Sharpe's Regiment (43 page)

‘That’s because you’re important and pompous. Don’t forget I’m here.’

‘I’ll try not to, but you’re easily overlooked.’ He smiled at her, thinking he was the luckiest man in the world.

They were ordered away from the hill an hour later. The Battalion was formed in parade order on the roadside, ready to march, its baggage somewhere behind it. Captain Harry Price stood at the head of a Company. The flags were cased again. They were marching into France.

Sharpe sat on Sycorax. Jane was beside him on her own mare. It was beginning to rain, the drops huge as pennies where they splashed on the rocks. ‘Sergeant Major!’

‘Sir!’

‘The Battalion will march in line of Companies.’

‘Where to, sir?’

Sharpe grinned. ‘Into France!’

But suddenly, before the order to march was given, and to Sharpe’s embarrassment and his wife’s delight, someone cheered. They cheered themselves and their victory. The noise spread, until the Prince of Wales’ Own Volunteers were filling the valley with their sound of delight. Sharpe had taken broken, persecuted men and made them into soldiers.

‘That’s enough, Sergeant Major!’

‘Sir! ’Talion!‘

Girdwood was mad, so these men, until another colonel was appointed, belonged to Sharpe now. He watched them march, listened to the singing that had already begun, and he thought how they had fought among the rocks to victory. They were, he considered, as good as any troops he had known and, for the moment at least, they were his men, his responsibility, and his pride. Jane watched him. She saw on his hard, striking face the glint of water that was not rain. He was staring at the men for whom he had fought against all the bastards who despised them because they were mere common soldiers. They were his men, his soldiers, Sharpe’s regiment.

The Battle of Vitoria (described in
Sharpe’s Honour)
finished French hopes in Spain. A handful of garrisons clung to their fortresses, but the French field armies, trounced by Wellington, fled northwards across the Pyrenees. No one expected their return. It was thought that the rest of 1813 would be spent in mopping up the French garrisons and preparing (from the new Pasajes supply-base) the invasion of France. A good time, then, for a man to return to England.

Yet Sharpe and Harper, by returning to Britain, missed some hard and confused fighting. Marshal Soult, sent by Napoleon to shore up the crumbling defences on the Spanish border, surprised Wellington by attacking instead of passively waiting to be attacked. Armies marched, countermarched, and fought in the mists of the Pyrenees, but by autumn’s end the French thrusts had all been defeated, the last fortresses in Spain had fallen (the fall of San Sebastian being particularly horrific), and Wellington could at last advance into France. Sharpe and Harper were back in time for the end of the Pyrenean fighting that cleared the foothills.

The action described in the epilogue of the novel is based on the famous description by Sir William Napier of the part played by
t
he 43rd during the battle of Nivelle (10th November, 1813). Napier described the battle in Volume V of his
History of the War in the Peninsula.
It is an unusually authoritative account, for Sir William Napier had been the 43rd’s commanding officer during their attack on the Lesser Rhune.

Sharpe’s battles with the hierarchy of the army in England are equally historical. The command of Britain’s army during the Napoleonic wars was a shambolic arrangement, split jealously between the War Office and the Horse Guards, with various other bureaucracies ever eager to hold onto their own shares. It was a venal system, open to abuses, of which the most famous was the scandal of 1809 when it was discovered that Mary Anne Clarke, when mistress of the Duke of York, Commander in Chief, had been selling promotions to officers. They had paid her, and she persuaded her lover to make the appointments. Sometimes, when he forgot, she would leave reminders pinned to the curtains of his bed. The Duke, King George III’s second son, though it was proved that he had taken no money himself, was forced to resign for two years.

The Duke of York has had a bad press. Every child knows about the Grand Old Duke of York, who had ten thousand men, who marched them up to the top of the hill, then marched them down again. He was every bit as bad and indecisive a field general as that nursery rhyme indicates (it was written after his disastrous Flanders campaign of 1794 in which Private Richard Sharpe, aged 16, fought in his first action), but in truth, bed-curtains aside, he was a highly efficient administrator who brought many much needed and sensible reforms to the army. Employing the younger sons of monarchs has always been one of mankind’s lesser problems, but Frederick, Duke of York and Albany, was well matched to his task.

Yet there was little he could do, or anyone else, to curb the venality of the recruiting system. Sergeant Horatio Havercamp, I suspect, reveals most of the trade’s tricks, though I like to think Horatio would not have stooped as low as some recruiting parties who equipped their hired prostitutes with manacles to pinion the reluctant volunteers in bed. The brothels where such public-spirited ladies worked were known as Crimping Houses. There was no conscription, of course, and every man (even the prisoners illegally handed to the recruiters) was a ‘volunteer’. The army would have dearly liked a press-gang system like the navy, but lacking it, they depended on the wiles of their recruiters and on the depths of their purse. The bounties were extravagant, though the recruit was almost always cheated out of all or most of it, and many colonels added their own monetary rewards to successful recruiters. Crimping existed quite legally. Contractors: independent civilian businessmen, would be offered so much money a head by the War Office, and their profit lay in keeping their bounty low and their promises high. It was much used in Ireland, where poverty drove so many men into the ranks of Britain’s army. In the early years of the war senior commissions would be given to a man who brought the army enough recruits; indeed, that is how Sir Henry Simmerson achieved his Lieutenant Colonelcy in the novel that opened this series,
Sharpe’s Eagle.
Such shifts were desperately needed for, with the exception of a few prime Regiments like the Rifles and the Guards, most units were chronically short of recruits; a shortage not helped by the existence of the home-bound militia that drained good men from the regular army.

The Prince Regent was fond of victory parades in Hyde Park, especially when enemy trophies were laid before him. The Royal family of the Regency period did not enjoy the affection that the present British Royal family receives from the public. It was not an attractive family. King George III had lost his sanity because of illness and his eldest son was a lavish wastrel who hated his father. Indeed, so unpopular was the Royal family, that the valet of the King’s youngest son was roundly applauded by the populace when he laid his master’s scalp open with a sabre stroke. The parades in Hyde Park, as well as indulging the Prince Regent’s soldiering fantasies, unusually allowed him to appear in public to adulation rather than jeers. The British public, though never very fond of the army, was proud of what it was doing under Wellington’s command, and would turn out to cheer dutifully in Hyde Park or to watch the patriotic pageants mounted in London’s theatres.

The Prince Regent, after he had become King, did publicly express his fantasies that he had been present at battlefields during the late war. He would embarrass Wellington by claiming, at dinner, to have led a charge at Waterloo. The Duke kept a politic silence.

A politic silence is also best kept about Foulness. It was not a secret military camp in 1813; it is now.

So Sharpe and Harper are back with the army. They, like so many officers and men of that army, now have their wives with them, and they have, at last, breached the defences of France. Wellington is the first foreign General to invade French soil since the very beginning of the Revolutionary War twenty years earlier. There was a feeling, that winter of 1813, that Napoleon would surely sue for peace soon. He was assailed in the north and his beloved France was invaded from the south. But there are battles yet to be fought, and campaigns to be won, so Sharpe and Harper will march again.

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