Sharpe's Siege

  In Commandmant Lassan’s old quarters two Marines, one who had been a surgeon’s mate and another who had trained in the butcher’s trade, laid out carpenter’s tools, shaving razors, and sewing kits on a table. They had no clamps, instead there was a cauldron of boiling pitch with which to cauterize a stump. They had no camphorated wine, nor any solution of lead acetate, so instead they had a barrel of salt-water to wash wounds, and a pot filled with spider-webs that could be stuffed into deep cuts. Patrick Harper, the big Irishman, had recommended maggots for cleaning wounds, but the dignity of their new-fetched professional pride would not allow the two Marines to accept the nostrum. They listened to the shots in the night, sipped the brandy that was supposed to dull wounded men’s pain, and wondered when the first wounded would be brought for their attention.

  Captain Palmer, trying to sleep where the sixty men were held in reserve, knew that there would be small rest tonight. Musket shots and sudden shouts came faint to the old offices, but not so faint that they did not cause men to stir and reach for their muskets or rifles. ‘I wish the bastards would come,’ one Marine muttered, and Palmer held the same belief. Better to get it over, he thought, than this damned waiting.

  A Spanish Rifleman on the southern wall sent for Sharpe. ‘Can you hear it, senor?’ The man spoke in Spanish.

  Sharpe listened. Faint, but unmistakable, came the sound of picks and spades thudding into earth, then the ring of a crowbar on stone. ‘They’re making a battery,’ he replied in Spanish.

  ‘In the village?’ The Rifleman made it half a guess and half a question.

  Sharpe listened again. ‘I’d say so.’

  ‘They’ll be in range, then.’ The Spaniard slapped the woodwork of his rifle.

  ‘Long range,’ Sharpe said dubiously.

  ‘Not for Taylor,’ the Spaniard said. The American’s marksmanship was a legend to Frederickson’s men.

  But Taylor, this night, was in the darkness; gone with Harper and Frederickson, gone to spread terror among the men who tried to keep a garrison awake with clamour, gone to the kill.

  Not a man made a sound. They lay flat to let their eyes adjust to the darkness.

  The sky was not so dark as the land. There was no moon, but a spread of stars showed between patches of cloud and that lighter sky might betray a silhouette from ground-level and so the Riflemen lay, bellies on the sand, unmoving.

  They were the best. Each man was a veteran, each had fought in more battles than could be casually recalled, and each had killed and gone past that point where a man found astonishment in the act of giving death to another human being.

  William Frederickson, whose passion was for the architecture of the past and who was as well educated as any man in Wellington’s Army, saw death as a regrettable but inevitable necessity of his trade. If wars could be won without death Frederickson would have been content, but so far mankind had devised no such process. And war, he believed, was necessary. To Frederickson the enemy was the embodiment of Napoleon’s Imperial ambitions, the foe of all that he held most dear, and while he was not so foolish, nor so blind, as to be unaware of their humanity, it was nevertheless a humanity that had been pointed in his direction with orders to kill. It was therefore necessary to kill more swiftly and more efficiently than the enemy.

  Thomas Taylor, Frederickson’s American, reckoned death as commonplace as a meal or a woman. It was part of being alive. From his youngest days he had only known cruelty, pain, sickness, poverty, and death, and he saw nothing strange in any of those things. If it had made him heartless, it had also given him a pride in surviving in the valley of the shadow. He could kill with a rifle, a knife, a sword bayonet, or his bare hands, and he was good with all of them. He was a man of great resentment, and small remorse. He resented a fate that had driven him from his own land, that had doomed him to an Army he did not love, but his pride would not let him be a bad soldier.

  For Patrick Harper killing was a soldier’s trade and an act that provoked equal measures of regret and pride. By nature the Irishman was a gentle, pacific man, but there was a rage in him that could be touched by battle and turn him into a warrior as fearsome as any celebrated in Celtic song. Only battle seemed to touch that rage.

  Sometimes, thinking of the men he had killed and whose faces he had seen show the last emotion of life, Harper might wish the blow withdrawn, the bayonet unthrust, or the trigger unpulled, but it was always too late. Other times, when he looked about the men he led, he was proud that he was of the best, that his deeds were celebrated, and that his name was never spoken with disdain. He loved the men he fought alongside, and their deaths hurt him, so he fought for them like a demon. He was a soldier, and he was a good one, and now he lay in the sand and was aware of the Green Jackets lying to his left and right and of the small sounds that came from the dunes ahead.

  For an hour or more the French had been sniping at the fort, teasing the defenders, but always from a safe distance. They had done it to the southern and eastern ramparts, and now dark figures showed in the dead ground to the north where Frederickson’s men lay.

  Sweet William clicked his tongue softly, held a hand up so that it was silhouetted on the dark sky, and slowly gestured further north.

  Thirteen shadows moved in the sand. They had blackened faces, blackened hands, and darkened weapons. Their rifles were slung taut across their backs for Frederickson, knowing the value of fear driven into an enemy’s heart, wanted this night’s killing to be silent. They would use blades, not bullets, and the thirteen men moved with the skilled silence that presages death. Each Rifleman had spent time in daylight on this very ground and, though the dunes looked different under the night’s cloak, the remembered knowledge was an advantage not given to their enemies.

  A squad of ten Frenchmen gathered under the fold of a dune that edged on to the saw-grass of the glacis. They were one of six such parties abroad this night and they were enjoying their work. No danger seemed to threaten them, not even random musket fire from the dark ramparts that showed above the glacis. For the first hour of their excursion, treading into unknown darkness, they had gone cautiously and nervously, but the night’s innocent silence had lulled their fears and made them bold.

  Fifty yards to their left Lieutenant Piellot’s squad suddenly yelled like savages and blasted shots at the fort. The men in the shelter of the dune grinned. Their own officer whispered that they could rest a moment and one sergeant made a cave about his head with his greatcoat and, under its hooding darkness, struck a flint on steel, blew tinder to life, and lit his short pipe.

  Five yards away, unseen, Thomas Taylor eased himself along the sand on his elbows. In his right hand, blackened with a ball of boot-blacking, was a twenty-three inch sword bayonet that had been honed and sharpened to a razor’s fineness.

  The French officer, a captain of skirmishers, clambered to the top of the dune, careless of the small noises made by the cascading sand. Lieutenant Piellot was making enough racket to wake the dead and the small laughter and low voices of his own squad caused the captain no concern. He stared at the fortress and thought he saw a figure move on the ramparts. At night the eyes played tricks and he stared at the place where he thought he had seen movement and decided he was wrong. He hoped the British would surrender swiftly. The captain, who had a fiancée in Rheims and a mistress in Bordeaux, did not relish dying for the Emperor in a useless escalade on this shabby fortress.

  Piellot’s men fired a volley and the noise slammed over the dunes in two waves; the first from the muskets and the second the echo from the fortress wall. The squad shouted insults, rattled their ramrods in hot barrels, and the captain knew there was no point in his own men startling the enemy until Piellot’s men quit their entertainment. He slid down the sand, calling to his men to relax, but suddenly his feet were seized, tugged hard, and the captain slithered down the dune, sprawling and flailing, until a boot slammed into his belly and a knee dropped on to his chest and a voice was hissing in fluent French that
unless he kept very silent the knife at his throat would cut through to his spine. The captain kept very silent.

  He could see nothing, but he could hear grunts and scuffles. One of his men’s muskets banged into the air and, in the muzzle’s red flash, the captain had a glimpse of black shapes rising and falling, of blades dripping, and suddenly the smell of raw blood was in his nostrils. Flesh sucked on steel, a blade grated on bone as it was withdrawn, men breathed heavily, then there was a respite from the sound of butchery.

  ‘One,’ Frederickson, kneeling on the captain, whispered the word into the sudden silence.

  ‘Two,’ Harper hissed.

  ‘Three,’ said a German from Mainz who kept a count of the Frenchmen he killed in battle.

  ‘Four,’ Thomas Taylor.

  ‘Five,’ a youth who was reputed to have stabbed his mother in Bedford then fled to the Army before the law could catch him.

  ‘Six,’ a Spaniard recruited in Salamanca to swell ranks depleted by war. The numbers went to thirteen. All

  Frederickson’s men were present, none was wounded, and, of the enemy, only the French captain was alive.

  That captain, feeling he had shown insufficient valour this night, pushed his hand down to his belt where a pistol was holstered. The knife pressed on his throat. ‘Don’t move,’ the voice said. The captain froze.

  Frederickson ran his free hand over the captain’s body, found pistol and sword, and drew both free. He pushed the pistol into his jacket, then used his knife to cut the Frenchman’s small ammunition pouch free. The Riflemen were slashing at the dead men’s cartouches. French musket balls, being fractionally smaller than the British issue, could be used by the Marines and Riflemen in their weapons, whereas captured British ball was useless to the French.

  ‘RSM Harper?’ Frederickson backed away from his captive. ‘Take the bugger back.’ Sweet William, careless of the conventions of this war, first tied a gag about the officer’s mouth. ‘Tommy? John? Go with Mr Harper.’ Frederickson was careful to give Harper the honorific due to a Regimental Sergeant Major.

  It took twenty minutes before the French officer was hauled by a loop of rope to the battlements on the western face, followed by nine precious cartouches of ready ammunition, and it was another ten minutes before Harper and his escort were back with Frederickson. They made themselves known with the harsh call of a nightjar, were answered in kind, then went on to the east where more Frenchmen waited in the darkness.

  ‘He says, sir,’ Lieutenant Fytch was acting as interpreter,

  ‘that there won’t be an attack tonight.’

  ‘He does, does he?’ Sharpe kept his eyes on the captured French officer who shook in the corner of the room.

  Sharpe did not blame the man. The French captain had been brought to the makeshift surgery to answer questions and the man doubtless believed the ranks of pincers, saws, probes, and razors were to be used on him. Each slow, burping bubble of the simmering pitch made Captain Mayeron shudder.

  ‘Ask him who’s in command,’ Sharpe ordered. He half listened to the ensuing conversation as he probed through Mayeron’s belongings. There was a fine watch with a chased silver lid that told Sharpe it was quarter past three in the morning. There was a bundle of letters, tied in a green ribbon, all written from Rheims and signed Jeanette. There was a miniature painting, enclosed in a leather wallet and presumably of the same Jeanette who simpered artfully at the beholder. There was a handkerchief, a clasp knife, three walnuts, an unwashed fork and spoon, a flask of brandy, a pencil stub, and a small, leather-clad diary that contained sketches of the countryside and a clumsy, heavy-jowled, pencil-drawn portrait of a girl called Marie. In the same page was a slip of pasteboard on which was glued some dried flowers and signed, evidently with love, by the same Marie.

  ‘Calvet,’ Fytch said. ‘A general.’

  ‘Never heard of him. Ask him if Bordeaux has risen for the King?’

  The question elicited an indignant, long answer that translated simply as ‘no’.

  Sharpe was not surprised by the answer, but he probed further. ‘Ask him if there was any trouble in the city recently?’

  Captain Mayeron, prompted by a particularly rich burst of bubbling from the cauldron of pitch, said there had been some bread riots at Christmas, but no political trouble except the usual grumbling of merchants made poor by the blockade. And no, the garrison had not rebelled, and no, he did not think the population was ready to rebel against the Emperor. He seemed to think about the last answer, shrugged, then repeated it.

  Sharpe listened to the translation and began to understand the treachery of the Comte de Maquerre. Hogan, in his feverish babbling, had used the man’s name, together with the name of Pierre Ducos, and now Sharpe suspected he was a victim of the clever Frenchman’s scheming.

  Or was he? In these last few hours, alone with his thoughts, Sharpe had begun to suspect a deeper, more secret scheme. Why would Wellington allow men like Wigram and Bampfylde to harbour grandiose schemes of invasion? Neither staff colonels nor naval captains had the authority to authorize such adventures, yet neither man had been slapped down except by Elphinstone who was of their own rank. Wellington or the Admiral of the Biscay Squadron could have ordered the two men to stop their scheming, yet they had been allowed to indulge their dreams of madness. And why had the Comte de Maquerre been sent to Bordeaux? Surely the answer was that Wellington wanted the French to believe in an Arcachon landing. General Calvet’s presence at Arcachon meant that he could not oppose a bridge across the Adour. So the victim was not Sharpe, but the French, yet de Maquerre’s treachery had still abandoned Sharpe to this fate in a slighted fortress.

  Captain Mayeron, fearful because of the boiling pitch, suddenly spoke.

  ‘He asks,’ Fytch translated, ‘whether he can be exchanged.’

  ‘For whom?’ Sharpe asked. ‘They haven’t taken any of us prisoner! Give him his belongings back, then lock him in the liquor store.’

  Sharpe returned to the ramparts and there stood down half of his men and sent them to get some precious sleep. The captured Captain Mayeron had convinced Sharpe that the enemy he faced, though overwhelming in numbers, was half-trained and incapable of a night-time escalade. The Frenchman had also convinced Sharpe that he was not caught in a trap, but was an unwitting part of a greater trap. But that was no consolation, for in the morning the French guns would begin their fire and the time of trial would begin.

  Frederickson first led his squad eastwards, then south through the tangle of small meadows. He was drawn by a rhythmic, clanging sound that came from the direction of the watermill.

  He paused in the black-shadowed shelter of the byre where Harper had drawn his own tooth. There was the beat of owl-wings overhead, then silence again except for the ring of picks or crowbars on the watermill’s stones.

  Frederickson waved his men into hiding, then stared at the mill. There was the faintest glow of light limning the doors and windows, suggesting that men worked inside the big stone building by the light of shielded lanterns.

  ‘They’re putting guns in there,’ Harper offered his opinion in a hoarse whisper.

  ‘Probably.’ Artillery placed in the mill would be protected by stone walls from rifle fire, and would be able to rake the southern and eastern flanks of the beleaguered fortress.

  Frederickson turned towards the village where the bulk of the enemy forces had gone. More half-shielded lights showed among the small buildings, but he could see no movement between the village and the mill. He wondered how many picquets guarded the big stone building that straddled the stream. ‘Hernandez?’

  The Spanish Rifleman from Salamanca appeared beside Frederickson. He moved with an uncanny silence; a stealth learned when he was a guerrillero, and a stealth much prized by Captain Frederickson. The Spaniard listened to his Captain’s quick orders, showed a white grin against blackened skin, and went southwards. Hernandez, Frederickson believed, could have picked the devil’s own pockets and got clean away. r />
  The other Riflemen waited for twenty minutes. A French squad fired from the glacis, shouted insults at the ramparts, but no defender fired back. A dog barked in the village, then yelped as it was kicked into silence.

  Frederickson smelt Hernandez before he saw him, or rather he smelt blood, then heard two thumps as the Spaniard seemed to materialize out of the shadows. ‘There are four men on the track from the mill to the village,’ Hernandez whispered, ‘and there were two guarding the bridge.’

  ‘Were?’

  ‘Si, señor.’ Hernandez gestured to the ground and thus explained the curious double thump that had presaged his return.

  Frederickson’s voice was gentle with reproof. ‘You didn’t cut their heads off, did you, Marcos?’

  ‘Si, señor. Now they cannot give the alarm.’

  ‘That’s certainly true.’ Frederickson was glad that the darkness cloaked the horrors at his feet.

  He led his squad south, following the path reconnoitred by Hernandez, a path that led to the small bridge beside the mill. Once at the bridge they were close enough to see the shapes of men working inside the building. One group of men, using crowbars, sledgehammers and picks, were making loopholes in the thick outer wall of the mill, while others cleared the mill’s machinery to leave a space for the guns. ‘There were twenty French bastards inside,’ Hernandez whispered.

  ‘Guns?’

  ‘I didn’t see them.’

  One of the lantern shields was lifted as a man stooped to light a cigar. Frederickson thought he saw the shape of a French field gun in the recesses of the mill, but it was hard to tell exactly what lay in the deep shadows. But Frederickson knew that at least twenty men worked inside, and another four Frenchmen were close to the mill. Sweet William had thirteen men, but his were Riflemen. The odds therefore seemed stacked against the French, in which case there was small point in waiting, so Frederickson, sword drawn, led his men to the attack.