Sharpe 3-Book Collection 5: Sharpe's Company, Sharpe's Sword, Sharpe's Enemy

by Bernard Cornwell

  Colquhoun Grant, the Exploring Officer, also was a real character who was captured shortly before the Battle of Salamanca. He escaped from his captors in France and spent some astonishing weeks at liberty in the streets and salons of Paris. He continued to wear full British uniform and if he was challenged he claimed that it was the uniform of the American army. His story, more incredible than fiction, can be found in Jock Haswell’s ‘The First Respectable Spy’ (Hamish Hamilton, 1969).

  The French did use codes and Captain Scovell, mentioned in Chapter 4, was the man who broke the enemy codes. Any reader who would like to see how the codes worked can find all the details in Appendix XV of Volume V of Oman’s ‘A History of the Peninsular War’. For the details of the espionage background to Sharpe’s Sword I owe a debt to Jock Haswell’s book and, for that and much more besides, to Oman’s vast and brilliant history.

  Salamanca is still one of the most beautiful cities of the world. The Plaza is virtually unchanged since the Sixth Division paraded there on June 29th, 1812 (although the bullfights have been moved to a modern arena). The Plaza is, simply, magnificent. The area where the French created a wasteland around their three fortresses has been rebuilt, alas uglily, but enough of the old city remains and it well repays a visit. The Roman Bridge is now reserved for pedestrians only. The crenellations and the small fortress were removed in the middle of the nineteenth century, restoring the bridge to its original appearance, though the stone bull is still there above the eleventh arch. It marks the place where the bridge was broken in the floods of 1626. Only the fifteen arches nearest the city are Roman, the other eleven are reconstructions from the seventeenth century. The Irish College is unchanged from the days when it was the army’s hospital in 1812.

  The battlefield is a particularly pleasing site to visit, for the ground has scarcely changed since July 22nd, 1812. Some trees have gone in the years since and a railway line now runs between the Greater and Lesser Arapile and on into the small valley where the Sixth Division halted Clausel’s counter-attack. There are a handful of modern houses south of Arapiles, but not enough to spoil the ground. To find the battlefield take the road south from the city, the N63O to Caceres, and the village of Arapiles is signposted to the left. The side-road to the village roughly marks the left hand limit of the Third Division’s advance and the Heavy Cavalry must have charged just about where the village is signposted on the main road. It is well worth taking a good account of the battle, with good maps. I have simplified the story of the battle a little, concentrating on the events around the Arapiles, and anyone interested enough to visit the site would be well rewarded by reading one of the many splendid accounts that are available as non-fiction. Once at the Arapiles the ground becomes obvious, thanks to the hills, and there is a memorial obelisk, now sadly weathered, on the crest of the Greater Arapile. Climbing to the memorial makes one wonder at the Portuguese troops who had to make the same climb, in full kit, against a defended skyline. They truly had a hopeless task.

  I spent more than a week walking the battlefield and, as ever, received much help from the local people.

  Salamanca was a great victory. Wellington suffered close to five thousand casualties (of whom about one thousand were killed outright on the field and no one knows how many dying later of their wounds). Marmont, fearful of Napoleon’s wrath, tried to hide his casualties. He told the Emperor he had lost about six thousand men. In fact he lost fourteen thousand, one Eagle standard, six other standards, and twenty guns. It was a shattering defeat that told the world that a French army could be utterly beaten. It cleared the French from western Spain, and the defeat would have been even more crushing had the Spanish garrison at Alba de Tormes obeyed orders and stayed at their guns. Their defection from the war allowed Marmont’s remaining 34,000 soldiers to escape and it led, also, to the strange and ‘impossible’ victory at Garcia Hernandez. The Germans lost 127 men in the charge. The French, including a whole Battalion taken prisoner, lost about 1,100 from 2,400. The first square broke in much the same way as the description in the novel.

  To find Garcia Hernandez, follow the road to Alba de Tormes from Salamanca. It is well signposted because Alba de Tormes (thanks to St. Teresa of Avila) is still a busy place of pilgrimage. Go through the town and follow the signs to Penaranda, and the village is some seven kilometres beyond Alba de Tormes. Today it calls itself’Garcihernandez‘ and the road by-passes it, but turn left into the village, cross the only bridge that leads over a small stream, and the track (suitable for cars) leads into the lee of the hill where the

  King’s German Legion made their magnificent, extraordinary charge.

  I owe a great debt to Thomas Logio, physician and friend, who supplied me with a ‘suitable’ wound for Richard Sharpe. He saved me from my own medical ignorance, though I fear I may have embellished the information to his embarrassment. For that, I beg his forgiveness. Whatever is accurate about Sharpe’s injury, treatment and recovery belongs to Dr. Logio.

  The rest is all fiction. No Leroux, no Lord Spears, no codename ‘El Mirador’, not even, alas, a Marquesa de Casares el Grande y Melida Sadaba. Sharpe and Harper are just shades of the real men who marched and marched and finally fought on that burning July day in the valley by the Arapiles. It was a great victory and they must have been relieved, the survivors, and perhaps a little apprehensive for they knew, surely, that the war that in 1812 was spreading around the world would need many more such ‘great’ victories if it was ever to end. Sharpe and Harper will march again.

  BERNARD CORNWELL

  Sharpe’s Enemy

  Richard Sharpe and

  the Defense of Portugal,

  Christmas 1812

  For my daughter, with love

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  EPILOGUE

  HISTORICAL NOTE

  ‘... this system is yet in its infancy

  ... much has been accomplished in a short time and there

  is every reason to believe that the accuracy of the

  Rocket may be actually brought upon a par with that of

  other artillery ammunition for all the important pur

  poses of field service.’

  COLONEL SIR WILLIAM CONGREVE..1814.

  THE GATEWAY OF GOD

  PROLOGUE

  On December 8th, 1812, the English soldiers first came to Adrados.

  The village had escaped the war. It lay in that part of Spain east of the northern Portuguese border and, though it was close to the frontier, few soldiers had passed through its single street.

  The French had come once, three years before, but they had been running from the English Lord Wellington and running so fast that they scarcely had time to stop and loot.

  Then in May of 1812 the Spanish soldiers had come, the Garrison of Adrados, but the villagers had not minded. There were only fifty soldiers, with four cannon, and once the guns had been placed in the old Castle and Watchtower outside the village the soldiers seemed to think their war was done. They drank in the village inn, flirted with the women at the stream where the flat stones made laundry easy, and two village girls married gunners in the summer. By some confusion in
the Spanish Army the ‘garrison’ had been sent a powder convoy intended for Ciudad Rodrigo and the soldiers boasted that they had more powder, and fewer guns, than any other Artillery troop in Europe. They made crude fireworks for the weddings and the villagers admired the explosions that flashed and echoed in.their remote valley. In the autumn some of the Spanish soldiers deserted, bored with guarding the valley where no soldiers came, eager to go back to their own villages and their own women.

  Then the English soldiers came. And on that day of all days!

  Adrados was not a place of great importance. It grew, the priest said, sheep and thorns, and the priest told the villagers that made the village a holy place because Christ’s life began with the shepherds’ visit and ended with a crown of thorns. Yet the villagers did not need the priest to tell them that Adrados was sacred because only one thing brought visitors to Adrados, and that was on the Feast on December 8th.

  Years before, no one knew how many, not even the priest, but in those far-off days when the Christians fought the Muslims in Spain, the Holy Mother had come to Adrados. Everyone knew the story. Christian Knights were falling back through the valley, hard pressed, and their leader had stopped to pray beside a granite boulder that was poised on the edge of the pass which fell off to the west, towards Portugal, and then it had happened. She had appeared! She stood on the granite boulder, Her face pale as ice, Her eyes like mountain pools, and She told the Knight that the pursuing Muslims would soon stop to pray themselves, to face east towards their heathen home, and that if he turned his tired troop about, if they drew their battered swords, then they would bring glory to the cross.

  Two thousand Muslim heads dropped that day. More! No one knew how many and each year the figure grew with the story’s telling. Carved Muslim heads decorated the archway of the Convent that was built around the place where She had appeared. In the Convent chapel, at the top of the altar steps, was a small patch of polished granite; the place of the Holy Footfall.

  And each year on December 8th, the Day of the Miracle, women came to Adrados. It was a woman’s day, not a man‘s, and the men would go to the village inn once they had carried the statue of the Virgin, its jewels swaying beneath the gilded canopy, round the village bounds and back to the Convent.

  The Nuns had left the Convent two hundred years before, attracted to plumper houses in the plains, unable to compete with the towns where the Holy Mother had been more generous in her appearance, yet the buildings were still good. The chapel became the village church, the upper cloister was a store-place, and one day a year the Convent was still a place for miracles.

  The women entered the chapel on their knees. They shuffled awkwardly across the flagstones, their hands busy with beads, their voices muttering urgent prayers, and their knees would take them to the top of the steps. The priest intoned his Latin. The women bent and kissed the smooth dark granite. There was a hole in the stone and legend said that if you kissed in that place and the tip of your tongue could reach the very bottom of the hole, then the baby would be a boy.

  The women cried as they kissed the stone; not with sorrow, but with a kind of ecstasy. Some had to be helped away.

  Some prayed for deliverance from illness. They brought their tumours, their disfigurements, their crippled children. Some came to pray for a child and a year later they would return and give thanks to the Holy Mother for now they shared Her secret. They prayed to the Virgin who had given birth and they knew, as no man could know, that a woman brought forth her children in sorrow, yet still they prayed to be mothers and their tongues stretched down the hole. They prayed in the candled glory of the Convent Chapel of Adrados and the priest piled their gifts behind the altar; the harvest of each year.

  December 8th, 1812. The English came.

  They were not the first visitors. Women had been arriving in the village since dawn, women who had walked twenty miles or more. Some came from Portugal, most from the villages that were hidden in the same hills as Adrados. Then two English officers came, mounted on big horses, and with them was a girl. The officers had loud braying voices. They helped the girl from her horse outside the Convent then rode to the village where they paid their respects to the Spanish Commandant over cups of the region’s harsh red wine that was served in the inn. The men in the inn were good humoured. They knew that many of the women were praying for a child and they would be called on to help the Holy Mother in the prayer’s fulfilment.

  The other British soldiers came from the east which was strange because there should have been no British soldiers to the east, but no one remarked on the fact. There was no alarm. The British had not been to Adrados, but the villagers had heard that these heathen soldiers were respectful. Their General had ordered them to stand to attention when the Host was carried through the streets to a deathbed, and to remove their hats, and that was good. Yet these English soldiers were not like the Spanish garrison. These red-coated men were foul looking, villainous, unkempt, their faces full of crudity and hatred.

  A hundred of them waited at the eastern end of the village, sitting by the washing place next to the road and smoking short clay pipes. A hundred other men filed through the village led by a big man on horseback whose red coat was lavishly looped with gold. A Spanish soldier, coming from the castle to the inn, saluted the Colonel and was surprised when the English officer smiled at him, bowed ironically, and his mouth was almost toothless.

  The Spaniard must have said something in the inn for the two British officers, jackets unbuttoned, came into the roadway and watched the last of the soldiers file by towards the Convent. One of the officers frowned. ‘Who the devil are you?’

  The soldier he had spoken to grinned. ‘Smithers, sir.’

  The Captain’s eyes flicked up the line of soldiers. ‘What Battalion?’

  ‘Third, sir.’

  ‘What bloody Regiment, you fool?’

  ‘The Colonel’ll tell you, sir.’ Smithers stepped into the centre of the street, put a hand to his mouth. ‘Colonel!’

  The big man turned his horse, paused, then spurred towards the inn. The two Captains pulled themselves upright and saluted.

  The Colonel reined in. He seemed once to have had the jaundice, perhaps to have served in the Fever Islands, for his skin was yellow like old parchment. The face beneath the tasselled bicorne hat twitched in involuntary spasm. The blue eyes, startlingly blue, were unfriendly. ‘Button your bloody jackets.’

  The Captains put down their wine cups, buttoned their jackets and pulled their belts into place. One, a plump young man, frowned because the Colonel had shouted at them in front of the grinning privates.

  The Colonel let his horse walk two steps closer to the pair of Captains. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Here, sir?’ The taller, thinner Captain smiled. ‘Just visiting, sir.’

  ‘Just visiting, eh?’ The face twitched again. The Colonel had a strangely long neck hidden by a cravat that he pinned high on his throat. ‘Just the two of you?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And Lady Farthingdale, sir,’ added the plump one.

  ‘And Lady Farthingdale, eh?’ The Colonel mimicked the Captain’s plummy voice, then he screamed at them in sudden vehemence. ‘You’re a bloody disgrace, that’s what you are! I hate you! Christ’s belly, I hate you!’

  The street was suddenly silent in the winter sunshine. The soldiers that had gathered either side of the Colonel’s horse grinned at the two Captains.

  The taller Captain wiped the spittle flung from the Colonel’s mouth off his red jacket. ‘I must protest, sir.’

  ‘Protest! You puking horror! Smithers!’

  ‘Colonel?’

  ‘Shoot him!’

  The plump Captain grinned, as if a joke had been made, but the other flung an arm up, flinched, and as Smithers, grinning, levelled and fired his musket so did the Colonel bring out an ornate chased pistol and shoot the plump Captain in the head. The shots echoed in the street, the smoke drifted in two distinct cl
ouds above the fallen bodies, and the Colonel laughed before standing in his stirrups. ‘Now, lads, now!’

  They cleared the inn first, stepping over the corpses whose blood was spattered on the lintel of the door, and the muskets crashed in the building, bayonets hunted the men into corners and killed them, and the Colonel waved the hundred men who had been waiting at the eastern end of the village into the street. He had not wanted to start this quickly, he had wanted to get half his men up to the Convent first, but these bloody Captains had forced his hand and the Colonel screamed at them, urged them on, and led half his force towards the big, square, blank-walled Convent.

  The women in the Convent had not heard the shots fired five hundred yards to the east. The women were crowded in the upper cloister, waiting their turn to shuffle into the chapel on their knees, and the first they knew that the war had at last come in its horror to Adrados was when the red-coated men appeared in the gateway, bayonets levelled, and the screaming began.

  Other men were clearing the village houses, one by one, while yet more streamed across the valley towards the castle. The Spanish garrison had been drinking in the village, only a handful were at their posts, and they assumed that British uniforms belonged to their allies and further assumed that these British soldiers could explain the uproar in the village. The Spaniards watched the redcoats come across the rubble of the castle’s fallen east wall, shouted questions at them, and then the muskets fired, the bayonets came, and the garrison died in the mediaeval ramparts. One Lieutenant killed two of the redcoats. He fought with skill and fury, drove more of the invaders back, and he escaped over the fallen wall and ran through the thorn bushes to the watchtower on its hill to the east. He hoped he would find a handful of his men there, but he died in the thorns, shot by a hidden marksman, and the Spanish Lieutenant never knew that the men who had captured the watchtower were dressed not in British red, but in French blue. His body rolled under a thorn bush, crushing the old brittle bones of a raven left by a fox.