‘Make ready!’
By God! Another attack. The defenders turned from the city and looked over the walls. There, from the darkness, from the corpse-littered slope, another attack surged towards the ditch. More meat for the guns, and the fire flashed down the priming tubes, the smoke crashed out, and the mincer turned on.
Sharpe waited for the first gun, heard it, and started running. To Badajoz.
CHAPTER 27
The heights of the wall disappeared in smoke, the flames lancing through, and he jumped, the sword high, and the men in the ditch screamed at them. ‘Down! Down!’
He had not counted on this. The ditch was crammed with the living, the dying, and the dead, and the living clawed at him. ‘Get down! They’ll kill us.’
He had sprawled down on bodies, but he scrambled up and heard his men thumping around him. There were small fortresses in the ditch, piled corpses, that soaked the grapeshot and sheltered men who themselves crouched on other corpses.
The bullets flickered into the ravelin’s shadow, and the wounded pulled at him, and Sharpe swung the sword ahead of him, clearing a path. He screamed at them, ‘Out the way!’ The dead could not move, and he was wading in bodies, slipping on blood, and to his right, by the Trinidad, the gunners were shredding the last attack.
Hands clutched at Sharpe, tried to pull him down, and out of the darkness a bayonet was thrown at him. Behind him Harper was shouting, in his own tongue, rousing the Irish. A man reared up in front of Sharpe, clawed at him, and Sharpe hammered down with the sword hilt. Ahead was the ravelin’s sloping face with the light bright above it and the guns were waiting. Sharpe felt the temptation to sink into the rank stench in the ditch and let the night hide him. He swung the sword again, using the flat, and a man fell, and Sharpe’s feet were on the slope and he climbed, not wanting to, fearing the oblivion, his body cringing from the death that ravaged the ravelin’s top. He stopped.
There was a new sound in the ditch, a sound so mad that he had turned, the sword bright in his hand, and he looked unbelievingly behind him. The survivors of the South Essex, their yellow facings smeared with blood, were struggling towards him. They had seen their Light Company carve a path to the ravelin, and now they wanted to join the madness, but it was their voices that had stopped Sharpe.
‘Sharpe! Sharpe! Sharpe!’ They chanted it senselessly, a war cry, and men who did not know what it meant picked up the sound, and the ditch stirred, and the shout bellied into the night. ‘Sharpe! Sharpe! Sharpe!’
‘What are they saying, March?’
‘It sounds like “sharp”, my Lord.’
The General laughed because moments before he had wished for one thousand Sharpes, and now, perhaps, that rogue was giving him the city. His aides-de-camp, hearing the grim tone of the laughter, did not understand and did not like to ask.
The gunners, high on the wall, heard the chant and did not understand. They were massacring the newest attack on the Trinidad, hurling it back as they had hurled the others back, but then they saw the ravelin’s top dark with men, and the men were shouting, and the whole ditch was moving that they had thought filled with corpses, and the corpses had come to life and were coming to them, for their revenge, and the dead were shouting. ‘Sharpe! Sharpe! Sharpe!’
The madness was on Sharpe, the glory of it, the song of battle shrieking in his ears, so he did not hear the gunfire, or feel the blast of the shot, or know that, behind him, crossing the diamond, the men were falling, and the guns were tangling the air with death. He jumped. He had crossed the ravelin, running, the heat of the fire close on his right side, and the drop was huge. The new ditch was strangely empty, and he jumped, seeing a stone leap from a musket strike. The jump winded him, pitched him forward, but he was up and running.
‘Sharpe! Sharpe! Sharpe!’
I will die here, he thought, in this empty ditch with the strange white bundles that stirred in the small breeze. He remembered the wool-padding that had protected the two breaches and wondered at a mind that could notice such irrelevant things at the point of a death.
‘Sharpe! Sharpe! Sharpe!’
I will die here, he thought, just at the foot of the slope, and then he hated the bastards who would kill him and the anger drove him up, slipping on the rubble, unable to fight, only to climb, to carry the sword to the French flesh. There were men around him, screaming unintelligibly, and the air was thick with smoke, grapeshot, and flame. Harper was passing him, the huge axe held easily, and Sharpe, refusing to be second, drove his legs towards the dark sky beyond the row of shining blades.
‘Sharpe! Sharpe! Sharpe!’
Private Cresacre was dying, his guts strung blue on his lap, his tears for himself and for his wife, who he would suddenly miss though he had beat her cruelly. And Sergeant Read, the Methodist, the quiet man who never swore, or drank, was blind, and could not cry because the guns had taken his eyes. And past them, mad with lust, a battle madness, went the dark horde who followed Sharpe and tore their hands on the rough stone, going up the slope, up, where they had never dreamed to go, and some went back, torn by the guns, piling the new ditch as the other was piled, but the fine madness was on them.
‘Sharpe! Sharpe! Sharpe!’
You save your breath for climbing, but shouting dulls the fear, and who needs breath when death waits at the summit? A bullet clanged on Sharpe’s sword, jerking it in his hand, but it was whole, and the blades were near. He went to the right, his whole brain singing with the scream of death, and a stone moved beneath his left hand, throwing him, and a huge hand pushed at him, heaved him, and Sharpe grabbed at the thick chain that anchored the Chevaux de Frise. The top, death’s peak.
‘Sharpe! Sharpe! Sharpe!’
The French fired once more, the guns slamming backwards, and the new breach was taken, two vast men standing at its crest, untouched by fire, and the French ran with nowhere to run, and Harper screamed at the sky because he had done a great thing.
Sharpe leaped, downhill, into the city, and the sword was a live thing in his hand. A breach was taken, death cheated, and death wanted a payment. The sword chopped down on the blue uniforms, and he did not see men, just enemy, and he ran, slipping, falling, down the breach until the ground was firm beneath him and he was inside. Inside! Badajoz. And he snarled at the bastards, killed them, found a gun crew cowering by a wall and remembered the song of death, the leaping flames. The sword hacked at them, cut them, chopped them, and an axe was whirled at them, and the French abandoned the new, low wall behind the breaches, because the night was lost.
A dark tide flowed over the breach, over the other breaches, a tide that made now no coherent sound. It was terrifying in its incoherence, the sound of the banshee, the keening of too much sorrow, too much death, and the madness turned to insensate rage, and they killed. They killed till their arms were tired, till they were soaked with blood, and there were not enough men to kill and they turned into the streets, a scrabbling, dark flood, up into Badajoz.
Harper leaped the wall built behind the breaches. A man cowered there, pleading, but the axe dropped and Harper’s lips were drawn back around his teeth and he was sobbing an anger at the city. There were more men ahead, blue-uniformed, and he ran at them, the axe circling, and Sharpe was there, and they killed because so many were dead, so much blood, an army had nearly died, and these were the bastards who had jeered at it. Blood and more blood. An account to be balanced with a ditch full of blood. Badajoz.
Sharpe was crying. Venting an anger that had waited for this moment. He stood, the sword dark red, and he wanted more Frenchmen to come to his sword, and he stalked them, teeth bared, screaming at the night, and a body moved, a blue arm lifted, and the blade whirled, bit, was lifted again, and bit down once more, clean to the pavement.
A Frenchman, a mathematician conscripted as an artillery officer, who had counted forty separate attacks on the Trinidad and had repulsed them all, stood quiet in the shadows. He was still, quite still, waiting for this madness to pas
s, this blood lust, and he thought of his fiancée, far away, and prayed she would never see anything as horrid. He watched the Rifle officer and prayed for himself that he would not be seen, but the face turned, the eyes hard-bright with tears, and the mathematician called out. ‘No! Monsieur, no!’ The sword took him, disembowelled him as Cresacre had been disembowelled, and Sharpe sobbed in rage as he ripped again and again, thrusting down at the gunner, ripping him, mutilating the bastard, and then the giant hands gripped him. ‘Sir!’ Harper shook him. ‘Sir!’
‘Christ!’
‘Sir!’ The hands pulled on Sharpe’s shoulders, turning him.
‘Christ.’
‘Sir!’ Harper slapped him. ‘Sir.’
Sharpe leaned back against the wall, his head back, touching the stone. ‘Oh Jesus. Oh God.’ He was panting, the sword arm limp, and the pavement ahead was shredded with blood. He looked down at the artillery officer, torn into a grotesque death. ‘Oh God. He was surrendering.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’ Harper had recovered first, the axe shattered in a killing strike, and he had watched in awe as Sharpe had killed. Now he quieted Sharpe, soothed him, and watched the sense come back even as the madness climbed up the city streets.
Sharpe looked up, calm now, his voice bereft of all feeling. ‘We did it.’
‘Yes.’
Sharpe leaned his head back again, on to the wall, and his eyes closed. It was done, the breach. And to do it he had discovered that a man must banish fear as never before, and with that fear must go all other emotion except rage and anger; humanity must go, feeling, all must go except rage. Only that would conquer the unconquerable.
‘Sir?’ Harper plucked at Sharpe’s elbow. No one else could have done this, Harper thought, no one but Sharpe could have led men past death’s peak.
‘Sir?’
The eyes opened, the face came down, and Sharpe stared at the bodies. He had slaked his pride, carried it through a breach, and it was done. He looked at Patrick Harper. ‘I wish I could play the flute.’
‘Sir?’
‘Patrick?’
‘Teresa, sir. Teresa.’
God in heaven. Teresa.
CHAPTER 28
Hakeswill had not meant to go into the ditch, but, as soon as the South Essex made their attack and had left the Light Company to give covering fire from the glacis lip, he had seen that there was greater safety for him in the shadow of the ravelin. No chance, there, of an axe-blow in the dark from Harper, and so he had swung himself down a ladder, snarling at the frightened men, and then, in the chaos, had burrowed deep into the bodies in the shadowed ditch. He saw the attack go in, saw it fail, and he watched as Windham and Forrest tried to rouse other attacks, but Sergeant Hakeswill was snug and safe. Three bodies covered him, still warm in death, and he felt them shudder from time to time as the grape fragments struck home, but he was safe. At some time in the night a Lieutenant, a stranger to Hakeswill, tried to provoke him from his lair, screaming at the Sergeant to move and attack, but it was simple to grip the Lieutenant’s ankle, trip him, and the bayonet slid so easily between the ribs and Hakeswill had a fourth body, surprise on its face, and he cackled as he slid expert hands over the pockets and pouches and counted his loot. Four gold coins, a silver locket and, best of all, an inlaid pistol that Hakeswill tugged from the Lieutenant’s belt. The weapon was loaded, balanced to perfection, and he grinned as he thrust it into his jacket. Every little helped.
He had tied his shako with strings beneath his chin. He fumbled at the knot, tore it apart, and held the hat close before his face. ‘We’re safe now, safe.’ His voice was ingratiating, plaintive. ‘I promise you. Obadiah won’t let you down.’ Near to him, just beyond his parapet of corpses, a man sobbed and screamed and called for his mother. He was a long time dying. Hakeswill listened, his head cocked like an animal, and then he looked again into the hat. ‘He wants his mother, he does.’ Tears came to his eyes. ‘His mother.’ He looked up into the darkness, over the flames, and he howled at the sky.
There were periods of quietness in the ditch, periods when the death did not plunge downwards and when the mass of men, living and dead, crouched motionless beneath the high muzzles, and then, just when it seemed that the fight might be over, there would be a stir in the ditch. Men would try to rush the breaches, be restrained by other men, and the guns would fire again and the screaming would start again. Some men went mad, the agony too much, and one man thought the guns were the sound of God hawking and spitting and he knelt in the ditch and prayed until a lump of God’s spittle took off his head, but Hakeswill was safe. He sat with his back to the ditch scarp, his front protected by the dead, and he talked into his hat. ‘Not tonight. I can’t do it tonight. The pretty lady will have to wait, yes she will.’ He wheedled into the hat, and then listened to the fight with a professional’s ear. He shook his head. ‘Not tonight. Tonight we lose.’
He did not know how long he was in the ditch, or how long it took the dying to die, or how many times the lifeless flesh quivered around him as the canister pulverized the pile. Time was measured by sobs, by guns, by the passing of hopes, and it ended, unexpectedly, with the great shout. ‘Sharpe! Sharpe! Sharpe!’ Hakeswill’s face twitched over his parapet and watched as the living climbed from the spaces between the bodies and they were going away from him, over the ravelin, and to his right another attack clawed up the Trinidad.
‘Sharpe! Sharpe! Sharpe!’ The two men, he thought, must die, and he cackled at them, willing the canister to shred them, but they kept climbing and the shout went on. ‘Sharpe! Sharpe! Sharpe!’
Hakeswill saw Sharpe slip almost at the top of the ramp and the Sergeant’s heart leaped for joy; he was shot! But no, the bastard was pushed on by Harper, reached up for a chain, and there he stood, high on the central breach, lit by flames, and the Irishman was beside him, blades in their hands, and Hakeswill watched as they turned once to gesture a great triumph towards the British. Then they had gone, down to the city, and Hakeswill pushed the bodies aside, rammed his shako on his head, and kicked his way through the crowd that was flooding towards the Trinidad.
At the breach’s head men swung the great axes, the chains split, and the Chevaux de Frise was heaved ahead of them and into a trench the defenders had dug on the rubble crest, and then the British were jumping the blades, shrieking murder, and sliding down the broken stones to the city’s interior. They were berserk with rage. Hakeswill could feel it, the madness, and nothing would stop them this night. Even the wounded were pulling themselves up the breach ramps, some on their bellies, trying to reach the city and asking only for a chance to hurt as they had been hurt. They wanted drink, and women, and deaths, and more drink, and they remembered that Spaniards had fired at them from the city’s walls and that made every living person in Badajoz an enemy. So they went, a dark, scrabbling stream, over the breaches and up into the alleyways and streets, trampling the wounded in their rush, more coming, more, the breaches living with the mass of men scuttling into the city, spreading up into Badajoz, revenge.
Hakeswill went with them up a long street that led to a small plaza. He knew he was going in roughly the right direction, uphill and angling left, but he was trusting to instinct and luck. The plaza was already crowded with soldiers. Muskets sounded as door locks were blasted open, the first screams were coming from the city’s women and some, not wanting to be trapped in their houses, tried to run higher up the hill. Hakeswill watched one caught. Her earrings were ripped from her and blood sprayed on her dress as that, too, was torn from her and she was naked, spinning between the soldiers who pushed her, laughed at her, and then leaped on her. Hakeswill skirted the group. It was not his business, and he guessed that the woman who had escaped would lead him to the cathedral. He followed.
Captain Robert Knowles, elated and tired, leaned briefly on the castle gateway. Hooves echoed in the streets. Philippon, the French General, with a handful of mounted men had ridden away, escaping, down to the bridge that would take
them to refuge in the San Cristobal Fort. They had lost the huge fortress and, as they rode, they heard the dark business begin behind them. They whipped the horses, raked back with spurs, clattered on to the bridge and behind them, running, came the fleeing French infantry. Philippon’s face was grief-stricken, not for the city, but for his failure. He had done all that could be done, far more than he had hoped, yet still he had lost. Wellington, damned Wellington, had won.
Knowles’s men crowded into the gateway, jeering the departing enemy, and one of them seized a torch from its bracket. ‘Permission to go, sir?’ The flames lit the eager, hungry faces that watched Knowles. ‘Go!’
They cheered, ran whooping into the streets and Knowles laughed for them, hefted his sabre, and followed. Teresa. He ran into the dark streets, the doors bolted, the ground-floor windows covered in intricate iron bars and he was soon lost, alone, in the tangle of streets. He stopped at a crossroads, listening to the screams up and down the hill, and then guessed that he should follow the street with the richest houses. A man pounded past him, uphill, and he saw the distinctive crossbelt of a French soldier. The man was armed, his long bayonet gleaming, but he did not stop, just kept running, his breath coming in rasping heaves. Knowles ran downhill, his boots echoing from the dark houses, and then the street stopped, opened into a big plaza and there, above him, was the cathedral.
There was panic in the plaza. The last French had gone, escaping north, but the people of Badajoz had not gone with them. Those that were not in their houses were here, struggling up the cathedral steps, crowding its doors, hoping for sanctuary. They ran past Knowles, barging into him, ignoring him, and he looked wildly around him. There were so many streets! And then he saw, dark behind the cathedral, a small alley with balconied houses and he ran, staring up at the buildings and then he stopped, turned, and he saw two trees, a recessed frontage, and he pounded on the closed door. ‘Teresa! Teresa!’
Sharpe 3-Book Collection 5: Sharpe's Company, Sharpe's Sword, Sharpe's Enemy Page 25