Sharpe's Siege s-18

by Бернард Корнуэлл

  “Bugger me,” Killick said. “Are they going to fight?”

  “Yes,” Sharpe said, “they are.”

  The Marines were clambering up the side of the Thuella, leaving the Riflemen alone in the fortress. It would be close, damned close. “Take your flag, Captain,” Sharpe said to Killick.

  The American was watching the French column reform. “There’s hundreds of the bastards.”

  “Only two thousand.” Sharpe was scraping with a stone at a nick on the fore-edge of his sword.

  “I wish…” Killick began instinctively.

  “You can’t,” Sharpe said. “This is our fight. And if we don’t make it, sail without us. Lieutenant Minver!”

  “Sir?”

  “Your men next! Get them down to the water. Regimental Sergeant Major!”

  Harper was inside the fortress at the foot of the breach. “Sir?”

  “Block it!”

  Harper waited with a squad of men beside a cheval-de-frise made from a scorched beam to which had been lashed and nailed fifty captured French bayonets. The blades jutted at all angles to make a savage barricade that Harper, with six Riflemen, now struggled to carry to the breach’s crest. As they did, so the renewed fire of the twelve-pounders struck the breach’s outer face. A chip of stone whistled over Harper’s head, but he heaved at his end of the beam, bellowed at the Riflemen to push, and the great spiked bulwark was slammed into place.

  Sharpe was on the west wall. Minver’s men were climbing down ladders to the sand, while the first of Killick’s longboats was pushing away from the Thuella. Sharpe guessed it would take ten minutes to board Minver’s company safely, and another five before the longboats would return for the last of the Teste de Buch’s defenders. The tide in the channel swept far too strongly to risk swimming to the safety of the schooner, so Sharpe must fight until the boats could carry all his men away. Killick, carrying his American flag to safety, paused by Sharpe and stared at the French horde. “Do I wish you luck, Major?”

  “No.”

  Killick seemed torn by his desire to stay and witness what promised to be a rare fight, and his need to hasten the longboats in the rain-flecked channel. „I’ll have a bottle of brandy waiting in my cabin, Major.“

  “I’ll look forward to it.” Sharpe was unable to express his emotions, instead, awkwardly, he thanked the American for keeping their pact.

  Killick shrugged. “Why thank me? Hell, I get a chance to fight you bastards again!”

  “But your government. They’ll make trouble because you helped me?”

  “As long as I make money,” Killick said, “the American government won’t give a damn.“ The French drums began their sound, then, just as suddenly, stopped. The American stared at the column. ”Two thousand of them, and fifty of you?“

  That’s about it.“

  Killick laughed, and his voice was suddenly warm. “Hell, Major, I’m glad I’m not one of those poor bastards. I’ll have the brandy waiting, just make sure you come and drink it.” He nodded, then walked towards his boats.

  Sharpe walked to the broken end of the rampart above the breach where half of Frederickson’s company was stationed. The other half, with Frederickson himself, was in the courtyard.

  Harper was still on the breach, jamming captured bayonets among the stones. The rain still crashed down, washing mortar and dust away from the breach and spreading dirty yellow floodwater out of the ditch.

  The French drums, made soggy by rain, sounded again from the south. A Rifleman licked cracked lips. The rain, grey and depressing, blurred the massed French bayonets above which, glinting gold, Sharpe saw an enemy standard. Such, he thought, was the vision of death in the morning. The French were coming.

  Commandant Henri Lassan would march, at his own request, in the front rank of the column. He had written to his mother, apologizing to her that he had lost the fortress and telling her that she could nevertheless be proud of her son. He had sent her his rosary and asked that the shining, much-fingered beads be laid to rest in the family’s chapel.

  “They’re boarding the schooner,” Favier reported to Calvet. The northern attack had been abandoned and everything would be thrown into this one, final storm. Favier thought that was a mistake. The northern attack could have driven itself between the fortress and the water, blocking the garrison’s escape, but Calvet was not worried.

  “The cavalry can play on the beach. Send them an order.” Calvet dismounted, then drew his sword that had once impaled two Cossacks together like chickens on a spit. The general shrugged off his cloak so that his men could see the gold braid on his jacket, then walked to the column’s head and raised his stubby, muscular arms. “Children! Children!” The drummers, hushed by officers, rested their sticks.

  Calvet’s voice reached to the very last rank of the column. “They’re colder than you are! They’re wetter than you are! They’re more frightened than you are! And you’re French! In the name of the Emperor! In the name of France! Follow!”

  The drummers hauled leather rings up ropes to tighten wet skins then, as the cheer caught like fire in the ranks, the sticks started their tattoo again. Like a monster, lurching and shuddering, driven by the heartbeat of the drumsticks and bright with bayonets and given courage by a brave general, the column marched forward.

  One of the German Riflemen, his left arm bandaged, played a flute. The tune came thin through the pouring rain to fill Sharpe with melancholy. He had always wanted to play the flute, but had never learned. There was small comfort in such thoughts so he dismissed them, wondering instead whether the boats had reached the shore to pick up Minver’s men, but he could not see from beside the breach, nor could he spare the time to go and look.

  The French column, swaying left and right as it marched in step, was halfway to the fortress. Sharpe’s men knew not to fire, but Sharpe guessed half of the rain-sodden rifles would not fire at all when the time came. The rain dripped down his sleeves, soaked his overalls, and squelched in his boots. Goddamned bloody treacherous mucky rain.

  Harper, Frederickson, and a dozen Riflemen were crouching high on the breach, just behind the cheval-de-frise. Frederickson watched Sharpe, who shook his head. Not yet, not yet. The German flautist carefully wrapped his instrument in wash-leather, tucked it into his jacket, and picked up his rifle that had layers of sacking wrapped round the lock.

  The French twelve-pounder guns had ceased firing. The gunners, knowing that this was no weather for Riflemen, had come outside the mill’s sheltering walls to watch the assault.

  The rain glittered like polished blades. It seethed down vertically. Water flowed in great swathes off the battlements to flood the inner ditch. A bolt of lightning, sudden and scaring, cracked to the east.

  The French were a hundred yards away. They shouted their ‘Vive I’Empereur’ in the drumbeat’s pause, but the great shout was drowned by the hammering, silver rain that bounced in fine spray from the scorched and battered stones of the fort.

  Sharpe turned. The west wall was ready. He could do no more there. That was his refuge, the place where he must hold the French just long enough to get his men down to the boats. He turned back to see the French skirmishers, red shoulder-wings darkened by rain, running clumsily up the glacis slope. He wondered if Calvet had sent men to the north who might cut between the west wall and the water and so bar the Riflemens’ escape.

  The French were nervous now. Some would be hoping that the rain had destroyed every rifle charge, but the veterans would know that even in this rain some guns would spark. They began to hurry, eager to get this first shock over. The skirmishers were spreading on the glacis and the first muskets banged smoke from the lip.

  “Charge! Charge!” Calvet roared the words like a challenge as he led his ‘grumblers’, his veterans, through the gap in the glacis.

  They charged. The column lost its order now. Some men, the timorous, sheltered in the outer ditch and pretended to fire upwards, but most, the brave, swarmed along the road towar
ds the chaos of stone that was their shattered bridge to revenge.

  Sharpe looked at Frederickson. “Now!” Frederickson’s men, ripping rags from locks, stood to fire directly over the breach’s summit, while from the ramparts every man who could fire a weapon knelt or stood. “Fire!”

  Perhaps half the guns fired, while on the other weapons the leather-gripped flints sparked on to damp powder. Sharpe’s rifle kicked back, then he was shouting at the men who guarded the broken edge of the battlement.

  The lead torn from the church roof and not needed for bullets had been piled on the ramparts with cobblestones, dead howitzer shells, and broken masonry. It was all hurled down at the attackers. The French muskets were as useless as the defenders’ rifles. One carefully protected charge of dry powder might spark, but once that was gone it was hopeless to think of reloading in this rain.

  Riflemen stood and hurled missiles and the attack faltered. There were dead at the breach’s foot, put there by Frederickson’s volley, but then the living, roared on by Calvet, surged over the bodies. A lead sheet sliced into a man’s skull and a howitzer shell bounced on the stones.

  “On! On!” Calvet was alive. He did not know how many had died, but he felt the old joy of battle and his huge voice plucked men up the ramp of stones. He swung his sword at the cheval-de-frise and staggered sideways as a cobblestone hit his skull. “The Emperor! The Emperor!”

  A tide of men scrambled on the breach. An officer, armed with an expensive percussion cap pistol that was proof against the rain, fired upwards and a Rifleman toppled from the ramparts and was torn apart by bayonets.

  “Push!” Calvet was shoving the cheval-de-frise forward, forcing a gap. A howitzer shell, thrown from the ramparts, hit his left arm, stunning it, but he could see a space at the end of the spiked beam and he jumped for it. His sword-arm was still good and he pointed the way as he breasted the breach’s summit. “Charge!”

  ,The flood of men, pushed from behind and desperate to escape the rain of missiles from above, flowed over the breach.

  Harper watched them. He saw the general, saw the gaudy golden braid and plucked the rag away from the seven-barrelled gun’s lock. He pulled the trigger and three Frenchmen were hurled backwards on the inner face of the breach. Calvet, who had been leading the dead men, survived.

  “Fire!” Frederickson, given the blunderbusses, bellowed the order and three of the six guns belched their stone scraps at the enemy.

  A Frenchman was impaled on one of the bayonets jammed between stones and, despite his desperate screams, was trampled further on to the blade by his comrades. Other men, sobbing and struggling, had been forced on to the cheval-de-frise that now lay canted on the breach’s inner face. Yet most men survived to leap down on to the courtyard’s cobbles.

  “Back! Back!” Frederickson’s men were not there to contest the breach, but to guard the ramp. They went backwards, appalled by the scrabbling tide of men who surged into the fortress.

  Sharpe, seeing that the breach was lost, blew a two-fingered whistle. “Back! Back!” His men ran down the ramparts.

  At the foot of the stone ramp, facing the collapsed gateway, was the single cannon. Its capsquare was broken, but the barrel was charged with the last of the garrison’s dry powder and rammed with metal scraps, stone fragments, and rusty nails. A trail of powder had been trickled into its vent, then covered with a patch of oilcloth.

  Harper stood by the cannon. Beside it, sheltered in a hole beneath the stone ramp, was a torch made of twisted straw, rags and pitch. He plucked it out and whirled it through the air so that the flames were fanned into a sudden, rain-sizzling blaze.

  “Now!” Frederickson, halfway up the ramp with his men, shouted the order.

  Harper plucked the oilcloth free and jammed the burning concoction of dripping pitch and straw on to the venthole. He saw the powder spark and threw himself sideways.

  The cannon fired.

  It recoiled viciously and the barrel, ramming with all the force of the dirty powder inside it, tore itself off the carriage, but not before the charge, spreading like duckshot, emptied itself into the courtyard.

  The stones and metal scraps flayed into the French. A shower of blood momentarily rivalled the rain, then the barrel clanged down on to the carriage’s right wheel, snapping spokes as if they were matchwood, and Harper was scrambling up the ramp and shouting for his axe.

  Men screamed in the yard. Men had been blinded, eviscerated, torn ragged. Calvet had instinctively thrown himself flat and now listened to the horror about him. “Charge!” He scrambled up. “Charge!”

  He could see how few defenders were left to face him, but at least they were. Riflemen, the British elite, and he would capture these last few as a token of his victory. “Charge!”

  Men, made courageous by the paucity of the defenders and roused to gallantry by the general’s voice, obeyed. From among the wounded and the dead, from the clinging smoke of the cannon, a pelting, yelling mass of men emerged. Calvet led them.

  “Now!” Frederickson had the last seven lime-barrels at the head of the ramp. Sergeant Rossner threw one, it bounced, split open, then, spewing powder that was turned to instant whitewash by the rain, slammed into the first rank of Frenchmen. A man screamed as the barrel pinned him against the broken gun-carriage and as limewash flayed at his eyes.

  Frederickson looked behind him. Sharpe’s men, using the dry cover of the citadel where captured French ammunition had been stored, were holding the southern wall. Minver’s men, with agonizing slowness, were being rowed towards the Thuella.

  A second lime barrel thumped down the slope, then a third. More Frenchmen were scrambling on to the walls to attack the citadels, but the men in those small fortresses had the last dry charges and they forced the attackers into the cover of the embrasures.

  “Now!” A fourth barrel bounced and struck a man full in the chest.

  A pistol fired from the courtyard and Rossner grunted as the bullet hit his arm.

  “Go!” Frederickson pushed him towards the sea. “Go!”

  More Frenchmen were coming, clawing at the ramp, fighting past the smashed gun carriage, over the broken barrel strakes, and across the bodies of their own wounded. The foot of the ramp was a grotesque mixture of whitewash and blood like a painter’s accident.

  “Now!” The fifth barrel went, then the sixth.

  Sharpe had come to the head of the ramp. He could see Minver’s men scrambling up the Tkuella’s side, but the French could not be held for long. Some were trying to climb the inner wall to the ramparts, using debris from the burned offices as scaling ladders, and Sharpe ran back to stop them. He drove his sword down once, twice, and a man screamed as the blade raked his face.

  “Now!” The last barrel was thrown by Harper. It did not bounce, but flew full tilt to smash into a fresh charge of men. The Thuella’s boats had still not started their return journey.

  “Swords!” Frederickson shouted the order.

  The French, exhilarated by their victory in the breach and seeing that no more barrels could plunge into their ranks, charged. A single rank of Riflemen, sword-bayonets in place, awaited them.

  Then Harper broke the line.

  With a shout that filled the whole courtyard with its echo, Patrick Harper charged down the stone slope. He carried the great, bright-bladed axe, and in his veins there was the keening of a thousand Irish warriors. He was shouting in his Gaelic now, daring the French to have at him, and the leading Frenchmen dared not.

  Harper was six feet four, a giant, and had muscles like a mainmast’s cables. He did not attack cautiously, feeling for his enemy’s weakness, but screamed his challenge at the full run. The axe took two men with its first blow then Harper turned the blade as though it weighed less than a sword, brought it back, blade dripping blood, while his voice, chanting its ancient language, drove the Frenchmen backwards.

  A French captain, eager for glory and knowing that the ramp must be taken, lunged, and the axe-blade slit his
belly open to the rain. Harper screamed triumph, defying the French, daring them to come to challenge his blade. He stopped a few feet from the bottom of the ramp, victorious, and the rain dripped pink from the broad-bladed axe that he held in his right hand. He laughed at the French.

  “Sergeant!” Sharpe bellowed. “Patrick!”

  The longboats, at last, were pushing back to the shore.

  “Patrick!” Sharpe cupped his hands. “Come back!”

  Harper shouldered the axe. He turned, disdaining to run, and walked slowly up the stone ramp to where Frederickson waited. He turned there and stared down into the courtyard. The officer with the percussion pistol, its barrel charged with powder from a dry horn, slipped a percussion cap over the gun’s nipple, but Calvet, who recognized bravery when he saw it, shook his head. That Rifleman, Calvet thought, should be in the Imperial Guard.

  “Citadels!” Sharpe’s shout was sudden in the odd silence that followed Harper’s lone attack. “Retreat! Retreat!”

  The Riflemen who had guarded the extremities of the west wall scrambled from their strongholds and ran to the ladders.

  Calvet, seeing it, knew his enemy was finished. “Charge!”

  “Back! Back! Back!” Sharpe pushed his men away. Now the French could have the fort, but now came the worst moment, the difficult moment, the end of Sharpe’s battle and the race for the boats.

  The Riflemen had no time to queue at the ladders, instead they jumped from the walls and fell headlong in the sand. Sharpe waited, standing in one of the embrasures with his sword drawn. Harper came to his side but Sharpe snarled at him to go.

  The French charged over the bodies of the dead. They wanted revenge, but found an empty rampart. Empty but for the one officer, sword drawn, whose face was like death. That face checked them for a few seconds, enough to let Sharpe’s men scramble towards the sea’s edge.