Sharpe 12 - Sharpe's Battle (40 page)
Read Sharpe 12 - Sharpe's Battle Online
Authors: Bernard Cornwell
“I'll go on killing Frogs, General. It's all I'm good for.” He glanced at the doctor and saw the man was nearly finished with his previous patient and he braced himself for the pain to come. "And the Real Companïa Irlandesa,
General,“ he asked, ”what happens to them?"
“Cadiz. But they go as heroes, Sharpe. A battle won! Almeida still invested and Masséna scuttling back to Ciudad Rodrigo. ”Pon my word, Sharpe, but we're all heroes now!"
"I'm sure your father and mother always said you'd be a hero one day,
General."
Runciman had shaken his head. “No, Sharpe, they never did. They were hopeful for me, I don't deny it, and no wonder for they were blessed with only the one child and I was that fortunate blessing, and they gave me great gifts, Sharpe, great gifts, but not, I think, heroism.”
“Well, you are a hero, sir,” Sharpe said, “and you can tell anyone who asks that I said as much.” Sharpe held out his right arm and, despite the pain, shook Runciman's hand. Harper had just appeared at the church doorway and was holding up a bottle to show that there was some consolation waiting when
Sharpe's bullet was extracted. “I'll see you outside, sir,” Sharpe told
Runciman, “unless you want to watch the surgeon pull out the bullet?”
“Oh, good Lord, no, Sharpe! My dear parents never thought I'd have the stomach to study medicine and I fear they were right.” Runciman had gone pale. “I shall let you suffer alone,” he said and backed hastily away with a handkerchief held over his mouth in case the noxious effusions of the hospital gave him a sickness.
Now the doctor pulled the bullet free of the wound before ramming a dirty rag against Sharpe's shoulder to staunch the flow of blood. “No bones broken,” he said, sounding disappointed, “but there are some bone chips off the rib that'll hurt you for a few days. Maybe for ever, if you live. You want to keep the bullet?” he asked Sharpe.
“No, sir.”
“Not as a keepsake for the ladies?” the doctor asked, then took a flask of brandy from a pocket of his blood-stiffened apron. He took a deep swallow, then used a corner of his bloody apron to wipe the tips of the forceps clean.
“I know a man in the artillery who has dozens of spent bullets mounted in gold and hung on chains,” the surgeon said. “He claims each one lodged near his heart. He's got the scar, you see, to prove it, and he presents a bullet to every woman he wants to roger and tells each silly bitch that he dreamed of a woman who looked just like her when he thought he was dying. It works, he says. He's a pig-ugly scoundrel but he reckons the women can't wait to claw his breeches down.” He offered Sharpe the bullet again. “Sure you don't want the damn thing?”
“Quite sure.”
The doctor tossed the bullet aside. “I'll get you wrapped up,” he said. “Keep the bandage damp if you want to live and don't blame me if you die.” He walked unsteadily away, calling for an orderly to bandage Sharpe's shoulder.
“I do hate bloody doctors,” Sharpe said as he joined Harper outside the church.
“My grand-da said the same thing,” the Irishman said as he offered Sharpe the bottle of captured brandy. “He only saw a doctor once in all his life and a week later he was dead. Mind you, he was eighty-six at the time.”
Sharpe smiled. “Is he the same one whose bullock dropped off the cliff?”
"Aye, and bellowed all the way down. Just like when Grogan's pig fell down a well. I think we laughed for a week, but the damned pig wasn't even scratched!
Just wet."
Sharpe smiled. “You must tell me about it some time, Pat.”
“So you're staying with us then?”
“No court of inquiry,” Sharpe said. “Runciman told me.”
“They should never have wanted one in the first place,” Harper said scornfully, then took the bottle from Sharpe and tipped it to his mouth.
They wandered through an encampment smeared with the smoke of cooking fires and haunted with the cries of wounded men left on the battlefield. Those cries faded as Sharpe and Harper walked further from the village. Around the fires men sang of their homes far away. The singing was sentimental enough to give
Sharpe a pang of homesickness even though he knew his home was not in England, but here, in the army, and he could not imagine leaving this home. He was a soldier and he marched where he was ordered to march and he killed the King's enemies when he arrived. That was his job and the army was his home and he loved both even though he knew he would have to fight like a gutter-born bastard for every step of advancement that other men took for granted. And he knew too that he would never be prized for his birth or his wit or his wealth, but would only be reckoned as good as his last fight, but that thought made him smile. For Sharpe's last battle had been against the best soldier France had and Sharpe had drowned the bastard like a rat. Sharpe had won, Loup was dead, and it was over at last: Sharpe's battle.
HISTORICAL NOTE
The royal guard of Spain in Napoleonic times consisted of four companies: the Spanish, American, Italian and Flemish companies, but alas, no Real Companïa Irlandesa. There were, however, three Irish regiments in Spanish service (de Irlanda, de Hibernia and de Ultonia), each composed of Irish exiles and their descendants. The British army, too, had more than its share of Irishmen; some English county regiments in the Peninsula were more than one third Irish and if the French could ever have disaffected those men then the army would have been in a desperate condition.
It was in a fairly desperate condition in the spring of 1811 anyway, not because of disaffection, but simply because of numbers. The British government had yet to realize that in Wellington they had at last discovered a general who knew how to fight and they were still niggardly in sending him troops. The shortfall was partly remedied by the fine Portuguese battalions that were under Wellington's command. Some divisions, like the Seventh, had more Portuguese than British soldiers and every account of the war pays tribute to the fighting qualities of those allies. The relationship with the Spanish was never so easy nor so fruitful, even after General Alava became liaison officer to Wellington. Alava became a close friend to Wellington and was with him, indeed, on the field of Waterloo. The Spanish did eventually appoint Wellington the Generalisimo of their armies, but they waited until after the battle of Salamanca in 1812 had driven the French out of Madrid and central Spain.
But in 1811 the French were still very close to Portugal which they had occupied twice in the previous three years. Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajoz barred Wellington's progress into Spain and until those twin fortresses fell (in early 1812) no one could be certain that the French would not attempt another invasion of Portugal. Such an invasion became much less likely after the battle of Fuentes de Onoro, but it would not have been impossible.
Fuentes de Onoro was never one of Wellington's 'favourite' battles, which were those that he could recall with some pleasure at his own generalship. Assaye, in India, is the battle of which he was most proud and Fuentes de Onoro is probably the one of which he was least proud. He made one of his rare mistakes when he allowed the Seventh Division to march so far from the rest of the army, but he was rescued by the brilliant performance of the Light Division under Craufurd on that Sunday morning. It was a display of soldiering that impressed everyone who witnessed it; the Division was far from help, it was surrounded, yet it withdrew safely and took only a handful of casualties. The fighting in the village itself was far worse, little more than a slaughterous brawl that left the streets glutted with the dead and dying, yet in the end, despite the French bravery and their one glorious moment when they did capture the church and the crest, the British and their allies held the ridge and denied Masséna the road to Almeida. Masséna, disappointed, distributed the rations he had been carrying for Almeida's garrison among his own hungry army, then marched back to Ciudad Rodrigo.
So Wellington, despite his mistake, was left with a victory, but it was a victory soured by the escape of Almeida's garrison. That garrison was being blockaded by Sir William Erskine who, sadly, did not have too many 'lucid intervals'. The letter from the Horse Guards describing Erskine's madness is genuine and shows one of the problems Wellington had in trying to prosecute a war. Erskine did nothing when the French blew up Almeida's defences and slept while the garrison slipped away in the night. The whole lot of them should have been made prisoner, but instead they escaped a feeble blockade and went to reinforce the vast French armies in Spain.
Most of those armies were fighting guerrilleros, not British soldiers, and in another year some of them would be fighting an even more terrible enemy: the Russian winter. But the British too have their hardships to come, hardships that Sharpe and Harper will share, endure and, happily, survive.
The End