Feed the monster, he thought, that was grinding his army, his fine army, but the monster must be fed until it gave up. He could make up the shattered battalions, the reinforcements would come, but without Badajoz there was no victory. Damn the Engineers. There were miners in Britain, hundreds in Cornwall alone, but none with the army, no Corps of Sappers who could have tunnelled under the bastions, packed the cavern with powder, and blown the French to kingdom come. He found himself wondering whether he should have slaughtered the garrison at Ciudad Rodrigo, whether he could have lined them up in tens and shot them, then left the bodies to rot in the town ditch so that any Frenchmen who chose to contest another breach could only expect the terrible vengeance of the English. He could not have ordered it, any more than he would order it here if they won this night. If.
He turned irritably towards his aides. His face was long and harsh-shadowed in the torchlight cast from Lord March’s hand. ‘Any news of the Fifth?’
The answering voice was low, anxious not to add to the bad news. ‘They should be attacking now, my Lord, General Leith sends his apologies.’
‘God damn his apologies. Why can’t he be on time?’ His horse shied, struck by a spent musket bullet, and the General soothed it. He could expect nothing of the escalades. Leith was late and the garrison at San Vincente would be warned, while Picton was hoping for the moon if he thought he could lay his long ladders against the castle wall. Victory, he knew, would have to be carved here, at the south-east corner, where flame and smoke churned over the ghastly ditch. Distantly, like a reminder of another world echoing in the depths of hell, the Cathedral bell tolled eleven, and Wellington looked up into the blackness and then back at the flames. ‘One more hour, gentlemen, one more hour.’ And then what, he wondered? Failure? Hell was no place for miracles.
On the walls the French gunners slackened their fire. They had drowned the ditch in death and now they listened to the screams and moans that came from below. The attacks seemed to have stopped, so the gunners stretched, soaked their faces with water splashed from the buckets used to wet the sponges, and watched as fresh ammunition was brought up the ramp. They did not expect much more effort from the British. A few men had climbed the breaches, one was even impaled on the sabre blades, but it was a hopeless effort. Poor bastards! There was no joy any longer in shouting insults. A Sergeant, leather-skinned and hard, leaned on a gunwheel and flinched. ‘Christ! I wish they’d stop screaming.’
A few men had lit surreptitious cigars that they hid from their officers by leaning deep into the gun embrasures. One man wriggled forward, past the acrid muzzle, until he could peer down into the ditch. The Sergeant called wearily to him. ‘Come back! Those Rifle bastards will get you.’
The man stayed. He peered down, far down, at the writhing horror in the ditch. He pulled himself back. ‘If they get in they’ll bloody slaughter us!’
The Sergeant laughed. ‘They won’t get in, lad, not a chance. In two hours you’ll be tucked in bed with that horrid thing you call a woman.’
‘You’re jealous, Sergeant.’
‘Me? I’d rather go to bed with this.’ The Sergeant slapped the barrel of his gun. The wreathed ‘N’, Napoleon’s symbol, was searing hot. ‘Now get back here, lad, put that bloody cigar out, and look smart. I might need you, God help me.’
A call from the observation point. ‘Make ready!’
The Sergeant sighed and stood up. Another tiny group of idiot British were running towards the Santa Maria breach and his gun covered the approach. He watched them down the length of his glistening gun, saw them slip on blood, stumble on stone, and then they were in his target zone. He stood to one side, touched the match to the powder-filled reed, and the green-jacketed men were beaten into fragments. It was so easy. The Sergeant bellowed orders for the reloading, listened to the hiss as the sponge seared down the bore, and was glad that he was at Badajoz this night. The French had begun to fear this Lord Wellington, to turn him into a bogey man to frighten their sleep, and it was pleasing to show that the English Lord could be beaten. The Sergeant grinned as the bulbous lumps of canvas-wrapped grapeshot were rammed into the cannon. This night Wellington would taste defeat, utter defeat, and the whole Empire would rejoice. This night belonged to France, only to France, and Britain’s hopes were being buried where they belonged; in a ditch for the dead.
CHAPTER 26
‘This way! This way!’ They were going right, away from the San Pedro bastion, clawing a path on the hill’s steep side until they had turned a corner and would receive some shelter from the grapeshot. The first attack had been horribly repulsed, but the Third Division would try again. They could hear the fury at the main breach, far away, and see on the sheeted floodwaters the dim reflections of the fires that were consuming the Light and Fourth Divisions. Knowles could feel a madness in the air, beating its dark wings against a city, bringing a night of insane death and crazy effort. ‘Light Company! Light Company!’
‘Here, sir.’ An old Sergeant, steadying his Captain with a hand, and then a Lieutenant leading a dozen men. My God, Knowles thought, is this all that is left? But then he saw more men, tugging the cumbersome ladder. Another Sergeant grinned at him. ‘Do we go again, sir?’
‘Wait for the bugle.’ He knew there was no point in making a scattered attack that could be picked off piecemeal by the defenders. The whole Division must go together.
Knowles suddenly felt good. There was an impression in his head, one that had been nagging him, and now he pinned it down. The musket fire had been light from the parapet. The grapeshot had confused him, but now, thinking back to the chaos of the first attack, the shattering ladder, he remembered how few had been the musket flashes from the walls. The French must have left a skeleton garrison in the castle, and a confidence surged through him! They would do it. He grinned at his men, slapped their backs, and they were glad that he was confident. He was trying to think how Sharpe would do this. The danger was not the muskets, the danger was from the defenders toppling the long, rickety ladders. He ordered off a dozen men, under the Lieutenant, and told them they were not to try and climb the ladder. Instead they were to fire at the ladder’s head, scour the parapet of its defenders, and only when the parapet was clear and he had led the men over the battlements were they to follow. ‘Understand?’
They grinned and nodded, and he grinned back and drew the curved sabre from its scabbard.
The Sergeant laughed. ‘I thought you were going to forget it again, sir.’ The men laughed at him and he was glad of the darkness to cover his blush, but they were good men, his men, and he suddenly understood, as never before, the sense of loss that Sharpe had suffered. Knowles wondered how he was to climb the ladder and hold the sword, and knew he would have to put the blade between his teeth. He would drop it! He was nervous, but then, instead of bugles, there were shouts and the trampling of feet and the moment had come.
The survivors of the Third Division erupted from the darkness. The carcasses flowed down, and the cannon in the small castle bastion shredded the attack, but they were screaming defiance and the ladders swayed in the ungainly curves until they slammed against the castle wall.
‘Up!’ He jammed the blade between his teeth and gripped the rungs. Musket balls came down and then he heard his own guns firing, the Lieutenant calling the orders, and he was climbing. The great, irregular granite blocks were going past his face, and he scrambled up, the fear a living thing beside him, and he concentrated on keeping the sabre between his teeth. His jaw ached. It was such a stupid thing to worry about because he was nearing the top and he wanted to laugh and he was afraid, so afraid, because the enemy would be waiting, and he felt his knuckles graze against the granite as the slope of the ladder took him close to the wall. He took the sabre from his mouth.
‘Stop firing!’ The Lieutenant stared up and held his breath.
Knowles had to use his fist, wrapped round the sabre handle, as a prop to help him up the last rungs. It was easier than climbing with th
e blade in his teeth. He suddenly felt foolish, as if someone might have laughed at him for climbing a ladder with a sabre in his mouth, and he wondered why the mind chose such irrelevant and stupid thoughts at such a moment. He could hear the guns, the screams, the crash of another ladder, and the man behind pushed at him, and the top was there! This was the moment of death and his fear harrowed him, but he pushed over the top and saw the bayonet come sawing towards him. He leaned to one side, tottering on the ladder, and swung his right arm for balance and, to his surprise, saw the sabre at the end of the arm cleave down into the enemy’s head. A hand pushed him from behind, his feet were still pedalling at the rungs, but he had run out of ladder! He was falling forward on to the body of the dead man, and another enemy was coming, so he rolled and twisted and knew he was there. He was on the ramparts! There was a keening in his throat, that he did not hear, a sound of insensate fear, and he thrust up with the sabre, into the man’s groin, and the scream winged into the night and the blood pulsed on to Knowles’s wrist, and the second man was with him.
They had done it! They had done it! The men were coming up the ladder, and he was filled with a joy that he did not know existed. He was on his feet, his blade bloodied to the hilt, and the enemy were running towards them, muskets outstretched, but the fear was conquered. There was something odd about the Frenchmen’s uniforms. They were not blue and white. Knowles had a glimpse of red turnbacks and yellow facings, but then he was jumping forward, remembering that Sharpe always attacked, and the sabre twisted a bayonet aside, flicked up, and he had the man in the throat. ‘Light Company! To me! Light Company!’
A musket volley shattered along the parapet, but he was still alive and more of his men were joining him. He heard the enemy shouting orders. German! These were Germans! If they were half as good as the more numerous Germans who fought for Wellington, but he would not feel fear, only victory. He led his men down the wall, bayonets out. The enemy were few and outnumbered, and every yard of wall that Knowles’s men cleared was another yard where ladders could safely be climbed and the castle parapet filled with the red uniforms.
The Germans died hard. They defended each casement, each stairway, but they stood no chance. The castle had been denuded of troops, only a thin battalion left, but that battalion fought grimly. Each minute that they saved on the battlements was another minute for the central reserves to reach the castle, so they fought on, despising the odds, and screamed as they fell from the parapets, chopped down by the redcoats, and fought till the wall was lost.
Knowles felt the joy of it. They had won the unbelievable victory. They had climbed a rock hill and a castle and they had won! He pounded his men on their backs, hugged them, laughed with them, forgave them all their crimes, because they had done it. It did not matter that the vast castle buildings would still have to be cleared, the dark, treacherous courtyards, because no one now could take this battlement from them. The British had won the city’s highest point and from here they could fight downhill, into the streets, down to the main breach, and Knowles knew he would reach Teresa first and he would see, some time in the night, the gratitude on Sharpe’s face. He had done it. They had done it. And for the first time that night, it was British cheers that startled the air in Badajoz.
The cheers could not be heard at the breaches. The castle was a long journey away, at least a mile’s ride by the time a horseman had circled the floodwaters, and it would be minutes yet before the messenger would be despatched. Picton waited. He had heard the bell strike eleven as he saw his first, magnificent men cross the parapet, and he waited, listening to the sounds of battle, to know if they had won or were being chopped to pieces in the castle yards. He heard the cheers, stood up in his stirrups and roared his own, then turned to an aide-de-camp. ‘Ride, man, ride!’ He turned to another staff officer and clapped the man mightily on the back. ‘We’ve proved him wrong! Damn his eyes! We did it!’ He chuckled, anticipating Wellington’s reaction when the news arrived at midnight.
Anger would take a man through a breach, sheer passion, but a small idea helped. It was not much of an idea, hopeless even, deserving the name Forlorn, but it was all Sharpe had, and so he stared at the ravelin that stretched so invitingly towards the third, unsullied breach. There was no point in trying to outrace the grapeshot across its flat, diamond surface. Any man who tried was flicked hopelessly away, contemptuous meat to the gunners’ fire. Yet the third breach was the newest, and the French had been given small time to entrap it, and Sharpe could see, through the sifting smoke, that the Chevaux de Frise on the new breach’s summit was too short. There was a gap at the right hand side, a gap three men could pass abreast, and the only problem was reaching the gap. There was no approach in the ditch. The fires still seethed, white hot and violent, and the only path was across the ravelin. They must climb the ravelin, brave the top, and jump into the ditch, and it must be done at the ravelin’s edge, close to the flames, where the diamond shape narrowed and the fatal journey was short.
He had no right to take the Company on the journey. This was a Forlorn Hope, born of despair and nurtured by pride, and it belonged to the volunteer, to the foolish. He knew he did not have to go himself, but he wanted no dead man’s shoes. He had waited, letting the violence of the last attack spend itself in the ditch, and there was now a kind of truce before the breaches. As long as the British stayed quiet, harmless behind the ravelin, the gunners let them be. Only when men came into the firelight, towards the breaches, did the muzzles spout flame and the grapeshot crease the ditch floor. Back in the darkness, down the glacis, Sharpe could hear orders being called. Another attack was coming, the last reserves of the Division being fed into the ditch, and that was the moment, the hopeless moment, when the feeble idea, based only on the narrowing width of the ravelin, must be tried. He turned to his men and drew the sword, the blade a great streak in the night, and the steel hissed as he swung it to the point at the firelight.
‘I’m going there. There is one more attack, just one, and then it’s all over. No one’s touched that central breach, and that’s where I’m going. Over the ravelin, down into the ditch, and I’ll probably break my bloody legs because there are no ladders or hay-bags, but that’s where I’m going.’ The faces were pale, staring at him as they squatted on the slope. ‘I’m going because the French are laughing at us, because they think they’ve beaten us, and I’m going to hammer those bastards into pulp for thinking that.’ He had not known how much anger there was inside him. He was not a speechmaker, never had been, but the anger gave him words. ‘I’m going to make those bastards wish they had never been born. They are going to die, and I can’t ask you to come with me, because you don’t have to come, but I’m going, and you can stay here and I won’t blame you.’ He stopped, out of words, unsure even of what he had said. The fires crackled behind him.
Patrick Harper stood up, stretched his huge arms and in one of them, catching the fires of death, was a vast axe, one of the many that had been issued to cut at the obstacles in the ditch. He stepped forward, over the dead, and turned to look at the Company. In the flamelight, hard by the terrible ditch, Patrick Harper was like a warrior sprung from a forgotten age. He grinned at the Company. ‘Are you coming?’
There was nothing to make them go. Too often Sharpe had asked the impossible of them, and they had always given, but never in this horror, never like this, but they stood up, the pimps and the thieves, murderers and drunks, and they grinned at Sharpe and looked to their weapons. Harper looked down on his Captain. ‘It was a fine speech, sir, but mine was better. Would you be giving me that?’ He pointed to the seven-barrelled gun.
Sharpe nodded, handed it over. ‘It’s loaded.’
Daniel Hagman, the poacher, took Sharpe’s rifle. No man was a better shot. Lieutenant Price, nervously flexing his sabre, grinned at Sharpe. ‘I think I’m mad, sir.’
‘You can stay.’
‘And let you get to the women first? I’ll come.’
Roach and Peters,
Jenkins and Clayton, Cresacre the wife-beater, all were there, and all felt the nervous exhilaration. This was a place fit to go mad in. Sharpe looked at them, counted them, loved them. ‘Where’s Hakeswill?’
‘Buggered off, sir. Haven’t seen him.’ Peters, a huge man, spat on the glacis.
Below them the last battalion was climbing the slope, almost within the firelight, and Sharpe knew that the Company must attack at the same time. ‘Ready?’
‘Sir.’
A mile’s ride away, unknown to the rest of the army, the Third Division was clearing the last of the castle yards. It had taken nearly an hour’s hard fighting against the Germans and against the French who had pounded up from the central reserve in the Cathedral square. A mile in the other direction, equally unknown, Leith’s Fifth Division had stormed the San Vincente. The ladders had split apart, the wood green, and the men had fallen into a spiked ditch, but other ladders were brought up, the muskets smashed at the battlements, and they had won a second impossible victory. Badajoz had fallen. The Fifth Division were in the city’s streets, the Third possessed the castle, but the men in the ditch and on the dark glacis had no way of knowing. The news travelled faster inside the city. Rumours of defeat raced like a plague through the narrow streets, up on to the Santa Maria and Trinidad bastions and the defenders looked fearfully behind them. The city was dark, the castle silhouette unchanged, and they shrugged and told each other it could not be true. But what if it was? Fear batted at them with grim wings.
Sharpe 3-Book Collection 5: Sharpe's Company, Sharpe's Sword, Sharpe's Enemy Page 24