Sharpe's Havoc (7 page)

“But your men followed you?”

“They did,” Vicente said warmly, “and Sergeant Macedo fought very bravely.”

“I think,” Sharpe said, “that despite being a bloody lawyer you’re a remarkable bloody
soldier.”

“I am?” The young Portuguese sounded amazed, but Sharpe knew it must have taken a natural
leader to bring men out of a tavern to ambush a party of dragoons.

‘So did all your philosophers and poets join the army?” Sharpe asked.

Vicente looked embarrassed. “Some joined the French, alas.”

“The French!”

The Lieutenant shrugged. “There is a belief, senhor, that the future of mankind is
prophesied in French thought. In French ideas. In Portugal, I think, we are old-fashioned and
in response many of us are inspired by the French philosophers. They reject the church and
the old ways. They dislike the monarchy and despise unearned privilege. Their ideas are very
exciting. You have read them?”

“No,” Sharpe said.

“But I love my country more than I love Monsieur Rousseau,” Vicente said sadly, “so I
shall be a soldier before I am a poet.”

“Quite right,” Sharpe said, “best choose something useful to do with your life.” They
crossed a small rise in the ground and Sharpe saw the river ahead and a small village beside
it and he checked Vicente with an upraised hand. “Is that Barca d’Avintas?”

“It is,” Vicente said.

“God damn it,” Sharpe said bitterly, because the French were there already.

The river curled gently at the foot of some blue-tinged hills, and between Sharpe and the
river were meadows, vineyards, the small village, a stream flowing to the river and the
goddamned bloody French. More dragoons. The green-coated cavalrymen had dismounted and
now strolled about the village as if they did not have a care in the world and Sharpe, dropping
back behind some gorse bushes, waved his men down. “Sergeant! Skirmish order along the
crest.” He left Harper to get on with deploying the rifles while he took out his telescope
and stared at the enemy.

“What do I do?” Vicente asked.

“Just wait,” Sharpe said. He focused the glass, marveling at the clarity of its magnified
image. He could see the buckle holes in the girth straps on the dragoons’ horses which were
picketed in a small field just to the west of the village. He counted the horses. Forty-six.
Maybe forty-eight. It was hard to tell because some of the beasts were bunched together. Call
it fifty men. He edged the telescope left and saw smoke rising from beyond the village, maybe
from the river bank. A small stone bridge crossed the stream which flowed from the north. He
could see no villagers. Had they fled? He looked to the west, back down the road which led to
Oporto, and he could see no more Frenchmen, which suggested the dragoons were a patrol sent
to harry fugitives. “Pat!”

“Sir?” Harper came and crouched beside him.

“We can take these bastards.”

Harper borrowed Sharpe’s telescope and stared south for a good minute. “Forty of them?
Fifty?”

“About that. Make sure our boys are loaded.” Sharpe left the telescope with Harper and
scrambled back from the crest to find Vicente. “Call your men here. I want to talk to them.
You’ll translate.” Sharpe waited till the thirty-seven Portuguese were assembled. Most
looked uncomfortable, doubtless wondering why they were being commanded by a
foreigner. “My name is Sharpe!” he told the blue-coated troops, “Lieutenant Sharpe, and I’ve
been a soldier for sixteen years.” He waited for Vicente to interpret, then pointed at the
youngest-looking Portuguese soldier, a lad who could not have been a day over seventeen and
might well have been three years younger. “I was carrying a musket before you were born. And
I mean carrying a musket. I was a soldier like you. I marched in the ranks.” Vicente, as he
translated, gave Sharpe a surprised look. The rifleman ignored it. “I’ve fought in
Flanders,” Sharpe went on, “I’ve fought in India, I’ve fought in Spain and I’ve fought in
Portugal, and I’ve never lost a fight. Never.” The Portuguese had just been run out of the
great northern redoubt in front of Oporto and that defeat was still sore, yet here was a man
telling them he was invincible and some of them looked at the scar on his face and the
hardness in his eyes and they believed him. “Now you and I are going to fight together,”
Sharpe went on, “and that means we’re going to win. We’re going to run these damned Frenchmen
out of Portugal!” Some of them smiled at that. “Don’t take any notice of what happened
today. That wasn’t your fault. You were led by a bishop! What bloody use is a bishop to
anyone? You might as well go into battle with a lawyer.” Vicente gave Sharpe a swift and
reproving glance before translating the last sentence, but he must have done it correctly
for the men grinned at Sharpe. “We’re going to run the bastards back to France,” Sharpe
continued, “and for every Portuguese and Briton they kill we’re going to slaughter a
score.” Some of the Portuguese thumped their musket butts on the ground in approbation. “But
before we fight,” Sharpe went on, “you’d better know I have three rules and you had all better
get used to those rules now. Because if you break these three rules then, God help me, I’ll
goddamn break you.” Vicente sounded nervous as he interpreted the last few words.

Sharpe waited, then held up one finger. “You don’t get drunk without my permission.” A
second finger. “You don’t thieve from anyone unless you’re starving. And I don’t count
taking things off the enemy as thieving.” That got a smile. He held up the third finger. “And
you fight as if the devil himself was on your tail. That’s it! You don’t get drunk, you don’t
thieve and you fight like demons. You understand?” They nodded after the translation.

“And right now,” Sharpe went on, “you’re going to start fighting. You’re going to make
three ranks and you’ll fire a volley at some French cavalry.” He would have preferred two
ranks, but only the British fought in two ranks. Every other army used three and so, for the
moment, he would too, even though thirty-seven men in three ranks offered a very small
frontage. “And you won’t pull your trigger until Lieutenant Vicente gives the order. You can
trust him! He’s a good soldier, your Lieutenant!” Vicente blushed and perhaps made some
modest changes to his interpretation, but the grins on his men’s faces suggested the
lawyer had conveyed the gist of Sharpe’s words. “Make sure your muskets are loaded,” Sharpe
said, “but not cocked. I don’t want the enemy knowing we’re here because some careless
halfwit lets off a cocked musket. Now, enjoy killing the bastards.” He left them on that
bloodthirsty note and walked back to the crest where he knelt beside Harper. “Are they doing
anything?” he asked, nodding toward the dragoons.

“Getting drunk,” Harper said. “Gave them the talk, did you?”

“Is that what it is?”

“Don’t get drunk, don’t thieve and fight like the devil. Mister Sharpe’s sermon.”

Sharpe smiled, then took the telescope from the Sergeant and trained it at the village where
a score of dragoons, their green coats unbuttoned, were squirting wineskins into their
mouths. Others were searching the small houses. A woman with a torn black dress ran from one
house, was seized by a cavalryman and dragged back indoors. “I thought the villagers were
gone,” Sharpe said.

“I’ve seen a couple of women,” Harper said, “and doubtless there are plenty more we can’t
see.” He ran a huge hand over the lock of his rifle. “So what are we going to do with
them?”

“We’re going to piss up their noses,” Sharpe said, “till they decide to swat us away and
then we’re going to kill them.” He collapsed the glass and told Harper exactly how he
planned to defeat the dragoons.

The vineyards gave Sharpe the opportunity. The vines grew in close thick rows that
stretched from the stream on their left to some woodland off to the west, and the rows were
broken only by a footpath that gave laborers access to the plants which offered dense
cover for Sharpe’s men as they crawled closer to Barca d’Avintas. Two careless French
sentries watched from the village’s edge, but neither saw anything threatening in the
spring countryside and one of them even laid his carbine down so he could pack a small pipe
with tobacco. Sharpe put Vicente’s men close to the footpath and sent his riflemen off to
the west so that they were closer to the paddock in which the dragoons’ horses were
picketed. Then he cocked his own rifle, lay down so that the barrel protruded between two
gnarled vine roots and aimed at the nearest sentry.

He fired, and the butt slammed back into his shoulder and the sound was still echoing from
the village’s walls when his riflemen began shooting at the horses. Their first volley
brought down six or seven of the beasts, wounded as many again and started a panic among the
other tethered animals. Two managed to pull their picketing pins out of the turf and jumped
the fence in an attempt to escape, but then circled back toward their companions just as
the rifles were reloaded and fired again. More horses screamed and fell. A half-dozen of the
riflemen were watching the village and began shooting at the first dragoons to run toward
the paddock. Vicente’s infantry remained hidden, crouching among the vines. Sharpe saw that
the sentry he had shot was crawling up the street, leaving a bloody trail, and, as the smoke
from that shot faded, he fired again, this time at an officer running toward the paddock.
More dragoons, fearing they were losing their precious horses, ran to unpicket the beasts
and the rifle bullets began to kill men as well as horses. An injured mare whinnied
pitifully and then the dragoons’ commanding officer realized he could not rescue the
horses until he had driven away the men who were slaughtering them and so he shouted at his
cavalrymen to advance into the vines and drive the attackers off.

“Keep shooting the horses!” Sharpe shouted. It was not a pleasant job. The screams of the
wounded beasts tore at men’s souls and the sight of an injured gelding trying to drag itself
along by its front legs was heartbreaking, but Sharpe kept his men firing. The dragoons,
spared the rifle fire now, ran toward the vineyard in the confident belief that they were
dealing with a mere handful of partisans. Dragoons were supposed to be mounted infantry
and so they were issued with carbines, short-barrelled muskets, with which they could fight
on foot, and some carried the carbines while others preferred to attack with their long
straight swords, but all of them instinctively ran toward the track which climbed among the
vines. Sharpe had guessed they would follow the track rather than clamber over the entangling
vines and that was why he had put Vicente and his men close by the path. The dragoons were
bunching together as they entered the vines and Sharpe had an urge to run across to the
Portuguese and take command of them, but just then Vicente ordered his men to stand.

The Portuguese soldiers appeared as if by magic in front of the disorganized dragoons.
Sharpe watched, approvingly, as Vicente let his men settle, then ordered them to fire. The
French had tried to check their desperate charge and swerve aside, but the vines obstructed
them and Vicente’s volley hammered into the thickest press of cavalrymen bunched on the
narrow track. Harper, off on the right flank, had the riflemen add their own volley so that
the dragoons were assailed from both sides. Powder smoke drifted over the vines. “Fix
swords!” Sharpe shouted. A dozen dragoons were dead and the ones at the back were already
running away. They had been convinced they fought against a few undisciplined peasants and
instead they were outnumbered by real soldiers and the center of their makeshift line had
been gutted, half their horses were dead and now the infantry was coming from the smoke with
fixed bayonets. The Portuguese stepped over the dead and injured dragoons. One of the
Frenchmen, shot in the thigh, rolled over with a pistol in his hand and Vicente knocked it
away with his sword and then kicked the gun into the stream. The unwounded dragoons were
running toward the horses and Sharpe ordered his riflemen to drive them off with bullets
rather than blades. “Just keep them running!” he shouted. “Panic them! Lieutenant!” He looked
for Vicente, “Take your men into the village! Cooper! Tongue! Slattery! Make these bastards
safe!” He knew he had to keep the Frenchmen in front moving, but he dared not leave any
lightly wounded dragoons in his rear and so he ordered the three riflemen to disarm the
cavalrymen injured by Vicente’s volley. The Portuguese were in the village now, banging
open doors and converging on a church that stood next to the bridge that crossed the small
stream.

Sharpe ran toward the field where the horses were dead, dying or terrified. A few
dragoons had tried to untie their mounts, but the rifle fire had chased them off. So now
Sharpe was the possessor of a score of horses. “Dan!” he called to Hagman. “Put the wounded
ones out of their misery. Pendleton! Harris! Cresacre! Over there!” He pointed the three men
toward the wall on the paddock’s western side. The dragoons had fled that way and Sharpe
guessed they had taken refuge in some trees that stood thick just a hundred paces away. Three
picquets were not enough to cope with even a half-hearted counterattack by the French so
Sharpe knew he would have to strengthen those picquets soon, but first he wanted to make sure
there were no dragoons skulking in the houses, gardens and orchards of the village.

Barca d’Avintas was a small place, a straggle of houses built about the road that ran down
to the river where a short jetty should have accommodated the ferry, but some of the smoke
Sharpe had seen earlier was coming from a barge-like vessel with a blunt bow and a dozen
rowlocks.

Now it was smoking in the water, its upper works burned almost to the waterline and its
lower hull holed and sunken. Sharpe stared at the useless boat, looked across the river that
was over a hundred yards broad and then swore.

Harper appeared beside him, his rifle slung. “Jesus,” he said, staring at the ferry,
“that’s not a lot of good to man or beast, is it now?”