The Battle of Salamanca by Benito Pérez Galdós is this week’s new translation. It is the tenth and last of the First Series of the Episodios Nacionales and was translated from the original Spanish by Vox Day. It is now available via Kindle, KU, and audiobook. The ebooks have already been sent to the paid subscribers.
THE END OF THE FIRST SERIES
The tenth and final volume of the Episodios Nacionales First Series, The Battle of Salamanca, carries Gabriel Araceli from the Béjar sierra to the two bare hills south of Salamanca known to the Spanish as Los Arapiles, where, on 22 July 1812, Wellington broke Marmont’s army in forty minutes and changed the course of the Peninsular War.
Gabriel is a major now, attached to the Spanish division serving with the allied army, and he has one private errand. The condesa’s letters, which open the novel, have finally run their quarry to ground: Luis de Santorcaz, the freemason and afrancesado who stole Inés seven years ago, is not in France after all. He is in Plasencia, ill, keeping the girl close, and calling himself her father.
What follows is Galdós at the height of his powers, moving between the headquarters of an allied field army, a French-occupied provincial capital that Gabriel enters in disguise and very nearly does not leave, and the sickroom of a dying revolutionary who will not surrender what he has taken. Around this runs the strangest and funniest thread in the whole series: miss Fly, the ward of colonel sir Abraham Simpson, an Englishwoman who has learned her Spanish out of the old ballads and consequently addresses Gabriel as though he were the Cid.
And behind all of it, the armies converge on the plain. Galdós, who never wrote a better battle, calls the Arapiles the true preface to Waterloo, the last field on which the trumpets of the imperial Iliad sounded. Gabriel fights it on foot among Pack’s highlanders, and comes down off the hill covered in blood he cannot identify as his own or another man’s. The First Series of the Episodios Nacionales ends here. It began at Trafalgar with a starving orphan in the streets of Cádiz, and it closes with that same man, sixty years on, laying down the account of how he got everything he had by beginning with nothing at all.
About the Series
The Episodios Nacionales is a cycle of forty-six historical novels tracing the history of Spain from the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 through the Restoration of the 1870s. Written between 1872 and 1912, the cycle is one of the supreme achievements of European fiction, a work that stands with Balzac’s Comédie Humaine as a panoramic portrait of an entire nation across a century of upheaval. This is the first English translation of the tenth volume and marks the completion of the First Series.
About the author. Benito Pérez Galdós (1843–1920) is widely regarded as the greatest Spanish novelist since Cervantes. Over four decades, he produced the Episodios Nacionales, one of the most incredible accomplishments of world literature ever written. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature five times.
Excerpt
Sure that the French had taken the direction of Toro, I made my way south, looking for the Valmuza, a stream that runs four or five leagues from the capital. I marched on foot with all the haste my great bodily weariness and the fatigues of my soul allowed me, and at eight in the morning I entered Aldea Tejada, after fording the Tormes and crossing a rough and broken country from Tejares. Some villagers told me before I got there that there were no French in the neighbourhood or in the village, and there I heard it said that a great many English had been seen the night before towards Siete Carreras and Tornadizos.
My own people were close at hand, I said to myself, and taking something of what was needed to sustain me I went on.
Nothing worth noting happened to me until Tornadizos, where I met the English vanguard and several parties of D. Julián Sánchez. It was ten in the morning.
“A horse, gentlemen, lend me a horse,” I said to them. “If not, prepare to hear from the señor duque. Where is headquarters? At Bernuy, I believe. A horse, quickly.”
At last they gave me one, and putting him at full gallop, first by the road and then by tracks and paths, at a quarter to twelve I was at headquarters. I dressed in my uniform with all speed, informing myself at the same time of lord Wellington’s quarters, so as to present myself to him at once.
“The duke passed by here a moment ago,” Tribaldos told me. “He is going about the village on foot.”
A moment later I found the señor duque in the square, coming back from his walk. He knew me at once, and going up to him I said:
“I have the honour to inform your excellency that I have been in Salamanca and that I bring all the data and news your excellency desires.”
“All of it?” said Wellington, making no demonstration either of goodwill or of displeasure.
“All of it, General.”
“Are they determined to defend themselves?”
“The French army evacuated the city yesterday afternoon, leaving only eight hundred men.”
Wellington looked at the Portuguese general Troncoso, who was coming at his side. Without understanding the English words that passed between them, it seemed to me that the second was saying:
“Your excellency has divined it.”
“This is the plan of the fortifications that defend the passage of the bridge,” I said, holding out the sketch I had brought away.
Wellington took it, and after examining it with the profoundest attention, asked:
“Are you sure that there are guns on traversing carriages in the ravelin, and eight ordinary pieces in the bastion?”
“I counted them, General. The drawing may be imperfect; but there is not a single line in it that is not the representation of an enemy work.”
“Oh, oh! A ditch from San Vicente to el Milagro,” he exclaimed in astonishment.
“And a parapet at San Vicente.”
“San Cayetano appears to be an important fortification.”
“Terrible, General.”
“And these others at the bridge-head…”
“Which join the forts by means of zigzag stockades.”
“Very well,” he said with satisfaction, putting the sketch away. “You have discharged your commission satisfactorily, as it appears.”
“I am at my general’s orders.”
And then, turning his penetrating look about him, he added:
“They told me that miss Fly committed the rashness of going to Salamanca too, to see the buildings. I do not see her.”
“She has not come back,” said one of the Englishmen of the suite.
They all questioned me with alarming looks, and I felt a certain awkwardness. I would have given anything for the señorita Fly to present herself at that moment.
“She has not come back?” said the duke, with an expression of alarm, fixing his eyes on me. “Where is she?”
“General, I do not know,” I answered, a good deal put out. “Miss Fly did not go with me to Salamanca. I met her there, and afterwards… We parted on leaving the city, because it was necessary for me to be at Bernuy before twelve.”
“Very well,” said lord Wellington, as though he believed he had given excessive importance to a matter which in itself had none. “Come up to my quarters at once to complete the information I need.”
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