Sharpe's Battle

by Bernard Cornwell

  "What will the court do to you?"

  "Christ knows. At worst? Order a court martial and have me thrown out of the army. At best? Break me down to lieutenant. But that'll be the end of me.

  They'll make me a storekeeper again, then put me in charge of bloody lists at some bloody depot where I can drink myself to death."

  "But they have to prove you shot those buggers! God save Ireland, but none of us will say a word. Jesus, I'd kill anyone who said different!"

  "But there are others, Pat. Runciman and Sarsfield."

  "They won't say a word, sir."

  "May be too late anyway. General bloody Valverde knows, and that's all that matters. He's got his knife stuck into me and there's bugger all I can do about it."

  "Could shoot the bastard," Harper said.

  "You won't catch him alone," Sharpe said. He had dreamed of shooting Valverde, but doubted he would have the opportunity. "And Hogan says that bloody Loup might even send an official complaint!"

  "It isn't fair, sir," Harper complained.

  "No, Pat, it isn't, but it hasn't happened yet, and Loup might walk into a cannon ball today. But not a word to anyone, Pat. I don't want half the bloody army discussing it."

  "I'll keep quiet, sir," Harper promised, though he could not imagine the news not getting round the army, nor could he imagine how anyone would think justice might be served by sacrificing an officer for shooting two French bastards. He followed Sharpe between two parked wagons and a brigade of seated infantry. Sharpe recognized the pale-green facings of the 24th, a Warwickshire regiment, while beyond them were the kilted and bonneted Highlanders of the

  79th. The Highlanders' pipers were playing a wild tune to the tattoo of drums, trying to rival the deeper percussive blasts of the French cannonade. Sharpe guessed the two battalions formed the reserve poised to go down into Fuentes de Onoro's streets if the French looked like capturing the village. A third battalion was just joining the reserve brigade as Sharpe turned towards the sound of breaking tiles and cracking stone.

  "Right, down here," Sharpe said. He had spotted a track that led beside the graveyard's southern wall. It was a precipitous track, probably made by goats, and the two men had to use their hands to steady themselves on the steep top portion of the slope, then they ran down the last few yards to the scanty cover of an alleyway where they were greeted by the sudden appearance of a nervous redcoat who came round the corner with levelled musket. "Hold your fire, lad!" Sharpe called. "Anyone who comes down here is probably on your side, and if they're not you're in trouble."

  "Sorry, sir," the boy said, then ducked as a scrap of tile whistled overhead.

  "They're a bit lively, sir," he added.

  "Time to worry, lad, is when they stop firing," Sharpe said, "because that means the infantry are on their way. Who's in charge here?"

  "Don't know, sir. Unless it's Sergeant Patterson."

  "I doubt it, lad, but thanks anyway." Sharpe ran from the alley's end, turned down a side street, dodged right into another street, jumped down a steep flight of stone stairs littered with broken tiles and so found himself in the main street which ran down the hill in a series of sharp twists. A roundshot hit the street's centre just as he ducked down beside a dungheap. The ball ploughed up a patch of stone and earth, then bounced to smash into a reed- thatched cattle byre as another roundshot splayed apart some roof beams across the street. Still more shots crashed home as the French gunners put in a sudden energetic spell. Sharpe and Harper took temporary cover in a doorway that bore the fading chalk marks from both armies' billeting officers; one mark read 5/4/60 meaning that five men of number four company of the 60th

  Rifles had been billeted in the tiny cottage, while just above it was a legend saying that seven Frenchmen, the mark carried the enemy's strange cross-bar on the shank of the 7, of the Sand of the Line had once been posted to the house that now lacked its roof. Dust drifted like mist in what had been the front room where a torn sacking curtain fluttered forlornly at a window. The village's inhabitants and their belongings had been carried in army wagons to the nearby town of Frenada, but inevitably some of the villagers' possessions had been left behind. One doorway was barricaded with a child's cot while another had a pair of benches as a firestep. A mixture of riflemen and redcoats garrisoned the town and they were sheltering from the cannonade by crouching behind the thickest walls of the deserted houses. The stone walls could not stop every French roundshot and Sharpe had already passed three dead men put out in the street and seen a half-dozen wounded men making their slow way back up towards the ridge. "What unit are you?" he called to a sergeant sheltering behind the cot across the street.

  "Third Division Light Companies, sir!" the sergeant called back.

  "And the First Division!" another voice chimed in. "Don't forget the First

  Division!"

  It seemed the army had collected the cream of two divisions, their skirmishers, and put them into Fuentes de Onoro. Skirmishers were the brightest men, the ones trained to fight independently, and this village was no place for men who could only stand in the battle line and fire volleys.

  This was going to be a place of sharpshooting and street brawls, a place where men would be separated from their officers and forced to fight without orders.

  "Who's in charge of you all?" Sharpe asked the sergeant.

  "Colonel Williams of the 60th, sir. Down there, in the inn."

  "Thanks!" Sharpe and Harper edged down the side of the street. A roundshot rumbled overhead to drive into a roof. A scream sounded, then was cut off. The inn was the very same tavern where Sharpe had first met El Castrador and where now, in the same garden with the half-severed vine, he found Colonel Williams and his small staff.

  "It's Sharpe, isn't it? Come to help us?" Williams was a genial Welshman from the 60th Rifles. "Don't know you," he said to Harper.

  "Sergeant Harper, sir."

  "You look handy to have in a scrap, Sergeant," Williams said. "Damned noisy today, eh?" he added in mild complaint of the cannonade. He was standing on a bench that gave him a view over the garden wall and the roofs of the lower houses. "So what brings you here, Sharpe?"

  "I'm just making sure we know where to deliver ammunition, sir."

  Williams offered Sharpe an owlish gaze of surprise. "Got you fetching and carrying, have they? Seems a waste of time for a man of your talents, Sharpe.

  And I don't think you'll find much custom here. My boys are all well supplied.

  Eighty rounds a man, two thousand men, and as many cartridges again stacked up in the church. Sweet Jesus!" This last imprecation was caused by a round-shot that must have gone within two feet of the Colonel's head, forcing him to duck hard down. It crashed into a house, there was a tumble of falling stone and then, quite suddenly, silence.

  Sharpe tensed. The silence, after the crash of the guns and the splintering thunder of the roundshots' destructive impacts, was unnerving. Maybe, he thought, it was just a strange pause, like the sudden coincidental silence that could descend on a room of lively talkers during that moment when an angel was said to be passing over the room, and maybe an angel had flickered across the gunsmoke and all the French cannon had found themselves momentarily unloaded. Sharpe almost found himself praying for the guns to start again, but the silence stretched and stretched, threatening to be replaced by something much worse than a cannonade. Somewhere in the village a man coughed and a musket lock clicked. A horse whinnied up on the ridge where the pipes played.

  Rubble fell in a house where a wounded man whimpered. Out in the street a spent French cannon ball rolled gently downhill, then lodged against a fallen beam.

  "I suspect we'll have company soon, gentlemen," Williams said. He climbed down from the bench and brushed white dust from his faded green jacket. "Very soon.

  Can't see a thing from here. Gunsmoke, you see. Worse than fog." He was talking to fill the ominous silence. "Down to the stream, I think. Not that we can hold them there, not enough loopholes, but
once they're in the village they'll find life a bit difficult. At least I hope so." He nodded agreeably to

  Sharpe, then ducked out of the door. His staff ran after him.

  "We're not staying here, are we, sir?" Harper asked.

  "Might as well see what's happening," Sharpe said. "Got nothing better to do.

  Are you loaded?"

  "Just the rifle."

  "I'd have the volley gun ready," Sharpe said. "Just in case." He began loading his own rifle just as the British guns on the ridge opened fire. Their smoke jetted sixty feet out from the crest and their noise punched at the wounded village as the shots screamed overhead towards the advancing French battalions.

  Sharpe stood on the bench to see the dark columns of infantry emerging from the French gunsmoke. The first British case shot exploded above and ahead of the columns, each explosion staining the air with a smear of grey-white smoke riven with fire. Solid shots seared into the massed ranks, but none of the missiles seemed to make an ounce of difference. The columns kept coming: twelve thousand men under their eagles being drummed across the flat land towards the hammering artillery and the waiting muskets and the primed rifles beyond the stream. Sharpe looked left and right, but saw no other enemies apart from a handful of green-coated dragoons patrolling the southern fields.

  "They're coming straight in," he said, "no messing. One attack, Pat, hard at the village. No buggering round the edge yet. Looks like they think they can come straight through here. There'll be more brigades behind, and they'll throw them in one after the other till they get the church. After that it's downhill all the way to the Atlantic, so if we don't stop them here we'll not stop them anywhere."

  "Well, as you say, sir, we've got nothing better to do." Harper finished loading his seven-barrelled gun, then picked up a small rag doll that had been discarded under the garden bench. The doll had a red torso on which a mother had stitched a white crossbelt to imitate a British infantryman's uniform.

  Harper propped the doll in a niche in the wall. "You keep guard now," he said to the rag bundle.

  Sharpe half drew his sword and tested the edge. "Didn't get it sharpened," he said. Before a battle he liked to have the big blade professionally honed by a cavalry armourer, but there had been no time. He hoped it was not an omen.

  "You'll just have to bludgeon the bastards to death then," Harper said, then crossed himself before reaching into his pocket to make sure his rabbit's foot was in its proper place. He looked back to the rag doll and was suddenly overwhelmed by a certainty that his own fate hung on the doll surviving in the wall's niche. "You take care now," he told the doll, then gave fate a nudge by jamming a scrap of stone across the niche's face to try and imprison the small rag toy.

  A crackling sound like the tearing of calico announced that the British skirmishers had opened fire. The French voltigeurs had been advancing a hundred paces in front of their columns, but now were stopped by the fire of the riflemen concealed among the gardens and hovels on the stream's far bank.

  For a few minutes the skirmish fire stuttered loud, then the outnumbering voltigeurs threatened to surround the British skirmishers and the whistles of the officers and sergeants sounded shrilly to call the greenjackets back through the gardens. Two riflemen were limping, a third was being carried by two of his comrades, but most splashed unscathed through the stream and up into the labyrinthine maze of cottages and alleys.

  The French voltigeurs crouched behind the garden walls on the stream's far bank and began trading fire with the village's defenders. The stream became fogged with a lacy veil of powder smoke that drifted south in the day's small wind. Sharpe and Harper, still waiting in the inn, could hear the French drummers sounding the pas de charge, the rhythm that had driven Napoleon's veterans over half Europe to fell their enemies like ninepins. The drums suddenly paused and both Sharpe and Harper instinctively mouthed the words along with twelve thousand Frenchmen, "Vive l'Empereur." Both men laughed as the drums started again.

  The guns on the ridge had abandoned the case shot and were smashing roundshot down into the columns and now that the enemy's main formations were almost at the village's eastern gardens Sharpe could see the damage being done by the iron balls as they slashed through file and rank to fling men aside like bloody rags before bouncing in sprays of misted blood to smash into yet more ranks of men. Again and again the missiles lanced through the massed files, yet again and again, doggedly, unstoppably, the French closed up their ranks and kept on coming. The drummers beat on, the eagles flashed in the sun as brightly as the bayonets on the muskets of the leading ranks.

  The drums paused again. "Vive l'Empereur!" the mass of Frenchmen called, but this time they drew out the last syllable into a long cheer that sustained them as they were released to the attack. The columns could not march in close order through the maze of walled gardens on the village's eastern bank and so the attacking infantry was let off the leash and ordered to charge pell-mell through the vegetable plots and small orchards, across the stream and up into the fire of Colonel Williams's defenders.

  "God save us," Harper said in awe as the French attack engulfed the far bank like a dark wave. The enemy were cheering as they ran and as they overwhelmed the small walls and trampled down the spring crops and splashed into the shallow stream.

  "Fire!" a voice shouted and the muskets and rifles cracked from the loopholed houses. A Frenchman went down, his blood thick in the water. Another fell on the clapper bridge and was unceremoniously pushed into the ford by the men crowding behind. Sharpe and Harper both fired from the inn garden, their bullets spinning over the lower roofs to plough into the mass of attackers who were now shielded from the artillery on the ridge by the village itself.

  The first French attackers burst against the village's eastern walls. Bayonets clashed against bayonets. Sharpe saw a Frenchman appear on a top of a wall, then jump down into a hidden yard. More Frenchmen followed him across the wall. "Sword on, Pat," Sharpe said and drew his own sword as Harper clicked the sword bayonet onto his rifle. They ducked through the garden door and ran down the main street to find their progress blocked by a double rank of redcoats who were waiting with charged muskets and fixed bayonets. Twenty yards further down the street there were more redcoats who were firing over a makeshift barricade of window shutters, doors, tree branches and a pair of commandeered handcarts. The barricade was shaking from the assault of the

  French on the far side and every few seconds a musket would be thrust through the entanglement and blast fire, smoke and bullet at the defenders.

  "Ready to open files!" the redcoat Lieutenant called. He looked to be about eighteen years old, but his West Country voice was firm. He nodded a greeting to Sharpe, then looked back to the barricade. "Steady now, boys, steady!"

  Sharpe knew he would not need the sword yet, so sheathed it and reloaded his rifle instead. He bit the bullet off the cartridge, then held the round in his mouth as he pulled the rifle's hammer back one click to the half cock. He could taste the acrid, salty powder in his mouth as he poured a pinch of powder from the cartridge into the lock's open pan. He held tight to the rest of the cartridge as he pulled the frizzen full up to close the pan cover, then, with the rifle so primed, he let its brass stock fall to the ground. He poured the rest of the cartridge's powder into the muzzle, crammed the empty waxed cartridge paper on top of the powder to serve as wadding, then bent his head to spit the bullet into the gun. He yanked out the steel ramming rod with his left hand, spun the ramrod so that the splayed head faced downwards and thrust the rod hard down the barrel. He pulled it out, spun it again and let it fall into its holding rings, then tossed the rifle up with his left hand, caught it under the lock with his right and pulled the hammer back through a second click so that the weapon was at full cock and ready to fire. It had taken him twelve seconds and he had not thought once about what he was doing, nor even looked at the gun while he loaded it. The manoeuvre was the basic skill of his trade, the necessary skill that had to be taug
ht to new recruits and then practised and practised until it was second nature. As a new recruit, just sixteen years old, Sharpe had dreamed about loading muskets. He had been forced to do it again and again until he had been bored rigid by the drill and was ready to spit at the sergeants for making him do it one more time and then, on a damp day in Flanders, he had found himself doing it for real and suddenly he had fumbled the cartridge and lost his ramrod and forgotten to prime the musket. He had somehow survived that fight, and afterwards he had practised again until at last he could do it without thinking. It was the same skill that he had laboured to drive into the Real Companïa Irlandesa during their unhappy stay in the San Isidro Fort.

  Now, as he watched the defenders back away from the collapsing barricade, he found himself wondering how many times he had loaded a gun. Except there was no time to make a guess for the barricade's defenders were running back up the street and the victory roar of the French was swelling as they dismantled the last pieces of the obstacle.