Sharpe's Eagle

For Judy

"Every man thinks meanly of himself 

for not having been a soldier

--Samuel Johnson

The guns could be heard long before they came into sight. Children clung to their mothers'
skirts and wondered what dreadful thing made such noises. The hooves of the great horses mixed
with the jangling of traces and chains, the hollow rumbling of the blurring wheels, and above it
all the crashes as tons of brass, iron and timber bounced on the town's broken paving. Then they
were in view; guns, limbers, horses and outriders, and the gunners looked as tough as the squat,
blackened barrels that spoke of the fighting up north where the artillery had dragged their
massive weapons through swollen rivers and up rain-soaked slopes to pound the enemy into oblivion
and defeat. Now they would do it again. Mothers held their smallest children and pointed at the
guns, boasted that these British would make Napoleon wish he had stayed in Corsica and suckled
pigs, which was all he was fit for.

And the cavalry! The Portuguese civilians applauded the trotting ranks of gorgeous uniforms,
the curved, polished sabres unsheathed for display in Abrantes' streets and squares, and the fine
dust from the horses' hooves was a small price to pay for the sight of the splendid Regiments
who, the townspeople said, would chase the French clean over the Pyrenees and back into the
sewers of Paris itself. Who could resist this army? From north and south, from the ports on the
western coast, they were coming together and marching east on the road that led to the Spanish
frontier and to the enemy. Portugal will be free, Spain's pride restored, France humbled, and
these British soldiers can go back to their own wine-shops and inns, leaving Abrantes and Lisbon,
Coimbra and Oporto in peace. The soldiers themselves were not so confident. True they had beaten
Souk's northern army but, marching into their lengthening shadows, they wondered what lay beyond
Castelo Branco, the next town and the last before the frontier. Soon they would face again the
blue-coated veterans of Jena and Austerlitz, the masters of Europe's battlefields, the French
regiments that had turned the finest armies of the world into so much mincemeat. The townspeople
were impressed, at least by the cavalry and artillery, but to experienced eyes the troops
gathering round Abrantes were pitifully few and the French armies to the east threateningly big.
The British army that awed the children of Abrantes would not frighten the French
Marshals.

Lieutenant Richard Sharpe, waiting for orders in his billet on the outskirts of town, watched
the cavalry sheath their sabres as the last spectators were left behind and then he turned back
to the job of unwinding the dirty bandage from his thigh.

As the last few inches peeled stickily away some maggots dropped to the floor and Sergeant
Harper knelt to pick them up before looking at the wound.

"Healed, sir. Beautiful."

Sharpe grunted. The sabre cut had become nine inches of puckered scar tissue, clean and pink
against the darker skin. He picked off a last fat maggot and gave it to Harper to put safely
away.

"There, my beauty, well fed you are." Sergeant Harper closed the tin and looked up at Sharpe.
"You were lucky, sir."

That was true, thought Sharpe. The French Hussar had nearly ended him, that man's blade
halfway through a massive down-stroke when Harper's rifle bullet had lifted him from the saddle
and the Frenchman's grimace, framed by the weird pigtails, had turned to sudden agony. Sharpe had
twisted desperately away and the sabre, aimed at his neck, had sliced into his thigh to leave
another scar as a memento of sixteen years in the British army. It had not been a deep wound but
Sharpe had watched too many men die from smaller cuts, the blood poisoned, the flesh discoloured
and stinking, and the doctors helpless to do anything but let the man sweat and rot to his death
in the charnel houses they called hospitals. A handful of maggots did more than any army doctor,
eating away the diseased tissue to let the healthy flesh close naturally. He stood up and tested
the leg. "Thank you, Sergeant. Good as new."

"Pleasure's all mine, sir."

Sharpe pulled on the cavalry overalls he wore instead of the regulation green trousers of the
95th Rifles. He was proud of the green overalls with their black leather reinforcement panels,
stripped from the corpse of a Chasseur Colonel of Napoleon's Imperial Guard last winter. The
outside of each leg had been decorated with more than twenty silver buttons and the metal had
paid for food and drink as his small band of refugee Riflemen had escaped south through the
Galician snows. The Colonel had been a lucky kill; there were not many men in either army as tall
as Sharpe but the overalls fitted him perfectly and the Frenchman's soft, rich, black leather
boots could have been made for the English Lieutenant. Patrick Harper had not been so fortunate.
The Sergeant topped Sharpe by a full four inches and the huge Irishman had yet to find any
trousers to replace his faded, patched and tattered pair that were scarcely fit to scare crows in
a turnip field. The whole company was like that, their boots literally tied together with strips
of hide, and as long as their parent Battalion was home in England Sharpe's small company could
find no Commissary Officer willing to complicate his account books by issuing them with new
trousers or shoes.

Sergeant Harper handed Sharpe his uniform jacket. "Do you want a Hungarian bath,
sir?"

Sharpe shook his head. "It's bearable." There were not too many lice in the jacket, not enough
to justify steeping it in the smoke from a grass fire and to smell like a charcoal burner for the
next two days. The jacket was as worn as those of the rest of his company but nothing, not the
best-tailored corpse in Portugal or Spain, would have persuaded Sharpe to throw it away. It was
green, the dark green jacket of the 95th Rifles, and it was the badge of an elite Regiment.
British Infantry wore red, but the best British Infantry wore green, and even after three years
in the th Sharpe took pleasure in the distinction of the green uniform. It was all he had, his
uniform and what he could carry on his back. Richard Sharpe knew no home other than the Regiment,
no family except for his company, and no belongings except what fitted into his pack and
pouch-es. He knew no other way to live and expected that it would be the way he would die. Round
his waist he tied the red officer's sash and covered it with the black leather belt with its
silver snake buckle. After a year in the Peninsula only the sash and his sword denoted his
officer's rank and even his sword, like the overalls, broke regulations. Officers of the Rifles,
like all Light Infantry officers, were supposed to carry a curved cavalry sabre but Sharpe hated
the weapon. In its place he wore the long, straight sword of the Heavy Cavalry; a brute of a
weapon, ill balanced and crude, but Sharpe liked the feel of a savage blade that could beat down
the slim swords of French officers and crush aside a musket and bayonet.

The sword was not his only weapon. For ten years Richard Sharpe had marched in the red-coated
ranks, first as a private, then a Sergeant, carrying a smooth-bore musket across the plains of
India. He had stood in the line with the heavy flintlock, gone terrified into broken breach-es
with a bayonet, and he still carried a ranker's weapon into battle. The Baker rifle was his mark,
it set him aside from other officers, and sixteen-year-old Ensigns,* (*The Historical Note at the
back of the book explains military terms that may be unfamiliar.) fresh in their bright new
uniforms, looked warily at the tall, black-haired Lieutenant with the slung rifle and the scar
which, except when he smiled, gave his face a look of grim amusement. Some wondered if the
stories were true, stories of Seringapatam and Assaye, of Vimeiro and Lugo, but one glance from
the apparently mocking eyes, or a sight of the worn grips on his weapons, stopped the wondering.
Few new officers stopped to think of what the rifle really represented, of the fiercest struggle
Sharpe had ever fought, the climb from the ranks into the officers' mess. Sergeant Harper looked
out of the window into the square soaked in afternoon sunlight.

"Here comes Happy, sir."

"Captain Hogan."

Harper ignored the reproof. He and Sharpe had been together too long, shared too many dangers,
and the Sergeant knew precisely what liberties he could take with his taciturn officer. "He's
looking more cheerful than ever, sir. He must have another job for us."

"I wish to God they'd send us home."

Harper, his huge hands gently stripping the lock of his rifle, pretended not to hear the
remark. He knew what it meant but the subject was a dangerous one. Sharpe commanded the remnants
of a company of Riflemen who had been cut off from the rearguard of Sir John Moore's army during
its retreat to Corunna the winter before. It had been a terrible campaign in weather that was
like the traveller's tales of Russia rather than northern Spain. Men had died in their sleep,
their hair frozen to the ground, while others dropped exhausted from the march and let death
overtake them. The discipline of the army had crumbled and the drunken stragglers were easy meat
for the French cavalry who flogged their exhausted mounts at the heel of the British army. The
rabble was saved from disaster only by the few Regiments, like the 95th, which kept their
discipline and fought on. 1808 turned into 1809 and still the nightmarish battle went on, a
battle fought with damp powder by freezing men peering through the snow for a glimpse of the
cloaked French Dragoons. Then, on a day when the blizzard bellied in the wind like a malevolent
monster, the company had been cut off by the horsemen. The Captain was killed, the other
Lieutenant, the rifles wouldn't fire and the enemy sabres rose and fell and the damp snow muffled
all sounds except for the grunts of the Dragoons and the terrible chopping of the blades cutting
into wounds that steamed in the freezing air. Lieutenant Sharpe and a few survivors fought clear
and scrambled into high rocks where horsemen could not follow, but when the storm blew out, and
the last desperately wounded man died, there was no hope of rejoining the army. The second
Battalion of the 95th Rifles had sailed home while Sharpe and his thirty men, lost and forgotten,
had headed south, away from the French, to join the small British garrison in Lisbon.

Since then Sharpe had asked a dozen times to be sent home but Riflemen were too scarce, too
valuable, and the army's new commander, Sir Arthur Wellesley, was unwill-ing to lose even
thirty-one. So they had stayed and fought for whichever Battalion needed its Light Company
strengthened and had marched north again, retracing their steps, and been with Wellesley when he
avenged Sir John Moore by tumbling Marshal Soult and his veterans out of North Portugal. Harper
knew his Lieutenant harboured a sullen anger at his predicament. Richard Sharpe was poor, dog
poor, and he would never have the money to purchase his next promotion. To become a Captain, even
in an ordinary Battalion of the line, would cost Sharpe fifteen hundred pounds, and he might as
well hope to be made King of France as raise that money. He had only one hope of promotion and
that was by seniority in his own Regiment; to step into the shoes of men who died or were
promoted and whose own commissions had not been purchased. But as long as Sharpe was in Portugal
and the Regiment was home in England he was being forgotten and passed over, time and again, and
the unfairness soured Sharpe's resentment. He watched men younger than himself purchase their
Captaincies, their Majorities, while he, a better soldier, was left on the heap because he was
poor and because he was fighting instead of being safe home in England.

The door of the cottage banged open and Captain Hogan stepped into the room. He looked, in his
blue coat and white trousers, like a naval officer and he claimed his uniform had been mistaken
for a Frenchman's so often that he had been fired on more by his own side than by the enemy. He
was an Engineer, one of the tiny number of Military Engineers in Portugal, and he grinned as he
took off his cocked hat and nodded at Sharpe's leg. "The warrior restored? How's the
leg?"

"Perfect, sir."

"Sergeant Harper's maggots, eh? Well, we Irish are clever devils. God knows where you English
would be without us." Hogan took out his snuff box and inhaled a vast pinch. As Sharpe waited for
the inevitable sneeze he eyed the small, middle-aged Captain fondly. For a month his Riflemen had
been Hogan's escort as the Engineer had mapped the roads across the high passes that led to
Spain. It was no secret that any day now Wellesley would take the army into Spain, to follow the
River Tagus that was aimed like a spear at the capital, Madrid, and Hogan, as well as sketching
endless maps, had strengthened the culverts and bridges which would have to take the tons of
brass and wood as the field artillery rolled towards the enemy. It had been a job well done in
agreeable company, until it rained and the rifles wouldn't fire and the crazy-eyed French Hussar
had nearly made a name for himself by his mad solo charge at a group of Riflemen. Somehow
Sergeant Harper had kept the damp out of his firing pan, and Sharpe still shivered when he
thought of what might have happened if the rifle had not fired.