“If you say so.” Sharpe spoke with the caution of a man wary of an enemy bringing a gift.
But this enemy smiled, shucked an oyster, then tossed the shell halves on to the sand in front of Sharpe. “They used to collect tons of those things out of the bay. Tons! Used to take them to a place at the end of the channel,” Killick jerked a thumb north, “and burn them, Major. Burn them. They stopped a few years back because they couldn’t ship the stuff out any more, but there’s a stone barn full of it up there. Full of it.” Killick smiled.
Sharpe frowned, not understanding. “Full of what?”
“Major! I may bring you breeches, but I’m damned if I’m going to pull them up for you.” Killick twisted another oyster apart with his blade, then shrugged. “Always think I’m going to find a pearl in these damn things, and I never do. Lassan was pretty astonished you spared our lives, Major.” The last sentence was said as casually as his remark about pearls.
“Lassan?” Sharpe asked.
“He was the commandant here. Scrupulous sort of fellow. So why did you, Major?”
The question was evidently asked seriously, and Sharpe thought carefully about his answer. “I find it hard to hang people, even Americans.”
Killick chuckled. “Squeamishness, eh? I was hoping I’d talked my way out of a hanging. All that guff about never hanging a sailorman in still airs.” Killick grinned, pleased with his cleverness. “It was all bally-hoo, Major. I just made it up.”
Sharpe stared at the American. For days Sharpe had believed, with all the force a superstition could command, that by showing mercy to Killick he had saved Jane’s life. Now it was bally-hoo? “It isn’t true?”
“Not a word, Major.” Killick was pleased with Sharpe’s shock reaction. “But I thank you anyway.”
Sharpe stood. “I have work to do.” His hopes were sliding into a bleak despair. “Good day to you.”
Killick watched the tall figure walk away. “Remember, Major! Oyster shells! Halfway between here and Gujan, and that ain’t bally-hoo!”
Sharpe went into the fortress. He wanted to speak with no one. Suddenly all the preparations he had made against siege seemed useless, contemptible, and pathetic. The hay-rakes, taken from the villages, seemed feeble instruments with which scaling-ladders could be knocked aside. The two guns, made ready by Harper, were toys to swat at a monster. The pine abatis was a bauble, no more of an obstacle than a sheep hurdle. Jane was dying. Sharpe could not see beyond that fact.
“Sir!” Frederickson ran up the stone ramp. “Sir!”
Sharpe, who had been sitting in one of the embrasures that faced the channel, looked up. “William?”
“Two thousand of the buggers, plus two batteries of artillery.” Frederickson’s mounted Riflemen had returned on lathered horses with the grim news.
Sharpe looked down again, wondering what purpose the white lines on the rampart, each numbered, had served.
“Sir?” Frederickson frowned.
Sharpe’s head jerked up again. “Two thousand, you say?”
“At least.”
Sharpe forced himself to attend to the news. “How far?”
“Three hours.”
“They’ll arrive in darkness,” Sharpe spoke softly. Somehow he did not care if it was two or twenty thousand.
“Sir?” Frederickson was puzzled by Sharpe’s mood.
“Tell me,” Sharpe suddenly stood, “what happens when you burn oyster shells?”
“Oyster shells?” Frederickson frowned at the strange question. “You get quicklime, of course.”
“Lime?” Sharpe told himself he could not wallow in self-pity. He had men to defend and an enemy to defy. “It blinds people?”
“That’s the stuff,” Frederickson said.
“Then we’ve got three hours to fetch some.” Sharpe was shaking himself back to normal. He passed on Killick’s directions and ordered one of the limbers taken north.
Two hours later, when the light was nothing but a glow above the western horizon, eight barrels of quicklime were carried into the fortress. Like the powder from the Customs House it was old and damp through too long storage behind the lime-kilns and it clumped in great dirty-white fist-sized lumps, but Frederickson took the barrels to the gallery where the cooking fires were lit and levered off the barrel tops so that the powder would start to dry. “It’s a nasty weapon,” he said to Harper.
“It’s a nasty war,” Harper crumbled one of the lumps, “and if the Frogs decide not to fight, sir, we can always paint the bloody place white.”
From the courtyard outside came the sound of stones whispering on steel as the bayonets were sharpened. The job was being done with the obsessiveness of men who knew that careful preparation could fractionally tip the casual scales of life and death in their favour. Sharpe, listening to the hiss of steel, tried to guess what his enemy planned.
The French, he decided, would be mostly raw troops. They would arrive in weary darkness and head for the village that promised shelter and water. Yet their General would know that a surprise night assault could bring him swift victory. If Sharpe was that General he would assemble his veterans and send them on a silent march to the north, from whence, while the defenders were distracted by the noise of the troops in the village, those veterans would strike.
So Sharpe must strike first.
Except that, sitting in the gathering dusk, Sharpe was assailed by bleak and horrid doubts. One hundred and seventy men, desperately short of ammunition, faced over ten times their own number. The enemy brought guns, while Sharpe only had the two twelve-pounders that were loaded, like the duck-guns, with scraps of stone and metal. It was madness to fight here, yet unthinkable to surrender without a fight.
Captain Frederickson, his face smeared black with dampened soot scraped from the shattered kitchen chimney, crouched beside Sharpe. “I’ve chosen a dozen men, sir. Including Harper.”
“Good.” Sharpe tried to imbue his voice with enthusiasm, but could not succeed. “I don’t understand, William, why the bastards are fighting us. Why not let us rot here? Why waste men on us?”
“Christ knows, sir.” Frederickson obviously did not care. He only anticipated a rare fight. “You’ll want a prisoner, no doubt?”
“It would be useful, William.” Sharpe stared eastwards, but there was still no sign of the approaching French forces. “I wish I could come with you.”
“You can’t, sir.”
“No.” This was one of the sacrifices of command; that Sharpe must delegate. In years past he would have liked nothing better than to have led a raiding party against the enemy, but now he must stay in the fortress where the nervous garrison could see and take confidence from his calm demeanour.
He walked with Frederickson to the north-west corner of the fort where, with the aid of a fishing net hung from an embrasure, the Riflemen climbed down to the night-shadowed sand. The shining metal of their weapons and uniforms had, like their faces, been blacked. They carried no packs, no canteens, only ammunition, bayonets, and firearms. They were Sharpe’s best and if he lost them tonight he would lose this battle.
When they had disappeared into the darkness Sharpe turned and walked, feeling suddenly lonely, to the eastern ramparts. He waited there, staring inland, until at last the sounds came from the darkness.
“Sir?” A Marine sentry spoke nervously.
“I hear it, lad.” Sharpe heard the chink of trace chains, the thump of wheels, the noise of artillery drawn behind horses. He heard, too, the soft thunder made by boots. The French had come.
For a long time he could not see the enemy. There was no moon and the land was dark. He heard the noises, he heard the voices raised in sudden orders, then a flash of lantern light showed, another, and slowly, dimly, Sharpe made out the darker mass that seemed to mill into the village to the south.
The enemy had come and the second battle of Arcachon was about to begin.
CHAPTER 14
General Calvet sat in a miserable hovel in a
miserable village on the miserable edge of an increasingly miserable France. “You say this Sharpe is good?”
“Lucky,” Ducos said scornfully.
“The Emperor,” Calvet said, “will tell you a soldier needs luck more than brains. He came up from the ranks?”
“Like yourself, General,” Ducos replied.
“Then he must be good.” Calvet rubbed his hands in gleeful anticipation. The general had a broad, scarred face, burned with powder stains like dark tattoos. He wore a bushy, black veteran’s moustache. “Favier! You’ve fought the English, what are they like?”
Favier knew this was a time for truth, not bombast. “Unimaginative in attack, rock-solid in defence, and quick with their muskets, very.”
“But these scoundrels are short of ammunition.” The general had heard how the British had scoured the local villages for powder. Calvet sat at a scarred table with a map drawn by Commandant Lassan beside the bread and cheese that was his supper. “So the quicker they are with muskets, the sooner they’ll exhaust their powder.” Calvet stared at the map. A double ditch, one of them flooded, surrounded three sides of the fort, but the fourth side, that which faced the channel, had no flooded ditch. The main bastion stood in the tidal shallows, but the northern half of the western wall was edged with sand as far as the moat’s outflow. That was the vulnerable place.
The moat’s outflow was a sluice gate in a small, masonry dam at the fort’s north-western corner. That dam would act as a bridge leading to the ramparts’ base, and the trick of this attack, Calvet knew, would be to draw the defenders’ attention away from that spot.
“You’ll attack tonight?” Ducos asked eagerly.
“Don’t be a damned fool, man. That’s what he’s expecting! He’s got his men on alert! They’ll have a bad night and I’ll make it worse, but I won’t attack.” Calvet saw the disapproval on Ducos’ face and, knowing what sinister power Ducos sometimes wielded with the Emperor, the big general deigned to explain himself. “I’ve got raw troops, Ducos, nothing more than bloody farm-boys. Have you ever attacked at night? It’s chaos! A bloody shambles! If they’re repulsed, and they will be, they’ll taste defeat and a new conscript should always be given a victory. It makes him feel invincible! No. We attack tomorrow. The goddamns have had no sleep, they’ll be nervous as virgins in a Grenadiers’ barracks, and we’ll crush them.” Calvet leaned back in his chair and smiled about the crowded room. “Tomorrow night we’ll have Major Sharpe as our dinner guest.”
An aide lit a new candle. “If he’s alive, sir.”
“If he’s not, we’ll eat him.” Calvet laughed. “We ate enough men in Russia. Human flesh tastes like skate, did you know that, Ducos? Next time you eat skate, remember it.”
“Thank you, sir.” Ducos did not smile.
“Boiled buttock of corporal, well-peppered,” Calvet mused. “I’ve dined on worse. What’s the range of their damned rifles?”
“Two hundred paces,” Favier said, “but they can be a nuisance up to four hundred.”
“Then we’ll put the howitzers here.” Calvet’s thumb smeared the pencil marks that showed the village on the map. “I want them bedded down as mortars.”
“Of course, sir,” the Artillery colonel said.
“And the other guns here,” the thumb stabbed down again, leaving a scrap of cheese by the watermill. “Make embrasures in the wall, but don’t open fire tonight. Tonight I want muskets up on the glacis. Lots of them. Keep the bastards worried. I want noise, bangs, shouts.” He was looking at one of his Battalion colonels. “Pick a different spot every few minutes, don’t make it regular. You know how to do it.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Make ‘em use up some of their precious ammunition. But keep clear of this place.” Calvet pointed to the dam. “I want that left alone.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And at dawn I want no one in sight, no one.” Calvet stood. He was a huge man, with a paunch like a ready-barrel of howitzer powder. He stretched his arms, yawned, and turned to the straw mattress that was laid by the fire. “Now I’m sleeping, so get out. Wake me at five.”
“Yes, sir.”
“When we do attack,” the general’s rumbling voice checked the exodus of uniformed officers, “we do it quickly, efficiently, and right. Any man who lets me down will have to explain himself, alone, to me.” He raised one clenched fist the size of a small cannon-ball. “Now bugger off and keep the bastards hopping.”
The waves broke and sucked on the beach at the channel entrance, the wind rattled pine branches and sighed over the ramparts, and the picked men of the best French Battalion went to their night-time task while the others slept. And General Calvet, head on a haversack and boots ready by his bed, snored.
“Hold your fire!” Sharpe bellowed the order, heard it echoed by a sergeant, then ran down the southern rampart.
Six or seven musket shots had cracked from the glacis, the balls hissing uselessly overhead, and, two Marines and a Rifleman had instinctively returned fire. “You don’t fire,” Sharpe said, “unless you’re ordered to fire or unless the bastards are climbing the wall! You hear?”
None of the three men replied. Instead, crouching beneath the battlements, they reloaded their weapons.
Sharpe sent Fytch around the ramparts with a new warning that no man was to fire. The French, Sharpe guessed, were trying to provoke just such defensive fire to see which parts of the rampart responded most heavily. Let the bastards guess.
Sixty men were in the old garrison offices, fully armed, but told to catch what sleep they could. When the attack came, and Sharpe did not expect it till the deadest hours of the night, those men could be on the ramparts in minutes.
He crouched in an embrasure. The wind fingered cold on the scabbed blood on his forehead, and the sigh of it in his ears made listening difficult. He thought he heard the scrape of a boot or musket butt on the glacis, but was not sure. Whatever the sound was, it was too small to presage a full attack. Sharpe had crouched beyond a fortress’s defences, throat dry and fear rampant, and he knew what sudden commotion was made by a mass of men moving to the escalade. There would be ladders bumping forward, the chink of equipment, the scrape of hundreds of boots, but he could hear nothing but the wind and see nothing but the blackness.
He went to the eastern wall and crouched beside Sergeant Rossner. “Anything?”
“Nothing, sir.” The German sergeant had his shako upended on the firestep and half-filled with cartridges. Beside him was a roped mass of hay. If an attack came the hay would be lit then slung far over the walls to illuminate targets. No lights were allowed in the courtyard or on the walls of the Teste de Buch, for such lights could only silhouette the defenders for the convenience of French marksmen.
Sharpe moved on, crouching to talk with men, offering them wine from his canteen, always giving the same message. There was nothing to fear from random shots, or from the shouts that sometimes sounded in the darkness. The French were trying to fray the defenders’ nerves, and Sharpe would have done the same. Once there was the sound of massed feet, shouts, and a fusillade of musketry that flattened on the walls, but no dark shapes appeared beyond the glacis lip. Jeers and insults came from the darkness, more shots, but Sharpe’s men, once the first fear had subsided, learned to ignore the sounds.
In Commandmant Lassan’s old quarters two Marines, one who had been a surgeon’s mate and another who had trained in the butcher’s trade, laid out carpenter’s tools, shaving razors, and sewing kits on a table. They had no clamps, instead there was a cauldron of boiling pitch with which to cauterize a stump. They had no camphorated wine, nor any solution of lead acetate, so instead they had a barrel of salt-water to wash wounds, and a pot filled with spider-webs that could be stuffed into deep, cuts. Patrick Harper, the big Irishman, had recommended maggots for cleaning wounds, but the dignity of their new-fetched professional pride would not allow the two Marines to accept the nostrum. They listened to the shots in the night, sipped the b
randy that was supposed to dull wounded men’s pain, and wondered when the first wounded would be brought for their attention.
Captain Palmer, trying to sleep where the sixty men were held in reserve, knew that there would be small rest tonight. Musket shots and sudden shouts came faint to the old offices, but not so faint that they did not cause men to stir and reach for their muskets or rifles. “I wish the bastards would come,” one Marine muttered, and Palmer held the same belief. Better to get it over, he thought, than this damned waiting.
A Spanish Rifleman on the southern wall sent for Sharpe. “Can you hear it, senor?” The man spoke in Spanish.
Sharpe listened. Faint, but unmistakable, came the sound of picks and spades thudding into earth, then the ring of a crowbar on stone. “They’re making a battery,” he replied in Spanish.,
“In the village?” The Rifleman made it half a guess and half a question.
Sharpe listened again. “I’d say so.”
“They’ll be in range, then.” The Spaniard slapped the woodwork of his rifle.
“Long range,” Sharpe said dubiously.
“Not for Taylor,” the Spaniard said. The American’s marksmanship was a legend to Frederickson’s men.
But Taylor, this night, was in the darkness; gone with Harper and Frederickson, gone to spread terror among the men who tried to keep a garrison awake with clamour, gone to the kill.
Not a man made a sound. They lay flat to let their eyes adjust to the darkness.
The sky was not so dark as the land. There was no moon, but a spread of stars showed between patches of cloud and that lighter sky might betray a silhouette from ground-level and so the Riflemen lay, bellies on the sand, unmoving.
They were the best. Each man was a veteran, each had fought in more battles than could be casually recalled, and each had killed and gone past that point where a man found astonishment in the act of giving death to another human being.
William Frederickson, whose passion was for the architecture of the past and who was as well educated as any man in Wellington’s Army, saw death as a regrettable but inevitable necessity of his trade. If wars could be won without death Frederickson would have been content, but so far mankind had devised no such process. And war, he believed, was necessary. To Frederickson the enemy was the embodiment of Napoleon’s Imperial ambitions, the foe of all that he held most dear, and while he was not so foolish, nor so blind, as to be unaware of their humanity, it was nevertheless a humanity that had been pointed in his direction with orders to kill. It was therefore necessary to kill more swiftly and more efficiently than the enemy.
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