Sharpe's Company

by Bernard Cornwell

  Harper shivered with the cold. ‘I’ll pray for another miracle.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A chance to get Hakeswill.’ He nodded towards the city. ‘In one of those little alleyways. I’ll tear his bloody head off.’

  ‘What makes you think we’ll get through the wall?’

  Harper gave a humorless laugh. ‘You don’t really think we can fail, do you?’

  ‘No.’ But then he had not really thought he could lose his Captaincy, had not thought he could lose the Company, and not in his worst dreams had he ever thought he would have to stand and watch Patrick Harper being flogged. The cold, wet night drummed on, bringing the bad dreams true.

  Chapter 15

  Rain, and more rain, increasing in vehemence, so by dawn it was seen that the river had flooded, was foaming white and high on the stone arches of the old bridge and, far more seriously, had swept the pontoon bridge downstream.

  ‘Company!’ The last syllable was drawn out, mingling with the shouts of other Sergeants. ‘Shun!’

  ‘Stand still! Eyes front!’

  A jingle of bridles and bits brought the Battalion’s senior officers into the cleared space at the centre of the paraded Companies. Two sides of the rectangle were each formed by three Companies; four Companies were paraded on one long side and faced the solitary wooden triangle.

  ‘Order arms!’ Again and again. Hands slapped on wet wood, the brass hilts slopped into the muck. Rain slanted on the ranks.

  Sergeants marched stiffly through the sludge, slammed into attention and saluted. ‘Company on parade, sir!’ The mounted Captains, miserable in their cloaks, acknowledged.

  ‘Battalion ready for punishment parade, sir!’

  ‘Very good, Major. At ease.’

  “Talion!’ Collett’s voice rode over wind and rain. ‘Stand at ... ease!’ There was a convulsive shuffle in the mud.

  Sharpe, his head foul from the night’s drinking, had paraded with the Light Company. Rymer was embarrassed, but it was Sharpe’s place, and Hakeswill’s yellow face was expressionless. A pulse throbbed beneath the livid scar on the Sergeant’s neck. Daniel Hagman, the old Rifleman, had come to Sharpe before the parade and told him that the Company was mutinous. It was doubtless an exaggeration, but Sharpe could see the men were sullen, angry and, above all, shocked. The only good news was that Windham had cut the punishment to sixty lashes. Major Hogan had paid the Colonel a visit and, although the Engineer had failed to persuade Windham of Harper’s innocence, he had impressed him by describing Harper’s record. The Battalion waited in the sweeping rain, full of cold misery.

  “Talion! Shun!’ Another shuffle and Harper appeared between two guards. The Irishman was stripped to the waist, showing the massive muscles of his arms and chest. He walked easily, ignoring the rain and mud, and grinned towards the Light Company. He seemed the least concerned man on the parade.

  They lashed his wrists high on the triangle, spread his legs and tied them at the base, and then a Sergeant pushed the folded leather between Harper’s teeth so that he would not bite his tongue off in the pain. The Battalion’s doctor, a sickly man with a streaming nose, gave Harper’s back a cursory inspection. He was obviously healthy. A leather strip was tied round his kidneys, the doctor nodded miserably at Collett, the Major spoke to Windham, and the Colonel nodded. ‘Carry on!’

  The drumsticks came down on soggy skins. The Sergeant nodded at the two lads. ‘One!’

  Sharpe remembered it. His own flogging had been in a village square in India. He had been tied to an ox-cart, not a triangle, but he remembered the first slashing cut with the leather thongs, the involuntary arching of the back, the teeth grinding into the leather, and the surprise that it was not as bad as he had expected. He had almost got used to the blows, was feeling confident, and resented it when the doctor stopped the lashes to check that he was still capable of receiving more punishment. Later, the pain had blurred. It had begun to hurt, really to hurt, as the lashes tore at the skin and the alternate blows, from two sides, ripped and frayed till the watching Battalion saw the glint of bone laid open as the blood dripped on to the village dust.

  God! It had hurt!

  The South Essex watched in silence. The drums, their skins stretched by the rain, could hardly be heard; they were like the muffled beats of a funeral. The lashes sounded soggy as they drew blood, the Sergeant in charge of the flogging chanted the numbers, and in the background the French guns fired on.

  The drummer boys paused. The doctor stepped close to Harper’s back, sneezed, and nodded to the Sergeant.

  ‘Twenty-five!’

  The rain diluted the blood.

  ‘Twenty-six!’

  Sharpe looked at Hakeswill. Was there a glint of triumph in the face? It was impossible to tell. The face twitched in a spasm.

  ‘Twenty-seven!’

  Harper turned his head to face the Light Company. He was not moving at all as the blows hit him. He spat out the leather gag, grinned at them.

  ‘Twenty-eight! Harder!’

  A drummer boy used all his strength. Harper grinned even wider.

  ‘Stop it!’ Collett stepped his horse forward. ‘Put the gag in!’

  They pushed the leather back in Harper’s mouth, but he spat it out again, and grinned through the punishment. There was an appreciative murmur from the Light Company, almost a laugh, and they saw that Harper was chatting to the drummer boys. The bastard had beaten the punishment! Sharpe knew it was hurting him, but knew that Harper’s pride would not let it show, would only let him pretend a total unconcern.

  The punishment finished, made almost farcical by Harper’s unbelievable bravery. ‘Cut him down!’

  Sharpe had seen men crumple to the ground after just two dozen strokes, but Harper stepped away from the cut thongs, still grinning, and did nothing more than massage his wrists. The doctor asked him a question and the Irishman laughed, refused the offer of a blanket to be draped over his bleeding back, and turned to follow his escort off the parade.

  ‘Private Harper!’ Windham had spurred his horse forward.

  ‘Sir?’ There was almost a contempt in Harper’s voice.

  ‘You’re a brave man. Here.’ Windham tossed a gold coin towards the Ulsterman. For a brief fraction of a second it seemed as if Harper might ignore the coin, then a huge hand whipped up, snatched it from the air, and he gave the Colonel his big, infectious grin. ‘Thank you, sir.’

  The Battalion gave a low, collective sigh of relief. Windham must have realized, even as the punishment was happening, that he was flogging the most popular man in the Battalion. There had been hostility in the parade, an unusual hostility. Soldiers did not object to a flogging, why should they? If a man deserved punishment then a battalion would line up and watch punishment done. But soldiers also had a keen sense of injustice and Sharpe, watching Windham, knew that the Colonel had sensed the Battalion’s outrage. A mistake had been made. It could not be admitted or reversed, not without proof, but the gold coin had been a clever touch. Windham, for all his pretence at being a simple country squire, was a clever man.

  And Hakeswill a cunning man. The Sergeant kept his face expressionless as the parade was dismissed. Hakeswill was triumphant. Harper had been defeated, demoted, and the Company was at Hakeswill’s mercy. He now wanted one thing more, and would get it, Sharpe’s misery; and thanks to Company rumor, the Sergeant knew where that misery could be accomplished, at the house behind the Cathedral with its two orange trees.

  Sharpe found Harper in a shelter, two of the wives putting grease on his back and bandaging the wounds. ‘Well?’

  Harper grinned. ‘Hurt like hell, sir. I couldn’t have taken much more. ‘ He held up the golden guinea. ‘What do I do with this?’

  ‘Spend it?’

  ‘No.’ The Irishman stared past Sharpe into the sea of mud that was swept by great curtains of grey rain. ‘I’ll keep it, sir, until I’ve killed the bastard.’

  ‘Or until I kill him?’

  �
��One of us, sir. But make it soon. Before we leave this place.’

  If ever they would leave Badajoz, Sharpe thought. That afternoon he took a working party east, towards the Portuguese border. They found the precious pontoons aground in the flood and stripped naked to manhandle the great boats to where oxen could haul them back. The siege was bogged down, in rain, mud and misery. Badajoz was like a great castle in mid-ocean. The rain had flooded the fields to the south, the west, and the north, and still the wind shrieked at them, brought more water, and though it was a time for effort, the effort could not be made. The trenches were flooded, the sides collapsed, and when gabions were used to shore the batteries, the water dissolved their earth filling into liquid sludge that flowed out leaving a hollow, useless wicker shell.

  Everything was fouled with mud. Carts, supplies, forage, food, uniforms, weapons and men. The camp was foul, the only movement the slow flapping of wet canvas in the wind, and fever killed as many as the ceaseless French guns. The time that the French had hoped to gain by their attack on the parallel was given to them by the weather. Morale slumped. The first Monday of the siege was the worst. It had rained for a week, and it still rained, and darkness fell on an army that could scarce even light a fire any more. Nothing was dry, nothing was warm, and a man from a Welsh Regiment, a fusilier, went mad. There were shouts in the night, a terrifying scream as he carved his wife with a bayonet, and then hundreds of men were fumbling in the darkness, thinking it was a French attack, while the madman ran through the camp, slashing left and right with his weapon. He screamed that the resurrection of the dead was here and now, that he was the new Messiah, and finally his Sergeant cornered him and, sensible that no one wanted a court-martial and execution, killed the man with one neat stab.

  Sharpe met Hogan that Sunday night. The Major was busy. Colonel Fletcher’s wound was keeping the Chief Engineer in his tent and Hogan had taken much of his work. The Irishman was gloomy. ‘We’ll be defeated by the rain, Richard.’ Sharpe said nothing. The spirit of the army was crushed by the water; they wanted to strike back, to hear their own guns firing at the French, but the guns, like the army, were bogged down. Hogan stared into the wet, pelting night. ‘If only it would stop.’

  ‘And if it doesn’t?’

  ‘Then we give up. We’ve lost.’

  Outside, in the cold night, the rain smashed down, dripped heavily from the lip of Hogan’s tent, and the slow drops seemed to Sharpe to be the drumbeats of defeat. Unthinkable defeat.

  Chapter 16

  On Tuesday afternoon it stopped raining.

  There were suddenly scraps of blue sky between the tattered clouds and, like some beast saved from imminent drowning, the army heaved itself out of the mud and attacked the trenches with renewed energy.

  They hauled the guns over the hill that night. The ground was still an almost impenetrable sludge, but they hauled on ropes, thrust wicker beneath reluctant wheels, and with an enthusiasm endowed by the break in the weather, the troops took the vast twenty-four-pounders to the newly-dug batteries.

  In the morning, in a miraculously clear dawn, there was a cheer from the British camp. The first shot had been fired and they were hitting back! Twenty-eight siege guns were in place, protected by gabions, and the Engineers directed the artillery officers so that the iron balls hammered at the base of the Trinidad bastion. The French guns tried to destroy the siege guns and the valley above the grey, placid floodwaters of the Rivillas was shrouded with smoke that swirled as the cannon balls pierced through the mist.

  At the end of the first day, when an evening breeze drifted the smoke southwards, a hole was visible in the masonry of the bastion. It was not much of a hole, more of a chipped dent, surrounded by smaller shot scars. Sharpe stared at the damage through Major Forrest’s telescope and gave a humorless laugh. ‘Another three months, sir, and they might notice us. ‘

  Forrest said nothing. He was afraid of Sharpe’s mood, of the depression that had come with idleness. The Rifleman had hardly any duties. Windham seemed to have abandoned the wives’ parade, the mules were in pasture, and Sharpe’s time hung heavily. Forrest had spoken to Windham, but the Colonel had shaken his head. ‘We’re all bored, Forrest. The assault will cure all.’ Then the Colonel had taken his fox hounds south for a day’s hunting, and with him half the Battalion’s officers. Forrest had tried, unsuccessfully, to cheer Sharpe up. He looked now at Sharpe’s morose profile. ‘How’s Sergeant Harper?”

  ‘Private Harper’s getting better, sir. Another three or four days and he’ll be on duty.’

  Forrest sighed. ‘I can’t get used to calling him “Private”. It doesn’t seem right.’ Then he blushed. ‘Oh dear. I suppose I’ve put my foot in it.’

  Sharpe laughed. ‘No, sir. I’m getting used to being a Lieutenant.’ It was not true, but Forrest needed reassurance. ‘Are you comfortable, sir?’

  ‘Very. It’s a splendid view.’ They were watching the valley and the city, waiting for the attack that would be made just after dark. Half the army were on the hilltop, in the trench or the new, half finished batteries, and the French must have known that something was about to happen. It was not difficult to guess what was intended. The British guns were more than half a mile from the Trinidad bastion, too far to be truly effective, and the Engineers needed to cut that range in half. That meant building a second parallel, with new batteries, right on the edge of the floodwaters, just where the French had built the Picurina Fort. Tonight the fort would be attacked. Sharpe had desperately hoped that the Fourth Division, his own, would be chosen, but instead the Third and Light would go forward in the darkness and Sharpe was merely a spectator. Forrest looked down the slope. ‘It shouldn’t be difficult.’

  ‘No, sir.’ Which was true, Sharpe thought, but only half the battle. The Picurina Fort was almost makeshift; a wedge-shaped obstacle facing the British tide and only intended to slow them down. It had a ditch that protected a low stone wall, and on the wail were palisades, split-trunks loop holed for muskets, and the fort was far enough from the city so that the French guns could not douse the attack with grapeshot. The fort should fall, but that still left the lake formed by the dammed Rivillas. The floodwater blocked the direct approach to the city. Unless the lake could be drained, any attack would have to come from the south, squeezed between the water and the south wall, passing by the huge Pardaleras Fort, and the attacking columns would be under fire from scores of French guns and shredded by grapeshot. Sharpe borrowed Forrest’s glass again and trained it on the dam. It was remarkably well-built, for a temporary structure, and Sharpe could see a balustraded stone walkway along the dam top that led to the fort, much stronger than the Picurina, that defended the dam. The fort and dam were hard by the city walls. A man with a musket on the San Pedro bastion could easily fire down on to the stone walkway. Forrest saw where he was looking.

  ‘What are you thinking, Sharpe?’

  ‘I was thinking it wouldn’t be easy to attack the dam, sir.’

  ‘You think anyone intends to attack the dam?’

  Sharpe knew an attack was intended, Hogan had told him so, but he shrugged his shoulders. ‘I wouldn’t know, sir.’

  Forrest looked round conspiratorially. ‘Don’t tell anyone, Sharpe, but we’re going to!’

  ‘We, sir?’ Sharpe had a flicker of excitement in his voice. ‘The Battalion, sir?’

  ‘I’m speaking out of turn, Sharpe, out of turn.’ Forrest was pleased at the quickening in Sharpe’s voice. ‘The Colonel’s offered our services. The General of Division was talking to him. We may be the lucky ones!’

  ‘When, sir?’

  ‘I don’t know, Sharpe! They don’t tell me these things. Look! The curtain’s going up!’

  Forrest pointed to the huge number one battery. A gunner had snatched the last gabion from the embrasure and one of the guns, silent for half an hour, bellowed flame and smoke down the hillside. The ball, under-aimed, struck the ground in front of the Picurina, scarred the earth as it bounced, and
then fell with a tall splash into the lake. The jeer of the French inside the small fort was audible four hundred yards away.

  The gunners raised the barrel half an inch by turning the huge screw beneath the breech. The barrel hissed as it was sponged out. The embrasure had been plugged again as defence against the inevitable fire from the city walls. The powder bags were thrust deep into the gun’s throat, rammed home and the ball trundled into the muzzle. A Sergeant leaned over the touch-hole, thrust down with the spike that punctured the powder bags, and then inserted the tube filled with fine powder that fired the charge. His hand went up, an officer shouted orders and the gabions were pulled from the front of the battery. The men crouched with their hands over their ears as the Sergeant touched the priming tube with a match burning at the end of a long pole, and the gun slammed back on the inclined wooden platform. The ball struck the timber palisade of the Picurina, splintering the tree-trunks, driving the shards of unseasoned wood in vicious showers on the defenders, and it was the turn of the British to cheer.

  Forrest was looking at the fort through his telescope. He tut-tutted. ‘Poor lads.’ He turned to Sharpe. ‘That can’t be very nice for them.’

  Sharpe wanted to laugh. ‘No, sir.’

  ‘I know what you’re thinking, Sharpe. That I’m too charitable to the enemy. You’re probably right, but I can’t help imagining that my son is in there.’

  ‘I thought your son was an engraver, sir.’

  ‘Yes, he is, Sharpe, yes he is, but if he was a French soldier he might be in there and that would be most upsetting.’

  Sharpe gave up trying to follow Forrest’s charitable imaginings and turned back to the Picurina. The other British guns had got the range and the heavy balls were systematically destroying the flimsy defences. The French inside were trapped. They could not retreat, for the lake was to their rear, and they must have known that the cannonade would end in an infantry attack as soon as dusk gave way to night. Forrest frowned at the sight. ‘Why don’t they surrender?’