Sharpe's Battle

by Bernard Cornwell

  "Let him die hard," Loup said. "He deserves it."

  Some of the survivors of Oliveira's battalion opened a galling rifle fire from the walls and Loup wheeled away from it. "Dragoons! Dismount!" He would let his dismounted cavalry hunt down the defiant survivors while his infantry dealt with the Real Companïa Irlandesa and the riflemen who seemed to have taken refuge in the barracks buildings. That was a pity. Loup had hoped that his advance guard would have trapped Sharpe and his damned greenjackets in the magazine, and that by now Loup would have had the pleasure of meting out an exquisitely painful revenge for the two men Sharpe had killed, but instead the rifleman had temporarily escaped and would need to be dug out of the barracks like a fox being unearthed at the end of a day's good run. Loup tilted his watch's face to the moon as he tried to work out just how much time he had left to break the barracks apart.

  "Monsieur!" a voice shouted as the Brigadier closed his watch and slid out of his saddle. "Monsieur!"

  Loup turned to see a thin-faced and angry Portuguese officer in the firm grip of a tall French corporal. "Monsieur?" Loup responded politely.

  "My name is Colonel Oliveira, and I must protest, monsieur. My men are surrendering and your men are killing still! We are your prisoners!"

  Loup fished a cigar from his sabretache and stooped to a dying fire to find an ember that would serve to light the tobacco. "Good soldiers don't surrender," he said to Oliveira, "they just die."

  "But we are surrendering," Oliveira insisted bitterly. "Take my sword."

  Loup straightened, sucked on the cigar and nodded to the Corporal. "Let him go, Jean."

  Oliveira shook himself free of the Corporal's grip. "I must protest, monsieur," he said angrily. "Your soldiers are killing men who have their hands raised."

  Loup shrugged. "Terrible things happen in war, Colonel. Now give me your sword."

  Oliveira drew his sabre, reversed the blade and held the hilt towards the hard-faced dragoon. "I am your prisoner, monsieur," he said in a voice thickened by shame and anger.

  "You hear that!" Loup shouted so that all his men could hear. "They have surrendered! They are our prisoners! See? I have their Colonel's sabre!" He took the sabre from Oliveira and flourished it in the smoky air. Gallantry insisted he should now give the weapon back to his defeated enemy on a promise of parole, but instead Loup hefted the blade as though judging its effectiveness. "A passable weapon," he said grudgingly, then looked into

  Oliveira's eyes. "Where are your colours, Colonel?"

  "We destroyed them," Oliveira said defiantly. "We burned them."

  The sabre slashed silver in the moonlight and blood seeped black from the slash on Oliveira's face where the steel had sliced across his left eye and his nose. "I don't believe you," Loup said, then waited until the shocked and bleeding Colonel had recovered his wits. "Where are your colours, Colonel?"

  Loup asked again.

  "Go to hell," Oliveira said. "You and your filthy country." He had one hand pressed over his wounded eye.

  Loup tossed the sabre to the Corporal. "Find out where the colours are, Jean, then kill the fool. Cut him if he won't tell you. A man usually loosens his tongue to keep his balls screwed on tight. And the rest of you," he shouted at his men who had paused to watch the confrontation between the two commanding officers, "this isn't a damned harvest festival, it's a battle. So start doing your job! Kill the bastards!"

  The screams began again. Loup drew on his cigar, brushed his hands and walked towards the barracks.

  The Dona Juanita's hounds began to howl. The sound set more children crying, but one glance from Sharpe was enough to make the mothers quell their infants' misery. A horse whinnied. Through one of the loopholes Sharpe could see that the French were leading away the horses captured from the Portuguese officers.

  He assumed the Irish company's horses had already been taken away. It had gone quiet in the barracks. Most of the French attackers had pursued the

  Portuguese, leaving just enough infantrymen behind to keep the trapped men blocked inside the barracks. Every few seconds a musket ball cracked against the stone, a reminder to Sharpe and his men that the French were still watching every blocked-up door and window.

  "Bastards will have captured poor old Runcibubble," Hagman said. "I can't see the General living on prisoners' rations."

  "Runciman's an officer, Dan," Cooper said. Cooper was aiming his rifle through one of the loopholes, stalking a target. "He won't live on rations. He'll give his parole and be feeding on proper Frog victuals. He'll get even fatter. Got you, you bastard." He pulled his trigger, then slid the rifle inside to let another man take his place. Sharpe suspected that the erstwhile Wagon Master

  General would be lucky to be a prisoner because if Loup was fighting true to his reputation then it was more likely that Runciman was lying slaughtered in his bed with his flannel nightdress and tasselled woollen cap soaked in blood.

  "Captain Sharpe, sir!" Harper called from the far end of the block. "Here, sir!"

  Sharpe worked his way between the straw mattresses that lay on the beaten earth floor. The air inside the blocked-up barracks was fetid and the few wicks still alight were guttering. A woman spat as Sharpe went by and Sharpe turned on her. "You'd rather be out there being raped, you stupid bitch? I'll bloody well throw you out, if that's what you want."

  "No, señor," she shrank away from his anger.

  The woman's husband, crouching at a loophole, tried to apologize for his wife.

  "It's just that the women are frightened, sir."

  "So are we. Anyone but a fool would be frightened, but that doesn't mean you lose your manners." Sharpe hurried on to where Harper was kneeling beside the pile of straw-filled sacks that had served as mattresses and which now blocked the door.

  "There's a man calling you, sir," Harper said. "I think it's Captain Donaju."

  Sharpe crouched near the loophole next to the barricaded door. "Donaju! Is that you?"

  "I'm in the men's barracks, Sharpe. Just to let you know that we're all well."

  "How did you escape the gatehouse?"

  "Through the door to the ramparts. There's half a dozen officers here."

  "Is Kiely with you?"

  "No. Don't know what's happened to him."

  And Sharpe did not much care. "Is Sarsfield there?" he asked Donaju.

  "Fraid not," Donaju answered.

  "Keep the faith, Donaju!" Sharpe called. "These buggers will be gone at first light!" He felt oddly relieved that Donaju had taken over the defence of the other barracks, for Donaju, for all his shy and retiring appearance, was proving to be a very good soldier. "Pity about Father Sarsfield," Sharpe said to Harper.

  "He'll have gone straight to heaven, that one," Harper said. "Not many priests you can say that about. Most of them are proper devils for whiskey, women or boys, but Sarsfield, he was a good man, a real good man." The firing at the northern end of the fort died away and Harper crossed himself. "Pity about the poor Portuguese bastards too," he said, realizing what the lull in the sound of fighting meant.

  Poor Tom Garrard, Sharpe thought. Unless Garrard lived? Tom Garrard had always had a charmed life. He and Sharpe had crouched in the fiery red dust of

  Gawilghur's breach as blood from their comrades' corpses trickled past like rivulets flowing down a rockfall. Sergeant Hakes will had been there, gibbering like a monkey as he tried to hide under a drummer boy's corpse. Damn

  Obadiah Hakeswill, who had also claimed to bear a charmed life, though Sharpe could not believe the bastard still lived. Dead of the pox, like as not, or, if there was even a trace of justice in a bad world, gutted by the bullets of a firing squad. "Watch the roof," Sharpe said to Harper. The barracks roof was a continuous arch of masonry designed to resist the fall of an enemy mortar shell, but time and neglect had weakened the tough construction. "They'll find a weak spot," Sharpe said, "and try and break through to us." And it would be soon, he thought to himself, for the heavy silence in the fort betrayed that />
  Loup had finished off Oliveira and would now be coming for his real prize,

  Sharpe. The next hour promised to be grim. Sharpe raised his voice as he walked back to the other end of the room. "When the attack comes just keep firing! Don't aim, don't wait, just fire and make room at your loophole for another man. They're going to reach the barracks walls, we can't stop that, and they're going to try to break open the roof, so keep a good ear above you.

  Soon as you see starlight, fire. And remember, it'll be light soon and they won't stay after sunrise. They'll be feared that our cavalry will cut off their retreat. Now, good luck, boys."

  "And God bless you all," Harper added from the gloom at the far end of the room.

  The attack came with a roar like a rush of water released by lifting a sluice gate. Loup had massed his men in the cover of some nearby barracks, then released them in a desperate charge against the two barracks' north-facing walls. The rush was designed to carry the French infantry fast across the dangerous patch of ground covered by Sharpe's muskets and rifles. Those guns cracked to fill the barracks with yet more filthy smoke, but the third or fourth shot from each loophole sounded perversely loud and suddenly a man reeled back cursing from his musket's wrist-shattering recoil. "They're blocking the holes!" another man called.

  Sharpe ran to the nearest loophole on the north wall and rammed his rifle into the hole. The muzzle cracked on stone. The French were holding masonry blocks against the loophole's outer opening, effectively ending Sharpe's fire. More

  Frenchmen were climbing onto the roof where their boots made a muffled, scraping sound like rats in an attic. "Jesus Christ!" A man stared wanly upwards. "Mary, Mother of God," he began to pray in a wailing voice.

  "Shut up!" Sharpe snapped. He could hear the ringing noise of metal working on stone. How long before the roof collapsed and let in a flood of vengeful

  Frenchmen? Inside the barracks a hundred pale faces stared at Sharpe, willing an answer he did not possess.

  Harper came up with the solution instead. He clambered up on the monstrous pile of straw-filled sacks by the door so that he could reach the topmost point of the end wall where a small hole served as a chimney and ventilator.

  The hole was too high for the French to block, and high enough to give Harper a clear shot along the roofline of Donaju's barracks. The bullets would be rising and so would be more of a threat to those Frenchmen nearest Harper, but if he could fire enough bullets he could at least slow down the assault on

  Donaju and pray that Donaju would return the compliment.

  Harper opened with his seven-barrelled gun. The crash echoed through the barracks with the sound of a thirty-two-pounder cannon. A scream answered the blast that had whipped like canister shot across the other roof. Now, one by one, muskets and rifles were handed up to the big Sergeant who fired again and again, not bothering to aim, but just cracking the bullets into the grey mass that swarmed on the neighbouring roof. After a half-dozen shots the mass began to shred as men sought shelter on the ground. The answering fire smacked all around Harper's loophole, creating more dust than danger. Perkins had reloaded the volley gun and Harper now fired it again just as a musket flashed from the equivalent venthole in Donaju's barracks. Sharpe heard a scraping sound above him as a Frenchman's boots slid down the outer curve to the wall's base.

  A man screamed in the barracks as he was hurled backwards by a musket ball.

  The French were randomly unmasking the loopholes and firing into the room where the wives and children crouched and whimpered. The besieged huddled away from the loopholes' lines of fire, the only defence they had. Harper kept firing while a group of men and women loaded for him, but most of the barracks' occupants could only wait in the smoky gloom and pray. The noise was hellish: a banging, ringing, scraping cacophony, and always, like an eerie promise of the horrid death that defeat promised, the feral wolf howl of

  Loup's men all around the barracks.

  Dust sifted down from a patch of the ceiling. Sharpe moved everyone away from the threatened area, then ringed it with men armed with loaded muskets. "If a stone falls," he told them, "shoot like hell and keep shooting." The air was difficult to breathe. It was filled with dust, smoke and the stench of urine.

  The cheap rushlight candles were guttering. Children were crying throughout the length of the barracks now and Sharpe could not stop them. Women were crying too, while muffled French voices mocked their victims, doubtless promising that they would give the women something better than mere smoke to cry about.

  Hagman coughed, then spat onto the floor. "Like a coal mine, it is," he said.

  "You ever been in a coal mine, Dan?" Sharpe asked.

  "I was a year down a mine in Derbyshire," Hagman said, then flinched as a musket flash speared through a nearby loophole. The ball spread itself harmlessly on the opposite wall. "I was just a littl'un," Hagman went on. "If my dad hadn't gone and died and my mam moved back to her sister's in

  Handbridge I'd be there still. Or more likely dead. Only the luckiest see their thirtieth birthday down the mines." He shuddered as a huge, rhythmic crashing began to reverberate through the tunnel-like barracks. Either the

  French had brought a sledgehammer, or else they were using a boulder like a battering ram. "Like the little pigs in the house, aren't we," Hagman said in the echoing dark, "with the big bad wolf huffing and puffing outside?"

  Sharpe gripped his rifle. He was sweating, and his rifle's stock felt greasy.

  "When I was a child," he said, "I never believed the pigs could really see off the wolf."

  "Pigs don't, as a rule," Hagman said grimly. "If the bastards go on banging like that they'll give me a headache."

  "Dawn can't be far off," Sharpe said, though whether Loup would truly withdraw in the first light, Sharpe did not know. He had told his men that the French would go at dawn to give them hope, but maybe there was no hope. Maybe they were all condemned to die in a wretched fight in the scrabbling ruins of an abandoned barracks where they would be bayoneted and shot by an elite French brigade who had come to destroy this scratch force of unhappy Irishmen.

  "Mind out!" a man called. More dust streamed down from the ceiling. So far the old barracks had stood the assault astonishingly well, but the first breach in the masonry was imminent.

  "Hold your fire!" Sharpe ordered. "Wait till they break through!"

  A huddle of kneeling women were telling their beads, rocking back and forth on their knees as they said the Hail Mary. Nearby a circle of men waited with expectant faces, muskets aimed up at the threatened patch of ceiling. Behind them an outer ring of men waited with more loaded guns.

  "I hated the coal mine," Hagman said. "I was always frightened from the moment

  I went down the shaft. Men used to die there for no reason. None at all! We'd just find them dead, peaceful as you like, sleeping like babes. I used to think the devils came from the earth's centre to take their souls."

  A woman screamed as a masonry block in the ceiling jarred and threatened to fall. "At least you didn't have screaming women in the mines," Sharpe said to

  Hagman.

  "But we did, sir. Some worked with us and some were ladies working for themselves, if you follow my meaning. There was one called Dwarf Babs, I remember. A penny a time, she charged. She'd sing to us every Sunday. Maybe a psalm or perhaps one of Mr Wesley's hymns. "Hide me, O my Saviour, hide, till the storm of life be past"." Hagman grinned in the sultry dark. "Maybe Mr

  Wesley had some trouble with the Frenchies, sir? Sounds like it. Do you know

  Mr Wesley's hymns, sir?" he asked Sharpe.

  "I was never one for church, Dan."

  "Dwarf Babs wasn't exactly church, sir."

  "But she was your first woman?" Sharpe guessed. In the dark Hagman blushed.

  "And she didn't even charge me."

  "Good for Dwarf Babs," Sharpe said, then raised his rifle as, at last, a section of the roof gave way and crashed to the floor in a welter of dust, scre
ams and noise. The ragged hole was two or three feet across and obscured by dust beyond which the wraith-like shapes of French soldiers loomed like giants. "Fire!" Sharpe yelled. The ring of muskets blazed, followed, a second later, by the second ring of guns as more men fired into the void. The French reply was oddly muted, almost as if the attackers had been surprised by the amount of musket fire that now poured up from the newly opened vent. Men and women reloaded frantically and passed the newly charged guns forward, and the

  French, driven from the hole's edge by the sheer volume of fire, began hurling rocks into the barracks. The stones crashed harmlessly onto the floor. "Block the loopholes!" Sharpe ordered, and men rammed the French-delivered stones into the loopholes to stop the intermittent bullets. Better still the air began to feel fresh. Even the candle flames took on new life and glowed into the darker recesses of the packed, fearful barracks.