Sharpe's Regiment (40 page)

‘A favour?’

‘I’ll fight his bloody battle for him, which means we stand a chance of winning.’ Sharpe laughed at his own immodesty.

‘Any other enemies here, Major Sharpe?’ Nairn asked with mock innocence.

Sharpe smiled, thought of Sergeant Lynch, and lied. ‘No, sir.’

 

‘Doesn’t look any different to Spain, does it?’ Harper, with a fresh mug of tea, stood beside Sharpe on the great hill and looked down on the enemy’s last fortresses before the open country.

Sharpe propped a broken mirror above a bowl of water and stropped his razor on the side of his right boot. ‘Buggers didn’t have trenches in Spain.’ He had searched the French positions with his telescope. He did not much like what he saw. The French had made the great hump of hill beneath him into a remarkable fortress. They had built dry stone walls that connected their small forts, dug trenches, and at the very end of the hill, that lay like a ridge among lesser hills, there was a series of concentric walls that surrounded a pinnacle of rock. The rock was crowned with embrasures, packed, doubtless, with muskets that could not be reached by British cannon, for no cannon could be placed in a position to reach the pinnacle. This, Sharpe knew, would be an infantryman’s job. An attack uphill, against stone and trenches, against an enemy fanatical to protect their homeland.

The Battalion’s orders, given to Girdwood, but taken by Sharpe, instructed the Prince of Wales’ Own Volunteers to attack behind two other Battalions. The first two Battalions would take the out-works, clear the first trenches, and let the Prince of Wales’
Own
Volunteers go through them for the task of finishing the job. Sharpe’s men were to scour the last defences and take the pinnacle, the last fortress. To the right and left of the enemy hill were others, crowned by similar works, to be screened or attacked by other Battalions. By nightfall, if all went well, the road out of the mountains would be cleared and France, with its full barns and winter pastures, would be at Wellington’s disposal.

Sharpe scraped the razor over his skin without benefit of hot water. He flinched, then stolidly scraped on. ‘I’m giving you a special squad, Patrick.’

‘Special, sir?’

Sharpe dipped the blade into the icy, dirty water that had already been used by nine other officers. ‘We can’t make a formal bloody assault on that place. Too many god-damn rocks.’ It would be like threading through a maze of ditches and walls that would tear a tight formation into ruin. ‘We’re going in two columns, Light and Grenadier Companies leading, but I’m giving you your own squad. Go in the centre, and if you see either column in trouble, go in on their flank. Don’t wait for my orders, just keep going.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Harper grinned happily. He liked such independence. ‘Can I pick my men, sir?’

‘I’ve already done it.’ Sharpe wiped his face on his officer’s sash. ‘O’Grady, Kelleher, Rourke, Callaghan, Joyce, Donnell, the Pearce brothers, O‘Toole, Fitzpatrick, and Halloran.’ He looked at Harper’s wide grin. ‘And I thought perhaps you ought to take an extra sergeant. Just to help you.’

‘And who might that be, sir?’

‘I don’t know.’ Sharpe pulled on his old jacket and began to button it. ‘Lynch, perhaps?’

‘I think the boys would be happy with that, sir.’

Sharpe gave an atrocious imitation of Harper’s Donegal accent. ‘Grand, Patrick, just grand. And would you be minding if I finished your tea?’

‘Whatever you want, sir.’ Harper laughed. ‘Christ, but it’s good to be back.’

 

 

At eight o‘clock the Battalion was ordered down to the valley. They left the thin sunshine, going into shadow. The tracks, made by goats, forced the Companies to go in single file. Servants led their officers’ horses. Sharpe, like most of the veteran officers, had left his horse with the baggage.

He had bought himself a fine seven year old mare in England, replacing the cheap saddle horse he had bought on his second journey to Foulness. Jane Gibbons had named the mare Sycorax.

‘I can’t even spell it!’ Sharpe had growled,

‘I suppose you’d call her Florence, or Peggotty.’ Jane stroked the mare’s nose. ‘Sycorax she is.’

‘Why Sycorax?’

‘She was a nasty witch with a pretty name. She was Caliban’s mother, and this is your horse.’ She laughed at him. ‘And it is a pretty name, Richard.’

So Sycorax she stayed, a sturdy, dependable beast with a witch’s name, bought with the proceeds of the diamonds.

Maggie Joyce was pouring the money from the diamonds into St Alban’s Street where it was converted into four per cent stock. Sharpe had taken some of the jewels back. Jane had necklaces, ear-rings, and bracelets that had once been worn by a Spanish Queen. Sharpe had also taken a second necklace, the fragile, beautiful piece of filgreed gold hung with pearls and diamonds, which he had wrapped, cased, and sent by special messenger to a London address.

The reply reached him the day before the Battalion sailed from Portsmouth. “Dear Major Sharpe, How can I possibly accept such a splendid Gift? With Gratitude and astonishment, of course. You are too Generous a man. Be lucky. Anne, Countess Camoynes.” There was a post-script. “You may see from the Public Papers that Lord Fenner has resigned. He no Longer has the Wealth to Sustain his position. For all Your Services, I will Remember you fondly, as I trust you will me for mine.”

The Battalion formed up in the valley. From above them, dulled by distance and the convex hill slope that hid the events from the waiting men, came the sound of muskets. Sharpe ordered the Colours uncased, the Colours of the First Battalion that were stained and shredded by war. He had been commanded to add the insignia of the three white feathers onto the Battalion’s badge, but there had not yet been time to put them on the flags. A wind, that carried the musket smoke into the upper air, rippled the heavy silks and stirred the yellow tassels. Cannon sounded, not British, but French mountain guns that guarded the rock fortresses. The new men looked nervously upwards, the veterans waited, and to Lieutenant Colonel Girdwood, who had dreamed so often of this moment when he would go into proper battle, the sounds seemed like a cacophony of hell and glory and trembling and death. He waited.

 

 

The horses were left with the servants in the valley. Sharpe, no longer pretending to consult Girdwood, gave the orders. The Battalion would advance in two columns. The Grenadier Company would lead the right hand column, the Light Company the left, while RSM Harper and his detail would go in the centre, ahead of Sharpe and the Colour party. ‘I don’t want any god-damned foolishness. We’re not on a parade ground. You can’t keep the ranks dressed up there, so just keep going! Listen for orders, but if you can’t hear any then you won’t do anything wrong if you just attack to the front. Attack! All the time!’ He looked round the faces, staring especially at the new men like Captain Smith and Captain Carline. ‘And don’t let your men settle into safe holes, understand? They like to do that, so keep them moving! Roust them out, take them forward.’ He described what he had seen through his telescope; the nightmare landscape of trenches and walls, of blank culverts where men could be trapped with French sharp-shooters above them, a jumbled, rocky landscape designed for defence. ‘It has to be fast work! If they drive us into the ground, we’re done for! So tell your men to fire on sight, not to wait for orders, and warn them there’ll be sticking work.’ Captain Smith looked worried at the thought of bayonets. ‘We go in fast. Tell them the French are more scared than we are.’

‘They must be bloody terrified then,’ Lieutenant Price said, and raised a smile from the officers.

‘They are,’ Sharpe said, ‘because they know they’re fighting us.’ And oddly, even the new men who had never fought, and who had been given a new lease on their shabby careers, suddenly knew that they could win. They followed a soldier, and they went to a fight.

 

It took more than two hours to climb the hill and catch up with the first attacking Battalions. Charlie Weller, pushed into the back file of the Light Company, saw his first enemy dead; a man crumpled on the rocks, his blood congealed by the cold. Another dead Frenchman’s beard was frosted white.

He saw British dead, one with an arm seemingly torn from the socket, another blown apart by a cannon ball with his guts blue on the rocks. More terrible than the dead were the wounded. Charlie passed groups of Frenchmen, one sobbing because his eyes were gone, another gasping out his life in terrible, huge, clouding breaths. His belly had been laid open by a sword. A British private gave him wine to sip, but the man could not take it.

A British sergeant whose left thigh was torn open to the bone and whose blood, despite the leather belt twisted into his groin, pulsed onto the ground, grinned at Weller. ‘Go on, lad! Give ’em hell.‘ Weller thought he was more likely to vomit. He stumbled on, following the pack of men in front, wondering if he would remember to clear the ramrod from his musket before he fired. Ahead, seemingly closer all the while, was the sound of the guns.

Lieutenant Colonel Girdwood walked beside Sharpe. Without the pitch in his moustache he seemed punier. His small, black eyes darted about the unfamiliar scenery. He too saw the dead, but he had seen men torn by bullets before. Yet never in Ireland had he seen men struck by artillery fire. Somehow the gobbets of flesh, like the work of a demented, drunken butcher, seemed unreal. He shied away once as a dog ran across his front.

The sun was fitful between clouds. The smoke of the French mountain guns was like a thin skein above the Battalion, bringing its filthy smell of powder smoke. Somewhere a man screamed, the scream rising and falling in a dreadful cadence. It was silenced suddenly and Girdwood shuddered.

The Lieutenant Colonel could not make sense of what he saw. He could not tell where the enemy positions were, or how far the leading Battalions had reached in their attack. He could see, at the ridge’s northern end, the steep pinnacle of rock, wreathed in smoke, but dead ground lay before the pinnacle and Girdwood was confused. Once, through a shifting mist of smoke, he saw red uniforms running forward, a loose knot of men not in any proper order, and he wondered if he heard a cheer, but was not sure. He watched Sergeant John Lynch, plodding ahead of him, and thought that if Lynch showed no fear, then nor need he.

Sergeant Lynch was terrified. He had sensed that there was some purpose to his attachment to this band of Irishmen, and it was a purpose he did not like. He had let his accent flower for them, sounding more Irish than they, but he felt their scorn and he was scared.

He had never been in a group like this. He knew how many Irish fought in this army, but he had thought of them merely as rank-fillers, peasants who could be pushed around and forced into obedience. He had never seen their pride. These men were sure that Major Sharpe had grouped them together because he wanted the best in front, and who were better than they? They spoke filthily of England’s King, despised the officers whom Lynch admired, but went to this fight, beneath a flag not their own, with a relish that was almost contagious. ‘You know why God made Ireland so small?’ one of them, sharpening his bayonet with long strokes of a stone, asked Lynch.

‘No.’ Lynch was nervous of their confidence, their grim assurance.

‘Otherwise we’d have conquered the whole bloody world and there’d be no fights left, eh?’ The man laughed, and held the blade up to inspect its edge. ‘And what would a man do then?’

Some of them spoke in Gaelic, laughing with Harper, and Lynch felt sure the laughter was aimed at him. He remembered the death of Marriott in the river among the Essex marshes, knew it was still unpunished, and was fearful.

d‘Alembord, at the head of the left column, was going into his second battle. He was aware of Harper’s Irish group on his right and was determined that his Light Company would prove better. He considered that he had the best men, the fastest, most spirited men, but he wished Harper was back as his Sergeant. He drew his sword and, in the wan, winter light, the slim steel seemed a fragile weapon to take into this land of rock and musket fire and sudden death. Huckfield, a studious and careful man from the north of England who had been promoted to the new rank of Company Sergeant Major, shouted forward to d’Alembord. ‘Major’s calling a halt, sir!’

The Battalion stopped. Sharpe, standing in front of the Colours that told the French who their new enemies were, drew his sword. The steel, carefully sharpened before dawn, rang scrapingly on the scabbard throat. ‘Fix bayonets!’

The seventeen inch blades were drawn, slotted onto muzzles, while the few Riflemen still in d‘Alembord’s ranks pushed their longer sword-bayonets onto their weapons. Among the Riflemen was a young Spaniard, Angel, who had never been formally sworn into the Battalion but was one of its best marksmen. The other men of the Light Company, knowing how fanatically he fought, swore that he could not live long.

They were at the edge of the fight, facing the chaos and confusion of the attack, and a Brigade Major, sweating despite the cold after his long scramble towards the new Battalion, gave Sharpe what little news of the battle that he could, then ordered them forward. Sharpe raised his sword and his voice. ‘The Battalion will rendezvous at the pinnacle!’ Each man knew his task and the sword pointed the way. ‘Forward!’

 

At Pasajes Sharpe had broken up the four Companies he had formed in Essex. He split the men among the existing Companies, mixing experience with inexperience. Yet, even so, he knew that half of this Battalion had never fought. If he could have chosen an ideal battle for their baptism, he would have liked to fight a defensive action, his men secure in the knowledge that so long as they reloaded their muskets quickly no harm could come to them. Instead he was committing them to a frontal attack on positions that were firmly held and savagely fortified. There could be no flank attack here, the valley bottoms were sodden with bogs, and the road northwards ran along the side of the hill and was barred by the French forts.