There was no skill left, no order, just a bitter mass of men who ripped at each other with blades, kicked and clawed and stabbed again. A Marine sergeant, shouting an incomprehensible challenge, bayoneted one of Sharpe’s assailants and kicked the other in the face. The axeman, choking on blood in his lungs, fell sideways and two Marines grunted as they forced bayonets into his trunk. Somewhere a man sobbed, and another screamed.
Sharpe twisted up and, his sword lost, picked up the wide-bladed axe. The Marine sergeant did not hear Sharpe’s thanks, but just drove on with his bloodied bayonet.
A Frenchman tripped on a gunslide, an opening appeared and Sharpe hacked down with the axe blade, then screamed the challenge to drive the enemy a full two paces back.
An explosion hammered in the courtyard, a sound that echoed like a drumbeat of hell in the echoing walls of the Teste de Buch. Smoke billowed.
Harper had turned the cannon, then fired it with its charge of stone-shards, nails, and lead scraps into the French who came down the stone ramp. The cannon’s recoil had thrown it back five yards. “Now kill them!” Harper charged.
Minver’s Riflemen, on the north wall, fired down at the French who were left in the courtyard. Some of the Riflemen, wanting loot from the dead, jumped down to risk broken ankles. The long sword bayonets, brass-handled, hunted forward.
Sharpe swung the axe underhand, screaming the chal—lenge and the blade buried itself in a body, wrenched free in a gush of blood and he went forward again.
He saw a movement to his left, ducked, and a man jumping from a ladder tripped on Sharpe’s back and sprawled into the Marines. One hit him a hammer blow of a musket butt, killing him as clean as a rabbit chopped on the neck.
Sharpe turned, protected by the embrasure, and saw the French firing from the dunes. Another man neared the ladder’s head and Sharpe swung the axe into his face, heard the scream, then took an upright of the ladder, pushed it away and sideways, and heard the shouts as the ladder tumbled.
“Behind you!” The voice warned him, Sharpe ducked, and a bayonet slid over his back. He drove the axe handle into the Frenchman’s belly then stepped back, reversed the weapon, and brought the head down in a vicious swing to bury it into the man’s ribs. The axe stuck there.
A French musket, tipped with a bayonet, lay at his feet. It felt unnatural, but it served. He jabbed it forward as he had learned so many years ago. Forward, twist, back, right foot forward, lunge, twist, back.
If he shouted orders he did not know it. If he screamed with rage, he did not know it. He just fought to clear a wall of enemy.
There was the strange sensation that he had noticed before in battle, the odd slowing of the world as though the men around him were puppets under palsied fingers. He alone seemed to be moving fast.
A Frenchman, eyes wide with terror, lunged, and it seemed a simple matter to knock the man’s musket aside and drive the bayonet into the man’s belly, to twist, to draw it free then, stamp the foot forward again. Another Frenchman, to the left, fumbled with his musket’s lock and Sharpe, not knowing if his captured musket was loaded, pulled the trigger and felt not the slightest surprise as it fired to rip a bloody hole in the man’s throat.
That made a gap. A French sergeant, wise in war, saw Sharpe and lunged, but Sharpe was faster and his bayonet caught the man’s arm, ripped down to bone, and a Marine, at Sharpe’s shoulder, drove his blade into the sergeant’s groin.
The fort could be lost for all Sharpe knew. He only understood that these bloodslick stones must be fought for and that the Marines were fighting like men possessed, overbearing the enemy with a ferocity and confidence that put terror into the French who had to fight them. And terror was the first and chief weapon of war. It was terror that brought this murderous rage beneath the dragon-slayer’s banner that was wind-lifted above the fight.
A scream, prolonged, rising to a shout that would have chilled the horsemen of the devil, sounded beyond the enemy.
Sharpe knew that sound. “Patrick!”
Harper, the courtyard cleansed of the enemy, climbed the ramp that twitched with the wounded thrown down by the cannon. He led a charge of bayonets to the ramparts and the French, assailed on three sides, began to give.
Frenchmen, come to the ladders’ tops with fear, saw that their fear was justified. They forced their way back down, shouting to the men who waited behind that the enemy was imminent. One ladder, its rungs green, broke to tumble six men on to the sand.
Riflemen, sent by Frederickson on to the western rampart, cleared the water bastion and, leaning in its cannon embrasures, enfiladed the ladders. Captain Palmer led more Marines from the north.
“Charge!” Sharpe yelled it unnecessarily, for the victory was clear. The Marines had fought half the length of a rampart and now they carried their blades the rest of the way and the French, who had seen the redcoats snatch victory from defeat, took to the ladders or jumped into the ditch.
Harper had a lunge of his bayonet-tipped rifle deflected into an enemy’s thigh so kept the rifle swinging so that the brass-bound butt smashed the man’s jaw. He kicked him aside, ripped the blade into another man, and saw the rampart was empty of opponents. Marines were kneeling in embrasures to fire at the French conscripts. Captain Palmer, sword red with blood, was standing by the flagstaff that had somehow stood with its trophy of table-linen and uniform sleeves still flying.
“God save Ireland.” Harper, his huge chest heaving for breath, sat on a gunslide. His face, spattered with blood, looked up at Sharpe. “Jesus God.”
“Close.” Sharpe, breathing like a blown horse, glanced back to the gate, but no trouble threatened there. He looked at the strange musket in his hand and tossed it down. “God.” The French were fleeing north through the dunes. “Hold your fire! Hold your fire!”
A Rifleman threaded the dead bodies, stepping in blood, to bring Sharpe his sword.
“Thank you.” Sharpe took it. He wanted to smile, but his face seemed frozen in the grimace of fighting.
The fort had held. Blood trickled thick in the rampart’s gutters.
Briquet’s men, defeated, ran.
The larger attack, beaten to bloody ruin at the gate, was a shambles in retreat. If that attack had lasted five minutes longer, just five minutes, then the fort would have fallen. Sharpe knew that. He shuddered to think of it, then stared at the bloody, edge-nicked blade of his sword. “Jesus.”
Then the howitzer shells began to fall again.
CHAPTER 17
A man wept and could not be consoled. His right leg was gone at the thigh, taken by a howitzer shell. He wanted his mother, but he would die instead. The other wounded men, shivering in the foul tunnel that led to the makeshift surgery, wished he would stop his blathering. A Marine corporal, his shoulder mangled by a bayonet, read St John’s gospel aloud and men wished that he too would be silent.
The Marines who had volunteered as surgeons wore clothes that were soaked in blood. They cut, tied and sawed, helped by lightly wounded men who held the badly wounded down while legs or arms were crudely butchered off and arteries tied and raw flesh cauterized with fire because they did not know if all the blood vessels were safely blocked.
The French wounded, under the angry rain of howitzer shells, were carried to the gate, across the crude bridge of fascines, and left on the roadway among their dead colleagues. Ten Marines, protected by ten Riflemen, moved among the carnage beyond the gate and collected enemy ammunition. The French artillery colonel, seeing his own wounded countrymen brought outside the fort, wanted to cease fire, but Calvet snarled at the gunners to continue. The twelve-pounders, loaded with heavy canister, tried to flick the ammunition collectors away, but the Marines dodged among the bodies and hurled the enemy pouches back to the archway. Only when they had retreated did General Calvet order his guns to cease their fire so that Frenchmen, armed with white flags, could go forward and rescue the injured.
Within the fort a dozen unwounded French prisoners were herded down to
the liquor store to join Captain Mayeron, Twenty dead Frenchmen were inside the ramparts. One of them, lying in the embers of the burned buildings, suddenly flipped in the air as the ammunition in his pouch exploded. There was a smell of roast meat to mingle with the stench of blood and powder. Men who saw the sudden jerk and flip of the body laughed because, they said, it was just like a frog. It was better to laugh than to weep.
“I’m sorry, sir,” Palmer said again.
Sharpe shook his head. “We got rid of them.”
“I should have been watching.” Palmer was determined to expose his blame.
“Yes, you should.” Sharpe had used a bucket of well-water to clean his sword. Marines and Riflemen pissed into weapons, blocked the muzzles, and sloshed the urine around to scour the powder deposits from the barrels.
No one spoke much. Most men, their weapons cleaned, just sat by the embrasures and stared into empty air. Buckets of drinking water were carried to the walls while smoke drifted from the smouldering fires in the courtyard. The fort was a place of ruin, blood, smoke, ash, and exhaustion, as if the defenders had suffered a defeat instead of winning a victory.
“If they’d got on to the northern wall,” Sharpe said to Palmer, “we’d be‘ surrendering our swords by now. You did well to stop them.” Sharpe rammed his sword home. He could not remember a fight so bitter or so close, not even at Badajoz. There the horror had been the cannons on the walls, not the infantrymen behind them. “And your Marines,” Sharpe said, “fought magnificently,”
“Thank you, sir.” Palmer nodded at Sharpe’s chest. “That must have hurt.”
Sharpe looked down. The small bolstered whistle, mounted on his leather crossbelt, was dented flat in its centre. He remembered the bang of the French musket and knew that had the ball been aimed a fraction either way it would have pierced his heart. The fight was a blur now, but later the individual moments would come to his half-waking dreams as nightmares. The memory of the moment when the French had driven him to the ground, the memory of the bullet thumping his chest, the sheer fear of that first glimpse of blue-uniformed men on his walls; those were the incidents that made a man shudder with delayed terror. Sharpe never recalled the moments of triumph after a battle, only those moments of near defeat.
Harper, a scrap of dirty paper in one hand, climbed the stone ramp. “Seventeen dead, sir. Including Lieutenant Fytch.”
Sharpe grimaced. “I thought he’d live.”
“Difficult with a bullet in your bellows.”
“Yes.” Poor Fytch, who was so very proud, Sharpe remembered, of his pistol. “Wounded?”
“At least thirty are bad, sir.” Harper’s voice was bleak.
A howitzer shell landed in the courtyard, bounced, and exploded. The shells seemed like small things after the fight. If the French had any sense, Sharpe thought, they would assault now. They should have men clawing and screaming at the walls, but perhaps the French were as shaken as he was.
Rifleman Taylor came up from the courtyard and spat tobacco juice over the ramparts. He jerked a thumb towards Harper’s cannon. “It’s buggered.”
“Buggered?” Sharpe asked.
“Snapped a capsquare.” The field-gun’s left trunnion had leaped out of its socket and broken the metal strap that should have held it in place. Doubtless Bampfylde’s fire had weakened the capsquare and now the twelve-pounder was as good as useless. Sharpe looked at Harper. “See what you can do, Patrick.”
“I can give wine to the lads?” Harper suggested bleakly.
“Do that.” Sharpe walked around the ramparts. French dead, stripped of their equipment, were being heaved on to the sand by the channel. If any of his men had shown the energy Sharpe would have ordered shallow graves dug, but even their own dead lay unburied. Two Marines, their faces still masked with powder, wearily hauled an abandoned French ladder through an embrasure and carried it down to the gate where it would be added to the new barricade.
Sharpe threaded the south-west citadel, wondering how he had ever come through it at the full charge. The French gunners, advised that the wounded had been cleared from the fort’s apron, opened fire again. The jets of flame stabbed from the watermill and the twelve-pound shots crashed into the wall to fray the defenders’ already shredded nerves. Sharpe found Frederickson. “Thank you, William.”
“For doing my duty?” Sweat had trickled through the powder on Frederickson’s face to make odd brown rivulets on his sun-baked skin.
“I’m leaving you in command,” Sharpe said, “while I go to see the wounded.”
“I’d have that attended to.” Frederickson gestured at Sharpe’s left thigh where the blood started by a French bayonet had crusted on to the overalls.
“It doesn’t hurt.” Sharpe raised his voice so that every man about the gate could hear him. “Well done!” Two Marines, carrying a body, grinned at him. The body, Sharpe saw, was young Moore, the boy from Devon, who had been shot in the forehead and who must have died instantly.
Sharpe felt a thickening in his throat and the prick of tears at his eyes, but he swore instead. Moore was luckier than the wounded who, in the foul stone gallery, waited for the surgeon’s butchery. Sharpe went to give small, bleak comfort to men who were beyond consolation and whose future was nothing but pain and poverty.
The shells still fell, the blood stank, and Sharpe’s men waited for the next assault.
The remnants of Captain Briquet’s force returned to the village. Their faces were bleak, exhausted and bloodied. A wounded man, using his musket as a crutch, collapsed on the sand. A drummer boy, who had survived the attack on the main gate and who was not yet twelve years old, wept because his father, a sergeant, had died with Captain Briquet on the fort’s western wall. The survivors of Briquet’s force told stories of blades and blood, of faces screaming hatred, of a Rifleman swinging an axe, of a cannon blasting men into bloody scraps on the ramp, of soldiers gouging and cutting and dying.
Surgeons used sea-water to wash lime from the eyes of defeated men. No man had been blinded; for reflex had made attackers close their stinging eyes and stumble away from the white cloud, but the use of the quicklime infuriated General Calvet. “They’re savages! Savages! Worse than the Russians!”
The senior French officers were gathered in the hovel that was Calvet’s command post. They stared at the map, avoiding each other’s eyes, and were glad when Calvet, seeking a target for his anger, chose Pierre Ducos.
„Tell me,“ Calvet said to Ducos, ”exactly why men died today?“
“They died,” Ducos was quite unmoved by the general’s fury, “for a victory that France needs.”
“Victory over what?” Calvet asked scathingly. “A huddle of goddamn refugees who use quicklime?” He stared belligerently at Ducos. “We agree their plans for a landing are foiled, so why don’t I let this Sharpe moulder behind his walls?” No one in the room thought it odd that a general should seek permission from a major, not when the major was Pierre Ducos with his odd power over the Emperor’s affections.
“Because,” Ducos said, “if Sharpe escapes, he will take evidence with him that would betray the Comte de Maquerre.”
“Then warn de Maquerre!” Calvet snapped. “Why should men die here for lack of a letter?” Ducos did not reply, implying that Calvet trespassed on forbidden territory. The general banged a big, splayed hand on the map in a gesture of irritated frustration. “We should be down south, thumping Wellington, not pissing about with a bloody major! I’ll leave a Battalion here to pen the bugger in, then we can go south where we’re needed.“
Pierre Ducos smiled thinly. The general spoke good military sense, but Pierre Ducos wanted Richard Sharpe in his power, and thus Ducos now played his final, winning card. “Can you suggest, General, the manner in which I explain to the Emperor how a British major, with less than two hundred men, defeated the great Calvet?”
Those icy words stung. For a moment it seemed as if Ducos had said too much, but then Calvet gave a shrug of surrender.
“I hope you’re right, Ducos. I hope the goddamns aren’t pouring men ashore at the Adour while we’re pissing about.” He growled with impotent menace, then slapped a hand on the map. “So if it must be done,” Calvet said, “then how do we prise this bastard out from his walls? I need a breach!”
“You can have one, sir.” To everyone’s surprise it was Commandant Lassan, returned safely from the failed northern attack, who spoke, and who now told Calvet that he had written no less, than twelve times in the last eight years to the Minister of Marine, responsible for the coastal forts, complaining that the Teste de Buch’s main gateway was in danger of collapse. The stones had shifted so much that the gate pintles were a full inch out of true, and cracks had appeared in the guardroom walls. The Ministry, after the fashion of government departments, had done nothing. “The whole gateway can be collapsed,” Lassan said.
General Calvet believed him. He ordered the twelve-pounders to concentrate their fire on the archway; artillery fire to make an avalanche of stone that would spill into the ditch and provide a slope up which attackers could scramble. “That’s where our main attack goes in the morning.” Calvet took a lump of charcoal and scrawled a thick arrow on the fortress plan. The arrow pointed at the gateway. “I shall lead that attack,” Calvet growled, “while you,” he gestured at an infantry colonel, “will make a demonstration here.” He scored another arrow that aimed itself at the northern wall. “That’ll split their defenders.” Calvet stared at his broad arrow and imagined the archway tumbling its stones into the ditch to make a bridge; he saw his men flooding over that barricade and taking their bayonets to this so-called ‘elite’ of Riflemen and Marines. “We’ll parade the prisoners through Bordeaux to show what happens to scum who think they can defy France.”
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