‘Aim!’ Palmer shouted.
‘Hold your fire! Hold your fire!’ Sharpe took station at the head of the Marines. He made his voice steady. There was a time to rouse men in battle and a time to calm them. ‘Marines will advance. At the march! Forward!’ Sharpe was taking the Marines down the left flank of the waggons, leaving Frederickson to control the right side of the road.
Minver’s Riflemen were showing themselves on this French flank, green-jacketed men who appeared from behind trees and farm buildings, men who worked forward in the skirmishing chain, each man covering his partner, and their fire nibbled at the flank of the French Company.
A French officer looked sideways, judging whether to turn a file to flick the Riflemen away with a controlled volley, then he looked forward to where the redcoats advanced.
This was no mad charge, meant to panic, but a slow, steady advance to show confidence. Sharpe wanted to close the range, he wanted this volley of musketry to kill. He watched the enemy’s movements. Ramrods, new and bright-metalled, flashed as they were raised. He heard the scraping rattle as they plunged downwards into muskets held between clenched knees. ‘Marines! Halt!’
The boots of the men who advanced on the road crashed to attention. The sound seemed unnaturally loud.
Minver’s men still fired, their bullets spinning constantly from the flank. Carbine bullets, fired by dismounted cavalrymen, buzzed past Sharpe. An ox, oblivious of the carnage around, staled on the road and the smell of the steam pricked at Sharpe’s nostrils. ‘To your front! Aim!’ Sharpe wanted this slow and sure. He wanted the Frenchmen to see the shape of their death before it came. He wanted them scared.
The Marine line seemed to take a quarter turn to the right as the muskets went into the shoulders. One or two men who had not yet cocked their pieces pulled back the flints and the clicks seemed ominous.
Sharpe walked to the flank of the Marine formation and raised his sword. Some of the French were priming their muskets, but most were staring nervously at the small line of redcoats who seemed so deliberate and savage. Sharpe let them wait, giving their imaginations time to torment them.
Harper came to stand alongside Sharpe. He had his rifle loaded, aimed, and he waited for the order. To Harper’s eyes these Frenchmen were boys, the scrapings ofa countryside to bring Napoleon’s armies up to strength. These were not the moustached, experienced veterans who had died in the appalling Spanish battles, but conscripts dragged unwilling from school or farm to die in a cause that was doomed anyway.
The conscripts primed their pieces. Some had forgotten to take their ramrods out of their musket barrels, but it did not matter.
‘Aim low!’ Sharpe’s voice was harsh. He knew most troops fired high. ‘Aim at their balls! Fire!’ The word swept down.
The volley smashed out, the sound of the muskets deafening as the heavy weapons leaped back into bruised shoulders. The smoke, stinking of rotten eggs, made its fog.
‘Lie down!’ Sharpe shouted. He saw astonished faces and his voice rose in anger. ‘Lie down! Lie down!’
The Marines, puzzled, dropped flat. Sharpe knelt to one side of the rolling, poisonous cloud of musket smoke.
The French Company had shaken as the volley struck home. Just like a man punched in the belly the whole Company seemed to fold, then the officers and sergeants, shouting orders, pushed the ranks back into place and Sharpe saw how the rear files had to step over the writhing and the dead left by the Marine’s well-aimed volley.
The French commander ignored the Riflemen on his flank. They could be dealt with after the redcoats. ‘Tirez!’
For a new Company, unblooded, it was a good response. Sixty or seventy muskets fired at the gunsmoke, but the Marines were flat and the conscripts fired high.
‘Go for them! Go!’ Sharpe was triumphant now. This one Company had been the last danger, but he had drawn their sting by laying his men flat. ‘On your feet! On your feet!
Go! Cheer, you bastards!‘ This was the moment for noise, the moment for terror.
The Marines, who a second before had been the target for a controlled, tight volley, scrambled unscathed to their feet and charged. They yelled as if they were boarding an enemy ship. Lieutenant Fytch fired his pistol wildly, then tried to drag his heavy sword from its scabbard.
The conscripts, staring through their own musket-smoke, saw the unharmed enemy coming with long bayonets and, like the first two Companies at the convoy’s head, broke.
Some were slow, and those the Marines caught and pinned to the ground with bayonets. A mounted officer, scarlet-faced and furious, charged at the redcoats, but Sharpe lunged with his sword, caught the horse’s hindquarters and the beast turned, teeth snapping, as the officer hacked down with his infantry sword.
The blades met, clashed, and the shock ran up Sharpe’s arm. The horse reared, lashed with its hooves as it was trained to do, but Sharpe backswung the sword into the beast’s mouth as he was trained to do.
The animal twisted, the officer kicked his feet out of the stirrups and, as the horse fell to one side, nimbly threw himself clear. The horse collapsed off balance, lips bleeding, then scrambled to its feet as if nothing was amiss.
‘Surrender,’ Sharpe said to the officer.
The reply, whatever it meant, did not signify surrender. The Frenchman’s sword blade Hickered out in an expert lunge. The man’s horse was now cropping the grass and the Frenchman reached with his spare hand for its bridle.
Sharpe lunged, knew that the man would counterattack, so immediately stepped back. The blade duly came for him, skewered thin air, and Sharpe’s heavy blade cracked down on to the sword hilt, driving the weapon down, and Sharpe stepped forward, brought his knee up, then used the ugly, iron guard of his sword to punch the officer’s face. ‘Surrender, you crapaud bastard!’
The officer was on the grass, sword forgotten and hands clutched to his crotch. He was gasping for breath, moaning, and Sharpe decided that constituted a surrender. He kicked the man’s sword into the ditch, pulled the horse towards him, and hauled himself clumsily into the saddle. He wanted the extra height to see what happened on his small, well-chosen battlefield.
The French had run. A Company of them were being organized a quarter mile north, but they posed no immediate problem. A few survivors still clung to the waggons, some died from bayonet thrusts, but most were being taken prisoner. The waggons were otherwise abandoned and Sharpe guessed their drivers, with other fugitives, had fled into the beech woods. ‘Captain Palmer?’
Palmer seemed astonished to see Sharpe on horseback. ‘Sir?’
‘One squad of men into the beech trees. Flush the damn place clear. Don’t be cautious about it! Scare the bastards!’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Captain Frederickson!’ Sharpe twisted the horse towards the far side of the road. ‘Keep that Company busy!’ Sharpe pointed to the north. ‘Take half Minver’s men and press them, William, press them!’
There were picquets to be set on the flanks, the wounded to take into the shelter of the waggons, and the waggons themselves to explore. The two coaches, harness-horses shivering, were brought forward. One was empty, the other contained two women who sat, terrified, with smelling salts uncapped. ‘Put a guard on them, Captain Palmer! Unharness the horses.’ Sharpe would leave the women where they were, but the horses, like the oxen, would be scattered into the meadows. Some men would have advised killing the animals to deprive the French of their future use, but Sharpe could not bear to give that order.
The oxen lumbered away, protesting under the prodding of the bayonets. One beast, wounded by a musket bullet in the small battle, was slaughtered and Sharpe watched two Marines cutting up the steaming, warm flesh that would make a fine supper tonight.
Other Marines swarmed over the waggons, ripping the canvas covers away and slashing the tie-ropes. Barrels and boxes were uncovered and thrown to the road’s verges where the prisoners, shivering and terrified, sat under guard.
It had taken tw
enty-five minutes of savagery, of fire and smoke and bluff and blood, and a French convoy, deep in France and guarded by a half Battalion of troops, was taken. Better still, and even more inexplicable, Sharpe’s headache was entirely gone.
CHAPTER 11
Lieutenant of Marines Fytch, to whom Sharpe had hardly spoken since they had marched inland, brought the civilians to Major Sharpe. The Lieutenant herded them at pistol-point until told by Sharpe to put his damned toy away. Fytch, his martial ardour offended by the Rifleman, gestured at the four stout and worried looking men. ‘They’re from the town, sir. Buggers want to surrender.’
The four men, all dressed in good woollen clothes, smiled nervously at the mounted officer. They each wore the white cockade which was the symbol of the exiled King Louis XVIII and thus an emblem of anti-Napoleonic sentiment. The sight of the cockade, and the evident willingness of the four men to embrace a British victory, were uncomfortable reminders to Sharpe of Bampfylde’s hopes. Perhaps Bordeaux, like this small town, was ripe for rebellion? He should, Sharpe knew, have interrogated a captured French officer by now, but his determination to obey Elphinstone’s privately given orders, had made him ignore the duty.
‘Kindly ask them,’ Sharpe said to Fytch who evidently had some French, ‘if they still wish to surrender when they understand that we will be leaving here this afternoon and may not be back for some months?’
The Mayor’s monarchical enthusiasm evaporated swiftly. He smiled, bowed, fingered the cockade nervously, and backed away. But he still wished to assure the English milord that anything the town could offer his men would be available. They had only to ask for Monsieur Calabord.
‘Get rid of him,’ Sharpe said. ‘Politely! And get those damned civilians off the bridge!’ Townspeople, hearing the crackle of musketry, had come to view the battle. The one-legged toll-keeper was vainly trying to make them pay for the privilege of their grandstand view.
Frederickson’s rifles snapped from the north as he harried the broken infantry away from the scene of their defeat. Two waggoners and four cavalrymen, hands held high, were being prodded from the beech trees towards the disconsolate prisoners. Marines were piling captured muskets in a pile.
The luckiest Marines were rifling the waggons. Much of the plunder was useless to a looter. There were vats of yellow and black paint that the French mixed to colour their gun-carriages, and which now the Marines spilled on to the road to mingle with the blood and ox-dung. Two of the waggons held nothing but engineer’s supplies. There were coils of three inch white-cable, sap forks, cross-cut saws, bench-hammers, chalk-lines, scrapers, felling-axes, augers, and barrels of Hambro’ line. There were spare cartouches for the infantry, each bag filled with a wooden block drilled to hold cartridges. Other waggons held drag-chains, crooked-sponges, relievers, bricoles, wad-hooks, sabot bracers, and hand-spikes. There were garlands for the stacking of round-shot and even band instruments including a Jingling Johnny that a proud Marine paraded about the stripped waggons and shook so that the tiny bells mounted on the wooden frame made a strangely festive sound in the bleak, cold day. Another man banged the clash-pans until Sharpe curtly ordered him to drop the bloody cymbals.
On one waggon there were crates of tinned food. The French had recently invented the process and it was a miracle to Sharpe how such food stayed fresh over weeks or even months. Bayonets prised open lids, and jellied chickens and joints of lamb were hacked into portions so that men’s faces, already blackened by powder smoke, were now smeared with grease. Sharpe accepted a leg of chicken and found it delicious. He ordered two dozen of the tins put aside for Frederickson’s Riflemen.
And in the centre two waggons, strapped down by three inch cable and covered by a double wrapping of tarpaulin, was powder. Barrels of black powder that were destined for the mortars at Bayonne, and coils of quick-match to be cut into shell-fuses. ‘Lieutenant Minver!’
‘Sir?’
‘These waggons! Drag them to the bridge. I want the powder packed in the roadway.’ It would not be a scientifically controlled explosion, as Hogan so long ago had taught Sharpe to devise, but it might seriously weaken the new stone structure with its proud, carved urns, and the purpose of Sharpe’s incursion was to slow the French supplies. A blown bridge, demanding a detour through an old town, would cause a temper-fraying delay. ‘And pack all the other waggonloads round it!’
That would take at least two hours. In the meantime captured spades dug graves in the cold soil of the water meadows. A French cavalryman, wearing the odd plaited pigtails at his temples, the cadenettes, was buried first. French prisoners did the work for the twenty-two dead Frenchmen, while the Marines dug graves for their three dead.
‘Congratulations, sir,’ Palmer said.
‘Your men did well, Captain.’ Sharpe meant it. He had been impressed by the steadiness of the Marines, and by their swiftness to reload muskets. Those qualities won battles, and battles changed history.
Patrick Harper, a tinned chicken in one hand, brought Sharpe a leather bag taken from the abandoned carriage. ‘It’s all Frog scribble, sir.’
Sharpe looked through the papers and suspected they were just the kind of thing Michael Hogan prayed for. Hogan might be dead now, but the papers would be a goldmine to whoever had succeeded to his job.
‘Guard them, Patrick.’
Harper had also helped himself to a fine, silver-chased pistol that had been discarded in the carriage.
The sun, paled to a silver disc by new cloud and mist, was low. A cold wind, the first wind since Sharpe had spared
Killick’s life, sighed chill over the graves. A scream came from the farm, and a cheer went up from the Marines searching the last waggon as they found wine bottles packed in sawdust. A corporal brought a bottle to Sharpe. ‘Sir?’
‘Thank you, Corporal.’ Sharpe held the bottle out to Harper who obligingly struck the neck with the blade of his sword-bayonet. The scream sounded again. A girl’s scream.
Sharpe dropped the wine and put his heels back. Prisoners twisted aside as the horse plunged down the bank, jumped a shallow ditch, then Sharpe reined the beast right, ducked under a bare-branched apple tree, and twisted left. Pounding feet sounded behind him, but all Sharpe could see was a man running away, running towards the river and Sharpe put his heels back again.
The man was a Marine. He was clutching his red jacket loose in one hand and holding up his unbuttoned breeches with his other. He looked over his shoulder, saw Sharpe, and dodged to his right.
‘Stop!’
The man did not stop, but ducked through a gap in the thorn hedge that tore his jacket from his grasp. He abandoned it and began running across the field. Sharpe forced his horse at the gap, kicked it through, and drew his sword. The man was stumbling, flailing for balance on the tussocks of the meadow, then the flat of the heavy sword, swept down in a clumsy curve, took him on the side of the head. He fell, uncut by the blade, and Sharpe circled the horse back to the fallen man.
It was all because of the farm girl; the green-eyed, pale, shivering girl whom the man had dragged into the scanty hay-store and attacked. She was now sitting, trembling, with the scraps of her torn clothing drawn around her thin body.
‘She asked for it,’ the Marine, taken back to the dung-stinking farmyard, said.
‘Shut your face!’ Harper had appointed himself Master-at-Arms. ‘She wouldn’t be bloody screaming and you wouldn’t be bloody running, would you?’
‘Fetch her some clothes,’ Sharpe snarled at one of the Marines who had formed a circle about the prisoner. ‘Captain Palmer! You warned this man?’
Palmer, pale-faced, nodded.
‘Well?’ Sharpe insisted on a verbal acknowledgement.
‘Aye, aye, sir.’ Palmer swallowed. ‘But the girl wasn’t raped, sir.’
‘You mean she screamed too loudly. But you know what the orders are, don’t you?’ This question was addressed to all the Marines who stared with undisguised hostility at the Rifle Officer who threatened
to hang one of their own comrades. There was silence as Sharpe rammed his sword home. ‘Now back to your duties! All of you!’ He jumped off the horse.
Captain Palmer, a Marine sergeant, Harper and Sharpe stayed with the prisoner. The story came slowly at first, then quickly. It had been attempted rape. The girl, the Marine said, had encouraged him, but her screams and the bruises and scratches on her thin arms told a different story.
‘Matthew Robinson’s a steady man, sir.’ Palmer walked with Sharpe to the end of the farmyard. Sharpe could see that Minver’s Riflemen had managed to get the first powder waggon to the end of the bridge, but, faced with the slope of the roadway, could get it no further. They were now rolling the powder barrels to the crown of the arch.
‘You know what the Standing Orders are,’ Sharpe said bleakly.
‘It won’t happen again, sir.’ Palmer sounded contrite.
‘I know damned well it won’t happen again!’ Sharpe, hating the necessity of the moment, snapped the words. ‘That’s why we’re hanging the bastard!’
‘I mean we don’t need Robinson’s death as an example, sir,’ Palmer pleaded.
‘I’m not doing it as an example.’ Sharpe turned and gestured towards the farmer and his wife. ‘I’m doing it for them! If the French people think we’re savages, Palmer, then they’ll fight us. You know what it’s like having guerrilleros up your backside when you fight? Every waggon we send up from the coast will have to be guarded by a Battalion! Every one! That’s how we beat the French out of Spain, Captain, not just by hammering the bastards in battle, but because half their armies were guarding waggons against Spanish peasants. Peasants like them!’ Again he pointed to the French couple.
‘The girl wasn’t harmed, sir,’ Palmer said stubbornly. ‘And we’ve proved by our action here that we can offer protection.’
‘And the story is spread about,’ Sharpe said, ‘that a man can rape a girl and his officers will condone it.’
Palmer stood his ground. ‘If Robinson was one of your men, sir, one of your Riflemen, would you ...’
Sharpe 3-Book Collection 6: Sharpe's Honour, Sharpe's Regiment, Sharpe's Siege Page 80