Sharpe’s rifles

by Bernard Cornwell

  Just as the innocent scrabbling of an unfledged owlet in an attic could be turned by a child’s dread into the night-steps of a fearful monster, so Sharpe let his fears feed and grow as the days passed.

  He could tell no one of his certainty that the assault would end in disaster. He did not want to earn Vivar’s scorn by such an admission, and there was no one else in whom he could confide. Harper, like the Spanish Major, seemed imbued by a blithe confidence that the attack would work. “Mind you, sir, the Major will have to wait another week.”

  The thought of postponement spurted hope into Sharpe. “He’ll have to wait?”

  “Those volunteers, sir. They’re not ready, not ready at all.” Harper, who had taken on himself the job of training the volunteers in the art of platoon fire, sounded genuinely concerned.

  “Have you told the Major?”

  “He’s coming to inspect them in the morning, sir.”

  “I’ll be there.“

  And in the morning, in a rain which darkened the rocks and dripped from the trees, Sharpe went down to the valley where Lieutenant Davila and Sergeant Harper demonstrated to Bias Vivar the results of a week’s training.

  It was a disaster. Vivar had asked merely that the three hundred men be taught the rudiments of musket drill; that, like a half Battalion, they could stand in three ranks and fire the rippling platoon volleys which could gut an attacking force.

  But the volunteers could not hold the rigid, tight ranks which concentrated the musket fire into deadly channels. The trouble began as the men in the rear rank instinctively stepped backwards to give themselves adequate space in which to wield their long ramrods, while the centre rank also took a step back to distance itself from the men in front, and thus the whole formation was shaken ragged. Under fire, the instinct would be for that backward movement to continue and, in just a few volleys, the French would have these men running. Nor were they even training with ammunition, for there was not enough powder and shot for that. They merely went through the musket motions. How the front rank would react to the percussion of the rear ranks’ musket shots in their ears, Sharpe dared not think.

  The ‘muskets’ were any gun that a man could contrive to bring. There were ancient fowling pieces, musketoons, horse-pistols, and even a matchlock. Some of the miners did not even have guns, carrying their picks instead. Doubtless such men would make fearsome fighters if they could first close on their enemy, but the French would never let them. They would make mincemeat of these men.

  It was not that the volunteers lacked bravery; their very presence in this remote valley attested to their willingness to fight, but they could not be turned into soldiers. It took months to make an infantryman. It took a steel-hard discipline to enable a man to stand in the battle-line and face the massed drums and shining bayonets of a French attack. Natural bravery or a cocksure stubbornness were no substitutes for training; a fact the Emperor had proved again and again as his veterans had destroyed Europe’s ill-trained armies.

  A French infantry attack was a thing of awe. French troops did not attack in line, but in vast columns. Rank after rank of men, massed tight, with bayonets glinting above their heads, marched to the beat of the boy drummers who were hidden in their midst. Men fell at the front and flanks as skirmishers bit at the column; sometimes a cannon ball flayed through the packed ranks, yet always the French closed up and marched forward. The sight was fearsome, the sense of power was terrifying, and even the bravest men could break at the mere sight unless months of training had taught them to stand hard.

  “But we won’t be facing infantry.” Vivar tried to find a scrap of hope in the face of disaster. “Only cavalry.”

  “No infantry?” Sharpe sounded doubtful.

  “There’s a few to protect the French headquarters,” Vivar said dismissively.

  “But if they shake out like that,” Sharpe gestured at the dispirited volunteers, “they’ll never stand against cavalry, let alone infantry.”

  “The French cavalry are tired.” Vivar was clearly piqued by Sharpe’s insistent pessimism. “They’ve worn their horses to the bone.”

  “We should wait,” Sharpe said. “Wait till they’ve marched south.”

  “You think they won’t garrison Galicia?” Vivar was stubborn in his refusal to wait. He gestured for Davila and larper to join him. How long before the volunteers would >e hammered into shape?

  Davila, no infantryman, looked at Harper. The Irishman hrugged. “It’s desperate, sir. Bloody desperate.”

  Harper’s response was so unlike his usual cheerfulness hat it depressed even Vivar. The Spaniard only needed :hese volunteers brought to a minimum of efficiency before aunching his attack, but the Irishman’s gloom seemed to Dresage indefinite postponements, if not outright abandonment.

  Harper cleared his throat. “But what I don’t understand, sir, is why you’re trying to turn them into soldiers at all.”

  “To win a battle?” Sharpe suggested acidly.

  “If it comes to a straight scrap between these lads and French Dragoons, we’re not going to win,” Harper paused, “begging your pardon, sir.” None of the officers spoke. His voice took on a note of authority, like a practical man demonstrating a simplicity to fools. “What’s the point in training them to fight an open battle when that’s not what you’re expecting? Why do they need to learn platoon fire? These lads have to fight in the streets, sir. That’s just gutter fighting, so it is, and I’ll wager they’re as good at that as any Frenchman. Get them into the city, then set them loose. I wouldn’t want to face the bastards.”

  “Ten trained men can see off a rabble.” Sharpe, hearing his hopes of a postponement being dashed by Harper’s words, spoke harshly.

  “Aye, but we’ve got two hundred trained men,” Harper said, “and we just push them to wherever there’s real trouble.”

  “My God!” Vivar was suddenly elated. “Sergeant, you are right!”

  “Nothing, sir.” Harper was obviously delighted at the praise.

  “You are right!” Vivar slapped the Irishman’s shoulder. “I should have seen it. The people, not the army, will free Spain, so why turn the people into an army? And we forget, gentlemen, just what forces will be on our side in the city.

  The citizens themselves! They’ll rise and fight for us, and we would never think of refusing their help because they’re not trained!“ Vivar’s optimism, released by Harper’s words, was in full flood. ”So, we can go soon. Gentlemen, we are ready!“

  So now, Sharpe thought, even the training would be abandoned. An outnumbered rabble would march on a city. Vivar made it all sound so easy, like filling a pit with rats then letting in the terriers. Yet the pit was a city, and the rats were waiting.

  Vivar’s volunteers might not be trained soldiers, but the Major insisted on swearing them into the service of the Spanish Crown. The priests conducted the ceremony, and each man’s name was solemnly recorded on paper as a duly sworn soldier of His Most Christian Majesty, Ferdinand VII. Now the French could have no excuse for treating Vivar’s volunteers as civilian criminals.

  Yet soldiers needed uniforms, and there was no dyed cloth to make bright coats, nor any of the other accoutrements of a soldier like shakos, belts, pouches, or gaiters. But there was plenty of coarse brown homespun to be had, and from that humble material Vivar ordered simple tunics to be made. There was also some white linen, fetched from a nunnery twenty miles away, which was made into sashes. It was a very crude uniform, fastened with loops about bone buttons, but, if any rules of war could be applied to Vivar’s expedition, the brown tunics passed as soldiers’ coats.

  The wives of the volunteers cut and sewed the brown tunics while Louisa Parker, high in the fortress, helped the Riflemen mend their green jackets. The coats were ragged, torn, threadbare and scorched, yet the girl proved to have an extraordinary skill with the needle. She took Sharpe’s green jacket and, in less than a day, made it seem almost new. “I even ironed out the bugs,” she said happily, and folded
back a seam at the collar to prove that the lice had truly been exterminated by the stub of a broken sabre which she had used as a flatiron.

  “Thank you.” Sharpe took the coat and saw how she had turned the collar, darned the sleeves, and patched the black facings. His trousers could not be restored to their original grey, so she had sewn patches of brown homespun over the worst rents. “You look like a harlequin, Lieutenant.”

  “A fool?”

  It was the evening of the day on which Harper had convinced Vivar of the uselessness of training the volunteers. Sharpe, as on previous evenings, walked the ramparts with Louisa. He prized these moments. As the fears of defeat grew on him, these snatched conversations were passages of hope. He liked to stare at the firelight reflected from her face, he liked the gentleness which sometimes softened her vivacity. She was gentle now as she leaned against the parapet. “Do you suppose my uncle and aunt are in Santiago?”

  “Perhaps.”

  Louisa was swathed in a Cazador’s scarlet cloak and wore a close fitting bonnet. “Perhaps my aunt won’t take me back. Perhaps she will be so scandalized by my terrible behaviour that I will be cast from chapel and home.”

  “Is that likely?”

  “I don’t know.” Louisa was wistful. “I sometimes suspect that’s what I want to happen.”

  “Want?” Sharpe was surprised.

  “To be cast adrift in the middle of the biggest adventure in the world? Why ever not?” Louisa laughed. “When I was a child, Lieutenant, I was told it was perilous to cross the village green in case the gypsies took me. And if soldiers ever appeared in the village—‘ she shook her head to demonstrate the enormity of such an occasion’s danger. ”Now I’m in the middle of a war and accompanied only by soldiers!“ She smiled at the predicament, then gave Sharpe a look which mingled curiosity and warmth. ”Don Bias says you’re the best soldier he’s ever known.“

  Sharpe thought it odd that she used Vivar’s Christian name, then supposed it was the polite usage of an hidalgo. ‘He exaggerates.“

  “What he actually said, ”Louisa spoke more slowly, and Sharpe sensed she was delivering a message to him, “was that if you had more confidence in yourself, you’d be the best. I suppose I shouldn’t have told you that?” He wondered if the criticism were true and Louisa, mistaking his silence for hurt, apologized.

  “I’m sure it is true,” Sharpe said hastily.

  “Do you like being a soldier?”

  “I always dreamed of having a farm. God knows why, because I know nothing of the business. I’d probably plant the turnips upside down.” He stared at the campfires in the deep valley; tiny sparks of warmth and light in an immensity of cold darkness. “I imagined I’d have a couple of horses in a stable, a stream to fish,” he paused, shrugged, “children.”

  Louisa smiled. “I used to dream of living in a great castle. There would be secret passages, dungeons, and mysterious horsemen bringing messages in the night. I think I should have preferred to have lived in the days of Queen Elizabeth. Catholic priests in the shrubbery and Spaniards in the channel? Except those old enemies are now our friends, aren’t they?”

  “Even the priests?”

  “They aren’t the ogres I thought they were.” She was silent for a second. “But if you’re brought up too firmly in one persuasion then you’re bound to be curious about the enemy, are you not? And we English were always taught to hate Catholics.”

  “I wasn’t.”

  “But you know what I mean. Aren’t you curious about the French?”

  “Not really.”

  Louisa frowned. “I find myself curious about the Catholics. I even find myself with a most unProtestant affection for them now. I’m sure Mr Bufford would be scandalized.”

  “Will he ever know?” Sharpe asked.

  Louisa shrugged. “I shall have to describe my adventures to him, shall I not? And I shall have to confess that the Inquisition didn’t torture me or try to burn me at the stake.” She stared into the night. “One day this will all seem like a dream?”

  “Will it?”

  “Not for you,” she said ruefully. “But one day I will find it hard to believe that any of this even happened. I will be Mrs Bufford of Godalming, a most respectably dull lady.”

  “You could stay here,” Sharpe said, and felt immensely brave for saying it.

  “Could I?” Louisa turned to him. There was a glow to their left where a Rifleman drew on his pipe, but they both ignored it. She turned away and traced some indeterminate pattern on the parapet. “Are you saying that the British army will stay in Portugal?”

  The question surprised Sharpe, who thought he had broken through to a more intimate layer of conversation. “I don’t know.”

  “I think the Lisbon garrison must have gone already,” Louisa said flatly. “And if not, what possible use would such a small garrison be when the French march south? No, Lieutenant, the Emperor has taught us a smart lesson, and I fear we’ll not dare risk our army again.”

  Sharpe wondered where she had gained such firm opinions on strategy. “What I meant when I said you could stay here…“ he began clumsily.

  “Forgive me, I know,” Louisa interrupted him quickly, and there was a very awkward silence between them until she spoke again. “I do know what you’re saying, and I am very sensible of the honour you do me, but I do not want you to ask anything of me.” The formal words were said in a very small voice.

  Sharpe had wanted to say that he would offer her everything that was in his power. It might not be much; in terms of money it was nothing, yet in slavish adoration it was everything. He had not said that, yet Louisa, out of his incoherence, had understood everything and now he felt embarrassed and rejected.

  Louisa must have sensed that embarrassment, and regretted causing it. “I don’t want you to ask anything of me yet, Lieutenant. Will you give me until the city’s captured?”

  “Of course.” Hope flared again in Sharpe, to mingle with the shame left by his clumsy proposal. He supposed he had spoken too soon, and too impetuously, yet Louisa’s evident desire to stay in Spain and avoid the fate of matrimony to Mr Bufford had provoked his words.

  The sentry paced further away from them, the smell of his tobacco drifting back along the ramparts. The fire in the courtyard blazed bright as a man threw a log onto it. Louisa turned to watch the sparks whirl up to the height of the tower’s crenellations. From somewhere deep in the fortress came the wailing noise of one of the Galician bagpipes that inevitably provoked cries of feigned horror from Sharpe’s men. She smiled at the sound of the dutiful protests, then frowned accusingly at Sharpe. “You don’t think Don Bias will succeed in taking the city, do you?”

  “Of course I…“

  “No,” she interrupted him. “I listen to you. You think there are too many Frenchmen in Santiago. And in private you say that this is Don Bias’s madness.”

  Sharpe was somewhat disconcerted by the accusation. He had not admitted his real fears to Louisa, yet she had truly perceived them. “It is madness,” he said defensively. “Even Major Vivar says it is.”

  “He says it is God’s madness, which is different,” Louisa said in gentle reproof. “But it would work better, wouldn’t it, if there were less Frenchmen in the city?”

  “It would work better,” Sharpe said drily, “if I had four Battalions of good redcoats, two batteries of nine pounders, and two hundred more Rifles.”

  “Suppose,” Louisa began, then checked her.words.

  “Go on.”

  “Suppose the French thought that you had marched to a hiding place near the city. A place where you planned to wait during the day so you could attack just after dark? And suppose,” she hurried on to prevent him interrupting, “that the French knew where you were hiding?”

  Sharpe shrugged. “They’d send men out to slaughter us, of course.”

  “And if you were in another place entirely,” Louisa spoke now with the same enthusiasm with which she had greeted the mystery of the str
ongbox, “you could attack while they were out of the city!”

  “It’s all very complicated,” Sharpe said in muted criticism.

  “But supposing I was to tell them that?”

  Sharpe, astonished, said nothing. Then he shook his head abruptly. “Don’t be ridiculous!”

  “No, truly! If I went to Santiago,” Louisa rode over his protest by raising her voice, “if I went there and said that’s what you were doing, they’d believe me! I’d say that you wouldn’t let me come with you, and that you insisted I had to go on my own to Portugal, but I preferred to find my aunt and uncle. They’d believe me!”

  “Never!” Sharpe wanted to stop this outburst of nonsense. “Major Vivar’s already played that trick on them. He spread rumours that he’d travelled with me, which sent the French haring off south. They won’t fall for it again.” He regretted extinguishing such enthusiasm, but her idea was quite hopeless. “Even if you tell the French that we’re hiding somewhere, they won’t send cavalry out to find us until after dawn. And by then it will be too late to attack. If there was a way of stripping the garrison at night…“ He shrugged, intimating that there was no way.

  “It was just a notion.” Louisa, chastened, stared at the bats which flickered past the ramparts in the night.

  “It was kind of you to want to help.“

  “I do want to help.”

  “Just by being here, you help.” Sharpe tried to sound gallant. The sentry turned at the rampart’s end and paced slowly back towards them. Sharpe sensed that the girl would retire to her room at any moment and, though he risked further embarrassment, he could not bear to let the moment pass without reinforcing his thin hopes. “Did I offend you earlier?” he asked clumsily.

  “Don’t think such a thing. I am flattered.” Louisa stared at the lights in the deep valley.

  “I can’t believe that we’re going to run away from Spain.” If that was Louisa’s objection to accepting him, then Sharpe would scotch it, not because he knew that the Lisbon garrison would stay in place, but because he could not accept that the British intervention had been defeated. “We’re going to stay. The Lisbon garrison will be reinforced, and we’ll attack again!” He paused, then plunged closer to the heart of the matter. “And there are officers’ wives with the army. Some live in Lisbon, some stay a day or so behind the army, but it isn’t unusual.”