Sharpe's Siege

by Bernard Cornwell

  ‘You poxed bastard,’ Sharpe said. ‘You coward!’

  ‘Sir!’ An Army officer touched Sharpe’s arm in remonstrance, but Sharpe rounded on the man, who stepped back in sudden fear from the savage face.

  Sharpe looked back to Bampfylde. ‘You ran away.’

  ‘That is not ...’

  ‘Just as you did not take the fortress, you bastard, I did. And then I held it, you bastard, I held it against a goddamned brigade of crapaud troops. We beat them, Bampfylde. We fought them and beat them. I lost some of your Marines, Bampfylde, because you don’t fight a demi-brigade without losing men, but we won!’ There was an embarrassed silence among the elegantly dressed party. A cold wind stirred the water to Sharpe’s right, then a dull cough of artillery thumped its noise across the river. ‘Do you hear me, Bampfylde?’

  The naval officer said nothing, and there was nothing but terror on his fleshy young face. The other officers, appalled by Sharpe’s face and by the anger in his voice, stood as if frozen.

  ‘Over two thousand men, you bastard, and less than two hundred of us. We fought them till we had no bullets left, then we fought with steel, Bampfylde. And we won!’ Sharpe took another step towards the naval captain who, terrified, stepped backwards.

  ‘He told me ...’ Bampfylde began, but could not go on.

  ‘Who told you what?’

  Bampfylde’s eyes went past Sharpe and the Rifleman turned to see the Comte de Maquerre, a girl on his arm, standing with Colonel Wigram. The Comte looked at Sharpe as though he saw a revenant come from the tomb. Sharpe, who had not expected to find the Comte, stared with equal disbelief.

  Then, to both minds, came the shared knowledge of treachery and the Comte de Maquerre panicked. He ran.

  The Comte ran towards the bridge that led to the north bank of the Adour where a handful of French troops retreated from the First Division. There should have been more French troops there, Calvet’s troops, enough troops to turn the river into blood, but de Maquerre had been fooled by the story of a landing and so Calvet’s troops had been frittered away at Arcachon. The Comte de Maquerre had unwittingly served Wellington well, but he was a traitor and so he ran.

  Sharpe ran after him.

  Colonel Wigram raised a hand as if to call for prudent decorum in front of ladies, but Sharpe pushed the man down the sea-wall and into the mud.

  De Maquerre leaped down the sloping wall, miraculously kept his footing on the slippery river’s edge, and climbed on to the bridge.

  ‘Stop him!’ Sharpe bellowed it.

  Portuguese infantrymen crossing the bridge saw a tall, distinguished officer in British uniform being chased by a dirty, tattered wretch. They made way for the Comte.

  Sharpe banged his wounded thigh as he clambered on to the roadway. Blood ran warm on his thigh as he snarled at men to make way. ‘Stop him!’

  A jittery horse, made nervous by the strange road across which it was being led blindfolded, checked de Maquerre’s panicked flight. It swerved its rump into the Frenchman’s path and the Comte was forced to leap for the safety of one of the moored chasse-marées. He turned as he landed on the deck, saw he could run no further, and drew his sword.

  Sharpe jumped forward from the planks on to the boat’s deck and drew his own sword.

  The Comte de Maquerre, seeing the filth and blood of battle on Sharpe, sensed that the fight was lost before it began. He lowered his slim blade. ‘I surrender, Major.’

  ‘They hang spies,’ Sharpe said, ‘you bastard.’

  De Maquerre glanced towards the water and Sharpe knew the man was contemplating a leap into the cold grey tide, but then a voice drew the Frenchman’s attention back to the bridge.

  ‘Sharpe!’ It was the petulant voice of the mud-smeared Colonel Wigram who, with Elphinstone, was forcing his way past the Portuguese troops on the crowded roadway.

  The Comte de Maquerre looked at Wigram and gestured towards Sharpe. ‘He’s mad!’

  ‘Major!’ Wigram stepped down to the chasse-marée’s deck. ‘There are things you don’t understand, Major!’

  ‘He’s a traitor. A spy.’

  Wigram stayed by the cable-taut roadway. ‘He was supposed to tell the French we planned a landing! Don’t you see that?’

  Sharpe stared at the tall, thin Frenchman. ‘He works for a man called Pierre Ducos. Oh, you fooled him, Wigram, I understand that, but this bastard tried to trap me.’

  De Maquerre, sensing survival in Wigram’s alliance, gestured again at Sharpe. ‘He’s mad, Wigram, mad!’

  ‘I’m mad enough,’ Sharpe said, ‘to hate hanging men.’

  The Comte de Maquerre could step no further back. His retreat was blocked by two naval ratings who crouched nervously beside the anchor’s winch. The Frenchman watched Sharpe’s sword, then Sharpe’s eyes. The boat shivered as Elphinstone leaped on to the deck from the roadway, and the movement seemed to prompt de Maquerre into a burst of pleading French directed at Wigram.

  ‘In English, you bastard!’ Sharpe stepped a pace closer to the frightened de Maquerre. ‘Tell him who Ducos is! Tell him who Favier is! Tell him how you offered to make me a Major General in your Royalist Army!’

  ‘Monsieur!’ de Maquerre, faced with the Rifleman, could only plead.

  ‘Sharpe!’ Colonel Wigram made his voice very sensible and calm. ‘There will have to be a formal inquiry before a properly constituted tribunal ...’

  ‘... and what will they do? Hang him?’

  ‘If found guilty, yes.’ Wigram sounded uncertain.

  ‘But I don’t like hanging men!’ Sharpe said each word slowly and deliberately. ‘I’ve discovered a weakness in myself, and I regret it, but I can’t bear seeing men hanged!’

  ‘Quite understandable.’ Wigram, convinced he was dealing with a madman, spoke soothingly.

  The Comte de Maquerre, sensing a reprieve in Sharpe’s words, tried a very nervous smile. ‘You don’t understand, monsieur.’

  ‘I understand you’re a bastard,’ Sharpe said, ‘and a spy, but you won’t hang for it. But this is for the men you killed, you pimp!’ The sword lunged as Sharpe shouted the final word. The blade, pitted with the rust of water and blood, twisted as Sharpe thrust it, twisted as it took de Maquerre in the upper belly, still twisted as the blood sprayed two feet into the air, and still was twisted so that the body’s flesh would not stick to the steel as the Frenchman, blood drenching his white breeches, fell into the river that Calvet should have defended.

  The sound of Sharpe’s voice faded over the water. The two sailors gaped and one of them, spattered by blood, turned to retch into the scuppers.

  ‘That wasn’t wise,’ Colonel Elphinstone pushed past an appalled Wigram who watched as the body of a spy, surrounded by diluting blood, floated towards the sea.

  ‘He was a traitor,’ Sharpe said, ‘and he killed my men.’ The tiredness was washing through him. He wanted to sit down, but he supposed he should explain. Somehow it was too difficult. ‘Hogan knew,’ he said, remembering his friend’s fevered words. ‘Michael Hogan?’ He looked for understanding into Elphinstone’s honest face.

  Elphinstone nodded. ‘It was Hogan’s idea to let the French think we planned an invasion.’

  ‘But Wigram sent de Maquerre, didn’t you?’ Sharpe stared at the grey-faced colonel who said nothing. ‘Hogan would never have sent that pimp to risk our lives!’

  ‘Hogan was ill,’ Wigram spoke defensively.

  ‘Then wait till he’s well,’ Sharpe glowered at the staff officer, ‘then call him before your properly constituted tribunal.’

  ‘That can’t be done.’ Colonel Elphinstone spoke gently. ‘Hogan died.’

  For a second the news made no sense. ‘Dead?’

  ‘The fever. May he rest in peace.’

  ‘Oh, God.’ Tears came to Sharpe’s eyes and, so that neither Elphinstone nor Wigram should see them, the Rifleman turned away. Hogan, his particular friend, with whom he had so often talked of the pleasures to come when peace brought an
end to killing, was dead of the fever. Sharpe watched de Maquerre’s body turning on the tide, and his grief for a friend turned into a fresh pulse of anger. ‘That should have been Bampfylde!’ Sharpe pointed at the corpse and turned to Elphinstone. ‘He ran away!’

  The grimness of Sharpe’s face made Colonel Wigram scramble back to the plank bridge, but Elphinstone simply reached for Sharpe’s sword and dried the wet, bloodied blade on a corner of his jacket. He handed the sword back. ‘You did well, Major.’ He tried to imagine a handful of men facing a half brigade, and could not. ‘You need to rest.’

  Sharpe nodded. ‘Can you get me a horse, sir?’ He asked it in a voice that suggested nothing had happened, that no blood trickled on the rain-slick deck.

  ‘A horse? I’m sure we can.’ Elphinstone saw in Sharpe the weariness of a soldier pushed to the edge of reason. The colonel was an engineer, knowledgeable of the stresses that could shatter stone or wood or iron, and now he saw the same fracturing tension in Sharpe. ‘Of course!’ Elphinstone made his own voice redolent of normality, ‘you’re eager to see your wife! I had the honour of dining with her two nights ago.’

  Sharpe stared at the colonel. ‘You dined with her?’

  ‘My dear Sharpe, it was entirely proper! At Lady Hope’s! There was a ragout and some very fine beef.‘

  Sharpe forgot de Maquerre, forgot the bridge, and forgot the ragged skirmishes that flared and died across the river. He even forgot Hogan. ‘And Jane’s well?’

  Elphinstone shrugged. ‘Shouldn’t she be? Ah, she did mention a cold, but that was soon gone. A winter’s sniff, nothing more. She was distressed for Hogan, naturally.’

  Sharpe gaped incredulously at the colonel. ‘No fever?’

  ‘Your wife? Good Lord, no!’ Elphinstone sounded astonished that Sharpe should even ask. ‘She wouldn’t credit you were defeated, of course.’

  ‘Oh, God.’ Sharpe sat on the chasse-marée’s gunwale and, because he could not help it, more tears came to his eyes and ran cold on his cheeks. No fever. He had let Killick live because of Jane’s fever, and he would not contemplate surrender to Calvet because of her fever, and it had only been a cold, a winter’s sniff. Sharpe did not know whether to laugh or cry.

  A gun banged over the river and a rocket wobbled into the sky to plunge uselessly into the river’s mud. A French cavalry trumpet sounded the retreat, but Sharpe did not care. He wept. He wept because a friend had died, and he wept with joy because Jane lived. He wept because at last it was over; a battle that should never have been fought, but a battle that, through stubbornness, pride, and an American enemy’s promise, had come to both this victory on a river’s edge and to this vast relief. It was over; Sharpe’s siege.

  HISTORICAL NOTE

  There was a fort at the Teste de Buch, though no such action as Sharpe’s siege took place there. Yet the freedom enjoyed by the British to make coastal raids had been firmly established by Nelson’s victories, and many such raids did take place. They were made possible, of course, thanks to the Royal Navy’s mastery of the seas.

  The Royal Navy had reached its apogee of popularity with Nelson (a fact that aroused envy in the Army, which was cordially disliked by most British people), but it was a popularity not shared by most of the Royal Navy’s own seamen who endured vile conditions, low pay and, unless they were fortunate in their ship’s captain, frequent and brutal physical punishment. One of the easiest escapes from such a regime was to an American ship where the men were assured of instant citizenship. Their fear of the punishment that awaited them, should they be recaptured, helped make such deserters into superb fighters. Cornelius Killick would doubtless have numbered such men in his crew.

  That an American should rescue Sharpe is not so fanciful. Colquhoun Grant, whose real-life adventures have previously contributed to Sharpe’s career, was rescued while a fugitive prisoner in Nantes by an American ship’s captain who ignored the fact that Grant was his country’s enemy. Blood and language, it seems, were often thicker than formal alliances. That, however, would not have prevented an American privateer’s crew from being strung from the yardarm by the Royal Navy, especially as the Navy had been piqued by American successes afloat.

  Those successes had been gained in the War of 1812, a quite pointless conflict between Britain and America. Afloat, the Americans inflicted a stinging series of defeats on the Royal Navy, only to lose the final frigate battle, while ashore the course of the war was similar, but reversed; with Britain easily defeating the American attempts to invade Canada, capturing and burning Washington, but then losing the final battle at New Orleans. The causes of the conflict had been resolved before war was declared, and its final battle was fought after the peace had been signed. Sharpe is indeed fortunate to be denied any part of the nonsense by Cornelius Killick.

  The chasse-marées existed, and were hired for the purpose of making the bridge over the Adour. The French made no effective resistance to that bridge, and the action on the northern bank was distinguished chiefly by the employment of the erratic Rocket Artillery (fully described in in Sharpe’s Enemy) in one of its rare appearances on Wellington’s battlefields.

  Wellington went no further north on the Biscay coast; instead he turned eastwards and marched on Toulouse. Throughout the campaign his men were met with the white cockade and there was no resistance movement in France like that which bedevilled Napoleon’s armies in occupied Spain.

  One reason for that French quiescence, apart from French weariness with Napoleon’s wars, was Wellington’s sensible treatment of the French population. Any criminal act against the French was punishable by summary execution though, like Sharpe, many officers found it hard to hang their own men. The Provosts, the military policemen, were less squeamish. Every item of food had to be purchased, and that endeared the British Army to a population accustomed to their own Army’s habit of legalized theft. That the food was paid for in counterfeit coin did not matter, for Wellington’s forgeries contained the proper amount of silver and were indistinguishable from the product of the Paris mint.

  The British Army, richly blessed with gaol-birds, had no trouble in finding expert coiners in its ranks.

  So, even though the merchants of Bordeaux, made poor by British blockade, are eager for the war’s end, and even though the French population is giving a guarded welcome to men whose discipline is so much greater than Napoleon’s troops, the war is still not over. The Emperor is at large and many die-hards in France believe that his genius can yet snatch glory from disaster. The last defences are often the toughest to take, so Sharpe and Harper must march again.

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