‘We’re half-good,’ Sharpe spoke with a sudden intensity, ‘but we’re going to be the bloody best. We’re going to be the cocks of the dirtiest dunghill in Europe. We’re going to make the French shiver to think of us. We’re going to be good!’
Harper’s eyes were unreadable; as cold and hard as the stones of the hillside, but there was a stirring of interest in his voice now. ‘And you need me to do it?’
‘Yes, I do. Not to be a bloody lapdog. Your job is to fight for the men. Not like Williams, who wanted you all to like him, but by making them good. That way we all stand a chance of going home when this war’s over. You want to see Ireland again, don’t you?’
‘Aye, I do.’
‘Well, you won’t see it again if you fight against your own side as well as the bloody French.’
Harper blew out a great breath, almost in exasperation. It was plain he had accepted the stripes, however reluctantly, because Vivar had pressed them on him. Now, with equal reluctance, he was being half-persuaded by Sharpe. ‘A good few of us will never see home,’ he said guardedly, ‘not if we go to this cathedral for the Major.’
‘You think we shouldn’t go?’ Sharpe asked with genuine curiosity.
Harper considered. He was not weighing what answer he should give, for his mind was already made up, but rather what tone he should use. He could be surly, thus ensuring that Sharpe knew of his continuing hostility, or he could match Sharpe’s conciliatory manner. He chose neither, but rather spoke in a flat and dutiful voice. ‘I think we should go, sir.’
‘To see a saint on a white horse?’
Again the Irishman teetered between his choices. He stared at the stark horizon, then shrugged as he chose his new course. ‘It never does to question a miracle, sir. You just take the guts and belly out of it and you’re left with nothing at all.’
Sharpe heard the acquiescence, and knew his price was being paid. Harper would co-operate, but Sharpe wanted that co-operation to be willing. He wanted their fragile truce to become more than an agreement of convenience. ‘You’re a good Catholic?’ he asked, wondering just what sort of a man his new Sergeant was.
‘I’m not so devout as the Major, sir. Not many are, are they?’ Harper paused. He was making his peace with Sharpe, but there would be no formal declaration of hostility’s end, nor any regrets about the past, but rather a new beginning that must find its halting start on this cold hillside. Both men were too proud for apology, so apologies must be forgotten. ‘Religion’s for the women, so it is,’ Harper went on, ‘but I make my nod to the Church when I must, and I hope God’s not looking when I don’t want Him to see what I’m doing. But I believe, aye.’
‘And you think there’s some usefulness in taking an old flag to a cathedral?’
‘Aye, I do,’ Harper said flatly, then frowned as he tried to think of an explanation for his bald faith. ‘Did you see that wee church in Salamanca where the Virgin’s statue had eyes that moved? Your priest there said it was a miracle, but you could see the string the fellow jerked to make the wooden eyeballs twitch!’ More relaxed now, he laughed at the memory. ‘But why go to the trouble of having a string? I asked myself. Because the people want a miracle, that’s why. And just because some people invent a miracle doesn’t mean there aren’t real ones, does it now? It means the opposite, so it does, for why would you imitate something that doesn’t exist? Perhaps it is the real banner. Perhaps we will see St James himself, in all his glory, riding in the sky.’ Harper frowned for a second. ‘But we’ll never know if we don’t try, will we?’
‘No.’ Sharpe’s agreement was half-hearted, for he could put no credence in Vivar’s superstition. Yet he had wanted Harper’s opinion, for he keenly felt the worry of the night’s decision on him. By what right could a mere Lieutenant order men into battle? His duty, surely, was to take these men to safety, not march them against a French-held city. Yet there was an impulse to adventure which led him there, and Sharpe had wanted to know if Harper would follow the same impulse. It seemed he would, which meant that the other greenjackets would also. ‘You think the men will fight?’ Sharpe asked openly.
‘One or two of them will make a fuss.’ Harper was scornful of the prospect. ‘Gataker will squeal, I dare say, but I’ll knock his bloody brains about. Mind you, they’ll want to know what it is they’re fighting for, sir.’ He paused. ‘Why the hell do they call it a gonfalon? It’s a bloody flag, so it is.’
Sharpe, who had had to ask Vivar the same question, smiled. ‘A gonfalon’s different. It’s a long stringy banner you hang off a cross-staff on a pole. Old-fashioned sort of thing.’
An awkward silence followed. Like strange dogs meeting they had growled at each other, made a rough peace, and now kept a cautious distance. Sharpe ended the silence by nodding down into the valley where, far beneath the high track, men were arriving. They were villagers; tough Galicians from across the Mouromorto domain; herdsmen, miners, blacksmiths, fishermen, and shepherds. ‘In one week,’ he asked Harper, ‘can we knock that lot into infantry?’
‘We have to do that, sir?’
‘The Major will provide interpreters, and we teach them to be infantry.’
‘In a week?’ Harper sounded astonished.
‘You believe in miracles, don’t you?’ Sharpe said lightly.
Harper replied in kind. He fluttered the stripes in his hand, and grinned. ‘I believe in miracles, sir.’
‘Then let’s get to work, Sergeant.’
‘Bloody hell.’ It was the first time Harper had heard himself addressed as Sergeant. It seemed to surprise him, then he gave a sly grin and Sharpe, who had trodden the same path years before, knew that the Irishman was secretly pleased. Harper might have fought against the stripes, but they were a recognition of his worth, and he doubtless believed that no other man in the company deserved them. So now Harper had the chevrons, and Sharpe had a Sergeant.
And both men had a miracle to perform.
CHAPTER 12
At night the men would sing around the fire in the courtyard. They did not sing the rumbustious marching songs which could make the miles melt beneath hard boots, but the soft, melancholic tunes of home. They sang of the girls left behind, of mothers, of children, of home.
Each night there was the flicker of campfires in the deep valley beneath the ramparts where Vivar’s volunteers made their encampment. The volunteers came from throughout the Mouromorto domains. They bivouacked where chestnuts grew beside the stream in a sheltered crook of the hill, and they made wood and turf huts. They were peasants who obeyed the ancient call to arms, just as their ancestors had shouldered a scythe blade and marched to face the Moors. Such men would not leave their womenfolk behind, and at night the skirted shapes flickered between the fires and the children cried from the turf huts. Sharpe heard Harper warn the Riflemen against the temptation of the women. ‘One touch,’ he said, ‘and I’ll crack your skull open like a bloody egg.’ There was no trouble, and Sharpe marvelled at the ease with which Harper had assumed his unwanted authority.
By day there was work. Hard work, urgent work, to fashion a victory from defeat. The priests drew a map of the city on which, in careful detail, Vivar plotted the French defences. News of the enemy preparations came daily, fetched to the hills by refugees who fled from the invader and told tales of arrests and killings.
The city was still bounded by the decayed walls of its mediaeval defences. Those walls were gone in places, and in others the houses had spilt outside to make suburbs, yet the French were basing their defence on the ancient line of ramparts. Where the stones had fallen they had made barricades. The defences were not fearsome; Santiago de Compostela was no frontier city, enwrapped in star-trace and ravelins, but the ramparts could still be a terrible obstacle to an infantry attack. ‘We attack just before dawn,’ Vivar announced early in the week.
Sharpe grunted agreement. ‘What if they have picquets beyond the walls?’
‘They will. We ignore them.’
Shar
pe heard the first risk being taken, the first corner cut in this desperate lunge for an impossible victory. Vivar was relying on darkness and weariness to fuddle the wits of the French. Yet it would only take one soldier to stumble in the night, for his musket to spark and fire, and the whole attack would be betrayed. Vivar proposed attacking without loaded muskets. There would be time, he said, after the initial surprise for the men to load their guns. Sharpe, an infantryman who relied on his gun far more than a cavalryman like Vivar, hated the idea. Vivar pressed, but the most Sharpe would yield was that he would consider it.
The plans grew more detailed and, as they did, so Sharpe’s fears gathered like dark clouds looming on the skyline. It was easy to win a victory on paper. There were no dogs to bark, no stones to strip a man, no rain to soak powder, and the enemy performed as dozily as Vivar could wish; on paper. ‘They’ll know we’re coming?’ Sharpe asked him.
‘They’ll suspect we’re coming,’ Vivar allowed. The French could hardly have failed to hear of the gathering in the hills, though they might well dismiss such a threat as negligible. They had, after all, broken the armies of Spain and Britain, so what did they have to fear from a few peasants? Yet the Count of Mouromorto and Colonel de l’Eclin would know exactly what ambition spurred Blas Vivar, and they were both in Santiago. The refugees confirmed it. Marshal Ney’s cavalry had taken the city and then ridden back to Corunna to join Marshal Soult, leaving two thousand French cavalrymen inside the circuit of broken walls.
They had not been left there to stop an ancient banner reaching a shrine, but rather to collect forage from the coastal valleys of Galicia. Having thrown the British out of Spain, Marshal Soult was now planning to march south. His officers, bragging in the taverns of Corunna, spoke openly of their plans, and those words were faithfully retailed to Vivar. The French, once their wounded and frostbitten ranks were mended, would turn south on Portugal. They would conquer that country and expel the British from Lisbon. The coast of Europe would thus be sealed against British trade, and the Emperor’s stranglehold would be complete.
Soult’s route south would lead through Santiago de Compostela and thus he had ordered that the city become his forward supply base. His army would collect those supplies to fuel its southern attack. French cavalry was aggressively patrolling the countryside in search of the food and fodder which, the refugees told Vivar, was being stockpiled in houses about the cathedral’s plaza. ‘So you see,’ Vivar said to Sharpe on a night later in the week when they met as usual to stare at the city’s map and hone their plan of assault, ‘you have a proper reason for attacking, Lieutenant.’
‘Proper?’
‘You can claim that you are not just humouring a mad Spaniard. You are protecting your Lisbon garrison by destroying French supplies. Is that not true?’
But Sharpe was in no mood for such reassurance. He stared at the city’s plan, imagining the French sentries staring into the night. ‘They’ll know we’re coming.’ Sharpe could not rid himself of the fear of the enemy’s preparedness.
‘But not where we’ll attack, nor when.’
‘I wish de l’Eclin wasn’t there.’
Vivar scorned his fears. ‘You think Imperial Guards don’t sleep?’
Sharpe ignored the question. ‘He isn’t there to collect forage. His job is to take the gonfalon, and he knows we’ll bring it to him. Whatever we plan, Major, he’s already thought of. He’s waiting for us! He’s ready for us!’
‘You’re frightened of him.’ Vivar leaned against the wall of the tower room where the map was kept. Firelight flickered in the courtyard below where a Spaniard sang a slow, sad song.
‘I’m frightened of him,’ Sharpe confirmed, ‘because he’s good. Too good.’
‘He’s only good in attack. He can’t defend! When you attacked his ambush, and I attacked him in the farmyard, he wasn’t so clever, was he?’
‘No,’ Sharpe allowed.
‘And now he’s trying to defend a city! He’s a chasseur, a hunter like a Cazador, and he’s no good at defence.’ Vivar would brook no defeatism. ‘Of course we’ll win! Thanks to your ideas, we’ll win.’
The praise was calculated to elicit enthusiasm from Sharpe who had suggested an inside-out stratagem for the assault. The attack would not try to take the city house by house, or street by street, but instead it would strike fast and hard for the city’s centre. Then, split into ten parties, one party for each of the roads that broke the circuit of the ancient defences, the attackers would drive the French outwards towards the open country. ‘Let them get away!’ Sharpe had argued. ‘So long as you take the city.’
If they took the city, which Sharpe doubted, they could hope to hold it for no more than thirty-six hours. Soult’s infantry, marching from Corunna and reinforced with the superb French artillery, would soon make mincemeat of the Major’s men. ‘I only need a day,’ Vivar hesitated. ‘We capture it at dawn, we find the traitors by noon, we destroy the supplies, and that night we unfurl the gonfalon. The next day we leave in glory.’
Sharpe went to the narrow window. Bats, woken from their winter’s sleep by the arrival of soldiers in the fortress, flickered in the red light. The hills were dark. Somewhere on those black slopes Sergeant Harper led a patrol of Riflemen on a long, looping march. The patrol was not just to search for a bivouacking French cavalry patrol, but also to keep the men hard and accustom them to the vagaries of marching at night. All of Vivar’s small force, including the half-trained volunteers, would have to make such a journey and, having seen what chaos a night march could inflict on troops, Sharpe flinched inwardly. He thought, too, of the dreadful odds. There were two thousand French cavalrymen in Santiago de Compostela. Not all would be there when Vivar attacked; some would be bivouacking in the farmlands which they pillaged, but there would still be a mighty preponderance of enemy.
Against whom would march fifty Riflemen, one hundred and fifty Cazadores of whom only a hundred had horses, and close to three hundred half-trained volunteers.
Madness. Sharpe turned on the Spaniard. ‘Why don’t you wait till the French have marched south?’
‘Because to wait wouldn’t make a story which will be told in every Spanish tavern. Because I have a brother who must die. Because, if I wait, I will be thought as spineless as the other officers who’ve fled south. Because I’ve sworn to do it. Because I cannot believe in defeat. No. We go soon, we go very soon.’ Vivar was almost speaking to himself, staring down at the charcoal marks which showed the French defences. ‘Just as soon as our volunteers are ready, we go.’
Sharpe said nothing. The truth was that he now believed that the attack was madness, but it was a madness he had helped to plan and sworn to support.
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 Blas 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.
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