The enemy had come and the second battle of Arcachon was about to begin.
CHAPTER 14
General Calvet sat in a miserable hovel in a miserable village on the miserable edge of an increasingly miserable France. ‘You say this Sharpe is good?’
‘Lucky,’ Ducos said scornfully.
‘The Emperor,’ Calvet said, ‘will tell you a soldier needs luck more than brains. He came up from the ranks?’
‘Like yourself, General,’ Ducos replied.
‘Then he must be good.’ Calvet rubbed his hands in gleeful anticipation. The general had a broad, scarred face, burned with powder stains like dark tattoos. He wore a bushy, black veteran’s moustache. ‘Favier! You’ve fought the English, what are they like?’
Favier knew this was a time for truth, not bombast. ‘Unimaginative in attack, rock-solid in defence, and quick with their muskets, very.’
‘But these scoundrels are short of ammunition.’ The general had heard how the British had scoured the local villages for powder. Calvet sat at a scarred table with a map drawn by Commandant Lassan beside the bread and cheese that was his supper. ‘So the quicker they are with muskets, the sooner they’ll exhaust their powder.’ Calvet stared at the map. A double ditch, one of them flooded, surrounded three sides of the fort, but the fourth side, that which faced the channel, had no flooded ditch. The main bastion stood in the tidal shallows, but the northern half of the western wall was edged with sand as far as the moat’s outflow. That was the vulnerable place.
The moat’s outflow was a sluice gate in a small, masonry dam at the fort’s north-western corner. That dam would act as a bridge leading to the ramparts’ base, and the trick of this attack, Calvet knew, would be to draw the defenders’ attention away from that spot.
‘You’ll attack tonight?’ Ducos asked eagerly.
‘Don’t be a damned fool, man. That’s what he’s expecting! He’s got his men on alert! They’ll have a bad night and I’ll make it worse, but I won’t attack.’ Calvet saw the disapproval on Ducos’ face and, knowing what sinister power Ducos sometimes wielded with the Emperor, the big general deigned to explain himself. ‘I’ve got raw troops, Ducos, nothing more than bloody farm-boys. Have you ever attacked at night? It’s chaos! A bloody shambles! If they’re repulsed, and they will be, they’ll taste defeat and a new conscript should always be given a victory. It makes him feel invincible! No. We attack tomorrow. The goddamns have had no sleep, they’ll be nervous as virgins in a Grenadiers’ barracks, and we’ll crush them.’ Calvet leaned back in his chair and smiled about the crowded room. ‘Tomorrow night we’ll have Major Sharpe as our dinner guest.’
An aide lit a new candle. ‘If he’s alive, sir.’
‘If he’s not, we’ll eat him.’ Calvet laughed. ‘We ate enough men in Russia. Human flesh tastes like skate, did you know that, Ducos? Next time you eat skate, remember it.’
‘Thank you, sir.’ Ducos did not smile.
‘Boiled buttock of corporal, well-peppered,’ Calvet mused. ‘I’ve dined on worse. What’s the range of their damned rifles?’
‘Two hundred paces,’ Favier said, ‘but they can be a nuisance up to four hundred.’
‘Then we’ll put the howitzers here.’ Calvet’s thumb smeared the pencil marks that showed the village on the map. ‘I want them bedded down as mortars.’
‘Of course, sir,’ the Artillery colonel said.
‘And the other guns here,’ the thumb stabbed down again, leaving a scrap of cheese by the watermill. ‘Make embrasures in the wall, but don’t open fire tonight. Tonight I want muskets up on the glacis. Lots of them. Keep the bastards worried. I want noise, bangs, shouts.’ He was looking at one of his Battalion colonels. ‘Pick a different spot every few minutes, don’t make it regular. You know how to do it.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Make ’em use up some of their precious ammunition.
But keep clear of this place.‘ Calvet pointed to the dam. ’I want that left alone.‘
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And at dawn I want no one in sight, no one.’ Calvet stood. He was a huge man, with a paunch like a ready-barrel of howitzer powder. He stretched his arms, yawned, and turned to the straw mattress that was laid by the fire. ‘Now I’m sleeping, so get out. Wake me at five.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘When we do attack,’ the general’s rumbling voice checked the exodus of uniformed officers, ‘we do it quickly, efficiently, and right. Any man who lets me down will have to explain himself, alone, to me.’ He raised one clenched fist the size of a small cannon-ball. ‘Now bugger off and keep the bastards hopping.’
The waves broke and sucked on the beach at the channel entrance, the wind rattled pine branches and sighed over the ramparts, and the picked men of the best French Battalion went to their night-time task while the others slept. And General Calvet, head on a haversack and boots ready by his bed, snored.
‘Hold your fire!’ Sharpe bellowed the order, heard it echoed by a sergeant, then ran down the southern rampart.
Six or seven musket shots had cracked from the glacis, the balls hissing uselessly overhead, and two Marines and a Rifleman had instinctively returned fire. ‘You don’t fire,’ Sharpe said, ‘unless you’re ordered to fire or unless the bastards are climbing the wall! You hear?’
None of the three men replied. Instead, crouching beneath the battlements, they reloaded their weapons.
Sharpe sent Fytch around the ramparts with a new warning that no man was to fire. The French, Sharpe guessed, were trying to provoke just such defensive fire to see which parts of the rampart responded most heavily. Let the bastards guess.
Sixty men were in the old garrison offices, fully armed, but told to catch what sleep they could. When the attack came, and Sharpe did not expect it till the deadest hours of the night, those men could be on the ramparts in minutes.
He crouched in an embrasure. The wind fingered cold on the scabbed blood on his forehead, and the sigh of it in his ears made listening difficult. He thought he heard the scrape of a boot or musket butt on the glacis, but was not sure. Whatever the sound was, it was too small to presage a full attack. Sharpe had crouched beyond a fortress’s defences, throat dry and fear rampant, and he knew what sudden commotion was made by a mass of men moving to the escalade. There would be ladders bumping forward, the chink of equipment, the scrape of hundreds of boots, but he could hear nothing but the wind and see nothing but the blackness.
He went to the eastern wall and crouched beside Sergeant Rossner. ‘Anything?’
‘Nothing, sir.’ The German sergeant had his shako upended on the firestep and half-filled with cartridges. Beside him was a roped mass of hay. If an attack came the hay would be lit then slung far over the walls to illuminate targets. No lights were allowed in the courtyard or on the walls of the Teste de Buch, for such lights could only silhouette the defenders for the convenience of French marksmen.
Sharpe moved on, crouching to talk with men, offering them wine from his canteen, always giving the same message. There was nothing to fear from random shots, or from the shouts that sometimes sounded in the darkness. The French were trying to fray the defenders’ nerves, and Sharpe would have done the same. Once there was the sound of massed feet, shouts, and a fusillade of musketry that flattened on the walls, but no dark shapes appeared beyond the glacis lip. Jeers and insults came from the darkness, more shots, but Sharpe’s men, once the first fear had subsided, learned to ignore the sounds.
In Commandmant Lassan’s old quarters two Marines, one who had been a surgeon’s mate and another who had trained in the butcher’s trade, laid out carpenter’s tools, shaving razors, and sewing kits on a table. They had no clamps, instead there was a cauldron of boiling pitch with which to cauterize a stump. They had no camphorated wine, nor any solution of lead acetate, so instead they had a barrel of salt-water to wash wounds, and a pot filled with spider-webs that could be stuffed into deep cuts. Patrick Harper, the big Irishman, had re
commended maggots for cleaning wounds, but the dignity of their new-fetched professional pride would not allow the two Marines to accept the nostrum. They listened to the shots in the night, sipped the brandy that was supposed to dull wounded men’s pain, and wondered when the first wounded would be brought for their attention.
Captain Palmer, trying to sleep where the sixty men were held in reserve, knew that there would be small rest tonight. Musket shots and sudden shouts came faint to the old offices, but not so faint that they did not cause men to stir and reach for their muskets or rifles. ‘I wish the bastards would come,’ one Marine muttered, and Palmer held the same belief. Better to get it over, he thought, than this damned waiting.
A Spanish Rifleman on the southern wall sent for Sharpe. ‘Can you hear it, senor?’ The man spoke in Spanish.
Sharpe listened. Faint, but unmistakable, came the sound of picks and spades thudding into earth, then the ring of a crowbar on stone. ‘They’re making a battery,’ he replied in Spanish.
‘In the village?’ The Rifleman made it half a guess and half a question.
Sharpe listened again. ‘I’d say so.’
‘They’ll be in range, then.’ The Spaniard slapped the woodwork of his rifle.
‘Long range,’ Sharpe said dubiously.
‘Not for Taylor,’ the Spaniard said. The American’s marksmanship was a legend to Frederickson’s men.
But Taylor, this night, was in the darkness; gone with Harper and Frederickson, gone to spread terror among the men who tried to keep a garrison awake with clamour, gone to the kill.
Not a man made a sound. They lay flat to let their eyes adjust to the darkness.
The sky was not so dark as the land. There was no moon, but a spread of stars showed between patches of cloud and that lighter sky might betray a silhouette from ground-level and so the Riflemen lay, bellies on the sand, unmoving.
They were the best. Each man was a veteran, each had fought in more battles than could be casually recalled, and each had killed and gone past that point where a man found astonishment in the act of giving death to another human being.
William Frederickson, whose passion was for the architecture of the past and who was as well educated as any man in Wellington’s Army, saw death as a regrettable but inevitable necessity of his trade. If wars could be won without death Frederickson would have been content, but so far mankind had devised no such process. And war, he believed, was necessary. To Frederickson the enemy was the embodiment of Napoleon’s Imperial ambitions, the foe of all that he held most dear, and while he was not so foolish, nor so blind, as to be unaware of their humanity, it was nevertheless a humanity that had been pointed in his direction with orders to kill. It was therefore necessary to kill more swiftly and more efficiently than the enemy.
Thomas Taylor, Frederickson’s American, reckoned death as commonplace as a meal or a woman. It was part of being alive. From his youngest days he had only known cruelty, pain, sickness, poverty, and death, and he saw nothing strange in any of those things. If it had made him heartless, it had also given him a pride in surviving in the valley of the shadow. He could kill with a rifle, a knife, a sword bayonet, or his bare hands, and he was good with all of them. He was a man of great resentment, and small remorse. He resented a fate that had driven him from his own land, that had doomed him to an Army he did not love, but his pride would not let him be a bad soldier.
For Patrick Harper killing was a soldier’s trade and an act that provoked equal measures of regret and pride. By nature the Irishman was a gentle, pacific man, but there was a rage in him that could be touched by battle and turn him into a warrior as fearsome as any celebrated in Celtic song. Only battle seemed to touch that rage.
Sometimes, thinking of the men he had killed and whose faces he had seen show the last emotion of life, Harper might wish the blow withdrawn, the bayonet unthrust, or the trigger unpulled, but it was always too late. Other times, when he looked about the men he led, he was proud that he was of the best, that his deeds were celebrated, and that his name was never spoken with disdain. He loved the men he fought alongside, and their deaths hurt him, so he fought for them like a demon. He was a soldier, and he was a good one, and now he lay in the sand and was aware of the Green Jackets lying to his left and right and of the small sounds that came from the dunes ahead.
For an hour or more the French had been sniping at the fort, teasing the defenders, but always from a safe distance. They had done it to the southern and eastern ramparts, and now dark figures showed in the dead ground to the north where Frederickson’s men lay.
Sweet William clicked his tongue softly, held a hand up so that it was silhouetted on the dark sky, and slowly gestured further north.
Thirteen shadows moved in the sand. They had blackened faces, blackened hands, and darkened weapons. Their rifles were slung taut across their backs for Frederickson, knowing the value of fear driven into an enemy’s heart, wanted this night’s killing to be silent. They would use blades, not bullets, and the thirteen men moved with the skilled silence that presages death. Each Rifleman had spent time in daylight on this very ground and, though the dunes looked different under the night’s cloak, the remembered knowledge was an advantage not given to their enemies.
A squad of ten Frenchmen gathered under the fold of a dune that edged on to the saw-grass of the glacis. They were one of six such parties abroad this night and they were enjoying their work. No danger seemed to threaten them, not even random musket fire from the dark ramparts that showed above the glacis. For the first hour of their excursion, treading into unknown darkness, they had gone cautiously and nervously, but the night’s innocent silence had lulled their fears and made them bold.
Fifty yards to their left Lieutenant Piellot’s squad suddenly yelled like savages and blasted shots at the fort. The men in the shelter of the dune grinned. Their own officer whispered that they could rest a moment and one sergeant made a cave about his head with his greatcoat and, under its hooding darkness, struck a flint on steel, blew tinder to life, and lit his short pipe.
Five yards away, unseen, Thomas Taylor eased himself along the sand on his elbows. In his right hand, blackened with a ball of boot-blacking, was a twenty-three inch sword bayonet that had been honed and sharpened to a razor’s fineness.
The French officer, a captain of skirmishers, clambered to the top of the dune, careless of the small noises made by the cascading sand. Lieutenant Piellot was making enough racket to wake the dead and the small laughter and low voices of his own squad caused the captain no concern. He stared at the fortress and thought he saw a figure move on the ramparts. At night the eyes played tricks and he stared at the place where he thought he had seen movement and decided he was wrong. He hoped the British would surrender swiftly. The captain, who had a fiancée in Rheims and a mistress in Bordeaux, did not relish dying for the Emperor in a useless escalade on this shabby fortress.
Piellot’s men fired a volley and the noise slammed over the dunes in two waves; the first from the muskets and the second the echo from the fortress wall. The squad shouted insults, rattled their ramrods in hot barrels, and the captain knew there was no point in his own men startling the enemy until Piellot’s men quit their entertainment. He slid down the sand, calling to his men to relax, but suddenly his feet were seized, tugged hard, and the captain slithered down the dune, sprawling and flailing, until a boot slammed into his belly and a knee dropped on to his chest and a voice was hissing in fluent French that unless he kept very silent the knife at his throat would cut through to his spine. The captain kept very silent.
He could see nothing, but he could hear grunts and scuffles. One of his men’s muskets banged into the air and, in the muzzle’s red flash, the captain had a glimpse of black shapes rising and falling, of blades dripping, and suddenly the smell of raw blood was in his nostrils. Flesh sucked on steel, a blade grated on bone as it was withdrawn, men breathed heavily, then there was a respite from the sound of butchery.
&nb
sp; ‘One,’ Frederickson, kneeling on the captain, whispered the word into the sudden silence.
‘Two,’ Harper hissed.
‘Three,’ said a German from Mainz who kept a count of the Frenchmen he killed in battle.
‘Four,’ Thomas Taylor.
‘Five,’ a youth who was reputed to have stabbed his mother in Bedford then fled to the Army before the law could catch him.
‘Six,’ a Spaniard recruited in Salamanca to swell ranks depleted by war. The numbers went to thirteen. All
Frederickson’s men were present, none was wounded, and, of the enemy, only the French captain was alive.
That captain, feeling he had shown insufficient valour this night, pushed his hand down to his belt where a pistol was holstered. The knife pressed on his throat. ‘Don’t move,’ the voice said. The captain froze.
Frederickson ran his free hand over the captain’s body, found pistol and sword, and drew both free. He pushed the pistol into his jacket, then used his knife to cut the Frenchman’s small ammunition pouch free. The Riflemen were slashing at the dead men’s cartouches. French musket balls, being fractionally smaller than the British issue, could be used by the Marines and Riflemen in their weapons, whereas captured British ball was useless to the French.
‘RSM Harper?’ Frederickson backed away from his captive. ‘Take the bugger back.’ Sweet William, careless of the conventions of this war, first tied a gag about the officer’s mouth. ‘Tommy? John? Go with Mr Harper.’ Frederickson was careful to give Harper the honorific due to a Regimental Sergeant Major.
It took twenty minutes before the French officer was hauled by a loop of rope to the battlements on the western face, followed by nine precious cartouches of ready ammunition, and it was another ten minutes before Harper and his escort were back with Frederickson. They made themselves known with the harsh call of a nightjar, were answered in kind, then went on to the east where more Frenchmen waited in the darkness.
Sharpe 3-Book Collection 6: Sharpe's Honour, Sharpe's Regiment, Sharpe's Siege Page 85