‘Isabella?’
“The wee girl, sir.’
‘She’s still here?’ Sharpe’s back felt as if it had been struck by a French four-pounder.
Harper blushed. ‘I think she may want to stay on with me, for a wee bit, you understand. That’s if you don’t mind, sir.’
‘Mind? Why should I mind? But how the hell do you know? You don’t speak Spanish, she doesn’t speak English.’
‘A man can tell these things.’ Harper said the words mysteriously, as if Sharpe would not understand. Then he smiled. ‘But I’m glad you’re doing the right thing, sir, so I am.’
Sharpe had laughed. ‘Who the hell are you to tell me what the right thing is?’
Harper shrugged. ‘I’m the true faith, so I am. You’ll have to bring the wee one up a Catholic.’ ‘I don’t intend to bring the wee one up.’ ‘Aye, that’s true. It’s woman’s work, sure enough.’ ‘I don’t mean that.’ He meant that Teresa would not stay with the army, nor he go to the hills, and so he would still be away from his child and his wife. Not for a while, but the time would come when she would leave, and he wondered if he was marrying only to give Antonia a name, her legitimacy, something he had never had himself. He was embarrassed by the ceremony, if a frightened priest standing among grinning soldiers constituted a ceremony, yet he felt a shy joy, was touched by pride because Teresa was beside him, and he supposed he loved her. Jane Gibbons was many miles and more impossibilities away. He listened to the words, felt awkward, and watched the happiness on Teresa’s aunt’s face.
Man and wife, father of a child, Captain of a company, and Sharpe looked up, past the trees, into the wide sky where the kestrels hung, and then Teresa plucked his elbow, spoke something in Spanish and he thought he knew what she had said. He looked down at her, at the slim beauty, the dark, strong eyes, and he felt a terrible fool because Harper was grinning, just as Hogan and the Company were grinning, and the girl, Isabella, was crying for happiness. Sharpe smiled at his wife. ‘I love you.’ He kissed her, remembering that first kiss, beneath the lances, and it had led here. He smiled at the thought, because he was glad, and Teresa, happy that he was smiling, clutched his arm.
‘I can kiss the bride, Richard?’ Hogan beamed at them both, clasped Teresa, and planted a huge kiss on her that made Sharpe’s men cheer. The aunt clapped them, spoke in quick-fire Spanish at Sharpe, and then brushed at the remains of dirt and blood on his uniform. Then Lieutenant Price insisted on kissing the bride, and the bride insisted on kissing Patrick Harper, and Sharpe tried to hide his happiness because he believed that to show an emotion, any emotion, was to expose a weakness.
‘Here.’ Hogan held up a cup of wine. “With the compliments of the bride’s uncle. Your health, Richard.’
‘It’s a funny way to get married.’
They’re all funny ways, whichever way you do it.’ Hogan beckoned to the servant who was holding Antonia, made the girl hold the baby up and he trickled red wine into its mouth. ‘There, my love. It’s not every wee girl who gets to go to her parents’ wedding.’
At least the child was well. The illness, whatever it was, had gone and the doctors, thanking God because they had done nothing, said it was a malady that went with growing. They had shrugged, pocketed their fee, and wondered why God spared the bastards.
They left the city that afternoon, an armed group that could defend itself against the violence that still ravaged Badajoz. The dead lay on the streets. They climbed out through the Santa Maria breach and the ditch was still full, thick with bodies, so thick that heat came from the hundreds and hundreds of dead. Some men searched in the carnage, looking for brothers, sons, or friends. Others stood at the ditch’s edge and wept for an army, as Wellington had wept when he stood on the glacis, and the great heap steamed in the April chill. Teresa, seeing the breaches for the first time, muttered in Spanish and Sharpe saw her eyes go up to the walls, to the silent guns, and he knew she was imagining their power.
Colonel Windham was on the glacis, staring down to where his friend Collett had died, and he turned as Sharpe and his party climbed the ladders from the ditch. ‘Sharpe?’
‘Sir?’
Windham saluted him, strangely formal amongst so much death. ‘You’re a brave man, Sharpe.’
Sharpe was embarrassed. He shrugged. ‘Thank you. And you, sir. I saw the attack.’ He stopped, out of words, and then remembered the portrait. He took it from inside his jacket and handed over the wrinkled, stained picture of the Colonel’s wife. ‘I thought you’d like this, sir.’
Windham looked at it, turned it over, back again, and then looked at Sharpe. ‘How on earth did you find it?”
‘It was in the hat, sir, of a man called Obadiah Hakeswill, who stole it. He also stole my telescope.’ The glass had been in Hakeswill’s haversack, and was now in Sharpe’s. He jerked a head towards Harper, standing with Isabella. ‘Sergeant Harper, sir, did not steal a thing.;
Windham nodded. The breeze tugged at the tassel on his hat. ‘You’ve given him back his Sergeantcy?’ The Colonel smiled in resignation.
‘Yes, sir. And I’ll give him his rifle and green jacket next. If you have no objection.’
‘No, Sharpe. The Company is yours.’ Windham smiled briefly at Sharpe, perhaps remembering the conversations about humility, then looked at Harper. ‘Sergeant!’
‘Sir?’ Harper stepped forward, stood to attention.
‘I owe you an apology.’ Windham was obviously embarrassed deeply by the need to speak so to a Sergeant.
‘No apology needed, sir!’ Harper’s face was straight, his bearing formal. ‘A striped back is very attractive to the ladies, sir.’
‘Blood and hounds!’ Windham was relieved to be off the hook. He nodded at Sharpe. ‘Carry on, Captain Sharpe.’
They walked back to the camp, leaving the stench of the dead behind them, and the sounds of the city faded as they walked. They passed the trenches and the batteries, and Sharpe saw where a gunner had planted spring flowers on a parapet. The weather was turning, warming to a dry summer, and he knew that the army would be marching soon, north and east, going into the heart of Spain.
Badajoz was done.
That night, two miles down the Seville road, a twitching figure scrabbled down beneath a field marker, muttering to himself, knowing he could not be killed, and pulled out the oilcloth bundle of stolen goods. Hakeswill was deserting. He knew he could not go back. There was a witness to the death of Knowles, the portrait had been in the Sergeant’s hat, and he understood that only a firing squad awaited him. He sniffed the night air and was not worried. He would go somewhere and find something, as he always did, and this was not the first night that he had been utterly alone, homeless, and his dark shape loped into the night, seeking mischief.
A man went into a breach for one thing only, pride, and Sharpe had been there. He had stood at the top of a breach, fear defeated, and gone down into a horror that tarnished victory as blood tarnished a sword. He lay awake and thought of streets running with wine, silver, madness and blood.
He had hoped for so much; for a Captaincy, for revenge on a clerk, for a company, for a woman he loved and a child he had never seen, and the hopes had been won at Badajoz. He lay in Leroy’s tent, its owner in hospital with a terrible wound, the night was quiet, dark, silent for the first time in weeks, and a great victory had been won. The gates of Spain had been burst open. He looked at his woman, beautiful in the firelight that seeped through the canvas, and he marveled that he was married. Then he looked at the child, dark hair and snub nosed, that slept between them and the love welled up, incomprehensible, uncontrollable. He kissed his daughter, Antonia, and in the flame light she seemed terribly small and vulnerable. Yet she was alive, and his, his only relative by blood. She was his, to be protected as he must protect all those other souls who liked him, were proud of him, and proud to be in his ranks - Sharpe’s Company.
Historical Note
On the morning of 7 April 1812, Philippon and the su
rvivors of the city garrison surrendered in the Fort of San Cristobal, thus sealing one of the British Army’s most famous victories; the storming of Badajoz.
The next day, around mid-day, Wellington ordered a gallows erected in the plaza by the Cathedral and, though there is no evidence that the gallows were used, the threat was sufficient to bring order to the city’s streets. Thus ended one of the British Army’s most notorious episodes; the sack of Badajoz.
I have tried, in this story, to offer some reasons why the sack was so pitiless. The rules of war condoned it, and the instincts of soldiers who had survived such a horrific fight demanded it. Those soldiers also suspected, with some justification, that the inhabitants of Badajoz were pro-French. None of this, perhaps, excuses their behavior; many of the soldiers who ransacked the city had taken no part in the assault, but they were reason enough for the ordinary soldier on that climactic April night. Some historians suggest, diffidently, that Wellington allowed the sack, and let it continue beyond the first day, as a warning to other towns that harbored French garrisons. If true the warning did not work, as the British were to discover one year later at San Sebastian. The fight there was just as hard, and the sack afterwards just as horrific.
The sack of Badajoz was not without one famous love story. A Lieutenant of the 95th Rifles, Harry Smith, met and married a fourteen-year-old Spanish girl, Juana Maria de los Dolores de Leon, who was fleeing from the horror. She was not completely unscathed, her ear-rings had been torn bloodily from her lobes, but Lieutenant Smith found and protected her. Years later, after her husband had been knighted, a town was named after her in South Africa that was itself to see a famous siege; Ladysmith.
I have tried to be faithful to the events of the campaign. Thus, for instance, the guns sunk into the wall at Ciudad Rodrigo existed, and the story of the Nottinghamshire Battalion charging across the planks is true. Each battle described in the story happened, though the attack on the dam was not made at battalion strength, nor was it made as early in the siege. It happened on 2 April, under the command of Lieutenant Stanway of the Engineers who, like the unfortunate Fitchett, failed to take enough powder and so the explosion miscarried.
On the morning of 7 April, beneath the breaches, there was found a mass of bodies, still warm, and observers guessed their number at twelve or thirteen hundred dead. Wellington wept at the sight. Many historians have blamed him for attacking too soon, though, given the pressures on him, and his lack of a proper Engineering train, his decision is difficult to criticize. Hindsight is a great General. Badajoz was won by sheer bravery, bravery like that of Lieutenant Colonel Ridge of the 5th Fusiliers whose exploits I borrowed and gave to Captain Robert Knowles. Ridge died, shot at the end of the fight, and Napier gave him a famous epitaph: ‘And no man died that night with greater glory, yet many died, and there was much glory.’
The novel does not do justice to the Fifth Division whose attack on the San Vincente bastion, made late, was most responsible for the city’s fall. There was no Forlorn Hope on the third, the central breach, and accounts of the night differ as to whether any man even reached that breach. The Light Division claimed that some of their dead were found on its slopes, but most survivors disagree, and so, with a novelist’s freedom, I took the breach for Sharpe. There was one final attack on the breaches, which succeeded, but Wellington did not order it until he was certain that the Fifth Division were in the defenders’ rear. Purists will also be offended that Sharpe attacked Ciudad Rodrigo with the Third Division, and Badajoz with the Fourth, but it is the fate of fictional soldiers to be always where the fight is thickest even when that means a cavalier disregard for the make-up of divisions. Some battalions were involved in both assaults, notably those of the Third and Light Divisions, so my sin is not too great.
I have tried to be exact, with the above exceptions, to the real events. The letters and diaries of the campaign are, as ever, a trove of information. Thus, for instance, the details in the book of the daily weather conditions are taken from the diaries and I feel a constant debt to those long-dead soldiers whose memories I plunder. One myth should be put to rest. Badajoz was not assaulted on Easter Sunday. 6 April was the second Monday after Easter in 1812, and no amount of imagination can change that fact.
The castle walls at Badajoz are unchanged, the only addition to the scenery is a road that passes at the foot of the casde hill. The breaches in the two bastions have been repaired and the giant ditch is now a municipal garden. The glacis is entirely gone. The approaches to the breaches, like the San Miguel Hill, have been built over. The approach to the Trinidad is hidden by nondescript buildings, and that to the Santa Maria by a modern and remarkably ugly bull-ring. The area of the central breach is still a passage through the walls, the defences between the two bastions being largely destroyed, but it is possible to climb to the bastions’ parapets and into the embrasures, and marvel at the courage of men who would attack such a place. Ciudad Rodrigo’s defences are better preserved; the breach repairs are visible above the glacis, and the marks of British cannon balls are still chipped into the church tower. The Fort of San Cristobal, across the river from Badajoz, is in almost perfect repair. The South Essex could march in tomorrow and have it set up for defence within hour. Best preserved of all are the defences of Elvas, just across the border, and all are worth visiting.
The memorial plaques in the Trinidad bastion (where the Madrid road enters Badajoz) recall the assault and sack of the city, but not that of 6 April 1812. They remember August 1936, and some inhabitants still remember the massacre which followed the assault by Franco’s troops. History has a sad way of repeating itself in Badajoz. It is not a pretty city; some people have described it as gloomy, as if the ghosts of too many battles stalk the streets, but I did not find it so. As in other places in Portugal and Spain, I met with much kindness and courtesy, and was given every help with my researches. The last words in this book can be left with a man who became accustomed to having the last word: Wellington. Writing to the War Minister, and talking of his 5000 casualties, he said: ‘The capture of Badajoz affords as strong an instance of the gallantry of our troops as has ever been displayed. But I greatly hope that I shall never again be the instrument of putting them to such a test.’
About the Author
Bernard Cornwell was born in London in 1944, raised in South Essex, and educated at Monkton Combe School and London University. He worked for BBC TV in London for seven years, mostly as a producer on the Nationwide programme, before taking charge of the Current Affairs department for BBC TV in Northern Ireland. In 1978 he became editor of Thames Television's Thames at Six.
It was the Hornblower novels by C. S. Forester that first interested Bernard Cornwell in the Napoleonic Wars, an interest he has pursued since his schooldays. In his spare time from television he did research for the Richard Sharpe novels, of which Sharpe's Company is the third. Married to an American, he now lives in Devon.
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