders, I have my theory to
account for it. They must have picked up the habit there, and the
Spaniards under Alva had left their traces behind them in the speech of
the region they had occupied. As a rule, swearing betrays a poverty of
invention; it is the resource of the vulgar and ignorant to emphasize
their assertions; but in Spain the swearing developed an originality
that almost reconciled one to it. There was an awful insolence, a ribald
riotousness in some of the oaths which redeemed them from the scorn
which every well-balanced mind should feel for displays of petulance. I
respect a good round oath--an oath that blanches my cheeks and makes me
imagine that it would not be extraordinary if the ground were to open
and swallow the varlet who uttered it. That sort of oath is to be
tolerated for its audacity. The malediction is a higher form of oath,
and some maledictions are magnificent. To the amateur I can recommend
King Lear's upon Cordelia, Francesco Cenci's upon Beatrice--which is
more Shakspearian than Shakspeare--and even puny Moore's upon the
traitorous Gheber. The joint-stock oath which Sterne puts into the
mouths of the Abbess of Andoüillets and the novice, Margarita, who had
the whitlow on her middle finger, is passable for its fantastic
ingenuity; and the strong locutions pat in the lips of a certain
Duke--unless notoriety belies him--are to be licensed because of his
rank, and because he is a soldier. But he should have the courage to
blurt them out on all occasions. He who dares to outrage society should
not shrink from offending an individual.
"You ---- naughty boy, why did you sound the wrong call?" said H.R.H. to
a bugler, but as soon as he got out of earshot of a certain Personage,
he muttered in an angry undertone, "You canonized little beggar, you
know what I meant."
The Spaniards are liberal and earnest and dogged in their railings,
anathemas, and execrations, but still the sleepy oxen do not hurry
themselves. They care no more for a volley of select comminations than
the jackdaw of Rheims did for the archbishop's curse. Of a verity this
bullock's pace is a snail's pace, and we have ample leisure to inspect
the peasants as we crawl along. Brawny, hardy, and firmly-knit as
Highlandmen, their faces are weather-beaten and frank; their manner,
when one speaks to them, independent but polite; in dress like unto
their Celtic kinsmen of Brittany, short-jacketed, loose, and slovenly,
but in stature more like to the tall mountaineers of Tipperary. They
must be poor, very poor; but they have the appearance of content, and
with it of honesty, sobriety, and civility.
And now a little secret must be imparted. Every man-jack of these
ox-drivers is a Carlist, and that is the reason we are not attacked
to-day! In a week those innocent clowns may be blazing away at the
regular army of Spain from the brushwood on a hillside, for after such
fashion are Carlist wars conducted. A band assembles at the call of some
chief--that is to say, the peasants leave their cabins and meet at some
rock, some conspicuous tree, or some cross-roads. They have with them a
flag, perhaps; perhaps a priest or two; they are badly armed with such
arms as insurgents carry--blunderbusses, flint-muskets, fowling-pieces,
horse-pistols; they have no distinctive uniform, except a few of the
older bands--the permanent army of Carlism--which are clad in the seedy
clothes that the French Garde Mobile wore during the late war. The
campaign opens; a descent is made upon some village, the mayor is asked
to supply so many hundred rations, and the young men are summoned to
join the flag. Sometimes the mayor refuses, and there is a fight between
"the volunteers of liberty," that is to say, the local national guard,
and the Carlists. On the average, so the reports go, one man is killed
in each of these combats, and three wounded. That is a battle at this
stage of the Carlist war. With the regular troops sent against them the
Carlists act otherwise. They take up ground in some inaccessible eyrie,
pop at the passing detachments from their ambuscade, draw them on in the
hope of catching them in a trap; but the troops are cautious, they
pepper away at the Carlists from a distance until the Carlists run, and
the affair ends, as usual, with the loss of one man killed and three
wounded. The peasants return to their cabins to tell the tale of their
gallantry, and if the troops perchance should come their way, why they
are but inoffensive, ingenuous tillers of the soil, the most peaceful
beings on the face of nature. The firearm is hid in the thatch or in the
neighbouring hedge. But the officers who lead the troops do not allow
their enemies the monopoly of gasconade. In the _Gaceta de Madrid_ the
bulletin of the engagement duly appears, and the names of the doughty
warriors are chronicled for the admiration of the señoritas. One Carlist
chief--at least, so pretend the wags--had been killed outright thrice,
wounded mortally five times, and has had his band completely dispersed
and broken up seven times in the _Gaceta_, and yet he is still alive
and troublesome. A most outlandish war, but how disastrous in its
effects on the trade and prosperity of the country! It could not be
carried on if the soil were not rich to plenteousness. There is an
adventurous vigour in the breed, too, and the terrain lends itself to
guerilla fighting. So far, I know nothing of the merits of Carlism; but
this I can divine, that it is the old rivalry betwixt town and country,
and the "pagans" or villagers are all Carlists--question of transmitted
feud or local traditions, or both. The rustics have the advantage over
the town-bred men; they are familiar with the by-paths; every sheiling
is a refuge for them, every dweller therein a self-constituted scout.
When they choose to seek them, they must have secure hiding-places.
Artillery is an arm of derision in the hills; cavalry can rarely act
effectually, and in the way of reconnoitring is next to useless, as its
movements can be espied from rock-cover on every eminence; but in the
open these insurgents can do nothing against disciplined troops. Pity
that they should be such fools as to abandon their pleasant and
comfortable, if humble, homesteads, to help on the aspirations of any
right-divine make-believe claimant to the heaven-sent mission--by
accident of birth--of impressing other human beings that he is wiser
than they, and should have revenues and reverence for condescending to
govern them.
What would our ox-drivers do, I wonder, if they could overhear and
understand the conversation in which thoughts like these are exchanged
in the lumbering Noah's ark they are helping through their domain? We
are getting nigh and nigher to the clouds, and the quilt of snow on the
mountain grows thicker. The pathway is traceable only by the marks of
the hoofs of beasts of burden and the ruts of wheels, and the fleecy
banks at each side rise gradually higher. It is palpably colder, and yet
we are far from the culminating point of the Pyrenean pass; straight
saplings are not infrequent around, and here and there a lowly hut in a
nook under some sheltering rock, both hut and rock hoary with snow,
startles us with the reminder that human beings actually live here. The
Basques, said Voltaire, are a people who sing and dance on the summit
of the Pyrenees. Our ox-drivers do not sing, neither do our muleteers.
This interminable glare is becoming very fatiguing to the eyes, and the
higher we ascend the rarer are the refreshing little streaks of darker
hue. Stumps of dwarf trees replace the straight saplings to be seen
lower down; and hardly are we on the crest of one snow-capped hill than
another, hidden under the same smooth sheet of everlasting lime-white,
mocks us. Slowly and painfully the oxen toil along, and the peasants by
their side sink knee-deep at every step. Will this ever end? It was
picturesque at first to watch the long caravan coiling over the spiral
track which turns right and left like a corkscrew. Now it is tedious,
for we are chilled and worn-out, hungry and cramped. The sublimity of
nature is grandiose, but there may be too much of it. One tires of
rolling perpetual cigarettes; one even tires of studying the forcible
Spanish adjurations that begin with the third letter of the alphabet. My
companions, four French commercial travellers, relapse into silence and
doze off into fitful starts of the sleepiness begot of extreme cold;
the fifth--a grandee of Castile I take him to be at the very least by
his appearance, broad swarthy countenance, shaven upper lip and chin,
and short spade whiskers of a night-black--the fifth, this Spaniard, did
not relapse into silence, for he had never uttered a word since we
started.
What weariness to the flesh is this tedious climb to regions
hyperborean! I catch myself yawning. What if our waggon were to break
down! At last one of the Frenchmen bursts out, "_Dieu de Dieu, j'en ai
assez_." He would stand or rather sit it no longer, opened the door, and
alighted. We all followed his example, even to the taciturn Spaniard,
and took to the road. A walk in advance might send the blood
circulating, and on we plodded in the middle of the path, regardless of
the snow which soaked into our boots and saturated our trousers to the
knees. Not a living being was visible but two crows who bore us company,
and hopped on our flanks like a covering-party. The road was tantalizing
in its tortuousness; after walking a furlong we found ourselves a couple
of yards directly above the point we had quitted a quarter of an hour
before. One of the Frenchmen, seeing this, had an inspiration; he
determined to go up the mountain perpendicularly, and before we could
dissuade him he had sunk to his armpits in a treacherous crevasse. We
dragged him out by making a cable of our pocket-handkerchiefs and
throwing it to him. He took his wetting in good part.
"Ah!" he cried, "shan't I have something to tell them when I get back to
the Boulevard des Italiens." And then, as if reflecting, he added, "But
no, 'twill never do; they'd call me _farceur_."
A red-brick building with an arrangement of iron on the roof, as if it
had been employed as a signal-post, faced us--high up on the pinnacle of
a ridge at one moment; was at our side the next; behind us anon; and
directly before us now. By turns it was small and large. We were asking
ourselves (all except the Spaniard; he never spoke) was this a
phantasmagoria, when a jingle of bells was heard on the still air. Where
did it come from? We could see nothing. Suddenly, as a theatrical ghost
springs from a trap-door, at an abrupt turn a wild figure appears
bearing right down upon us. A Carlist chieftain? Not so fast. A muleteer
simply, sitting sideways on his prad, and leading a half-dozen mules
laden with panniers in Indian file behind him. He told us we had reached
the summit, and that there was a fonda a short distance off. Signs of
life multiplied; we met mountaineers, with oxen drawing small cars with
solid wheels similar to those of toy carriages--wheels that kept up
perpetual creak and croak--and finally we encountered the caravan from
Alsasua to Beasain. But we encountered no Carlists, that is, no armed
Carlists, for every man there is Carlist in soul. The smoky fonda was as
miserable as the most miserable of Irish shebeens; yet they gave us good
white bread and eggs to eat, and, with the aid of the sauce of hunger
and sundry glasses of acid Val de Peñas to wash it down, we made a
hearty meal. The caravan overtook us in half an hour; the rest of the
journey was downhill, the snow was deeper than on the other side, and
the jolting terrific, but we did not care. Our goal was near, and we
had eaten and drunk. We laughed at the dangers we had passed, and even
the Spaniard unbent and exhibited unexpected powers of conversation.
Alas! for my judgment; he was no grandee of Castile, but a butcher from
Saragossa, a mere _carnifex_ with blood of the common red tint.
At Alsasua we came upon a village bleaker than Beasain, with soldiers
billeted under every roof. They loitered in twos and threes about the
wide street, which was drab with patches of dirty snow. Here were placed
a few mountain guns under custody of a shivering sentry, there a bugler
in slovenly greatcoat blew some call with pinched lips on a battered
instrument. At the station--a rude shanty with wooden partitions and a
plank erection run up as refreshment-stall--some attempt had been made
at fortification. There were mud-works thrown up in its vicinity, and
the walls were roughly loop-holed. A party of Linesmen were in
possession. On a siding close by was the locomotive which had been
riddled with shot by the insurgents on the now disused line to
Pampeluna. Our own locomotive was awaiting us, with steam up, and I
hurried to procure my ticket. I pushed a piece of honest red gold
through the wicket, and an extremely nice, slim female clerk gave me the
pasteboard with my change and thanks. Something struck me in the silver
shoved towards me; the leaden hue of the pesetas was suspicious. I took
up one and rung it; the dull sound convinced me it was bad. I rung
another--same result. I was desolate; but I had to call the attention of
the extremely nice girl to the error she had fallen into; and she
coolly, without adumbration of a blush, or faintest pretence at apology,
took back the base coins, and gave me their equivalent in coins that
were sterling. And then, for the first time, it broke upon me, that it
was not considered a scoundrelly act to pass bad money upon an innocent
foreigner, or upon an innocent native, for the matter of that. I further
learned that if I had removed that bad money from the counter, I should
have had to bear with the loss. That extremely nice girl would have
assured me with all politeness that I must be labouring under an
illusion.
The Spaniard has personal dignity to a prodigious degree. But his
personal dignity does not hinder the ordinary Spaniard from endeavouring
to foist counterfeit stamps upon his neighbour whenever he has the
chance.
The tarantara of a bugle stirred a company of soldiers to take their
places in the train. They were our escort to Miranda, on the borders of
Old Castile, where we might consider ourselves out of danger. It is my
opinion we were never in any danger.
We reached Miranda safely, and from that swept down in the darkness to
Madrid without molest, the most of us snoring as regularly as the funnel
of the engine snorted. I had a fearsome vision of a sweet Spanish maiden
who had knowingly placed a worthless peseta in the tirelire at Mass, and
had been sentenced by Santa Cruz to grill on the gridiron of hell for
the term of her natural life. A carpet-bag utilized as a pillow was the
origin of my vision. Had that carpet-bag been more carelessly packed,
the penalty on the poor girl might have been prolonged to eternity.