There are buttons, buckles, cannon balls, pistol balls, rifle balls, remains of bayonets, nails, horseshoes, melted lead, pickaxes, maravedíes... and aluminum foil, cans or plastic bags. The scene of the last battle that Napoleon won in Spain is today on the outskirts of l'Ordal, a town in the municipality of Subirats on the limits of the Garraf massif. A plaque commemorates that clash, of which the most complete archaeological excavation has been carried out this year.
A team led by archaeologist Pablo Carrasco, 34, inspected the battlefield, where the French troops, with some 10,000 men, surprised the allies, some 3,500 troops garrisoned in three areas of l'Ordal waiting. to attack Barcelona. It is estimated that it caused between 600 and 700 deaths on the Allied side and about 300 on the French side.
We are actually in the full decline of the great emperor. After the withdrawal of Russia in 1812, Napoleon's Grande Armée disappeared and by the following year it faced Russians, Prussians, Austrians and Swedes in Germany. A month after l'Ordal, Napoleon loses the key battle of Leipzig (Germany), the most massive and savage of the time.
Carrasco, who arrived in Barcelona in 2019 to study a master's degree in advanced studies at the University of Barcelona, specialized in military history and georeference systems. His doctoral thesis deals with the Napoleonic era, and he has excavated other battles from this period, such as that of Vitoria, but also from the Carlist wars.
Before working on the ground, the archaeologist analyzes ancient cartographies, written sources, consults Google Maps and Google Earth and visits the site. “You form an idea of the place, but when you are on site to work it can be very different,” he explains to this newspaper.
One of the previous visits to l'Ordal before the excavation was at night, with a full moon. Because on September 12 to 13, 1813, this astronomical circumstance occurred. It was key for the French attack.
The military amalgam formed by the British, Spanish, Germans, Calabrians, Swiss and Irish was advancing from south to north along the Mediterranean coast. It was commanded by General Bentick, with Frederick Adams in the vanguard, and they came victorious from the battle of Castalla (Alicante). They were waiting for their moment in l'Ordal.
But Marshal Louis Gabriel Suchet decides to launch a surprise attack against the coalition. He forms his troops and launches them on l'Ordal. The battle is terrible and the allies are taken by surprise in the camp, in the light of the moon.
When those battles were 200 years old, there was political interest in remembering and documenting them. In l'Ordal, a plaque commemorates the confrontation. “Battlefields in general have been explained above all by political interest or discourse; not only the Napoleonic ones, but also the Roman ones and others, have been at the service of a specific narrative, more political than academic.”
The fight lasted around three and a half hours, which can be considered a high intensity fight. “I have read written sources that collect testimonies from neighbors who explain that they buried some victims. The owner of the nearby Mata del Racó farmhouse was an intellectual who wrote about what had happened. He says that after a few days it was full of naked corpses, they looted them. People took their clothes and searched their pockets; in a time of misery, everything was very precious.” All those soldiers must be buried in the surrounding area.
So the battle of l'Ordal defines the war, because “Barcelona will remain French until April 1814. Without the defeat of l'Ordal the allies would have attacked Barcelona earlier. But they don't do it, they only continue north when the French definitively leave Spain," Carrasco contextualizes.
“In archeology, the use of metal detectors was frowned upon, but we have worked with it. It has been demonstrated, even in the scientific literature, the difference in results with and without this instrument, and if it is georeferenced well it gives very good information,” explains Carrasco. Its detections allow metal to be located up to about 15 centimeters deep.
With a simple metal detector they have located dozens of important objects. For example, buttons: aesthetics aside, they carry the number of the regiment to which they belonged, which gives valuable information about who acted in battle.
And where: some British button suggests the position of the Allied guns. The 7th, 44th and 121st regiments are documented on the French side (800 men are estimated in each battalion per regiment), which is a surprise, because the first two regiments are documented, but not the 121st; perhaps some of the 121st uniforms were being reused by the other two… “It's a mystery.” One of the 121 buttons appears “in a very secluded place”: were they chasing them? The allied troops, defeated, regrouped in Vilafranca del Penedès and Sant Sadurní d'Anoia.
On the Spanish side, with at least four regiments, the uniforms lack a distinctive button. It is a flat button. “My hypothesis is that they shoot in street clothes,” he says.
Among the finds there are also some strange projectiles, with grooves. Carrasco suspects that they modified them to fit them as closely as possible to the barrel of the rifles and so that they could be directed with precision. Not like the usual ones of the time, long rifles that fired heavily.
Carrasco has opened consultations with specialists in historical ballistics to determine why they are altered in this way. Until then, bullets are spherical. The grooves, in addition to helping with aiming, could be more damaging, the damage to the enemy is deeper. Due to the disposition in battle and the rifle or rifle used, the allied side would have used them. "We don't know if they are orders from above or if they are made by the troops themselves, the soldiers were very bored in the trenches and while waiting, perhaps it occurred to them to design this type of bullets."
This type of projectile has not yet appeared in the survey of the Battle of Vitoria, fought three months earlier between the same contenders, but on a different scale: it is estimated that 60,000 men per side.
“There are different spaces, different battles at the same time. Many spherical projectiles appear, but for now we have not identified these crashed projectiles. Perhaps it is that in Ordal, or on the Levantine front, they came up with that more destructive projectile. It would be very interesting to advance further on this topic.”
In a very small space, numerous bullets appear together, most likely from a pistol. Most likely, those that fell to an officer when he was shot down, since a priori the common soldiers did not carry pistols. In a remote area, in the direction of Sant Sadurní, the remains suggest the escape route of the allies.
There are also many coins. “It is surprising that we found many maravedíes, and they are medieval coins. In the 17th century the Spanish empire, which went from bankruptcy to bankruptcy, had resealed them, but that happened a hundred years earlier. In the Napoleonic era that coin should no longer have been in legal tender, but we found 13 or 14, there are many, and that tells us that although in the middle of the 18th century they had made sides canceling those coins, possibly ordinary life was different and they were still using. Possibly because the troops are in contact with the lowest level of the economy: the bakery, the local commerce, the taverns... It is fascinating.”
But not only a Napoleonic battle was fought in Ordal. Remains of Carlist skirmishes and the civil war also appear. It is no coincidence: the place was strategic for the control of Barcelona.
