Redcoat

by Bernard Cornwell

  BERNARD CORNWELL

  Redcoat

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  REDCOAT

  Before becoming a full-time writer Bernard Cornwell worked as a television producer in London and Belfast. He now lives in Massachusetts with his American wife. He is the author of the hugely successful Sharpe series of historical novels.

  Penguin publish his bestselling contemporary thrillers Sea Lord, Wildtrack, Crackdown, Stormchild and Scoundrel, and also his myth-imbued Arthurian romance, The Warlord Chronicles, which consists of The Winter King, Enemy of God and Excalibur.

  For more information about Bernard Cornwell’s books, please visit his official website: www.bernardcornwell.net.

  Redcoat was conceived

  and nurtured by

  IRVIN KERSHNER,

  a Patriot, to whom the book

  is now gratefully dedicated

  “Let us now, if you please, take a view of the other side of the question. Suppose we were to revolt from Great Britain, declare ourselves independent, and set up a Republic of our own – what would be the consequence? I stand aghast at the prospect – my blood runs chill when I think of the calamities, the complicated evils, that must ensue.”

  Revd Charles Inglis, Philadelphia, 1776

  Contents

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Part Two

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Part Three

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  PART ONE

  One

  The Bloodybacks stole through warm darkness to the killing.

  A hidden moon silvered chasms of cloud and offered a wan glow which silhouetted the jagged spikes of pine tops on the western horizon. The eastern sky was unclouded; a pit of blackness studded with the clean brightness of stars. The paths beneath the trees were dark, utter dark, a blackness in which long files of men cursed softly.

  The sun would rise to bring the steamy, breath-stealing heat of the full day; yet even now, in the night’s small hours, there was a close, stifling warmth that made the men sweat beneath their thick woollen coats. Red coats. The men were soldiers; six companies of Redcoats who followed their leaders through a wooded defile towards a tavern, a crossroads, and the enemy.

  A stream made its homely sound to the south, the wind rattled pine branches, while the night hordes of insects drowned whatever noise the nailed boots made on the dry and fallen needles. A whispered order was passed down the files of men. They stopped and crouched.

  Private Sam Gilpin’s hands were slick with sweat. His body prickled with the heat. A horse whinnied.

  It had to be an enemy’s horse, for the Redcoats had come on foot. Even the General was on foot. The sound told Sam that the enemy must be close, very close, and, despite the cloying warmth, he shivered suddenly.

  His musket would not fire. None of the soldiers’ muskets would fire, for they had been ordered to unscrew the dog-heads and take out their flints. A musket without a flint could not spark the powder, so it could not fire a bullet, but nor could a careless man stumble in the dark and fire a shot which would warn the enemy.

  The Redcoats had come in the warm darkness, in silence, and the enemy was close.

  “Follow!” Again the order was a whisper. Sam’s company was led off the path into the blackness beneath the trees. Each man tried to walk silently, yet twigs snapped, dry pineneedles crunched together, and once a brass-bound musket butt crashed loud against a pine trunk.

  The sound made the men freeze, but no warning shout came from the enemy lines. Sam wondered if the enemy was waiting, awake and ready. Were their muskets loaded, flints drawn back, cocked to blast flames and smoke and death into the trees? His heart pounded heavy with the fear of a soldier before the killing. Sweat stung his eyes. It was hard to breathe the resinous air. The file moved again and Sam saw the smear of a red glow to his left and he knew it marked the enemy encampment.

  “Down!”

  Sam stopped, crouched. The redness was the remnant of a camp fire. There were other dying fires visible through the trees. The glowing embers revealed the shapes of dark buildings. Again a horse whinnied, but Sam could see no movement around the fires.

  “Bayonets! Bayonets!” The order was a hoarse whisper.

  Sam rugged his bayonet free of its scabbard. He had sharpened the blade to a wicked point in the dusk; now he slotted it over his musket’s muzzle and twisted it into place. The grease that kept the bayonet free of rust was sticky on his palm. All around him he could hear the scrape and click of blades being fixed and it seemed impossible for the enemy not to hear, but still there was no shout or musket flash. Sam took a leather lace from his ammunition pouch. He tied one end around the blade’s shoulder, and the other he lashed to the musket’s sling-swivel. Now no enemy could seize and wrench the blade away, nor, twisting the bayonet free of dead flesh, would he lose the weapon to a corpse.

  There was fear in Sam, but also exhilaration. He feared letting his comrades down, he feared Captain Kelly’s disappointment or Sergeant Scammell’s scorn, he feared his own fear, yet he also had the fire of a young man’s pride inside him. They were the red-coated Bloodybacks, the kings of the castle, cocks of the dungheap, and soldiers of the King, and in a moment they would be unleashed like rough-pelted hounds to tear and savage the King’s enemies.

  Footsteps sounded to his right and Sam saw the tall dark shape of Sergeant Scammell pacing along the company’s front. “You’re not here to fucking dance with the buggers, you’re here to kill the fuckers. You hear me?” Scammell’s voice was a mere whisper, but still fearsome. Few men in the company liked Scammell, but even those who hated him were glad of his presence this night, for, in the confusion of battle, the Sergeant displayed a chilling efficiency. The embers of the enemy’s camp fires reflected dull red on the steel of Scammell’s seventeen-inch bayonet.

  Sam fingered his own greased blade. It was a three-sided bayonet, channelled to release blood so that the blade would not stick in flesh. It was not a weapon for cutting, but for stabbing. “Go for their bellies or throats,” Scammell was whispering. “Don’t tickle the bastards, kill them!”

  Captain Kelly and Ensign Trumbull had their sabres drawn. The two officers stood at the edge of the trees, staring at the enemy. Kelly was tall, quiet, and liked by the men. Trumbull was thirteen, a schoolboy given an officer’s coat, and despised. Sam saw the small twitching of the Ensign’s sabre blade and knew the boy was nervous.

  Sam’s tw
in brother was also nervous. “You’ll stay close, Sam?” Nate asked.

  “I’ll stay close,” Sam offered the reassurance, just as he always offered reassurance to Nate. On nights like this, back home in England, the brothers would sometimes crouch in the Squire’s coverts where, while Sam eagerly anticipated the sport, Nate would inevitably fret about mantraps and gamekeepers. Sam had always led, and Nate followed, but this night their prey was more deadly than the Squire’s deer.

  Sam watched the enemy’s dying fires. Perhaps in England the hearth of his parents’ cottage was similarly fading as it waited for morning’s rousing. Captain Kelly had told Sam that the sun rose earlier in England than it did here, but Sam did not understand the concept, and so he imagined that it was at this very moment that his mother’s cockerels would be ruffling themselves to wake the world and his father’s dogs would be twitching in their sleep beside the kitchen fire. Then he wondered what the village girls would think of Sam Gilpin if they could see him now, face dirty, gun in hand, waiting for the order to attack the King’s enemies. That thought stilled his nervousness and made him smile.

  “I wish they’d start,” Nate muttered beside him.

  The night sky’s edge was touched with a hint of grey to pale the brightness of the eastern stars. It was the false dawn. The land was still black. The enemy horse whinnied again and Sam heard its hooves trampling hard ground, and he wondered if, around the dying fires, he could see the humped shapes of men asleep. The inevitable fears, bred of waiting, began to make him edgy. Had they no sentries? The enemy should have picquets on the forest edge. Perhaps they were waiting. Perhaps they had cannons in the darkness by the houses and, in an instant, the great muzzles would explode flame and scraps of shot to tear men’s bellies to bloody shreds.

  Sam licked dry lips and flirted with the fear of what was about to erupt in the night. Captain Kelly, before they marched, had said this was the enemy’s rearguard, left to harass the British advance, and the Redcoats plotted to destroy the rearguard, not with fire and bullet but with the seventeen-inch blades. Sam feared that, instead, they would march like sheep to the slaughteryard.

  “Go, go, go!” The order, when it came, was soft. Somehow Sam had expected the blare of trumpets, the unfurling of great silk colours, the panoply of pride to drive a soldier on to death.

  “Move!” Scammell was hissing at the men. The officers were out of the trees now, walking in the small moonlight that seeped between the rifted clouds. Sam followed. To his left, beyond the track, he could see the lines of soldiers coming like ghosts from the trees. The Redcoats appeared black in the darkness, but the pale breeches and white crossbelts seemed bright, though not as bright as the long blades that glinted in the night.

  The ground was rough grassland; tussocky and uneven. The men advanced in three ranks which were made ragged by the dark and by their eagerness to close on the sleeping enemy. Except they might not be sleeping. Sam, in the leading rank, watched for the dim glow of a linstock that could touch fire to a cannon’s charged barrel.

  A dog caught the scent of unwashed strangers on the small wind and barked. One of the humped shapes by a fire stirred and sat up. The steel-tipped lines advanced, their boots noisy in the grass, their breathing hoarse.

  The dog’s barking became frantic. It woke another dog that bayed at the moon, and the sound stung the advancing officers to throw stealth to the wind. “Charge! Charge!” The second word was drawn out like a banshee’s howl of death.

  And the men, unleashed, cheered. Their nerves, made tight by apprehension, threw them on. Sam’s fear disappeared to be replaced by the elation of danger. No enemy cannon crashed fire and death. No muskets blazed from the dark. The enemy sentries slept, and the Redcoats had achieved surprise.

  The first of the enemy died in their sleep.

  Others woke to see the bright surprise of blades above them. The bayonets stabbed down. Sam, coming to the first fire, aimed at the white of a sleeping man’s throat. He thrust down, and the blade went clean through the soft tissue to impale the earth beneath. Blood splashed Sam and turned the white skin of his enemy’s face black. More blood, fountaining from a slit artery, hissed in the dying fire.

  Redcoats were going past Sam now, blades thrusting down. The enemy were scrambling out of their blankets, but too late. They died with blades in their bellies, in their ribs, in their necks. The British were surging on through the waking encampment, and their sound was a surly growl of effort punctured by the butcher’s chop of steel in flesh.

  Sam twisted his blade free of the soil. His victim’s body flopped up as Sam tried to drag the bayonet out of the torn neck and he had to stamp on the dying man’s chest to rip the steel free.

  Sam was in the rear now and, his spirit soaring with the joy of battle, he ran to the skirmish’s front, careless of where his brother might be. He saw two of the enemy running to a stand of muskets and he caught one, tripped him, kicked the man in the jaw, then stabbed the second in the small of the back. The enemy screamed, arched, and tried to grip the blade that was twisting in his kidneys. The man’s open mouth bayed at the dying stars, then he fell, dying, screaming, but his screams were drowned by the other screams and by the triumphant shouts of the Redcoats.

  Sergeant Scammell was not shouting, just killing with his usual efficiency. Captain Kelly’s sword was reddened to the hilt. Ensign Trumbull was screaming like an excited girl, whirling his sabre, shouting orders that no one noticed.

  Muskets sparked to Sam’s left.

  “Incline left!” Captain Kelly’s voice was strangely calm. “Form! Company will advance at the double! Steady, lads!”

  Perhaps half the company obeyed, the rest were too busy with death.

  “Charge!” Sam saw the huddle of enemy break before the threat of the blades. One man, perhaps an enemy officer since he carried a sword, screamed defiance and made a lone attack upon the Redcoats. His sword cracked against a parrying musket barrel, then Sergeant Scammell’s blade grated on the enemy’s ribs, the man gasped, sobbed, and two more blades thrust him down to ragged ruin. The rest of the enemy ran, disappearing into the forest. Another enemy, white shirt bright in the night, flung himself on an unsaddled horse and galloped away.

  The killing seemed to end as swiftly as it had begun. A moment of triumph and savagery, then the shouts of officers and sergeants brought the killers to discipline. Grinning Redcoats, strangers, were around Sam now. The light companies of six different regiments had marched to this attack, and nearly all had wet bayonets. A Highlander, his belted plaid sopping with blood, killed a wounded man with a short vicious slash of a knife, then crouched to search his victim’s clothing for coins and food.

  Picquets were set, flints were put in folded leather pads and screwed into dog-heads. A handful of prisoners found at the tavern were prodded into the field. The Redcoats forced laughter for the relief of survival.

  Dawn flooded the land with a grey light which showed a field littered with torn corpses. Blood on blood. A dog licked at blood. The prisoners, all in shirts and trousers only, stared in horror at the bloody bodies that lay twisted in the pale grass. One man vomited. Another wept. Others faced their captivity with bitter, proud faces.

  The clearing about the tavern buzzed with flies coming to the killing ground. One of the enemy, killed as he ran, had fallen into a dying fire. His hair and scalp had burned away to his blackened skull. A Redcoat was pulling off the man’s good linen breeches.

  Nate found Sam. Nate’s bayonet was unblemished. “Like pigsticking,” he said in a kind of wonderment.

  Sam was resharpening the tip of his blade with a stone. He saw his brother’s unused bayonet. “I’m surprised you didn’t run with the buggers.”

  “Not on my own, I wouldn’t.” Nate crouched by Sam and surreptitiously pulled his bayonet through a sticky patch of bloodied mud to make it look as though he had fought as hard as his comrades. He watched for Sergeant Scammell as he made the deception, but Nate’s persecutor was far
off. “But I am going to run,” Nate said obstinately.

  Sam nodded towards the dead. “You’ll end up like them.”

  “We’ll all end up like them,” Nate said, staring at his sticky bayonet, “unless we run.”

  The heat was rising to the thick hateful swelter of daytime. The corpses would stink if they were not buried soon, but first they must be plundered. The enemy dead were stripped of clothes, searched for coins, and their teeth were wrenched out to be sold to the men who made false-teeth for the wealthy. Other Redcoats sat and broke apart the dry bread and thick hanks of salted beef that were breakfast.

  Ensign Trumbull came from the tavern with a trophy. It was an enemy flag; one of the new standards that had appeared on the battlefields this summer. Trumbull swung the flag around his head in triumph. Nate watched the epauletted boy. “Pisser,” he said savagely.

  “You’ll be a pisser if you run,” Sam spoke with harsh affection to his twin brother. “They’ll catch you. If you’re lucky they’ll flog you.” Sam pointed his cleaned and sharpened bayonet towards Nate. “But they’ll probably kill you.”

  “They won’t catch me.”

  Sam drained the last of the tepid brackish water from his canteen. He tried to count the dead, but gave up at a hundred. No Redcoats had died. The flies buzzed. The first staff officers were arriving on horseback to see the night’s carnage that had turned the field around the tavern into a shambles. The laughter of the newcomers was loud.