Sharpe 12 - Sharpe's Battle (17 page)

They ran down the ramp just as Oliveira's skirmishers attacked from the right.

The appearance of the caçadores distracted the voltigeurs and gave Sharpe's riflemen the chance to cross to the barracks without fighting through a whole voltigeur company, but it was a narrow chance, for even as Harper began shouting in Gaelic to order the Real Companïa Irlandesa to open their door a huge cheer from the gatehouse on Sharpe's left announced the arrival of Loup's main force. Sharpe was among the barracks now where the voltigeurs were retreating from the attack of the Portuguese skirmishers. The Frenchmen's retreat drove them at right angles across Sharpe's path. Loup's men realized their danger too late. A sergeant screamed a warning, then was clubbed to the ground by Harper's volley gun. The Frenchman tried to stand, then the butt of the heavy gun slammed sickeningly into his skull. Another Frenchman tried to turn and run in the opposite direction, then realized in his panic that he was running towards the Portuguese and so turned back again only to find Rifleman

Harris's sword bayonet at his throat. “Non, monsieur!” the Frenchman cried as he dropped his musket and raised his hands.

“Don't speak bloody Crapaud, do I?” Harris lied and pulled his trigger. Sharpe swerved past the falling body, parried a clumsy bayonet thrust and hammered his attacker down with his heavy sword. The man tried to stab his bayonet up at Sharpe who gave him two furious slashes with the big sword and left him screaming and bleeding and curled into a ball. He back-cut another French skirmisher, then ran on to the moon-cast shadow of the next empty barracks block where a huddle of riflemen were protecting Miranda. Harper still shouted in Gaelic, one of the precautions Sharpe had agreed with Donaju in case the

French used an English speaker to confuse the defenders. The Sergeant's shouting had at last gained the attention of the guardsmen in the nearest barracks and the end door opened a crack. A rifle flared and crashed close beside Sharpe, a bullet hissed through the dark overhead while behind him a man screamed. Hagman was already at the barracks door where he crouched and counted the riflemen inside. “Come on, Perks!” he called, and Perkins and

Miranda scuttled over the open space, followed by a rush of riflemen. “They're all safe, sir, all safe,” the Cheshireman called to Sharpe, "just you and

Harps."

“Go, Pat,” Sharpe said, and just as the Irishman began to run a voltigeur came round the corner of the building, saw the big rifle Sergeant running away and dropped to one knee as he levelled his musket. He saw Sharpe a second later, but it was already too late. Sharpe came out of the dark shadow with the sword already swinging. The blade caught the voltigeur just above the eyes and such was the anger and strength in the blow that the top of the man's skull came away like a decapitated boiled egg.

“God save England,” Hagman said, watching the blow from the barracks door.

“Come in, Harps! Come on, sir! Hurry!” The panic started among the voltigeurs by the counterattacking Portuguese had helped the riflemen escape Loup's first assault, but that panic was subsiding as Loup's main force arrived through the captured gatehouse. That force would soon have Sharpe's men trapped in the barracks.

“Mattresses! Packs!” Sharpe shouted. “Pile 'em behind the doors! Pat! Look to the windows! Move, woman!” he snarled at a screaming wife who was trying to leave the barracks altogether. He unceremoniously pushed her back. Bullets cracked on the stone walls and splintered the door. There were two small windows on either side of the long room and Harper was stuffing them with blankets. Rifleman Cresacre pushed his rifle through one of the half-blocked windows and fired towards the gatehouse.

Sharpe and Donaju had discussed earlier what might happen if the French attacked and they had gloomily agreed that the Real Companïa Irlandesa might be trapped inside their barracks and so Donaju had ordered his men to make loopholes in the walls. The work had been done half-heartedly, but at least the loopholes existed and gave the defenders a chance to fire back. Even so, in the rushlit gloom of the tunnel-like barracks, this was a nightmarish place to be trapped. The women and children were crying, the guardsmen were nervous and the barricades behind the two end doors flimsy.

“You all know what to do,” Sharpe called to the guardsmen. “The French can't get in here, and they can't blow the walls down and they can't shoot through stone. You keep up a good fire and you'll drive the bastards away.” He was not sure that anything he had said was true, but he had to do his best to restore the men's spirits.

There were ten loopholes in the barracks, five on each long side, and each loophole was manned by at least eight men. Few of the men were as efficient as

Sharpe would have liked at loading a musket, but with so many men using each loophole their fire would still be virtually continuous. He hoped the men in the second barracks were making similar preparations for he expected the

French to assault both barracks at any moment. “Someone opened that damned gate for them,” Sharpe told Harper. Harper had no time to answer, for instead a great howling noise announced the advance of Loup's main body of troops.

Sharpe peered through a chink in one of the blocked windows and saw the flood of grey uniforms surge past the barracks. Behind them, pale in the moonlight,

Loup's horsemen rode under their wolf-tail banner. “It's my own fault,” Sharpe said ruefully.

“Yours, why?” Harper was ramming the last barrel of his volley gun.

“What does a good soldier do, Pat? He goes for surprise. It was so obvious that Loup had to attack from the north that I forgot about the south. Damn it.” He pushed his rifle through the gap and looked for the one-eyed Loup.

Kill Loup, he thought, and this attack would stall, but he could not see the

Brigadier among the mass of grey uniforms into which he fired his rifle indiscriminately. The enemy's fire crackled harmlessly against the stone walls, while inside the barracks muskets crashed loud at loopholes and children wailed. “Keep those damn kids quiet!” Sharpe snapped. The dark, chill barracks room became foul with the acrid smell of powder smoke that scared the children almost as much as the deafening gunfire. “Quiet!” Sharpe roared, and there was a sudden gasping silence except for one baby that screamed incessantly. “Keep the damn thing quiet!” Sharpe shouted at the mother. “Hit it if you have to!” The mother plunged a breast into the baby's mouth instead, effectively stifling it. Some of the women and older children were usefully loading spare muskets and stacking them beside the windows. “Can't stand bloody children crying,” Sharpe grumbled as he reloaded his rifle, “never have and never will.”

“You were a baby once, sir,” Daniel Hagman said reprovingly. The poacher turned rifleman was liable to such sententious moments.

“I was sick once, damn it, but that doesn't mean I have to like disease, does it? Has anyone seen that bastard Loup?”

No one had, and by now the mass of the Loup Brigade had swept past the two barracks in pursuit of the Portuguese who had called back their skirmish line and formed two ranks so that they could trade volleys with their attackers.

The fight was lit by a half-moon and the guttering flicker of what remained of the camp-fires. The Frenchmen had ceased their wolf-like howling as the fight became grim, but it was still a one-sided affair. The newly woken Portuguese were outnumbered and facing men armed with a quick-loading musket, while they were equipped with the slow-loading Baker rifle. Even if they tap-loaded the rifle, abandoning the rammer and the leather patch that gripped the barrel's rifling, they still could not compete with the speed of the well-trained

French force. Besides, Oliveira's caçadores were trained to fight in open country, to harass and to hide, to run and to shoot, and not to trade heavy volleys in the killing confrontation of the main battle line.

Yet even so the caçadores did not break easily. The French infantry found it hard to pinpoint the Portuguese infantry in the half-dark, and when they did establish where the line was formed it took time for the scattered French companies to come together and make their own line of three ranks. But once the two French battalions were in line they overlapped the small Portuguese battalion and so the flanks of the French pressed inwards. The Portuguese fought back hard. Rifle flames stabbed the night. The sergeants shouted at the files to close to the centre as men were hurled back by the heavy French musket balls. One man fell into the smouldering embers of a fire and screamed terribly as his cartridge pouch exploded to tear a haversack-sized hole in his back. His blood hissed and bubbled in the red-hot ashes as he died. Colonel

Oliveira paced behind his men, weighing the fight's progress and judging it lost. That damned English rifleman had been right. He should have taken refuge in the barracks blocks, but now the French were between him and that salvation and Oliveira sensed the coming calamity and knew there was little he could do to prevent it. He had even fewer options when he heard the ominous and unmistakable sound of hooves. The French even had cavalry inside the fort.

The Colonel sent his colour party back to the northern ramparts. “Find somewhere to hide,” he ordered them. There were old magazines in the bastions, and fallen walls that had made dark caves amidst the ruins, and it was possible that the regiment's colours might be preserved from capture if they were hidden in the tangle of damp cellars and tumbled stone. Oliveira waited as his hard-pressed men fired two more volleys then gave the order to retreat.

“Steady now!” he called. “Steady! Back to the walls!” He was forced to abandon his wounded, though some bleeding and broken men still tried to crawl or limp back with the retreating line. The French uniforms pressed closer, then came the moment Oliveira feared most as a trumpet blared in the dark to the accompaniment of swords scraping out of scabbards. “Go!” Oliveira shouted to his men. “Go!”

His men broke ranks and ran to the walls just as the cavalry charged, and thus the caçadores became the dream target of all horsemen: a broken unit of scattered men. The grey dragoons slashed into the retreating ranks with their heavy swords. Loup himself led the charge and deliberately led it wide so that he could turn and herd the fugitives back towards his advancing infantry.

Some of Oliveira's left-hand companies reached the ramparts safely. Loup saw the dark uniforms streaming up an ammunition ramp and was content to let them go. If they crossed the wall and fled out into the valleys then the remainder of his dragoons would hunt them down like vermin, while if they stayed on the ramparts his men inside the San Isidro Fort would do the same. Loup's immediate concern was the men who were trying to surrender. Dozens of

Portuguese soldiers, their rifles unloaded, stood with hands raised. Loup rode at one such man, smiled, then cut down with a backswing that half severed the man's head. “No prisoners!” Loup called to his men. “No prisoners!” His withdrawal from the fort could not be slowed by prisoners and, besides, the slaughter of a whole battalion would serve to warn Wellington's army that in reaching the Spanish frontier they had encountered a new and harder enemy than the troops they had chased away from Lisbon. “Kill them all!” Loup shouted. A caçador aimed at Loup, fired, and the bullet slapped inches past the

Brigadier's short grey beard. Loup laughed, spurred his grey horse and threaded his way through the panicking infantry to hunt down the wretch who had dared try to kill him. The man ran desperately, but Loup cantered up behind and slashed his sword in an underhand swing that laid the man's spine open to the night. The man fell, writhing and screaming. “Leave him!” Loup called to a French infantryman tempted to give the wretch his coup de grâce.

“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