Sharpe's Havoc

by Bernard Cornwell

  And then, quite suddenly, there were no Frenchmen firing on the northern slope. The grass was horrid with dead men and wounded men and with fallen muskets and with little flickering fires where the musket wadding had set light to the grass, but the survivors had fled to the Amarante road in the valley. The single tree looked as though it had been attacked by locusts. A drum trundled down the hill, making a rattling noise. Sharpe saw a French flag through the smoke, but could not see whether the staff was topped by an eagle. “Stop firing!” Hill called.

  “Clean your barrels!” Sharpe shouted. “Check your flints!” For the French would be back. Of that he was certain. They would be back.

  Chapter 9

  More men came to the seminary. A score of Portuguese civilians arrived with hunting guns and bags of ammunition, escorted by a plump priest who was cheered by the redcoats when he arrived in the garden with a bell-mouthed blunderbuss like those carried by stage-coach drivers to repel highwaymen. The Buffs had relit the fires in the kitchens and now fetched great metal cauldrons of tea or hot water to the roof. The tea cleaned out the soldiers’ throats and the hot water swilled out their muskets and rifles. Ten boxes of spare ammunition were also carried up and Harper filled his shako with the cartridges, which were not as fine as those supplied for the rifles, but would do in a pinch. “And this is what you call a pinch, sir, eh?” he asked, distributing the cartridges along the parapet where the rifles and ramrods leaned. The French were thickening in the low ground to the north. If they had any sense, Sharpe thought, the enemy would bring mortars to that low ground, but so far none had appeared. Perhaps all the mortars were to the west of the city, guarding against the Royal Navy, and too far away to be fetched quickly.

  Extra loopholes were battered through the garden’s northern wall. Two of the Northamptonshires had manhandled a great pair of rain butts to the wall and propped the door of the garden shed across the barrels’ tops to make a fire step from which they could shoot over the wall’s coping.

  Harris brought Sharpe a mug of tea, then looked left and right before producing a leg of cold chicken from his cartridge box. “Thought you might like this as well, sir.”

  “Where did you get it?”

  “Found it, sir,” Harris said vaguely, “and I got one for you too, Sarge.” Harris gave a leg to Harper, then produced a breast for himself, brushed some loose powder from it and bit into it hungrily.

  Sharpe discovered he was famished and the chicken tasted delicious. “Where did it come from?” he insisted.

  “I think they were General Paget’s dinner, sir,” Harris confessed, “but he’s probably lost his appetite.”

  “I should think he has,” Sharpe said, “and a pity to let good chicken waste, eh?” He turned as a drumbeat sounded and saw the French were forming their ranks again, but this time only on the northern side of the seminary. “To your places!” he called, chucking the chicken bone far out into the garden. A few of the French were now carrying ladders, presumably plundered from the houses that were being battered by the British guns. “When they come,” he called, “aim for the men with the ladders.” Even without the rifle fire he doubted the French could get close enough to place the ladders against the garden wall, but it did no harm to make certain. Most of his riflemen had used the lull in the fight to load their newly cleaned barrels with leather-wrapped balls and prime powder which meant their first shots ought to be lethally accurate. After that, as the French pressed closer and the noise rose and the smoke thickened, they would use cartridges, leave the leather patches in their butt traps and so sacrifice accuracy for speed. Sharpe now loaded his own rifle, using a patch, but no sooner had he returned the ramrod to its slots than General Hill was beside him.

  “I’ve never fired a rifle,” Hill said.

  “Very like a musket, sir,” Sharpe said, embarrassed at being singled out by a general.

  “May I?” Hill reached for the weapon and Sharpe yielded it. “It’s rather beautiful,” Hill said wistfully, caressing the Baker’s flank, “not nearly as cumbersome as a musket.”

  “It’s a lovely thing,” Sharpe said fervently.

  Hill aimed the gun down the hill, seemed about to cock and fire, then suddenly handed it back to Sharpe. “I’d dearly like to try it,” he said, “but if I missed my aim then the whole army would know about it, eh? And I’d never live that down.” He spoke loudly and Sharpe understood he had been an unwitting participant in a little piece of theater. Hill had not really been interested in the rifle, but rather in taking the men’s minds away from the threat beneath them. In the process he had subtly flattered them by suggesting they could do something he could not, and he had left them grinning. Sharpe thought about what he had just seen. He admired it, but he also admired Sir Arthur Wellesley who would never have resorted to such a display. Sir Arthur would ignore the men and the men, in turn, would fight like demons to gain his grudging approval.

  Sharpe had never wasted much time worrying why some men were born to be officers and others not. He had jumped the gap, but that did not make the system any less unfair. Yet to complain of the world’s unfairness was the same as grumbling that the sun was hot or that the wind sometimes changed its direction. Unfairness existed, it always had and it always would, and the miracle, to Sharpe’s eyes, was that some men like Hill and Wellesley, though they had become wealthy and privileged through unfair advantages, were nevertheless superb at what they did. Not all generals were good, many were downright bad, but Sharpe had usually been lucky and found himself commanded by men who knew their business. Sharpe did not care that Sir Arthur Wellesley was the son of an aristocrat and had purchased his way up the ladder of promotion and was as cold as a lawyer’s sense of charity. The long-nosed bugger knew how to win and that was what mattered.

  And what mattered now was to beat these Frenchmen. The column, much larger than the first, was surging forward, driven by the drumsticks. The Frenchmen cheered, perhaps to give themselves confidence, and they must have been encouraged by the fact that the British guns on the river’s far side could not see them. But then, provoking a British cheer, a spherical case shot fired by a howitzer exploded just ahead of the column’s center. The British gunners were firing blind, arching their shots over the seminary, but they were firing well and their first shot killed the French cheering dead.

  “Rifles only!” Sharpe called. “Fire when you’re ready. Don’t waste the patch! Hagman? Go for that big man with the saber.”

  “I see him, sir,” Hagman said and shifted his rifle to aim at the officer who was striding ahead, setting an example, asking to be rifle meat.

  “Look for the ladders,” Sharpe reminded the others, then walked to the parapet, put his left foot on the coping and the rifle to his shoulder. He aimed at a man with a ladder, sighting on the man’s head in the expectation that the bullet would fall to take him in the lower belly or groin. The wind was in Sharpe’s face so would not drift the shot. He fired and was immediately blinded by the smoke. Hagman fired next, then there was the crackle of the other rifles. The muskets kept silent. Sharpe went to his left to see past the smoke and saw that the saber-carrying officer had vanished, as had any other man struck by a bullet. They had been swallowed by the advancing column that stepped over and past the victims, then Sharpe saw a ladder reappear as it was snatched up by a man in the fourth or fifth rank. He felt in his cartridge box for another round and began to reload.

  He did not look at the rifle as he reloaded. He just did what he had been trained to do, what he could do in his sleep, and just as he primed the rifle so the first musket balls were shot from the garden wall, then the muskets opened fire from the windows and roof, and the seminary was again wreathed in smoke and noise. The cannon shots rumbled above, so close that Sharpe almost ducked once, and the case shot banged above the slope. Bullets and musket balls ripped into the French files. Close to a thousand men were in the seminary now and they were protected by stone walls and given a wide open target. Sharpe fired ano
ther shot down the hill, then walked up and down behind his men, watching. Slattery needed a new flint and Sharpe gave him one, then Tarrant’s mainspring broke and Sharpe replaced the weapon with Williamson’s old rifle which Harper had been carrying ever since they left Vila Real de Zedes. The enemy’s drums sounded nearer and Sharpe reloaded his own rifle as the first French musket bullets rattled against the seminary’s stones. “They’re firing blind,” Sharpe told his men, “firing blind! Don’t waste your shots. Look for targets.” That was difficult because of the smoke hanging over the slope, but vagaries of wind sometimes stirred the fog to reveal blue uniforms and the French were close enough for Sharpe to see faces. He aimed at a man with an enormous mustache, fired and lost sight of the man as the smoke blossomed from his rifle’s muzzle.

  The noise of the fight was awesome. Muskets crackling incessantly, the drumbeats thumping, the case shots banging overhead, and beneath all that violence was the sound of men crying in distress. A redcoat slumped down near Harper, blood puddling by his head until a sergeant dragged the man away from the parapet, leaving a smear of bright red on the roofs lead. Far off-it had to be on the river’s southern bank-a band was playing “The Drum Major” and Sharpe tapped his rifle’s butt in time to the tune. A French ramrod came whirling through the air to clatter against the seminary wall, evidently fired by a conscript who had panicked and pulled his trigger before he cleared his barrel. Sharpe remembered how, in Flanders, at his very first battle as a red-coated private, a man’s musket had misfired, but he had gone on reloading, pulling the trigger, reloading, and when they drilled out his musket after the battle they found sixteen useless charges crammed down the barrel. What was the man’s name? He had been from Norfolk, despite being in a Yorkshire regiment, and he had called everyone “bor.” Sharpe could not remember the name and it annoyed him. A musket ball whipped past his face, another hit the parapet and shattered a tile. Down in the garden Vicente’s men and the redcoats were not aiming their muskets, but just pushing the muzzles into the loopholes, pulling the triggers, and getting out of the way so the next man could use the embrasure. There were some green-jackets in the garden now and Sharpe guessed a company of the 60th, the Royal American Rifles, must be attached to Hill’s brigade and was now joining the fight. They would do better, he thought, to climb to the roof than try to fire their Bakers through the loopholes. The single tree on the northern slope was thrashing as though in a gale and there was scarcely one leaf left on its splintered branches. Smoke drifted through the winter-bare twigs that twitched continually from the bullet strikes.

  Sharpe primed his rifle, put it to his shoulder, looked for a target, saw a knot of blue uniforms very close to the garden wall and put the bullet into them. The air hissed with bullets. God damn it, but why didn’t the bastards pull back? A brave group of Frenchmen tried to run down the seminary’s western face to reach the big gate, but the British guns at the convent saw them and the shells cracked black and red, smearing blood across the paved terrace and up the garden wall’s whitewashed stones. Sharpe saw his men grimacing as they tried to force the new bullets down the powder-fouled barrels. There was no time to clean the rifles, they just hammered the bullets down and pulled the trigger. Fire and fire again, and the French were doing the same, a mad duel of bullets, and above the smoke, across the northern valley, Sharpe saw a horde of new French infantry streaming out of the city.

  Two men in shirtsleeves were carrying boxes of ammunition round the roof. “Who needs it?” they shouted, sounding like London street traders. “Fresh lead! Who needs it? Fresh lead! New powder!” One of General Hill’s aides was carrying canteens of water to the parapet while Hill himself, red-faced and anxious, stood close to the redcoats so he was seen to share their danger. He caught Sharpe’s gaze and offered a grimace as if to suggest that this was harder work than he had anticipated.

  More troops came to the roof, men with fresh muskets and full cartridge boxes, and with them were the riflemen of the 60th whose officer must have realized he had been in the wrong place. He gave Sharpe a companionable nod, then ordered his men to the parapet. Flames jetted down, smoke thickened, and still the French tried to blast their way through stone walls with nothing but musket fire. Two Frenchmen succeeded in scaling the garden wall, but hesitated at the top and were seized and dragged across the coping to be battered to death by musket butts on the path beneath. Seven dead redcoats were laid out on another gravel path, their hands curling in death and the blood of their wounds slowly hardening and turning black, but most of the British dead were in the seminary’s corridors, dragged away from the big windows that made the best targets for the frustrated French.

  A whole new column was now climbing the slope, coming to swell the shattered ranks of the first, but though the beleaguered men in the seminary could not know it, these newcomers were the symptom of French defeat. Marshal Soult, desperate for fresh troops to attack the seminary, had stripped the city itself of infantry, and the people of Oporto, finding themselves unguarded for the first time since the end of March, swarmed down to the river and dragged their boats out of warehouses, shops and back-yards where the occupiers had kept them under guard. A swarm of those small craft now rowed across the river, past the shattered remnants of the pontoon bridge, to the quays of Vila Nova de Gaia where the Brigade of Guards was waiting. An officer peered anxiously across the Douro to reassure himself that the French were not waiting in ambush on the opposite quay, then shouted at his men to embark. The Guards were rowed back to the city and still more boats appeared and more redcoats crossed. Soult did not know it, but his city was filling with the enemy.

  Nor did the men attacking the seminary know it, not till the redcoats appeared at the city’s eastern edge, and by then the second giant column had climbed into the death storm of bullets flicking from the seminary’s walls, roof and windows. The noise rivaled that of Trafalgar, where Sharpe had been dazed by the incessant boom of the great ships’ guns, but this noise was higher pitched as the muskets’ discharges blended into an eerie, hard-edged shriek. The higher slope of the seminary hill was sodden with blood and the surviving Frenchmen were using the bodies of their dead comrades as protection. A few drummers still tried to drive the broken columns on, but then came a shout of alarm from a French sergeant, and the shout spread, and suddenly the smoke was dissipating and the slope emptying as the French saw the Brigade of Guards advancing across the valley.

  The French ran. They had fought bravely, going against stone walls with muskets, but now they panicked and all discipline vanished as they ran for the road going east toward Amarante. Other French forces, cavalry and artillery among them, were hurrying from the higher part of the city, escaping the flood of redcoats ferried across the Douro and fleeing the revenge of the townsfolk who hunted up the alleys and streets to find wounded Frenchmen whom they attacked with fish-filleting knives or battered with clubs.

  There was screaming and howling in Oporto’s streets, but only a strange silence in the bullet-scarred seminary. Then General Hill cupped his hands. “Follow them!” he shouted. “Follow them! I want a pursuit!”

  “Rifles! To me!” Sharpe called. He held his men back from the pursuit. They had already endured enough, he reckoned, and it was time to give them a rest. “Clean your guns,” he ordered them, and so they stayed as the redcoats and riflemen of the 1st Brigade formed ranks outside the seminary and then marched away eastward.

  A score of dead men were left on the roof. There were long streaks of blood showing where they had been pulled away from the parapet. The smoke about the building slowly cleared until the air felt clean again. The slopes beneath the seminary were strewn with discarded French packs and French bodies, not all of them dead. A wounded man crawled away between the blood-spattered blossoms of ragweed. A dog sniffed at a corpse. Ravens came on black wings to taste the dead, and women and children hurried from the houses in the valley to begin the plunder. A wounded man tried to twitch away from a girl who could not have been
more than eleven and she drew a butchering knife from her apron belt, a knife that had been sharpened so often that its blade was little more than a whisper of thin steel attached to a bone handle, and she sliced it across the Frenchman’s throat, then grimaced because his blood had splashed onto her lap. Her little sister was dragging six muskets by their slings. The small fires started by wadding smoked between the corpses where the plump Portuguese priest, the blunderbuss still in one hand, made the sign of the cross over the Frenchmen he had helped to kill.

  While the living French, in panicked disarray, ran.

  And the city of Oporto had been recaptured.

  The letter, addressed to Richard Sharpe, Esq, was waiting on the mantel of the parlor in the House Beautiful and it was a miracle it had survived because that afternoon a score of Royal Artillery gunners made the house into their billet and the first thing they did was to break up the parlor’s furniture to make a fire and the letter was an ideal piece of kindling, but then Captain Hogan arrived just before the fire was lit and managed to retrieve the paper. He had come looking for Sharpe and had asked the gunners if any messages had been left in the house, thinking Sharpe might have left one. “English folk live here, lads,” he told the gunners as he opened the unsealed letter, “so wipe your feet and clean up behind yourselves.” He read the brief message, and thought for a while. “I suppose none of you have seen a tall Rifle officer from the 95th? No? Well, if he shows up, tell him to go to the Palacio das Carrancas.”