‘Leave them.’ Sharpe knew that any northward-bound convoy would be travelling empty.
It took two hours to set the trap. No one could be visible, and so Minver’s Company of Riflemen and Palmer’s Marines were somehow crammed into the tiny farm buildings. Frederickson’s Company, drawing the short straw because Sharpe trusted their officer, were in the more exposed beech wood. Harper, with two of Frederickson’s Riflemen, was a half mile to the north as look-out.
The farmer, with his wife and daughter, crouched in a corner of their kitchen that was filled with big, stinking men armed with the heavy Sea-Service muskets. The daughter was waif-like and, beneath her stringy, dirty hair, pretty in a winsome and frightened way. The Marines, starved of women for months, eyed her hopefully.
‘One flicker of trouble,’ Sharpe warned Palmer, ‘and I’ll kill the man responsible.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Sharpe visited the Riflemen in the small barn. The barn’s outside end wall, as in England, served as the countryman’s museum. A stoat was nailed to the wood, its old, dry fur pricked with frost. Ravens decayed there, and an otter skin hung empty. The Riflemen, despite their cold breakfast and shivering night, grinned at Sharpe.
He walked north along the hedgerow. He saw two men strolling down the road with a dog at their heels. A quarter of an hour later a woman drove a skeletal cow north, doubtless to sell the beast at market to raise enough cash to see the winter through. None of them saw the Rifleman.
It seemed extraordinary to Sharpe that he could be here, deep in France, unchallenged. Only the Navy, he supposed, could make such a thing possible. The French, bereft of a fleet, could never set such a trap on a Hampshire road. But Sharpe could come here, strike like a snake, and be gone by the next sundown, while Bampfylde’s flotilla, riding at the mouth of the Arcachon Channel, was as safe as if it was anchored in the River Hamble.
Sharpe turned back towards the farm. The cold weather and the emptiness of the road made him doubt whether any convoy would travel today. His head hurt foully and, safe from any man’s gaze, he flinched with the pain and rubbed a cautious hand over his bandaged forehead. Johnny Pearson, he remembered, had just pitched forward into a dish of hot tripe; no warning, no sound, just stone dead a few seconds after he had cheerfully said it was time to take the bandage off his scalp. Sharpe pressed his forehead to test whether the bone grated. It did not, but it hurt like the very devil.
Back in the farm hovel a cauldron boiled on the open fire and the Marines had pooled their tea to fill the small room with a homely smell. The girl, Sharpe noticed, was now giving the strangers shy smiles. She had catlike, green eyes, and she laughed when the men tried to talk to her.
‘Take some tea to the barn,’ Sharpe ordered.
“Twas our leaves,‘ a voice said from the back of the room.
Sharpe turned, but no one pressed the objection and the tea was taken out to the Riflemen.
The frost melted outside. The mist cleared somewhat, showing the poplars to the north where Harper lay hidden in a ditch. A grey heron, enemy of trout fishermen, sailed with slow, flapping wings towards the north.
Sharpe, as the morning wore on and as the Marines beguiled the green-eyed girl into giggling flirtation, decided the day was being wasted. Nothing would come. He crossed to Frederickson’s men to find them hidden deep beneath the thick drifts of dead leaves and told Sweet William that, if nothing appeared within two hours, they would start to withdraw. ‘We’ll march to Facture and billet the men warm tonight.’ That would leave a short crisp distance for the morning march to Arcachon where Sharpe would insist that the nonsense about taking Bordeaux be abandoned.
Frederickson was disappointed that this journey might be in vain. ‘You wouldn’t wait till dusk?’
‘No.’ Sharpe shivered inside his greatcoat. He was sure nothing would come now, though he partly suspected that he rather hoped nothing would come so that he could begin the homeward journey. Besides, his head was splitting fit to burst. He told himself he needed a doctor, but he dared not reveal the extent of his pain to Frederickson. Sharpe forced a rueful smile. ‘Nothing’s going to come, William. I feel it in my bones.’
‘You have a reliable skeleton?’
‘It’s never wrong,’ Sharpe said.
The enemy came at midday.
Harper and his two men brought news of it. Twenty cavalry, walking rather than riding their horses, led six canvas-covered wagons, two coaches, and five Companies of infantry. Sharpe, trying to ignore the searing stabs in his head, considered Harper’s report. The enemy was coming in strength, but Sharpe decided that surprise would nullify that advantage. He nodded to Palmer. ‘Go.’ He ran to the barn and ordered Minver’s Riflemen to their hidden positions. ‘If I blow “withdraw”,’ he said, ‘you know where to go.’
‘Over the bridge.’ Minver drew his sword and licked his lips. ‘And cover the retreat.’
Sharpe doubled back, Harper with him, to where the Marines crouched behind the hedge. ‘You see the milestone?’ Sharpe said to Palmer.
Palmer nodded. Fifty yards up the road was a milestone that had been first defaced of its number of miles, then re-inscribed with the strange kilometres that had recently been introduced in France. The stone recorded that it was 43 kilometres to Bordeaux, a distance that meant nothing to Sharpe. ‘We don’t move till they reach that stone, understand?’
‘Yes, sir.’ Palmer blanched to think of letting the enemy come that close, but raised no objection.
Normally all Sharpe’s presentiments, any gloom, would have vanished at the first sight of the enemy, but the pain in his skull was a terrible distraction. He wanted to lie down in a dark place, he wanted the oblivion of sleep, and he tried to will the pain away, but it was there, tormenting him, and he forced his attention past the stabbing ache to watch the cavalry appear from the last wisps of mist. Through his glass he could see that the cavalry horses were winter-thin. The British Army, in their tiny corner of France, had not even brought the cavalry over the Pyrenees, knowing that until the spring grass had fattened the horses the cavalry would be a burden rather than an advantage. But the French had always been more careless of their horses. ‘If a horse gets close to you,’ Sharpe told the Marines who, he thought, might not have experienced cavalry before, ‘hit it in the bloody mouth.’ The Marines, shivering in the lee of the hedge, grinned nervously.
Behind the cavalry, squealing as such waggons always squealed, the heavy transport waggons lumbered on the roadway. Each was hauled by eight oxen. Behind the waggons were the infantry, and behind the infantry the two carriages that had their windows and curtains tight closed against the cold.
Sharpe pushed his telescope back into his pocket. In the beech wood, he knew, Frederickson’s killers would be sliding loaded rifles forward. This was like shooting fish in a barrel, for the enemy, deep in their homeland, would be marching with unloaded muskets and absent minds. They would be thinking of sweethearts left behind, of the next night’s billet, and of the enemy waiting at the far, far end of the long road.
A French cavalry officer, brass helmet shielded with canvas and with a black cloak covering his gaudy uniform, suddenly swung up into his saddle. He spurred ahead of the convoy, doubtless drawn to the town beyond the river where wineshops would be open and fires burning in brick hearths.
‘Damn.’ Sharpe said it under his breath. The man could not help but see the ambush and he would spring it fifty yards too soon. But nothing went as planned in war, and the disadvantage must be taken, then ignored. ‘Deal with the bugger, Patrick. Wait till he sees us.’
‘Yes, sir.’ Harper thumbed back the cock of his rifle.
Sharpe looked at Palmer. ‘On my order we advance. Two files.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘No shouting, no cheering.’ French and Spanish troops cheered as they advanced, but the silence of a British attack was an eerie and unsettling thing. The Marines, white-faced, crouched low. One crossed himself, while another, his ey
es shut, seemed to be praying silently.
The French officer kicked his horse into a trot. The man had a cigar which dribbled smoke, and his broad, open face looked cheerfully at the sodden, misty countryside. He glanced at the farm, bent to pluck his cloak loose of his stirrup leather where it had wrapped itself as he mounted, then saw the red coats and white crossbelts where the Marines were concealed in the hedge-shadow that was still white with frost.
He was so astonished that he kept coming, mouth opening to shout an inquiry, and when he was still some fifteen yards short of the hedgerow, Harper shot him.
The rifle bullet struck a cuirass hidden by the cloak. The ball, squarely hitting the steel, punctured the armour and deflected upwards, through the Frenchman’s throat and into his brain. Blood, bright as dawn, fountained from the man’s open mouth.
‘In line!’ Sharpe bellowed. ‘Advance!’
The horse, terrified, reared.
The Frenchman, still incongruously holding his cigar, toppled backwards in the saddle. He was dead, but his knees still gripped the horse’s flanks and, when the beast plunged its forefeet back down, the corpse nodded forward in a grotesque obeisance to the Marines who were scrambling from the ditch to form a double-line across the road.
‘Forward!’
The horse turned, eyes showing white, and the dead Frenchman seemed to grin a bloodshot grin at Sharpe before the horse whirled the ghastly face away. The body slumped to the left, fell, but the man’s boot was fast caught in the stirrup and the corpse was dragged, bouncing, behind the bolting horse.
‘Hold your fire!’ Sharpe cautioned the Marines. He wanted no nervous man to waste a musket shot. He drew his sword. ‘Double!’
The remaining cavalry had stopped, appalled. The waggons, with their vast weight, still trundled forward. The infantry seemed oblivious of the ambush’s opening shot.
The Marines, their breath misting, ran up the road that was marked with great splashes of blood. Sharpe’s boot crushed the dead cavalry officer’s fallen cigar.
Two cavalrymen hauled carbines from their saddle holsters. ‘Halt!’ Sharpe shouted.
He stood to one side of the road. ‘Front rank kneel!’ That was not entirely necessary, but a kneeling rank always steadied raw troops and Sharpe knew that these Marines, for all their willingness, had small experience in land fighting. ‘Captain Palmer? Fire low, if you please.’
Palmer, a naval cutlass in his hand, seemed startled at Sharpe’s sudden courtesy in allowing him to give the order to fire. He cleared his throat, measured the distance to the enemy, saw how the handful of cavalry were already climbing into saddles and spreading on to the verges, and shouted the order. ‘Fire!’
Fifty musket balls crashed out of fifty muzzles. ‘Reload!’ a sergeant shouted. Lieutenant Fytch, a heavy brass-hilted pistol in his right hand, jiggled up and down on the balls of his feet with excitement.
Harper had gone right to clear the filthy, yellowish cloud of musket smoke. He saw six horses down, legs kicking on the roadway’s stone. Two men had fallen, while two others crawled towards the beechwood. An ox from the leading waggon was bellowing with pain.
A carbine banged, then another. Far to the convoy’s rear the French infantry were hurrying down the verges, officers shouting. The ox-waggons, brake blocks squealing, were juddering to a clumsy halt.
Harper was looking for officers. He saw one, a cavalryman with drawn sabre, who was bellowing at his men to form line and charge.
It took Harper twenty seconds to reload the Baker Rifle. Another Marine volley hammered forward, this one doing less damage because the redcoats, unsighted by their musket smoke, fired blind. Harper had the rifle at his shoulder, the officer in his sights, and he pulled the trigger.
Black powder flared, flaming debris lashed his cheek, then he unslung the seven-barrelled gun and jumped sideways again. The officer was turning away, hand clasped to a shoulder, but a half dozen cavalrymen were coming forward, sabres drawn and spurs slashing back at thin flanks.
“Ware cavalry, sir!‘ Harper shouted to Palmer then, hearing the wooden ramrods of the Marines still rattling in barrels, he fired his volley gun.
The impact threw him backwards, but the noise of the seven-barrelled gun, like a small cannon, seemed to stun the tiny battlefield. Two cavalrymen were snatched from their saddles, a horse swivelled to throw its rider, and the cavalry’s small threat was finished. Then, beyond the wounded horses and the scatter of the day’s first dead, the leading two Companies of French infantry appeared in front of the waggons. Their muskets were tipped with bayonets.
Frederickson opened fire.
The volley, stinging from the flank, flayed into the first infantry ranks, and Frederickson was bellowing commands as though he held more men under orders. The French were glancing nervously towards the beechwood as Captain Palmer loosed his third volley.
The mist remnants were thick with smoke now. The stench of blood mingled with powder-stink.
Sharpe had joined Harper. Minver’s men, slower to deploy, were firing from the left.
‘Stop loading!’ Sharpe shouted at the Marines. ‘Front rank up! Fix swords!’ The headache was forgotten now in the greater urgencies of life and death.
‘Bayonets, sir,’ Harper muttered. Only Green Jackets, who carried the sword bayonet, used the order to fix swords.
‘Bayonets! Bayonets! Captain Palmer! I’ll trouble you to go forward!’
Sharpe could sense this whole battle now, could feel it in his instincts and he knew it was won. There was an exultation, an excitement, a feeling that no other experience on God’s earth could bring. It could bring death, too, and wounds so vile that a man would shudder in his sleep to dream of them, but war also gave this supreme feeling of imposing the will on an enemy and taking success in the face of disaster.
The French outnumbered Sharpe by three or four to one, but the French were dazed, disorganized, and shaken. Sharpe’s men were keyed to the fight, ready for it, and if he struck now, if he behaved as though he had already won, then this half stunned enemy would break.
Sharpe looked at the Marines. ‘Advance. At the double! Advance!’
The cavalry was gone, destroyed by the seven-barrelled gun and by Frederickson’s sharpshooters. Dead and wounded horses lay in the fields, dropped by rifle-fire, and their surviving riders had fled to the safety of the waggons that offered some small shelter from the bullets. In front of the waggons a rabble of infantry was being shaken into line and Sharpe’s Marines, coming from the smoke with muskets tipped with bayonets, charged them.
If the enemy held, Sharpe knew, then the Marines would be slaughtered.
If the enemy held, then each Marine would be faced with three or four bayonets.
It would only take one enemy officer, one of those blue-coated men on horseback, to survey Sharpe’s feeble charge and the Marines were done for.
‘Charge!’ Sharpe shouted it as though the volume of his voice alone would breed extra men to face down the enemy line that, uneven though it was, bristled with blades.
‘Fire!’ Frederickson, good Frederickson, had understood all. He had formed his Company into ranks, taken them from the trees’ cover and now, at sixty yards range, poured a controlled volley of rifle fire into the infantry’s flank.
That volley, with Sharpe’s stumbling charge, broke the French. Just as scared Frenchmen began to see the paucity of the attacking force, so another enemy appeared and another voice was shouting charge, and then the sight of the bayonets, as it so often did, engendered panic.
The French infantry, mostly young conscripts who had no stomach for a fight, broke and fled. An officer beat at them with the flat of his sabre, but the French were running backwards. The officer turned, drew a pistol, but a rifle bullet buried itself in his belly and he folded forward, eyes gaping, and one of Frederickson’s Riflemen grasped the bridle as the officer fell sideways to the cold earth.
‘Form at the first waggon’s rear!’ Sharpe yelled it to Palme
r as they ran forward. The Marines’ line was now broken by the necessity for men to step around the dead and dying on the ground. Harper, who could not bear to see an animal suffer, picked up a fallen French pistol and shot a wounded, screaming horse between the eyes.
A carbine, fired by a dismounted cavalryman, threw down a Marine. Minver’s men shot the cavalryman, six bullets striking at once and flinging him down like a puppet that lay suddenly still and bloodied on the pale grass.
There were fugitives under the first waggon. One still had a musket and Sharpe, thinking it loaded, struck with his sword to knock it clear. The boy, terrified, screamed, but Sharpe had gone on, jumping blue-jacketed dead. Ahead, in a foul panic, a mass of infantry tumbled in pell mell retreat. An officer, emerging from a coach, shouted at them, and some, braver than the rest, slowed, turned, and formed a new line.
‘Captain Frederickson!’
‘I see them, sir!’
Sharpe ran behind the rear of a waggon. On this left side of the road, where Minver’s men stayed in hiding, a full Company of French infantry was formed in three ranks. ‘6oth!’ Sharpe had to shout twice to Minver as Frederickson’s volley drowned his first shout. ‘Flank attack! Flank attack!’
Palmer’s Marines were panting. Some had reddened bayonets, and others stabbed at Frenchmen cowering beneath the heavy waggon, but Palmer and his sergeants pushed them into line and shouted at them to load muskets.
The French Company fired first.
The range was seventy yards, too long for muskets, but two Marines were down, a third was screaming, and the others still thrust with wooden ramrods at powder and bullets. Sharpe supposed the Marines used wooden ramrods because metal rods would rust at sea, then forgot the idle speculation as more enemy bullets thumped into the heavy timber of the waggons. Stragglers from the first Company had joined the ranks where French muskets tipped up as the enemy began to reload.
Sharpe 3-Book Collection 6: Sharpe's Honour, Sharpe's Regiment, Sharpe's Siege Page 79