The smoke was acrid. Sharpe wanted to draw his sword, but he needed both hands to curb Sycorax’s panic. She burst through the smoke and Sharpe saw a mass of snarling redcoats hacking and thrusting at the French gunners. This was revenge, and none of the Fusiliers would take an enemy’s surrender. The gunners would pay for the damage they had done, and so the bayonets ripped and thrust.
Sycorax stopped, quivering, because a French trench blocked her path. The trench was shallow, as if it had only been half finished. A redcoat and two Frenchmen lay dead inside. Sharpe scraped his sword free and tried to make sense of the chaos beyond the trench. Taplow’s men were brawling, stabbing and clawing their way through the battery while, just seventy paces to their left, a fresh enemy battalion was marching through the gunsmoke. The only man to have seen that threat was Frederickson, who had spread his skirmishers in a tenuous line to block the enemy’s approach, but a handful of Riflemen could not hope to stop a determined charge by a whole battalion. Taplow’s men were in utter disorder, seeking only vengeance, yet at any moment the enemy’s counter-attack would come on them like thunder.
‘Form companies!’ Sharpe shouted at the fusiliers. He spurred Sycorax over the shallow trench, then used the flat of his sword on men hunting down the last gunners who were trying to find refuge beneath the hot barrels of their guns. ‘Form companies!’ He found a Major. ‘Are-you in command now?’
‘Command?’ The man was dazed.
‘Taplow’s dead.’
‘Good God!’ The Major gaped at Sharpe.
‘For Christ’s sake, form your men! You’re about to be attacked.’
‘We are?’
Sharpe twisted to his left and saw that the French battalion had checked their advance while they fixed bayonets yet, despite the small delay, there could not be more than half a minute before the French advanced into the captured battery where they would make mincemeat of the redcoats. Sharpe shouted for the men to form, and a few Sergeants saw the danger and took up the cry, but Sharpe knew it was hopeless. Taplow’s men were oblivious of everything but the captured battery and its small plunder. In less than a minute they would be overwhelmed. He swore under his breath. No one had even thought to spike the enemy guns, and Sharpe wished he had remembered to put a hammer and a few nails in his saddlebag.
Then, blessedly, he heard a crashing volley and he saw the Highlanders coming out of the smoke bank. Nairn had brought them in to the left of Taplow’s charge, and now the Scots fell on the flank of the advancing French battalion. It took just two Scottish volleys before the French gave up the counter-attack.
Sharpe found Taplow’s senior Major. ‘Form your battalion!’
‘I can’t ...’
‘Do it. Now! Or else I’ll have you arrested! Move!’
A French gunner, wounded from a dozen blades, collapsed beside Sharpe’s horse. Redcoats were drinking the powder-stained water from the gun-buckets in which the cannon swabs were soaked between shots. The English wounded were propped against the wicker baskets filled with earth that made the cannon embrasures. One such basket seemed to explode into dirty shreds under the impact of a roundshot and Sharpe realized that French guns, further up the ridge, had begun to fire into the captured battery.
‘You’re the reserve now!’ Sharpe shouted at the Major. ‘Form your men and fall in behind the Highlanders!’
He did not wait to see if he was obeyed, but spurred after the Scots who were marching onwards. To their left, beyond Nairn’s second battalion, another brigade was going forward. The attack seemed to have broken the outer French crust, but as the British advanced so they would squeeze the French into an ever thicker and more impenetrable defence.
Sharpe rode past a dead Rifleman and was relieved to see it was not Harper. Nairn’s attack, spirited and bloody, was going well. The Highlanders’ Grenadier Company was in an enemy trench, led by a group of officers and sergeants who used their massive claymore swords to scour the French out. Frederickson’s sharpshooters picked off the fleeing enemy. Two pipers, apparently oblivious of the horror, calmly played their instruments. There was something about that music, Sharpe thought, that suited a battlefield. The noise was like that which a man might make if he was being skinned alive, but it seemed to fill the enemy with fear just as it inspired the Scots to savagery. A riderless horse, its neck sheeted with blood, galloped in panic towards the enemy lines.
‘Taplow’s dead!’ Sharpe found Nairn.
Nairn stared at Sharpe as though he had not heard, then he sighed. ‘So much for prayer before battle. Poor man.’
The neighbouring brigade had stormed a small redoubt and Sharpe could see its ramparts swarming with British and Portuguese infantry. Bayonets rose and fell. The attack, Sharpe decided, had gone beyond the ability of any one man to control it; now it was just a mass of maddened men released to battle, and so long as they could be kept moving forward, then so long was victory possible.
Sharpe lost sense of time. The fear was gone, as it always seemed to vanish once the danger was present. Nairn’s men, thinned out and bloodied, pushed forward into gunfire. Smoke thickened. Knots of men lay in blood where canister had struck. The wounded crawled for help, or vomited, or cried, or just lay softly to let death come. Order seemed to have gone. Instead of battalions marching proudly to the attack, it now seemed to Sharpe that the assault consisted of small groups of men who dashed a few yards forward, then summoned up the courage for another quick advance. Some men sought shelter and had to be rousted back into the advance. Somewhere a Colour showed through the smoke. Sometimes a cheer announced an enemy trench taken. A British galloper gun unlimbered and fired fast into the blinding fog.
The defence thickened. The enemy gunfire, which had been shattering at the start of the assault, seemed to double in its intensity. Nairn’s men, broken into leaderless units, went to ground. Nairn tried to force them on, but the brigade was exhausted, yet Division judged the moment to perfection for, just as Nairn knew he could ask no more of his men, a reserve brigade came up behind and swept through the scattered remnants of his three battalions.
The Scotsman had tears in his eyes; perhaps for the dead, or perhaps for pride. His men had done well.
‘Congratulations, sir,’ Sharpe said, and meant it, for Nairn’s men had driven deep into the horrid defences.
Nairn shook his head. ‘We should have gone further.’ He frowned, listening to the battle. ‘Some poor bastard’s fetching it rough, though.’
‘The big redoubt, sir.’ Sharpe pointed forward and left to where, amidst the shifting scrim of gunsmoke, there was a thicker patch of white smoke which betrayed the position of the large central redoubt. Musketry cracked about its earthen walls.
‘If we take that fort,’ Nairn said, ‘the battle’s won.’
But other men would have to take the redoubt. They were fresh men, Highlanders of the reserve brigade who marched into the maelstrom with their pipes playing. Nairn could only watch. He sheathed his sword as though he knew it would not be wanted again in this battle, nor, indeed, in this war. ‘We’ll advance behind the attack, Sharpe.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Sharpe rode to reorganize the shattered battalions. Bullets hissed near him, a shell dropped just over his head, and once he seemed to be bracketed by a shrill whistling of canister, yet he somehow led a charmed existence. Around him an army bled, but Sharpe lived. He thought of Jane, of Dorset, and of all the pleasures that waited with peace, and he prayed that victory would come soon, and safely.
The French gunners ripped bloody gaps in the Highlanders who charged the redoubt. Canister coughed at point-blank range, reinforced by the musketry of infantry who lined the palisade to fire down into the swarm of men who scrambled across the dry ditch and over the bodies of their clansmen.
‘Rather them than me.’ Sergeant Harper stood beside Sharpe’s horse.
Frederickson’s company had come well through the horror. They’d lost six men only. Taplow’s battalion had suffered far
worse and, when Sharpe had re-formed it, there seemed only to be half as many men as had started on the attack, and that half so dazed as to be in a trance. Some of the men wept because Taplow was dead. ‘They liked him,’ the Light Company’s Captain had explained to Sharpe. ‘He flogged them and swore at them, but they liked him. They knew where they were with him.’
‘He was a brave man,’ Sharpe said.
‘He was frightened of peace. He thought it would be dull.’
The Highlanders scrabbled at the earth wall. French muskets clawed at them, but somehow the Scotsmen hauled themselves up and thrust their bayonets over the barricade. One man dragged himself to the top, fell, another took his place, and suddenly the Scots were tearing the palisade to scrap and flooding through the gaps. The cheers of the attackers sounded thin through the smoke. The supporting companies were crossing the ditch of dead men, and the redoubt was taken.
Sharpe sheathed his sword. He noted, with some surprise, that it was unbloodied. Perhaps, he thought, he would not have to kill in this last battle, then a superstitious certainty suggested that he would only survive if he did not try to kill. He touched his unshaven chin, then forgot the auguries of life and death as a massive volley hammered from the far side of the captured redoubt.
‘God save Ireland.’ Harper’s voice had awe in it.
A French counter-attack, as desperate as the Highland assault, had been launched on the redoubt and Sharpe saw with horror how the blue-coated enemy was clearing the newly taken ramparts. Men fought hand to hand, but the French had the advantage of numbers and they were winning by sheer weight alone.
Survivors of the Scottish regiments jumped down to escape from the fort, French cheers scorned them, then the reserve battalions, more Scotsmen, were snarling forward with bayonets outstretched.
‘We’ll form as a reserve!’ Nairn shouted at Sharpe.
‘Skirmishers forward!’ Sharpe shouted.
Nairn’s brigade had marched three battalions strong, but now it formed in only two. The shrunken Highlanders were on the left, and the remains of the two English battalions paraded as one on the right. The men crouched, praying they would not be needed. Their faces were blackened by powder residue through which sweat carved dirty white lines.
The second Scottish attack clawed its way into the redoubt. Once again the bayonets rose and fell on the parapet, and once again the Scots drove the French out. Smoke drifted to obscure the fight, but the pipes still played and the cheers were again in Gaelic.
Sharpe kept his sword sheathed as he rode Sycorax towards Nairn. Above him, incongruous on this day of struggle, two larks climbed high above the smoke. Sycorax shied away from a dead Scottish Sergeant. The battle had become quiet, or at least it seemed so to Sharpe. Men fought and died not two hundred paces northwards, and all around the guns still thundered their gut-thumping menace into the smoke-cloud, but it seemed unthreatening to Sharpe. He remembered the remains of the salt beef in his pouch, and was astonished to find that a French musket bullet had lodged in the tough, gristly meat. He prised the ball free, then bit hungrily into the food.
‘There’s another brigade a quarter mile behind us,’ Nairn said. ‘They’ll go on to the end of the ridge if the fort falls.’
‘Good.’
‘Thank you for all you did,’ Nairn said.
Sharpe, embarrassed by the praise, shook his head. ‘I didn’t even get my sword wet, sir.’
‘Nor me.’ Nairn stared up into the sky.
A French cannonball, fired blind from the left flank, and aimed at the Scotsmen who had captured the redoubt, flew wide. It took off the head of Sharpe’s horse in an eruption of warm blood. For a second Sharpe sat on the headless mare, then the body tipped forward and he frantically kicked his feet out of the stirrups and threw himself sideways as the animal’s corpse threatened to roll on to him.
‘God damn it!’ Sharpe sprawled in a puddle of warm horse blood, then clambered to his feet. ‘God damn it!’
Nairn governed his impulse to laugh at Sharpe’s undignified fall. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said instead.
‘She was a present from Jane.’ Sharpe stared at the charnel mess that had been Sycorax. The headless body was still twitching.
‘She was a good horse,’ Nairn said. ‘Save the saddle.’ He turned in his own saddle to see if one of his spare horses was in sight, but a sudden volley of musketry turned him back.
Another French counter-attack was sweeping forward, this one outflanking and assaulting the redoubt, and again the Scots were being forced backwards by a superior number of men. Blue-coated infantry swarmed at the redoubt’s walls, muskets crashed, and for the second time the French retook the fort. Screams sounded as Highlanders were hunted down inside the courtyard. ‘The bloody French are fighting well today.’ Nairn sounded puzzled.
The enemy scrambled along the palisade, bayoneting wounded Scotsmen. These Frenchmen were, indeed, fighting with a verve that the earlier attack, in column, had not displayed. An eagle standard shone among the smoke and, beneath its brightness, Sharpe saw a French General. The man was standing with legs straddled wide on the fort’s southern parapet. It was an arrogant pose, suggesting that the Frenchman was lord of this battlefield and more than equal to anything the British could throw against him. Frederickson’s Riflemen must have seen the enemy General, for a dozen of them fired, but the Frenchman had a charmed life this day.
‘That’s Calvet!’ Sharpe had trained his glass on the Frenchman and recognized the short, squat figure of the man he had fought at the Teste de Buch. ‘It’s bloody Calvet!’
‘Let’s teach the bastard a lesson.’ Nairn drew his sword. It was evident that with the last repulse of the Scots there were no fresh troops to launch against the recaptured redoubt. If Calvet was given more than a few minutes he would reorganize his defences and the fort would be doubly hard to take. Now was the moment to counter-attack, and Nairn’s was the closest brigade. ‘Quick, Sharpe! Let’s get it over!’
Calvet turned imperiously away. On either flank of the redoubt his men were marching forward. The fort’s ditch was heaped with dead and dying men.
‘On your feet!’ Nairn had ridden to the space between his two battalions. ‘Fix bayonets!’ He waited till the blades were fixed, then waved his cocked hat. ‘Forward! Let me hear the pipes!’
The two battalions went forward. So far they were unnoticed. The French were clearing their embrasures and firestep, while one of Calvet’s battalions was being formed in three ranks in front of the shattered palisade and blood-drenched ditch. It was an officer of that battalion who first saw Nairn’s threat and shouted a warning up to the fort’s parapet.
No one had thought to spike the guns, and now the French artillerymen charged them with canister and crashed death out at Nairn’s attack. Sharpe, hurrying to keep up with the mounted Scotsman, saw Nairn fall, but it was only Nairn’s horse that had been wounded. The old Scotsman, his hat gone and his white hair disarrayed, picked himself up and brandished his sword. ‘Forward!’
The fort had been captured twice, and twice recaptured. The crude earthen square, with its battered palisades, seemed to be sucking men into its horror, almost as if by mutual consent the two armies had agreed that whoever won the fort would gain the day. Sharpe could see open ground to his right, ground that would outflank the smoking redoubt, but cool sense, which might have suggested occupying the ground, had been replaced by a savage pride that would not permit General Calvet the satisfaction of holding the redoubt. Nairn, so long denied the chance to show his skills, would now prove himself the master of this battle’s heart. He had more than the redoubt’s guns to contend with, for the battalion of French infantry were loading their muskets in readiness for Nairn’s assault.
‘Steady, lads, steady!’ Nairn had launched his attack on an impulse, now he had to slow it down so that his men did not become ragged with fear or eagerness. ‘Watch your dressing! Steady, lads!’ He smiled as Sharpe joined him. ‘One last effort, Sharpe, just o
ne last effort!’
One of the Highlander’s Colours fell, was retrieved, and hoisted again. A Sergeant’s leg was sliced off at the knee by a cannonball. The pipes whipped fervour into flagging hearts.
The French infantry was loaded and their muskets were raised. There was no sign of Calvet who must have stayed inside the redoubt. Sharpe watched the Frenchmen cock their muskets. ‘We’ll break the bastards!’ Nairn shouted. ‘We’ll break them!’
The French infantry fired and the air was filled with the splintering volley and the whiplash hiss of its bullets. Smoke gouted thick as blood from the cannon embrasures and Sharpe saw the ground ahead of him churn with the strike of canister. Nairn staggered backwards and Sharpe turned to him in alarm.
‘It’s only my leg, man! It’s nothing! Go on! Go on!’ Nairn was wounded, but still exultant. He limped, but would not let Sharpe stay with him. ‘Give them a volley, Richard, now’s your moment!’
‘Brigade!’ Sharpe’s voice was huge. ‘Brigade will halt! Present!’
The redcoats stopped. They raised their heavy muskets. The French battalion knew what was coming and frantically tried to reload. Sharpe raised his sword, paused a heartbeat, then swept it down. ‘Fire!’
A crashing thunderous volley, a spew of acrid smoke, and no time to wonder what damage the bullets had done. ‘Charge!’
‘Take the boys home, Richard!’ Nairn called. ‘Take them home!’
‘Charge!’ Sharpe felt the rage rising, the unreasonable rage of battle, the anger that would only be slaked by victory. It was this same pride and rage that had made Taplow spur ahead of his men to certain death, and which had made Nairn lead his men into the cauldron that was the redoubt’s killing ground. ‘Charge!’ A musket ball slapped past his face. Sharpe could see the faces of the French infantry now, and they looked desperately young and desperately frightened.