Sharpe's Company

by Bernard Cornwell

  Now, as Sharpe approached the rain-swept baggage, the women grinned at him from beneath their blankets. Lily Grimes, a tiny woman of irrepressible cheerfulness, and a voice with the piercing quality of a well-honed bayonet, gave him a mock salute. ‘Given up parading us, Cap’n?’ The women always called him Captain.

  ‘That’s right, Lily.’

  She sniffed. ‘He’s mad.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Bloody Colonel. What did he want us to parade for, anyway?’

  Sharpe grinned. ‘He worries about you, Lily. He likes to keep an eye on you.’

  She shook her head. ‘He wants to look at Sally Clayton’s tits more like.’ She laughed and peered up at Sharpe. ‘You didn’t look away either, Cap’n. I watched you. “

  ‘I was just wishing it had been you, Lily. “

  She shrieked with laughter. ‘Any time, Cap’n, you just ask. ‘

  Sharpe laughed, walked away from her. He admired the wives, and he liked them. They endured all the discomforts of the campaign; the nights under pouring rain, the hard rations, the long marches, yet they never gave up. They watched their men go into battle and afterwards they searched the field for a corpse or a wounded husband, and all the while they brought up their children and looked after their men. Sharpe had seen Lily carrying two of her children up a hard road, her husband’s musket, and the family’s few belongings as well. They were tough.

  And they were not ladies; three years in the Peninsula had made sure of that. Some dressed in old uniforms, most were garbed in voluminous, filthy skirts with tattered shawls and scarves around their heads. They were tanned dark brown, with calloused hands and feet, and most could strip a corpse bare in ten seconds, a house in thirty. They were foul-mouthed, loud, and utterly immodest. No women could live with a battalion and be anything else. They slept with their men, often enough, in open fields with nothing but a tree or hedge to give an illusion of privacy. The women washed themselves, relieved themselves, made love, gave birth, and all in plain sight of a thousand eyes. To a fastidious observer they were a fearful sight, yet Sharpe liked them. They were tough, loyal, kind and uncomplaining.

  Major Collett bawled an order for the Battalion to make ready, and Sharpe turned to his command; the baggage. It was chaos. Two children had succeeded in cutting the pannier from one of the Sutler’s mules, and the Sutler, a Spaniard who was a kind of traveling shop-keeper with the Battalion, was screaming at the children, but not daring to let go of the straw halter that tethered his other mules.

  Sharpe yelled at them. ‘Make ready!’ They took no notice. The Sutler’s assistants caught the children, snatched back the bottles, but then the mothers, sensing loot, attacked the assistants for beating the children. It was pandemonium, his new command.

  ‘Richard!’ Sharpe twisted back. Major Hogan was behind him.

  ‘Sir.’

  Hogan grinned down from his horse. ‘We’re very formal today.’

  ‘We’re very responsible. Look.’ Sharpe waved at the baggage train. ‘My new Company.’

  ‘I heard.’ Hogan slipped from his horse, stretched, and then turned as there were sudden shouts from the bridge. An officer’s horse had become frightened by the sliding, grey water. It was nervously backing in short, jerking steps towards the infantry company behind. The Captain, panicking, was whipping the beast, increasing its terror, and the horse began to rear fitfully.

  ‘Get off!’ Hogan shouted. He had a surprisingly loud voice. Tool! Get off! Dismount!’

  The officer lashed down at the horse, wrenched the reins, and the horse put all its force into bucking the rider off its back. It succeeded. The horse slammed up, screaming, and the officer tumbled from the saddle, bounced once on the roadway’s edge, and disappeared downstream into the river. ‘Stupid bastard!’ Hogan was angry. A Sergeant threw a length of timber into the water, but it fell short, and Sharpe could see the Captain flailing the river, struggling against the freezing current that took him away from the bridge. ‘He’s had it.’

  No one dived in to save the officer. By the time a man had stripped himself of pack, haversack, ammunition pouch, weapons and boots the Captain would be long gone. The horse, free of its burden, stood shivering on the bridge and a Private soothed it, then led it calmly to the southern bank. The Captain had disappeared.

  ‘There’s a vacancy.’ Sharpe laughed.

  ‘Bitter?’

  ‘Bitter, sir? No, sir. Being a Lieutenant is very satisfying.’

  Hogan gave a sad smile. ‘I hear you were drunk.’

  ‘No.’ He had been drunk three times since the day Teresa left, the day he had lost the Company. Sharpe shrugged. ‘You know that gazette was refused in January? No one dared tell me. Then the new man arrives so someone has to tell me. So I look after the baggage while some half-cooked youngster destroys my Company.’

  ‘Is he that bad?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m sorry.’ Sharpe’s anger had taken himself by surprise.

  ‘Do you want me to talk to the General?’

  ‘No!’ Pride would stop Sharpe bleating for help, but then he turned back. ‘Yes, you can talk to the General. Tell him I’ll lead the Forlorn Hope for him at Badajoz. ‘

  Hogan paused with a pinch of snuff half-way to his nostrils. He put it back in the box, carefully, and snapped the lid shut. ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘I’m serious.’

  Hogan shook his head. ‘You don’t need it, Richard. God! There’ll be promotion by the grave load! Don’t you understand? You’ll be a Captain within a month.’

  Sharpe shook his head. He understood, but his pride was hurt. ‘I want the Hope, sir, I want it. Ask for me.’

  Hogan took Sharpe’s elbow and turned him so they were both looking eastwards along the river towards the city. ‘Do you know what it’s like, Richard? It’s bloody impossible!’ He pointed to the great stone bridge that carried the road to the city. ‘We can’t attack there. Anyone trying to cross that bridge will be shredded. So, try the east wall. They’ve damned the stream and it’s one bloody great lake. We’d need the navy to cross that, unless we can blow up the dam and they’ve built a fort to stop us doing that. There’s the castle, of course.’ Hogan’s words were urgent, almost bitter. ‘If you feel like climbing a hundred feet of rock and then scaling a forty foot wall, and all the time dodging the grapeshot, you’re welcome.’ He pointed again. ‘So there’s the west wall. Looks easy enough, doesn’t it?’ It did not look easy. Even at four miles Sharpe could see the huge bastions, jutting like miniature castles, that protected the wall. Hogan’s accent was becoming more pronounced as it always did when the Engineer spoke with passion. ‘It looks too easy! They want us to attack there. Why? My guess is that it’s mined. There’s more bloody powder under that glacis than Guy Fawkes dreamed of. We attack there and we give St Peter his busiest day since Agincourt!’ He was really angry now, seeing with his Engineer’s eye the problems, turning the problems into blood. ‘That leaves the south wall. We have to take at least one outlying fort, perhaps two, and then get through the walls. Do you know how thick they are? What was the distance from the brink of the ditch to the back of the walls at Ciudad Rodrigo?’

  Sharpe thought back. “Thirty yards? Fifty in some places.’

  ‘Aye.’ Hogan pointed back to Badajoz. ‘A hundred yards, at least, and more in some places. And that ditch is a bastard, Richard, a real bastard. It’ll take a minute to cross it, at least, and they have all the flank fire they’ll ever need, and more. That wall, Richard, is big. Big! You could put Ciudad Rodrigo’s wall in that ditch and you wouldn’t even see it. Don’t you understand? It is a killer.’ He said the words distinctly, trying to convince Sharpe. Hogan sighed, ‘Jesus! We can starve them out. We can hope they die laughing, we can hope they get the plague, but I tell you, Richard, I don’t know if we can get through a breach.’

  Sharpe stared at the great fortress in the slanting, hissing rain. ‘We’ll have to.’

  ‘And do you know how? By throw
ing so many poor bastards into the fight that the French simply can’t kill them all. It’s the only way and I don’t like it.’

  Sharpe turned back. ‘The poor bastards will still need a Forlorn Hope.’

  ‘And there has to be a bloody fool to lead it, I suppose, and you’re proving a fool! For God’s sake, Richard, why do you want the Hope?’

  Sharpe’s anger flared. ‘Because it’s better than this humiliation! I’m a soldier, not a bloody clerk! I fetch bloody, forage, count bloody shovels, and take punishment drills. It’s yes, sir, no, sir, can I dig your latrine, sir, and it’s not bloody soldiering!’

  Hogan glared at him. ‘It is bloody soldiering! What the hell else do you think soldiering is?” The two men were facing each other across the mud. ‘Do you think we can win a war without forage? Or without shovels? Or, God help us, without latrines? That is soldiering! Just because you’ve been allowed to swan about like a bloody pirate for years doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take your turn at the real work.’

  ‘Listen, sir. ‘ Sharpe was close to shouting. ‘When they tell us to climb those bloody walls, you’ll be glad there are some bloody pirates in the ditch and not just bloody clerks!’

  ‘And what will you do when there are no more wars to fight?’

  ‘Start another bloody one.’ Sharpe began to laugh. ‘Sir.’

  ‘If you survive this one.’ Hogan shook his head, his anger dying as quickly as it had flared. ‘Good God, man! Your woman’s inside. And your child.’

  ‘I know.’ Sharpe shrugged. ‘But I want the Hope.’

  ‘You’ll die.’

  ‘Ask Wellington for me.’

  The Irishman frowned. ‘You’re just hurting in your pride, that’s all. In two months, it will be a bad dream, I promise.’

  ‘Maybe. I still want the Hope.’

  ‘You’re a stubborn, bloody fool.’

  Sharpe laughed again. ‘I know. Colonel Windham says I need humility.’

  ‘He’s right. It’s a wonder any of us like you at all, but we do.’ He shrugged. ‘I’ll talk to the General for you, but I’m making no promises. ‘ He gathered the reins into his hand. ‘Would you give me a leg up? If it’s not beneath your dignity. ‘

  Sharpe grinned, heaved the Major on to his horse. ‘You’ll ask him for me?’

  ‘I said I’d talk to him, didn’t I? It’s not his decision, you know that. It belongs to the General of the attacking Division.’

  ‘But they listen to Wellington.’

  ‘Aye, that’s true. ‘ Hogan pulled on the reins, and then checked himself. ‘You know what tomorrow is?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Tuesday, March the seventeenth.’

  ‘So?’ Sharpe shrugged.

  Hogan laughed. ‘You’re a heathen; an unrepentant, doomed heathen, so you are. St Patrick’s Day. Ireland’s day. Give Sergeant Harper a bottle of rum for being a good Catholic.’

  Sharpe grinned. ‘I will.’

  Hogan watched the South Essex break up step as they marched over the bridge, followed by Sharpe and his raggle-taggle of women, children, servants, and mules. Hogan was saddened. He counted the tall Rifleman as a friend. Perhaps Sharpe was arrogant, but Hogan, along with all the engineering in his head, kept more than a little of Shakespeare. In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man as modest stillness and humility. But this was not peace, this was a horrid campaign and tomorrow, St Patrick’s Day, the army would start digging towards Badajoz. Hogan knew that stillness and humility would not capture the fortress. Time might, but Wellington would not give them time. The General was worried that the French field armies, bigger than the British, might march to the rescue. Badajoz must be taken swiftly, paid for in blood, and the assault would come soon, too soon, perhaps even before Lent was over. Hogan did not relish the prospect. The wall could be closed up with the English dead. He had promised he would talk to Wellington, and so he would, but not as Sharpe had hoped. Hogan would do a friend’s duty. He would ask the General, if it were possible, that Sharpe’s request should be refused. He would save Sharpe’s life. It was, after all, the very least he could do for a friend.

  Part Three

  St Patrick's Day, March 17th

  to

  Easter Sunday, March 29th 1812

  Chapter 11

  If a man could have found a new-fangled hot air balloon and flown it over Badajoz, he would have looked down at a city shaped like the quarter segment of a cogged wheel. The castle, ancient stone on rock, was the giant axle boss. The north and east walls were spokes, leaving the axle at right angles to each other, while the south and west walls joined in a long, rough curve that was studded with seven huge cogs.

  It was impossible to attack from the north. The city was built on the bank of the River Guadiana, wider at Badajoz than the Thames at Westminster, and the only approach lay across the long, ancient stone bridge. Every yard of the bridge was covered by the guns mounted on the city’s north wall while, across the river, the bridge entrance was guarded by three outlying forts. The largest, San Cristobel, could house more than two regiments. The French were sure that there could be no attack from the north.

  The east wall, the other spoke, was more vulnerable. At its northern end was the castle, high and huge, a fortress that had dominated the landscape for centuries, but south of the castle, the city wall was on lower ground and faced towards a hill. The French knew the danger and, just where the castle hill dropped steeply to the lower city, they had dammed the Rivillas stream. Now the vulnerable east wall was protected by a sheet of flood water, as wide as the river to the north, and running far to the south of the city. As Hogan had said to Sharpe; only the navy could attack across the new lake, unless the dam could be blown up and the lake drained.

  Which left the huge curve of the south and west walls, a curve nearly a mile long that had no convenient river or stream to offer protection. Instead there were the cogs on the wheel’s rim, the seven vast bastions that jutted out from the city wall, each bastion the size of a small castle. San Vincente was the most northerly, built beside the river at the angle of the north and west walls, and from the San Vincente the bastions ran south and west till they met the flooded Rivillas. San Jose, Santiago, San Juan, San Roque, Santa Maria, and so to the Trinidad. The saints, the mother of Christ, and the Holy Trinity, each with more than a score of guns, to protect a city.

  The bastions were not the only protection to the great curve of walls. First came the glacis, the earth slope that deflected the round shot and bounced it high over the defences, and then the huge ditch. The drop from the glacis to the ditch bottom was nowhere less than twenty feet and, once in the ditch, the real problems began. The bastions would flank any attack, pouring in their plunging fire, and there were ravelins in the great dry moat. The ravelins were like great, triangular, fake walls that split an attack and, in darkness, could deceive men into thinking they had reached the real wall. Any man who climbed a ravelin would be swept off by carefully aimed cannon. From the ditch the walls rose fifty feet and on their wide parapets they mounted guns every five yards.

  Badajoz was no mediaeval fortress hastily converted for modern warfare. It had once been the pride of Spain, a brilliantly engineered, massively built death trap, that was now garrisoned by the finest French troops in the Peninsula. Twice the British had failed to take the city and there seemed no reason, a year later, to suppose that a third attempt would meet with success.

  The fortress had just one weakness. To the south-east, opposite the Trinidad bastion and across the flood waters, rose the shallow San Miguel hill. From its low, flat top a besieger could fire down on to the south-east corner of the city, and that was the single weakness. The French knew it, and had guarded against it. Two forts had been built to the south and east. One, the Picurina, had been built across the new lake on the lower slopes of the San Miguel hill. The second fort, the huge Pardaleras, was to the south and guarded the approach to any breach that might be carved by the guns on the hill. It was not mu
ch of a weakness, but all the British had to work on and so, on St Patrick’s Day, they marched to the rear of the San Miguel hill. They knew, and the French knew, that the effort would be against the south-east corner of the city, against the Santa Maria and Trinidad bastions, and the fact that the selfsame plan had failed twice before did not matter. From the top of the hill, where curious men gathered to look at the city, the breach made in the last siege could be clearly seen between the two bastions. It had been repaired, in lighter coloured stone, and the new masonry seemed to mock the coming British efforts.

  Sharpe stood next to Patrick Harper and stared at the walls. ‘Jesus, they’re big!” The Sergeant said nothing. Sharpe pulled the bottle from inside his greatcoat and held it out. ‘Here. A present for St Patrick’s Day.’

  Harper’s broad face beamed with pleasure. ‘You’re a grand man, sir, for an Englishman. Would you be ordering me to save you half for St George’s Day?’

  Sharpe stamped his feet against the cold. ‘I think I’ll take that half now.’

  ‘I thought you might. ‘ Harper was glad to see Sharpe, of whom he had seen little in the past month, but there was also an embarrassment in the meeting. The Irishman knew Sharpe needed reassurance that the Light Company missed him, and Harper thought him a fool for needing the words to be said. Of course they missed him. The Light Company were no different to the rest of the army. They were failures, almost to a man, whose failings had led them to courtrooms and jails. They were thieves, drunks, debtors, and murderers, the men Britain wanted out of sight and mind. It was easier to empty a town jail to a recruiting party than go through the tedious business of trial, sentence and punishment.

  Not all were criminals. Some had been gulled by the Recruiting Sergeants, offered an escape from village tedium and narrow horizons. Some had failed in love and joined the army in despair, swearing they would rather die in battle than see their sweetheart married to another man. Many were drunkards who were terrified of a lonely shivering death in a winter ditch and joined an army that offered them clothes, boots, and a third of a pint of rum each day. Some, a few, a very few, joined for patriotism. Some, like Harper, joined because there was nothing but hunger at home and the army offered food and an escape. They were, almost to a man, the failings and leavings of society and to them all the army was one big Forlorn Hope.