Sharpe's Siege

  ‘If we could find a boat tomorrow,’ Sharpe said specula tively.

  Frederickson gave the suggestion short shrift. ‘In this weather? And can you sail a boat? Even if it was flat calm we’d be up to our arses in water and confusion within minutes.’

  ‘The Marines might be able to sail.’

  ‘Web-foot soldiers don’t sail,’ Frederickson said. ‘Besides, any boat big enough for us will have been scooped up by Bampfylde. He’s a naval officer, remember. He has a patriotic duty to become rich.’

  Sharpe shrugged in the darkness. ‘We’ll just have to hold this place, won’t we? Beat the bastards ragged and then rip the guts out of Bampfylde.’ The last few words were spoken so savagely that even Frederickson shivered.

  Sharpe reached up to his scalp and took off the bandage that had been there since the fort had been captured. He tossed the bloody rag into the darkness. ‘For two sous, William, I’d march south tomorrow. Take our goddamned chances.’

  ‘It’s a bare country,’ Frederickson said, ‘with few places to hide. And the wounded would slow us down.’

  ‘So we’ll stay.’ Sharpe was matter of fact again. ‘You’ll command the south and east walls and I’ll give you half the Marines as a tow-row Company.’ He meant Grenadiers, the shock troops. ‘Palmer can have Minver’s Company and the other Marines for these walls. I want six of your best men. I’m taking the same from every Company.’

  ‘You, Harper, and the pick of the bunch?’ Frederickson smiled.

  ‘In case there’s a tender spot.’ Sharpe stood. ‘Try and get some sleep, William. Tomorrow’s likely to be a long day.’

  ‘And the last peaceful one for a while?’

  ‘If the Frogs know we’re here, yes.’ Sharpe slapped the granite wall of the citadel. ‘Bloody silly place to die, isn’t it?’

  ‘That’ll teach ’em to fight us.‘

  ‘Yes.’ Sharpe laughed, walked away, then stopped. His voice came out of the darkness. ‘What does Teste de Buch mean, William?’

  ‘I don’t know. But I know what Tête de Buche would mean.’

  It sounded the same to Sharpe. ‘What?’

  ‘Woodenhead, blockhead, idiot.’

  ‘Goddamn,’ Sharpe was amused, for only a blockhead would find himself in this predicament, yet in the morning the blockhead must make his goddamns ready to fight, and not just fight, but win. Here, on the edge of France, in the dead days of winter, they must take victory from disaster and hold the fort.

  CHAPTER 13

  Major Pierre Ducos rode his horse along the shabby, damp, dispirited lines of conscripts. A few, precious few, veterans stiffened these ranks, but most of the faces were young, pinched and terrified. No wonder, for yesterday some of these youths had been blooded and savaged, and their tale had spread gloom amongst the rest of the demi-brigade. ‘The enemy was a Battalion strong,’ a Chef de Battalion spoke nervously to Ducos, ‘with skirmishers added.’

  ‘There were less than two hundred men, Colonel.’ Ducos’ voice was pitiless. ‘You were six hundred.’ Dear God, but how Ducos despised soldiers! Braggarts and drum-thumpers all, until the enemy knocked the wind out of their bellies, after which they whined that they had been outnumbered, or that the sun had dazzled them, or that their powder had been damp. God only knew why politicians resorted to soldiers as a final instrument of policy; it was like wagering on a cockfight to decide the fate of empires. ‘And now, Colonel, you will face those same few enemy with upwards of two thousand men. You think it will be enough?’ Ducos made the inquiry with a mocking solicitousness.

  ‘They’re behind walls,’ the colonel spoke nervously.

  ‘In a fortress that has been slighted,’ Ducos said acidly, ‘and is without cannon and has very little musket ammunition.’ Pierre Ducos allowed himself a moment’s pleasure that Richard Sharpe was stranded and trapped. It would, of course, have been far more elegant if Favier had tricked Sharpe into marching through open countryside towards Bordeaux, but the ploy of the forged Bourbon commission had failed and Ducos acknowledged that Favier and de Maquerre had done well. The squadron of ships was gone and Sharpe was bereft. A threatened British landing had been averted, and within a few hours Major Richard Sharpe would be surrounded by bayonets and menaced by two batteries of artillery. Commandant Henri Lassan also marched with the besieging force and, though the Commandant had been disgraced by the loss of his command, restitution had been promised if his intimate knowledge of the Teste de Buch’s defences made General Calvet’s recapture of the coastal fort swift.

  At least, Ducos consoled himself, the general of this demi-brigade knew his business. Calvet was an old soldier of France, a veteran of the Revolutionary wars, and a hard man risen from the ranks in the hard way. He had made his name in Russia where, amidst the retreat of the Grand Army, he had held his brigade together. Other men starved, froze, or were hacked to bloody ruin by the Cossacks, but Calvet’s men, fearing their general more than the enemy or the weather, held to their ranks. To this day, it was said, Calvet’s wife slept on a pillow stuffed with the hair cut from the Cossacks her husband had killed with his own sword. It was a rare flash of imagination in a man known for his direct, straightforward, and bloody mode of fighting. General Calvet was a brute, a butcher, a tough man in a bloody profession, and Ducos, if he had believed in a God, would have given thanks that such an instrument was at his hand.

  Jules Favier, restored to uniform and in high spirits, walked his horse alongside Ducos’ mount. ‘Calvet,’ he said in mild warning, ‘has never fought goddamns.’

  ‘Goddamns,’ Ducos retorted, ‘have never fought Calvet.’

  Colonel Favier acknowledged that truth, then looked at the sky. ‘The seamen said there’d be a storm.’

  ‘They were wrong,’ Ducos said. And indeed the weather, that all night had grumbled with thunder and blown foul and hard, had this morning settled into a gusty, calming mood. Intermittent sunshine glowed on the floodwaters that stretched from overflowing ditches into the fields. Cavalry had gone south across those fields in case Sharpe decided to march to safety down the coast, but Ducos was certain that the Rifleman would stay in the fortress and wait in hope for the return of his ships. ‘Calvet will settle his hash,’ Ducos said with a rare smile on his pinched, scholar’s face.

  The gun-wheels rumbled louder than thunder on the plank-bridge at Facture, then the force was on the marshes proper, the Bassin d‘Arcachon stretched vast to their right, and the fortress of Teste de Buch lay a half day’s march in front.

  Calvet, Ducos, and retribution were coming for a Rifleman.

  In the night a stab of lightning, its forked branches wide enough to embrace the whole northern sky, had slashed down to sheen the waters of the bay with a steel-hard light that had glittered and gone. The wind had raged at the fort, but in the dawn, that was ragged with clearing cloud, the wind had strangely dropped and the air was suddenly warmer. Patrick Harper, scraping with a blunt razor at the stubble on his face, declared there was even a touch of spring in the February air. ‘The baby will be two months old today, so he will,’ he declared to Sharpe.

  ‘And better off if you’d stayed with the Battalion,’ Sharpe growled.

  ‘Not at all!’ Harper was relentlessly cheerful. ‘The ships will come, sir, so they will.’

  One of the wounded men was put on the western ramparts to watch for those ships, while another was placed on the eastern walls to look for the enemy. Two of Frederickson’s Germans, solid reliable men, were sent inland on captured cavalry horses to glean what tidings they could. Another, a silent corporal with a flat, hard face, was sent south on the best of the captured horses. ‘I’m sorry to lose him,’ Sweet William said, ‘but if he can make it in three days, then we might survive.’ The man, a volunteer, had been sent to try and thread the enemy lines and carry news of Sharpe’s predicament to the British Army. Sharpe doubted if the man would ever be seen again, but the possibility that ships could be sent north on a rescue mission was not to be disca
rded.

  The calm, warmer weather raised the men’s spirits. Uniforms, soaked by the last few days’ exertions, were hung to dry on ramparts, giving the Teste de Buch a comfortingly domestic air. Palmer’s Marines, stripped to the waist, took axes and billhooks from the villagers and went to the woods where tree after tree was felled and dragged back to the fort for fuel and barricades. Small boats were broken up and their timbers brought within the walls. Every container that could hold water, from rain-barrels to cooking pots, was carried to an empty, scorched magazine and stored in safety.

  It was no time to be careful of French opinion. Houses were searched for food, powder and weapons. Smoked hams and bacon were brought to the fort, cattle were slaughtered, and winter stores of wheat, pathetically hidden, were dragged in heavy sacks up the sandy road.

  To one of the merlons, a jutting stone stub between two embrasures, a stripped pine trunk was lashed tight. It had been the tallest tree in the woodlands and now, at its tapering tip, it carried a crude flag.

  The flag was not the Union flag, for Minver’s men could not find sufficient blue cloth to make such a thing. Instead it was the flag of England; the red cross of St George made from the sleeves of Marines’ uniforms and sewn on to a white field that had previously served as a tablecloth in the house of the Customs Inspector at Le Moulleau. A red cross on white, the flag of the man who had slain the dragon, and though few of Sharpe’s men would hold allegiance to England, coming as they did from Germany or Ireland or Scotland or Wales or Spain, the flag was oddly comforting. It streamed in the wind-gusts as a signal to an empty sea.

  The defences were Sharpe’s concern. There were four ramparts, and at the corners of the fort were higher citadels, little more than guerites for the shelter of sentries, but the citadels effectively blocked swift movement from one rampart to the next. A soldier, wishing to go from the north wall to the east, must thread the two doorways of the north-east citadel and, to make a swifter passage, Sharpe had walkways of rough pine lashed together then bridged diagonally across the corners.

  The courtyard was not square, but made into an irregular shape by the buildings that were sheltered beneath the ramparts. The burned barracks filled the square of the north-eastern corner, while the garrison offices and the officers’ quarters filled the south-western. The gap between them was crudely but thickly barricaded with an abatis of untrimmed pine trees. If the enemy penetrated the courtyard then they would be faced by the thick hedge of bristly pine.

  Sharpe’s greatest worry was ammunition. Lieutenant Fytch, set to count the cartridges left to the Marines, gloomily reported that each man had scarce thirty shots left. The Riflemen, who always carried more into battle, had over sixty, but the grim total was less than nine thousand cartridges in the fort. A Battalion could fire as much in the first five minutes of a battle, and Frederickson, scratching calculations on a bastion with a spare rifle flint, grunted. ‘I reckon we’ve got enough for an eighteen-minute battle. After that we’ll be throwing blacking-balls at them.’

  ‘We’ve got the powder in the horns.’ Sharpe was speaking of the fine powder that every rifleman carried in a horn. The powder was kept for the special shots, when marksmanship might be spoiled by the coarser powder of cartridges, but Sharpe knew that, even if spare bullets could be found, the extra powder would not be sufficient for more than six or seven hundred rounds.

  So more men were sent out to search for powder. The villagers had duck guns, therefore there must be powder in the countryside, and Sharpe gave the men permission to pull walls down to find hidden supplies. He would be lucky, he thought, to even double his ammunition supply, so other means of killing Frenchmen must be devised.

  Lieutenant Fytch had a dozen men sharpening pine stakes that had first been hammered into the bed of the wet ditch. The stakes, whittled to points with knives and bayonets, were hidden beneath the water in those places Sharpe judged the most dangerously exposed to French assaults. Above the stakes, heaped on the ramparts, were piles of masonry that had been loosened by Bampfylde’s explosions. A building stone, dropped from the firestep, would kill a man as effectively as any bullet, yet the piled masonry seemed a pathetic weapon to prepare against whatever might come from the east.

  ‘Perhaps they won’t come,’ Patrick Harper said.

  ‘There aren’t supposed to be many troops in this area,’ Sharpe said hopefully.

  ‘I suppose they was ghosts we were fighting two days ago?’ Harper asked innocently. ‘And perhaps we won’t need this bastard.’ He slapped the breech of one of the two twelve-pounder guns rescued from the ditch. Harper had taken it upon himself to make the guns battleworthy. Presently there was not enough powder to fire even one cannon, but Harper prayed enough propellant would be scraped up from the local village. Like many an infantryman he was fascinated by cannon and wanted desperately to make at least one of these guns capable of firing a shot. With a gentleness that was surprising in such a huge man, and with a tenacity Sharpe had seen before in the Irishman, Harper was using a narrow-bladed awl to dig the iron spike, scrap by bright scrap, out of the vent-hole.

  ‘Can it be cleared?’ Sharpe asked.

  Harper’s pause seemed to suggest that the job might be expedited if officers did not insist on asking him damn-fool questions, then he shrugged. ‘I’ll clear the bastard it if takes all day and night, sir.’

  By the afternoon Sharpe fervently hoped that the cannons could be made to work, for Lieutenant Minver had struck gold. Or rather, in the strongroom at the back of the Customs House at Le Moulleau, he had found eight barrels of black powder.

  ‘It’s filthy stuff, sir,’ Minver said dubiously.

  Sharpe fingered some of the powder in his right hand. It was old, it smelt damp, and it was the worst kind of black powder; that made from the dusty leavings of finer powder and adulterated with ground pit-coal, but it was still gunpowder. He put a pinch into the pan of his rifle, snapped the flint on to the frizzen, and the powder fizzed dirtily. ‘Mix it with the other captured powder. And well done.’

  A laboratory was made in the chapel where three men tore pages from Lassan’s remaining books and twisted the paper into crude cartridges that were filled with the coarse powder. They lacked bullets as yet, but Frederickson had a squad of men ripping the lead from the church at Arcachon and Sergeant Rossner was stoking a fire in the furnace that had once heated the French shot and Lieutenant Fytch was the possessor of a pistol that came complete with a mould for bullet-making which, though slightly smaller in calibre than the muskets or rifles, would still make a usable missile. Some undamaged bullets were raked out of the burned barracks where, Sharpe supposed, his spare ammunition had been exploded by Bampfylde.

  More powder still came from Arcachon and from the villages of Le Teste, Pyla and Le Moulleau. There were leather bags of powder, boxes of powder, and small barrels of powder. There were even musketoons, an ancient match-lock, six blunderbusses, eight duck guns, and a fine duelling pistol that had yet another bullet mould in its wooden case.

  The men were busy and, as ever, purposeful activity made them content. When a cheer announced that Patrick Harper had succeeded in making one of the twelve-pounders battleworthy, that contentment soared into a confidence that belied the desperation of their predicament. Harper started on the second twelve-pounder gun. ‘Unless you’d like me to work on one of the big buggers?’ he asked Sharpe hopefully.

  Sharpe declined the offer. He did not have enough men to raise one of the vast thirty-six pounders from the channel, nor could he spare the powder needed to fire one of the huge guns. Even these smaller field guns, if they could both be fired, would not be used more than once or twice. They were weapons for emergency only.

  ‘Sir!’ The wounded man watching inland waved to Sharpe. ‘Visitor, sir!’

  Sharpe ran to the gate, walked across the precarious plank bridge, and saw a tall, long-haired man walking towards the glacis.

  It was Cornelius Killick, and the sight of the American asto
nished Sharpe. He had thought Killick would have long gone inland, yet here was the privateer captain looking for all the world as though he merely took an afternoon stroll. Sharpe met the American beyond the glacis. ‘I thought you’d gone to Paris, Mr Killick.’

  Killick ignored Sharpe’s greeting, staring instead at the work being done to barricade the fort’s blackened archway. ‘You look as if you’re expecting trouble, Major.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Stranded, are you? A modern Robinson Crusoe?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  Killick laughed at Sharpe’s evasive answers, then allowed himself to be drawn away from the fort. ‘I’m doing a bit of repair work myself.’

  ‘You are?’

  ‘I’m putting an elmwood arse on an oak-built ship.’ The American grinned. ‘The Thuella wasn’t quite as knocked up as I thought. You want passage, Major Sharpe?’

  ‘To America?’ The thought amused Sharpe.

  ‘We make fine whisky, Major,’ Killick said persuasively, ‘and fine women!’

  ‘If you say so, but I’ll refuse just the same.’

  The two men walked to the sand dunes by the channel where the American opened a leather bag and offered Sharpe an oyster. ‘Ever eaten a raw oyster, Major?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Perhaps you’d better not. You might accuse me of breaking my promise not to fight Englishmen.’ Killick laughed, broke a shell open with a clasp knife, and tipped the oyster into his mouth. ‘So you’re in trouble.’

  ‘I can’t deny it.’

  Killick sat and, after a moment’s hesitation, Sharpe sat beside him. He suspected the American had come here for some purpose, though Killick was at pains to make the visit seem casual. The purpose could be simply to spy on Sharpe’s preparations, but Killick had made no real effort to enter the fort and seemed content to have Sharpe’s attention. The American tossed empty shells on to the sand. ‘Some of my men, Major, being less civilized than myself, ain’t happy with me. All because of my oath, you understand. If we can’t fight, then we can’t make money.’