Sharpe 12 - Sharpe's Battle (30 page)

But not, both sides knew, the last.

CHAPTER 8

The French did not attack again. They stayed on the stream's eastern bank, while behind them, at the distant line of oaks that straddled the straight white road, the rest of their army slowly deployed so that by nightfall the whole of Masséna's force was encamped and the smoke of their fires mingled to make a grey wash that darkened to a hellish black as the sun sank behind the

British ridge. The fighting in the village had stopped, but the artillery kept up a desultory battle till nightfall. The British had the best of it. Their guns were emplaced just back from the plateau's crest so that all the French could aim for was the skyline itself and most of their shots were fired too high and rumbled impotently over the British infantry concealed by the crest.

Shots fired too low merely thumped into the ridge's slope which was too steep for the roundshot to bounce up to their targets. The British gunners, on the other hand, had a clear view of the enemy batteries and one by one their long- fused case shot either silenced the French artillery or persuaded the gunners to drag their cannon back into the cover of the trees.

The last gun fired as the sun set. The flat echo of the sound crashed and faded across the shadowed plain while the smoke from the gun's barrel curled and drifted in the wind. Small fires flickered in the village ruins, the flames glimmering luridly on broken walls and snapped beams. The streets were crammed with dead men and pitiful with the wounded who cried through the night for help. Behind the church, where the luckier casualties had been safely evacuated, wives searched for husbands, brothers for brothers and friends for friends. Burial parties looked for patches of soil on the rocky slopes while officers auctioned the possessions of their dead mess-fellows and wondered how long it would be before their own belongings were similarly knocked down for puny prices. Up on the plateau the soldiers stewed newly slaughtered beef in their Flanders cauldrons and sang sentimental songs of greenwoods and girls.

The armies slept with their weapons loaded and ready. Picquets watched the dark as the big guns cooled. Rats scampered through the fallen stones of

Fuentes de Onoro and gnawed at dead men. Few of the living slept well. The

British footguards had been infected with Methodism and some of the guardsmen gathered for a midnight prayer meeting until a Coldstreamer officer growled at them to give God and himself a bloody rest. Other men prowled in the dark to seek the dead and wounded for plunder. Now and then an injured man would call out in protest and a bayonet would glint quickly in the starlight and a wash of blood ebb into the soil as the newly dead man's uniform was searched for coins.

Major Tarrant had at last heard about Sharpe's impending ordeal by court of inquiry. He could hardly have avoided learning of it for a succession of officers came to the ammunition park to give Sharpe their condolences and to complain that an army which persecuted a man for killing the enemy must be an army led by idiots and administered by fools. Tarrant did not understand

Wellington's decision either. “Surely the two men deserved to die? I agree they hardly endured the proper processes of the law, but even so, can anyone doubt their guilt?” Captain Donaju, who was sharing Tarrant's late supper with

Sharpe, nodded agreement.

“It's not about two men dying, sir,” Sharpe said, "but about bloody politics.

I've given the Spanish reason to distrust us, sir."

“No Spaniards died!” Tarrant protested.

“Aye, sir, but too many good Portuguese did, so General Valverde's claiming that we can't be trusted with other nations' soldiers.”

“This is too bad!” Tarrant said angrily. “So what happens to you now?”

Sharpe shrugged. “There's a court of inquiry, I'm blamed, which means a court martial. The worst they can do to me, sir, is take away my commission.”

Captain Donaju frowned. “Suppose I speak to General Valverde?”

Sharpe shook his head. “And ruin your career, too? Thank you, but no. What this is really about,” he explained, "is who should become Generalisimo of

Spain. We reckon it should be Nosey, but Valverde doesn't agree."

“Doubtless because he wants the job himself!” Tarrant said scornfully. “It is too bad, Sharpe, too bad.” The Scotsman frowned down at the dish of liver and kidney that Gog and Magog had cooked for his supper. Traditionally the officers received the offal of newly slaughtered cattle, a privilege Tarrant would happily have foregone. He tossed a peculiarly nauseating piece of kidney to one of the many dogs that had attached themselves to the army, then shook his head. “Is there any chance at all that you might avoid this ridiculous court of inquiry?” he asked Sharpe.

Sharpe thought of Hogan's sarcastic remark that Sharpe's only hope lay in a

French victory that would obliterate all memories of what had happened at San

Isidro. That seemed a dubious solution, yet there was another hope, a very slender hope, but one Sharpe had been thinking about all day.

“Go on,” Tarrant said, sensing that the rifleman was hesitant about offering an answer.

Sharpe grimaced. “Nosey's been known to pardon men for good behaviour. There was a fellow in the 83rd who was caught red-handed stealing money from a poor- box in Guarda and he was condemned to be hanged for it, but his company fought so well at Talavera that Nosey let him go.”

Donaju gestured with his knife towards the village that was beyond the eastern skyline. “Is that why you fought down there all day?” he asked.

Sharpe shook his head. “We just happened to find ourselves down there,” he said dismissively.

“But you took an eagle, Sharpe!” Tarrant protested. “What more gallantry do you need to display?”

“A lot, sir.” Sharpe winced as his sore shoulder gave a stab of pain. “I'm not rich, sir, so I can't buy a captaincy, let alone a majority, so I have to survive by merit. And a soldier's only as good as his last battle, sir, and my last battle was San Isidro. I have to wipe that out.”

Donaju frowned. “It was my only battle,” he said softly and to no one but himself.

Tarrant scorned Sharpe's pessimism. “Are you saying, Sharpe, that you have to perform some ridiculous act of heroism to survive?”

“Yes, sir. Exactly that, sir. So if you've got some horrid errand tomorrow then I want it.”

“Good God, man.” Tarrant was appalled. “Good God! Send you to your death? I can't do that!”

Sharpe smiled. “What were you doing seventeen years ago, sir?”

Tarrant thought for a second or two. “Ninety-four? Let's see now... ” He counted off on his fingers for another few seconds. "I was still at school.

Construing Horace in a gloomy schoolroom beneath the walls of Stirling Castle and being beaten every time I made an error."

“I was fighting the French, sir,” Sharpe said. “And I've been fighting one bugger or another ever since, so don't you worry about me.”

“Even so, Sharpe, even so.” Tarrant frowned and shook his head. “Do you like kidney?”

“Love it, sir.”

“It's all yours.” Tarrant handed his plate to Sharpe. "Get your strength up,

Sharpe, it seems you might need it." He twisted around to look at the red flame glow that lit the night above the fires of the French encampments.

“Unless they don't attack,” he said wistfully.

“The buggers aren't going away, sir, until we drive them away,” Sharpe said.

"Today was just a skirmish. The real battle hasn't started yet, so the

Crapauds will be back, sir, they'll be back."

They slept close to the ammunition wagons. Sharpe woke once as a small shower hissed in the embers of the fire, then slept again until an hour before dawn.

He awoke to see a small mist clinging to the plateau and blurring the grey shapes of soldiers tending their fires. Sharpe shared a pot of hot shaving water with Major Tarrant, then pulled on his jacket and weapons and walked westwards in search of a cavalry regiment. He found an encampment of hussars from the King's German Legion and exchanged a half-pint of issue rum for an edge on his sword. The German armourer bent over his wheel as the sparks flew and when he was done the edge of Sharpe's heavy cavalry sword was glinting in the dawn's small light. Sharpe slid the blade carefully into its scabbard and walked slowly back towards the gaunt silhouetted shapes of the wagon park.

The sun rose through a cloud of French cooking smoke. The enemy on the stream's eastern bank greeted the new day with a fusillade of musketry that rattled among Fuentes de Onoro's houses, but died away as no shots were returned. On the British ridge the gunners cut new fuses and piled their ready magazines with case shot, but no French infantry advanced from the distant trees to be the beneficiaries of their work. A large force of French cavalry rode southwards across the marshy plain where they were shadowed by horsemen from the King's German Legion, but as the sun rose higher and the last pockets of mist evaporated from the lowland fields it dawned on the waiting British that Masséna was not planning any immediate attack.

Two hours after dawn a French voltigeur picquet on the stream's eastern bank called out a tentative greeting to the British sentry he knew was hidden behind a broken wall on the west bank. He could not see the British soldier, but he could see the blue haze of his pipe smoke. “Goddam!” he called, using the French nickname for all British troops. “Goddam!”

“Crapaud?”

A pair of empty hands appeared above the French-held wall. No one fired and, a moment later, an anxious moustached face appeared. The Frenchman produced an unlit cigar and mimed that he would like a light.

The greenjacket picquet emerged from hiding just as warily, but when no enemy fired at him he walked out onto the clapper bridge that had lost one of its stone slabs in the previous day's fighting. He held his clay pipe out over the gap. “Come on, Frenchie.”

The voltigeur walked onto the bridge and leaned over for the pipe that he used to light his cigar. Then he returned the pipe with a short length of garlic sausage. The two men smoked companionably, enjoying the spring sunshine. Other voltigeurs stretched and stood, just as the greenjackets relaxed in their positions. Some men took off their boots and dangled their feet in the stream.

In Fuentes de Onoro itself the British were struggling to remove the dead and the wounded from the crammed alleys. Men wrapped cloth strips about their mouths to drag the blood-black and heat-swollen bodies from the piles that marked where the fighting had been fiercest. Other men fetched water from the stream to relieve the thirst of the wounded. By mid-morning the truce across the stream was official and a company of unarmed French infantry arrived to carry their own casualties back across the bridge that had been patched with a plank taken from the watermill on the British bank. French ambulances waited at the ford to carry their men to the surgeons. The vehicles had been specially constructed for carrying wounded men and had springs as lavish as any city grandee's coach. The British army preferred to use farm carts that jolted the wounded foully.

A French major sat drinking wine and playing chess with a greenjacket captain in the inn's garden. Outside the inn a work party loaded an ox-drawn wagon with the dead who would be carried up to the ridge and buried in a common grave. The chessplayers frowned when a burst of raucous laughter sounded loud and the British Captain, annoyed that the laughter was not fading away, went to the gate and snapped at a sergeant for an explanation. “It was Mallory, sir,” the Sergeant said, pointing to a shamefaced British rifleman who was the butt of French and British amusement. “Bugger fell asleep, sir, and the Frogs was loading him up with the dead 'uns.”

The French Major took one of the Englishman's castles and remarked that he had once almost buried a living man. “We were already throwing earth in his grave when he sneezed. That was in Italy. He's a sergeant now.”

The rifle Captain might have been losing the game of chess, but he was determined not to be outdone in stories. “I've met two men who survived hangings in England,” he remarked. "They were pulled off the scaffold too soon and their bodies sold to the surgeons. The doctors pay five guineas a corpse,

I'm told, so they can demonstrate their damned techniques to their apprentices. I'm told the corpses revive far more often than you'd think.

There's always an unseemly scramble round the gallows as the man's family tries to cut the body down before the doctors get their wretched hands on it, and there doesn't seem anyone in authority to make sure the villain's properly dead before he's unstrung.“ He moved a bishop. ”I suppose the authorities are being bribed."

“The guillotine makes no such mistakes,” the Major said as he advanced a pawn.

“Death by science. Very quick and certain. I do believe that is checkmate.”

“Damn me,” the Englishman said, “so it is.”

The French Major stowed away his chess set. His pawns were musket balls, half limewashed and half left plain, the court pieces were carved from wood and the board was a square of painted canvas that he wrapped carefully about the chessmen. “It seems our lives have been spared this day,” he said, glancing up at the sun that was already past the meridian. “Maybe we shall fight tomorrow instead?”

Up on the ridge the British watched as French troops marched south. It was clear that Massena would now be trying to turn the British right flank and so

Wellington ordered the Seventh Division to deploy southwards and thus reinforce a strong force of Spanish partisans who were blocking the roads the

French needed to advance artillery as part of their flanking manoeuvre.

Wellington's army was now in two parts; the largest on the plateau behind

Fuentes de Onoro was blocking the approach to Almeida while the smaller part was two and a half miles south astride the road along which the British would need to retreat if they were defeated. Massena put a telescope to his one eye to watch as the small British division moved south. He kept expecting the division to stop before it left the protective artillery range of the plateau, but the troops kept marching and marching. “He's made a bollocks of it,” he told an aide as the Seventh Division finally marched way beyond the range of the strong British artillery. Massena collapsed the telescope. "Monsieur