Frederickson took the precious glass and trained it. He stared for twenty seconds, then shook his head. “It looks like a bloody limber!”
“Doesn’t it?” Sharpe took the glass back and, his guess reinforced by Frederickson’s puzzled confirmation, saw more clearly the box shape slung between the high wheels. He had seen those objects before; the small carts that carried the ready ammunition to French guns. “Bloody Bampfylde,” he said as he stared at the shape beneath the trees, “has been wrong about everything. The fort is defended, they’re not bloody militia, and I’ll wager you a year’s pay they’ve got a damned ambush waiting for the web-foots.“ Sharpe swept the telescope right again to look at the fort. He could just see the gunners working on the water-bastion. Above them, sluggish in the falling breeze, the tricolour was bright, while closer, on the ramparts above the fort’s gate, he could see no one.
He lowered the glass a fraction. It was hard to tell from this low vantage-point, but the approach to the fort seemed to go through a humped landscape of wind-drifted dunes. One thing was certain; which was that all French eyes were glued seawards. “I think we ought to have a snap at it.”
Frederickson grinned. “No ladders?” He mentioned it not to discourage Sharpe, but to encourage a solution.
Sharpe raised the glass. “They’ve kept the drawbridge down.” Where the approach road crossed the inner ditch a solid wooden bridge was suspended by chains. It led to a closed gate. The fact of the drawbridge being down reinforced Sharpe’s suspicion that another French force was hidden in the woods. If that force was pushed backwards by the Marines then their horses would drag the field guns over the bridge and into the fort’s safety.
Sharpe closed the telescope and slid the brass shutters over its lenses. What he planned was risky, even foolhardy, but the Marines marched into ambush and the fort would never again be so unprepared for a surprise attack. Once the hidden field guns opened fire then the garrison would know the enemy was at their rear and men would hurry to the land defences and slide their muskets over the wall.
The road ahead dropped to a stone mill that stood beside a small stream. Beyond that were pale, poor meadows where broken byres served a handful of thin cattle. Beyond that again were the masts of the coastal shipping huddled where another village, betrayed by smoke from its chimneys, lay at the basin’s edge. The Riflemen must cross the stream, slip through the scant cover of the meadows, then work their way into the sandy waste about the fort. Sharpe smiled. “To be truthful I don’t know how we get over the bloody wall.”
“Knock on the front door?” Frederickson suggested.
Sharpe pushed his telescope into the tin box that protected it from harm, then into his pocket. “Send two good men south to warn Bampfylde. Then we go down the slope in small groups. Open order. Rendezvous at the first cattle shed.” He had a growing suspicion that this was a task best left to a small group, a very small group. Sharpe turned. “Sergeant Harper!”
The huge Irishman, grinning with anticipation, loped up the road. “Sir?”
“You wanted to be killed, so come with me.”
“Yes, sir.”
Sharpe and Harper were going to war.
The guns of the Teste de Buch fired shot weighing thirty-six pounds, each shot propelled by ten pounds and two ounces of black powder. The iron balls, striking the Scylla, splintered oak like matchwood, threw cannon barrels off carriages, and made carnage among the gun crews.
They were deadly weapons that graced Lassan’s semicircular water-bastion. Each was mounted on a traverse and slide. The traverse was hinged at the embrasure in the fort’s wall, and wheeled at its rear so that the crew could swivel the whole gun to face anywhere within its designated arc of fire. The traversing wheels, iron bound, had ground deep, semi-circular grooves into the stone. For this battle the guns were slewed right to fire south-west and Lassan’s men had hammered iron pegs into holes drilled in the curving grooves so that the traverses, under the guns’ recoil, did not swing out of true.
The recoil was soaked up by the slide. A field gun, or a gun aboard a ship, was mounted on wheels and the hammer of the shot’s explosion in the breech would drive the weapon fiercely backwards. After each shot the crew must man-handle the gun forward again, aim it again, and all the time the crews were swabbing out and reloading, but not with these guns. Lassan’s great weapons also had wheels, but the wheels fitted over wooden ramps that sloped up towards the rear of the traverse. The recoil slammed the guns backwards and gravity ran them down into place again. And again, and again, and another thirty-six pound ball of iron shivered the Scylla as Lassan’s monsters belched flame and smoke across the waters of the channel.
The smoke of the guns drifted northwards, but, in that strange phenomenon that all gunners knew and none could ever explain, the very firing of the guns seemed to still the wind. The smoke thickened before the embrasures, making a filthy-smelling fog that obliterated the target from the gunners’ view.
The blinding fog did not matter. Henri Lassan had thought long about the science of gunnery and had ordered white lines painted on the granite bastions. A similar pattern of lines was painted on the barracks’ roof from where, unobstructed by the smoke, a sergeant watched the target and shouted out the alignment. “Three!” he bellowed, and ‘three!“ the gun captains shouted, and four handspikes wrenched the eye-pins from the drilled holes and four other handspikes levered the traverses about until the iron wheel was flush with the white-line marked with the numeral three, then the pins were dropped into new holes and the guns, despite the fog of war, hammered their shot with deadly accuracy.
„Two!“
The shout told Lassan that the target was moving and he guessed, correctly, that the frigate was bearing away. He walked southwards, away from his gunsmoke, to see the two-decked Vengeance raise her gunports. That battleship was beyond Cap Ferrat and far beyond range. He watched. The great slab-side, chequered black and white, disappeared in one great clap of smoke, but, as Lassan had suspected, the broadside fell uselessly into the sea. “Keep firing!”
“One!” the sergeant shouted from the roof and the crews levered at the vast guns as the boys ran up the stone ramp with more charges. A ball from the frigate rumbled overhead, another struck the stone of the embrasure nearest Lassan with a crack that made his heart pulse warm fear through his chest, but most of the frigate’s shots were uselessly striking the sea wall or glancing off the southern glacis.
“She’s gone!” the sergeant shouted.
“Cease fire!” Lassan shouted, and the thunder ended suddenly. The smoke cleared with painful slowness to show that the frigate, sorely wounded, had gone south beyond the arc of the big guns. Lassan contemplated manning some of the twenty-four pounders on his southern ramparts, then saw the shot-torn foresails fill with air again and knew that the British captain, under orders to keep the fort’s gunners busy, was heading back into the channel. The sight of those torn sails and flying severed cables made Lassan think that some of his shots had been going high.
“Lower the barrels, Lieutenant!” Lassan wanted to pump his shots into that fragile hull.
The Scylla’s guns were run out, ready to fire when the frigate wore, but the bow-chasers, long-nines, barked defiance. The balls cracked on the bastion’s stone, doing no damage, then the sergeant on the barrack roof again had the enemy in his line of aim. “One!” the sergeant shouted.
“Fire!” Gerard bellowed. The great barrels jerked back and up, the wheels rumbled as they rolled back down the slide, and the smoke, that stank like rotten eggs, pumped again into the cold air. Lassan’s garrison might have been stripped to the bone, he might not even have crews for every gun, but he would do his duty and he would show the British that an under-manned fort could still hurt them and still, by the grace of the good God and in the service of the French Emperor, win battles.
The handcart was made of splintered, fragile wood that was held to uncertain unity by bent, rusted nails and with lashings of th
in, frayed, black twine. Some of the wheel-spokes were broken.
Sharpe pulled the handcart out of the cattle byre and listened to the ghastly screech of the wooden axle that ran through two ungreased wooden blocks. He supposed that the cart was used to take hay from these meadows into the village, or perhaps bedding straw to the fort, but it had been abandoned through the frost months to lie in this byre where the spiders had made thick webs on its spokes and handles. “It could work.” Sharpe tested the small bed of the cart and it seemed solid enough. “Except we don’t speak French.”
“Sweet William does, sir,” Harper said, then, seeing Sharpe’s face, corrected himself. “Captain Frederickson croaks Frog, sir.”
A group of armed men, approaching a fort, invited hostility, but two men, pushing a wounded comrade on a handcart, posed no threat.
“Jesus.” Frederickson’s voice was awed when, arriving at the cattle byre, he heard Sharpe’s plan. “We’re supposed to walk up and ask for a bloody sawbones?”
“You suggested knocking on the front door,” Sharpe said. “So why not?”
The Riflemen still drifted down the gentle slope. They came in scattered groups, spread out in the chain formation they would use in battle, and no alarm had been raised at the sight. Sharpe doubted whether any Frenchman had even seen the dark shapes flit down the slope. Once on the lower ground, over the tiny stream and hidden by the ditches that were edged by straggling blackthorn hedges, the Riflemen were invisible. The fort still thundered its huge noise.
“What we need,” Sharpe said, “is blood.” He was reckoning that the fort would not refuse entry to a mortally wounded man, but mortal wounds were usually foul with blood and, in search of it, both officers looked instinctively to Patrick Harper.
Who stared back with a slow and horrified understanding. “No! Holy Mother, no!”
“It has to come out, Patrick.” Sharpe spoke in a voice of sweet reason.
“You’re not a surgeon, sir. Besides!” Harper’s swollen face suddenly looked cheerful. “There’s no pincers, remember?”
Sweet William unbuckled his pouch. “The barber-surgeons of London, my dear Sergeant, will pay six shillings and six pence for a ten-ounce bag of sound teeth taken from corpses. You’d be surprised how many fashionable London ladies wear false teeth taken from dead Frogs.” Frederickson flourished a vile-looking pair of pincers. “They’re also useful for a spot of looting.”
“God save Ireland.” Harper stared at the pincers.
Captain Frederickson smiled. “You’ll be doing it for England, Sergeant Harper, for your beloved King.”
“Christ, no, sir!”
“Strip to the waist,” Sharpe ordered^
“Strip?” Harper had backed into the corner of the filthy byre.
“We need to have your chest soaked in blood,” Sharpe said as though this was the most normal procedure in the world. “As soon as the tooth’s pulled, Patrick, let the blood drip on to your skin. It won’t take long.”
“Oh, Christ in his heaven!” Harper crossed himself.
“It doesn’t hurt, man!” Frederickson took out his two false teeth and grinned at Harper. “See?”
“That was done with a sword, sir. Not bloody pincers!”
“We could do it with a sword.” Sharpe said it helpfully.
“Oh, Mary mother of God! Christ!” Harper, seeing nothing but evil intent on his officers’ faces, knew that he must mutiny or suffer. “You’d be giving me a wee drink first?”
“Brandy?” Frederickson held out his canteen.
Harper seized the canteen, uncorked it, and tipped it to his mouth.
“Not too much,” Frederickson said.
“It’s not your bloody tooth. With respect, sir.”
Frederickson looked at Sharpe. “Do you wish to play the surgeon, sir?”
“I’ve never actually drawn a tooth.” Sharpe, in front of the curious Riflemen who had gathered to watch Harper’s discomfiture, kept his voice very formal.
Frederickson shrugged. “We should have a screw-claw, of course, but the pincers work well enough on corpses. Mind you, there is a knack to it.”
“A knack?”
“You don’t pull.” Frederickson demonstrated his words with graphic movements of the rusted pincers. “You push the tooth towards the jawbone, twist one way, the other, then slide it out. It’s really not hard.”
“Jesus!” The big Irish sergeant had gone pale as rifle-cartridge paper.
“I think,” Sharpe said it with some misgivings, “that as Sergeant Harper and I have been together so long, I ought to do the deed. Push, twist, and pull?”
“Precisely, sir.”
It took five minutes to persuade and prepare Harper. The Irishman showed no fear in battle; he had gone grim-faced into the carnage of a dozen battlefields and come out victorious, but now, faced with the little business of having a tooth pulled, he sat terrified and shaking. He clung to Frederickson’s brandy as if it alone could console him in this dreadful ordeal.
“Show me the tooth.” Sharpe spoke solicitously.
Harper eventually opened his mouth and pointed to an upper tooth that was surrounded by inflamed gum. “There.”
Sharpe used a handle of the pincers and, as gently as he could, tapped the tooth. “That one?”
“Jesus Christ!” Harper bellowed and jerked away. “Bloody kill me, you will!”
“Language, Sergeant!” Frederickson was trying not to laugh while the other Riflemen were grinning with keen enjoyment.
Sharpe reversed the pincers. The jaws, somewhat battered and rusted, were saw-toothed for better purchase. It was a handy instrument for burglary and doubtless ideal for the procurement of false teeth from mangled corpses, but whether it was truly suitable for a surgical operation Sharpe could not yet say. “It can’t be worse than having a baby,” he said to Harper. “And Isabella didn’t make this fuss.”
“Women don’t mind pain,” the Irishman said. “I do.”
“Don’t grip the fang too hard,” Frederickson observed helpfully, “or you might smash it, sir. It’s the devil of a job to fetch out the remnants of a broken tooth. I saw it happen to Jock Callaway before Salamanca and it quite spoilt Jock’s battle. You remember Jock, sir?”
“The 61st?” Sharpe asked.
“Died of the fever next winter, poor fellow.” Frederickson stooped to see what was happening.
The word ‘fever’ shot through Sharpe’s head like a death-knell, but this was no time for such thoughts. “Open-your mouth, Sergeant.”
“You’ll be gentle?” Harper’s voice was sullen and mutinous.
“I will be as gentle as a new-born lamb. Now open your bloody gob.”
The huge mouth with its yellowed teeth opened. The Irishman’s eyes were wary and a faint groan, half a moan, escaped as Sharpe brought the pincers up.
Slowly, very slowly, doing his utmost not to jar the offending tooth, Sharpe closed the vicious jaws on that part of the tooth not hidden by the swollen gum-tissue. “That’s not too bad, is it?” he asked soothingly. He gripped the handles tight, but not too tight, and felt a faint tremor run through the huge man. “Ready?”
He pushed upwards. He could smell Harper’s breath and feel the rank fear from the man. He sympathized with it. Sharpe had once had a tooth pulled in India and he remembered the pain as vividly as any wound taken in battle. He pushed harder. The tooth did not move, though
Harper quivered as he loyally tried to push against Sharpe’s pressure.
“Harder,” Frederickson muttered.
Sharpe pushed harder, the metal jaws slipped up into the swollen gums, and the pincers were wrenched away as Harper bellowed and flailed to one side. “Jesus and his bloody saints! Christ!” The sergeant had his hands to his mouth that was trickling blood. “God in heaven!” He was keening with the sudden agony.
“It slipped,” Sharpe said in apologetic explanation.
“Bloody near killed me!” Harper swallowed more brandy, then spat a pot
ent mixture of blood and alcohol on to the ground. “Jesus!”
“Perhaps I should try,” Frederickson offered. Lieutenant Minver, like his men, grinned.
“God damn all officers! All!” Harper was in a blaze of anger now. “Bloody murdering bastards!” He picked up the pincers, opened his mouth, and probed with a finger.
He flinched.
Sharpe drew back. The Riflemen, no longer laughing, watched as the huge, bare-chested man put the pincers over his own tooth. The big hand closed and Harper’s blue eyes seemed to grow wider. He pushed and Sharpe heard a distinct crack, like gristle snapping, then the pincers were being twisted right and left, Harper was moaning, and again there were the tiny sounds of tissue parting or bone grating.
Sharpe held his breath. No one moved. A French child of ten could have taken these prize troops captive at this moment as the bare-chested Harper, shaking with the pain and cold, began to pull.
The Irishman’s hand trembled. A bead of blood pulsed at his lower lip, another, then in a great groan and a gush of pus and blood, the huge tooth tore free. Scraps of flesh were attached to its branching roots, but blood, bright red blood was pouring on to Harper’s chest in great rivulets that steamed in the cold air.
“Get him on to the wagon!” Sharpe ordered.
“Christ in his heaven!” The pain had brought tears to Harper’s eyes. He stood, coughing blood, a fearful sight. He was weeping now, not out of weakness, but in anger and pain. He was blood smothered; steaming with warm blood, coughing blood, his face and chest soaked in blood.
“You shouldn’t go,” Frederickson said to Sharpe, meaning that it was foolish for the two senior officers to risk themselves at the same time.
Sharpe ignored the well-meant advice. “Lieutenant Minver. As soon as we have the gate open, you charge! Swords fitted!”
“Sir.” The lieutenant, a thin dark man, smiled nervously. Harper lay on the cart, shivering.
“Take your men to the edge of the sand,” Sharpe said as he took off his pack, his officer’s sash, snake-buckled belt, his Rifleman’s jacket, and his shako. Frederickson was doing the same. “Sergeant Rossner? You bring this equipment.”
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