Sharpe’s rifles

by Bernard Cornwell

  “Difficult to do a good job in six days, sir,” Harper said wryly. “I’m sure God did his best, but where was the sense in putting Ireland plum next to England?”

  “He probably knew you bastards needed smacking around.” Sharpe turned to look south. “But how the hell do we smack this French bastard back into his tracks?”

  “If he attacks.”

  “He’ll attack. He thinks he’s better than us, and he’s damned annoyed at being tricked again. He’ll attack.”

  Sharpe walked to the southern edge of the common ground, then swivelled back to stare at the city. He was putting himself in de I’Eclin’s glossy boots, seeing what the Frenchman would see, trying to anticipate his plans.

  Vivar was certain that de l’Eclin would come from the west, that the chasseur would wait till the setting sun was a blinding dazzle behind his charge, then launch his Dragoons across the open ground.

  Yet, Sharpe reasoned, a cavalry charge was of dubious value to the French. It might sweep the Dragoons in glorious style to the city’s margin, but there the horses would baulk at walls and barricades, and the glory would be riven into blood and horror by the waiting muskets and rifles. De I’Eclin’s attack, just like Vivar’s, would best be done by infantry that could open the city to the cavalry’s fierce charge; and the best infantry approach was from the south.

  Sharpe pointed to the south-western corner of the city. “That’s where he’ll make his attack.”

  “After dark?”

  “At dusk.” Sharpe frowned. “Maybe earlier.”

  Harper followed him over a ditch and an embankment. The two Riflemen were walking towards a slew of buildings that straggled like a limb from the city’s south-western corner and which could shelter de I’Eclin’s men as they approached. “We’ll have to put men in the houses,” Harper said.

  Sharpe seemed not to hear. “I don’t like it.”

  “A thousand Dragoons? Who would?”

  “De I’Eclin’s a clever bastard.” Sharpe was half-talking to himself. “A clever, clever bloody bastard. And he’s especially clever when he’s attacking.” He turned and stared at the city’s barricaded streets. The obstacles were manned by Cazadores and by the brown-coated volunteers who were piling brushwood into fires that could illuminate a night attack. They were doing, in fact, exactly what the French had done the night before, yet surely Colonel de l’Eclin would foresee all these preparations? So what would the Frenchman do? “He’s going to be bloody clever, Sergeant, and I don’t know how clever.”

  “He can’t fly,” Harper said stoically, “and he doesn’t have time to dig a bloody tunnel, so he has to come in through one of the streets, doesn’t he?”

  The stolid good sense made Sharpe suppose he was seeing danger where there was none. Better, he thought, to rely on his first instincts. “He’ll send his cavalry on a feint there,” he pointed to the smooth western ground, “and when he thinks we’re all staring that way, he’ll send dismounted men in from the south. They’ll be ordered to break that barricade,” he pointed to the street which led from the city to the church, “and his cavalry will swerve in behind them.”

  Harper turned to judge for himself, and seemed to find Sharpe’s words convincing. “And so long as we’re on the hill or in those houses,” he nodded towards the straggling buildings that lay outside the defences, “we’ll murder the bastard.” The big Irishman picked up a sprig of laurel and twisted the pliant wood in his fingers. “But what really worries me, sir, is not holding the bastard off, but what happens when we withdraw? They’ll be flooding into those streets like devils on a spree, so they will.”

  Sharpe was also worried about that moment of retreat. Once Vivar’s business in the cathedral was done, the signal would be given and a great mass of people would flee eastwards. There would be volunteers, Riflemen, Cazadores, priests, and whatever townspeople no longer cared to stay under French occupation; all jostling and running into the darkness. Vivar had planned to have his cavalry protect the retreat, but Sharpe knew what savage chaos could overtake his men in the streets when the French Dragoons realized that barricades had been abandoned. He shrugged. “We’ll just have to run like hell.”

  “And that’s the truth,” Harper said gloomily. He tossed away the crumpled twig.

  Sharpe stared at the twisted scrap of laurel. “Good God!”

  “What have I done now?”

  “Jesus wept!” Sharpe clicked his fingers. “I want half the men in those houses,” he pointed at the line of buildings which led from the south-western barricade, and enfiladed the southern approach to the city, “and the rest on the hill.” He began running towards the city. Til be back, Sergeant!“

  “What’s up with him?” Hagman asked when the Sergeant returned to the hilltop.

  “The doxie turned him down,” Harper said with evident satisfaction, “so you owes me a shilling, Dan. She’s marrying the Major, so she is.”

  “I thought she was soft as lights on Mr Sharpe!” Hagman said ruefully.

  “She’s got more sense than to marry him. He ain’t ready for a chain and shackle, is he? She needs someone a bit steady, she does.”

  “But he was sotted on her.”

  “He would be, wouldn’t he? He’ll fall in love with anything in a petticoat. I’ve seen his type before. Got the sense of a half-witted sheep when it comes to women.” Harper spat. “It’s a good job he’s got me to look after him now.”

  “You!”

  “I can handle him, Dan. Just as I can handle you lot. Right, you Protestant scum! The French are coming for supper, so let’s be getting ready for the bastards!”

  Newly cleaned rifles pointed south and west. The green-jackets were waiting for the dusk and for the coming of a chasseur.

  The idea buzzed in Sharpe’s head as he ran uphill towards the city centre. Colonel de l’Eclin could be clever, but so could the defenders. He stopped in the main plaza and asked a Cazador where Major Vivar might be. The cavalryman pointed to the smaller northern plaza beyond the bridge which joined the bishop’s palace to the cathedral. That plaza was still crammed with people, though instead of yelling defiance at the trapped Frenchmen, the crowd was now eerily quiet. Even the bells had fallen silent.

  Sharpe elbowed his way through the crush and saw Vivar standing on a flight of steps which led to the cathedral’s northern transept. Louisa was with him. Sharpe wished she was not there. The memory of his boorish behaviour with the Spaniard embarrassed him, and he knew he should apologize, but the girl’s presence inhibited any such public repentance. Instead he shouted his idea as he forced his way up the crowded steps. “Caltrops!”

  “Caltrops?” Vivar asked. Louisa, unable to translate the unfamiliar word, shrugged.

  Sharpe had picked up two wisps of straw as he ran through the city and now, just as Harper had unwittingly twisted the laurel twig, Sharpe twisted the straw. “Caltrops! But we haven’t got much time! Can we get the blacksmiths working?”

  Vivar stared at the straw, then swore for not thinking of the idea himself. “They’ll work!” He ran down the steps.

  Louisa, left with Sharpe, looked at the twisted straw which still meant nothing to her. “Caltrops?”

  Sharpe scooped some damp mud from the instep of his left boot and rolled it into a ball. He snapped the straw into four lengths, each about three inches long, and he stuck three of them into the mud ball to form a three-pointed star. He laid the star on the flat of his hand and pushed the fourth spike into the mud ball so that it stood vertically. “A caltrop,” he said.

  Louisa shook her head. “I still don’t understand.”

  “A medieval weapon made of iron. The cleverness of it is that, whatever way it falls, there’s always a spike sticking upwards.” He demonstrated by turning the caltrop, and Louisa saw how one of the spikes, which had first formed part of the three-pointed star, now jutted upwards.

  She understood then. “Oh, no!”

  “Oh, yes!”

  “Poor horses!�
��

  “Poor us, if the horses catch us.” Sharpe crumpled the straw and mud into a ball that he tossed away. Proper caltrops, made from iron nails which would be fused and hammered in the fire, should be scattered thick on the roadways behind the retreating Riflemen. The spikes would easily pierce the soft frog tissue inside a horse’s hoof walls, and the beasts would rear, twist, plunge, and panic. “But the horses recover,” he assured Louisa, who seemed upset by the simple nastiness of the weapon.

  “How did you know about them?” she asked.

  “They were used against us in India…“ Sharpe’s voice faded away because, for the first time since he had climbed the cathedral steps, he saw why the crowd was packed so silently in the plaza.

  A rough platform had been constructed at its centre; a platform of wooden planks laid across wine vats. On it was a high-backed chair which Sharpe at first took to be a throne.

  The impression of royal ceremony was heightened by the strange procession which, flanked by red-uniformed Cazadores, approached the platform. The men in the procession were robed in sulphurous yellow and capped with red conical hats. Each carried a scrap of paper in his clasped hands. “The paper,” Louisa said quietly, “is a confession of faith. They’ve been forgiven, you see, but they must still die.”

  Sharpe understood then. The tall chair, far from being a throne, was a garotte. On its high back was a metal implement, a collar and screw, that was Spain’s preferred method of execution. It was the first such machine he had seen in Spain.

  Priests accompanied the doomed men. “They’re all anfran-cesadosj Louisa said. ”Some served as guides to French cavalry, others betrayed partisans.“

  “You intend to watch?” Sharpe sounded shocked. If Louisa blanched at the thought of pricking a horse’s hoof, how was she to bear watching a man’s neck being broken?

  “I’ve never seen an execution.”

  Sharpe glanced down at her. “And you want to?”

  “I suspect I shall be forced to see many unfamiliar things in the next years, don’t you?”

  The first man was pushed up to the platform where he was forced into the chair. The iron collar was prised around his neck. The sacrist, Father Alzaga, stood beside the executioner. ”Pax et misericordia et tranquillitas! ” He shouted the words into the victim’s ear as the executioner went behind the chair, and shouted them again as the lever which turned the screw was snatched tight. The screw constricted the collar with impressive speed so that, almost before the second Latin injunction was over, the body in the chair jerked up and slumped back. The crowd seemed to sigh.

  Louisa turned away. “I wish…“ she began, but could not finish.

  “It was very quick,” Sharpe said in wonderment.

  There was a thump as the dead body was pushed off the chair, then a scraping sound as it was dragged off the platform. Louisa, no longer watching, did not speak till after the next shout from Father Alzaga signified that another traitor had met his end. “Do you think badly of me, Lieutenant?”

  “For watching an execution?” Sharpe waited till the second body was released from the collar. “Why on earth should I? There are usually more women at a public hanging than men.”

  “I don’t mean that.”

  He looked down at her and was instantly embarrassed. “I would not think badly of you.”

  “It was that night in the fortress.” There was a plea in Louisa’s voice, as if she desperately needed Sharpe to understand what had happened. “You remember? When Don Bias showed us the gonfalon and told us the tale of the last battle? I think I was trapped then.”

  “Trapped?”

  “I like his nonsense. I was brought up to hate Catholics; to despise them for their ignorance and fear them for their malevolence, but no one ever told me of their glory!”

  “Glory?”

  “I’m bored with plain chapels.” Louisa watched the executions as she spoke, though Sharpe doubted whether she was even aware that men died on the crude scaffold. “I’m bored with being told I’m a sinner and that my salvation depends only on my own dogged repentance. I want, just once, to see the hand of God come in all its glory to touch us. I want a miracle, Lieutenant. I want to feel so very small in front of that miracle, and that doesn’t make any sense to you at all, does it?”

  Sharpe watched a man die. “You want the gonfalon.”

  “No!” Louisa was almost scornful. “I do not believe for one small second, Lieutenant, that Santiago fetched that flag from heaven. I believe the gonfalon is merely an old banner that one of Don Bias’s ancestors carried into battle. The miracle lies in what the gonfalon does, not in what it is! If we survive today, Lieutenant, then we will have achieved a miracle. But we would not have done it, nor even tried to do it, without the gonfalon!” She paused, wanting some confirmation from Sharpe, but he said nothing. She shrugged ruefully. “You still think it’s all a nonsense, don’t you?”

  Still Sharpe said nothing. For him the gonfalon, whether nonsensical or not, was an irrelevance. He had not come to Santiago de Compostela for the gonfalon. He had thought it was for this girl, but that dream was dead. Yet there was something else that had fetched him to this city. He had come to prove that a whoreson Sergeant, patted on the head by a patronizing army and made into a Quartermaster, could be as good, as God-damned bloody good, as any born officer. And that could not be proved without the help of the men in green jackets who waited for the enemy, and Sharpe was suddenly swept with an affection for those Riflemen. It was an affection he had not felt since he had been a Sergeant and had held the power of life and death over a company of redcoats.

  A scream jerked his attention back to the plaza where a recalcitrant prisoner fought against the hands which pushed him up to the platform. The man’s fight was useless. He was forced to the garotte and strapped into the chair. The iron was bent around his neck and the collar’s tongue inserted into the slot where the screw would draw it tight. Alzaga made the sign of the cross. ‘Pax et misericordia et tranquillitasr

  The prisoner’s yellow-frocked body jerked in a spasm as the collar gripped his neck to break his spine and choke the breath from him. His thin hands scrabbled at the arms of the chair, then the body slumped down. Sharpe supposed that swift death would have been the Count of Mouromorto’s fate if he had not stayed safe inside the French-held palace. “Why,” he asked Louisa suddenly, “did the Count stay in the city?”

  “I don’t know. Does it matter?”

  Sharpe shrugged. “I’ve never seen him apart from de l’Eclin before. And that Colonel is a very clever man.”

  “You’re clever, too,” Louisa said warmly. “How many soldiers know about caltrops?”

  Vivar pushed through the crowd and climbed the steps. “The forges are being heated. By six o’clock you’ll have a few hundred of the things. Where do you want them?”

  “Just send them to me,” Sharpe said.

  “When you hear the bells next ring, you’ll know the gonfalon is unfurled. That’s when you can withdraw.”

  “Make it soon!”

  “Shortly after six,” Vivar said. “It can’t be sooner. Have you seen what the French did to the cathedral?”

  “No.” But nor did Sharpe care. He only cared about a clever French Colonel, a chasseur of the Imperial Guard, then a single rifle shot sounded from the south-west, and he ran.

  Chapter 17

  The shot warned, not of de l’Eclin’s arrival, but of the approach of a Cazador patrol. Their horses were whipped to blood and lather. Vivar, who had returned with Sharpe to discover what had prompted the shot, translated the picquet’s message. “They saw French Dragoons.”

  “Where?”

  “About two leagues to the south-west.”

  “How many?”

  “Hundreds.” Vivar interpreted his patrol’s anxious report. “The Frenchmen chased them and they were lucky to escape.” He listened to more excited words. “And they saw the chasseur.” Vivar smiled. “So! We know where they are now. All w
e must do is hold them out of the city.”

  “Yes.” Somehow the news that the enemy was at last approaching served to calm Sharpe’s apprehension. Most of that nervousness had been concentrated on Colonel de PEclin’s cleverness, but the prosaic knowledge of which road the enemy was on, and how faraway his forces were, made him seem a less fearsome opponent.

  Vivar followed the tired horsemen through the gap in the barricade. “You hear the hammers?” he called back.

  “Hammers?” Sharpe frowned, then did indeed hear the echoing ring of hammers on anvils. “Caltrops?”

  Til send them to you, Lieutenant.“ Vivar started up the hill. ”Enjoy yourselves!“

  Sharpe watched the Major walk away, then, on an impulse, he threaded the barricade and followed him up the cobbled street. “Sir?”

  “Lieutenant.”

  Sharpe made certain he was out of his men’s earshot.

  “I want to apologize for what happened in the tavern, sir, I…“

  “What tavern? I haven’t been in a tavern all day. Tomorrow, maybe, when we’re safely away from these bastards, we’ll find a tavern. But today?” Vivar’s face was entirely serious. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Lieutenant.”

  “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

  “I don’t like it when you call me ”sir“,” Vivar smiled. “It/ means you’re not being belligerent. I need you belligerent, Lieutenant. I need to know Frenchmen are going to die.”

  They’ll die, sir.“

  “You’ve put men in the houses?” Vivar meant the houses which lay along the road outside the city’s perimeter.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “They can’t defend against an attack from the west there, can they?”

  “It won’t be from the west, sir. We’ll see them to the west first, but they’ll attack from the south.”

  It was plain as a pikestaff that Vivar was unhappy with Sharpe’s deployment, but he also had faith in the Rifleman’s skills and that faith made him swallow his protest. “You’re a typical British soldier,” he said instead, “talking of taverns when there’s work to do.” He laughed and turned away.