Sharpe's Escape

by Bernard Cornwell

  He looked back west, loaded the rifle with its stock half submerged in water, saw a man taking aim with his musket and fired at him. The voltigeurs were at last realizing that they were fighting a cruelly unequal battle and they were running back out of the rifles' range, but the cavalry, farther away, saw only a scatter of red coats and a group of the horsemen turned, drove back their spurs, and burst past the retreating voltigeurs. "Back," Sharpe called, "gently back. And edge left!" He was taking his men closer to the square now, wading through water a foot deep. He still had to cross the stream, but so did the cavalry, and those Frenchmen seemed oblivious of the flooded obstacle. Perhaps they thought the sheet of water was all one depth, just a foot or so deep, and so they lowered their sabers, spurred their horses into a canter and rode for the kill. "Wait till they're floundering," Sharpe said, "then kill them."

  The front rank splashed into the flooded land on the opposite bank, then one horse went down into the stream, pitching its rider over its head. The other horses slowed, struggling now to find their footing, and

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  Sharpe shouted at his men to open fire. A hussar, his pigtails hanging either side of his sunburned face, snarled as he wrenched at his reins and tried to force his horse on through the stream and Sharpe put a bullet straight through the sky-blue jacket. A shell exploded in the second rank of horsemen who had pulled up when they saw the first check. Sharpe reloaded, glanced around to make sure none of the voltigeurs from the farm were coming through the swampy ground, then shot a dragoon. This was easy killing and the horsemen understood it and turned their horses and raked back their spurs so that they struggled back to the firmer ground, still pursued by rifle fire.

  And there was more rifle fire now, a storm of it from the far side of the South Essex where the cazadores had come to the redcoats' aid and were driving the voltigeurs back, then the north side of the square exploded into smoke as two companies fired a volley into the flank of the horsemen who were spurring away to safety. Sharpe slung his rifle on his shoulder. "Not a bad day's work, Pat," he said, then nodded at the lone cavalry horse that had crossed the stream and marooned itself in the marsh. "They still pay a reward for enemy horses, don't they? He's all yours, Sergeant."

  The cavalry were no longer threatening and so the South Essex deployed into a four-rank line, twice as thick as they would use on a normal battlefield, but safer in case any of the hussars or dragoons decided to try one last attack. That was unlikely for there were Portuguese cazadores on the battalion's left flank now, and empty marshland on their right, while the French, harassed by the cannon fire, were retreating across the valley. Best of all the light company was back.

  "It went well," Lawford said. He had mounted the horse Harper had brought to the battalion. "Very well."

  "A nervous moment or two," Major Forrest said.

  "Nervous?" Lawford said in a surprised tone. "Of course not! Everything went exactly as I thought. Quite exactly as I thought. Pity about Lightning, though." He looked with disgust at his brother-in-law who, plainly drunk, was sitting behind the color party, then he took off his hat as Sharpe walked down the line. "Mister Sharpe! That was very pretty what you did to those voltigeurs, very pretty. Thank you, my dear fellow."

  Sharpe changed jackets with Bullen, then looked up at Lawford who was beaming with happiness. "Permission to rescue our wounded from the farm, sir," Sharpe said, "before I return to duty."

  Lawford looked puzzled. "Rescuing the wounded is part of your duty, isn't it?"

  "I mean being quartermaster, sir."

  Lawford leaned from his captured saddle. "Mister Sharpe," he said softly.

  "Sir?"

  "Stop being bloody tedious."

  "Yes, sir."

  "And I'm supposed to send you to Pero Negro after this," the Colonel went on and, seeing Sharpe did not understand, added, "to headquarters. It seems the General wants a word with you."

  "Send Mister Vicente, sir," Sharpe said, "and the prisoner. Between them they can tell the General everything he needs to know."

  "And you can tell me," Lawford said, watching the French go back into the far hills.

  "Nothing to tell, sir," Sharpe said.

  "Nothing to tell! Good God, you've been absent for two weeks and you've nothing to tell?"

  "Just got lost, sir, looking for the turpentine. Very sorry, sir."

  "You just got lost," Lawford said flatly, then he looked at Sarah and Joana who were in muddy breeches and had muskets. Lawford looked as if he was about to say something about the women, then shook his head and turned back to Sharpe. "Nothing to tell, eh?"

  "We got away, sir," Sharpe said, "that's all that matters. We got away." And they had. It had been Sharpe's escape.

  Historical Note

  The French invasion of Portugal in the late summer of 1810 was defeated by hunger, and it marked the last time that the French tried to capture the country. Wellington, by now commander of both the Portuguese and the British armies, adopted a scorched earth policy that brought huge hardship to the Portuguese people. Attempts were made to deny the invaders every scrap of food, while the inhabitants of central Portugal were required to leave their homes, either to take to the hills, go north to Oporto or south to Lisbon, which was to be defended by the extraordinary Lines of Torres Vedras.

  The strategy worked, but at a very high price. One estimate reckons that forty to fifty thousand Portuguese lost their lives in the winter of 1811-1812, most from hunger, some from the French, but an appalling figure, amounting to about 2 per cent of the then Portuguese population. It was, by any reckoning, a hard-hearted strategy, throwing the burden of the war onto the civilian population. Was it necessary? Wellington conclusively defeated Massena on the heights of Bussaco, and had he guarded the road around the north of the great ridge, he could probably have repulsed the French there and then, forcing them back to Ciudad Rodrigo across the Spanish border, but that, of course, would have left Massena's army relatively undamaged. Hunger and disease were much greater enemies than redcoats and riflemen, and by forcing Massena to spend the winter in the wasteland north of the lines, Wellington destroyed his enemy's army. At the beginning of the campaign, in September 1810, Massena commanded 65,000 men. When he got back to Spain he had fewer than 40,000, and had lost half his horses and virtually all his wheeled transport. Of the 25,000 men he lost, only about 4,000 were killed, wounded or taken prisoner at Bussaco (British losses were about 1,000); the rest were lost because the Lines of Torres Vedras condemned Massena to a winter of hunger, disease and desertion.

  So why fight at Bussaco if the Lines of Torres Vedras could do the job better? Wellington fought there for the sake of morale. The Portuguese army did not have a sterling record against the French, but it was now reorganized and under Wellington's command and, by giving it a victory on the ridge, he gave that army a confidence it never lost. Bussaco was the place where the Portuguese learned they could beat the French and, rightly, it holds a celebrated place in Portuguese history.

  The ridge is heavily forested now, so that it is difficult to imagine how any battle could have been fought up its eastern face, but photographs taken in 1910 show the ridge as almost entirely bare, and contemporary accounts suggest that was how it was a hundred years earlier. Those photographs can be seen in the splendid book, Bussaco 1810, by Rene Chartrand, published by Osprey. In most books about the battle the monastery on the reverse slope is referred to as a convent, a word which properly can be applied to communities of either monks or nuns, but common usage restricts it to nuns, and I have seen the building at Bussaco called the Convento dos Carmelitas Descalgos and the Mosteiro dos Carmelitas, so I refer to it as a monastery to avoid giving the impression that nuns were present. It was occupied by the Barefoot Carmelites until 1834 when the Portuguese monasteries were dissolved. It still exists, as do the clay stations of the cross in their brick housings, and all can be visited. A massive hotel, built in the early twentieth century as a royal palace, n
ow stands next to the monastery.

  Massena was indeed twenty-two miles behind Bussaco on the eve of the battle. He had visited Bussaco briefly, then returned to his eighteen-year-old mistress, Henriette Leberton, and Ney's aide, D'Esmenard, was forced to hold a conversation through their closed bedroom door. Massena managed to tear himself from Henriette's arms and rode back to Bussaco where he decided against any kind of reconnaissance and simply launched his troops into their attack. It was a foolhardy decision, for the ridge at Bussaco is a formidable position. Some of his generals advised against an attack, but Massena was confident his troops could break the British and Portuguese line. It was an error born of over-confidence and, though the French columns did reach the crest as described in the novel, they were pinched off and defeated.

  The French sack of Coimbra was every bit as nasty as its depiction in Sharpe's Escape. The first troops into the city were new conscripts, ill trained and undisciplined, and they ran wild. The city had 40,000 inhabitants at the beginning of the campaign, and at least half had decided not to retreat towards Lisbon, and of those that remained about a thousand were murdered by the occupiers. The university was plundered, the royal tombs in Santa Cruz opened and defiled, and, though the hungry French discovered plenty of food in the city, they managed to destroy most of it. Warehouses of supplies were put to the torch so that when Massena's army marched south they were as hungry as when they arrived.

  Massena left his wounded in Coimbra under a totally inadequate guard. Their hold on the city lasted just four days after which Colonel Trant, a British officer leading Portuguese militia, captured Coimbra from the north and, having endured some difficulties protecting his new prisoners from the vengeance of the city's inhabitants, managed to march or carry them north to Oporto.

  Massena, meanwhile, had encountered the Lines of Torres Vedras and was astonished by them. Wellington and his chief engineer, Colonel Fletcher, had somehow managed to keep the massive construction project a secret (even from the British and Portuguese governments), and though Massena had heard rumors about a line of forts, he was in no way prepared for the actuality. The lines comprised 152 defensive works (bastions or forts), mounting 534 cannon, and covering 52 miles of ground. The first two lines barred the French from approaching Lisbon, the third, far to the south, enclosed an emergency enclave into which Wellington could withdraw his troops if it became necessary to embark his army. A French officer said of the first two lines that they "were of such an extraordinary nature that I daresay there was no other position in the world that could be compared to them." Another Frenchman, a hussar officer, put it more graphically: "before them was a wall of brass and behind them a region of famine." Massena stared at the lines through a glass and was driven off by a cannon shot, to which he responded by taking off his hat, which was polite of him, but in truth he was furious that he had not been warned of the new fortifications. It seems extraordinary that he had not heard of them, but they remained a secret. Thousands of men had worked on constructing the defenses, and thousands of others had passed the lines as they used the roads going through the works, yet the French were utterly surprised by them. Massena made no serious attempt to breach them, indeed the only fighting at the lines themselves was a scrappy battle between two sets of skirmishers which took place at Sobral on 12 October, the day after the first French troops reached the lines. The fight at the end of Sharpe's Escape is loosely based on that fight, but I confess the operative word is loosely because I moved it the best part of twenty miles to put it nearer the Tagus and gave it to Sir Thomas Picton who was nowhere near Sobral.

  Most of the 152 forts of the lines are still in existence, but many of them are so ruined and overgrown that they are not easily found. If the only chance of seeing them is a very swift visit then that should probably be to the town of Torres Vedras itself where, just to the north, the Fort of Saint Vincent has been restored. A longer visit should rely (as should any visit to a Peninsular battlefield) on Julian Paget's superb guide, Wellington's Peninsular War (Leo Cooper, London, 1990).

  Massena stayed in Portugal much longer than Wellington had hoped. The attempt to strip central Portugal of food never really worked, and the French discovered enough supplies to keep them well fed through October. They repaired the windmills and rebuilt the ovens, but by November they were on half rations, and then they were besieged by a winter that was unusually cold and wet. They left Torres Vedras in mid-November and retreated to where they hoped more food would be available, and somehow they lasted in Portugal until March when, hungry, dispirited and unsuccessful, they went back to their depots in Spain. It had been a bitter defeat for Massena.

  John Grehan's book, The Lines of Torres Vedras, published by Spellmount in 2000, was invaluable in writing Sharpe's Escape. It contains by far the best description of the lines themselves, but much more besides, including a gripping account of the battle of Bussaco, and I am indebted to it, though any mistakes are, of course, mine. Sharpe and Harper will march again.