Sharpe’s rifles

by Bernard Cornwell

  “Are you sure…“ Harper began.

  “Come on!” Sharpe’s voice was made harsher by the fears which seethed inside him. This whole expedition was misbegotten and mad! Yet pride would not let him turn back, nor would it let him make an obeisance towards Vivar’s water-sprites. “I haven’t got any bloody holy water!” he growled. “Anyway, it’s superstitious bloody nonsense, Sergeant, and you know it.”

  “I don’t know that at all, sir.”

  “Come on!” Sharpe led the way through the stream and cursed because his tattered boots let in cold water. The Riflemen, oblivious to the cause of the small delay at the water’s edge, followed. This mist seemed thicker in the valley’s bottom and the guide, who had splashed through the stream with Sharpe, hesitated on the far bank.

  “Hurry!” Sharpe growled, though it was a pointless admonition for the blacksmith spoke no English. “Hurry! Hurry!”

  The guide, clearly flustered, indicated a narrow sheep track that angled up the further slope. As he climbed, Sharpe realized they must have come very close to the city, which was betrayed by the mephitic stink of its streets that seemed to him to be a foretaste of the horror that awaited his men.

  Sharpe suddenly realized that the thump and chink of moving cavalry had been left behind, and he knew Vivar must have sent the Cazadores on their northward detour which was designed to take them far from the ears of French sentries. The ill-trained volunteer infantry should be some two or three hundred yards behind Sharpe by now. The Riflemen were isolated, ahead of the attack, and now very close to the holy city of St James.

  And they were late, for the mist was being silvered by the first hint of the false dawn. Sharpe could see Harper beside him, he could even see the beads of moisture on the peak of Harper’s shako. He had lost his own shako in the battle at the farm, and now wore a Cazador’s forage cap instead. The cap was a pale grey and Sharpe was seized with the sudden irrational knowledge that the light-coloured cloth would make his head a target for some French marksman on the hill above. He snatched it off and threw it into some brambles. He could feel the thump of his heart. His belly was tender and his mouth dry.

  The blacksmith, going very cautiously now, led the Riflemen across a rough pasture and into a grove of elm trees that grew at the hill’s summit. The bare branches dripped and the mist wavered in the darkness. Sharpe could smell a fire, though he could not see it. He wondered if it belonged to one of the French guardposts and the thought of the waiting sentries made him feel horribly alone and vulnerable. The dawn was coming. This was the moment when he should be attacking, but the mist masked the landmarks which Vivar had coached him to expect. To his right there should be a church, to his left the loom of the city, and he should not be on a hilltop, but in a deep ravine which would hide the Riflemen’s approach.

  Sharpe, lacking those landmarks, supposed there was still further to go, that they yet had to drop down into the ravine, but the blacksmith checked under the trees and, in dumbshow, indicated that the city lay to their left. Sharpe did not respond, and the guide plucked again at the Rifleman’s green sleeve and pointed to the left. “Santiago! Santiago!”

  “Jesus bloody wept.” Sharpe dropped to one knee.

  “Sir?” Harper knelt beside him.

  “We’re in the wrong bloody place!”

  “God save Ireland.” The Sergeant’s voice was scarce above a whisper. The guide, unable to gain an understandable response from the greenjackets, disappeared into the darkness.

  Sharpe swore again . He was in the wrong place. That mistake worried and irritated him, but what angered him more was the knowledge that Vivar would say it was because the spirits of the stream, the xanes, had been slighted. God damn it, but that was nonsense! All the same Sharpe had gone astray, he was late, and he did not know where Vivar’s other troops were. The fears took hold of him. This was not how an attack should start! There should be bugles and banners in the mist! Instead he was alone, lost, far ahead of the Cazadores and volunteers. He told himself he had known this would happen! He had seen it happen before, in India, where good troops, forced to a night attack, had become lost, frightened, and beaten.

  “What do we do, sir?” Harper asked.

  Sharpe did not answer, because he did not know. He was tempted to say they would pull back in an abandonment of the whole attack, but then a shape moved to his left, boots rustled the frosted grass, and the blacksmith re-appeared in the mist with Bias Vivar at his side. “You’ve come too far,” Vivar whispered.

  “God damn it, I know!”

  The blacksmith was evidently trying to explain how the Riflemen had risked the mischief of the xanes, but Vivar could spare no time for such regrets. He waved the man away and knelt beside Sharpe. “It’s two hundred paces to the church. That way.” Vivar pointed to his left. The church should have been to their right.

  Vivar’s force had curled around the city in the night and now approached from the north. The city’s northern wall had long been destroyed, its stone taken to build the newer houses which spread beyond the line of mediaeval fortifications along the road which led to Corunna. He had chosen that road for his approach, not only because it lacked the barrier of a mediaeval wall, but also because the guards might think that any approaching troops were Frenchmen coming from Soult’s army.

  The church, which served the newer suburb, had been turned into a French guardpost. It lay three hundred yards outside the main defence line that was composed of barricades. Every road into the city had such a guardhouse, intended to give an early alarm should Santiago be assaulted. The sentries of such posts might be killed in an attack, but the noise of their sacrifice would serve as a warning to the city’s main defences. “I think,” Vivar whispered to Sharpe, “that God is with us. He’s sent the mist.”

  “He’s sent us to the wrong God-damned place.”

  The Riflemen should have been a quarter-mile to the south, in the marshy ravine, and they should have been there an hour before. The ravine snaked behind the church and led up to the houses just outside the main defences. They had lost the chance to make that secretive approach. Nor, so close to the enemy and so near to the treacherous wolf-light of dawn, could they spare the time to creep back through the mist.

  “Leave the guardhouse to me,” Vivar said.

  “You want me to charge straight past it?”

  “Yes.”

  Which was easy for Vivar to ask, but it meant a change of plan which put the whole assault in jeopardy. Because they had come late and to the wrong place, the Riflemen would lose surprise. Vivar proposed that Sharpe’s assault ignore the guardhouse. That was possible, but the French sentries would not ignore them. Their reaction would take time. Astonished men lose precious seconds, and further seconds could be lost if the enemy muskets, dampened by the mist, misfired. The darkness might even have swallowed the Riflemen before the French fired, but fire they would, startling the dawn long before the greenjackets had covered the three hundred yards from the church to the city’s defences. The guards at the barricades would be warned. They would be waiting and, at best, Vivar’s force could find itself clinging to a few houses on the northern side of the city and, as the day lightened and the mist shredded, the cavalry would cut off their retreat. By midday, Sharpe knew, they could all be prisoners of the French.

  “Well?” Vivar sensed from Sharpe’s silence and immobility that the Rifleman already believed the battle lost.

  “Where’s your cavalry?” Sharpe asked, not out of interest, but to delay the horrid decision.

  “Davila’s leading them. They’ll be in place. The volunteers are in the pasture behind.” Receiving no response, Vivar touched Sharpe’s arm. “With or without you, I’ll do it. I have to do it, Lieutenant. I would not care if the Emperor himself and all the forces of hell guarded the city, I would have to do it. There is no other way of expunging my family’s shame. I have a brother who is a traitor, so the treason must be washed away with enemy blood. And God will look mercifully upon
such a wish, Lieutenant. You say you do not believe, but I think on the verge of battle every man feels the breath of God.”

  It was a fine speech, but Sharpe did not relent. “Will God keep the guardhouse quiet?”

  “If he wills it, yes.” The mist was lightening. Sharpe could see the bare pale branches of the elm above him. Every second’s delay was puting the assault in more jeopardy, and Vivar knew it. “Well?” he asked again. Still Sharpe said nothing and the Spaniard, with a gesture of disgust, stood. “We Spanish will do it alone, Lieutenant.”

  “Bugger you, no! Rifles!” Sharpe stood. He thought of Louisa; she had said something about seizing the moment and, despite his demons, Sharpe thought he might lose her if he did not act now. “Coats and packs off!” The Riflemen, so they could fight unencumbered, obeyed. “And load!”

  Vivar hissed a caution against loading the rifles, but Sharpe would not go into the attack with neither surprise nor loaded weapons. The risk of a misfire must be endured. He waited till the last ramrod had been thrust home and the last lock primed. “Fix swords!”

  Blades scraped, then clicked as the bayonets’ spring-loaded catches slotted onto the rifle muzzles. Sharpe slung his own rifle and drew his big clumsy sword. Tn file, Sergeant. Tell the men not to make a bloody sound!“ He looked at Vivar. Til not have you thinking we didn’t have the courage.”

  Vivar smiled. “I would never have thought that. Here.” He reached up and took the tiny sprig of dead rosemary from his hat and tucked it into a loose loop on Sharpe’s jacket.

  “Does that make me one of your elite?” Sharpe asked.

  Vivar shook his head. “It’s a herb that averts evil, Lieutenant.”

  For a second Sharpe was tempted to reject the super-stition, then, remembering his defiance of the xanes, he let the shred of rosemary stay where it was. The morning’s task had become so desperate that he was even prepared to believe that a dead herb could give him protection. “Forward!”

  In for a penny, Sharpe thought and, God damn it, but he had put his approval on Vivar’s madness back in the fort’s chapel when he had let the mystery of the gonfalon overwhelm him like the heady fumes of some dark and heated wine. Now was not the time to let the fears stop the insanity.

  So forward. Forward through the trees, past a stone wall, and suddenly Sharpe’s boots grated on flint and he saw they had come to the road. A building loomed dark to his right, while ahead of him he could at last see the guardhouse fire. Its flames were dim, smeared vague by the mist, but it had been lit outside the church and thus illumined the roadway. Any second now the challenge might sound. “Close up!” Sharpe whispered to Harper. “And fingers off triggers!”

  “Close up!” Harper hissed. “And don’t bloody fire!”

  Sharpe proposed to go past the guardhouse at a run. The noise would begin then, but that could not be helped. It would begin with the smatter of musket and rifle fire, and end in the full cacophony of death. For now, though, there was only the scrape of boots on flint, the thump of muffled equipment, and the hoarse breathing of men already tired by hours and hours of marching.

  Harper crossed himself. The other Irishman in the company did the same. They grinned, not with pleasure, but fear. The Riflemen were shaking, and their bellies wanted to empty. Mary, Mother of God, Harper repeated to himself time and time again. He supposed he should say a prayer to St James, but he knew none, and so he nervously repeated the more familiar invocation. Be with us now and at the hour of our death. Amen.

  Sharpe led the advance. He walked slowly; ever staring at the smeared light of the watch-fire. The flamelight glinted up his sword blade which he held low. Far beyond the first blaze, he could now see the blur of other fires which must be burning at the margin of the main French defence. The mist was silvering, lightening, and he even thought he could see the faint tangle of pinnacles and domes that was the city’s roofline. It was a small city, Vivar had said; a mere handful of houses about the abbey, hostels, cathedral, and plaza, but a city held by the French that must be taken by a motley little army.

  A motley, brown-dressed, ill-trained little force that was inspired by one man’s faith. Vivar, Sharpe thought, must be drunk on God if he believed the moth-eaten shred of silk could work its miracle. It was madness. If the British army knew that an ex-Sergeant was leading Riflemen on such a mission, they would court-martial him. Sharpe supposed he was as mad as Vivar; the only difference was that Vivar was goaded by God, and Sharpe by the stubborn, stupid pride of a soldier who would not admit defeat.

  Yet, Sharpe reminded himself, other men had achieved glory on dreams just as impractical. Those few knights, forced a thousand years before to their fastnesses in the mountains by the overwhelming armies of Mahomet, must have felt just this same despair. When those knights had tightened their girths and lifted their lances from the stirrup-couches and stared at the great crescent of the enemy beneath the rippling banners that had brought blood from the desert, they must have known that this was the hour of their death. Yet still they had slammed down the visors of their helmets, raked back their spurs, and charged.

  A stone grated beneath Sharpe’s foot and brought his thoughts back to the present. They were in a street now, the countryside left behind. The windows of the silent houses had iron grilles. The road was climbing, not steeply, but enough of a slope to make the charge more difficult. A shape moved by the fire, then Sharpe saw there was a crude barrier placed across the road that would stop his mad dash to the city’s main defences. The barriers was nothing but two handcarts and some chairs, but still a barrier.

  The moving shape by the watch-fire resolved itself into a human silhouette; a Frenchman who stooped to light a pipe with a burning spill taken from the flames. The man suspected nothing, nor did he look northwards to where he might have seen the reflection of firelight on fixed bayonets.

  Then a dog barked in a house to Sharpe’s right. He was so tense that he jumped sideways. The dog became frantic. Another dog took up the alarm, and a cockerel challenged the morning. The Riflemen instinctively quickened their pace.

  The Frenchman by the fire straightened and turned. Sharpe could see the distinctive shape of the man’s shako; an infantryman. Not a dismounted cavalryman, but a Goddamned French infantryman who unslung his musket and pointed it towards the Riflemen. ‘Qui vive?

  The challenge began the day’s fight. Sharpe took a breath, and ran.

  Chapter 14

  It was extraordinary how, once the waiting was over, the fears sloughed away.

  Sharpe ran. It was uphill. His bootsole, so carefully sewn into place the day before, flapped free. Though he ran on the road’s flint-hardened surface, it seemed as if he pounded through a thick and cloying mud, yet the fears went because the die was cast and the game must be seen to its end.

  „Qui vive?“

  ‘Ami! Ami! Ami!“ Vivar had given him a whole French phrase that might confuse an alert enemy sentry, but Sharpe had been unable to commit the strange words to memory, and so had settled on the simpler word for ’friend‘. He shouted it louder, at the same time pointing behind him as though he fled from some enemy hidden in the mist.

  The sentry hesitated. Four other Frenchmen had come from the church porch. One had a Sergeant’s stripe on his blue sleeve, but he evidently did not want the responsibility of firing on his own side for he shouted into the church for an officer to come. ‘Capitaine! Capitaine!“ Then, shako-less and still buttoning his bluejacket, the Sergeant turned back towards the approaching Riflemen. ’Halte la!”

  Sharpe held up his left hand as though he was ordering his men to slow down. He slowed himself, gasping again: “Ami! Ami!“ He appeared to stumble forward, exhausted, and the clumsy subterfuge took him to within two paces of the enemy Sergeant. Then he looked into the Frenchman’s eyes and saw the sudden terror of realization.

  It was too late. All Sharpe’s fears, and all the relief from those fears, went into his first sword stroke. One pace forward, the snarling lunge, and t
he Sergeant was folding over the twisting blade and the first sentry was opening his mouth to shout as Harper’s bayonet came up into his belly. The Frenchman’s finger closed in spasm on his musket’s trigger. Sharpe was so close to the man that he did not see the muzzle flame, only the explosion in the pan. A spark of burning powder fizzed over his head, smoke billowed around him, then he was twisting and wrenching his sword free of the Frenchman’s flesh. The Sergeant fell backwards into the watch-fire and his hair, which had served as his towel for greasy hands, flared bright and high for an instant.

  The remaining three Frenchmen were retreating towards the porch, but the Riflemen were faster. Another musket shot stunned the dawn, then the sword-bayonets did their work. A Frenchman screamed terribly.

  “Silence the bastard!” Harper snapped. A blade ripped, there was a choking sound, then nothing.

  A pistol banged from the church door. A greenjacket gasped, turned, and fell into the fire. Two rifles fired, throwing a dark shape back into the church’s shadowed interior. The burning Rifleman screamed foully as he was dragged from the flames. The dogs were barking like the hounds of hell.

  Surprise was gone, and there were yet three hundred yards of road to cover. Sharpe was pulling the handcart aside, opening the road to the cavalry that must follow. “Leave the buggers!” There were still Frenchmen inside the church but they must be ignored if the assault was to have any chance of success. Even Sharpe’s own wounded must be abandoned if the city was to fall. “Leave them! Come on!”

  The Riflemen obeyed. One or two hung back, seeking safety in the shadows, but Harper demanded to know whether they would prefer to fight him or the French and the laggards found their courage. They followed Sharpe into the dark mist that was not so dark any longer. There were bugles sounding in the city, not in alarm yet, merely ordering the stand-to, but the calls served to instil urgency into the greenjackets. The haste made them lose all semblance of military order; they advanced neither in file nor line, but as a pounding mass of men who ran up the slope towards the looming city.