“They’re not harming us,” Lawford shouted above the din, “but we can’t let those wretches stay here!” He pointed to the smoke-wreathed Frenchmen. “That’s our land!” He took a breath. “Fix bayonets! Fix bayonets!”
Colonel Wallace, commander of the 88th, must have had the same thought, for Sharpe was aware that the Irishmen had stopped firing, and they would only do that to fix the seventeen-inch blades on their muskets. Clicks sounded all along the South Essex line as the two ranks slotted their bayonets onto blackened muzzles. The French, with extraordinary bravery, used the lull in the musket fire to try and advance again. Men clambered over dead and dying bodies, officers shouted them forward, the drummers redoubled their efforts and suddenly the Eagles were moving again. The leading Frenchmen were among the bodies of the dead voltigeurs now and must have been convinced that one more hard push would break through the thin line of Portuguese and British troops, yet the whole hilltop must have seemed ripples of flame and rills of smoke to them. “South Essex!” Lawford shouted. “Advance!” The cannons jetted more powder smoke and flaming scraps of wadding deep into the tight French ranks. Sharpe could hear the screaming of wounded men now. Musket shots hammered from a knot of Frenchmen to the right, but the South Essex and the men of Connaught were going forward, bayonets bright, and Sharpe kicked the horse forward, following the battalion, which suddenly broke into the double and shouted their challenge. The Portuguese, seeing the redcoats advance, cheered and fixed their own blades.
The charge struck home. The French were not formed properly, most did not have loaded muskets and the British line closed on the clumps of blue-coated infantry and then wrapped around them as the redcoats lunged with bayonets. The enemy fought back and Sharpe heard the crack of muskets clashing, the scrape of blades, the curses and shouts of wounded soldiers. The enemy dead obstructed the British, but they clambered over the bodies to rip with long blades at the living. “Hold your lines! Hold your lines!” a sergeant bellowed, and in some places the companies had split because some files were attacking one French group and the rest another, and Sharpe saw two French soldiers break clear through such a gap and start uphill. He turned the horse towards them and drew his sword, and the two men, hearing the blade’s long scrape against the scabbard’s throat, immediately threw down their muskets and spread their hands. Sharpe pointed the sword uphill, indicating they were prisoners now and should go to the South Essex color party. One obediently set off, but the other snatched up his musket and fled downhill. Sharpe let him go. He could see the Eagles were being hurried down the slope, being carried away from the danger of capture, and more Frenchmen, seeing their standards retreat, broke from the unequal fight. The allied cannons had stopped their fire because their targets were masked by their own men, but the French guns still shot through the thinning fog and then, off to Sharpe’s right, more cannons opened and he saw a second column, even larger than the first, appearing on the lower slope.
The first French attack broke from the back. Most of the men in the front ranks could not escape because they were trapped by their comrades behind, and those men were being savaged by Portuguese and British bayonets, but the French rear ranks followed the Eagles and, as the pressure eased, the remnants of the column fled. They ran, leaping over the dead and wounded that marked their passage up the hill, and the redcoats and Portuguese pursued them. A man from the grenadier company rammed his bayonet into the small of a Frenchman’s back, stabbed him again when he fell, then kicked him and stabbed him a third time when the man obstinately refused to die. A drum, painted with a French Eagle, rolled downhill. A drummer boy, his arm shot off by a cannonball, hunched in misery beside a gorse bush. British redcoats and blue-jacketed Portuguese ran past him, intent on pursuing and killing the fleeing enemy. “Come back!” Lawford shouted angrily. “Come back!” The men did not hear him, or did not care; they had won and now they simply wanted to kill. Lawford looked for Sharpe. “Get them, Sharpe!” the Colonel snapped. “Fetch them back!”
Sharpe wondered how the hell he was to stop such a chaotic pursuit, but he obediently kicked his borrowed horse, which immediately bolted downhill so violently that he was nearly thrown off the back of the saddle. He yanked the reins to slow the mare and she swerved to her left and Sharpe heard a bullet flutter past him and looked up to see that scores of voltigeurs still held the rocky knoll and were firing at him. The horse ran on, Sharpe clinging to the saddle’s pommel for dear life, then she stumbled and he felt himself flying. By a miracle his feet came clear of the stirrups and he landed on the slope with an almighty thump, rolled for a few yards and then banged against a boulder. He was sure he must have broken a dozen bones, but when he picked himself up he found he was only bruised. Ferragus had hurt him much worse, but the fall from the horse had exacerbated those injuries. He thought the mare must have been shot, but when he turned round to look for his fallen sword he saw the horse trotting calmly uphill without any apparent damage except her bullet-cropped ear. He swore at the mare, abandoned her, picked up his sword and rifle and went on downhill.
He shouted at redcoats to get back to the ridge. Some were Irishmen from the 88th, many of them busy plundering the bodies of French dead and, because he was an officer they did not know, they snarled, swore or simply ignored him, implicitly daring him to tangle with them. Sharpe let them be. If there was one regiment in the army that could look after itself it was the men of Connaught. He ran on down, shouting at troops to get the hell up to the ridge top, but most were halfway down the long slope, almost to where the fog had retreated, and Sharpe had to run hard to get within shouting distance and it was then, as the fog swirled away, that he saw two more French columns climbing from the valley. There was another column, he knew, somewhere near the summit, but these were new troops making a fresh attack. “South Essex!” he shouted. He had been a sergeant once and still had a voice that could carry halfway across a city, though using it caused his ribs to bang pain into his lungs “South Essex! Back! Back!” A shell struck the hill not five paces away, bounced up and exploded in jets of hissing smoke. Two scraps of casing spun past his face so close that he felt the momentary warmth and the slap of the hot air. French cannon were at the foot of the slope, just visible in the thinning fog, and they were firing at the men who had pursued the broken column, but who now had checked their reckless downhill run to watch the new columns advance. “South Essex!” Sharpe roared, and the anger in his voice was harsh, and at last men turned to trudge uphill. Slingsby, his saber drawn, was watching the columns, but, hearing Sharpe, he suddenly snapped at men to turn around and go back to the ridge top. Harper was one of them and, seeing Sharpe, the big man angled across the slope. His seven-barreled gun was slung on his back and in his hand was his rifle with its twenty-three-inch sword bayonet reddened to its brass handle. The rest of the light company, at last aware that more columns were attacking, hurried after Harper.
Sharpe waited to make sure that every redcoat and rifleman had turned back. French shells and round shot were banging onto the hill, but using artillery against such scattered targets was a waste of powder. One cannonball, spent after its bouncing impact, rolled down the hill to make Harper skip aside, then he grinned at Sharpe. “Gave it to them proper, sir.”
“You should have stayed up top.”
“It’s a hell of a climb,” Harper said, surprised to see how far down the hill he had gone. He fell in beside Sharpe and the two climbed together. “Mister Slingsby, sir,” the Irishman said, then fell silent.
“Mister Slingsby what?”
“He said you weren’t well, sir, and he was taking command.”
“Then he’s a lying bastard,” Sharpe said, careless that he ought not to say such a thing of another officer.
“Is he now?” Harper said tonelessly.
“The Colonel told me to step aside. He wants Mister Slingsby to have a chance.”
“He had that right enough,” Harper said.
“I should have been there,”
Sharpe said.
“And so you should,” Harper said, “but the lads are all alive. Except Dodd.”
“Matthew? Is he dead?”
“Dead or alive, I don’t know,” Harper said, “but I couldn’t see him anywhere. I was keeping an eye on the boys, but I can’t find Matthew. Maybe he went back up the hill.”
“I didn’t see him,” Sharpe said. They both turned and counted heads and saw the light company were all present except for Corporal Dodd. “We’ll look for him as we climb,” Sharpe said, meaning they would look for his body.
Lieutenant Slingsby, red-faced and saber drawn, hurried over to Sharpe. “Did you bring orders, Sharpe?” he demanded.
“The orders are to get back to the top of the hill as quick as you can,” Sharpe said.
“Quick, men!” Slingsby called, then turned back to Sharpe. “Our fellows did well!”
“Did they?”
“Outflanked the voltigeurs, Sharpe. Outflanked them, by God! We turned their flank.”
“Did you?”
“Pity you didn’t see us.” Slingsby was excited, proud of himself. “We slipped past them, drove in their wing, then hurt them.”
Sharpe thought the light company had been led to one side where it had been about as much use as a kettle with a hole in it, and had then been ignominiously chased away, but he kept silent. Harper unclipped his sword bayonet, cleaned the blade on the jacket of a French corpse, then quickly ran his hands over the man’s pockets and pouches.
He ran to catch up with Sharpe and offered a half sausage. “I know you like Crapaud sausage, sir.”
Sharpe put it into his pouch, saving it for dinner. A bullet whispered past him, almost spent, and he looked up to see puffs of smoke from the rocky knoll. “Pity the voltigeurs took that,” he said.
“No trouble to us,” Slingsby said dismissively. “Turned their flank, by God, turned their damn flank and then punished them!”
Harper glanced at Sharpe, looked as though he would start laughing, and managed to keep a straight face. The big British and Portuguese guns were hammering at the second big column, the one that had arrived just after the first had been defeated. That column was fighting at the top of the ridge and the two fresh columns, both smaller than the first pair, were climbing behind. Another bullet from the voltigeurs in their rocky nest whipped past Sharpe and he angled away from them.
“You still have my horse, Sharpe?” Slingsby demanded.
“Not here,” Sharpe said, and Harper made a choking sound which he turned into a cough.
“You said something, Sergeant Harper?” Slingsby demanded crisply.
“Smoke in my throat, sir,” Harper said. “It catches something dreadful, sir. I was always a sickly child, sir, on account of the peat smoke in our cottage. My mother made me sleep outside, God rest her soul, until the wolves came for me.”
“Wolves?” Slingsby sounded cautious.
“Three of them, sir, big as you’d like, with slobbery great tongues the color of your coat, sir, and I had to sleep inside after that, and I just coughed my way through the nights. It was all that smoke, see?”
“Your parents should have built a chimney,” Slingsby said disapprovingly.
“Now why didn’t we think of that?” Harper enquired innocently and Sharpe laughed aloud, earning a vicious look from the Lieutenant.
The rest of the light company was close now and Ensign Iliffe was among them. Sharpe saw the boy’s saber was red at the tip. Sharpe nodded at it. “Well done, Mister Iliffe.”
“He just came at me, sir.” The boy had suddenly found his voice. “A big man!”
“He was a sergeant,” Harris explained, “and he was going to stick Mister Iliffe, sir.”
“He was!” Iliffe was excited.
“But Mister Iliffe stepped past him neat as a squirrel, sir, and gave him steel in the belly. It was a good stroke, Mister Iliffe,” Harris said, and the Ensign just blushed.
Sharpe tried to recall the first time he had been in a fight, steel against steel, but the trouble was he had been brought up in London and almost born to that kind of savagery. But for Mister Iliffe, son of an impoverished Essex gentleman, there had to be a shock in realizing that some great brute of a Frenchman was trying to kill him and Sharpe, remembering how sick the boy had been, reckoned he had done very well. He grinned at Iliffe. “Only the one Crapaud, Mister Iliffe?”
“Only one, sir.”
“And you an officer, eh? You’re supposed to kill two a day!”
The men laughed. Iliffe just looked pleased with himself.
“Enough chatter!” Slingsby took command of the company. “Hurry up!” The South Essex colors had moved south along the ridge top, evidently going towards the fight with the second leading column, and the light company slanted that way. The French shells had stopped their futile harassment of the slope and were instead firing at the ridge top now, their fuses leaving small pencil traces in the sky above the light company. The sound of the second column was loud now, a cacophony of drums, war cries and the stutter of the skirmishers’ muskets.
Sharpe went with the light company to the ridge top where he reluctantly let Slingsby take them again while he looked for Lawford. The fog, which had cleared almost to the valley bottom, was thickening again now, a great billow of it hiding the two smaller columns and rolling southwards to where, by the rough track that climbed the ridge, the second French column was advancing. That second column, larger than the first, had climbed more slowly, and had been given an easier time than their defeated comrades for they had been able to follow the track that twisted its way up the ridge’s slope, and the track gave them a guide in the fog so that when they erupted into the sunlight they had managed to keep their ranks. Eight thousand men, driven by one hundred and sixty-three drummers, closed on the crest and there, under the flail of fire, they stopped.
The first battalion of the 74th Highlanders had been waiting and beside them was a whole brigade of Portuguese and on their right flank were two batteries of nine-pounders. The guns struck first, flaying the column with round shot and canister, making the heather slick with blood, and then the Highlanders opened fire. The range was very long, more suited for riflemen than redcoats, but the bullets slapped home and then the Portuguese opened fire and the column, like a bull confused by an unexpected attack by terriers, stalled. Columns were again meeting lines and, though the column outnumbered the line, the line would always outshoot the column. Only the men at the front of the column and a handful along the edge could use their muskets, but every man in the British and Portuguese line could fire his weapon and the column was being driven in, turned red, hammered, yet it did not retreat. The voltigeurs, who had chased away the Scottish and Portuguese skirmishers, retreated to the column’s front rank which now tried to return the musket fire. French officers shouted at the men to march, the drummers persisted with the pas de charge, but the front ranks would not press up into the relentless pelting of the musket balls. Instead, feebly, they returned the fire, but the men in the column’s front rank were dying every second, and then more Portuguese cannons came to the right flank of the 74th. The guns slewed around, their horses were taken back out of musket range, and the gunners rammed canister over round shot. The new guns crashed back and the leading left corner of the column began to resemble the devil’s butcher’s shop. It was a sodden tangle of broken bodies, blood and screaming men. And still the guns recoiled, jetting a spew of smoke with every discharge, their barrels depressed to fire down into the crowded mass of Frenchmen. Every round shot had to be wedged in the barrel with a circle of rope to stop the ball trickling down the barrel, and the rope loops burned in the air like crazed fireballs as they spun in mad whorls. More allied troops were coming to the fight, marching along the newly made road from the southern end of the long ridge. That southern end was quiet, apparently under no threat from the French, and the arriving men formed south of the guns and added their own musket fire.
The column shuddered
under the onslaught of the merciless guns and then began to edge northwards. The French officers could see there was an empty space on the ridge beyond the Portuguese brigade and they shouted at their men to go right. A voltigeur officer sent a company ahead to occupy the skyline as, behind them, the cumbersome mass edged its way towards the opening, leaving a right-angled line of bodies, the remnants of their left flank and front lines, thick on the rocky slope.
Lieutenant Colonel Lawford saw the column approaching and, more urgently, the voltigeurs running to claim the open ground. “Mister Slingsby!” Lawford called. “You will deploy the light company! Send those miscreants back where they belong. Battalion! Battalion will move to the right!” Lawford was marching the South Essex into the open space, going to seal it off, and Slingsby had the job of throwing back the enemy skirmishers. Sharpe, back on Slingsby’s horse which had been rescued by Major Forrest, rode behind the color party and counted the Eagles in the shuffling column. He could see fifteen. The noise of splintering dominated the air, the sound of muskets like dry thorns burning, and the incessant crackling was echoing from the distant side of the valley. The powder smoke drifted above the fog which had crept back up the slope almost to the ridge’s top. Every now and then the great white vaporous mass twitched as a French round shot or shell punched through. The hillside was dotted with bodies, all blue-coated. A man crawled downhill, trailing a broken leg. A dog ran to and fro, barking, trying to rouse its dead master. A French officer, sword discarded, held his hands to his face as blood oozed between his fingers. The cannons hammered and bucked, and then came the distinctive crack of the rifles as Sharpe’s company went into action. He hated just watching them, but he also admired them. They were good. They had taken the enemy voltigeurs by surprise and the riflemen had already put down two officers and now the muskets took up the fight.
Sharpe 3-Book Collection 4: Sharpe's Escape, Sharpe's Fury, Sharpe's Battle Page 10