Men asked each other what was happening, and no one knew. They waited, feeling the warmth coming into the day, and they listened to the battle sound and prayed that they would live to hear the sound of victory. They prayed to be spared the surgeons.
At the rear of the column, where the women and children waited for the day’s lottery of widowhood to be drawn, and where the local villagers stared wide-eyed at the strange, huge tribe that was packed into their valley, two horsemen reined in. One of the two men, a tall, dark-haired, scarred man shouted at a group of soldiers’ women who sat at the river’s edge. ‘Which Division is this?’
A woman who was suckling a baby looked up at the Rifleman who had shouted the question. ‘Second.’
‘Where’s the Fifth?’
‘Christ knows.’
Which answer, Sharpe reflected, he deserved. He spurred Carbine forward. ‘Lieutenant! Lieutenant!’
A Lieutenant of infantry turned. He saw a tall, suntanned man on a horse. The man wore a tattered uniform of the 95th Rifles. At his hip was a sword, which seemed to suggest that the unshaven man was an officer. ‘Sir?’ The Lieutenant sounded tentative.
‘Where’s Wellington?’
‘I think he’s over the river.’
‘Fifth Division?’
‘On the left, sir. I think.’
‘Are you the right?’
‘I think so, sir.’ The Lieutenant sounded dubious.
Sharpe turned his horse. The defile was jammed with men and he could hear the sound of guns that told him this road led only to the battlefield.
He did not care about Wellington. Now was not the time to find the General and speak of the treaty that La Marquesa had betrayed to him in Burgos. He had written down everything that she had told him, and he would make sure that the letter reached Hogan. But now Sharpe had caught up with the army on a day of battle, he was a soldier, and vindicating his name could wait until the fighting was done. He looked at Angel, mounted on an ugly horse that they had stolen in Pancorvo. ‘Come on!’
He led the boy back to the village where a bridge crossed to the western bank. He would find the South Essex, he would come back from the dead, and he would fight.
CHAPTER 21
The French guns fired all morning. Their sound rattled the windows in the city. It was like a thunder that had no ending.
The smoke grew like a cloud. The women who sat on the tiers of seats above the city wall grumbled because their view was obscured. They could not see the enemy. They could only see the great cloud that grew and spread and drifted southwards with the breeze. Some of them strolled on the ramparts, flirting with the officers of the town guard. Others, their parasols raised against the sun, dozed on the benches.
The gunners fired, aimed and fired again. They dragged the guns forward after each shot, levered the trails round with handspikes, and pushed the ammunition into the hot muzzles that steamed from the sponging out. Men were sent to the small streams of the plain for buckets of water to soak the sponges. The roads from the city were loud with the galloping limbers that brought new ammunition to feed the guns that hammered at the killing ground.
The French infantry sat on the ridges, slicing sausage and bread, drinking the raw, red wine that filled their canteens. The guns were doing their work. Good luck to the guns.
The guns bucked, their wheels jarring from the ground with each shot. As each gun thudded down the gunner ran forward to put his leather-covered thumb over the smoking touch-hole. With the touch-hole covered if was safe to ram the wet sponge down the barrel and kill the last red sparks before the next powder charge was pushed home. Without the touch-hole blocked the rush of air forced by the plunging sponge could flare pockets of unexploded powder that had been known to erupt with enough force to blast the sponge back and impale its handle through the body of a gunner.
The guns had names embossed on the barrels beneath the proudly wreathed “N”s. Egalité fired next to Liberté, while Fortune and Defi were being sponged out.
The gunners sweated and heaved and grinned; listened to their officers call the aim and they knew they were filling the western plain with death. They could not see their enemy, the smoke hid all to the west, but each shot lanced a spear of flame into the smoke that would twitch with the canister’s passing and then the gunners would reload, would haul the gun back into a true aim, then stand back as the chief gunner rammed his spike through the touch-hole into the canvas bag of powder, as the second man pushed the quill of fine powder into the hole made by the spike. The quill carried the fire down to the powder from the linstock held by the chief gunner.
‘Tirez!’
All gunners were deaf, they said. They were the kings of the battlefield and they never heard the applause.
Sometimes, rarely, a battery would pause. The smoke would clear slowly from its front and the officers would peer at their target. The British had been stopped.
The red lines were cowering in the crops, hiding behind stone walls or crouching in ditches filthy with the summer’s rain. The gunners knew the British were beaten. No troops in the world would dare advance into the horror of roundshot and canister that the guns poured into the killing ground.
For the British it was a nightmare of sound. The roundshot rumbled like giant barrels on planks overhead, the canister whistled, the screams of the wounded riding over it all. The musket balls from the broken canister rattled on stone or cracked through corn or thudded into flesh and always there was the rolling thunder from the white cloud ahead. Sometimes, when a gun was short of shot or canister, a shell would be fired instead. The shell would land in the broken crops. It would spin, its fuse smoking wildly, then the casing would crack apart in flame, smoke and iron fragments to add to the noise of death.
The British died in ones and twos. They sheltered where they could, but sheltering men won no battles. Yet these men could not go forward. No man could go into that storm of shot. They crouched, they lay in shallow scoops of land, they cursed their officers, they cursed their General, they cursed the French, they cursed the slow, crawling time, and they cursed the lack of help on the plain’s edge. They were alone in a storm of death and they could see no help. The Colours were shredded with shot.
The lucky ones were in the small village, the first village of the plain, for there the stone walls were a shield. Even so, some roundshot smashed the houses flat, carving bloody paths in the packed rooms, and always the air outside the hovels was loud with the sound of death.
The attack was stalled.
‘We have him, by God, we have him!’ Marshal Jourdan, who like all the French Marshals had begun to think of Wellington as unbeatable, knew that his enemy had underestimated him. Jourdan guessed that Wellington, secure for the first time by having greater numbers than the French, had committed his army to a frontal attack. The guns, the pride of the French army, were shredding the enemy.
He looked north. A few English cavalrymen were in sight on the river’s far bank and the sight of them had alarmed some of his officers. Jourdan clapped his hands for attention and raised his voice.
‘Gentlemen! The cavalry is a feint! If they planned to attack from there they would have done so already! They want us to weaken our left! We shall not!’
Indeed, he strengthened it. The reserves who guarded the northern river bank were marched south, behind the Arinez Hill, to reclaim the Puebla Heights. Jourdan planned more for them. When the British broke, and when he unleashed his lancers and sabres onto the killing ground, the men from the heights could sweep down to block the defile. The British, broken and bloodied, would be trapped. But first, Jourdan knew, he must let Wellington send more men onto the plain, more men to be killed and cut off, more corpses and prisoners for the Emperor’s glory. Jourdan knew he must wait. In another two hours, perhaps, the heights would be retaken and the moment would have come when he would destroy Wellington’s reputation for ever. The Marshal called for food, for a little wine. Another two hours, he thought, and he would
send the Eagles forward to take Spain back for France. He smiled at King Joseph. ‘I trust, sir, you have invited no one to sit on your right this evening?’
Joseph frowned in puzzlement, not understanding why Jourdan spoke about the victory feast which had been ordered in Vitoria. ‘I hope you will take that place of honour, my dear Marshal.’
Jourdan laughed. ‘I shall be pursuing the enemy, sir, but you may have the Lord Wellington to entertain. I hear he likes mutton.’
Joseph understood and laughed, ‘You’re that hopeful?’
Jourdan was that hopeful. He had won, he knew it, and he could taste the victory already.
The guns made the silver cutlery quiver on the white linen in Vitoria’s grandest hotel. The waiters had laid one hundred and fifty places in the dining room. The bottles of wine, standing in thick groups on all the tables, clinked together and sounded like a thousand small bells.
Flowers had been cut and were now being put on the high table. That was where King Joseph would sit for this feast of victory ordered by the French. A tricolour was hung from the ceiling. The crystal chandeliers vibrated with the sound of the cannon. The whole great room was filled with clinking, ringing, shaking things.
The hotel’s owner looked at the room and knew his men had done well. He wrung his hands. He should have dared ask the French to pay for this feast in advance. They had ordered the best Medoc, burgundy and champagne, and the kitchens were preparing five bullocks, two score sheep, two hundred partridges, and a hundred chickens. He groaned. The patriot in him prayed for a British victory, but the businessman feared that the British might not pay for what their enemy had ordered. He listened to the guns and, his purse more important than his pride, prayed that they would win the day.
The Marquess of Wellington, sitting his horse on the lower slopes of the western hills, watched the French gun line flame and smoke and shatter his men in the killing ground. None of Wellington’s staff officers spoke to him. The whole sky seemed to vibrate with the great blows of the guns.
Staff officers spurred on the slope beneath him. To a casual eye the western hill and the defile seemed like chaos. Wounded men dragged themselves towards surgeons, while other men waited for battle. To someone who had never seen a battle, there seemed no order in the casual disposition of men. They might have hoped for a plan to help them understand.
There was a plan. Jourdan planned to stop the attack with his guns, and Wellington planned to grip those guns in a fist and squeeze.
The English General thought of his plan like a left hand placed palm downwards on the map.
The thumb was the attack on the heights.
The index finger was the troops who had advanced beneath the heights into the guns’ thunder, the troops who had been stopped by the French artillery, the troops who suffered minute by horrid minute.
The thumb and index finger were supposed to do no more than pin the enemy’s attention, to draw his reserves across to the south and west, and, when that was done, the remaining three fingers would curl in from the north.
But where were they? The men on the plain were dying because the left hand columns were late and Wellington, who hated to see men die unnecessarily, would not even allow himself to be consoled by the fact that the longer he waited, the more his enemy would be convinced that the main attack was coming from the west.
He rode a small way up the slope and stared northwards. The land seemed empty. He clicked his fingers. An aide spurred forward.
The General turned. ‘Hurry them!’
‘My Lord.’
There was no need to explain who should be hurried. There should be three columns coming from the northern hills, columns that would trample the crops over the river, carry the bridges, and fall on the French right. Wellington wondered why in God’s name the French had left the bridges intact. His cavalry scouts had reported no signs of powder ready to blow the arches sky high. It made no sense. The General had feared that his northern attacks would have to wade the fords, their bodies drifting downstream in bloodied water, but the French had left the bridges open.
Yet the three columns which, like fingers, would squeeze the life from the French army, had not appeared and their lateness meant that the French guns were taking a heavy toll on the plain. The fingers of Wellington’s right hand drummed on the pommel of his saddle. He waited, while beneath him the guns shivered the warm morning.
‘Dear Captain Saumier?’
‘Ma’am?‘ He sounded tired. Eight times La Marquesa had sent him limping down the crowded tiers, either for more wine or more pastries.
‘In my coach there is a parasol. Would you be very gallant and fetch it for me?’
‘Entirely my pleasure, ma’am.‘
‘The white parasol, not the black.’
‘There’s nothing else I can fetch you at the same time?’ her escort asked hopefully.
‘Not that I can think of.’
He edged down the crowded bench, his ugly face reddening because he knew that the other women had observed him running errands like a small boy for La Marquesa.
She stared at the battlefield, seeing only the great cloud of cannon smoke. For some reason she found herself thinking about Sharpe, wondering whether he would have been as malleable as this Captain Saumier. Somehow she doubted it. Richard had always been ready to frown and growl his displeasure. He had been, she thought, a man of immense pride, a pride made fragile because it had come from the gutter.
She had felt regret when she had heard he was dead. She was glad then that she had lied to him, had told him that she loved him. Richard, she thought, had wanted her to say that and he had been eager to believe it. She wondered why soldiers, who knew death and horror better than anyone, were so often soggily romantic. Send them to their deaths happy was what the women of this army said; and why not? She tried to imagine being in bed with Captain Saumier, and the thought made her shudder. She cooled herself with her fan. The sun was tryingly hot.
A cavalry officer reined in at the wall’s foot. There had been a succession of such officers all morning who had come to show off to the ladies and shout up news from the fighting that was still hidden by the great bank of smoke. The cavalry officer swept off his hat. All was well, he said. The British were beaten. Soon Jourdan would order the line forward.
La Marquesa smiled. Victory today would mean Ducos’ defeat. A beat of pure malicious pleasure went through her at the thought of that defeat.
She looked away from the smoke. She looked at the empty northern fields, bright with poppies and cornflowers, a scene of innocence on this day of guns and smoke. Far off there, at the foot of the northern hills and too far away to play any part in today’s battle, was a small, story-book castle. She pulled her ivory spyglass open and stared at the tiny old fortress.
And instead she saw troops. Troops trampling the crops flat. Troops spilling from the gullies of the hills, troops swarming southwards towards the right of the French line. She stared. The troops wore red. She knew what she saw; it was the despised Wellington proving to the French yet again that he could not attack. Beneath her the cavalry officer caught a thrown handkerchief, wheeled his horse, and galloped back to the battle.
‘Sir!’
‘Sir!’
Marshal Jourdan, who a moment before had been thinking that the battle would be won by two o‘clock, and had been thinking regretfully that his pursuit would mean he could not attend the victory dinner that night, stared to his right.
He could not believe what he saw.
The columns were coming towards him, towards the unguarded flank, and the British Colours were bright over their heads. He had already taken his reserves from the right to re-assault the Puebla Heights, now Wellington had unleashed the weight of his real attack. For one brief, horrid second, Jourdan admired Wellington for waiting this long, for letting his men suffer under the guns long enough to convince the French that the frontal attack was the real attack, then the Marshal began shouting.
The right flanks of the French lines were to turn outwards. There would not be time to stop the British crossing the river, so Jourdan knew he must fight them on the near bank with his guns.
King Joseph, who had retired into his carriage to use his silver chamber pot, came hurrying back into the sunshine. ‘What’s happening?’
Jourdan ignored him. He was staring north, watching the most easterly enemy column that was not coming towards him. It was striking for the Great Road, trying to cut him off from France. He shouted for an aide. ‘What’s the village on the river bend there?’
‘Gamarra Mayor, sir.’
‘Tell them to hold it! Tell them to hold it!’
‘Sir!’
King Joseph, his breeches flap held in his hands, watched in horror as the aide spurred his horse into a gallop. ‘Hold what?’
‘Your kingdom, sir. There!’ Jourdan’s voice was savage. He was pointing at the river bend and the small village of Gamarra Mayor. ‘You!’ He pointed to another aide. ‘Tell General Reille I want his men in Gamarra Mayor. Go!’
If the river was crossed, and the road taken, then a battle, a kingdom and an army were lost. ‘Tell them to hold it!’ he shouted after the officer, then turned back to the west. A gun sounded, no great thing on this day, except this was a British gun and it had been brought to face the French, and the roundshot landed on the slope of the Arinez Hill, bounced, and came to rest a few yards from Jourdan’s horse. It was the first enemy shot to reach the Arinez Hill and it spoke of things to come.
Marshal Jourdan, whose day of triumph was turning sour, tossed his Marshal’s baton into his carriage. It was a red velvet staff, tipped with gold and decorated with gold eagles. It was a bauble fit for a triumph, but now, he knew, he had to fight against disaster. He had sent his reserves to his left, and now his right was threatened. He shouted for news and wondered what happened beyond the bank of smoke which hid this battle for a kingdom.