Sharpe 3-Book Collection 5: Sharpe's Company, Sharpe's Sword, Sharpe's Enemy

by Bernard Cornwell

  The attack stopped just outside the village. This was not a true battle, not yet. If the French had been serious, if they had really wanted to capture the miserable cottages, they could have marched in their great columns, the Eagles bright above, and the massed drums would have driven them on and the artillery would have blasted a path ahead of them, and the noise would have swelled to a great crescendo in the afternoon heat while the French wave swept over the village, up the small valley, and then there would be a battle. Sharpe dozed off again.

  Hogan woke him with an offer of lunch; two legs of cold chicken and diluted wine. Sharpe ate in the shadow of the farmhouse wall and he listened to the small sounds of the skirmishers bickering by the village. Still the great plain was empty to the west, the French were not taking the bait, and Hogan had gloomily admitted that in a couple of hours the Peer would probably order a full scale retreat. Another day gone.

  Wellington was pacing up and down in front of the farm. He had been down to the village once, seen that the defenders were in no trouble, and now he fretted as he ate cold chicken and waited for Marmont to show his hand. He had noticed Sharpe, welcomed him back ‘to the living’, but the Peer was in no mood for small talk. He paced, he watched, and he worried.

  “Sir! Sir!” A horseman was spurring up the ridge, coming from the west, and his horse was lathered with sweat. He jumped from the saddle, saluted, and offered a scrap of paper to the General. He was an aide-de-camp to General Leith and he did not wait for Wellington to read the paper. “Sir! They’re extending their left!”

  “The devil they are! Give me a glass! Quickly!”

  There was dead ground on the rolling plain, hollows in the wheat that hid themselves from the ridge, and the French were in the hollows. General Leith, off to the west, had seen the movement first, but now the French could be seen, climbing a track from the dead ground, and Sharpe, his own telescope extended, saw that the enemy was marching. The sheep were on the wolf-ground. Wellington rammed his glass shut, threw the chicken leg he had been eating over his shoulder, and his face was jubilant. “By God! That will do.!”

  His horse was ready, he mounted, and he spurred off to the west, outrunning his staffofficers, and the dust spurted from behind his horse. Sharpe kept staring to the south-west, at the great plain that stretched so invitingly in front of the French, and he saw the troops come out of the dead ground and into plain view. It was a beautiful sight. Battalion after enemy Battalion had turned themselves into the order of march and they were going westward in the blistering heat. The attack on the village was supposed to do no more than pin down the British rearguard while the French left, safe in the knowledge that their foes had already marched, were now eagerly trying to outmarch them. The heat simmered the air above the plain, yet the French were full of heart, full of ambition, and they swung along the dirt tracks between the thistles and the wheat, and their weapons were slung and their hopes high. They marched further and further west, stringing the French army finer and finer, and none of them could know that their enemy was waiting, ready for battle, hidden to their north.

  Hogan was replete with happiness. “We’ve got him! At last, Richard we’ve got him!”

  Chapter 21

  Battles rarely start quickly. They grow like grass fires. A piece of musket wadding, red hot, is spat onto grass, it smoulders, is fanned, and a hundred other such tiny sparks flicker on the dry ground. Some fade, others catch into flame and may be stamped out by an irritable skirmisher, but suddenly two will join and the wind catches the fire, blows it, swirls the smoke and then, quite suddenly, the little wadding sparks have become a raging flame that roasts the wounded and eats the dead. There was no battle yet at the Arapiles. There were sparks that could yet turn into an inferno, but the afternoon wore on and the officers watching from the farm at the southern end of the great ridge felt their elation turn to boredom. The French batteries still fired at the village over the heads of their troops who had settled in the grass and wheat, but the cannonade was slower, almost half-hearted, and the British used the lull to manhandle two guns back up the Lesser Arapile.

  The afternoon smouldered. Three o’clock passed, then four, and to the men on the ridge, to the Battalions behind the ridge, the sound of battle was like a distant storm that had no effect on them. The French left wing, a quarter of the army, was marching westwards and it heard the guns behind and thought it was merely the bickering of the rearguard.

  The British gunners of the Royal Horse Artillery who had dragged and forced two guns to the crest of the Lesser Arapile served their bucking monsters in the muck sweat of the heat. The guns crashed back on their trails, splintered rocks on the other Arapile hill, and after each shot the gunners had to lever the trails back into position, the monster had to be fed, and the smoke stung their eyes and fouled their breath. A gunner pushed a spherical case-shot into the barrel. It was Britain’s secret weapon, invented twenty-eight years before by Lieutenant Shrapnell, and still no other country had succeeded in copying the shell. This was a small case-shot because the gun, a six pounder, was the biggest that could be worked up the steep hill-slope. The hollow iron ball of Shrapnell’s invention had sixty musket balls packed round its central powder charge. The fuse had been cut so that the ball would explode over the Greater Arapile and the rammer thrust it down the gun’s throat, stood back, and the Sergeant who ruled this gun checked his crew, touched fire to fuse, and the gun wheels jarred off the rock, the trail slewed, the smoke slammed forward and the case shot thundered over the plain.

  The battle was smouldering. It could ignite at any moment and Fate, who is the soldiers’ Goddess, was taking an interest in the sparks that flickered and threatened about the Arapiles. An artillery officer on the Lesser Arapile saw the case-shot leave the smoke, he saw it as the faintest trace of a grey pencil-like line in the air and then it exploded, just over the far edge of the Greater Arapile, and it was a black-grey air burst shot through with deep red and the ground beneath and ahead of the explosion was spattered by the lead balls and the shattered casing. Most went harmlessly to ground, some ricocheted off the hot stone, but two balls, with Fate’s malevolence, took Auguste Marmont in the side and France’s youngest Marshal was down. He was not killed, but he would not lead his army again this day, an army he had already pointed to destruction.

  Wellington was far away. He had ridden to the Third Division and he had pointed them in a new direction, eastwards, and they had begun their march. The French marched west, thinking they were in a race to head off the

  British, but the British were coming towards them, and waiting behind them, and they could not know it. And the British, soured by the weeks of march and counter-march, of retreat, wanted to fight.

  Between the Third Division and the Arapiles, hidden in a deep fold of ground, there were more British. Horsemen. The Heavy Cavalry, newly come from Britain and eager to try out their mounts and their long thirty-five inch straight blades, blades they said were too heavy for a swift parry, but wonderful for killing infantrymen.

  The sun had bleached the plain pale. The killing ground was beginning to fill, as a stage might fill, but still it waited for the spark that would fan into a battle. It came in the west as the Third Division hit the head of the French column and to the men, up on the ridge by the farmhouse, it came as the distant muffled sound of muskets that were like a far-off thornbush fire. Smoke came from the west, and sound, and the dust that added to the smoke, and then the telescopes could make out a little of what was happening. The French column was being crumpled, thrown back, and the battle, that had started in the west was coming east, back to the Arapiles.

  The French battalions recoiled. They were outnumbered, outgunned and outgeneralled. They had thought they were the vanguard of a march, and found they were the front line of a battle, and their defeat was about to become disaster.

  Sharpe watched it. He hated the cavalry as all infantrymen hated cavalry and he was used to seeing the British cavalry ill-led and ine
ffective, but Fate was capricious to the French on that hot Spanish afternoon. The British Heavy Dragoons, some from the King’s own bodyguard, came on the French from the north. They wanted to fight. They came up from their dead ground in two ranks, trotting to keep their order, and the black horsetail plumes on their shining crested helmets rippled as they moved. Sharpe, watching through the glass, saw a shiver of light, a glitter, and the swords were up and the horsemen were booted knee to booted knee.

  He did not hear the trumpet that put them into the canter, but he saw the line go faster, and still they kept their discipline, and he knew what they must be feeling. All men fear the moment of going into battle, but these men were on their big horses and the smell of the powder was in their nostrils and the trumpet was setting their blood on fire and the swords in their hands were hungry. The French were not ready. Infantry can form square and the textbooks say that no cavalry in the world can break a well-formed square, but the French had not known the danger and they were not in square. They were falling back from a massive infantry attack and they were firing and loading, cursing their General, when the earth shook.

  A thousand horses, the best horses in the world, and a thousand swords came from the dust and the trumpets spurred the horsemen into the final charge, the moment when the horse is released to run like the devil and the line will stagger and bend, but it does not matter because the enemy is so close. And the horsemen, who had been given a target that every cavalryman dreamt of, opened their mouths in a triumphant scream and the great, heavy, edged blades came into the French with all the weight of man and horse. The fear had turned to anger, to craziness, and the British killed and killed, split the Battalions, rode down the French and the huge blades fell and the horses bit and reared, and the French, who could do no other, broke and ran.

  The horses ran with them. The swords came from behind. The Heavy Dragoons drove paths of blood and dust through the fugitives and there was no difficulty in killing. The French had their backs to the horses so the swords could take them in the neck or over the skull and the horsemen revelled in it, snarled at their enemies, and the swords had so many targets. The musket sound had gone. It was replaced by the thunder of hooves, by screams, and by the cleaving sound of a butcher’s block.

  Some French ran for help to the British infantry. The red ranks opened up, helped them in, because all infantry feared that moment when they were not in square and when the cavalry hit them at the full charge. The British soldiers shouted at the French, told them to run to the British lines, and the red-coated men watched in awe what the Heavy Dragoons were doing and knew that Fate could have decreed it otherwise and so they helped their enemy to escape the common enemy of all infantry. The spark had turned into a running flame.

  Sharpe watched from the hill, privileged as a spectator, and he saw the French left wing chewed into fragments between the horses and the Third Division. He watched the Heavy Dragoons, superbly led, reform again and again, charge again and again, and they fought till the troopers were too weary to hold the heavy swords.

  Eight French Battalions had been broken. An Eagle had been lost, five guns captured, and hundreds of prisoners, their faces blackened by the powder and their heads and arms sliced by the swords, had been taken. The French left had been split, shattered, and massacred. Now the horsemen were spent. Fate was not all on the British side. She had decreed the death of the Heavy Dragoons’ General who would never again be able to show British cavalry how to fight, but their job this day had been done. Their blades were thick with blood, they had ridden to glory, and they would remember the moments for ever when all a man had to do was lean right, cut down, and spur on.

  Wellington was launching his attacks, one by one, from the west to the east. The Third Division had marched, then the cavalry, and now more men were launched onto the great plain. They came from both sides of the Teso San Miguel and they drove southwards, aiming at the hinge of the French line, its centre, dominated by the Greater Arapile. Sharpe watched. He saw infantry spread out from the small valley between the ridge and the Teso San Miguel and march past the village. Their colours had been stripped of the leather casings and they flew over the Battalions and Sharpe felt the pang of extraordinary pride that the sight of the colours gave every soldier.

  The guns on the Greater Arapile shifted their aim, fired, and the first gaps were blown in the British lines, the Sergeants shouted at men to close up, close up, and they marched on, attacking in line, and Sharpe saw the yellow colour of the South Essex.

  It was the first time ever that he had not fought with them and he felt a deep guilt as he watched his men, the skirmishers, run ahead into the wheat. He watched them fearful for them, and he knew that the wound still hurt, that the doctors had said that it could re-open and bleed, and that the next time it might fester and he would die.

  Portuguese troops were marching for the Greater Arapile. The Fourth Division, survivors of the main breach at Bada-joz like Sharpe’s own South Essex, were marching to the right of the French hill. The shots kept coming. The French had arrayed guns on the plain beside the hill and the batteries bellowed at the British and Portuguese lines and the gaps appeared, were filled, and small knots of red or blue coated men were left behind on the trampled wheat. The French troops who had been attacking the village fell back in the face of the Fourth Division. It marched on, its colours high, and they threatened the French guns in the plain, the troops who retreated in front of them, and the troops who were coming back from the carnage in the west. Sharpe rested his telescope on Hogan’s shoulder and found his own men, paired in the wheat, and he saw Harper and kept him in the glass. The Sergeant was gesticulating to the Company, keeping them spread out, keeping them moving, and Sharpe felt a terrible guilt that he was not there. They would have to fight without him, and he could not bear the thought that some would die and that he might have saved them. He knew that there was little he could have done that Lieutenant Price and the Sergeants were not already doing, but that was small comfort.

  So far, he knew, the battle was falling to the British. The French left had gone, and now the centre was being assailed and Sharpe could npt see how the centre could hold out against the attacks. Surely the Fourth Division would take the ground to the right of the Greater Arapile, the French guns would limber up and go, and it seemed to Sharpe, watching from the thyme-scented hilltop, that the French had somehow lost the will to fight back. The wheat and grass were skeined with smoke, the air thundered with the round-shot, canister and shrapnel, and the thousands and thousands of men marched into the plain and the red jackets, everywhere, beat back the French. It seemed that, this day, Wellington’s men were remorseless, unbeatable, and that only nightfall would save a few Frenchmen. The sun was already sinking towards evening, still bright, but the night was coming.

  Marmont did not know what was happening. He had been taken away, treated by the surgeons, and his second in command was wounded, and a third man, General Clausel, took over the army. He could see what was happening and he had not lost the will to fight. He was still a young man and he had been a soldier for half his life and he did not intend to lose this battle. His left was gone, surprised and broken, and the centre was threatened, but he was playing his own game. He had been taught to fight by a master, Napoleon himself, and Clausel was content to let the centre fight while he collected his reserves, massed them, and drew them up behind the shelter of the Greater Arapile. He commanded a massive force, thousands of bayonets, and he held them back, waiting for the moment when he would release them like a huge counterpunch that would be aimed at the very centre of Wellington’s army. The battle was not yet lost, either side could win it.

  The Portuguese climbed the steep slope of the Greater Arapile and Clausel watched them and timed his counterattack so that they would be the first to suffer. The signal went. The crest of the hill was lined with infantry, the muskets could not miss at a few paces, and the Portuguese, helpless in the face of the last precipitous feet, were
tumbled backwards. No bravery could compensate for those last sheer feet. The Portuguese were blasted away by the French muskets, and even their defeat would not have mattered if the Fourth Division had been able to attack past the hill and surround it, for then the French on the Greater Arapile would have fled.

  The Fourth Division did not get past the hill. From behind it, coming out to Sharpe’s right, the counter-attack rose from the small patch of dead ground next to the hill’s western end. The French columns came forward. Twelve thousand men, their Eagles aloft, their blades as thick as the wheat they trampled flat, and Sharpe heard, through the guns, the drums of the French beating the pas-de-charge. This was war as France had taught the world war. This was the mass attack, the irresistible force, driven by blurred drumsticks, the collection of men turned into a great human battering ram that would be marched against the enemy to smash through the enemy’s centre and make a hole through which the cavalry would pour and tear at the flanks.

  The British line, two deep, could usually stop the column. Sharpe had seen it happen a dozen times and there was a cold mathematical logic to the process. A column was a great filled rectangle of men and only the men on its outer edges could use their muskets. Each man in the British line could fire and, even though the column had more men than the line, the line would always win the firefight. The frightening thing about the column was its size, and that scared unsteady troops, overawed them, but it was vulnerable to good troops. The column took the punishment, as Sharpe had seen other columns take punishment, and again he was amazed by the French soldiers who stayed so steady under horrific bombardment. Cannon balls struck the columns and successive ranks soaked up the balls’ passages, and shrapnel cracked over their heads, yet still the column moved. The drums never stopped.