Sharpe 3-Book Collection 6: Sharpe's Honour, Sharpe's Regiment, Sharpe's Siege

by Bernard Cornwell

  CHAPTER 16

  Two Marines from Sharpe’s squad, judging the intervals between the fall of howitzer shells, darted around the courtyard to retrieve those shells that had not exploded. There were six. The fuses of two had failed to ignite in the howitzer barrels, two had half burned-fuses, while two had simply failed to explode. The four with usable fuses were carried to the bastion above the gatehouse where Lieutenant Fytch licked nervous lips and fingered the hilt of his pistol.

  Bread and cold meat had been distributed, but most men found it hard to chew or swallow the food. As the French column came closer and the threat of its drums louder, the bread was abandoned beside the upturned shakoes that served as cartridge holders.

  A shell, landing in the flooded ditch, fountained water on to an embrasure. A man laughed nervously. A sparrow, made bold by winter hunger, pecked at one of the discarded lumps of bread then flew off.

  Marine Moore, for the twentieth time, lifted the pan lid to check that his musket was primed. For the twentieth time it was.

  The French drums sounded clearly inside the fort, punctuated only by the fire of the big guns. Between the rattled passages of drumbeats there was a pause filled by hundreds of voices. ‘Vive l’Empereur!‘

  ‘Funny thing to hear for the first time,’ Fytch said.

  ‘I’ve heard it more times than I can remember,’ Sharpe said truthfully, ‘and we beat the buggers every time.’ He looked at the column, a great mass of men that advanced implacably over the sandy esplanade. It had been French columns like this, so huge and seemingly so irresistible, that had terrified half the nations of Europe into surrender, but it was also a formation that was designed to contain half-trained troops who could, therefore, be scared and bloodied into defeat. French skirmishers were deploying on the glacis and one of them put a bullet within six inches of Sharpe’s face. A rifle cracked and Sharpe saw the Frenchman slide back behind his mist of musket smoke.

  Sharpe had drawn all his Riflemen to the southern or eastern walls. He waited till the enemy was two hundred paces away, then filled his lungs. ‘Rifles! Fire!’

  More than a hundred rifles spat fire.

  Perhaps a dozen men in the leading rank of the French column keeled over. Immediately, with a shiver, the column stepped over the bodies. A slow ripple seemed to move down the column as the succeeding ranks negotiated the dead and wounded.

  Riflemen concentrated on reloading; working with fast, practised hands, ramming ball and wad and powder down clean barrels, aiming again, firing again, reloading again.

  At a hundred paces Sharpe blew two blasts on his whistle. Those Riflemen whose places were on the other ramparts ran back to their stations.

  The field guns stopped firing.

  It seemed oddly quiet. The drumming and shouting still continued, but the ear-hammering percussion of the twelve-pounders was over. The howitzers, firing still, made a more muffled, coughing sound. A wounded man, under the razor, screamed from the surgery tunnel and a Marine, for no apparent reason, vomited.

  ‘At this range,’ Sharpe walked down the line of Marines and kept his voice as matter-of-fact as a drill-sergeant, ‘aim two feet above the target.’ He glanced at the enemy. ‘Take aim!’

  The red-coated men pushed their muskets over the embrasures.

  ‘Fire! Reload!’

  A Frenchman crawled across the sand of the glacis, trailing blood.

  A Marine, hit by a skirmisher’s musket ball, spun backwards, teetered on the edge of the firestep, then fell into the burning branches of the pine abatis.

  ‘Fire!’

  A howitzer shell cracked on the firestep beside Sharpe and span into the courtyard where its explosion made a ball of filthy smoke shot through with red flames.

  ‘Fire!’ Lieutenant Fytch shouted. He pointed his pistol at a French officer not fifty yards away and pulled the trigger. The gun rammed a shock up his arm and blotted his view with smoke.

  A Marine’s musket hangfired and he threw the gun into the courtyard and picked up the weapon of a dead man. The ammunition left in the pouch of the corpse who had fallen into the burning abatis began to explode.

  The Riflemen, knowing that survival depended on the speed of their work, no longer rammed shots home, but tap-loaded their guns by rapping the butts on the rampart then firing the weapon into the gap between the glacis’ shoulders. Musket balls and rifle bullets spat into the enemy, but still the column came forward. Sharpe, who had seen it so often before, was again amazed at how much punishment a French column would endure. Three of the Marines, issued with civilian blunderbusses taken from the surrounding villages, poured their fire into the column’s head.

  The shape of the attack was clear now.

  At the front of the column the French general had put raw recruits, musket-fodder; boys whose deaths would not damage the Empire and he had invited the British to slaughter them. Now, pushed by officers and sergeants, the survivors of those conscripts spread along the counter-guard or sheltered in the dry ditch and banged their muskets at the smoke-wreathed wall above them.

  Behind were the veterans. Twenty or more men carried great fascines of roped branches, great mattresses of timber that sheltered them from bullet strike and which would be thrown into the ditch where the drawbridge should have been. Behind them, moustached faces grim, came the Grenadiers, the assault troops.

  Frederickson had lit a candle sheltered in a lantern. He used a spill to take the flame from the candle to the first unexploded mortar shell. He watched the fuse hiss, waited till the fire had burned into the hole bored in the casing, then, with a grunt, heaved it over the edge.

  ‘Fire!’ Lieutenant Fytch, his pistol reloaded, wasted the bullet into a fascine.

  The shell bounced on the road, disappeared beneath the leading rank, then exploded.

  A hole seemed to be punched in the men carrying the great bundles, but as soon as the smoke cleared, the hole filled, and a French sergeant kicked dead men and discarded bundles into the ditch.

  ‘Patrick! The gate!’ Sharpe had waited till the last moment, believing that the volume of fire from the walls would hold the column’s head back, and now he wondered if he had waited too long. He had meant to attack with his own squad, but he preferred now to control this fight from the ramparts and he knew that any attack headed by Harper would be driven home with a professional savagery.

  ‘Fire!’ Frederickson shouted and a score of bullets thudded downward. Some spurted dust from the road, one span a Frenchman clear round, but the rest seemed to be soaked up in the surging, pushing mass that strained to reach the shelter of the archway. That arch was blocked by pine trees, but the barricade had been knocked about by roundshot, and the leading attackers, throwing their fascines down and jumping on to their uncertain footing, could see footholds among the branches.

  One man toppled from the makeshift bridge and fell on to the hidden spikes. His screams were cut off as water flowed into his mouth.

  Another mortar shell was thrown to explode on the roadway. The air was hissing with bullets, endless with the noise of muskets firing and the rattle of ramrods.

  ‘Now!’ Sharpe shouted at Sergeant Rossner.

  The sergeant, hiding beneath the ramparts at the south-eastern corner of the fort, had a wooden baker’s peel which he dug into a barrel of lime. He scooped shovel-load after shovel-load of the white powder over the edge.

  ‘Fire!’ Frederickson shouted.

  Lieutenant Fytch, aiming his pistol, was shot in the chest and thumped back, astonishment on his face and blood on his crossbelt. ‘I’m ...’ He could not say what he wanted to say, instead he began to gasp for breath; each exhalation a terrible, pitiful moan.

  ‘Leave him!’ Sharpe bellowed at a Marine. This was no time to rescue wounded men. This was a time to fight, or else they would all be wounded. ‘The whole barrel, sergeant!’

  Rossner stooped, lifted the barrel, and tipped it over the rampart. Two bullets struck it, but the powder spumed and fell, was caught by
the wind, and Sharpe saw it, like musket smoke, drifting on to the assault troops.

  Some of whom, safely over the moat, were dragging with their hands at the branches in the archway.

  ‘Fire!’ Harper bellowed the order to his squad and pulled the trigger of his seven-barrelled gun.

  Bullets tore through pine and threw men backwards.

  ‘Spike the bastards!’ Harper dropped the gun and unslung his rifle. He rammed its bayonet forward, between two branches, and twisted the blade in a Frenchman’s arm.

  Attackers were coughing, screaming, and clutching at their eyes as the lime drifted among the Grenadiers.

  ‘Fire!’ Sharpe yelled and a score of muskets hammered down into the crowd below.

  The conscripts on the counterguard fired at the fort, but most fired high. Some balls struck. A Marine corporal, hit in the shoulder, went on loading his musket despite the pain.

  ‘You’ve got them beat!’ Frederickson hurled a third shell that exploded among half-blinded men. ‘Now kill the bastards, kill them!’ Men loaded as fast as cut, grazed hands would work. Bullet after bullet spat down into the French mass that was still pushed forward by the rear ranks.

  Sharpe fired his own rifle down into the chaos. ‘Cheer, you buggers! Let them know they’ve lost! Cheer!’

  Lieutenant Fytch, blood filling his mouth, tried to cheer and died instead.

  ‘Fire!’ Frederickson shouted over the cheer.

  The area about the gate was flames and smoke and bullets heavy with death. Men screaming, men blinded, men bleeding, men crawling.

  ‘Fire!’

  Men stumbled, the pain in their eyes like fire, to fall from the makeshift causeway on to the spikes. Blood drifted on the muddy waters.

  ‘Fire!’

  Harper’s men, the lodgement beneath the archway cleared, knelt with reloaded weapons and poured bullets at point-blank range into defeated men. ‘Fire, you bastards, fire!’ Harper was keening with the joy of battle, lost in it, revelling in it, spitting hatred at men he had never met, men he would drink with on a summer’s day if life had been different, but men who now folded over his bullets and shed bright blood onto a blood-soaked road. ‘Fire!’

  The last shell was thrown far to explode where the roadway narrowed between the glacis’ shoulders and the men at the column’s rear, at last sensing that the front ranks had recoiled in screaming agony, faltered.

  ‘Fire!’ Rifles spat at conscripts on the counterguard. Farm-boys, who five weeks before had never seen an army musket, now choked their blood on to sand.

  ‘Cheer! Cheer!’ Men whose mouths were dry with gritty powder raised a cheer.

  ‘Keep firing! Drive them back!’

  Men’s faces were black with powder. Their nails bled where they had dragged at cartridges, levered stiff frizzens, and torn on flints. Their teeth, showing skull-white in the powder-dark faces, grinned as if in rictus. Breath came short. The whole world now was a few smoky yards, stinking of fire, in which a man rammed and loaded, fired and killed, rammed and loaded and other men screamed and some men crawled bleeding along the ramparts and another man slipped in spilt brains and swore because his musket fell into the courtyard.

  The French inched back. The bullets cracked at them, thudded into flesh and still the bullets came. No troops fired muskets faster and no troops had been given such a target.

  ‘Fire!’ Sharpe, his rifle re-loaded, pulled the trigger. The smoke of his men’s weapons obscured individuals, but he knew where the enemy was and his bullet twitched the smoke as it flashed through.

  Harper, no more enemy visible, shouted for his men to hold their fire. He hauled a pine tree aside, crouched, then beckoned to Taylor. ‘Ammunition.’

  They went to the edge of the ditch, found the men they had killed, and cut their cartridge bags away. They tossed the bags through the archway then went back and re-blocked the arch. There had been no time to run the one remaining cannon into a firing position and Harper, regretting the lost chance, went to check that the quickfuse still led through the cleared venthole to the charge. It was safe and, reassured, he began the laborious process of re-charging the seven-barrelled gun.

  A French officer, galloping his horse across the esplanade to see why the attack had faltered, was seen by two riflemen from the south-western bastion. They both fired. Man and horse shuddered, blood spat to sand, then the wounded horse, screaming and tossing, dragged its dead master in a great circle towards the column’s rear.

  ‘Fire!’ Frederickson shouted and more heavy bullets tore into the smoke and drove the column further back. The drums hesitated, a single rattle sounded defiance, then was silent.

  ‘Hold your fire! Hold it!’ Sharpe could see the enemy going, running, and though he wished he could have fired till the last enemy was out of sight, he had ammunition to conserve. ‘Hold your fire! Hold your fire!’ He felt the wild elation of a battle won, of an enemy broken. The space before the fort’s gate was foul with dead and wounded men, and smeared with a great, white smudge of lime that was mixed with blood. ‘Cease firing!’

  At which point Calvet’s real attack burst on to the north-western corner of the Teste de Buch.

  Black clouds were coming from the north. Captain Palmer had watched them, had seen the grey blur of rain beneath them and judged that by this night the Teste de Buch would once again be crouching beneath dirty weather. Biscay, he thought, was living up to its reputation for sudden storms and uneasy calms.

  Then the attack had struck at the fort’s gate.

  Men on the northern rampart turned to watch. It seemed to them that a cauldron boiled around the gate, a cauldron that billowed smoke into the sky.

  The musketry had fused into a single, sustained crackle. Screams punctuated it. The smell of rotten eggs, powder smoke stench, came over the courtyard. Palmer saw Fytch struck, saw him fall, imagined him dying. Blood, flowing from the lieutenant’s mouth, trickled to the firestep’s edge then, with obscene slowness, ran down the inner wall.

  Palmer watched Harper’s group sprint across the courtyard, trampling the useless, burned abatis, and fire like men possessed into the darkness of the arch.

  The fort stank of blood and smoke, the soldier’s smell.

  Palmer, grateful that the coughing shells no longer fell into the fort, turned back towards the north. Gulls fought above the channel’s beach a quarter mile away. The rain seemed no closer. Beneath the diving, screaming gulls two men in a rowing boat planted fish traps of woven willow.

  The noise and carnage at the Teste de Buch might have been a whole world away for all they seemed to care.

  The sea was empty. Not one grey sail offered hope. Palmer was thinking of a wife left in Gravesend, of two children who went hungry three days out of seven, of his hopes for that family when this war ended. An orchard, he thought, far from the sea and never fouled with smoke, would be a fitting place. Somewhere with a small cottage, not too big, but with a room where the children could sleep, another for himself and Betty, and a room where his few books could justify the name of study. A horse, for no gentleman walked where he could ride, and perhaps his father-in-law, who had mightily disapproved of Betty marrying a Marine, might lend some money to make the Marine into a market-gardener.

  ‘Sir?’ A Rifleman close to Palmer stared towards the channel.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Thought I saw something.’

  Palmer stared, saw nothing, and put it down to gulls fighting by the fish-traps.

  He was sure, thinking about it, that his eldest child’s feeble health was due to living in a town. Gravesend was filthy with coal-smoke and in winter the sea-fog could lie heavily on a small chest. Two of Palmer’s children had died as infants and were buried in the pauper’s graveyard, for a Marine officer had no money to spare on lavish funerals for the barely baptized. An orchard would be a place to grow up, Palmer thought, an orchard heavy with apples and with espaliered pear-trees growing against a sun-warmed crinkle-crankle wall.


  A cheer from the gate made him turn. The men on the ramparts still fired, but the cheer told Palmer that this round was won. God alone knew how, except that the Marines and Riflemen had loaded and fired in practised frenzy and the cheer swelled again and suddenly there was an unnatural silence because all the muskets had gone quiet and there was just the wind sighing over cold stone, the crying of the injured, and a sudden, startled shout from Palmer’s right. He ran.

  Three hundred Frenchmen had left the village before dawn and groped their way in the darkness. They had marched in a great circle, east and north and west, to come, an hour after first light, to the channel’s edge north of the fortress.

  One hundred of the men were new conscripts, brought along to fire their muskets when ordered.

  The other two hundred were among the best in Calvet’s force. They were led by a Captain Briquet whose warlike name, meaning sabre, gave the force an odd confidence. They were guided to their assault by Henri Lassan who saw, in this attack, his chance of redemption.

  Briquet, though a junior officer compared to many in Calvet’s force, had a reputation. He was brave, thorough, and a firebrand.

  His task was to approach the fort once the larger battle began. Under the cover of its noise, and trusting to the distraction offered by its existence, he planned to come close beneath the fort’s vulnerable north-western corner. Lassan had promised the approach could be made unseen because the sand-dunes offered hiding, and Lassan had been proved right.

  Once in place, hidden close to the fortress, a Forlorn Hope would charge across the masonry bridge of the dam, put ladders to the closest embrasures, and climb. The Hope, who expected death, would be led by Briquet who expected to be a major when the sun went down.

  The conscripts, under experienced sergeants, would flay the walls left and right of the assault with musket fire.

  The Forlorn Hope, gaining the ramparts, would hold a small section while the other veterans, with more ladders, flooded on to the sand strip between the fort and the channel to place more ladders. Briquet, knowing that the ramparts facing the channel would have the fewest defenders, aimed to take that wall. The stone ramp, that Lassan had drawn on his careful plan, would then lead into the heart of the Teste de Buch.