Sharpe 12 - Sharpe's Battle (38 page)

“That's what Miranda says too,” Harper said, and the riflemen laughed.

Sharpe walked to the rocks above the village. He had brought his riflemen back unscathed from their errand to the Light Division, only to find that Major

Tarrant had no new orders for him. The battle had become a vicious fight over mastery of the village, its graveyard and the church above, and men were not using ammunition so much as sword, bayonet and musket stock. Captain Donaju had wanted permission to join the men firing at the French from the crest's ridge, but Tarrant had been so worried by the proximity of the attackers that he had ordered the Real Companïa Irlandesa to stay close to the ammunition wagons that he was busily having harnessed to their horses or oxen. “If we must retreat,” he had told Sharpe, “it'll be chaos! But a man must be ready.”

The Real Companïa Irlandesa made a thin line between the wagons and the fighting, but then the attack of the 74th Highlanders and the Connaught

Rangers had eased Tarrant's urgency.

“Pon my soul, Sharpe, but it's hot work.” Colonel Runciman had been hovering around the ammunition wagons, fidgeting and worrying, but now he came forward to catch a glimpse of the turmoil in the village beneath. He gave his horse's reins to one of the riflemen and peered nervously over the crest at the fighting beneath. It was hot work indeed. The village, left reeking and smoking from the earlier battles fought through its streets, was once again a maelstrom of musket smoke, screams and blood. The 74th and 88th had driven deep into the labyrinth of houses, but now their progress was slowing as the

French defences thickened. The French howitzers on the other stream bank had begun lobbing shells into the graveyard and upper houses, adding to the smoke and noise. Runciman shuddered at the horrid sight, then stepped back two paces only to stumble on a dead voltigeur whose body marked the deepest point of penetration reached by the French. Runciman frowned at the body. “Why do they call them vaulters?” he asked.

“Vaulters?” Sharpe asked, not understanding the question.

“Voltigeur, Sharpe,” Runciman explained. “French for vaulter.”

Sharpe shook his head. “God knows, sir.”

“Because they jump like fleas, sir, when you shoot at them,” Harper offered.

“But don't worry yourself about that one, sir.” Harper had seen the look of worry on Runciman's face. “He's a good voltigeur, that one. He's dead.”

Wellington was not far away from Sharpe and Runciman. The General was sitting on his horse on the bloody dip of land where the road crossed the ridge between the church and the rocks, and behind him was nothing except the army's baggage and ammunition park. To the north and west his divisions guarded the plateau against the French threat, but here, in the centre, where the enemy had so nearly broken through, there was nothing left. There were no more reserves and he would not thin the ridge's other defenders and so open a back door to French victory. The battle would have to be won by his Highlanders and

Irishmen, and so far they were rewarding his faith by retaking the village house by bloody house and cattle shed by burning cattle shed.

Then the grey infantry struck from the flank.

Sharpe saw the wolf-tail banner in the smoke. For a second he froze. He wanted to pretend he had not seen it. He wanted an excuse, any excuse, not to go down that awful slope to a village so reeking with death that the air alone was enough to make a man vomit. He had fought once already inside Fuentes de

Onoro, and once was surely enough, but his hesitation was only for a heartbeat. He knew there was no excuse. His enemy had come to Fuentes de Onoro to claim victory and Sharpe must stop him. He turned. “Sergeant Harper! My compliments to Captain Donaju and ask him to form column. Go on! Hurry!”

Sharpe looked at his men, his handful of good men from the bloody, fighting

95th. “Load up, lads. Time to go to work.”

“What are you doing, Sharpe?” Runciman asked.

“You want to beat our court of inquiry, General?” Sharpe asked.

Runciman gaped at Sharpe, not understanding why the question had been asked.

“Why, yes, of course,” he managed to say.

“Then go over to Wellington, General,” Sharpe said, “and ask his Lordship's permission to lead the Real Companïa Irlandesa into battle.”

Runciman blanched. “You mean... ?” he began, but could not articulate the horror. He glanced down at the village that had been turned into a slaughterhouse. “You mean... ?” he began again and then his mouth fell slackly open at the very thought of going down into that smoking hell.

“I'll ask if you don't,” Sharpe said. "For Christ's sake, sir! Gallantry forgives everything! Gallantry means you're a hero. Gallantry gets you a wife.

Now for Christ's sake! Do it!" he shouted at Runciman as though the Colonel was a raw recruit.

Runciman looked startled. “You'll come with me, Sharpe?” He was as frightened of approaching Wellington as he was of going towards the enemy.

“Come on!” Sharpe snapped, and led a flustered Runciman towards the sombre knot of staff officers who surrounded Wellington. Hogan was there, watching anxiously as the tide of struggle in the village turned against the allies once again. The French were inching uphill, forcing the redcoats and the

Portuguese and the German infantry back out of the village, only this time there were no ranks of muskets waiting at the crest of the ridge to blast the enemy as they climbed the road and overran the churned-up graveyard.

Runciman hung back as the two men reached the staff officers, but Sharpe pushed his way through the horses and dragged the reluctant Colonel with him.

“Ask him,” Sharpe said.

Wellington heard the words and frowned at the two men. Colonel Runciman hesitated, snatched off his hat, tried to speak and only managed an incoherent stutter.

"General Runciman wants permission, my Lord-' Sharpe began coldly.

“-To take the Irish into battle.” Runciman managed to complete the sentence in a barely coherent rush. “Please, my Lord!”

Some of the staff officers smiled at the thought of the Wagon Master General leading troops, but Wellington twisted in his saddle to see that the red- jacketed Real Companïa Irlandesa had formed column. It looked a pathetically small unit, but it was there, formed, armed and evidently eager. There was no one else. The General looked at Sharpe and raised an eyebrow. Sharpe nodded.

“Carry on, Runciman,” Wellington said.

“Come on, sir.” Sharpe plucked the fat man's sleeve to pull him away from the

General.

“One moment!” The General's voice was frigid. “Captain Sharpe?”

Sharpe turned back. “My Lord?”

“The reason, Captain Sharpe, why we do not execute enemy prisoners, no matter how vile their behaviour, is that the enemy will reciprocate the favour on our men, no matter how small their provocation.” The General looked at Sharpe with an eye as cold as a winter stream. “Do I make myself clear, Captain Sharpe.”

“Yes, sir. My Lord.”

Wellington gave a very small nod. “Go.”

Sharpe dragged Runciman away. “Come on, sir!”

“What do I do, Sharpe?” Runciman asked. “For God's sake, what do I do? I'm not a fighter!”

“Stay at the back, sir,” Sharpe said, “and leave everything else to me.”

Sharpe scraped his long sword free. “Captain Donaju!”

“Captain Sharpe?” Donaju was pale.

“General Wellington requests,” Sharpe shouted loudly enough for every man in the Real Companïa Irlandesa to hear him, "that the King of Spain's bodyguard goes down to the village and kills every goddamn Frenchman it finds. And the

Connaught Rangers are down there, Captain, and they need a morsel of Irish help. Are you ready?"

Donaju drew his own sword. "Perhaps you would do the honour of taking us down,

Captain?"

Sharpe beckoned his riflemen into the ranks. There would be no skirmishers here, no delicate long-range killing, only a blood-soaked brawl in a godforsaken village on the edge of Spain where Sharpe's sworn enemy had come to turn defeat into victory. “Fix bayonets!” Sharpe called. For a second or two he was assailed with the strange thought that this was just how Lord Kiely had wanted his men to fight. His Lordship had simply wanted to throw his men into a suicidal battle, and this place was as good as any for that kind of gesture. No training could prepare a man for this battle. This was gutter fighting and it was either born into a man's bones or it was absent for ever.

“And forward!” Sharpe shouted. “At the double!” And he led the small unit up the road to the ridge's crest where the soil was torn by enemy roundshot, then over the skyline and down. Down into the smoke, the blood and the slaughter.

CHAPTER 11

Bodies lay sprawled on the upper slope. Some were motionless, others still stirred slowly with the remnants of life. A Highlander vomited blood, then collapsed across a grave that had been so churned by shell and roundshot that the pelvic and wrist bones of a corpse lay among the soil. A French drummer boy sat beside the road with his hands clasped over his spilt guts. His drumsticks were still stuck in his crossbelt. He looked up mutely as Sharpe ran past, then began to cry. A greenjacket lay dead from one of the very first attacks. A bent French bayonet was stuck in his ribs just above a distended, blackened belly that was thick with flies. A shell cracked apart beside the body and scraps of its casing whistled past Sharpe's head. One of the guardsmen was hit and fell, tripping two men behind him. Harper shouted at them to leave the man alone. “Keep running!” he called harshly. "Keep running!

Let the bugger look after himself! Come on!"

Halfway to the village the road curved sharply to the right. Sharpe left the road there, jumping down a small embankment into a patch of scrubland. He could see the Loup Brigade not far ahead. The grey infantry had plunged into the village from the north and were now threatening to cut the 88th into two parts. Loup's attack had first arrested the momentum of the British counterattack then reversed it, and to Sharpe's right he could see redcoats retreating out of the village to find shelter behind the remnants of the graveyard wall. A swarm of Frenchmen was pushing up from the village's lower houses, roused to one last brave effort by the example of Loup's brigade.

But Loup's brigade now had an enemy of its own, a small enemy, but one with something to prove. Sharpe led the Real Companïa Irlandesa through the scrubland, over a tiny plot of parched beans, then he was leaping down another low embankment and running hard towards the flank of the nearest grey infantry battalion. “Kill them!” Sharpe shouted, “kill them!” It was a horrid, savage and appropriate battle cry for the Real Companïa Irlandesa was outnumbered and unless they fell on the enemy with a hungry ferocity they would be repelled and broken. This fight would depend on savagery. “Kill the bastards!” Sharpe screamed. Fear was huge inside him, making his voice harsh and desperate. His belly was sour with terror, but he had long learned that the enemy suffered just the same fear and that to yield to it was to invite disaster. The key to this fight's survival lay in closing on the enemy fast, in crossing the open space where their muskets could kill and so getting his men hard into the enemy's ranks where the fight would degenerate into a street brawl.

And so he screamed his awful encouragement even as he wondered if his courage would fail and drive him to seek shelter behind one of the broken walls, but at the same time he was judging the enemy ahead. There was an alley crammed with enemy immediately in front of Sharpe, and to its left a low wall enclosing a garden. Some of Loup's men had crossed a fallen wall into the garden, but most were pushing through the alley towards the bigger fight raging in the village's centre. Sharpe headed for the alley. Frenchmen turned and called in warning. One man fired his musket to shroud the alley's entrance with white smoke, then Sharpe crashed into the rearmost grey ranks and slammed his sword forward. The relief of contact was enormous, releasing a terrible energy that he poured into the wickedly sharp sword blade. Men arrived either side of him with bayonets. They were screaming and stabbing, men in whom terror was similarly being turned into a barbaric frenzy. Other guardsmen had gone to clear the garden, while Donaju was fighting his way into another alley lower down the slope.

It was a gutter fight, and if for the first few moments Sharpe's men found it easier than they had expected that was because they had assaulted the rearmost of Loup's ranks, the place where the men least enthusiastic about fighting like animals in narrow streets had taken refuge. Yet the longer Sharpe's men fought, the closer they came to Loup's best fighters and the harder the fight proved.

Sharpe saw a big moustached sergeant working his way back through the ranks and rallying the men as he came. The Sergeant was shouting, hitting men, forcing the cowardly to turn and use their bayonets on the new attackers, but then his head snapped back and was surrounded with a momentary red mist of blood droplets as a rifle bullet killed him. Hagman and Cooper had found a rooftop from which to serve as sharpshooters.

Sharpe stepped over bodies, hammered muskets aside, then stabbed with his sword. There was no room for slashing strokes, only a tight space in which to jab and ram and twist the blade. The only leadership required of him now was to be seen fighting and the Real Companïa Irlandesa followed him willingly. It was as if they had been let off a leash and they fought like fiends as they cleared first one alley and then the next. The French retreated from the bitter attack, looking for an easier place to defend. Donaju, his face and uniform spattered with blood, rejoined Sharpe in a small triangular plaza where the two alleys met. A dead Frenchman lay on a dungheap, another blocked a door. There were bodies shoved into the gutters, bodies piled inside houses and bodies heaped against walls. The piles of dead showed the battle's progression, with skirmishers from the first day covered with Frenchmen, then

Highlanders, then French grenadiers in their massive bearskin hats beneath more redcoats and now Loup's grey uniforms made a new top layer. The stench of death was thick as fog. The ruts in the earthen road, where they showed between the corpses, were flooded with blood. The streets were glutted by death and choked with men seeking to glut them more.

Hagman and Cooper jumped from one broken roof to another. “Bastards to your left, sir!” Cooper called from his eyrie, indicating an alley that ran crookedly downhill from the small triangular plaza. The French had withdrawn far enough to give Sharpe's men a pause in which they could reload or else wrap dirty strips of cloth round slashed hands and arms. Some men drank from their hoarded rum issue. A few were wholly drunk, but they would fight all the better for it and Sharpe did not mind. “Bastards are coming, sir!” Cooper called in warning.

“Bayonets!” Sharpe called. “Now come on!” He drew out the last word as he led his men into the alley. It was scarcely six feet wide, no room to swing a sword. The first bend was just ten feet away and Sharpe reached it at the same time as a rush of Frenchmen. Sharpe felt a bayonet catch in his jacket, heard the cloth rip, then he was punching the iron hilt of his sword into a moustached face. He was fighting a grenadier who snarled through bleeding lips with yellow rotted teeth as he tried to kick Sharpe in the crotch. Sharpe hammered the sword down, but the blow was cushioned by the black greasy fur of the thick bearskin. The man's breath was fetid. The grenadier had let go of his musket and was trying to throttle Sharpe, but Sharpe seized the upper blade of his sword with his left hand, kept tight hold of the hilt with his right and rammed the blade hard into the Frenchman's throat. He pushed the grenadier's head back so far that he could see the whites of his eyes and still the man would not let go of his throat so Sharpe just slid the blade to his right, slid once and his world turned red as the sword sliced into the

Frenchman's jugular.

He clambered over the twitching body of the dying grenadier. Rum-crazed guardsmen were slashing with bayonets, hitting with musket stocks, kicking and screaming at an enemy who could not match this ferocity. Guardsman Rourke had broken his musket and had picked up a blackened roof beam instead and was now ramming the heavy timber forward at the Frenchmen's faces. The enemy began to edge backwards. An officer from Loup's brigade tried to rally them, but Hagman picked him off from a rooftop and the enemy's grudging retreat turned into a sudden rout. One Frenchman took refuge in a house where he lost his head by firing from a window on the advancing guardsmen. A rush of Irishmen stormed the house and killed every French fugitive inside.

“God save Ireland.” Harper dropped down beside Sharpe. “Jesus, but it's hard work.” He was breathing hoarsely. "Christ, sir, have you seen yourself?

Drenched in blood, so you are."

“Not mine, Pat.” Sharpe cuffed blood out of his eyes. He had reached the corner of a street which led into the village's heart. A dead French officer lay in the centre of the street, his mouth open and crawling with flies.

Someone had already cut open his pockets, seams and pouches and discarded a crude chess set with a board made of painted canvas, court pieces of carved wood and pawns from musket balls. Sharpe could smell the corpse as he crouched at the street corner and tried to divine the battle's course from the tangle of noise and smoke. He sensed he was behind the enemy now and that if he could just attack to his right then he would be threatening to cut off Loup's grey infantry and the bearskinned grenadiers who were now inextricably mixed together. If the enemy thought they were about to be surrounded they would probably retreat, and that retreat could lead to a wholesale French withdrawal. It could lead to victory.

Harper peered round the corner. “Thousands of the buggers,” he said. He was carrying a spontoon that he had picked up from a dead Connaught sergeant. He had snapped off four feet of the pike to make it a handier weapon for the grim business of killing in a confined space. He looked at the plundered French officer in the street. “No money in that chess set,” he said grimly. “Do you remember that sergeant at Busaco who found the silver chess men?” He hefted the spontoon. “Just send me a rich dead officer, please God.”

“No one will get rich off me,” Sharpe said grimly, then peered round the corner to see a barricade of dead grenadiers blocking the street with a mass of French infantry waiting behind them. “Who's loaded?” Sharpe asked the men crouching near him. “To the front,” he ordered the half-dozen men who raised their hands. “Hurry now! We go round the corner,” he told them, “you wait for my word, you kneel, you fire, then you charge like hell. Pat? You bring the rest five paces behind.” Sharpe was leading a mongrel mix of riflemen,

Connaught Rangers, Highlanders, guardsmen and caçadores.“'Ready, boys?” He grinned at them from a face smeared with enemy blood. “Then come on!”

He screamed the last word as he led his men around the corner. The French behind the barricade obliged Sharpe by firing straightaway, panicked by the awful screams of the attackers into firing too soon and firing too high.

“Halt! Kneel!” Sharpe stood among the kneeling men. “Aim!” Harper was already leading the second charge out of the alley. “Fire!” Sharpe shouted and the volley whipped over the dead grenadiers as Sharpe's men charged out of the smoke and scrambled over the warm heap of bloody dead. The French ahead of

Sharpe were desperately reloading, but their fixed bayonets impeded their ramrods and they were still trying to load their muskets when Sharpe's charge smashed home and the killing began again. Sharpe's sword arm was weary, his throat was hoarse from shouting and his eyes were stinging from powder smoke, sweat and blood, but there could be no rest. He rammed the sword home, twisted it, pulled it out, then rammed it forward again. A Frenchman aimed his musket at Sharpe, pulled the trigger and was rewarded with a hangfire as the powder in the pan caught fire, but did not set off the charge inside the barrel. The man screamed as the sword stabbed home. Sharpe was so weary from the killing that he was holding the big sword two-handed, his right hand on the hilt and his left gripping the lowest part of the blade so that he could shove it hard into the press of men. The crush of bodies was so great that there were times when he could hardly move and so he would claw at the faces nearest him, kick and bite and butt with his head until the damned French moved or fell or died and he could climb over another body and snarl forward with the bloody sword dripping.

Harper caught up with him. The spontoon's foot-long sharpened steel spearhead had a small cross-bar at its base to prevent the weapon being driven too deep into an enemy horse or man and Harper was repeatedly burying the blade clear to the cross-piece, then kicking and twisting to loosen the weapon before thrusting forward again. Once, when a French sergeant tried to rally a group of men, Harper lifted a dying man on the end of the truncated spear and used his thrashing body as a bleeding and screaming battering ram that he slammed into the enemy ranks. A pair of bloody-faced Connaught Rangers had attached themselves to Harper and the three were chanting their war cries in Irish.

A rush of Highlanders came out of a lane on Sharpe's right. He sensed that the battle was turning. They were attacking downhill now, not defending uphill, and the grey infantry of Loup's brigade was going back with the rest. He unclenched his left hand from the lower blade of the sword and saw he had cut his palm open. A musket flamed from a window to his left and a guardsman went spinning down, gasping. Captain Donaju led a charge into the roofless house that echoed with shouts as French fugitives were hunted through the tiny rooms and back into the pig shed. A terrible roar of triumph sounded to Sharpe's right as a company of Connaught Rangers trapped two companies of Frenchmen in a blind alley. The Irish began working their bloody way to the alley's end and no officer dared try to stop their slaughter. Down on the grassland north of

Poco Velha this battle had seen the most delicate of drill manoeuvres save the

Light Division, now it was witnessing a primitive wild fighting out of the most gruesome nightmare that might yet save the whole army.

“Left!” Harper called and Sharpe turned to see a rush of grey-uniformed

Frenchmen coming through an alley. The guardsmen no longer needed orders to counterattack, they just swarmed into the alley and screamed a wild, keening noise as they laid into the enemy. The Real Companïa Irlandesa had been caught up by the sublime joy of a victorious and killing fight. One man took a bullet in the chest and noticed nothing, but just went on stabbing and swinging his musket. Donaju had long ceased trying to exercise control. Instead he was fighting like his men, grinning horribly from a face made awful by blood, smoke, sweat and strain. “Seen Runciman?” Sharpe asked him.