Two hundred men, Briquet said, could capture this fort. It would take, if the first lodgement was successful, no more than twenty minutes.
Yet for that lodgement to work the British sentries must be drawn to look the other way, and in that cause men must die at the main gate. General Calvet had ordered it thus, but Captain Briquet’s fear, for he was a man who thirsted for glory, was that the larger attack would pierce the fortress before his Forlorn Hope could rush the stone dam. The colonel leading the main attack, Briquet knew, was desperate to succeed and there was not a man marching with the drummers who did not believe that the British would be swept ignominiously aside once the fascines were in place and the moustaches stormed over the ditch.
Briquet’s force, with stealth and care, crept southwards between the dunes and the water. Two men, ostensibly planting fish-traps from a tiny boat, gave warning when faces appeared at the fort’s north-western corner, but their warnings were few.
Briquet listened to the turmoil at the gate. Not once did he raise his head to look at the fort, not once did he risk discovery. That could wait for the last moment, the dash over the dam.
‘This is as close as we can get unseen,’ Lassan said.
The firing at the main gate was dying and Briquet knew this was the moment or there would be no moment at all. ‘Venez!’
His feet scrambled for footing in the sand, a sergeant shoved him upwards, and suddenly the fort loomed above him and Briquet had an impression that no men guarded the ramparts, but he dared not search for the enemy because there was a task to do. He saw the stone dam, exactly as Lassan had described it, and he leaped the small wooden fence that straggled to the sea, then his bootnails were loud on the stone that was lightly covered with sand.
A musket banged somewhere, then another, but Briquet took no notice. He jumped the rusted cogs of the sluice-gear and steadied himself with a hand on the fortress wall. ‘One!’ He pointed right, ‘Two!’ Left.
The ladders, carried with such care down the channel’s edge, were dragged forward. There were four men to each ladder, two planted the rails in the sand and the others swung the ladders up and over so that the timbers crashed on to the stonework. Briquet shouldered a sergeant aside with a snarl and climbed the first ladder as if the dogs of hell were at his heels.
A man appeared above him, startled, but a musket shot from below dissolved the man’s face in blood and Briquet, spattered by the gore, spat as his head cleared the embrasure’s lip.
He reached up, grasped the top of a merlon, and heaved himself over. He tripped on an empty gun slide, recovered, and already the sergeant was beside him.
Briquet drew his sword, the steel whispering at the scabbard’s throat. ‘Follow me!’
Men poured up the ladders. More men, cheering, followed with new ladders and Briquet, leading his charge along the western walls, knew that the fort was his.
He had achieved surprise, he had gained the wall, and he would be a major by sundown.
Captain Palmer saved the north wall. The pine-lashed walkway was still in place, circumventing the citadel, and he seized the timbers, grunted, then shoved the heavy pine-trunks into the courtyard beneath. Now the only access was through the citadel that was blocked by a barrel of lime.
‘Fire!’ Palmer, crammed into the tiny sentry-chamber with five Marines, fired over the barrel at the blue uniforms who had appeared with such suddenness on the gun-platform.
‘William! Stay!’ Sharpe needed a man above the gate. If the French, sensing that the defenders were being stripped away by the new threat, attacked again, then it would need a man like Frederickson to hold them.
‘Marines! Marines!’ He shouted the word like a battle-cry.
Sharpe was running towards the western wall. ‘Marines!’ The Marines, trained for the bloody business of boarding enemy ships, were the troops he needed now. The Rifles could defend the gate, but the Marines could show their worth in the close-quarter work. ‘Marines!’
Sharpe threw down his rifle and tugged the Heavy Cavalry sword from its ungainly scabbard. How in Christ’s name had the French sneaked into the fort? A musket ball snicked the wall beside him, fired by a Frenchman on the west wall. Sharpe could see red uniforms bunched at the far citadel, showing that the north wall held. Sharpe’s job, and the task of the Marines who ran behind him, was to throw the enemy off the western bastions.
The walkway across the corner of the ramparts was gone, burned by the fire, so Sharpe must lead his men through the zig-zag of the citadel. The enemy would know it, their muskets would be waiting for men coming from that narrow doorway, but it was no use dwelling on fear. Sharpe saw a French officer, sword drawn, leading his men in a rush down the western rampart and Sharpe knew it would be a race to see who reached the citadel first and he ran harder, ammunition pouch bouncing, then slammed through the door to check his speed by thumping on the inner wall.
Frederickson, left with the Riflemen, sent a volley at the French who had climbed the ladders. At this range, across the angle of the fort, the rifle fire was deadly.
Marines crushed into the citadel and Sharpe, trusting they would follow him, jumped through the doorway. ‘Come on!’
He emerged into winter sunlight to see a space of five empty, stone-flagged yards beyond which, screaming and threatening, the front rank of the French charged at him.
The enemy had the impetus here. They were running, and Sharpe had just emerged from the obstacle of the citadel. This was the second of pure, naked fear prompted by the sight of steel, then Sharpe snarled his challenge and hissed his blade in a glittering arc to check the French rush.
‘Bayonets!’ Sharpe shouted at the two men who had followed him on to the ramparts. Other Marines pushed behind, but it was up to Sharpe to clear a space for them. ‘Now kill them!’ He jumped forward to anticipate the French attack. The French officer, a short man with a fierce face, lunged with his sword. The man was flanked by moustached giants with bayonets.
The Heavy Cavalry sword, a butcher’s blade, swept one musket aside. The French officer’s sword skewered past Sharpe’s swerve and a Marine, instinctively seizing the blade, screamed as Briquet withdrew and cut the Marine’s fingers to the joints.
Sharpe hit the soldier nearest him with the guard of the sword, then sawed the blade downwards on to the officer. Briquet, sensing the flash of steel, ducked, but a Marine’s bayonet thumped on his ribs and the Heavy Cavalry sword took him in the side of the neck to end his hopes of glory.
A boot kicked at Sharpe’s groin and struck his upper thigh. His sword was tangled in the officer’s fall, but he ripped it clear and drove it forward with both hands so that the point was in his assailant’s throat.
A bayonet tried to reach Sharpe from the second French rank.
There were men grunting and kicking and slashing around him. He could smell their sweat, their breath, and he needed space. A musket fired, the noise huge, but it was impossible to tell which side had fired the shot.
The French, by sheer weight of numbers, were pressing the tiny handful of British backwards. Sharpe had a half yard of space behind him, stepped back, and screamed the war cry as he swung the great sword in a fearsome downwards swing. A man ducked, Sharpe twisted his wrist to lunge the sword, stamped forward, and a Frenchman moaned as the big blade gouged at his belly.
‘Marines! Marines!’ One Marine was down, coughing and bleeding, but two others forced their way over his body and thrust into the fight with bayonets. Two more came behind them. This was gutter fighting, something learned in a hard childhood and never taught by drill sergeants. Here men clawed and kicked and smelt the breath of the men they killed.
A Marine tripped over Captain Briquet’s body and a French bayonet lunged into his back. Immediately another Marine, screaming like a banshee, drove his blade into the Frenchman’s face. The bodies were like a barricade now, but the Marines kicked them down to the smouldering embers of the burned offices, and carried their wet blades forward.
&
nbsp; Sharpe was using the sword to press men back. He watched the enemy’s eyes and, though he did not know it, he smiled. He lunged, parried, stamped forward, lunged, and every action was now a reflex. Nineteen years of battle had come to this moment.
A musket exploded close to Sharpe and the bullet thumped at his chest like a prize-fighter’s blow. A French lieutenant, blood on his face and jacket, twisted into the enemy’s front rank and hissed his slim flexible blade towards Sharpe’s face. Sharpe knocked the blade aside and rammed his own heavier sword at the officer’s eyes. ‘On! On!’
They were holding. A dozen Marines were on the rampart now and the French, the impetus of their first charge checked, were wary of the bayonets. Some of the French, seeing their way blocked, turned to flood into the semi-circular bastion where the thirty-six pounders had stood. Others ran down the stone ramp into the courtyard.
Frederickson had brought a dozen Riflemen halfway down the southern rampart and he drilled them as if they were on the training ground at Shorncliffe. Aim, load, fire, aim, load, fire, and every volley flailed into the French who still swarmed up the ladders on to the battlements.
The French on the rampart, hearing a cheer as their comrades spilt down the ramp, gave ground before Sharpe. If the courtyard was taken then there would be no need to fight this savage Rifleman whose face was black with powder. His eyes glittered against darkened skin and his teeth were bared.
Sharpe sensed that the fight on the rampart was dying as men, on both sides, let their fear of cold steel bring them caution. He dared not let it die. He shouted his Marines to charge again, trampled over the French lieutenant’s body, and stabbed a French sergeant, wrenched the blade free of the clinging flesh, and his Marines drove into the newly made gap with blades jabbing at the enemy in quick, professional lunges.
Shots sounded in the courtyard. There was a scream, then the bellow of a vast gun, that told Sharpe Harper was in action.
Another volley came from Frederickson.
The rampart’s stones were slick with blood. A Marine slipped and a tall Frenchman, carrying an engineer’s axe, killed the fallen man with a single blow. The axeman gave the enemy new spirit and drove deep into Sharpe’s men.
Sharpe knew the fort was lost if the axeman lived. He lunged at the man and his sword rammed itself between the man’s ribs, grated, then a French hand gripped Sharpe’s blade, blood showed at his fingers, but the man held on, tugged, and another man clawed at Sharpe’s face. A bayonet stabbed his thigh, Sharpe fell backwards, sword lost in the melée, and a Frenchman’s breath was in his face and fingers were at his throat. Sharpe was on his back now, driven there by two Frenchmen. He brought up his knee and clawed his fingers at the man who tried to choke him. The man screamed as Sharpe’s fingers closed in his left eye.
There was no skill left, no order, just a bitter mass of men who ripped at each other with blades, kicked and clawed and stabbed again. A Marine sergeant, shouting an incomprehensible challenge, bayoneted one of Sharpe’s assailants and kicked the other in the face. The axeman, choking on blood in his lungs, fell sideways and two Marines grunted as they forced bayonets into his trunk. Somewhere a man sobbed, and another screamed.
Sharpe twisted up and, his sword lost, picked up the wide-bladed axe. The Marine sergeant did not hear Sharpe’s thanks, but just drove on with his bloodied bayonet.
A Frenchman tripped on a gunslide, an opening appeared and Sharpe hacked down with the axe blade, then screamed the challenge to drive the enemy a full two paces back.
An explosion hammered in the courtyard, a sound that echoed like a drumbeat of hell in the echoing walls of the Teste de Buch. Smoke billowed.
Harper had turned the cannon, then fired it with its charge of stone-shards, nails, and lead scraps into the French who came down the stone ramp. The cannon’s recoil had thrown it back five yards. ‘Now kill them!’ Harper charged.
Minver’s Riflemen, on the north wall, fired down at the French who were left in the courtyard. Some of the Riflemen, wanting loot from the dead, jumped down to risk broken ankles. The long sword bayonets, brass-handled, hunted forward.
Sharpe swung the axe underhand, screaming the challenge and the blade buried itself in a body, wrenched free in a gush of blood and he went forward again.
He saw a movement to his left, ducked, and a man jumping from a ladder tripped on Sharpe’s back and sprawled into the Marines. One hit him a hammer blow of a musket butt, killing him as clean as a rabbit chopped on the neck.
Sharpe turned, protected by the embrasure, and saw the French firing from the dunes. Another man neared the ladder’s head and Sharpe swung the axe into his face, heard the scream, then took an upright of the ladder, pushed it away and sideways, and heard the shouts as the ladder tumbled.
‘Behind you!’ The voice warned him, Sharpe ducked, and a bayonet slid over his back. He drove the axe handle into the Frenchman’s belly then stepped back, reversed the weapon, and brought the head down in a vicious swing to bury it into the man’s ribs. The axe stuck there.
A French musket, tipped with a bayonet, lay at his feet. It felt unnatural, but it served. He jabbed it forward as he had learned so many years ago. Forward, twist, back, right foot forward, lunge, twist, back.
If he shouted orders he did not know it. If he screamed with rage, he did not know it. He just fought to clear a wall of enemy.
There was the strange sensation that he had noticed before in battle, the odd slowing of the world as though the men around him were puppets under palsied fingers. He alone seemed to be moving fast.
A Frenchman, eyes wide with terror, lunged, and it seemed a simple matter to knock the man’s musket aside and drive the bayonet into the man’s belly, to twist, to draw it free then stamp the foot forward again. Another Frenchman, to the left, fumbled with his musket’s lock and Sharpe, not knowing if his captured musket was loaded, pulled the trigger and felt not the slightest surprise as it fired to rip a bloody hole in the man’s throat.
That made a gap. A French sergeant, wise in war, saw Sharpe and lunged, but Sharpe was faster and his bayonet caught the man’s arm, ripped down to bone, and a Marine, at Sharpe’s shoulder, drove his blade into the sergeant’s groin.
The fort could be lost for all Sharpe knew. He only understood that these bloodslick stones must be fought for and that the Marines were fighting like men possessed, overbearing the enemy with a ferocity and confidence that put terror into the French who had to fight them. And terror was the first and chief weapon of war. It was terror that brought this murderous rage beneath the dragon-slayer’s banner that was wind-lifted above the fight.
A scream, prolonged, rising to a shout that would have chilled the horsemen of the devil, sounded beyond the enemy.
Sharpe knew that sound. ‘Patrick!’
Harper, the courtyard cleansed of the enemy, climbed the ramp that twitched with the wounded thrown down by the cannon. He led a charge of bayonets to the ramparts and the French, assailed on three sides, began to give.
Frenchmen, come to the ladders’ tops with fear, saw that their fear was justified. They forced their way back down, shouting to the men who waited behind that the enemy was imminent. One ladder, its rungs green, broke to tumble six men on to the sand.
Riflemen, sent by Frederickson on to the western rampart, cleared the water bastion and, leaning in its cannon embrasures, enfiladed the ladders. Captain Palmer led more Marines from the north.
‘Charge!’ Sharpe yelled it unnecessarily, for the victory was clear. The Marines had fought half the length of a rampart and now they carried their blades the rest of the way and the French, who had seen the redcoats snatch victory from defeat, took to the ladders or jumped into the ditch.
Harper had a lunge of his bayonet-tipped rifle deflected into an enemy’s thigh so kept the rifle swinging so that the brass-bound butt smashed the man’s jaw. He kicked him aside, ripped the blade into another man, and saw the rampart was empty of opponents. Marines were kneeling in embras
ures to fire at the French conscripts. Captain Palmer, sword red with blood, was standing by the flagstaff that had somehow stood with its trophy of table-linen and uniform sleeves still flying.
‘God save Ireland.’ Harper, his huge chest heaving for breath, sat on a gunslide. His face, spattered with blood, looked up at Sharpe. ‘Jesus God.’
‘Close.’ Sharpe, breathing like a blown horse, glanced back to the gate, but no trouble threatened there. He looked at the strange musket in his hand and tossed it down. ‘God.’ The French were fleeing north through the dunes. ‘Hold your fire!’ Hold your fire!‘
A Rifleman threaded the dead bodies, stepping in blood, to bring Sharpe his sword.
‘Thank you.’ Sharpe took it. He wanted to smile, but his face seemed frozen in the grimace of fighting.
The fort had held. Blood trickled thick in the rampart’s gutters.
Briquet’s men, defeated, ran.
The larger attack, beaten to bloody ruin at the gate, was a shambles in retreat. If that attack had lasted five minutes longer, just five minutes, then the fort would have fallen. Sharpe knew that. He shuddered to think of it, then stared at the bloody, edge-nicked blade of his sword. ‘Jesus.’
Then the howitzer shells began to fall again.
CHAPTER 17
A man wept and could not be consoled. His right leg was gone at the thigh, taken by a howitzer shell. He wanted his mother, but he would die instead. The other wounded men, shivering in the foul tunnel that led to the makeshift surgery, wished he would stop his blathering. A Marine corporal, his shoulder mangled by a bayonet, read St John’s gospel aloud and men wished that he too would be silent.
Sharpe 3-Book Collection 6: Sharpe's Honour, Sharpe's Regiment, Sharpe's Siege Page 89