Arbolanche’s epistle is in Italian tercets, written from Brussels with the usual bitter tone of war lyric, and offers a vivid depiction of the hasty daily life of a common soldier walking the Spanish road:
Figure 3. Poesías del Maestre de Campo don Sancho de Londoño. BNE, Mss/21738, 116r.
¡Cuán miserable es la vida del soldado!
Estaba el tercio en Malta ahora ha un año
y está en Brabante ya muy sosegado.
Todos nosotros, si yo no me engaño,
temíamos salir de Lombardía
para emprender camino tan estraño.127
(How miserable is the soldier’s life! One year ago, I was in the Malta tercio and now we are in Brabant, peacefully. If I am not deceived, we were all scared of leaving Lombardy to walk this unfamiliar road.)
In his epistle, Arbolanche tries to convince Londoño to write a poem about the epic feats of their general and the latter’s patron, the great Duke of Alba.128 What captures the commander’s attention in Arbolanche’s letter, however, is a passing reference to the French city of Metz on the army’s way to Brabant, a fleeting mention that would prompt Londoño to offer a response several times longer than his friend’s motivating epistle:
Que a Mez no vimos, quizá porque pena
no nos causase ver su ancha campaña
de blancos huesos de españoles llena.129
(We did not see Metz, perhaps to avoid the grief of seeing its wide surrounding countryside whitened by Spanish bones.)
With his hyperbolic metonymy about the Spanish bones covering the field, Arbolanche is obviously referring to the high number of casualties at Metz. More than fifteen years after the siege, the place was still marked in the memory of the soldiers by the carnage of 1552, and a soldier serving in the Sicilian tercio and walking the Spanish road on their way to Flanders could not help mentioning it in a letter to a more veteran soldier who would walk the same road in a different contingent a few weeks later.
In his reply, Londoño recounts the details of the military campaign of Metz from the perspective of a captain in charge of a company of arquebusiers, reserving for himself a leading role in every strategic development, praising Alba, and making veiled references to other officers he considers responsible for the defeat because they did not follow his advice. Yet for the veteran commander, the main intent of his letter is to “uproot such an error” (desarraigar tan mal concepto) about the number of victims by contrasting the army’s muster rolls and the number of fallen soldiers of his own company with those circulating in informal soldierly pláticas, which he intends to prove false. Londoño points out, by the end of his epistle, that “the talk was started” (se ha la plática movido) by “so many bad poems” (tantas trovas mal trovadas) that it is difficult to set the count straight in the public’s perception of the events.130 Participating soldiers and witnesses generated a substantial body of discourse and opinion that circulated publicly, mostly in verse, and that Londoño aims at disavowing in the soldierly public sphere.131 Oral and written pláticas fed each other in a fluid interaction that oftentimes confronts the official narrative about specific military events or about the nature and limits of war and empire in general. As if he did not want to contribute to the noise of the soldierly public opinion, he instructs his friend Arbolanche to destroy his own poetic letters: “Once read, sir, I beg you to tear them apart” (Que leídas las rompáis, señor, os pido).132 Londoño signed his letter “in Liexa, without Mars and without Apollo / … lacking everything that we long for, / this year of sixty eight, / except for reading and writing” (quedo en Liexa sin Marte y sin Apolo / … sin cuanto, en fin, por bien se procura / este año de sesenta y ocho quedo / excepto la lección y la escriptura).133 The reproduction of the soldierly republic of letters, favored by the military otium of peacetime, herein remains assured, and the complex interplay between oral and written modes of textual production and exchange, a determining feature of the soldiers’ literary culture, is clearly in evidence.
Class tensions within the army, a constant source of pláticas about the matters of war, may have also been at play in the public discussions and soldierly trovas about what happened in Metz and in Arbolanche and Londoño’s private exchange about it. According to the famous French surgeon Ambroise Paré, present at the siege of Metz, the Duke of Alba “declared to the Emperor that the souldiers dyed dayly, yet, more than the number of two hundred, and that there was but little hope to enter into the Citty.” The emperor then asked whether his men dying under the walls of the sieged city “were gentlemen of remarke or quality,” to which Alba replied that “they were all poore souldiers.” Charles V’s reply was quite crude: “Then, sayd he, it makes no matter if they dye, comparing them to caterpillers and grashoppers, which eate the buddes of the earth. And if they were of any fashion, they would not bee in the campe for twelve shillings the month.”134 The anecdote may very well be false, particularly considering that Paré spoke from the other side of the front line, but it does remind us that class and rank indeed structured the production, distribution, and consumption of soldierly pláticas. And it confirms the existence of different memories about military events, of competing—many times irreconcilable—views and values about war and soldiering.
Whether or not the emperor ever uttered such harsh words, common soldiers had many reasons to share their discontent about the military and political superiors who governed their republic. The everyday conversations described by Isaba, Arbolanche, and Londoño could easily be transformed into illicit forms of speech that could go far beyond the limits when criticizing royal policies. It was precisely Sancho de Londoño who made the first systematic effort to discipline speech within the soldiers’ republic. His widely read military treatise, Discurso sobre la forma de reducir la disciplina militar a meyor y antiguo estado, which would be repeatedly copied, imitated, and extracted during the last decades of the sixteenth century, was requested by and dedicated to the Duke of Alba in 1568, and it included a well-known set of military ordinances that give us a glimpse of the soldiers’ daily life while in camp, marching, or in battle.135 Interestingly, many of these dispositions regulating a wide range of soldierly everyday practices, most notably drinking, whoring, and gambling, were driven by the authorities’ concern about the limits of legitimate speech in the spaces of war and were aimed at controlling what soldiers could and could not say. One of the often-mentioned liberties of soldierly life was the possibility of engaging in legal gambling. Illegal gambling, however, was forbidden because “it provokes curses, blasphemies, and swearing” (reniegos, blasfemias y juramentos), and military commanders and treatise writers agreed that “no soldier shall blaspheme or curse” (ningún soldado reniegue ni blasfeme).136 Blasphemy, not a minor fault in civil society as it could be charged and punished by the Inquisition, was more tolerated among soldiers, for whom swearing was just one more component of their public personae, a form of bizarría, according to Bernardo de Vargas Machuca, a soldier in the Americas.137
Bizarría was mix of dash, proud daring, arrogant gallantry, and military discipline, all publicly displayed in a combination of gestural demeanor, verbal manners, and dressing habits—a certain bodily hexis, that is, a “pattern of postures that is both individual and systematic [social], because linked to a whole system of techniques involving the body and tools, and charged with a host of social meanings and values.”138 It defined a whole behavioral pattern that was ultimately the essence of the soldierly habitus of the new war. Veteran colonial soldier Santiago de Tesillo warned Chilean bisoños against their hurry to become pláticos and bizarros, “since they think that one becomes a soldier just by enrolling; the drum sounds, they sign their names, loosen their cloaks, change the way they walk, they dally and threaten, and they think that is all they need to be soldiers” (pues piensan que no hay más que entrar a ser soldados y serlo desde luego. Suena la caja, concurren, asientan plaza, sueltan la capa y mudan el paso, galantean y desgarran, sin presumir por necesaria otra circunstancia).139 The authorities’