Sharpe 3-Book Collection 2: Sharpe’s Havoc, Sharpe’s Eagle, Sharpe’s Gold (48 page)

Then the red jackets seemed to disappear; there were only Chasseurs and French shouts of triumph as the dead were heaved from the staffs and the colours snatched up. Sharpe turned and held the blood-covered blade high over his head.

‘Halt! Present!’ He was directly in their line of fire and he threw himself flat, pulling Harper down, as he screamed the order to fire. The volley smashed overhead, and then they were up and running. The musket balls had plucked the Frenchmen from the colours, the flags had fallen again, but this time surrounded by enemy as well as British dead.

There were only a few yards to go but there were more horsemen spurring in towards the place where so many had died for the possession of the colours. Sharpe threw himself over the bodies, scrambled on blood and limbs, reached for a staff and pulled it towards him. It was the Regimental Colour, its bright yellow field torn with fresh holes, and he jammed his sword point downwards into a corpse and swung the staff like a primitive club at the horsemen. The King’s Colour was too far away. Harper was going for it, but a horse cannoned into the Sergeant and threw him back. Another horse reared and swerved from the great billow of yellow silk in Sharpe’s hand, a sword struck the staff and Sharpe saw splinters fly from the new wood; then he was hit by the net of forage strapped to the saddle and thrown over. He could smell the horses, see the hooves in the air over him, the face of the Frenchman framed by his silver shako chain bending towards him to pluck the colour from his hands. He held on. A hoof came down by his face, the horse twisted away from the corpses it had stepped on, the rider tugged and suddenly let go. Sharpe saw Harper swinging a great sergeant’s pike. He had hit the rider in the spine with its blade and the man slid gently on top of Sharpe, his last breath sighing softly in the Rifleman’s ear.

Sharpe pulled himself from beneath the body. He left the colour there; it was as safe as in his hands. Harper was swinging the pike, keeping the horsemen at bay. Where was the company? Sharpe looked round and saw them running towards the fight. They were so slow! He looked for his sword, found it, and plucked it from the body where he had thrust it. The horsemen still came, trying desperately to force their unwilling horses onto the mounds of dead. Sharpe screamed again; Harper was bellowing, but there was no enemy within sword’s length. He went forward towards the King’s Colour. He could see it lying beneath two bodies some five yards away. He slipped on blood, stood again, but there were three dismounted Frenchmen coming for him with drawn sabres. Harper was beside him; one Chasseur went down with the pike blade in his stomach, the other sank beneath Sharpe’s blade which had cut through the sabre parry as though the Frenchman’s sword was made of fragile ivory. But the third had got the Union Jack, had tugged it from the bodies and was holding it out to the mounted men behind. Sharpe and Harper lunged forward; the pike thunked into the Chasseur’s back but he had done his job. A horseman had snatched the fringe of the flag and was spurring away. There were more Frenchmen coming, clawing at the two Riflemen for the second colour, too many!

‘Hold them, Patrick! Hold them!’

Harper whirled the pike, screamed at them, was Cuchulain of the Red Hand, the inviolable. He stood with his legs apart, his huge height dominating the fight, begging the green-uniformed Frenchmen to come and be killed. Sharpe scrambled back to the Regimental Colour, pulled it from the body, and threw it like a javelin at the advancing company. He watched it fall into their ranks. It was safe. Harper was still there, growling at the enemy, defying them, but there was no more fight. Sharpe stood beside him, sword in hand, and the Frenchmen turned, found horses, and mounted to ride away. One of them turned and faced the two Riflemen, lifted a bloodied sabre in grave salute, and Sharpe raised his own red sword in reply.

Someone slapped his back; men shouted as though he had won a victory when all he had done was halve the victory of the French. The company was with them, standing with the dead, watching the Chasseurs trot away with their trophy. There was no hope of retrieving the King’s Colour; it was already three hundred yards away, surrounded by triumphant horsemen at the beginning of its long journey which would take it over the Pyrenees to be mocked by the Parisian mob before it joined the other colours, Italian, Prussian, Austrian, Russian and Spanish, that marked French victories round Europe. Sharpe watched it go and felt sickened and ashamed. The Spanish colours were there too, both of them, but they were not his concern. His own honour was tied up with the captured flag, his reputation as a soldier; it was a question of pride.

He touched Harper on the elbow. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes, sir.’ The Sergeant was panting, still holding the pike, which was bloodied for half its length. ‘Yourself?’

‘I’m fine. Well done. And thank you.’

Harper shook the compliment off but grinned at his Lieutenant. ‘It was a rare one, sir. At least we got one back.’

Sharpe turned to look at the colour. It hung above the company, tattered and blood-stained, lost and regained. An officer was below it and Sharpe recognised Leroy, morose, solitary Captain Leroy, whom Lennox had described as the only other decent soldier in the Battalion. His face was masked in blood, and Sharpe pushed through the ranks towards him.

‘Sir?’

‘Well done, Sharpe. This is a miserable shambles.’ The Captain’s voice was strange, the accent unusual, and Sharpe remembered he came from America; one of the small band of loyalists who still fought for the Mother country. Sharpe indicated Leroy’s head.

‘Are you hurt badly?’

‘That’s just a scratch. I’ve been cut in the leg though.’

Sharpe looked down. Leroy’s thigh was smothered in blood. ‘What happened?’

‘I was at the colours. Thank God you came, though Simmerson deserves to lose both. The bastard.’

Sharpe looked towards the bridge. Little could be seen of it because the field between was still full of French horsemen. There were puffs of smoke and the crackle of musketry, so someone had organised a scratch defence, but the Chasseurs were no longer fighting. Bugles called them from the slaughter, back up the road to where they formed ranks round their three trophies. They should feel proud of themselves, thought Sharpe; four hundred light cavalry had broken two Regiments, captured three colours, and all because of the stupidity and pride of Simmerson and the Spanish Colonel. He wondered where Simmerson was. He had not been in the group round the colours unless his dead body lay in one of the heaps. He turned to Leroy.

‘Have you seen Simmerson?’

‘God knows what happened to him. Forrest was there.’

‘Dead?’

Leroy shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Lennox?’

‘I haven’t seen him. He was in the square.’

Sharpe looked round the field. It was an appalling sight. The spot where they stood, where the colours had been fought for, was ringed with bodies. There were wounded men, stirring and crying, horses that lay on their sides, coughed blood, and beat the soil in a frantic tattoo. Sharpe found a Sergeant.

‘Get those horses shot, Sergeant.’

‘Sir?’ The man stared dumbly at Sharpe.

‘Shoot them! Hurry!’

He could not stand the sight of the wounded animals. Men walked to them and pointed muskets at their heads, and Sharpe turned to count his Riflemen.

‘They’re all safe, sir.’ Harper had counted already.

‘Thanks.’ They had been in little danger as long as they stayed in ranks and kept the bayonets steady. He remembered thinking the same thing as the South Essex proudly marched up the field, banners waving, and now they were broken. He tried to estimate the butcher’s bill. There were no more than thirty or forty dead Frenchmen on the field, a high enough price from four hundred, but they had gained glory for their Regiment and had inflicted appalling losses on the British and Spanish. A hundred dead? He looked at the piles of dead, the broken trail of bodies leading to the bridge; it was impossible to guess the number. It would be high, and there would be far more wounded, men whose faces had been laid open by the horsemen, blinded men who would be led to Lisbon, shipped home, and abandoned to the cold charity of a society long inured to maimed beggars. He shivered.

But it was not just the dead and injured. In its first fight Simmerson’s Battalion had lost its pride as well. For sixteen years Sharpe had fought for the army, had defended colours in the melee of battle and thrust with a bayonet as he tried to reach the enemy’s standard; he had seen captured banners paraded through camp and felt the fierce elation of victory, but this was the first time he had seen a British flag taken on the field and he knew how his enemies would celebrate when the trophy reached Marshal Victor’s army. Soon Wellesley’s army would have to fight a battle, not a skirmish against four squadrons of Chasseurs, but a real battle in which the killing machines of the artillery made survival a game of chance, and their enemies would now go into that battle with their spirits raised because they had already humiliated the British. He felt the beginnings of an idea, an idea so outrageous that he smiled, and young Pendleton, waiting to return his rifle, grinned back at his officer.

‘We did it, sir! We did it!’

‘Did what?’ Sharpe wanted to savour his idea but there was too much to do.

‘Saved the flag, sir. Didn’t we?’

Sharpe looked at the teenager’s face. After a life of thieving in the streets of Bristol the boy had a pinched, hungry face, but his eyes were shining and there was a desperate plea for reassurance in his expression. Sharpe smiled. ‘We did it.’

‘I know we lost the other one, sir, but that wasn’t our fault, was it, sir?’

‘No. If it hadn’t been for us they’d have lost both flags. Well done!’

The boy beamed. ‘And you and Sergeant Harper, sir.’ The boy’s words tumbled out in his urgent need to share the excitement. ‘They was terrified of you, sir!’

Sharpe took his rifle and laughed. ‘I don’t know about Sergeant Harper, but I was fairly frightened, too.’

Pendleton laughed. ‘You’re just saying that, sir!’

Sharpe smiled and walked away among the bodies. There was so much to do, the dead to be buried, the wounded to be patched up. He looked towards the bridge. It was empty now, the fugitives had crossed, and Sharpe could see them being organised into companies on the far bank. The French were half a mile away, in ordered ranks, and watching a lone horseman who was trotting his horse towards Sharpe. He supposed it was a French officer coming to discuss a truce while they sorted out their wounded. Sharpe felt a great weariness. He looked back at the bridge and wondered why Simmerson was not sending any men across to start the grave-digging, the bandaging, the stripping of the dead. It would take a whole day to clear up this mess. Sharpe slung his rifle and started walking towards the Chasseur officer, whose horse was picking a delicate course through the bodies. He raised a hand in salute.

And at that moment the bridge exploded.

The bridge was reluctant to be destroyed. It had stood through two millennia over the waters of the Tagus, and the old stonework yielded slowly to the modern explosives. The central pier gave a deep shudder that was felt as far away as Sharpe and his company; they wheeled round to see what had caused it, and dust flew from the crevices of the masonry. For a second it seemed as if the bridge might hold; the stones bulged and then tore themselves apart with an agonising slowness, until the black powder finally won and the masonry was blasted outwards in an obscene gout of smoke and flame. The road on the bridge rose into the air, hung suspended for a fraction, and then collapsed into the water. The pier, two arches, the purpose of the bridge, all were destroyed by the thunderous explosion that rolled interminably across the flat grasslands, frightening the horses of the French, making the loose horses whose owners had been unseated in battle whinny and gallop fitfully on the grass, as though looking for human reassurance. A huge, dirty plume of smoke, boiling with ancient dust, rose over the ruined spans, the water seethed, far up and down stream the stones fell into the green depths; only slowly did silence follow the thunder, the river rearrange itself to the new pattern of stones on its bed, the black smoke drift slowly westwards like a small, low, malevolent storm cloud. Hogan need not have worried. Forty feet had been ripped from the bridge, Wellesley was safe from marauding cavalry to his south, and Sharpe and his men were now marooned on the wrong side of the Tagus.

Captain Leroy collapsed on the grass. Sharpe wondered if he had been hit by some stray and freakishly driven stone chip from the bridge but the Captain shook his head.

‘It’s my leg. Don’t worry, Sharpe, I’ll manage.’ Leroy nodded towards the smoking ruin of the bridge. ‘Why the hell did they do that?’

Sharpe wished he knew. Had it been a mistake? Hogan surely would have waited for Sharpe and his swollen company of two hundred men to reach the safety of the other bank before lighting the fuses that ran into the base of the pier? He stared across the river but there was no sense to be made of the activity he could see, the men parading in companies; he thought he could see Simmerson on his grey horse surrounded by officers, staring at the destruction wrought to the bridge.

‘Sir, sir.’ Gataker, the Rifleman, was calling him. The French Chasseur officer had arrived, a Captain, with a suntanned face split by a large black moustache. Sharpe walked to him and saluted. The Frenchman returned the salute and looked round at the carnage.

‘Congratulations on your fight, Monsieur.’ He spoke perfect English; courteously, gravely, with respect. Sharpe acknowledged the compliment.

‘You have our congratulations, too. You have won a notable victory, sir.’ The words felt stilted and inept. It was extraordinary how men could claw savagely at each other, fight like demented fiends, yet in a few moments become polite, generous even about the damage an enemy had inflicted. The French Captain smiled briefly.

‘Thank you, M’sieu.’ He paused a moment, looked at the bodies lying near the bridge, and when he turned back to Sharpe his expression had changed; it had become less formal and more curious. ‘Why did you come across the river?’

Sharpe shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’

The Frenchman dismounted and looped his reins on his wrist. ‘You were unlucky.’ He smiled at Sharpe. ‘But you and your men fought well and now this?’ He nodded at the bridge.

Sharpe shrugged again. The Chasseur Captain with the big moustache looked at him for a moment. ‘I think perhaps you are most unlucky in your Colonel, yes?’ He spoke quietly so that the men who were staring curiously at their erstwhile enemy should not hear. Sharpe did not react, but the Frenchman spread his hands. ‘We have them, too. My regrets, M’sieu.’

It was all getting too polite, too cosy. Sharpe looked at the bodies lying untended in the field. ‘You wish to discuss the wounded?’

‘I did, M’sieu, I did. Not that I think we have too many, but we need your permission to search this piece of the field. As for the rest,’ he bowed slightly to Sharpe. ‘We are the masters of it.’

It was true. Chasseurs were now riding around the field corralling the stray horses. They were gaining a bonus, for there were half a dozen English thoroughbreds, lost by officers of the South Essex, and Sharpe knew they would be better remounts than anything the French could hope to buy in Spain. But there was something curious about the wording the Captain had used.

‘You did, sir? Did?’ Sharpe looked into the sympathetic brown eyes of the Frenchman, who shrugged slightly.

‘The situation, M’sieu, has changed.’ He waved a hand at the destroyed bridge. ‘I think you will have problems reaching the other side? Yes?’ Sharpe nodded, it was undeniable. ‘I think, M’sieu, my Colonel will want to renew the fight after a suitable period.’

Sharpe laughed. He pointed at the muskets, the rifles, the long bayonets. ‘When you are ready, sir, when you are ready.’

The Frenchman laughed too. ‘I will enquire, M’sieu, and inform you in ample time.’ He pulled out a watch. ‘Shall we say that we have one hour in which to look after our wounded? After that we shall talk again.’

He was giving Sharpe no choice. An hour was not nearly enough for his two hundred men to collect the wounded, carry them despite their agony, bring them to the entrance of the bridge and devise a way of getting them to safety. On the other hand an hour was far more than the French needed, and he knew there was no point in asking for more time. The Captain unlooped his reins and prepared to mount.

‘My congratulations again. Lieutenant?’ Sharpe nodded. ‘And my sincere regrets.
Bonne chance
!’ He mounted and cantered back towards the skyline.

Sharpe took stock of his new company. The survivors from the square had added some seventy men to his small command. Leroy was the senior officer, of course, but his wound forced him to leave the decisions to Sharpe. There were two more Lieutenants, Knowles from the Light Company and a man called John Berry. Berry was overweight with fleshy lips, a young man who petulantly demanded the date of Sharpe’s commission, and, on finding Sharpe was his senior, complained sulkily that his horse had been shot. Sharpe suspected that it was the only reason Berry had stayed with the colours.

The working parties took jackets from the dead, threaded the sleeves onto abandoned muskets, and made crude stretchers on which wounded men were carried to the bridge. Half the men worked on the piles round the spot where Sharpe and Harper had clambered across the blood and corpses to rescue the colour; the other half worked among the bodies that formed a fan shape ending at the entrance to the bridge. The French were swiftly finished and started rummaging through the blue-coated bodies of the Spanish. It was not mercy they were showing but a desire to loot the dead and the wounded. The British did the same, there was no stopping them; the spoils of a fight were the one reward of the survivors. The Riflemen, on Sharpe’s orders, collected abandoned muskets, dozens of them, and took ammunition pouches from the dead. If the French should attack then Sharpe planned to arm each man with three or four loaded guns and meet the horsemen with a continuous volley that would destroy the attackers. It would not bring back the lost colour. That had gone for ever or until in some unimaginable future the army might march into Paris and take back the trophy. As he moved among the carnage, directing the work, he doubted if the French really meant to attack again. The losses they would incur would hardly be worth the effort; perhaps instead they were hoping for his surrender.

He helped Leroy to the bridge, propped him against the parapet, and cut away the white breeches. There was a bullet wound in the American’s thigh, dark and oozing, but the carbine ball had gone clean through, and, despite Leroy’s evident disgust, Sharpe summoned Harper to put maggots in the wound before binding it with a strip torn from the shirt of a dead man. Forrest was alive, stunned and bleeding, found where the colours had fallen with his sword still gripped in his hand. Sharpe propped him next to Leroy. It would be minutes before Forrest recovered himself, and Sharpe doubted whether the Major, who looked like a vicar, would want to take any more military action that day. He put the colour with the two wounded officers, propped its great yellow flag over the parapet as a symbol of defiance to the French, but what about the British? Twice he had walked gingerly to the edge of the broken roadway and hailed the far bank, but it was as if the men there inhabited a different world, went about their business oblivious of the carnage just a few hundred feet away. For the third time Sharpe walked out onto the bridge through the broken stones.

‘Hello!’ There could only be thirty minutes of the hour left. He cupped his hands again. ‘Hello!’

Hogan appeared, waved to him, and came across the other part of the broken bridge. It was reassuring to see the Engineer’s blue coat and cocked hat, but there was something different about the uniform. Sharpe could not place the oddity but it was there. He waved at the gap between them.

‘What happened?’

Hogan spread his hands. ‘Not my doing. Simmerson lit the fuse.’

‘For God’s sake, why?’

‘Why do you think? He got frightened. Thought the French would swarm all over him. I’m sorry. I tried to stop him but I’m under arrest.’ That was it! Hogan wore no sword. The Irishman grinned happily at Sharpe. ‘So are you, by the way.’

Sharpe swore viciously and at length. Hogan let him finish. ‘I know, Sharpe, I know. It’s just plain stupid. It’s all because we refused to let your Riflemen form a skirmish line, remember?’

‘He thinks that would have saved him?’

‘He has to blame someone. He won’t blame himself, so you and I are the scapegoats.’ Hogan took off his hat and scratched his balding pate. ‘I couldn’t give a damn, Richard. It’ll just mean enduring the man’s spleen till we get back to the army. After that we’ll hear no more about it. The General will tear him apart! Don’t worry yourself!’

It seemed ridiculous to be discussing their mutual arrest in shouts across the gap where the water broke white on the shattered stonework. Sharpe waved his hand at the wounded.

‘What about this lot? We’ve got dozens of wounded and the French are coming back soon. We need help. What’s he doing?’

‘Doing?’ Hogan shook his head. ‘He’s like a chicken with its head chopped off. He’s drilling the men, that’s what he’s doing. Any poor sod who doesn’t have a musket will be lucky if he only gets three dozen lashes. The bastard doesn’t know what to do!’

‘But for Christ’s sake!’

Hogan held up his hand. ‘I know, I know. I’ve told him he’s got to get timber and ropes.’ He pointed at the forty-foot gap. ‘I can’t hope to get timber to bridge this, but we can make rafts and float them across. But there’s no timber here. He’ll have to send back for it!’

‘Has he done it?’

‘No.’ Hogan said no more. Sharpe could imagine the argument he had had with Simmerson, and he knew the Engineer would have done his best. For a moment they discussed names, who was dead, who was wounded. Hogan asked after Lennox but Sharpe had no news, and he wondered whether the Scotsman was lying dead on the field. Then there was the clatter of hooves and Sharpe saw Lieutenant Christian Gibbons ride onto the bridge behind Hogan. The blond lieutenant stared down at the Engineer.

‘I thought you were under arrest, Captain, and confined?’

Hogan looked up at the arrogant Lieutenant. ‘I needed a piss.’

Sharpe laughed. Hogan waved, wished him luck, and turned back to the convent leaving Sharpe facing Gibbons across the water. The Lieutenant’s uniform was clean and pristine.

‘You’re under arrest, Sharpe, and I am ordered to tell you that Sir Henry will request a General Court Martial.’

Sharpe laughed. It was the only possible response, and it enraged the Lieutenant. ‘It’s no laughing matter! You are ordered to surrender your sword to me.’

Sharpe looked at the water. ‘Will you fetch it, Gibbons? Or shall I bring it to you?’

Gibbons ignored the comment. He had been given a message to deliver and was determined to reach the end, whatever the difficulties. ‘And you are ordered to return the Regimental Colour.’

It was unbelievable. Sharpe could scarcely credit his ears. He stood on the shattered bridge in the searing heat while behind him were rows of wounded men whose cries could clearly be heard, yet Simmerson had sent his nephew to demand that Sharpe surrender his sword and hand over the colour.

‘Why was the bridge blown up?’

‘It is not your business, Sharpe.’

‘It damn well is, Gibbons, I’m on the wrong bloody side of it.’ He looked at the elegant Lieutenant, whose uniform was quite unstained by any blood or earth. He suspected Simmerson’s uniform would be the same. ‘Were you going to abandon the wounded, Gibbons? Was that it?’

The Lieutenant looked at Sharpe with distaste. ‘Will you please fetch the colour, Sharpe, and throw it to this side of the bridge?’

‘Go away, Gibbons.’ Sharpe spoke with an equal disdain. ‘Get your precious uncle to talk with me, not his lapdog. As for the colour? It stays here. You deserted it and I fought for it. My men fought for it and it stays with us till you get us back across the river. Do you understand?’ His voice was rising with anger. ‘So tell that to your fat windbag! He gets his colour with us. And tell him the French are coming back for another attack. They want that colour and that’s why I’m keeping my sword, Gibbons, so that I can fight for it!’ He drew the thirty-five inches of steel. There had been no time to clean the blade, and Gibbons could scarcely take his eyes off the crusted blood. ‘And Gibbons. If you want this you can bloody well come and get it yourself.’ He turned away from the Lieutenant, back to the wounded and dead, back to where Harper was waiting with a distressed face.

‘Sergeant?’

‘We found Captain Lennox, sir. He’s bad.’

Sharpe followed Harper through the rows of wounded, who stared at him dumbly. There was so little he could do! He could bind up wounds but there was no way to dull the pain. He needed brandy, a doctor, help. And now Lennox.