‘Then I,’ Frederickson said stonily, ‘would fight the bastards.’
‘Why?’
‘Why!’ Frederickson stared at Sharpe with amazement.
‘Because they’re crapauds! Because they’re slimy Frogs! Because as long as they’re fighting us they can’t go south and give the Peer a headache! Because the English have a God-given duty to rid the world of the French! Because it’s what I’m paid to do. Because I’ve got nothing better to do! Because Napoleon Bonaparte is a foul little worm who grovels in his own excrement! Because no one’s ordered me to surrender just because the odds are unhealthy! Because I don’t want to live under French rule and the more of those bastards I kill the more the rest of them will slowly comprehend that fact! Do you need more?’ He watched Sharpe. ‘If you weren’t married, would you surrender?’
‘No.’
‘So being married has weakened you. It does, you know. Saps a man.’ He grinned to show that he did not want to be taken seriously, even if he had spoken with real conviction. ‘I’m sorry about Jane, I truly am. But her fight isn’t here and you are.’
‘Yes.’ Sharpe felt ashamed of himself. He wanted to tell Frederickson about the superstition that had kept him going through the ambush and how Killick, unwittingly, had taken that strength away from him, but he could say nothing. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘You need a good fight,’ Frederickson said cheerfully. ‘Nothing like a good fight to raise the spirits. And two weeks from now, my friend, we’ll open a bottle and be embarrassed this conversation ever took place.’
‘Yes.’ Sharpe had expected some sympathy, and had found none. ‘They came for a parley.’
‘So I heard.’
‘They said that Bampfylde was told we’d been defeated. That’s why the Navy buggered off.’
‘Clever.’ Frederickson blew smoke into the wind.
It was de Maquerre, Sharpe thought. Perhaps Hogan had known de Maquerre was a traitor, but no one else had known. But now Sharpe knew and he vowed, should he survive this siege, that he would seek the Frenchman out. Then the first howitzer shell cracked apart and both men twisted towards the explosion even as the shards of broken shell casing, humming and fizzing from the smoke, spattered about them.
A howitzer was merely a short-barrelled cannon useful for the firing of exploding shell. The loss of accuracy occasioned by the stunted barrel was compensated by the diameter of the shell’s explosion.
Their proper use, in battle, was to lob shells over the heads of friendly troops. Thus, unlike the long-barrelled cannons, they were fired at a gentle upward angle.
Yet General Calvet did not want to use a shallow trajectory. Instead he wanted his four howitzers to fire as mortars; firing almost vertically so their shells would plummet straight down into the killing confines of the fortress walls.
So each eight hundred and eighty pound barrel had to be wrestled from its carriage and laid in a specially made cradle of timbers laid in the gunpits. The timbers were levered and sawn from the village houses, notched to take the howitzer’s trunnions, then wedged solid with wooden quoins. Now, angling up to the sky, they would arc their shells high over the walls. Or so the theory went.
The problems, apart from the shifting and settling of the timbers beneath the hammer blows of each shot, were twofold. First, the gunner must precisely gauge the weight of powder that would send the ball neatly into the courtyard of the Teste de Buch. A quarter ounce too much would send the shell searing far beyond the enemy. Second, the duration of the ball’s flight had to be estimated and one of the five fuses selected as appropriate. It was a science fleshed out with instinct, and the very first guesses of the French artillery colonel were a tribute to his experience.
He ordered five ounces of powder used, far less than a mortar would take for the same distance, and he selected the middle fuse. The first gun, firing its experimental shot, hammered down into the timbers and squirted a quoin loose, but the colonel, watching the tiny trace of smoke from the burning fuse, saw the shell arc sweetly towards the fort, then fall, faster and faster, to provoke a cracking, dirty-smoked explosion in the very centre of the enemy.
The shell was a sphere of cast-iron filled with powder. When the fuse burned to the powder, the shell exploded and fragments of iron whistled out to fill a circle, twenty yards in diameter, with possible death. The shells dropped almost vertically.
‘Take cover!’ Sharpe shouted through the smoke.
Two men were down, one screaming and clutching his belly, the other motionless.
A second shell hit the ramparts, bounced, and trickled down the stone ramp. Sharpe waited for the explosion.
A third shell tore through the rafters of the garrison’s offices and exploded on the upper floor. Lieutenant Fytch, shooting out of the door like a rabbit pursued by a ferret, shouted for water.
The fourth shell buried itself in the ashes and blackened timber of the burned barracks and vented those relics up and out as it coughed its dark explosion.
‘We’ve got one dead, sir!’ A Rifleman pointed to the second shell which had come to rest on the ramp. No smoke came from the reed which held the fuses, but Sharpe had seen such things explode quite inexplicably.
‘Stay clear of it!’
There was a pause in which, Sharpe knew, the enemy was realigning the guns and ladling black powder into the swabbed barrels. Sharpe was furious with himself. For some reason he had not anticipated mortar fire and the shock of it stunned him.
‘I suppose,’ Frederickson said, ‘we’re going to have to endure it for a while.’
‘I imagine so.’ But the powder laboratory was threatened, as was the surgeon’s room, and Sharpe shouted for Lieutenant Minver to make up a work-party to remove both to safer places deep in the stone galleries.
Six men ran with fouled water from the well and handed their buckets into the offices where other men fought the fire. Two Marines carried the wounded man towards the surgery, while a Rifleman dragged the dead man to the side of the yard. Sharpe saw, with approval, how the dead man’s ammunition was rescued.
Two more guns fired, this time with a different sound, and Sharpe whipped round to see that two of the enemy’s twelve-pounder guns, Napoleon’s ‘beautiful daughters’, were successfully embrasured in the scorched watermill. They were firing heavy canister, presumably to scour the defenders from the ramparts, and the heavy balls thudded on stone or whispered overhead. ‘Rifles! Watch those bastards!’ The gunners, five hundred yards away to the south-east, just might show themselves in a window of the mill, though the smoke of their guns provided a sheltering screen against the Rifles’ aim. Then, in a shattering beat of sound, the six other twelve-pounders, some inside the mill and the others sheltered by a stone wall that ran alongside the stream-race, opened fire.
A howitzer shell screamed down, this one exploding five yards above the courtyard’s cobbles, and a fragment of its casing took the skulltop from one of the men who had crouched for shelter behind the furnace. Bullet-making had been interrupted by the attack and molten lead, tipped by the shell’s blast, poured slow and obscene on to the dead face.
Another shell landed on the eastern ramparts and tossed a Rifleman down into the courtyard. The next shell overshot, cracking apart in the dry northern ditch, while the last of this second volley, its fuse damp, bounced, span, smoked, and Patrick Harper, magnificently casual as he emerged from a powder gallery, checked the spin with his boot, licked forefinger and thumb, then bent down and plucked the burning fuse free. ‘Good morning, sir!’
‘Good morning, RSM. Thank you for last night.’ Harper cocked an ear to the morning’s sounds. ‘Doesn’t seem to have discouraged the bastards, sir.’
Sharpe left just a dozen men in the shelter of the citadels, mostly Riflemen, and the rest were put deep in the safe galleries of the fort. The offices would have to burn.
Sharpe stayed on the ramparts, as did Captain Palmer, but Frederickson was ordered unwillingly into shelter. The heavy caniste
r balls rattled and scraped on the stones, bounced spinning from the glacis, and tore at the makeshift flag. Once a French gunner showed himself beside the mill, four rifles spat, but the man, with a derisive gesture, leaped to safety.
The shells had to be endured. They came with a horrid frequency, no longer spaced in batches of four because each French gun, finding its rhythm, fired at its own pace. Sometimes two or three would land together, sometimes there would be a pause as long as thirty seconds when no shell landed, but the morning seemed to Sharpe to be an unending thunder. Again and again the explosions cracked and shook and rumbled and the foul-smelling smoke soured the air and flames started again in the destroyed barracks to match the flames that shot up above the ramparts from the burning offices. Six men, led by Minver, had helped move the makeshift surgery into a ready magazine while another six, led by Harper, rescued the laboratory with its precious load of half-made cartridges.
A young Marine, crouching beside Sharpe in the dubious safety of the south-east citadel, flinched each time a shell exploded. ‘Bastards,’ he said, ‘bastards.’ Fragments of shell casing scrabbled on stone; one fragment came through the citadel door and dropped, still smoking, at Sharpe’s feet.
‘Bastards,’ the Marine said. A shell hit the citadel roof, making a noise like the ringing crack of a sledge-hammer, and Sharpe heard the shell scrape as it slid down the stone roof towards the ditch and he knew if it exploded outside the loopholes the iron would scythe this casement clean like a butcher’s cleaver swept at waist level, but the shell splashed harmlessly into the ditch.
‘Bastards,’ the Marine said.
The fortress shook with the explosions, the air thumped with them, the cobbles were scorched by them. One of Harper’s cannon, so lovingly restored, was blown from its carriage. A corpse, hit in the belly by an exploding shell, spattered flesh and blood on the walls. One of Sharpe’s walkways, circumventing the citadels, was lifted from its place and dropped into the barracks’ rubble. Another, at the south-western corner, was burned by the flames that climbed from Lassan’s offices.
The twelve-pounders, seeing no movement on the walls, changed to solid shot and the hammer blows rang like harsh bells throughout the Teste de Buch. At five hundred yards, over open sights, the gunners could not miss. Their iron shot skimmed the glacis to crack into the ramparts and the stones, laid with poor mortar, began to shift.
‘Bastards.’ The Marine’s knuckles, gripping the stock of his heavy musket, were white.
‘What’s your name?’ Sharpe asked.
The Marine, who looked about sixteen years old, blinked. ‘Moore, sir.’
‘Where are you from?’
‘Exminster, sir.’
‘Where’s that?’ Sharpe was peering through the loophole, watching for an attack, but when the boy did not reply, he turned to him. ‘Well?’
‘Near Exeter, sir. In Devon.’
‘Farmers?’
‘Father’s a publican, sir. The Stowey Arms.’
Two shells exploded, filling the air with smoke, thunder and the hot breath of flame, and Marine Moore, for once, did not swear.
‘One day,’ Sharpe said, ‘you and I will drink some pots of ale at your Stowey Arms in Exminster and no one will believe the tales we tell.’
The boy grinned. ‘Yes, sir.’
‘Is it a good alehouse?’
‘The best, sir.’
‘And the ale?’
‘Rare stuff, sir. Better than the muck you get here.’
‘French beer,’ Major Richard Sharpe said authoritatively,
‘is pissed by virgins.’ He saw the boy grin as he was supposed to, and slapped his shoulder. ‘You, Marine Moore, look through that hole. You see anything move, sing out. Understand?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘I’m relying on you.’ Sharpe, hiding his own terror that was quite as keen as Moore‘s, stepped out of the citadel’s shelter. He straightened his jacket and sword, then walked down the southern rampart. He saw the destruction in the courtyard, heard a roundshot shiver a merlon not six paces away, but walked on calmly. Men, sheltering in the arch-ways opening from the courtyard or crouching in the rampart’s citadels, should see him now. He must look calm in the face of this terror, he must let them know that the shells and shot, however loud, were not the end of the earth. He remembered how he, as a younger soldier, had watched his officers and sergeants and how he had believed that if they could take the murderous sounds, then so could he.
He stood at the midpoint of the rampart and stared south. He felt all the old symptoms of fear. His heart thumped in his ribcage, his belly seemed to be sinking, his throat was dry, he felt a muscle trembling in his thigh that he could not still, and sweat, though it was a cold day, pricked at his skin. He told himself he should not move from the spot until he had counted to twenty, then decided that a brave man would count to sixty.
He did this so his men would see him, not because he thought it safe. A roundshot glanced off the cordon of the parapet, and Sharpe knew the twelve-pounders, barrels heated, were firing higher. The mortars, he noticed, were both less frequent and less accurate and he guessed the wooden beds had shifted in the sandy soil. He reached fifty in his count, decided he was deliberately hurrying the numbers, so made himself start again from forty.
‘Sir! Mr Sharpe!’ It was Moore. The boy was pointing south-east, inland, and Sharpe, staring at that direction, saw the mass of men who had been drawn up behind the village and who now, drums beating and colours held high, emerged into plain view. The mortars, Sharpe realized with surprise, had stopped firing. He looked towards the field guns and those weapons, all eight of them, were silent. Their gunsmoke drifted over the meadows. He noticed that there was a touch of spring in the air and something beautiful in the way the sun glittered on the water.
Sharpe turned. ‘Captain Frederickson! To your places! All of you!’ He blew his whistle, watched as men debouched at a run from the stone tunnels, then turned back to see what his enemy might do.
The assault was coming.
General Calvet, a flitch of fat bacon in one hand and a watch in the other, grinned. ‘You think they’ll have manned the ramparts by now, Favier?’
‘I’m sure, sir.’
‘Give the signal, then. I’ll go back to lunch.’
Favier nodded to the trumpeter, who made the call, and the infantry immediately sat down.
The gunners, who had been hammering quoins into the shaken howitzer beds, leaped back as the portfires were lit and as the barrels thudded down again.
‘Lie down!’ Sharpe was furious. He had fallen for a trick like a raw officer fresh out of school and he had brought his men into the open, just as the French had wanted him to do, and now the shells were wobbling at the top of their arc, spiralling smoke, then were plunging towards the fort. ‘Lie down!’
The field guns fired, the shells exploded, and the nightmare of fire and banging and skull-splitting shrieks and flame and whistling fragments began again.
A solid shot, striking an embrasure, drove stone scraps into a man’s eyes. A shell, landing on the western wall between two Marines, took the belly of one and left the other unscathed but screaming.
‘They did that neatly,’ Frederickson said.
‘And I fell for it,’ Sharpe said with bitter self-digust.
Frederickson peered through an embrasure. The French infantry lay by the millstream as though on a holiday. ‘They’ll attack the gate when they do come.’
‘I imagine so.’
‘Confident bastards, letting us know.’ Both officers ducked as a roundshot shivered dust and dry mortar from the stones above them. The great masonry block had been shifted a full inch by the blow.
Sharpe stared at the far rampart. ‘Lieutenant Minver!’
‘Sir?’
‘Get some bread and cold meat sent round!’
Minver, somewhat aghast at being ordered to brave the courtyard where most of the shells exploded, nodded. Sharpe would leave his
men exposed for he had no way of telling just when the attack of massed infantry would start forward. They would come from the south-east and the howitzers could keep firing until the French were actually at the ramparts. The field guns, firing very close to the line of advance, would have to cease fire long before the attack struck home.
Sharpe wanted them to come. He wanted to hear the Old Trousers, the drummers’ pas de charge, he wanted to hear the screams of attacking men, the banging of muskets, for that would be preferable to this helpless waiting. He suddenly wanted to echo young Moore and swear uselessly at the gunners who sweated and fired and swabbed and fired again.
Harper, waiting on the western wall with Sharpe’s picked squad, went to the screaming Marine and slapped him into silence. ‘And shovel that mess over the side, lad.’ He gestured at the spilt guts of the dead man. ‘You don’t want flies here, do you?’
‘Flies in winter?’
‘Don’t be cheeky, lad. Do it.’
One of the Marines with Harper seemed untroubled by the shelling. He drew a stone along the fore-edge of a cutlass, doing it again and again in search of the perfect cutting blade. Another, leaning against the abandoned timber slide of one of Lassan’s guns, read a small book with evident fascination. From time to time he looked up, saw that his services were not yet required, and went back to the book. Captain Palmer, staring north and east from his allotted station, thought he saw movement in the dunes but when he examined the place with his spyglass he saw only sand and grass.
For a half hour more the bombardment continued. Screaming shells blasted apart in black ruin, flames roared from the rafters that collapsed in a shower of sparks into the ruins of the offices, and iron shards spat dirty death into the corners of the garrison. Men shivered. They stared at stone an inch before their face, they cursed the French, their officers, their luck, the whole rotten world that had brought them to this eye of a manmade hell, until at last, at long, long last, the trumpets sounded thin through the thunder’s noise and the far cheer betrayed that a mass of men moved towards the attack and the men in the fort, men in red and green and men with drawn and dirtied faces, prepared themselves to fight.
Sharpe 3-Book Collection 6: Sharpe's Honour, Sharpe's Regiment, Sharpe's Siege Page 87