Sharpe's Escape

  Harper picked his way back through the rocks. "Mister Iliffe, sir," he said.

  "What about him?"

  "He's dead, sir," Harper said, "and none of the others are even scratched."

  "Iliffe? Dead?" For some reason it did not make sense to Sharpe.

  "He wouldn't have felt a thing, sir." Harper tapped his forehead. "Straight in."

  Sharpe swore. He had not liked Iliffe until today, but in battle the boy had shown courage. He had been terrified, so terrified he had vomited at the prospect of fighting, but once the bullets began to fly he had conquered that fear and that was admirable. Sharpe walked to the body, took off his hat and stared down at Iliffe who looked vaguely surprised. "He would have made a good soldier," Sharpe said, and the men of the light company murmured agreement.

  Sergeant Read took four men and carried Iliffe's body back to battalion. Lawford would not be pleased, Sharpe thought, then wondered why the hell it could not have been Slingsby shot through the forehead. That would have been a good morning's work for a voltigeur, Sharpe thought, and wondered why the hell his own bullet had missed. He glanced up at the sun and realized it was still mid-morning. He felt as if he had been fighting all day, but back in England some folk would not even have finished their breakfasts yet.

  It was a pity about Iliffe, he thought, then drank some water, listened to the guns, and waited.

  "Now!" General Craufurd shouted and the two battalions stood, appearing to the French as though they had suddenly sprung from the bare ground. "Ten paces forward!" Craufurd bellowed, and they marched smartly, hefting loaded muskets. "Fifty-second!" Craufurd called to the battalion nearest him in a voice that was raw with anger and savage with resolve. "Avenge Moore!" The 52nd had been at Corunna where, in defeating the French, they had lost their beloved general, Sir John Moore.

  "Present!" the Colonel of the 52nd shouted.

  The enemy were close, less than twenty-five yards away. They were staring upwards where the long red line had so unexpectedly appeared. Even the novices in the battered French ranks knew what was coming. The British line overlapped the columns, every musket was aimed at the leading French files, and a French officer made the sign of the cross as the red line seemed to take a quarter turn to the right as the guns went up into men's shoulders.

  "Fire!"

  The ledge vanished in smoke as over a thousand musket balls thumped into the columns. Dozens of men fell and the living, still marching upwards in obedience to the drumbeats, found they could not get across the writhing pile of injured men. Ahead of them they could hear the scrape of ramrods going into musket barrels. The British gunners of the remaining battery shot four barrel-loads of canister that tore into the survivors, clouding the columns' head with sprays of blood. "Fire by half companies!" a voice shouted.

  "Fire!"

  The volley fire began: the rippling, merciless, incessant clock-work drill of death. The British and Portuguese skirmishers had reformed on the left and added their own fire so that the heads of the columns were ringed by flame and smoke, pummeled by bullets, flayed by the canister spitting down from the ledge. A hundred fires began in the grass as flaming wadding spat from the barrels.

  The fire was not just coming from the front. The skirmishers and the outer companies of the 43rd and the 52nd had wheeled down the slope to wrap themselves around the beleaguered French, who were now being shot at from three sides. The smoke of the half-company volleys rippled up and down the red lines, the balls slapped into flesh and banged into muskets, and the French advance had been stopped. No troops could advance into the bank of smoke that was ripped by flame as the volleys flared.

  "Bayonets! Bayonets!" Craufurd shouted. There was a pause as men took out the seventeen-inch blades and slotted them over blackened musket muzzles. "Now kill them!" Black Bob shouted. He was feeling exultant, watching his hard-trained men tear four times their number into ruin.

  The men with loaded muskets fired, and the redcoats were going down the hill, steadily at first, but then the two ranks met the French dead and they lost their cohesion as they negotiated the bodies, and there, just yards away, were the living. The British gave a great shout of rage and charged. "Kill them!" Black Bob was right behind the ranks, sword drawn, glaring at the French as the redcoats lunged with their blades.

  It was slaughterhouse work. Most of the French in the leading ranks who had survived the musketry and the canister were wounded. They were also crammed together, and now the redcoats came at them with bayonets. The long blades stabbed forward, were twisted and pulled back. The loudest noise on the ridge was screaming now, men shouting for mercy, calling for God, cursing the enemy, and still the half-company volleys whipped in from the flanks so that no Frenchmen could deploy into line. They had been marched up a hill of death and were penned like sheep just below its summit and the bullets killed them from the flanks and the blades took them at the front, and the only escape from the torment was back down the hill.

  They broke. One moment they were a mass of men cowering under an onslaught of steel and lead, and the next, starting with the rearmost ranks, they were a rabble. The front ranks, trapped by the men behind, could not escape and they were easy meat for the savage seventeen-inch blades, but the men at the back fled. Drums rolled down the hill, abandoned by boys too terrified to do anything except escape, and, as they went, the British and Portuguese skirmishers came from the flanks to pursue them. The last of the Frenchmen broke, pursued by redcoats, and some were caught in the village where the blades went to work again and the cobbles and the white stones of the houses were painted with more blood and the screams could be heard down in the valley where Massena watched, open-mouthed. Some Frenchmen became entangled in the vines and the cazadores caught them there and slit their throats. Riflemen poured bullets after the fugitives. A man shouted for mercy in a village house and the shout turned into a terrible scream as two bayonets took his life.

  And then the French were gone. They had been swamped by panic and the slope around the village was littered with abandoned muskets and bodies. Some of the enemy were fortunate. Two riflemen rounded up prisoners and prodded them up towards the windmill where the British gunners had reclaimed their battery. A French captain, who had only kept his life by pretending to be dead, yielded his sword to a lieutenant of the 52nd. The Lieutenant, a courteous man, bowed in acknowledgment and gave the blade back. "You will do me the honor of accompanying me up the hill," the Lieutenant said, and he then tried to make conversation in his school French. The weather had gone suddenly cold, had it not? The French Captain agreed it had, but he also would have agreed if the Englishman had remarked how warm it was. The Captain was shaking. He was covered in blood, none of it his own, but all from wounds inflicted by canister on men who had climbed near him. He saw his men lying dead, saw others dying, saw them looking up from the ground and trying to call for help he could not give. He remembered the bayonets coming at him and the joy of the killing plain on the faces of the men who held them. "It was a storm," he said, not knowing what he said.

  "Not now the heat's broken, I think," the Lieutenant said, misunderstanding his captive's words. The bandsmen of the 43rd and 52nd were collecting the wounded, almost all of them French, and carrying them up to the mill where those that survived would be put on carts and taken to the monastery where the surgeons waited. "We were hoping for a game of cricket if tomorrow stays fine," the Lieutenant said. "Have you had the privilege of watching cricket, monsieur?"

  "Cricket?" The Captain gaped at the redcoat.

  "The Light Division officers hope to play the rest of the army," the Lieutenant said, "unless war or the weather intervenes."

  "I have never seen cricket," the Frenchman said.

  "When you get to heaven, monsieur," the Lieutenant said gravely, "and I pray that will be many happy years hence, you will find that your days are spent in playing cricket."

  Just to the south there was more sudden firing. It sounded like British volleys, for they were
regular and fast, but it was four Portuguese battalions that guarded the ridge to the right of the Light Division. The smaller French column, meant to reinforce the success of the two that had climbed through Sula, had swung away from the village and found itself split from the main attack by a deep, wooded ravine, and so the men climbed on their own, going through a grove of pines, and when they emerged onto the open hillside above they saw nothing but Portuguese troops ahead. No redcoats. The column outnumbered the Portuguese. They also knew their enemy for they had beaten the Portuguese before and did not fear the men in brown and blue as they feared the British muskets. This would be a simple victory, a hammer blow against a despised enemy, but then the Portuguese opened fire and the volleys rippled like clockwork and the musket balls were fired low and the guns were reloaded swiftly and the column, like those to the north, found itself assailed from three sides and suddenly the despised enemy was driving the French ignominiously downhill. And so the last French column ran, defeated by men fighting for their homeland, and then the whole ridge was empty of the Emperor's men except for the dead and the wounded and the captured. A drummer boy cried as he lay in the vines. He was eleven years old and had a bullet in his lung. His father, a sergeant, was lying dead twenty paces away where a bird pecked at his eyes. Now that the guns had stopped the black feathered birds were coming to the ridge and its feast of flesh.

  Smoke drifted off the hill. Guns cooled. Men passed round water bottles.

  The French were back in the valley. "There is a road around the north of the ridge," an aide reminded Marshal Massena, who said nothing. He just stared at what was left of his attacks on the hill. Beaten, all of them. Beaten to nothing. Defeated. And the enemy, hidden once more behind the ridge's crest, waited for him to try again.

  "You remember Miss Savage?" Vicente asked Sharpe. They were sitting at the end of the knoll, staring down at the beaten French.

  "Kate? Of course I remember Kate," Sharpe said. "I often wondered what happened to her."

  "She married me," Vicente said, and looked absurdly pleased with himself.

  "Good God," Sharpe said, then decided that probably sounded like a rude response. "Well done!"

  "I shaved off my mustache," Vicente said, "as you suggested. And she said yes."

  "Never did understand mustaches," Sharpe said, "must be like kissing a blacking brush."

  "And we have a child," Vicente went on, "a girl."

  "Quick work, Jorge!"

  "We are very happy," Vicente said solemnly.

  "Good for you," Sharpe said, and meant it. Kate Savage had run away from her home in Oporto, and Sharpe, with Vicente's help, had rescued her. That had been eighteen months before and Sharpe had often wondered what had happened to the English girl who had inherited her father's vineyards and port lodge.

  "Kate is still in Porto, of course," Vicente said.

  "With her mother?"

  "She went back to England," Vicente said, "just after I joined my new regiment in Coimbra."

  "Why there?"

  "It is where I grew up," Vicente said, "and my parents still live there. I went to the university of Coimbra, so really it is home. But from now on I shall live in Porto. When the war is over."

  "Be a lawyer again?"

  "I hope so." Vicente made the sign of the cross. "I know what you think of the law, Richard, but it is the one barrier between man and bestiality."

  "Didn't do much to stop the French."

  "War is above the law, which is why it is so bad. War lets loose all the things which the law restrains."

  "Like me," Sharpe said.

  "You are not such a bad man," Vicente said with a smile.

  Sharpe looked down into the valley. The French had at last withdrawn to where they had been the previous evening, only now they were throwing up earthworks beyond the stream where infantry dug trenches and used the spoil to make bulwarks. "Those buggers think we're coming down to finish them off," he said.

  "Will we?"

  "Christ, no! We've got the high ground. No point in giving it up."

  "So what do we do?"

  "Wait for orders, Jorge, wait for orders. And I reckon mine are coming now." Sharpe nodded towards Major Forrest who was riding his horse along the spine of the spur.

  Forrest stopped by the rocks and looked down at the French dead, sounding tired.

  "Major Forrest," Sharpe said, "let me introduce you to Captain Vicente. I fought with him at Oporto."

  "Honored," Forrest said, "honored." His red sleeve was dark with blood from the musket ball that had struck him. He hesitated, trying to think of something complimentary to say to Vicente, but nothing occurred to him, so he looked back to Sharpe. "The Colonel wants the company now, Sharpe," he said.

  "On your feet, lads!" Sharpe stood himself and shook Vicente's hand. "Keep a look out for us, Jorge," he said, "we might need your help again. And give my regards to Kate."

  Sharpe walked the company back across ground scorched by musket and rifle fire. The ridge was quiet now, no guns firing, just the wind sighing on the grass. Forrest rode beside Sharpe, but said nothing until they reached the battalion's lines. The South Essex were in ranks, but sitting and sprawling on the grass, and Forrest gestured to the left-hand end of the line as if to order the light company to take their place.

  "Lieutenant Slingsby will command them for the moment," Forrest said.

  "He'll do what?" Sharpe asked, shocked.

  "For the moment," Forrest said placatingly, "because right now the Colonel wants you, Sharpe, and I daresay he isn't pleased."

  That was an understatement. The Honorable William Lawford was in a temper, though, being a man of exquisite politeness, the anger only showed as a slight tightening of the lips and a distinctly unfriendly glance as Sharpe arrived at his tent. Lawford ducked out into the sunlight and nodded at Forrest. "You'll stay, Major," he said, and waited as Forrest dismounted and gave his reins to Lawford's servant, who led the horse away. "Knowles!" Lawford summoned the Adjutant from the tent. Knowles gave Sharpe a sympathetic look, which only made Lawford angrier. "You had best stay, Knowles," he said, "but keep other folk away. I don't want what is said here bruited about the battalion."

  Knowles put on his hat and stood a few yards away. Forrest hovered to one side as Lawford looked at Sharpe. "Perhaps, Captain," he spoke icily, "you can explain yourself?"

  "Explain myself, sir?"

  "Ensign Iliffe is dead."

  "I regret it, sir."

  "Good God! The boy is entrusted to my care! Now I have to write to his father and say the lad's life was tossed away by an irresponsible officer who committed his company to an attack without any authorization from me!" Lawford paused, evidently too angry to frame his next words, then slapped his hand against his sword scabbard. "I command this battalion, Sharpe!" he said. "Perhaps you have never realized that? Do you think you can swan around as you like, killing men as you see fit, without reference to me?"

  "I had orders, sir," Sharpe said woodenly.

  "Orders?" Lawford demanded. "I gave no order!"

  "I was ordered by Colonel Rogers-Jones, sir."

  "Who the devil is Colonel Rogers-Jones?"

  "I believe he commands a battalion of cazadores," Forrest put in quietly.

  "God damn it, Sharpe," Lawford snapped, "Colonel Rogers bloody Jones does not command the South Essex!"

  "I had orders from a colonel, sir," Sharpe insisted, "and I obeyed." He paused. "And I recalled your advice, sir."

  "My advice?" Lawford asked.

  "Last night, sir, you told me you wanted your skirmishers to be audacious and aggressive. So we were."

  "I also want my officers to be gentlemen," Lawford said, "to show courtesy."

  Sharpe sensed that they had reached the real point of this meeting. Lawford, it was true, had a genuine grievance that Sharpe had committed the light company to an attack without his permission, but no officer could truly object to a man fighting the enemy. The complaint had been merely a rangin
g shot for the assault that was about to come. Sharpe said nothing, but just stared fixedly at a spot between the Colonel's eyes.

  "Lieutenant Slingsby," the Colonel said, "tells me that you insulted him. That you invited him to a duel. That you called him illegitimate. That you swore at him."

  Sharpe cast his mind back to the brief confrontation on the ridge's forward slope just after he had pulled the company out of the French panic. "I doubt I called him illegitimate, sir," he said. "I wouldn't use that sort of word. I probably called him a bastard."

  Knowles stared westwards. Forrest looked down at the grass to hide a smile. Lawford looked astonished. "You called him what?"

  "A bastard, sir."

  "That is entirely unacceptable between fellow officers," Lawford said.

  Sharpe said nothing. It was usually the best thing to do.

  "Have you nothing to say?" Lawford demanded.

  "I have never done a thing," Sharpe was goaded into speaking "except for the good of this battalion."

  That vehement statement rather took Lawford aback. He blinked. "No one is decrying your service, Sharpe," he said stiffly. "I am, rather, attempting to inculcate the manners of an officer into your behavior. I will not tolerate crass rudeness to a fellow officer."

  "You'd tolerate losing half your light company, sir?" Sharpe asked.

  "Half my light company?"

  "My fellow officer," Sharpe did not bother to hide his sarcasm, "had the light company in skirmish order underneath the French. When they broke, sir, which they did, he'd have lost them all. They'd have been swept away. Luckily for the battalion, sir, I was there and did what had to be done."