There are buttons, buckles, cannon balls, pistol bullets, defusels, remains of bayonets, nails, horseshoes, molten lead, pickaxes, morabatins... and aluminum foil, cans or plastic bags. The scene of the last battle that Napoleon won in Spain remains today on the outskirts of Ordal, a town in the municipality of Subirats, on the edge of the Garraf massif. A plaque commemorates this clash, of which a very complete archaeological excavation was carried out this year.
A team led by archaeologist Pablo Carrasco, 34, inspected the battlefield, where the French troops, with about 10,000 men, surprised the allies, about 3,500 troops quartered in three areas of Ordal waiting for 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 full decline of the great emperor. After the retreat from Russia in 1812, Napoleon's Grande Armée disappeared and by the following year it was facing Russians, Prussians, Austrians and Swedes in Germany. A month after 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 georeferencing systems. His doctoral thesis deals with the Napoleonic era, and he has excavated other battles of this period, such as that of Vitoria, but also of the Carline wars.
Before working on the ground, the archaeologist analyzes old maps, 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 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 to the French attack.
The military amalgam formed by the British, Spanish, Germans, Calabrians, Swiss or 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 waited for their moment in Ordal.
But Marshal Louis Gabriel Suchet decides to launch a surprise attack against the coalition. He forms his troops and sends them to Ordal. The battle is terrible and the allies are taken by surprise in the camp, in the moonlight.
When the 200th anniversary of these battles was celebrated, there was a political interest in remembering and documenting them. In Ordal, a plaque commemorates the confrontation. "Battlefields in general have been explained above all for political interest or discourse, not only the Napoleonic ones, but also the Romans 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 a nearby farmhouse, Mata del Racó, was an intellectual who wrote about what had happened. He explains that after a few days it was full of naked corpses, they were looted. People took their clothes and rummaged through their pockets, in a time of poverty everything good was very precious”. All these soldiers must be buried nearby.
So the battle of Ordal defines the war, because "Barcelona will remain French until April 1814. Without the defeat of Ordal, the allies would have attacked Barcelona earlier. But they don't, they only continue north when the French leave Spain for good," Carrasco contextualizes.
"The use of the metal detector was frowned upon in archeology, but we have worked with it. It is proven, even in the scientific literature, the difference in results with and without this instrument, and if the georeferencing is good it gives very good information", explains Carrasco. Its detections allow metal to be located up to 15 centimeters deep.
With a simple metal detector they have located dozens of important objects. For example, buttons: aesthetics aside, they bear the number of the regiment they belonged to, 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 calculated in each battalion per regiment), which is a surprise, because the first two regiments are documented, but not the 121st; perhaps some uniforms of the 121 were being reused by the other two... "It's an unknown". One of the 121 buttons appears "in a very remote place": were they being chased? 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 do not have a distinctive button. It's a flat button. "My hypothesis is that they shoot in street clothes", he points out.
Among the finds are also some strange projectiles, with grooves. Carrasco suspects that they were modified to fit the barrel of the rifles as much as possible and that they could be aimed accurately. Not like the usual ones of the time, long rifles that shot at eye level.
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 in aiming, could be more harmful, the destruction in the enemy is deeper. Because of the disposition in battle and the rifle or rifle used, they would have been used by the Allied side. "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 they were waiting, maybe they thought of designing this kind of bullets".
This kind of projectile has not yet appeared in the survey of the battle of Vitoria, fought three months before 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. A lot of spherical projectiles appear, but so far we have not identified these starry projectiles. Perhaps it is that in Ordal, or on the Valencian Levantine front, they came up with that most destructive projectile. It would be very interesting to advance further in this matter".
In a very small space, numerous bullets appear together, most likely from a pistol. Most likely, the ones that fell to an officer when he was shot, since a priori ordinary 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 a lot of Morabatin coins, and they are medieval coins. In the 17th century the Spanish empire, which went from bankruptcy to bankruptcy, had resealed them, but this happened a hundred years earlier. In the Napoleonic era that coin was no longer supposed to be in legal tender, but we found 13 or 14 of them, they are many, and this tells us that even though in the middle of the 18th century bans had been made canceling those coins possibly the current life was different and they continued to be used. Possibly because the troop is in contact with the lowest level of the economy: the bakery, the local trade, the taverns... It's fascinating".
But not only a Napoleonic battle was fought in Ordal. Remains of Carline skirmishes and the civil war also appear. It is no coincidence: the place was strategic for the control of Barcelona.
