Sharpe's Company

by Bernard Cornwell

  The bell tolled six, then the quarter, and on the half, the men lined up out of sight of the city. They carried no packs, just weapons and ammunition, and their Colonels inspected them, not to check on uniforms, but to grin at them and encourage them, because tonight the common man, the despised soldier, would write a page in history and that page had better be a British victory. Tension stretched as the sun sank, imagination making fears real, and the officers passed the rum rations down the ranks and listened to the old jokes. There was a sudden warmth in the army, a feeling of difficulties that would be shared, and the officers who came from the big houses felt close to their men. Imagination did not spare the rich, nor would the defenders, and tonight the rich and poor in the ditch would need each other. The wives made their farewells and hoped for a live husband on the morrow, and the children were silent, awed by the expectancy, while in the doctors’ tents the instrument cases were opened and the scalpels honed. The guns fired on.

  Seven o’clock. A half-hour only left and Sharpe and the other guides - all except the Rifleman were Engineers -joined their battalions. The Forlorn Hope of the Light Division was half composed of Riflemen, hoping for the laurel-wreath badge. They grinned at Sharpe and joked with him. They wanted the thing done and over in the way that a man facing the surgeon’s knife hastened the fatal clock. They would move at half-past seven and by half-past nine the issue would be decided. Those that lived would be drunk by ten and the wine would be free. They waited, sitting on the ground with their rifles between their knees, and prayed the clock on. Let it be over, let it be over, and darkness came and the guns boomed on, and the orders had to come.

  Half-past seven, and the orders still not given. There was a delay and no one knew why. The troops fidgeted, grew angry against unseen staff officers, cursed the bloody army and the bloody Generals because in the darkness the French would be swarming on the breaches, preparing traps for the British! The guns stopped firing, as they should have done, but there were still no orders and the men waited and imagined the French working on the new breach. Eight o’clock sounded, and then the half, and horses galloped in the darkness. Men shouted for information. There were still no orders, but rumored explanations. The ladders had been lost. The hay bags were missing and they cursed the Engineers, the lousy army, and the French worked on.

  Nine o’clock, and murder was being prepared in the breaches. Delay it, Sharpe thought, let it be tomorrow! The attack should go in on the heels of the guns, in the minutes of darkness when there was a trace of light so that the battalions would not get lost on the glacis. Still the time ticked away and still they waited and still the enemy were given precious minutes to work on the defences. Then there was a stir in the darkness. Orders, at last, and there would be no delay.

  Go, go, go, go, go. The ranks moved with the clinking of metal and thumping of rifle and musket stocks. There was a sense of relief to be moving in the darkness, in the bleak, total darkness, and the six thousand five hundred men, English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh and Portuguese moved against the city. The guides ordered quiet and the orders went back, but they were moving at last and no one could silence the thousands of boots that scraped and scuffed by the road that led between the flood and the Pardaleras Fort. Far to the north, the Third Division filed over the bridge by the broken mill that spanned the Rivillas and the air was filled with the croaking of frogs and the fears of men. The city waited in darkness. Silence in Badajoz.

  The Lieutenant who was leading the Forlorn Hope touched Sharpe’s elbow. ‘Are we too far to the left?’

  They had lost all touch with the Fourth Division. It was dark, utterly dark, and there was no sound from the fort or from the city. Sharpe whispered back. ‘We’re all right.’

  Still there was no firing, no sound from the city or from the Pardaleras that was now behind them. Silence. Sharpe wondered if the attack would be a surprise to the French. He wondered if perhaps the enemy had been fooled by the delay, perhaps the troops had relaxed, were waiting for another day and if the greatest gift the gods can give a soldier, surprise, had been given to the British. They were close now. The dim, dark shadow of the fortress blotted out half the sky. It was huge in the night, vast, unimaginably strong, and the slope of the glacis was beneath Sharpe’s feet and he paused as the sixty men of the Forlorn Hope aligned themselves and thrust their ladders and hay-bags to the front. The Lieutenant scraped his sword from the scabbard. ‘Ready.’

  There was firing from the right, far off, where the Third Division had been spotted. It sounded miles away, like someone else’s battle, and it was difficult to believe that the sound had anything to do with the dark glacis leading to the fortress in front. Yet the sound would alert all the French sentries and Sharpe hurried up the slope, angling to his left, and still there was no sound from walls or bastions. He tried to make sense of the shadows, to recognize the shapes he had seen just three nights before, and his footsteps sounded loud on the grass and he could hear the panting of men behind him. Surely the French would hear! At any moment, he almost cringed at the reality of the imagination, the grapeshot would stab down from the walls. He saw the corner of a bastion, recognized the Santa Maria, and a relief went through him as he knew he had brought the Hope to the right place.

  Sharpe turned to the Lieutenant. “This is it.’ He wished he was going with him, that he was leading the Hope, but it was not to be. The glory belonged to the Lieutenant who made no reply. Tonight he was a god, tonight he could do no wrong, because tonight he was leading a Forlorn Hope against the biggest citadel the British army had ever attacked. He turned to his men.

  They went. Silent. The ladders scraped over the stone lip of the glacis, down into the ditch, and the men scrambled down, slithering on the rungs, falling on to the thrown hay-bags. It had begun.

  Sharpe watched the walls. They were dark and silent. Behind him, at the foot of the glacis, he could hear the tramp of feet as the battalions approached and then, ahead, he heard the Lieutenant shout at his men and the first scrambling of boots on the breach. It had started. Hell had come to Badajoz.

  Chapter 23

  In the cathedral that day the prayers had been unceasing, muttered, sometimes hysterical; the words had accompanied the beads as the women of Badajoz feared for the dead who would come to their streets that night. Just as the British army knew the assault was coming, so, too, did the defenders and inhabitants of Badajoz. A host of candles flickered before the saints as if the tiny flames could keep at bay the evil that surrounded the city and came pressing closer as the night gloom filled the cathedral.

  Rafael Moreno, merchant, trickled powder into his pistols and hid them, loaded and primed, beneath the lid of his writing desk. He wished his wife were with him, but she had insisted enjoining the nuns in the cathedral, foolish woman, and praying. Prayers would not deflect the soldiers, bullets might, but it was more likely they could be bribed by the cheap red wine he had put in his courtyard. Moreno shrugged. The most valuable possessions were hidden, well hidden, and his niece insisted she had friends among the British. He could hear Teresa upstairs, talking to her child, and doubtless she had the heathen rifle loaded and ready. He liked his niece, of course, but there were times when he thought that his brother Cesar’s family were more than a little too wild. Downright irresponsible even. He poured himself wine. That child upstairs, improving in health, God be praised, but a bastard! And in his house! Moreno sipped the wine. The neighbors did not know, he had seen to that. They thought she was a widow whose husband had died in last year’s battles between the French and the disintegrating Spanish armies. He heard the clock in the cathedral tower begin wheezing as it wound itself up to strike the bell. Ten o’clock in Badajoz. He emptied his glass and called for a servant to refill it.

  The bell sounded, and below, in the cathedral, beneath the vaulted ceiling and the gold ledges, below the huge, dark chandelier, and beneath the sad eyes of the Virgin, the women heard the crackle of muskets begin far away. They looked up, over the gl
ow of the candles, at the Mother of God. Be with us now and in the hour of our need.

  Sharpe heard the first toll of the hour, and then no more. As it sounded, so the first fireball rose from the battlements, arced its spark-path in the blackness, and then plummeted to the ditch. It was the first of a storm, the tight packed balls flaming and falling as the carcasses were rolled on to the breach, and suddenly the breaches, the ditch, the ravelin, the obstacles, and the tiny figures of the Forlorn Hope were swamped in light, light poured from above, by flames that caught on the obstacles in the ditch, and the Hope began to climb as the fire was bright on their bayonets.

  The battalions behind cheered. Silence was done. The front ranks reached the ditch and the ladders scraped over. Men hurled themselves after the hay-bags and scrambled down ladders, a flow of men in desperate haste to cross the ditch and climb the huge ramps of the breaches. They were cheering, urging themselves on, even as the first tongues of quicksilver flame raced down the breaches of the Santa Maria and Trinidad.

  Sharpe dropped as the mines exploded. Not one or two, but tons of powder packed in the ditch, on the lower slopes of the ramps, was ignited and exploded outwards, and the Forlorn Hope was gone. Taken in an instant, ground into fragments of wet horror, all dead, as the first files of the first battalions were hurled backwards by the flame and flying stone.

  The French cheered. They lined the parapets, the bastions; and the guns that had been handled round to fire down into the ditch, guns which had been double shotted with canister, were unmasked. Muskets spat, were drowned by the cannon flames. The enemy cheered and shouted obscenities, and all the time the carcasses were thrown, lighting the targets, and the ditch was slopping with fire, a container of flames that would only be drowned in blood, and still the men went down the ladders and into the ditch.

  The third breach was silent, the new breach. It lay between the bastions, a huge fresh scar that could lead into the city, but Sharpe saw the French had worked well. The ditch in front of the wall was huge, as wide as a parade ground, but filled with the squat, half-finished ravelin. The ravelin was twenty feet high, shaped like a diamond, and the only way to the new breach was to go round it. The way was blocked. Carts had been tipped over in the approach ditches, then covered with timbers, and the fireballs had lit the obstacles so that they flamed huge and fierce, and no attacker could get close. Only the breaches in the bastions, the Santa Maria and the Trinidad, could be approached, and those were dominated by the enemy guns. They fired again and again, the ammunition hoarded against this night, and still the British tried, and still they died yards from the breaches’ base.

  Sharpe went back down the glacis, into the shadows, and turned once to see the high, great walls of the battle lit by fire. Flames jetted from the embrasures, writhing smoke into the maelstrom below, and in the light of the fires he saw strange patterns at the top of the breaches. He stopped and stared, trying to make sense of the shapes glimpsed through the harrowing fire and smoke, and saw that the French had crowned each breach with Ckevaux de Prise. Each one was a timber, thick as a battleship’s main mast, and from each chained timber there sprang a thousand sabre blades; the blade barrier, thick as a porcupine’s coat, to hook and tear any man who reached the summit. If any did.

  He found the Colonel of his next battalion, standing with drawn sword, staring at the fire-edged glacis. The Colonel glared at Sharpe. ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘Guns, sir. Come on.’ Not that the Colonel needed to be told, or to be guided. The face of the Santa Maria bastion was a sheet of reflected flame and they marched towards it as, suddenly, the canister whistled down the slope and cut huge swathes through the Battalion. The men closed ranks, marched on, nearer the lip, and the gunners doused the glacis with bursting canister and the Colonel waved his sword. ‘Come on!’

  They ran, order disappearing, and hurled themselves at the ditch. Bodies littered the glacis, twitched by new blasts of shot, and still more men climbed the slope and poured into the vast fire bowl. Men jumped towards hay-bags and landed, instead, on the dead or wounded. The living pushed forward towards the breach, trying to claw their way to the shattered stone, and each time the French gunners, high on the terrifying walls, swatted them back so that the ditch floor was thick with blood. Sharpe watched, appalled. His orders were to go back to where the reserve waited, to guide more men forward, but no man needed to be guided this night. He stayed.

  Not one man had reached a breach. The ditch between the glacis and the ravelin was black with men, disorganized men, the mingling of the Fourth and Light Divisions. Some cowered there for safety, thinking the shadow of the ravelin would give them protection from the guns that scorched down at them. But there was no safety. The guns could reach every inch of the ditch, firing in scientific patterns, killing, killing, killing, but for the moment they fired only where the British moved, towards the breaches, and the spaces before the great, stone ramps were thickening with dead. The guns fired canister, tin cans that burst apart in the muzzle flame and scattered musket balls like giant duck-shot, while other guns were loaded with grapeshot, naval ammunition, that rattled against the ditch wall.

  It was not just the guns. The defenders hurled anything that would kill from the ramparts. Stone lumps, the size of a man’s head, crashed down into the ditch; gun-shells, their fuses cut to a quarter inch and lit by hand, fizzed down and sent red hot fragments scything on the ditch’s floor, and even kegs of powder, fused and lit, were rolled down the breach slope. Sharpe watched one barrel, bouncing and tumbling, its fuse spinning madly red, finally leap into the ditch and explode in the face of a dozen Riflemen who were running for the Santa Maria breach. Only three lived, blinded and screaming, and one of them wandered, insensate with pain, into the burning timbers that blocked the path to the new breach. Sharpe fancied he could hear the man’s dying screams bubble with the flames, but there were so many dying, and so much noise, that he could not be certain.

  The noise of the living in the ditch was a growl and, suddenly, it rose to a sound of fury and Sharpe looked right to see a wave of men, Riflemen and red-jackets, charging forward. He groaned. They had stormed their way up the ravelin’s sloping face, desperate for victory, and the burgeoning attack spread out on the diamond’s top flat surface and ran with leveled bayonets towards the new breach. The French were waiting. Guns that had not fired were touched with flame, the grapeshot ripped in from three sides and the attack died in a dancing horror as men were struck as by contrary iron winds. A few lived, ran on, and found that the ravelin led to another sheer drop, into another ditch before the breach and, as they hesitated, the French infantry dropped them with musket fire and there was nothing but bodies left on the ravelin’s top, bodies that had fallen and left unrecognizable dark smears on the stone.

  The guns were winning the night. The ditch was blocked by fire. Men could not go right or left because of the flaming timbers that jammed the main ditch on either side of the two bastions, just as the approaches to the third breach were blocked. The four fires, fed with fresh timber from the walls, defined where the British could go, a space that was terrible with gunfire. Yet still more men went over the edge, hurrying down the ladders as if there was some safety in the milling, scrambling horde that bulged at the edges as fresh groups charged towards a breach. The ditch was filling with men, hundreds and hundreds of men, shouting men, holding their bayonets above the crush, and the grapeshot would lick down and clear a space of the living and the space would be filled again as men trampled the dying. The guns would belch again, and again, and the metal scraps turned the ditch into a charnel house. Still they went forward, incoherently brave, trying to reach an enemy they could not see or touch, and they died as they cursed and struggled forward.

  They went in small groups and Sharpe, crouched on the glacis, watched as an officer or Sergeant led them forward. Mostly they died in the ditch, but some, at last, reached the breach and clambered upwards. A dozen men would go and, in seconds, there would be s
ix, and three would reach the stone and begin to climb while the men on the glacis lip, next to Sharpe, knelt up and fired their muskets at the walls as if they could clear the path for the scrambling men. Sharpe wondered if the French were playing with them. Sometimes no gun would fire on the small, desperate groups, even though guns swept the approach to the breach, and he would watch them struggle, higher and higher until, casually almost, the enemy would pluck them off the stone, tumble them dead, and a new high-tide mark of blood was marked on the breach. Once a man even reached the Chesaux de Frise, he swept at the sabre blades with a musket, bellowing defiance, and then he was hit by an unseen French infantryman and he fell, twisting like a rag doll, down the slope and the French jeered him and poured fire down.

  Sharpe went right, looking for the Fourth Division and the South Essex, but the ditch was a massive sink of death, of weird shadows cast by the fires, and he could make out no faces in the packed crowd that was filling the space between the ravelin and glacis. Men sheltered behind parapets made from the dead, others clumsily reloaded muskets and fired them uselessly at the towering stone that crushed them with fire. He ran for a minute, right on the edge of the glacis, stumbling on the uneven paving and hearing the canister above him, in front of him, yet he was untouched. Small groups of men were on the glacis lip, Light Companies mostly, who rammed and fired, rammed and fired, hoping that their bullets might ricochet from an embrasure and kill a Frenchman. The canister flung them backwards, ragged down the slope, and beyond the bodies, in the darkness, more men waited for the orders that would send them running to the light, to the ditch, to the hundreds of dead. Sharpe had never seen so many dead.