The Great Siege

4

It was as an hour before dawn, only four or five hours after midnight, when Mustafa first unleashed hell.

The biggest Turkish guns, the bronze basilisks, had not been used on Elmo. They were not needed, and they consumed gunpowder with a gargantuan appetite. But they were used now.

They could hear the rumble of gunfire in Syracuse and Catania, one hundred and twenty miles to the north. It seemed like the whole world was trembling. Fourteen batteries of sixty-four guns opened up simultaneously, along with four monstrous basilisks each firing a ball weighing a scarcely believable two hundred pounds. They had reduced the Walls of Theodosius, that defended Constantinople for a thousand years. It was foolish to think they might be held back by the small walls of Birgu.

Yet the blood of Elmo had bought the defenders so much precious time, an entire month, that these modest curtain walls were now massively reinforced along their entire length. Mustafa had no doubt that his basilisks would soon bring them crumbling to the earth. But La Valette, ceaselessly walking on his rounds of inspection, instilled confidence in every defender’s heart.

‘Let the Turkish guns fire,’ he said. ‘Our walls can take it.’

Mustafa also had the master gunners of the leaner, longer-range culverins triangulate their guns to fire clean over the top and hit the town itself at random.

‘Churches, fine houses, knightly auberges, paupers’ hovels, dog kennels!’ he said. ‘Flatten them all!’

And from the forward trenches came the muffled thunk of fat-bellied mortars, belching out coarse-shaped, short trajectory missiles high into the air, crashing to land with equal, random destruction.

Cannonballs from the culverins bounced clear down narrow streets until they smashed into low walls, demolishing mean house-fronts in seconds. Pigs squealed, geese honked and raised their wings, a barrel of wine burst open on a cart and flooded a street claret-red, the cart exploding in splinters. The pigs twirled their tails and drank the spilled wine, then ran off screaming down the street as another ball crashed into a nearby well and destroyed it.

Women and children gathered at the base of the shuddering walls, handing up stones in lines to continue the bulking. La Valette ordered the rest of Birgu’s Mohammedan prisoners up from the dungeons of Angelo, to work on the most exposed parts of the walls at the end of a whip. Messages were sent back from the Turkish trenches to tell Mustafa. He dismissed the news with a single wave of his hand, and told them to keep firing. It was war. Men died.

In desperation, two of the Turkish captives were seen to raise their still-manacled hands, loosened only enough to let them lift rocks, and cry out the ancient formula of Muslim belief, the Shahada, Lâ ilâha illallâh, Muhammadu rasûlullâh! to show that they were brothers in the faith. But a work-gang of Maltese women heard them and believing that they were crying out secrets to the enemy, reacted in fury. Like maddened bacchantes, throwing back the veils in which they worked even now, and hitching up their long black skirts, they clawed their way up the wreckage of rubble and scaffolding to where the two unfortunates stood, and dragged them down to the square below. There they beat them to death with fistfuls of rocks. Children beat their bloody corpses afterwards with canes, and a wandering madman thrust sharp wooden sticks into their mouths and drove them hard down into the back of their throats to stop their traitorous speech.

It was a cruel fate that the culverins kept succeeding in hitting the Sacred Infirmary, which soon threatened to be rendered a bloody chaos. Panicked medical brothers hurried to and fro bearing bowls of water, bandages, flasks of turpentine, tripping, slithering and yelling out. One of them already wore his own wounded arm in a sling. But among them strode the tall, imperturbable figure of Fra Reynaud, determined that through sheer willpower, the chaos should not take hold. He forbad a single brother to raise his voice, though the wounded being stretchered in through the door in a stream made noise enough. Groans and screams rose to the high rafters.

Explosion followed explosion, almost as if the Turks knew where the infirmary was in the town and were targeting it deliberately. Jars of precious ointments trembled and jerked off the shelves, smashing to the ground, until Reynaud ordered all breakables stored on the flagstone floors, wadded with whatever they could find. Supplies were low enough, they could not afford to lose more. Then began the grim business of triage, moving from bed to bed, each already occupied by a dying man, determining who might be saved and who was already lost. A chaplain followed in Reynaud’s wake, administering Last Rites to those deemed beyond help. Dust cascaded down from the ceiling, already zigzagged with cracks, settling on bloody wounds, helping them clot. A woman screamed. She had gone into labour early, having seen her husband killed in front of her.

‘A wall is down on Senglea!’ someone cried. ‘The wall over French Creek, opposite Corradino!’

‘Rubbish,’ Reynaud said evenly, never lifting his head, attention fixed on the scalpel in his hand and the dying knight beneath. ‘Hysterical rumour. And do not raise your voice, Brother.’

The knight’s belly was ruptured within by shrapnel from a devilish exploding ball. Reynaud placed his fingers on the knight’s sternum and sliced quickly downward through the skin and muscle layer as far as the umbilicus. He carefully opened the cut. The belly’s organs were further encased in a translucent layer called the peritoneum, and now beneath it he could see the welling blue-black shadow of the blood that filled his abdomen. Cut open the peritoneum and that blood would flood out like water from an overfilled bucket. And a good operation should lose your patient no more than four ounces of blood. The knight was wounded deep in the spleen or liver or both.

Sweat dripped from the chaplain’s face onto his hands. He drew the cut to and sat back and covered the man’s belly with a cloth that seeped red instantly.

‘In the name of Christ,’ he said gently, ‘your time here is done.’

The knight closed his eyes. ‘I am glad of it, Brother.’ A minute later he died.

Reynaud stood. ‘Carry him out. Then see to that man there. And do not be too tight with the tourniquet. Enough to give the blood time to clot, that is all. Apply egg white, and bring me more alcohol. Now, Brother. This will hurt. Bite down. The stick is soaked in Alicante wine, so savour it.’

As the day went on, the medical chaplains began to see more and more burns victims. Burn wounds were the worst, the skin falling away like the skin of rotted fruit, flesh slithering off the bone, and the smell horribly like cooked meat. It had been a long time since Fra Reynaud had been able to eat roast pork. Fires raged from Ottoman incendiaries, firebombs, even mortar balls evilly laced with Greek fire that erupted in great clouds of inextinguishable flame as they struck home.

Reynaud called for more precious ointment of aloe and onion to reduce burns and blistering, and for an amputation, a caudle of alcohol, opium and hemlock. He sawed fast through a man’s leg bone, cut away the muscle and fat to leave a bone stump but with plenty of loose skin, applied a styptic, and tied up the skin and laid over it a wet ox bladder which would shrink as it dried. The fellow would probably live, though he’d be unlikely to run again.

He called for a count of how many ounces of opium remained to them. The count was not good, but his face remained impassive. He also demanded regular reports from the walls, and his firm, clear voice rang out across the infirmary ward at intervals.

‘The walls are still holding well! This town has not gone the way of Jericho just yet! So work on, Brothers, work on, and keep a steady hand.’

Word went round that a deserter from the Ottoman camp had revealed Mustafa’s terrifying intentions: not to enslave, but to slay every living thing within the town — every man, woman and child, every dog and chicken — except La Valette. He would be taken in chains before the Grand Sultan himself, and tortured to death at his pleasure.

Hearing that they were under sentence of death only steeled this steely people further.

La Valette vowed publicly that he would never be taken alive. ‘Though I plan to take some considerable killing.’

Such grim humour and granite resolution were much to Maltese taste. They began to say that this Grand Master of the Knights was not all bad.

‘Perhaps,’ said Franco Briffa, ‘he is the kind of cold-eyed bastard you want in command, during a little crisis like this.’

‘This deserter from the Ottoman camp,’ queried Smith. ‘Deserting already? Seems unlikely.’

‘It does,’ agreed Stanley.

‘Has anyone seen this deserter? How did he enter the town? What is his name? His reasons?’

‘Brother John,’ said Stanley, his ingenuous blue eyes wide with shock. ‘Surely you are not suggesting that there is no such deserter, and that this reported sentence of death we are all under, knights and citizens both, is merely a rumour circulated by the Grand Master himself, to put more strength in our backbones?’

Smith grimaced.

Stanley laughed.

Darkness falling on the second day revealed a new front of attack, and it seemed momentarily to strike dismay into even the heart of La Valette. It was a front he had truly not foreseen.

The Turks had observed that while the walls of Birgu still remained steadfast, cracked and battered but far from fallen, the walls of Senglea over French Creek were indeed beginning to crumble. They would be coming in over the water after all.

From the Turkish main camp over at Marsa arose vast sounds of shouting and rumbling, a great weight being hauled over the stony ground. And then across the harbour, the besieged saw trains of oxen, horses and mules, and hundreds, even thousands, of naked men, sweating in the flickering orange torchlight, men and beasts all alike under the lash, whipped onward, dragging behind them over the hill some mighty load. Finally their burden appeared, little by little. A beaked prow rose up into the starlit sky, high over the hill and then tipped down again. The dark hull of a galley, dragged along on greased timber rollers. They were dragging their boats overland from Marsamuscetto, directly into the Grand Harbour, evading the guns of San Angelo altogether. Then they could row out from the Marsa and attack Senglea and Birgu unopposed.

Flanking them marched hundreds of Janizaries, resplendent in damask and gold and silver, scimitars encrusted with semi-precious gems, beads of coloured glass and turkey-stone, muskets superbly damascened, and carrying high above their heads green banners embroidered with the sacred letter Aleph.

They were to attack on two sides at once. From land and sea.

La Valette clenched his jaw and called himself a fool. At his age. There was only one way into the harbour? But no, boats could always be carried overland, with enough manpower and determination. Had the Turks not done the same at Constantinople, a hundred years ago?

It was then that La Valette showed what a commander can be. His moment of paralysed shock lasted no longer than a bird’s call. ‘Hit back, hit back,’ he muttered to himself. ‘Every time, in every place, hit back.’

Then he rapped out his orders.

‘Mezquita to assemble a cavalry column with grenades! Ride out on the guns of Santa Margherita. The citizens to make up a volunteer force of the best swimmers, to cross the harbour under cover of night, and harry the Turkish column coming over with the boats. We will not sit and wait for them. We will attack on all fronts!’

The gates of the post of Provence thudded open and Don Pedro de Mezquita with forty armoured knights rode out at full gallop, swords raised over their heads. The Turkish gunners gaped. So confident had they been, so unsuspecting of anything so crazed as a counter-attack by the vastly outnumbered defenders, that they hadn’t even any armed infantrymen around to protect them.

The knights were upon them in a moment. Many fled in the darkness, and many more were cut down by the scything blades of the furious cavalry charge. Gunners collapsed back against their own guns, feeling the heat of the massive brazen barrel burning through their robes, as huge half-armoured chargers reared terrifyingly above, and long cavalry swords drove into them. Other cavalry men milled about before the guns and tossed grenades with smouldering fuses into the barrels. One or two even dismounted and began to pack the guns with all the powder they could find, while others wedged great rocks into the muzzles and hammered them home with mallets.

Don Mezquita himself had galloped up high onto Santa Margherita’s top, alone and exposed, to keep lookout.

‘Remount NOW!’ he cried, galloping back.

A large column of well-armed Ottoman musketeers was already swarming out towards them, the glow of their matchlock ropes like dancing fireflies in the dark.

A young knight — it was Henri Parisot himself, La Valette’s nephew — hurriedly lit the fuse at a gun’s breech. He then hauled himself up onto the gun barrel itself, about to explode, using it as a mounting block to get back on his horse.

‘A somewhat risky manoeuvre!’ called Don Pedro. ‘I advise you to trot away quite briskly from that gun now.’

The young knight spurred furiously and the horse veered sharply away just as the gun exploded. The great bronze barrel reared and then slewed hard to the right, spewing up dust and stones over the fleeing Parisot. When it had settled again, a black hairline crack had appeared along its side. Other grenades were detonating in the barrels with muffled booms, and then came a more ominous volleying crackle of musketry behind them, not three hundred yards off. All ducked in their saddles.

‘Open the gates!’ yelled Mezquita.

He needed to give no order to his cavaliers. They galloped back down from Santa Margherita in a cloud of dust and even as the gates were slammed shut behind them, the wood splintered with the incoming musket fire.

They dismounted and celebrated wildly in the street. Not a man was hurt. They must have slain forty or more trained gunners. As to how many Turkish guns they had successfully spiked, it was not certain. Perhaps no more than three or four. But the effect on the spirits of both besiegers and besieged was invaluable.

When they next looked out, the guns were being rapidly checked, or withdrawn to the armouries at the main camp for repair, and a sizeable detachment of well-armed infantrymen was now permanently stationed on Santa Margherita.

Any further cavalry sorties would be purely self-sacrificial.

The native Maltese volunteers knew exactly where to swim across the harbour, but they were few in number, just eight men, since so few of Malta’s fishermen had that strange art of moving through water like a fish. Those that could came up silent and dripping from the still water, daggers between their teeth, unseen and unheard by the enemy.

How many of the Turks hauling the boats they fell on and slew before they themselves were killed was never known. None of those men ever returned. It was a suicide mission. But for a while, from the tower of San Angelo where he kept watch in hawk-like vigil over the unfolding siege, La Valette could see clearly that the ominous procession of hauled galleys had slowed and stopped, and the column of orderly marching Janizaries broke into panic as they came under ferocious and unexpected attack from maddened knifemen, vaulting out of the dark from behind the heaped rocks.

Again, the moral effect of such an attack was considerable. The Turks had now been twice surprised and dismayed by the defenders’ aggression. Not for one second, though they were a force of many thousands, would they be safe from these Christian wolves, pouncing out of the night and falling on them with cold bloodlust, as careless of death as their own Janizaries.

The Grand Master said to Sir Oliver Starkey, ‘They were brave men.’

‘Sire? You mean — the natives?’

‘I do.’

‘The poor, low-born, barefoot, ragged-trousered native militia?’

La Valette looked at him. Starkey was making a mocking point. ‘I concede it,’ he said at last. ‘They fought and, I think, died, as bravely as any high-born knight of Europe. This peasantry that we rule over here — sullen, uncommunicative, dirty, dishonest, superstitious, forever quarrelling and fornicating among themselves as they are — I am beginning to think that they are not all bad.’

Starkey smiled to himself. From La Valette, it was high praise indeed.

But there could be no extended rejoicing or self-congratulation. Despite the defenders’ gallant sacrifices, by the following afternoon the Turks had thirty or forty lean galleys jostling together at the far western end of the harbour, well out of reach of the guns of San Angelo.

La Valette ordered the post of Senglea to ready themselves. He sent reinforcements across the pontoon bridge of boats behind the great chain, though only a hundred. No more could be spared. They were to hold out in St Michel, Senglea’s tiny fort. Marshal Copier commanded, and among the reinforcements went Henri Parisot and Nicholas.

‘If the pontoon falls,’ said Nicholas, ‘I can swim back again.’

Parisot grinned. ‘You seem to like being at the heart of things.’