Sharpe's Regiment (16 page)

Marriott would strip. He would stand shivering.

‘Run!’

He would run the tent lines, stumbling in the mud, jeered on his way by sergeants and corporals who would slash at his bare buttocks with their canes or steel-tipped pacing sticks. ‘Faster! Faster!’ He would come back to Sergeant Lynch with tears in his eyes and his pale flesh scarred by the welts of the blows.

Just keep your bloody mouth shut,‘ Harper told him.

‘We’re not animals. We’re men.’

‘No you’re not. You’re a bloody soldier now. Never look the bugger in the eyes, never argue, and never complain.’

Marriott listened, but did not hear. The other recruits did both, for in only a few hours Sharpe had become their unofficial leader and guide within the army. On their very first day Sharpe had calmed Charlie Weller down, gripping the boy’s shoulders till it hurt. ‘You do nothing, Charlie!’

‘He killed him!’

‘You do nothing! You bloody endure, that’s all. It gets better, lad.’

‘I’ll kill him!’ Weller, with all the passion of his seventeen years, could not hold back the tears caused by Buttons’ death.

‘After Patrick’s torn his head off, maybe,’ Sharpe grinned. He liked Weller. The boy was one of those rare recruits who had joined the army, not out of desperation, but because he wanted to serve his country. Weller, given time, would rise in the army, but Sharpe knew that first the seventeen year old must survive this place.

A place where, to his astonishment, he discovered that there were more than seven hundred men in training. Some were close to finishing, almost ready to take their place in the ranks that must fight the French, others, like his own squad, still learned the basic grammar of the trade. Yet there were more than enough men here to save the First Battalion in Pasajes and to form the core of a properly constituted Second as well.

He discovered too where the camp was. On a rainy, drizzling day he was ordered to the kitchens where he unloaded a cart of half rotted cabbages. A Mess-corporal, leaning in the doorway and staring at the low cloud to the south, grumbled what a god-awful bloody place it was.

‘What place?’ Sharpe asked.

The corporal lit a pipe and, when it was drawing to his satisfaction, spat into the mud. ‘End of the bleeding world. Called Foulness.’

‘Foulness?’

‘Bloody foul too, yes?’ The corporal laughed. ‘Christ knows why they sent us here. Chelmsford was all right, but the buggers want us here.’

The corporal was happy to talk. Foulness, he said, was an island, joined by the wooden bridge to the mainland, and on the island there was a single, small, poor village and this army camp. To the south, the corporal said, was the Thames Estuary. At low tide it was a great desert of mud. To the east was the North Sea and to the north and west were the tangling tidal creeks and rivers of the Essex coast.

‘It’s like a prison,’ Sharpe said.

The corporal laughed. ‘You won’t be here long. Six weeks and they ship you out! You should feel sorry for me. Stuck out here!’

Sharpe had guessed already that the corporal, like the two senior Companies in the camp that, alone on Foulness, were dressed in red jackets, was one of the men who were here to guard the recruits against escape. It truly was like a prison, with water as its walls and troops as its jailers. Sharpe chopped a cabbage in half. ‘Where do they ship us to?’

‘Wherever the buggers want you. You know that, you’re an old soldier.’

And being an old soldier was to Sharpe’s advantage, for it kept him out of trouble and spared him the punishments that racked the less experienced men. No sergeant wanted to punish Sharpe or Harper, for the simple reason that both men gave the appearance of being able to take any punishment that was handed to them. Instead it was Marriott, always Marriott, who, with his tuppence worth of education, was unable to rid himself of the idea that he was superior to the illiterate men who were his fellow recruits. He argued stubbornly, wept when he was punished, and even at night, in the stillness of the tent lines, when the soft tread of the patrolling sergeants and officers listening for mutiny could be heard outside, Marriott cried.

Harper’s view was simple. ‘It’s his own bloody fault.’

‘He thinks he’s too clever to be sensible.’ Sharpe was the only man to whom Marriott would listen, but even Sharpe could not drive into the ex-clerk’s head that the only route to survival lay in acceptance and submission.

‘I’m going to get out. I’ll run!’ Marriott had told him. He had only been in the army a week.

‘Don’t be a fool.’ There was a snap in Sharpe’s voice that made Marriott’s head jerk up, the snap of an officer. ‘You’re not running away!’

‘They can’t do this to people!’

That night, before the bugle called the lights-out, Sharpe told Harper that Marriott wanted to run. Harper shrugged. ‘What about us?’

‘Us?’

‘Bugger Marriott, it’s time we got the hell out of here.’

‘We don’t even know what they’re doing here.’ Sharpe knew that the camp did not exist solely to steal the men’s pay. If that was its sole purpose, why were they trained so hard?

‘Still time we got out.’ Harper said it stubbornly.

‘Give it another week, Patrick. Just one more week.’

The huge Irishman nodded. ‘But promise me one thing?’

‘What?’

The big, flat face grinned slowly. ‘I’d like to come here as RSM for just one day. Just one day. And one hour with that bastard Lynch.’

Sharpe laughed. Above his head, beautiful and crisp against the darkening sky, a skein of geese glided towards the eastern mudflats. ‘It’s a promise, Sergeant.’

A promise he would keep. But first he would discover just why this hidden Battalion of the South Essex trained so hard and were punished so savagely in the lost, wet, secret marshland camp called Foulness.

‘Say it, filth!’

Patrick Harper, staring stolidly over Sergeant Lynch’s shako, bawled out the words that he was required to say at every single parade. ‘God save the King!’

‘Again, filth!’

‘God save the King!’

Sergeant Lynch, in the eight days since he had taken over this squad, had not found fault with Harper once; with Marriott a thousand times, but with the big Irishman, not once. Sergeant Lynch had decided that the big man was broken. He had assured as much to Lieutenant Colonel Girdwood. ‘He’s just a big, stupid boar, sir. No trouble at all.’ Indeed, Sergeant Lynch was glad to have Privates O‘Keefe and Vaughn in his squad, for the presence of two trained men hastened the training of the other recruits.

‘Again, filth!’

‘God save the King!’

It was a beautiful morning. The sun was drying the mudflats and a small breeze brought the smell of salt to the parade ground. Sergeant Lynch, whose moustached face seemed unhappy this splendid day, stepped back from Harper to face his three ranks. ‘Filth! Stocks off!’

It was an extraordinary relief to unhook the thick, stiff, leather collars that they were then ordered to hand down the ranks to the men in the right file who, in turn, handed them to a corporal. Sergeant Lynch stared at them with his habitual expression of dislike. ‘Filth. You have work to do! Ditching work! If just one of you bastards gives me trouble, just one! I’ll damage you! I’ll damage you!’ It was evident he disapproved of the fatigue duty, preferring the close order drill in which every mistake was obvious and easily punished. ‘Left turn! Quick march!’

Each of the squad was issued with either a rake, a billhook, or a shovel. Sharpe assumed that they were to attack another of the island’s drainage channels, but, instead, Sergeant Lynch ordered them onto the embanked road which led off the island.

The Sergeant, like his two corporals, was armed with a musket. If this was a prison, then now the squad was under armed guard I as they left Foulness. Sharpe noted again the strength of the picquet that stood sentry duty at the wooden bridge. More than a dozen men watched the squad pass, while the presence of a tethered horse beside the wooden guard hut suggested to Sharpe that an officer was on duty there as well.

Sergeant Lynch took them back along the road they had come when they had first arrived at Foulness, then north on the track which led to the big brick house with its eagle weathervane, and Sharpe prayed that they were not being marched to Sir Henry Simmerson’s home. They splashed through the ford, climbed to the track on the bank, then, before reaching Sir Henry’s house, they turned right onto a narrow path that led, ever more narrowly, into the reeds of the sea-marsh.

It seemed to Sharpe that they must be skirting Sir Henry’s estate. They worked their way east, then north, and Sharpe was glad to see a creek between themselves and the house of the one man who might recognise him in this comer of Essex. Nevertheless his worry increased as, pace by pace, Sergeant Lynch led them closer and closer to the big, splendid house.

It looked peaceful on this bright summer’s day. The morning sun caught the gleaming white paint of the window and door frames that faced east. Before the east facade was a terrace that sloped down to a wide, close cut lawn that ended with a brick retaining wall. The top of the wall was level with the lawn, while at its base was the muddy channel of the creek.

The channel was silted and choked, the mud banked and overgrown with plants. Sergeant Lynch, stopping by a belt of sea rushes, ordered the men to halt. ‘Listen, filth!’ His voice was softer than usual, perhaps because he did not want to offend the ears of the English gentry beyond the silted creek. ‘You are going to clear out this bloody channel! Start there!’ He gestured with his pacing stick to the end of the garden wall, ‘and you will work it down to that marker!’ He pointed behind him and Sharpe saw, some two hundred yards away, a wooden pole that leaned in the marsh. ‘You will work in silence! Corporal Mason!’

‘Sergeant!’

‘Take the odd-numbered men and start at the marker!’

‘Sir!’

Sharpe and Harper, because they paraded beside each other, had consecutive numbers, so that Harper, who as the tallest man in the squad was number one, was taken with the corporal to the far marker. Sharpe, as number two, went with the second corporal through the rushes and down into the channel beside Sir Henry’s wall. Sergeant Lynch, impeccable in his regimentals, decided to stay on the dry bank.

It was hard, messy work. The mud was overgrown with rice grass that had to be tugged up, its spreading, linked roots hard to drag out of the slime, then the men with shovels, working behind, deepened the channel so that the slimy water, stinking of old vegetation, gurgled and seeped about their shins. Sharpe was sweating quickly, though oddly he found the work enjoyable, perhaps because it was so mindless and because there was a strange pleasure working in the sucking, thick cool mud.

It was clear that Sir Henry Simmerson had requested the channel cleared, not just so that his east lawn should be edged with water as if by a moat, but because, halfway down the brick, moss-grown wall, there was an archway that led into a boathouse. A barred gate, rusted and padlocked, faced the creek, while behind the bars Sharpe could see three old punts that would need this channel excavated if they were ever again to float. Beyond the punts Sharpe could see a stone stairway that must lead up to the garden.

‘You! You, filth!’ Sergeant Lynch was pointing at Sharpe. ‘Vaughn!’

‘Sergeant?’

‘Wait there, filth!’

It seemed to Sharpe that he had been singled out for punishment, though for what he could not think, but instead he saw, through the bars of the water gate, a man descend into the boathouse. He felt a second’s panic, fearing that it was Sir Henry himself, but instead it was a servant who, stooping along a brick walk built at one side of the tunnel that formed the arched dock, came and unlocked the padlock. The key took a deal of turning, so stiff was the lock, but finally it was undone and the gate creaked open.

The man sniffed, as though it was beneath his dignity to talk to a mere muddy soldier. ‘It has to be cleared out.’ He gestured at the boathouse. ‘Deep enough for the craft to float at high tide. Do you comprehend me?’ He frowned, as if Sharpe was an animal who might not understand English.

‘Yes.’

Sergeant Lynch sent Marriott to help Sharpe, and first they had to lift the punts out of the tunnel and put them on the bank of the creek. Next there was a mess of tarpaulins, poles, fishing lines, paddles and awning hoops to drag out of the dark, dank tunnel, and only then could they begin to dig at the stinking, clinging mud.

Marriott attacked the mud like a maniac, flinging it with his shovel out into the creek. Sharpe protested, telling him to slow down.

‘Slow down?’

‘They can’t see us in here! We take our bloody time.’ It was strange, Sharpe thought, how he slipped back into the ways of the ranks. As a Major his job was to make men work, but now, at the bottom of the army’s heap, he found himself looking for ways to avoid undue exertion.

Marriott did not argue, but instead slowed to such a dawdling pace that it would have taken them a full two days to dig the mud out from the boathouse. Sharpe approved. They were out of Sergeant Lynch’s sight, while the corporal in charge of this half of the squad was more concerned about keeping the mud from his shoes and trousers than how hard his men worked.

‘They shouldn’t do this to us,’ Marriott said.

‘Better than bloody drill.’ Sharpe was sitting on the brick walkway, wondering if he dared try and steal a few moments sleep.

‘Labourer’s work, this.’

‘We are bloody labourers,’ Sharpe yawned. A butterfly came down the garden steps, hovered bright in the boathouse entrance, then flew away. ‘We’re soldiers, lad. Our job is to clear up the bloody mess the politicians make. We’re the buggers no one wants until the politicians make their mistakes, then everyone’s grateful to us.’ He was surprised to hear himself say it, not because it was untrue, but because it did not tally with the character he had adopted in this squad. He pretended to be nothing more than a disappointed old soldier, unthinking and obedient, wise to the army’s ways and uncritical of its behaviour.