Sharpe's Siege

by Bernard Cornwell

  Men were ordered to the ramparts where they hammered iron spikes into the touch-holes of the huge thirty-six pounder guns. The spikes were sawn through and filed flat so that no pincers could gain sufficient purchase to draw them free. Teams of seamen, using tackles, blocks and ropes from the Cavalier, eased the vast gun barrels from their slides and tipped them, in tumbling crashes, into the channel. The twenty-four pounders, like the six field guns that should have been delivered to Baltimore, were likewise spiked, turned off their carriages, and jettisoned into the flooded ditch. The twelve-pounder carriages were rammed into the burning gate, then Chinese Lights, signalling confections of nitre, sulphur, antimony and orpiment, were tossed among the carriages to encourage the blaze.

  Those Marines who had remained at the Teste de Buch were the first men to leave the slighted fortress. They were rowed to the brig and, on their way, tipped muskets from the fort’s armoury into the corroding seawater. The Comte de Maquerre, after an emotional farewell to the newly woken Favier, went to the Scylla.

  By ten in the morning only a handful of sailors were left ashore. Quickfuses were laid into the fort’s magazines, while another was taken to a stack of powder barrels that had been piled in the kitchens beneath the barracks block. The spare rifle ammunition, left by Sharpe to await his return, was piled on to that stack. Jules Favier, who had taken his horse safely beyond the drawbridge before the destruction began, shook Bampfylde’s hand. ‘God save King George, Captain.’

  ‘God bless King Louis.’

  Favier used a naval ladder to descend the western battlements, then picked his way through the sand to where his horse was tethered. He waved a last time to Captain Bampfylde who, surrounded by his acolytes, walked to his waiting boat. A lieutenant paused, turned at the fuse’s end, and Favier saw the snap of light as flint struck steel.

  There was a pause as fire ate up the worsted quick-match that had been soaked with a liquid solution of mealed powder, spirits of wine, and isinglass. Bampfylde was being rowed through choppy waves towards the Cavalier. Spits of rain pitted the sand while gulls, wheeling effortlessly, rode the strong wind that blew from the hills towards the sea. Favier mounted his horse.

  The quick-match, hissing sparks, darted into an embrasure of the Teste de Buch. The first brig had hoisted its anchor and was already, under sails blown to a flat hardness, beating towards the channel’s mouth. The Scylla, Amelie, and Vengeance, sails reefed, were already hull down.

  Captain Bampfylde climbed the Cavalier’s tumblehome. The brig’s sidesmen twittered their pipes, the anchor was lifted, and Lieutenant Martin ordered sheets hauled tight. He was to take Captain Bampfylde to the Vengeance and it would be a pretty piece of seamanship to transfer the captain in this weather.

  Bampfylde, grinning with anticipation like a raw midshipman, stood at the rail of the Cavalier’s small quarterdeck. ‘It should be a picture, Ford!’

  ‘Indeed it should, sir.’ Ford opened his watch and saw that it was still an hour short of midday, the time when the French brigade should arrive. Now they would come to find a fortress destroyed.

  The two men waited. The rain striking the Cavalier’s vast driver sail made a rapping tattoo that was matched by the quiver of Bampfylde’s excited fingers.

  Lieutenant Ford was nervous. ‘Perhaps, sir, the rain’s ...’

  But even as he spoke the fuse-borne fire bit home.

  A lance of light, white and sharp and straight as a blade, pierced into the low cloud from the very centre of the Teste de Buch. It was followed by smoke; roiling greasy smoke shot through with red flames that spat outwards in sudden, angry dashes.

  Then came the noise; the rolling, grumbling, hammering sound of the powder magazines exploding, and in the noise came another roar as the explosives in the barracks caught the fire and Captain Bampfylde clapped his hands with delight as stones, tiles, and timbers shattered upwards.

  The single flame vanished, to be replaced by a horror of dirty smoke that carried ashes, made sodden by the rain, far out to sea. A few flames flickered bright above the unscathed ramparts, then, dampened by the squalls, disappeared. Bampfylde, pleased with his work, smiled. ‘The French nation is deprived of one fortress, Ford. That is a consolation to us.’

  ‘Indeed, sir.’

  Bampfylde turned. ‘I shall use your cabin, Mr Martin. Pray send me some coffee or, failing that, tea.’

  ‘Aye aye, sir.’

  The brigs turned where the shoals marked the limit of Cap Ferrat and were swallowed in the rising sea and the squalls of rain. The coast was left deserted, its fort empty and shattered, and the squadron was gone.

  Sharpe’s last sight of the bridge over the Leyre was of the powder billowing flame and smoke outwards, of stones from the balustrade making vast splashes in the shallow water, of the toll-keeper’s windows smashing inwards, and of four toppling stone urns. The bridge still stood, but it was weakened and no artilleryman would dare take the weight of guns over that stone roadway until a competent engineer, fond of life, volunteered to stand beneath the blackened arch as the guns trundled overhead.

  The Riflemen and Marines bivouacked after a mere five miles, leaving the river bank to go to an enormous house standing in a vast garden of lawns and lakes. The house remained shut despite all the hammering on its doors and, though Sharpe saw dark figures, silhouetted by candlelight, who folded shutters on the upper floor, no one appeared to inquire who the soldiers were. A carved escutcheon over the main door suggested that the house had been, and maybe still was, the residence of aristocrats.

  There was a barn at the house’s rear that was more than an adequate bivouac. There was straw, kindling for fires, and blessed shelter against the rain that had started to sweep in great gust-borne swathes over the garden.

  Sharpe ate tinned chicken with the cheese Jane had packed for him, and washed both down with wine taken from the ambushed convoy. Frederickson squatted beside him at the end of the barn that had been designated officer’s territory.

  ‘She said,’ Frederickson told Sharpe, ‘that she didn’t mean to scream. She’s called Lucille. She’s rather fetching, don’t you think?’

  ‘She’s not ugly,’ Sharpe allowed. He watched the pale girl who sat shyly with her man at the barn’s far end. ‘But Robinson’s a Marine! Marines can’t take wives on to ships.’

  ‘She says he paid for her. Twenty francs.’ Frederickson sucked a wing-bone clean. ‘That’s a very fair price for a bride in these parts.’

  ‘I paid that!’ Sharpe protested.

  ‘I suppose she’s yours, then,’ Frederickson laughed.

  ‘What’s he going to do? Kiss her goodbye at Arcachon? Does she know he’s a Marine?’

  ‘I told her,’ Frederickson said.

  Sharpe shrugged. Any troops marching through the countryside seemed to end with a tail of women, but it was one thing to be a soldier, rooted on land, and quite another to be a Marine who could offer a wife no home. ‘Can they ship her to England?’ Sharpe asked Palmer.

  ‘No.’ Palmer was cleaning the vent of his pistol. ‘Anyway, Robinson’s already married. Got a wife and two nippers in Portsmouth.’ He blew dust away from the touch-hole.

  ‘I suppose when he’s finished with her,’ Frederickson said, ‘she’d better go to one of my men. We can smuggle her on to the Amelie.’ No one demurred. It was a normal enough solution to a routine problem, and there were always men willing to take on a discarded or widowed woman. Sharpe remembered, after Badajoz, meeting a weeping woman who had just lost her husband in the dreadful slaughter of that fight. She did not weep for the loss, but because she had precipitately accepted another man in marriage and then been asked for the same favour by a sergeant who would have been a much better catch.

  Sharpe slept seven hours, waking to the predawn darkness and the hiss of rain on the wooden roof. Sergeants stirred sleepers awake with boot toe-caps and the first flames flickered to boil water.

  Sharpe went outside and stood against the barn wall where
Frederickson companionably joined him.

  ‘He’s gone,’ Sweet William said.

  Sharpe yawned. ‘Who’s gone?’

  ‘Marine Robinson. He buggered off with his Lucille. Another of Cupid’s walking wounded.’

  ‘Bloody hell.’

  ‘Palmer’s not best pleased.’ Frederickson buttoned his breeches.

  ‘Did the picquets see anything?’

  ‘They say not.’ Frederickson walked with Sharpe to a fire where Sergeant Harper was stewing tea. “Morning, Sergeant! It’s my guess,‘ Frederickson looked back to Sharpe, ’that the picquets were asked to look the other way.‘ The Marines had provided the guard last night.

  ‘Or he gave them a canter on the filly,’ Harper said. ‘I’ve known that a good few times.’

  ‘You should write your memoirs,’ Frederickson said cheerfully. He looked into the wet landscape where Robinson had disappeared. ‘We’ll not see him again.’

  Nor did they. Love had struck, as callous in its target as a musket ball fired at a Battalion, and a man ran for freedom while Sharpe marched his force into the rain-smeared dawn, going to the ships, going to his own woman whom he had married with as little forethought as Marine Robinson had shown in his desertion, and going home.

  At first Sharpe thought a ship must have burned at its moorings, then he thought it a rick-fire, then he assumed Bampfylde must have torched the village. Finally, in the half gale that blew his straggling force along the embanked road of the marshes, he saw that there were no masts in the channel and that the smoke, grey and hazy in the evening light, came from the fortress.

  ‘Jesus wept,’ Frederickson said.

  ‘God save Ireland!’ Patrick Harper stared at the gaping hole that had been the entrance to the fort. ‘Were they captured?’

  ‘Frogs would still be here.’ Sharpe turned to stare at the village, at the trees to the south, but nothing moved in the landscape. A few villagers stood watching them, but nothing more.

  ‘They’ve gone!’ Palmer spoke with horror in his voice.

  It was a nightmare. It took minutes to establish that there truly were no ships, not one, that not a single mast reared above a sand-dune, that no brig lay up channel and no frigate beat the stormy waters off the Cape. They had been abandoned.

  The gate of the fort was a smoking wreckage, tangled with the charred remains of gun carriages. The drawbridge was dangling chains, scorched by fire, and grey-edged, blackened beams that had fallen into a ditch to lay across the twelve-pounder gun barrels that were half sunk in muddy water.

  Two of the Marines splashed over the ditch and one heaved the other up to the stone platform to which the drawbridge had been hinged. The two men disappeared into the fort and came back with the beams that had been intended to be the gallows from which the Americans would hang. The timbers were long enough to bridge the ditch and, by that precarious means and with the horses abandoned to a meadow, Sharpe and his men went into the Teste de Buch. Its granite walls still stood, and the offices were untouched, but precious little else remained.

  There were no guns. There was no powder. The arched doorways to the magazines were blasted black. The barracks were a heap of damp ashes. Frederickson, suspicious that the brass-banded well bucket had been left in place, smelt the water. ‘Fouled.’

  Sharpe went to the highest rampart and stared with his telescope to sea. The ocean was an empty, heaving, grey mass whipped to white flecks by the wind. Empty. The broken, charred damp trail of a burned quick-match showed where the fuse had been laid. He swore uselessly.

  ‘We never saw those Frogs again!’ Harper said.

  ‘Maquereau.’ Sharpe spoke the nickname aloud, recalling his suspicions that the tall aristocrat had been nervous at their last meeting. Not that it mattered now. The bleak truth was, that with less than two hundred men and with no more ammunition than those men carried in their pouches, he was marooned on the French coast a hundred miles from safety. His Riflemen could march that in four days, but could the Marines? And what of the wounded? And if they were caught, Sharpe knew, they would be finished. Even the poorly mounted French cavalry would make short work of a hundred and seventy men.

  Those men slumped in the courtyard, made even more miserable by the buffet of wind and rain. ‘Captain Palmer!’ Sharpe’s voice bellowed through the squall. ‘I want billets found for everyone! Clear out the galleries. Send a squad to cut firewood!’

  He would make them busy. Men could make a new gangway over the ditch, and other men were sent to cut down pines that would barricade the gaping archway. Such forestry would be slow work with bayonets, but better than no work at all. Other men dragged two of the twelve-pounder barrels from the ditch and dropped them into two of the carriages that had merely been scorched rather than burned. The big guns, the ship-killers tipped into the shallow waters at the channel’s edge, were too heavy to tackle.

  ‘Lieutenant Fytch! Search every damned room in the place. Bring every cartridge, ball, or powder barrel to the ready magazine.’

  Some men were set to cooking, others went to the ramparts where they kept watch in the twilight. The wind raged at them, the rain slopped in bucketfuls from stone walls, but fires burned in galleries bored deep inside stone ramparts and ox-meat cooked in iron pots dragged from the wreckage of the kitchens. Frederickson used the limbers to collect barrels from the village that he filled with clean water from the small stream.

  ‘We don’t know what’s happened,’ Sharpe spoke to the officers in Lassan’s old quarters that still had a few books left on the shelves, ‘so it’s no use speculating. Bampfylde’s gone, we’re here.’

  ‘And who is in Bordeaux?’ Frederickson asked slowly.

  ‘God only knows. If it’s Boney’s men then we have to assume they’ll hear of us and come after us. If the city really has declared for Louis then they’ll help us. I want two of your best men, William, to ride that way in the morning. They’re to stay out of trouble, observe, and come back by nightfall with any news. And I want you to question the villagers tomorrow.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Sharpe looked at Palmer. ‘You take your men to all the local villages tomorrow, and to Arcachon. Search every house! Bring every grain of powder and scrap of lead you can find.’

  Palmer nodded. ‘And the Standing Orders about not upsetting the populace?’

  ‘Write them promissory notes. You’d better bring food, too. Everything you can find.’

  Frederickson tossed another newly cut piece of pine on to the fire that spluttered with resin. ‘You think we’ll stay here?’

  ‘We can’t march south, not if the Frogs are after us, and I’d rather be behind walls than in open country. Besides, if the Navy does come back for us then we’d better be where they can find us.’ That seemed the likeliest answer to Sharpe, that this weather had driven the ships offshore and that, as soon as the sea was calmer and the wind more gentle, the great sails would appear again. Yet second thoughts suggested otherwise. Why had Bampfylde slighted the fort? Why had he not left a handful of Marines in place? And why no letter nailed to a door? Those questions indicated to Sharpe that Captain Horace Bampfylde had run. He had abandoned his jejune plans for invading France and scuttled away. The more Sharpe thought about it, the less likely it seemed that the sails of Bampfylde’s flotilla would reappear. ‘And if we do stay here, gentlemen, then we may have to fight for it.’

  Fytch and Minver looked somewhat pale, while Frederickson gave a slow smile, then a chuckle, and finally made the sign of the cross on his faded green jacket. ‘As Patrick Harper would say, God save Ireland.’

  ‘Shouldn’t we have a flag, sir?’ Minver asked.

  ‘A flag?’

  ‘In case a naval ship happens past, sir. Something they can recognize.’

  ‘See to it. Cut a new flagpole tomorrow.’

  There was silence for a few seconds. The fire flared bright, then faded again. Lieutenant Fytch smiled nervously. ‘Perhaps the peace has come?’

&nbs
p; ‘Perhaps the moon will sprout wings and deliver us some artillery,’ Sharpe said, ‘but until someone in British uniform tells me to stop fighting, I’m going to hold this place and you’re going to help me do it.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘So get to work.’

  Outside there was a full gale blowing, shrieking over the water and driving rain in stinging blasts. Sharpe and Frederickson ran to the shelter of one of the small citadels where they settled back to watch the flicker of movements that betrayed sentries. Both officers had work to do, but they had instinctively come to this place to say what could not be said in open council. ‘Would you say,’ Sharpe asked quietly, ‘that we’ve got nine hundred and fifty feet of ramparts here?’

  Frederickson sucked his cheroot into a bright glow. ‘I’d say a few feet more. A thousand?’

  ‘That’s over five feet of wall to every man.’ Sharpe had been working it out and hating the arithmetic. ‘If they come, William, and they attack everywhere at once, they’ll crucify us.’

  ‘The crapauds never attack everywhere at once,’ Frederickson spoke scornfully. Crapauds against the goddamns. That was the soldier’s slang for French against British. The French had always called the British the goddamns and Sharpe, like many men in Wellington’s Army, liked the nickname. There was a reckless touch to it which spoke of French respect for the enemy, a touch entirely lacking in the scornful crapaud or toad. He took Frederickson’s cheroot and sucked smoke deep into his lungs. ‘Remember the Gateway of God?’

  ‘We won that.’ Frederickson took back the proffered cheroot.

  ‘So we did,’ Sharpe said. ‘I wonder what happened to those Americans?’

  ‘Buggered off if they’ve got any sense. Lucky bastards have probably got a whore apiece in Paris.’