The Marines who had volunteered as surgeons wore clothes that were soaked in blood. They cut, tied and sawed, helped by lightly wounded men who held the badly wounded down while legs or arms were crudely butchered off and arteries tied and raw flesh cauterized with fire because they did not know if all the blood vessels were safely blocked.
The French wounded, under the angry rain of howitzer shells, were carried to the gate, across the crude bridge of fascines, and left on the roadway among their dead colleagues. Ten Marines, protected by ten Riflemen, moved among the carnage beyond the gate and collected enemy ammunition. The French artillery colonel, seeing his own wounded countrymen brought outside the fort, wanted to cease fire, but Calvet snarled at the gunners to continue. The twelve-pounders, loaded with heavy canister, tried to flick the ammunition collectors away, but the Marines dodged among the bodies and hurled the enemy pouches back to the archway. Only when they had retreated did General Calvet order his guns to cease their fire so that Frenchmen, armed with white flags, could go forward and rescue the injured.
Within the fort a dozen unwounded French prisoners were herded down to the liquor store to join Captain Mayeron. Twenty dead Frenchmen were inside the ramparts. One of them, lying in the embers of the burned buildings, suddenly flipped in the air as the ammunition in his pouch exploded. There was a smell of roast meat to mingle with the stench of blood and powder. Men who saw the sudden jerk and flip of the body laughed because, they said, it was just like a frog. It was better to laugh than to weep.
‘I’m sorry, sir,’ Palmer said again.
Sharpe shook his head. ‘We got rid of them.’
‘I should have been watching.’ Palmer was determined to expose his blame.
‘Yes, you should.’ Sharpe had used a bucket of well-water to clean his sword. Marines and Riflemen pissed into weapons, blocked the muzzles, and sloshed the urine around to scour the powder deposits from the barrels.
No one spoke much. Most men, their weapons cleaned, just sat by the embrasures and stared into empty air. Buckets of drinking water were carried to the walls while smoke drifted from the smouldering fires in the courtyard. The fort was a place of ruin, blood, smoke, ash, and exhaustion, as if the defenders had suffered a defeat instead of winning a victory.
‘If they’d got on to the northern wall,’ Sharpe said to Palmer, ‘we’d be surrendering our swords by now. You did well to stop them.’ Sharpe rammed his sword home. He could not remember a fight so bitter or so close, not even at Badajoz. There the horror had been the cannons on the walls, not the infantrymen behind them. ‘And your Marines,’ Sharpe said, ‘fought magnificently.’
‘Thank you, sir.’ Palmer nodded at Sharpe’s chest. ‘That must have hurt.’
Sharpe looked down. The small holstered whistle, mounted on his leather crossbelt, was dented flat in its centre. He remembered the bang of the French musket and knew that had the ball been aimed a fraction either way it would have pierced his heart. The fight was a blur now, but later the individual moments would come to his half-waking dreams as nightmares. The memory of the moment when the French had driven him to the ground, the memory of the bullet thumping his chest, the sheer fear of that first glimpse of blue-uniformed men on his walls; those were the incidents that made a man shudder with delayed terror. Sharpe never recalled the moments of triumph after a battle, only those moments of near defeat.
Harper, a scrap of dirty paper in one hand, climbed the stone ramp. ‘Seventeen dead, sir. Including Lieutenant Fytch.’
Sharpe grimaced. ‘I thought he’d live.’
‘Difficult with a bullet in your bellows.’
‘Yes.’ Poor Fytch, who was so very proud, Sharpe remembered, of his pistol. ‘Wounded?’
‘At least thirty are bad, sir.’ Harper’s voice was bleak.
A howitzer shell landed in the courtyard, bounced, and exploded. The shells seemed like small things after the fight. If the French had any sense, Sharpe thought, they would assault now. They should have men clawing and screaming at the walls, but perhaps the French were as shaken as he was.
Rifleman Taylor came up from the courtyard and spat tobacco juice over the ramparts. He jerked a thumb towards Harper’s cannon. ‘It’s buggered.’
‘Buggered?’ Sharpe asked.
‘Snapped a capsquare.’ The field-gun’s left trunnion had leaped out of its socket and broken the metal strap that should have held it in place. Doubtless Bampfylde’s fire had weakened the capsquare and now the twelve-pounder was as good as useless. Sharpe looked at Harper. ‘See what you can do, Patrick.’
‘I can give wine to the lads?’ Harper suggested bleakly.
‘Do that.’ Sharpe walked around the ramparts. French dead, stripped of their equipment, were being heaved on to the sand by the channel. If any of his men had shown the energy Sharpe would have ordered shallow graves dug, but even their own dead lay unburied. Two Marines, their faces still masked with powder, wearily hauled an abandoned French ladder through an embrasure and carried it down to the gate where it would be added to the new barricade.
Sharpe threaded the south-west citadel, wondering how he had ever come through it at the full charge. The French gunners, advised that the wounded had been cleared from the fort’s apron, opened fire again. The jets of flame stabbed from the watermill and the twelve-pound shots crashed into the wall to fray the defenders’ already shredded nerves. Sharpe found Frederickson. ‘Thank you, William.’
‘For doing my duty?’ Sweat had trickled through the powder on Frederickson’s face to make odd brown rivulets on his sun-baked skin.
‘I’m leaving you in command,’ Sharpe said, ‘while I go to see the wounded.’
‘I’d have that attended to.’ Frederickson gestured at Sharpe’s left thigh where the blood started by a French bayonet had crusted on to the overalls.
‘It doesn’t hurt.’ Sharpe raised his voice so that every man about the gate could hear him. ‘Well done!’ Two Marines, carrying a body, grinned at him. The body, Sharpe saw, was young Moore, the boy from Devon, who had been shot in the forehead and who must have died instantly.
Sharpe felt a thickening in his throat and the prick of tears at his eyes, but he swore instead. Moore was luckier than the wounded who, in the foul stone gallery, waited for the surgeon’s butchery. Sharpe went to give small, bleak comfort to men who were beyond consolation and whose future was nothing but pain and poverty.
The shells still fell, the blood stank, and Sharpe’s men waited for the next assault.
The remnants of Captain Briquet’s force returned to the village. Their faces were bleak, exhausted and bloodied. A wounded man, using his musket as a crutch, collapsed on the sand. A drummer boy, who had survived the attack on the main gate and who was not yet twelve years old, wept because his father, a sergeant, had died with Captain Briquet on the fort’s western wall. The survivors of Briquet’s force told stories of blades and blood, of faces screaming hatred, of a Rifleman swinging an axe, of a cannon blasting men into bloody scraps on the ramp, of soldiers gouging and cutting and dying.
Surgeons used sea-water to wash lime from the eyes of defeated men. No man had been blinded; for reflex had made attackers close their stinging eyes and stumble away from the white cloud, but the use of the quicklime infuriated General Calvet. ‘They’re savages! Savages! Worse than the Russians!’
The senior French officers were gathered in the hovel that was Calvet’s command post. They stared at the map, avoiding each other’s eyes, and were glad when Calvet, seeking a target for his anger, chose Pierre Ducos.
‘Tell me,’ Calvet said to Ducos, ‘exactly why men died today?’
‘They died,’ Ducos was quite unmoved by the general’s fury, ‘for a victory that France needs.’
‘Victory over what?’ Calvet asked scathingly. ‘A huddle of goddamn refugees who use quicklime?’ He stared belligerently at Ducos. ‘We agree their plans for a landing are foiled, so why don’t I let this Sharpe moulder behind his walls?’ N
o one in the room thought it odd that a general should seek permission from a major, not when the major was Pierre Ducos with his odd power over the Emperor’s affections.
‘Because,’ Ducos said, ‘if Sharpe escapes, he will take evidence with him that would betray the Comte de Maquerre.’
‘Then warn de Maquerre!’ Calvet snapped. ‘Why should men die here for lack of a letter?’ Ducos did not reply, implying that Calvet trespassed on forbidden territory. The general banged a big, splayed hand on the map in a gesture of irritated frustration. ‘We should be down south, thumping Wellington, not pissing about with a bloody major! I’ll leave a Battalion here to pen the bugger in, then we can go south where we’re needed.’
Pierre Ducos smiled thinly. The general spoke good military sense, but Pierre Ducos wanted Richard Sharpe in his power, and thus Ducos now played his final, winning card. ‘Can you suggest, General, the manner in which I explain to the Emperor how a British major, with less than two hundred men, defeated the great Calvet?’
Those icy words stung. For a moment it seemed as if Ducos had said too much, but then Calvet gave a shrug of surrender. ‘I hope you’re right, Ducos. I hope the goddamns aren’t pouring men ashore at the Adour while we’re pissing about.’ He growled with impotent menace, then slapped a hand on the map. ‘So if it must be done,’ Calvet said, ‘then how do we prise this bastard out from his walls? I need a breach!’
‘You can have one, sir.’ To everyone’s surprise it was Commandant Lassan, returned safely from the failed northern attack, who spoke, and who now told Calvet that he had written no less than twelve times in the last eight years to the Minister of Marine, responsible for the coastal forts, complaining that the Teste de Buch’s main gateway was in danger of collapse. The stones had shifted so much that the gate pintles were a full inch out of true, and cracks had appeared in the guardroom walls. The Ministry, after the fashion of government departments, had done nothing. ‘The whole gateway can be collapsed,’ Lassan said.
General Calvet believed him. He ordered the twelve-pounders to concentrate their fire on the archway; artillery fire to make an avalanche of stone that would spill into the ditch and provide a slope up which attackers could scramble. ‘That’s where our main attack goes in the morning.’ Calvet took a lump of charcoal and scrawled a thick arrow on the fortress plan. The arrow pointed at the gateway. ‘I shall lead that attack,’ Calvet growled, ‘while you,’ he gestured at an infantry colonel, ‘will make a demonstration here.’ He scored another arrow that aimed itself at the northern wall. ‘That’ll split their defenders.’ Calvet stared at his broad arrow and imagined the archway tumbling its stones into the ditch to make a bridge; he saw his men flooding over that barricade and taking their bayonets to this so-called ‘élite’ of Riflemen and Marines. ’We’ll parade the prisoners through Bordeaux to show what happens to scum who think they can defy France.‘
‘I insist,’ Ducos said, ‘that Major Sharpe is handed over to my department.’
‘You can have the bastard.’ Calvet looked back at the map and, with a sudden gesture, extended the larger arrow straight into the courtyard. ‘Tell the men that the enemy is low on ammunition. Tell them we killed half the bastards today, tell them there’s women and wine inside. Tell them there’s a medal each for the first ten men inside.’ Calvet looked at his scribbled arrow and remembered the sheer volume of fire that the goddamns had poured into his column. He remembered men screaming, clawing at their eyes, and he remembered the trails of blood across the fort’s esplanade.
His men would remember just as clearly, and defeated men would be nervous about a renewed attack. Calvet needed something else, some new factor to change the second assault, and, with sudden energy, he scribbled marks in the sand-dunes by the channel. ‘If we put two twelves there,’ he asked the artillery colonel, ‘they can rake the breach till the last minute?’
The artillery colonel was already doubtful of his guns’ ability to bring down an archway in just a few hours. Even huge siege guns, twice the size of his twelve-pounders, could take weeks to shatter a well-built rampart, and now Calvet wanted to take two of the guns away from the breaching battery. ‘And even if I moved two guns, sir, how do we protect the crews from the Riflemen?’ Calvet wanted the two guns placed within two hundred yards of the ramparts.
Calvet grunted an acknowledgement. The closest howitzer fired, thumping the hovel with a punch of sound and air, and the beat of the great gun’s firing jarred a scrap of reed from the thatched roof. It fell on to Calvet’s map, landing on the channel. ‘If I had a ship there,’ Calvet mused aloud, ‘it would win the day. But I don’t have a ship, so your two gun-crews will have to take their dead and keep firing.’ He stared belligerently at the artilleryman.
‘But you can have a ship.’ Ducos spoke softly from his place beside the fire.
Calvet swung round to face the small major. ‘A ship?’
‘There is an American,’ Ducos said, ‘and he has a ship.’
‘Then fetch him!’ Calvet crossed out his new gun positions and drew the outline of a ship around the fleck of straw. ‘Fetch him, Ducos! And tell our ally he has to fight! Fetch him!’
Killick, summoned from Gujan, leaned over the General’s map table. He saw that Calvet wanted the southern wall bombarded. A ship, moored off the fort’s south-western angle, could fire till the very final second of an assault, long after the twelve-pounders in the mill would have been forced into silence for fear of hitting their own attacking column. The Thuella’s gunfire, coming at right-angles to the line of attack and aimed at the breach, would force the defenders away from that vulnerable point. Such a floating battery, Killick saw, would be a guarantee of victory to demoralized men. The American nodded. ‘It could be done.’
‘At dawn?’ Calvet asked.
Killick drew on his cigar. ‘It could be done, but not by me. I have taken an oath not to fight against the British.’ There was silence, except for the sudden percussion of an howitzer that shook more dust free from the roof. Killick shrugged. ‘I’m sorry, gentlemen.’
‘An oath?’ Ducos’ voice was sharp with scorn.
‘An oath,’ Killick repeated. ‘Major Sharpe spared my life in return for that oath,’ the American grinned, ‘and as the promise wasn’t made to a lady, it has to be honoured.’
Killick’s levity stung Ducos. ‘One does not keep oaths to savages. You, of all people, should know that.’
‘Is that why you didn’t send me the copper sheeting?’ Killick stared with dislike at Ducos. ‘Don’t lecture me, Major, about keeping promises.’
The copper sheeting had never come, but the schooner had been patched with coffin-elm and smeared with pitch. The job had been done faster than Cornelius Killick had dared hope.
The topmasts had been swayed up on tackles and lashed into place. Tangled shrouds had been sorted, cleated, and winched home. The Thuella, that had given the appearance of a dead and burning ship, lived again.
That very morning, as Frenchmen died in a fort’s gateway, anchors had been laid in the Gujan channel and, at high tide, the windlasses had hauled the empty hull off the mud. The Thuella had slipped into the water. In just a few seconds, an ungainly and grounded hulk had become a slender craft shivering to the touch of wind and waves. Her figurehead had been bolted into place. Meat and water and flour and bread and wine and biscuit and onions and more wine were taken aboard. The carpenter had sounded the bilges and, though some water was leaking through the repaired hull, he had declared the pumps could take care of the seepage.
‘So, yes,’ Killick now said, ‘the Thuella can be moored in the channel tomorrow morning, General, but it can’t fire a shot. I’ve taken an oath.’
Calvet, eager to harness the Thuella’s firepower, smiled. ‘Major Sharpe forfeited all honour, Captain Killick, when he chose to use quicklime against my troops. You may therefore consider yourself released from any undertakings of honour made with him.’
Killick, who had already expressed profo
und disgust at the use of quicklime, now shook his head. ‘I think I’m the best judge of my own honour, General.’
‘You are a civilian,’ Pierre Ducos, despite his small size, was endowed with a voice of unusual authority, ‘and by your own account, Mr Killick, you have trafficked with the enemy. I presume you do not wish to undergo a long period of questioning at the hands of French authorities?’ Killick said nothing. The other French officers, even Calvet, were made uneasy by the threat, while Ducos, sensing that he had an advantage over the tall, handsome American, smiled. ‘If Mr Killick does not offer some satisfactory explanation of his actions on French soil then I will use my authority to seek such an explanation.’
‘My explanation ...’ Killick began.
Ducos interrupted him. ‘Your explanations are best given with grapeshot at dawn. Do I have your oath, Mr Killick, that you will be there? Or must I investigate you?’
The American’s quick temper flared. ‘I was captured, you little bastard, because I volunteered to defend your bloody fort.’
‘And you lost not a man killed,’ Ducos said chillingly, ‘and you were released within hours. I think those circumstances deserve investigation.’
Killick looked to Calvet, but saw that the French general was powerless to countermand the thin, bespectacled major. The American shrugged. ‘I cannot be there at dawn.’
‘Then I will order your arrest,’ Ducos said.
‘I can’t be there at dawn, you bastard,’ Killick growled, ‘because the tide won’t serve. I’ve got twenty miles of shallow water to negotiate. Unless you can threaten God into a premature high-tide?’ He stared defiance at Ducos, then looked at the map. ‘One hour after dawn. No sooner.’
‘But one hour after dawn,’ Ducos was relentless in victory, ‘you will be moored off the fortress and bombarding the walls with grapeshot?’ He had seen a flicker of hope on Killick’s face, and knew the American was thinking that, once on board his ship, Pierre Ducos would be powerless to impose his will. ‘I want your promise, Mr Killick, your oath.’ Ducos had seized a piece of paper and, using the general’s charcoal, scrawled big letters that formed a confession that Killick had unlawfully entered into a treaty with the enemy, and a promise that, as recompense, the Thuella would bombard the fortress until surrender or victory ended the morning’s engagement. He thrust the paper forward. ‘Well?’
Sharpe 3-Book Collection 6: Sharpe's Honour, Sharpe's Regiment, Sharpe's Siege Page 90