Sharpe's Battle

by Bernard Cornwell

  "Open files!" the Lieutenant shouted and the two ranks of men obediently opened their files out from the centre to let the barricade's defenders stream through. At least three red-jacketed bodies were left on the street. A wounded man collapsed and pulled himself into a doorway, then a red-faced captain with grey side whiskers ran through the gap and shouted at the men to close ranks.

  The files closed again. "Front rank, kneel!" the Lieutenant shouted when his two ranks were again arrayed across the street. "Wait for it!" he called, and this time his voice cracked with nervousness. "Wait for it!" he called again more firmly, then drew his sword and gave the slim blade a couple of tentative strokes. He swallowed as he watched the French finally burst through the wreckage and charge up the hill with their bayonets fixed.

  "Fire!" the Lieutenant shouted, and the twenty-four muskets crashed in unison to choke the road with smoke. Somewhere a man was screaming. Sharpe fired his rifle and heard the distinctive sound of a bullet hitting a musket stock.

  "Front rank, stand!" the Lieutenant called. "At the double! Advance!"

  The smoke cleared to show a half-dozen blue-coated bodies down on the stones and earth of the road. Burning scraps of wadding flickered like candle flames.

  The enemy retreated fast from the threat of the bayonets, but then another mass of blue uniforms appeared at the bottom edge of the village.

  "I'm ready, Pollard!" a voice called behind Sharpe, and the Lieutenant, hearing it, halted his men.

  "Back, boys!" he shouted and the two ranks, unable to advance against the new mass of the enemy, broke files and retreated uphill. The new attackers had loaded muskets and some stopped to aim. Harper gave them the seven barrels of his volley gun, then followed Sharpe up the hill as the smoke of the big gun spread between the houses.

  The grey-whiskered Captain had formed a new defence line that opened to let the Lieutenant's men through. The Lieutenant formed his men into their two ranks a few paces behind the Captain's men and shouted at the redcoats to reload. Sharpe reloaded with them. Harper, knowing he would not have time to reload the volley gun, strapped it across his back and spat a bullet into his rifle.

  The drums were still beating the pas de charge, while on the ridge behind

  Sharpe the pipes were rivalling the sound with their feral music. The cannon on the ridge were still firing, presumably aiming case shot at the distant

  French artillery. The small village reeked of powder smoke, reverberated with musket shots and echoed with the screams and shouts of frightened men.

  "Fire!" the Captain ordered and his men poured a volley down the street. It was answered by a French volley. The enemy had decided to use their firepower rather than try to rush the defenders, and it was a battle the Captain knew he must lose. "Close on me, Pollard!" he shouted and the young Lieutenant took his men down to join the Captain's troops.

  "Fire!" Pollard shouted, then made a mewing sound that was momentarily drowned by the crash of his men's muskets. The Lieutenant staggered back, blood showing on the white facings of his elegant coat. He staggered again and let go of his sword which clattered on a doorstep.

  "Take him back, Pat," Sharpe said. "Meet me at the top of the cemetery."

  Harper lifted the Lieutenant as though he was a child and ran back up the street. The redcoats were reloading, their ramrods rising and falling over their dark shakoes. Sharpe waited for the smoke to clear and looked for an enemy officer. He saw a moustached man carrying a sword, aimed, fired and thought he saw the man twist backwards, but the smoke obscured his view and then a great rush of Frenchmen pounded up the street.

  "Bayonets!" the Captain called.

  One redcoat backed away. Sharpe put his hand in the small of the man's back and shoved him hard back into his rank. He slung his rifle and drew his sword again. The French charge stalled in the face of the unbroken ranks with their grim steel blades, but the Captain knew he was outgunned and outnumbered.

  "Pace backwards!" he ordered. "Slow and steady! Slow and steady! If you're loaded, boys, give them a shot."

  A dozen muskets fired, but at least twice as many Frenchmen returned the volley and the Captain's ranks seemed to shudder as the balls struck home.

  Sharpe was serving as a sergeant now, keeping the files in place from behind, but he was also looking back up the street to where a mixture of redcoats and greenjackets were retreating haphazardly from an alley. Their ragged retreat suggested the French were not far behind them and in a moment or two, Sharpe reckoned, the Captain's small company might be cut off. "Captain!" he shouted, then pointed with his sword when he had the man's attention.

  "Back, lads, back!" The Captain grasped the danger immediately. His men turned and ran up the street. Some were helping their comrades, a few ran hard to find safety, but most stayed together to join the larger number of British troops who were forming in the small cobbled space at the village's centre.

  Williams had held three reserve companies in the safer houses at the upper end of the village and those men had now come down to stem the rising French tide.

  The French burst out of the alley just as the company went past its mouth. A redcoat went down to a bayonet, then the Captain slashed his sword in a wild cut that sliced open the face of the Frenchman. A big French sergeant swung his musket stock at the Captain, but Sharpe lunged into the man's face with his sword and though the blow was off balance and feeble, it served to check the man while the Captain got away. The Frenchman rammed his bayonet at

  Sharpe, had it parried away, then Sharpe skewered the sword low and hard, twisting the blade to stop it being gripped by the man's flesh. He ripped it clear of the Frenchman's belly and went back up the hill, one pace, two, watching for more attacks, then a hand pulled him into the re-formed British ranks in the open space. "Fire!" someone shouted, and Sharpe's ears rang with the deafening bellow of serried muskets exploding all around his head.

  "I want that alley cleared!" Colonel Williams's voice called. "Go on,

  Wentworth! Take your men down. Don't let them stand!"

  A group of redcoats charged. There were French muskets firing from the windows of the houses and some of the men burst through the doors to drive the French out. More enemy came up the main street. They came in small groups, stopping to fire, then running up into the square where the battle was ragged and desperate. One small group of redcoats was overrun by a rush of Frenchmen who came out of a side alley and there were screams as the enemy's bayonets rose and fell. A boy somehow escaped the massacre and scrambled over the cobbles.

  "Where's your musket, Sanders?" a sergeant shouted.

  The boy swore, turned to look for his fallen weapon and was shot in the open mouth. The French, exhilarated by their victory over the small group, charged over the boy's body to attack the larger mass of men who were trying to hold the mouth of the recaptured alley. They were met by bayonets. The clash of steel on steel and of steel on wood was louder than the muskets, for few men now had time to load a musket and so they used their blades or the stocks of their guns instead of bullets. The two sides stood poised just feet from each other and every now and then a brave group of men would summon the courage to make a charge into the enemy ranks. Then the voices would rise to hoarse shouts and the clash of steel would begin again. One such assault was led by a tall, bareheaded French officer who drove two redcoats aside with whip-quick slashes of his sword, then lunged at a British officer who was fumbling with his pistol. The red-coated officer stepped back and so exposed Sharpe. The tall Frenchman feinted left and managed to draw Sharpe's sword away in the parry, then reversed his stroke and was already gritting his teeth for the killing lunge, but Sharpe was not fighting by the rules of some Parisian fencing master and so he kicked the man in the crotch, then hammered the heavy iron hilt of the sword down onto his head. He kicked the man out of the ranks, and back-cut his heavy sword at a French soldier who was trying to drag a musket and bayonet out of a redcoat's hand. The blade's edge, unsharpened, served as a cudgel ra
ther than a sword, but the Frenchman reeled away with his head in his hands.

  "Forward!" a voice shouted and the makeshift British line advanced down the street. The enemy retreated from Williams's reserve who now threatened to take back the whole lower part of the village, but then a vagary of wind swirled away a patch of dust and gunsmoke and Sharpe saw a whole new wave of French attackers swarming over the gardens and walls on the stream's eastern bank.

  "Sharpe!" Colonel Williams called. "Are you spoken for?"

  Sharpe elbowed back through the tight ranks of redcoats. "Sir?"

  "I'd be damned grateful if you were to find Spencer on the ridge and tell him we could use a few reinforcements."

  "At once, sir."

  "Lost a couple of my aides, you see," Williams began to explain, but Sharpe had already left on the errand. "Good man!" Williams called after him, then turned back to the fight that had degenerated into a series of bloody and desperate brawls in the murderous confines of the alleys and back gardens. It was a fight Williams feared losing for the French had committed their own reserves and a new mass of blue-coated infantry was now pouring into the village.

  Sharpe ran past wounded men dragging themselves uphill. The village was clouded with dust and smoke and he took one wrong turning and found himself in a blind alley of stone walls. He backtracked, found the right street again," and emerged on the slope above the village where a crowd of wounded men waited for help.

  They were too weak to climb the slope and some called out as Sharpe ran past.

  He ignored them. Instead he climbed up the goat path beside the graveyard. A group of worried officers were standing beside the church and Sharpe shouted at them to see if any knew where General Spencer was. "I've got a message!" he called.

  "What is it?" a man called back. "I'm his aide!"

  "Williams wants reinforcements. Too many Frogs!"

  The staff officer turned and ran towards the brigade that was waiting beyond the crest while Sharpe paused to catch his breath. His sword was in his hand and its blade was sticky with blood. He cleaned the steel on the edge of his jacket, then jumped in alarm as a bullet smacked hard into the stone wall beside him. He turned and saw a puff of musket smoke showing between some broken beams at the upper edge of the village and he realized the French had taken those houses and were now trying to cut off the defenders still inside

  Fuentes de Onoro. The greenjackets in the graveyard opened fire, their rifles cutting down any enemy foolish enough to show himself at a window or door for too long.

  Sharpe sheathed his cleaned sword then went over the wall and crouched behind a slab of granite on which a rough cross had been chiselled. He loaded the rifle, then aimed it at the broken roof where he had seen the musket smoke.

  The flint had skewed in the doghead and he released the screw, adjusted the leather patch that gripped the flint, then tightened it down. He thumbed the cock back. He was bitterly thirsty, the usual fate of any man who had been biting into salty gunpowder cartridges. The air was foul with the stench of smoke.

  A musket appeared between the beams and, a second later, a man's head showed.

  Sharpe fired first, but the rifle's smoke hid the bullet's mark. Harper slid down the graveyard's slope to land beside Sharpe. "Jesus," the Irishman said,

  "Jesus."

  "Bad in there." Sharpe nodded down to the village. He primed the rifle, then upended the weapon to charge the muzzle. He had left his ramrod conveniently propped against the grave.

  "More of the buggers coming over the stream," Harper said. He bit a bullet and was forced to silence until he could spit it into the rifle. "That poor lieutenant. Died."

  "It was a chest wound," Sharpe said, ramming the ball and charge hard down the barrel. "Not many survive chest wounds."

  "I stayed with the poor bugger," Harper said. "His mother's a widow, he told me. She sold the family plate to buy his uniform and sword, then said he'd be as great a soldier as any there was."

  "He was good," Sharpe said. "He kept his nerve." He cocked the rifle.

  "I told him that. Gave him a prayer. Poor wee bugger. First battle, too."

  Harper pulled the trigger. "Got you, you bastard," he said and immediately fished a new cartridge from his pouch while he pulled the hammer to half cock.

  More British defenders were emerging from between the houses, forced out of the village by the sheer weight of French numbers. "They should send some more men down there," Harper said.

  "They're coming," Sharpe said. He laid the rifle's barrel on the gravestone and looked for a target.

  "Taking their time, though," Harper said. On this occasion he did not spit the bullet into the rifle, but first wrapped it in the small patch of greased leather that would grip the barrel's rifling and so make the ball spin as it was fired. It took longer to load such a round, but it made the Baker rifle far more accurate. The Irishman grunted as he forced the patched bullet down the barrel that was caked with the deposits of gunpowder. "There's some boiling water behind the church," he said, telling Sharpe where to go if he needed to clean the fouled powder from his rifle's barrel.

  "I'll piss down it if I have to."

  "If you've got any piss. I'm dry as a dead rat. Jesus, you bastard." This was addressed at a bearded Frenchman who had appeared between two of the houses where he was beating down a greenjacket with a pioneer's axe. Sharpe, already loaded, took aim through the sudden spray of the dying rifleman's blood and pulled the trigger, but at least a dozen other greenjackets in the churchyard had seen the incident and the bearded Frenchman seemed to quiver as the bullets whipped home. "That'll teach him," Harper said, and laid his rifle on the stone. "Where the hell are those reinforcements?"

  "Takes time to get them ready," Sharpe said.

  "Lose a bloody battle just because they want straight ranks?" Harper asked scornfully. He looked for a target. "Come on, someone, show yourself... "

  More of Williams's men retreated out of the village. They tried to form ranks on the rough ground at the foot of the graveyard, but by abandoning the houses they had yielded the stone walls to the French who could hide as they loaded, fire, then duck back into hiding again. Some British were still fighting inside the village, but the musket smoke betrayed that their fight had shrunk to a small group of houses at the very top of the main street. One more push by the French, Sharpe thought, and the village would be lost, and then there would a bitter fight up through the graveyard for mastery of the church and the rock outcrop. Lose those two summits, he thought, and the battle was done.

  The French drumming rose to a new fervour. There were Frenchmen coming out of the houses to form small squads that tried to outflank the retreating British.

  The riflemen in the graveyard fired at the daring sallies, but there were too many French and not enough rifles. One of the wounded men tried to crawl away from the advancing enemy and was bayoneted in the back for his trouble. Two

  Frenchmen ransacked his uniform, searching for the small hoard of coins most soldiers hid away. Sharpe fired at the plunderers, then turned his rifle on the French who were threatening to find cover behind the graveyard's lower wall. He loaded and fired, loaded and fired until his right shoulder felt like one massive bruise hammered into the bone by the rifle's brutal recoil, then suddenly, blessedly, there was a skirl of pipes and a rush of kilted men spilt over the crest of the ridge between the church and the rocks to charge down the main road into the village.

  "Look at the bastards!" Harper said with pride. "They'll give the Frogs a right beating."

  The Warwicks appeared to Sharpe's right and, like the Scots, just poured over the edge and scrambled down the steeper slope towards Fuentes de Onoro. The leading French attackers paused for a second to judge the weight of the counterattack, then hurried back into the cover of the houses. The Highlanders were already in the village where their war cries echoed between the walls, then the Warwicks went into the western alleyways and drove hard and deep into the tangle of houses.

/>   Sharpe felt the tension drain out of him. He was thirsty, he ached, he was tired and his shoulder was agony. "Jesus," he said, "and it wasn't even our fight." The thirst was galling and he had left his canteen with the ammunition wagons, but he felt too tired and dispirited to go and find water. He watched the broken village, noting how the gunsmoke marked the British advance right back down to the stream's edge, but he felt little elation. It seemed to

  Sharpe that all his hopes had stalled. He faced disgrace. Worse, he felt a sense of failure. He had dared to hope that he could turn the Real Companïa

  Irlandesa into soldiers, but he knew, staring down at the gunsmoke and the shattered houses, that the Irishmen needed another month of training and far more goodwill than Wellington had ever been prepared to give them. Sharpe had failed with them just as he had failed Hogan, and the twin failures raked at his spirits, then he realized he was feeling sorry for himself just as Donaju had felt self-pity in the morning mist. "Jesus," he said, disgusted at himself.