‘You’ve faced them before?’
‘In the Pyrenees. It wasn’t pleasant.’
It began to rain as the two men rode back to the British lines. ‘Tomorrow’s Easter Day,’ Nairn said moodily.
‘Yes.’
Nairn took a long swig of rum from his flask, then offered it to Sharpe. ‘Even for a disbeliever like me it’s a bloody inappropriate day to fight a battle, wouldn’t you say?’
Sharpe did not reply for a gun had boomed behind him. He twisted in his saddle and saw the dirty puff of smoke on the crest of the ridge and, just a second later, he saw a spurt of water splash and die in the western marshes. The French were sighting in their twelve-pounders; the killing guns with their seven foot barrels.
The thought of those efficiently served weapons gave Sharpe a quick sudden pain in his belly. He had somehow convinced himself that there would be no fight, that the French would see how hopeless their cause was, yet the enemy gunners were even now ranging their batteries and Sharpe could hear the whining scrape of blades being whetted on stones in the British cavalry lines. At luncheon, which Nairn’s military family ate inside a large tent, Sharpe found himself hoping that peace would be announced that very afternoon, yet when a message arrived it proved to be orders for the brigade to prepare itself for battle the next day.
Nairn solemnly toasted his aides. ‘An Easter death to the French, gentlemen.’
‘Death to the French,’ the aides repeated the old toast, then stood to drink the King’s health.
Sharpe slept badly. It was not work that kept him awake, for the last marching orders had been copied and dispatched well before nightfall. Nor was it the supper of salt beef and sour wine that had made him restless. It was the apprehension of a man before battle; that same apprehension which had kept him awake on the nights before the duel with Bampfylde. The apprehension was fear; pure naked fear, and Sharpe knew that battle by battle the fear was getting worse for him. When he had first joined the army as a private he had been young and cocksure; he had even felt exhilarated before a fight. He had felt himself to be immortal then, and that had made him confident that he could maul and claw and kill any man who opposed him. Now, as an officer, and married, he possessed more knowledge and so had more fear. Tomorrow he could die.
He tried the old tricks to conquer the knowledge; attempting to snatch an augury of life or death from the commonplace. If a sparrow alighted this side of a puddle, he would live. He despised such superstitious obsessions, yet could not help but indulge them, though he had made the attempt too often in the past to believe in any such trivial portents. Indeed, every man in both armies, Sharpe knew, was trying to snatch just such prophecies from their fears, but there were few who would allow themselves to see death written in their stars, yet many must die. The eve of battle was a time for talismans and amulets and charms and prayers, but the dawn would bring the kick of musket-butts, the hiss of sabres and the skull-shattering sound of artillery firing. So Sharpe shivered in the night and hoped his death would be quick, and that he would not scream beneath the surgeon’s knife.
By dawn the rain had stopped and a drying wind blew across the countryside. High clouds scudded away from the sun’s rising as Sharpe walked through the smoking bivouac fires in search of a cavalry armourer who could put an edge on to his sword. It was the sword of a trooper of the Heavy Cavalry; a long-bladed, heavy, and unbalanced weapon. It was far too unwieldy for most men, even for the burly men who rode the big horses and trained with dumb-bells to give strength to their sword arms, but Sharpe liked the sword and was strong enough to make it into a responsive and murderous weapon.
He found an armourer who ran the blade up his treadled wheel and afterwards stropped it on his leather apron. Sharpe gave the man a coin, then shared a tin mug of tea. Afterwards, with the oiled sword-blade safe in its scabbard, he went back to Nairn’s tent outside of which he found the old Scotsman breakfasting on bread, cold salt-beef, and strong tea. Nairn watched with amusement as Sharpe unrolled the ancient and threadbare jacket from his pack.
‘While you were gone,’ Nairn said, ‘I was vouchsafed a new glimpse of our noble Colonel Taplow.’
Sharpe was grateful for the distraction from his fears. ‘Tell me, please?’
‘He’s holding a service of Holy Communion, for officers only, mark you, behind the latrines in ten minutes. You are invited, but I took the liberty of declining on your behalf. And on mine, as it happens.’
Sharpe laughed. He sat opposite Nairn and wondered whether his right hand was shaking as he reached for a slice of twice-baked bread. The butter was rancid, but the salt on the beef smothered the sour taste.
Nairn picked a shred of salt-beef from his teeth. ‘The thought of Taplow at his sacred offices is quite loathsome. Do you think God listens to such a man?’ Nairn poured rum into his tea.
‘I don’t know, sir.’
‘You’re not a believer, Sharpe?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Nor am I, of course, but I was still half tempted to attend Taplow’s magical incantations. Just in case they helped. I’m damned nervous, Sharpe.’
Sharpe felt a sudden strong surge of affection for Nairn. ‘Me too, sir.’
‘You? Truly?’
Sharpe nodded. ‘Truly. It doesn’t get easier.’
‘How many battles have you fought?’
Sharpe was dunking a lump of hard bread into his tea. He left it there as he thought, then shrugged. ‘God knows, sir. Dozens of the damn things. Too many.’
‘Enough to entitle you to be cautious, Richard. You don’t have to be heroic today. Leave that to some wet-behind-the-ears Lieutenant who needs to make his name.’
Sharpe smiled his thanks. ‘I’ll try, sir.’
‘And if I do anything foolish today, you will tell me?’
Sharpe looked up at the Scotsman, surprised by this confession of uncertainty. ‘You won’t need that, sir.’
‘But you’ll tell me?’ Nairn insisted.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Not that I’ll share any of the glory with you, Sharpe, you mustn’t think that, though I might say afterwards that you were moderately useful.’ Nairn laughed, then waved a greeting to two of his other aides who came to the breakfast table. ‘Good morning, gentlemen! I was thinking last night that perhaps Paris doesn’t count.’
‘Paris?’ One of the puzzled aides asked.
Nairn was evidently thinking of the war’s ending. ‘Perhaps the northern allies will take Paris, but Napoleon might just fall back and fall back, and we’ll keep marching on, and someday this summer the whole damned lot of us will meet in the very middle of France. There’ll be Boney himself in the centre, and every French soldier left alive with him, and the rest of Europe surrounding him, and then we’ll have a proper battle. One last real bastard of a killing. It seems unfair to have come this far and never actually fought against Napoleon himself.’ Nairn gazed wistfully across the bivouacs where the smoke of the cooking fires melded into skeins like a November mist. ‘I’ll keep the Highlanders in reserve, Sharpe. That way no one can accuse me of showing them favouritism.’
It was a strange world, Sharpe thought, in which to keep a battalion out of the battle line was construed as an insult. ‘Yes, sir.’
‘I suppose there’s no point in giving Captain Frederickson direct orders?’
‘Not if you want those orders obeyed, sir. But he knows what to do, and his men would appreciate a visit from you.’
‘Of course, of course.’ Nairn added more rum to his tea, then frowned. ‘Frederickson’s Rifles arc the only men in this brigade who eat properly. They never have salt beef! Why do we never catch them looting?’
‘Because they’re Riflemen, sir. They’re much too clever.’
Nairn smiled. ‘At least there’ll be no more salt beef once this battle’s won. We’ll have French rations.’
The other aides arrived, faces gleaming from their razors. Sharpe had still not shaved, and he had a sudden irra
tional conviction that he would survive the day if he did not shave, then another equally strong impulse said that he would only live if he did shave, and he felt the reptilian squirm of fear in his belly. He stared up at the long, long ridge that, just like the British bivouacs, was topped by a shifting layer of smoke. The smoke was thick enough to suggest the large numbers of Frenchmen who would be defending the high ground this day. Sharpe thought of Jane and suddenly longed for the Dorset house with its implicit promise of a nursery. He was about to ask whether any mail had arrived when a light flashed from the ridge top and Sharpe knew it was the sun reflecting from a telescope as an enemy officer gazed down at the British lines. The fear stirred in Sharpe. He was tempted to take some of Nairn’s rum, but resisted.
The waiting abraded the fear. The first Spanish, Portuguese and British brigades had marched long before dawn, their long lines uncoiling from the encampment in a sluggishly macabre motion, but Nairn’s brigade would be one of the last to leave the lines. They could only wait, pretending confidence, as the minutes wore on. Nairn inspected his battalions and tossed gruff encouragement to the soldiers. Some of the Highlanders sang psalms, but their tunes were so dirge-like that Sharpe went out of earshot. He had decided that his survival lay in not shaving.
It took another half hour before the orders came from Division and Nairn at last could order his men forward. Taplow’s battalion led, and the Highlanders marched at the rear. The brigade followed the other battalions who were already marching to the ridge’s southern slopes. Sharpe, mounted on his mare Sycorax, could see the Spanish Divisions that waited at the ridge’s northern end. Today those Spaniards had the place of honour, for they would comprise the major attack up the ridge’s spine. They had asked for the honour. As they attacked, so the British and Portuguese, under Marshal Beresford, would assault the ridge’s southern end to split the French defences. Other British troops were ringed about the city to make threatening feints designed to stop Marshal Soult concentrating his army on the ridge.
The French, secure on their heights, could see all that Wellington planned. There could be no deception this day, no sleight of arms to blind the enemy and cheat him. This would be work, hard work, work for the bayonet and the bullet, work for the infantry.
The southward march was not easy for the ground was soft. Nairn’s brigade, among the last in Beresford’s long column, found the tracks churned into a morass. At first that clinging mud was their only problem, but as their route angled ever closer to the ridge the brigade came within range of the French gunners. Nairn ordered his men to march through the marshy fields to the west of the tracks, but still the roundshot slashed into his battalion columns. The British artillery tried to reply, but they were shooting uphill at enemy batteries well dug in behind thick emplacements.
‘Close up, you scum!’ Lieutenant-Colonel Taplow bellowed at his leading company after a cannonball had crashed through a file to leave three men bloody and twitching on the soaking ground. ‘Leave them there!’ he shouted at two men who stooped to help the victims. ‘Leave them, I say, or I’ll have you flogged!’ At the rear of Taplow’s fusiliers a band played, their music made ragged by their stumbling progress over the tussocky soft ground. Drummer boys were ordered to attend to the three men, but two were already dead and the third had not long to live. The battalion surgeon finished the man with a quick knife cut, then, shrugging, wiped his bloody hands on his grey breeches.
The French artillery pumped smoke from the ridge crest. Sharpe, staring eastwards, could sometimes see the trace of a dark line in the sky and he knew he watched a cannonball at the top of its arcing flight, and he also knew that such a pencil line was only visible in the sky when the ball was coming straight at the observer. At those moments he felt a temptation to spur Sycorax onwards, feigning some urgent duty, but he restrained himself in case any man should think him cowardly. Instead he rode steadily, flinching inwardly, and hid his relief as the balls missed. One roundshot thumped into the mud just ahead of Sycorax, making the mare rear frantically. Somehow Sharpe kept his feet in the stirrups and his arse on the saddle as the gobbets of wet mud fountained about him. The mare was not properly trained to battle, but she was a good steady horse. She had been a gift from Jane, and that thought gave Sharpe a sentimental longing to see his wife. He wondered if her mail had become lost, because no letter had yet arrived, then a cannonball went just over his shako to decapitate a redcoat marching to Sharpe’s left and he forgot his wife in the sudden surge of fear.
‘Close up!’ a Sergeant shouted. ‘Close up!’ It was the litany of battle and the only obituary of the common soldier.
‘You’re used to this, I suppose?’ A Lieutenant, one of Nairn’s junior aides, spurred alongside Sharpe. Ahead of them a man’s entrails were being trodden into the mud, but either the Lieutenant did not notice or did not recognize what he saw.
‘I don’t think you ever get used to it,’ Sharpe said,
though it was not true. One did get used to it, but that did not help the fear. The Lieutenant, who was new to the war, was clearly terrified, though he was trying hard not to show it. ‘It’s better,’ Sharpe said truthfully, ‘once you can fire back. It’s much less frightening then.’
‘Bless you, sir, I’m not frightened.’
‘I am.’ Sharpe grinned, then looked to his right and saw that Frederickson’s men were so far unscathed. Frederickson had taken his Riflemen closer to the enemy, which had been a shrewd move for the Greenjackets made a small and seemingly negligible target compared to the long and cumbersome column of redcoats. The French were firing over the Riflemen’s heads.
A cavalry officer galloped past Frederickson’s men towards the head of Beresford’s column. Sharpe recognized the man as one of Wellington’s aides, and assumed from his haste that he carried an urgent message. A clue to the message came when the ridge’s northern end suddenly exploded with cannon fire. Sharpe twisted in his saddle and saw that the French had unmasked a dozen batteries that were hammering their missiles down the hill at the attacking Spaniards.
The Lieutenant frowned. ‘I thought we were supposed to attack at the same time as the Dagoes, sir?’
‘We were.’
God only knew what had gone wrong, but gone wrong it had. The Spaniards, instead of waiting until Beresford’s diversionary attack was in position to the south, had precipitately charged up the ridge’s northern slopes. Their bright uniforms and gaudy colours made a brave show, but it was a gallant display being eviscerated by the concentrated fire of the deadly twelve-pounders.
‘Halt! Halt!’ Divisional officers were galloping back down Beresford’s column. ‘Face right! Face right!’
Battalion officers and sergeants took up the cry and the great column halted and clumsily turned to face the bleak, steep slope at the ridge’s centre.
Nairn, who had been riding at the head of his brigade, spurred back. ‘Column of half companies!’ he ordered. It seemed that Marshal Beresford must be contemplating an immediate assault on the ridge. Certainly, if Beresford was to divert attention from the Spanish attack then he could not wait till he reached the gentler slopes at the ridge’s southern end, but would be forced to launch his eleven thousand men on a desperate uphill scramble against the French entrenchments.
The French batteries, seeing the British and Portuguese battalions shake into their attack columns, kept firing. ‘Lie down!’ Nairn shouted. ‘Lie down!’
The battalions dropped, making themselves a smaller and lower target for the enemy gunners, but leaving the officers on horseback feeling horribly exposed. Sharpe stared at the ridge and feared its muscle-sapping steepness. The sun, just rising above the summit, was suddenly dazzling.
‘Wait here, Sharpe!’ Nairn was excited. ‘I’ll discover what’s happening. You wait here!’
Sharpe waited. After breakfast he had pushed some bread and beef into a saddle bag and now, suddenly hungry, he gnawed at a lump of the meat.
‘They’ve cocked it up!’ Colone
l Taplow, his red face as bad-tempered as ever, rode to Sharpe’s side. ‘The Spanish have cocked it up, Sharpe!’
‘So it seems, sir.’ A cannonball thumped the earth to Sharpe’s left. Sycorax skittered sideways until Sharpe soothed her.
‘Seems?’ Taplow was incensed by the mild word. ‘They’ve cocked it up, that’s what they’ve done. Cocked it up!’ He gestured to the north where a new sound erupted as French musketry began flaying the Spaniards. The crackle of musketry was a thick, splintering sound that gave witness to just how many defenders had been waiting for the Spanish. ‘They went too early.’ Taplow seemed to revel in the Spanish mistake. ‘They couldn’t keep their breeches up, could they? Too much damned eagerness, Sharpe. No whippers-in, that’s their problem. No bottom. Not like the English. It’ll be up to us now, Sharpe, you mark my words. It’ll be up to us!’
‘Indeed it will, sir.’
The musketry was unending; a sustained terror of sound just like a million snapping rails of wood. And every snap meant another lead bullet flicking down the slope to strike home in the bunched Spanish ranks.
‘Ah ha! Told you so! No bottom!’ Taplow crowed triumphantly for the Spanish had begun to retreat. The movement was slow at first, merely a slight edging backwards, but it swiftly turned into a quick scramble to escape the flailing bullets. Sharpe was astonished that the Spaniards had climbed as far as they had, and he doubted whether any troops in the world could have gone further, but Colonel Taplow was not so generous. ‘All priming and no charge, that’s the Dago’s problem. No bottom, Sharpe, no bottom. Have a boiled egg.’
Sharpe accepted a hard-boiled egg which he ate as Beresford’s column patiently waited. The sun’s warmth was detectable now, and the small mist that had cloaked the western marshes was quite gone. A heron flapped clumsily into the air and flew southwards. A cannonball struck into Taplow’s bandsmen and Sharpe watched a blood-spattered trumpet fly into the air.