Sharpe's Siege

by Bernard Cornwell

  CHAPTER 6

  The bellow of the guns rolled like thunder over the rain-sodden land. Instinctively, without any orders, the Riflemen knelt as if to shelter from artillery.

  Sharpe ran. His metal scabbard flapped at his side, his rifle slipped from his shoulder to dangle at his elbow, and his pack thumped on to the small of his back.

  Sergeant Rossner, leading the small picquet that spied the route ahead, was crouching by a straggle of furze that lined the roadside at the crest of a gentle rise. He gave a Germanic grunt as Sharpe dropped beside him then a jerk of his half-shaven chin to indicate the source of the thunder.

  Not that Sharpe needed any such indication. Darkly streaked smoke billowed from the landscape a mile and a half ahead and to Sharpe’s left. Directly ahead of him, and reaching across the whole view, lay the silvered waters of the Arcachon basin, made visible suddenly by this rise in the road, but Sharpe stared only at the fortress, seemingly half-buried in the encroaching sand, and at the white-sailed frigate that coughed her own billow of whiter smoke to meld with the fort’s darker gusts. ‘Marines, eh?’ The German sergeant showed his disgust by spitting on to the road.

  Sharpe took out his telescope as Frederickson crouched beside him. From this landward side the Teste de Buch fort looked hardly formidable. It was built low within its protective glacis of packed earth and sand off which, as Sharpe watched, the small shot of the frigate bounced like cricket balls.

  The smoke from the fort’s guns drifted northwards, leaving the channel clear for the gunners’ aim. Four guns only were working, but they were served with a quick skill that betrayed the presence of real gunners. God damn Bampfylde’s fisherman, Sharpe thought, for the Teste de Buch was lethal still. It was doing the Scylla damage, while the frigate could make small impression on its massive walls.

  Sharpe trained the telescope left. He paused as he saw a throng of people, drably dressed, then realized, from the heavy skirts worn by most of the crowd, that he watched the villagers who, in turn, watched the uneven battle from the crest of the dunes beside the channel. Sharpe looked further south, seeking the bright coats of the Marines, then checked the glass again.

  He saw another small crowd of people, but these were not watching the frigate’s struggle, but instead seemed to be crowded at the edge of a group of dark pines. Some, a few, had strolled further north to watch the battle in the channel, but they had chosen a poor vantage point to witness a sight that must be rare in their harsh lives.

  ‘Why?’ he spoke aloud.

  ‘Sir?’ Frederickson asked.

  Sharpe was wondering why villagers, witnessing a contest that would be told to their grandchildren as a great happening in the village’s history, chose such a strange place to watch the event. Most of the villagers had gone to the dunes, seeking the best view, yet a sizeable few were huddled there at the wood’s edge. He stared at them, making out a shape beneath the tree shadows. ‘William? That wood, where the people are, tell me what you see?’

  Frederickson took the precious glass and trained it. He stared for twenty seconds, then shook his head. ‘It looks like a bloody limber!’

  ‘Doesn’t it?’ Sharpe took the glass back and, his guess reinforced by Frederickson’s puzzled confirmation, saw more clearly the box shape slung between the high wheels. He had seen those objects before; the small carts that carried the ready ammunition to French guns. ‘Bloody Bampfylde,’ he said as he stared at the shape beneath the trees, ‘has been wrong about everything. The fort is defended, they’re not bloody militia, and I’ll wager you a year’s pay they’ve got a damned ambush waiting for the web-foots.’ Sharpe swept the telescope right again to look at the fort. He could just see the gunners working on the water-bastion. Above them, sluggish in the falling breeze, the tricolour was bright, while closer, on the ramparts above the fort’s gate, he could see no one.

  He lowered the glass a fraction. It was hard to tell from this low vantage-point, but the approach to the fort seemed to go through a humped landscape of wind-drifted dunes. One thing was certain; which was that all French eyes were glued seawards. ‘I think we ought to have a snap at it.’

  Frederickson grinned. ‘No ladders?’ He mentioned it not to discourage Sharpe, but to encourage a solution.

  Sharpe raised the glass. ‘They’ve kept the drawbridge down.’ Where the approach road crossed the inner ditch a solid wooden bridge was suspended by chains. It led to a closed gate. The fact of the drawbridge being down reinforced Sharpe’s suspicion that another French force was hidden in the woods. If that force was pushed backwards by the Marines then their horses would drag the field guns over the bridge and into the fort’s safety.

  Sharpe closed the telescope and slid the brass shutters over its lenses. What he planned was risky, even foolhardy, but the Marines marched into ambush and the fort would never again be so unprepared for a surprise attack. Once the hidden field guns opened fire then the garrison would know the enemy was at their rear and men would hurry to the land defences and slide their muskets over the wall.

  The road ahead dropped to a stone mill that stood beside a small stream. Beyond that were pale, poor meadows where broken byres served a handful of thin cattle. Beyond that again were the masts of the coastal shipping huddled where another village, betrayed by smoke from its chimneys, lay at the basin’s edge. The Riflemen must cross the stream, slip through the scant cover of the meadows, then work their way into the sandy waste about the fort. Sharpe smiled. ‘To be truthful I don’t know how we get over the bloody wall.’

  ‘Knock on the front door?’ Frederickson suggested.

  Sharpe pushed his telescope into the tin box that protected it from harm, then into his pocket. ‘Send two good men south to warn Bampfylde. Then we go down the slope in small groups. Open order. Rendezvous at the first cattle shed.’ He had a growing suspicion that this was a task best left to a small group, a very small group. Sharpe turned. ‘Sergeant Harper!’

  The huge Irishman, grinning with anticipation, loped up the road. ‘Sir?’

  ‘You wanted to be killed, so come with me.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Sharpe and Harper were going to war.

  The guns of the Teste de Buch fired shot weighing thirty-six pounds, each shot propelled by ten pounds and two ounces of black powder. The iron balls, striking the Scylla, splintered oak like matchwood, threw cannon barrels off carriages, and made carnage among the gun crews.

  They were deadly weapons that graced Lassan’s semi-circular water-bastion. Each was mounted on a traverse and slide. The traverse was hinged at the embrasure in the fort’s wall, and wheeled at its rear so that the crew could swivel the whole gun to face anywhere within its designated arc of fire. The traversing wheels, iron bound, had ground deep, semi-circular grooves into the stone. For this battle the guns were slewed right to fire south-west and Lassan’s men had hammered iron pegs into holes drilled in the curving grooves so that the traverses, under the guns’ recoil, did not swing out of true.

  The recoil was soaked up by the slide. A field gun, or a gun aboard a ship, was mounted on wheels and the hammer of the shot’s explosion in the breech would drive the weapon fiercely backwards. After each shot the crew must manhandle the gun forward again, aim it again, and all the time the crews were swabbing out and reloading, but not with these guns. Lassan’s great weapons also had wheels, but the wheels fitted over wooden ramps that sloped up towards the rear of the traverse. The recoil slammed the guns backwards and gravity ran them down into place again. And again, and again, and another thirty-six pound ball of iron shivered the Scylla as Lassan’s monsters belched flame and smoke across the waters of the channel.

  The smoke of the guns drifted northwards, but, in that strange phenomenon that all gunners knew and none could ever explain, the very firing of the guns seemed to still the wind. The smoke thickened before the embrasures, making a filthy-smelling fog that obliterated the target from the gunners’ view.

  The blinding fog did n
ot matter. Henri Lassan had thought long about the science of gunnery and had ordered white lines painted on the granite bastions. A similar pattern of lines was painted on the barracks’ roof from where, unobstructed by the smoke, a sergeant watched the target and shouted out the alignment. ‘Three!’ he bellowed, and ‘three!’ the gun captains shouted, and four handspikes wrenched the eye-pins from the drilled holes and four other handspikes levered the traverses about until the iron wheel was flush with the white-line marked with the numeral three, then the pins were dropped into new holes and the guns, despite the fog of war, hammered their shot with deadly accuracy.

  ‘Two!’

  The shout told Lassan that the target was moving and he guessed, correctly, that the frigate was bearing away. He walked southwards, away from his gunsmoke, to see the two-decked Vengeance raise her gunports. That battleship was beyond Cap Ferrat and far beyond range. He watched. The great slab-side, chequered black and white, disappeared in one great clap of smoke, but, as Lassan had suspected, the broadside fell uselessly into the sea. ‘Keep firing!’

  ‘One!’ the sergeant shouted from the roof and the crews levered at the vast guns as the boys ran up the stone ramp with more charges. A ball from the frigate rumbled overhead, another struck the stone of the embrasure nearest Lassan with a crack that made his heart pulse warm fear through his chest, but most of the frigate’s shots were uselessly striking the sea wall or glancing off the southern glacis.

  ‘She’s gone!’ the sergeant shouted.

  ‘Cease fire!’ Lassan shouted, and the thunder ended suddenly. The smoke cleared with painful slowness to show that the frigate, sorely wounded, had gone south beyond the arc of the big guns. Lassan contemplated manning some of the twenty-four pounders on his southern ramparts, then saw the shot-torn foresails fill with air again and knew that the British captain, under orders to keep the fort’s gunners busy, was heading back into the channel. The sight of those torn sails and flying severed cables made Lassan think that some of his shots had been going high.

  ‘Lower the barrels, Lieutenant!’ Lassan wanted to pump his shots into that fragile hull.

  The Scylla’s guns were run out, ready to fire when the frigate wore, but the bow-chasers, long-nines, barked defiance. The balls cracked on the bastion’s stone, doing no damage, then the sergeant on the barrack roof again had the enemy in his line of aim. ‘One!’ the sergeant shouted.

  ‘Fire!’ Gerard bellowed. The great barrels jerked back and up, the wheels rumbled as they rolled back down the slide, and the smoke, that stank like rotten eggs, pumped again into the cold air. Lassan’s garrison might have been stripped to the bone, he might not even have crews for every gun, but he would do his duty and he would show the British that an under-manned fort could still hurt them and still, by the grace of the good God and in the service of the French Emperor, win battles.

  The handcart was made of splintered, fragile wood that was held to uncertain unity by bent, rusted nails and with lashings of thin, frayed, black twine. Some of the wheel-spokes were broken.

  Sharpe pulled the handcart out of the cattle byre and listened to the ghastly screech of the wooden axle that ran through two ungreased wooden blocks. He supposed that the cart was used to take hay from these meadows into the village, or perhaps bedding straw to the fort, but it had been abandoned through the frost months to lie in this byre where the spiders had made thick webs on its spokes and handles. ‘It could work.’ Sharpe tested the small bed of the cart and it seemed solid enough. ‘Except we don’t speak French.’

  ‘Sweet William does, sir,’ Harper said, then, seeing Sharpe’s face, corrected himself. ‘Captain Frederickson croaks Frog, sir.’

  A group of armed men, approaching a fort, invited hostility, but two men, pushing a wounded comrade on a handcart, posed no threat.

  ‘Jesus.’ Frederickson’s voice was awed when, arriving at the cattle byre, he heard Sharpe’s plan. ‘We’re supposed to walk up and ask for a bloody sawbones?’

  ‘You suggested knocking on the front door,’ Sharpe said. ‘So why not?’

  The Riflemen still drifted down the gentle slope. They came in scattered groups, spread out in the chain formation they would use in battle, and no alarm had been raised at the sight. Sharpe doubted whether any Frenchman had even seen the dark shapes flit down the slope. Once on the lower ground, over the tiny stream and hidden by the ditches that were edged by straggling blackthorn hedges, the Riflemen were invisible. The fort still thundered its huge noise.

  ‘What we need,’ Sharpe said, ‘is blood.’ He was reckoning that the fort would not refuse entry to a mortally wounded man, but mortal wounds were usually foul with blood and, in search of it, both officers looked instinctively to Patrick Harper.

  Who stared back with a slow and horrified understanding. ‘No! Holy Mother, no!’

  ‘It has to come out, Patrick.’ Sharpe spoke in a voice of sweet reason.

  ‘You’re not a surgeon, sir. Besides!’ Harper’s swollen face suddenly looked cheerful. ‘There’s no pincers, remember?’

  Sweet William unbuckled his pouch. ‘The barber-surgeons of London, my dear Sergeant, will pay six shillings and six pence for a ten-ounce bag of sound teeth taken from corpses. You’d be surprised how many fashionable London ladies wear false teeth taken from dead Frogs.’ Frederickson flourished a vile-looking pair of pincers. ‘They’re also useful for a spot of looting.’

  ‘God save Ireland.’ Harper stared at the pincers.

  Captain Frederickson smiled. ‘You’ll be doing it for England, Sergeant Harper, for your beloved King.’

  ‘Christ, no, sir!’

  ‘Strip to the waist,’ Sharpe ordered.

  ‘Strip?’ Harper had backed into the corner of the filthy byre.

  ‘We need to have your chest soaked in blood,’ Sharpe said as though this was the most normal procedure in the world. ‘As soon as the tooth’s pulled, Patrick, let the blood drip on to your skin. It won’t take long.’

  ‘Oh, Christ in his heaven!’ Harper crossed himself.

  ‘It doesn’t hurt, man!’ Frederickson took out his two false teeth and grinned at Harper. ‘See?’

  ‘That was done with a sword, sir. Not bloody pincers!’

  ‘We could do it with a sword.’ Sharpe said it helpfully.

  ‘Oh, Mary mother of God! Christ!’ Harper, seeing nothing but evil intent on his officers’ faces, knew that he must mutiny or suffer. ‘You’d be giving me a wee drink first?’

  ‘Brandy?’ Frederickson held out his canteen.

  Harper seized the canteen, uncorked it, and tipped it to his mouth.

  ‘Not too much,’ Frederickson said.

  ‘It’s not your bloody tooth. With respect, sir.’

  Frederickson looked at Sharpe. ‘Do you wish to play the surgeon, sir?’

  ‘I’ve never actually drawn a tooth.’ Sharpe, in front of the curious Riflemen who had gathered to watch Harper’s discomfiture, kept his voice very formal.

  Frederickson shrugged. ‘We should have a screw-claw, of course, but the pincers work well enough on corpses. Mind you, there is a knack to it.’

  ‘A knack?’

  ‘You don’t pull.’ Frederickson demonstrated his words with graphic movements of the rusted pincers. ‘You push the tooth towards the jawbone, twist one way, the other, then slide it out. It’s really not hard.’

  ‘Jesus!’ The big Irish sergeant had gone pale as rifle-cartridge paper.

  ‘I think,’ Sharpe said ,it with some misgivings, ‘that as Sergeant Harper and I have been together so long, I ought to do the deed. Push, twist, and pull?’

  ‘Precisely, sir.’

  It took five minutes to persuade and prepare Harper. The Irishman showed no fear in battle; he had gone grim-faced into the carnage of a dozen battlefields and come out victorious, but now, faced with the little business of having a tooth pulled, he sat terrified and shaking. He clung to Frederickson’s brandy as if it alone could console him in this dreadful ordeal.<
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  ‘Show me the tooth.’ Sharpe spoke solicitously.

  Harper eventually opened his mouth and pointed to an upper tooth that was surrounded by inflamed gum. ‘There.’

  Sharpe used a handle of the pincers and, as gently as he could, tapped the tooth. ‘That one?’

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ Harper bellowed and jerked away. ‘Bloody kill me, you will!’

  ‘Language, Sergeant!’ Frederickson was trying not to laugh while the other Riflemen were grinning with keen enjoyment.

  Sharpe reversed the pincers. The jaws, somewhat battered and rusted, were saw-toothed for better purchase. It was a handy instrument for burglary and doubtless ideal for the procurement of false teeth from mangled corpses, but whether it was truly suitable for a surgical operation Sharpe could not yet say. ‘It can’t be worse than having a baby,’ he said to Harper. ‘And Isabella didn’t make this fuss.’

  ‘Women don’t mind pain,’ the Irishman said. ‘I do.’

  ‘Don’t grip the fang too hard,’ Frederickson observed helpfully, ‘or you might smash it, sir. It’s the devil of a job to fetch out the remnants of a broken tooth. I saw it happen to Jock Callaway before Salamanca and it quite spoilt Jock’s battle. You remember Jock, sir?’

  ‘The 6 ist?’ Sharpe asked.

  ‘Died of the fever next winter, poor fellow.’ Frederickson stooped to see what was happening.

  The word ‘fever’ shot through Sharpe’s head like a death-knell, but this was no time for such thoughts. ’Open your mouth, Sergeant.‘

  ‘You’ll be gentle?’ Harper’s voice was sullen and mutinous.

  ‘I will be as gentle as a new-born lamb . Now open your bloody gob.’

  The huge mouth with its yellowed teeth opened. The Irishman’s eyes were wary and a faint groan, half a moan, escaped as Sharpe brought the pincers up.

  Slowly, very slowly, doing his utmost not to jar the offending tooth, Sharpe closed the vicious jaws on that part of the tooth not hidden by the swollen gum-tissue. ‘That’s not too bad, is it?’ he asked soothingly. He gripped the handles tight, but not too tight, and felt a faint tremor run through the huge man. ‘Ready?’