‘Now!’ Sharpe shouted at Sergeant Rossner.
The sergeant, hiding beneath the ramparts at the south-eastern corner of the fort, had a wooden baker’s peel which he dug into a barrel of lime. He scooped shovel-load after shovel-load of the white powder over the edge.
‘Fire!’ Frederickson shouted.
Lieutenant Fytch, aiming his pistol, was shot in the chest and thumped back, astonishment on his face and blood on his crossbelt. ‘I’m ...’ He could not say what he wanted to say, instead he began to gasp for breath; each exhalation a terrible, pitiful moan.
‘Leave him!’ Sharpe bellowed at a Marine. This was no time to rescue wounded men. This was a time to fight, or else they would all be wounded. ‘The whole barrel, sergeant!’
Rossner stooped, lifted the barrel, and tipped it over the rampart. Two bullets struck it, but the powder spumed and fell, was caught by the wind, and Sharpe saw it, like musket smoke, drifting on to the assault troops.
Some of whom, safely over the moat, were dragging with their hands at the branches in the archway.
‘Fire!’ Harper bellowed the order to his squad and pulled the trigger of his seven-barrelled gun.
Bullets tore through pine and threw men backwards.
‘Spike the bastards!’ Harper dropped the gun and unslung his rifle. He rammed its bayonet forward, between two branches, and twisted the blade in a Frenchman’s arm.
Attackers were coughing, screaming, and clutching at their eyes as the lime drifted among the Grenadiers.
‘Fire!’ Sharpe yelled and a score of muskets hammered down into the crowd below.
The conscripts on the counterguard fired at the fort, but most fired high. Some balls struck. A Marine corporal, hit in the shoulder, went on loading his musket despite the pain.
‘You’ve got them beat!’ Frederickson hurled a third shell that exploded among half-blinded men. ‘Now kill the bastards, kill them!’ Men loaded as fast as cut, grazed hands would work. Bullet after bullet spat down into the French mass that was still pushed forward by the rear ranks.
Sharpe fired his own rifle down into the chaos. ‘Cheer, you buggers! Let them know they’ve lost! Cheer!’
Lieutenant Fytch, blood filling his mouth, tried to cheer and died instead.
‘Fire!’ Frederickson shouted over the cheer.
The area about the gate was flames and smoke and bullets heavy with death. Men screaming, men blinded, men bleeding, men crawling.
‘Fire!’
Men stumbled, the pain in their eyes like fire, to fall from the makeshift causeway on to the spikes. Blood drifted on the muddy waters.
‘Fire!’
Harper’s men, the lodgement beneath the archway cleared, knelt with reloaded weapons and poured bullets at point-blank range into defeated men. ‘Fire, you bastards, fire!’ Harper was keening with the joy of battle, lost in it, revelling in it, spitting hatred at men he had never met, men he would drink with on a summer’s day if life had been different, but men who now folded over his bullets and shed bright blood onto a blood-soaked road. ‘Fire!’
The last shell was thrown far to explode where the roadway narrowed between the glacis’ shoulders and the men at the column’s rear, at last sensing that the front ranks had recoiled in screaming agony, faltered.
‘Fire!’ Rifles spat at conscripts on the counterguard. Farm-boys, who five weeks before had never seen an army musket, now choked their blood on to sand.
‘Cheer! Cheer!’ Men whose mouths were dry with gritty powder raised a cheer.
‘Keep firing! Drive them back!’
Men’s faces were black with powder. Their nails bled where they had dragged at cartridges, levered stiff frizzens, and torn on flints. Their teeth, showing skull-white in the powder-dark faces, grinned as if in rictus. Breath came short. The whole world now was a few smoky yards, stinking of fire, in which a man rammed and loaded, fired and killed, rammed and loaded and other men screamed and some men crawled bleeding along the ramparts and another man slipped in spilt brains and swore because his musket fell into the courtyard.
The French inched back. The bullets cracked at them, thudded into flesh and still the bullets came. No troops fired muskets faster and no troops had been given such a target.
‘Fire!’ Sharpe, his rifle re-loaded, pulled the trigger. The smoke of his men’s weapons obscured individuals, but he knew where the enemy was and his bullet twitched the smoke as it flashed through.
Harper, no more enemy visible, shouted for his men to hold their fire. He hauled a pine tree aside, crouched, then beckoned to Taylor. ‘Ammunition.’
They went to the edge of the ditch, found the men they had killed, and cut their cartridge bags away. They tossed the bags through the archway then went back and re-blocked the arch. There had been no time to run the one remaining cannon into a firing position and Harper, regretting the lost chance, went to check that the quickfuse still led through the cleared venthole to the charge. It was safe and, reassured, he began the laborious process of re-charging the seven-barrelled gun.
A French officer, galloping his horse across the esplanade to see why the attack had faltered, was seen by two riflemen from the south-western bastion. They both fired. Man and horse shuddered, blood spat to sand, then the wounded horse, screaming and tossing, dragged its dead master in a great circle towards the column’s rear.
‘Fire!’ Frederickson shouted and more heavy bullets tore into the smoke and drove the column further back. The drums hesitated, a single rattle sounded defiance, then was silent.
‘Hold your fire! Hold it!’ Sharpe could see the enemy going, running, and though he wished he could have fired till the last enemy was out of sight, he had ammunition to conserve. ‘Hold your fire! Hold your fire!’ He felt the wild elation of a battle won, of an enemy broken. The space before the fort’s gate was foul with dead and wounded men, and smeared with a great, white smudge of lime that was mixed with blood. ‘Cease firing!’
At which point Calvet’s real attack burst on to the north-western corner of the Teste de Buch.
Black clouds were coming from the north. Captain Palmer had watched them, had seen the grey blur of rain beneath them and judged that by this night the Teste de Buch would once again be crouching beneath dirty weather. Biscay, he thought, was living up to its reputation for sudden storms and uneasy calms.
Then the attack had struck at the fort’s gate.
Men on the northern rampart turned to watch. It seemed to them that a cauldron boiled around the gate, a cauldron that billowed smoke into the sky.
The musketry had fused into a single, sustained crackle. Screams punctuated it. The smell of rotten eggs, powder smoke stench, came over the courtyard. Palmer saw Fytch struck, saw him fall, imagined him dying. Blood, flowing from the lieutenant’s mouth, trickled to the firestep’s edge then, with obscene slowness, ran down the inner wall.
Palmer watched Harper’s group sprint across the courtyard, trampling the useless, burned abatis, and fire like men possessed into the darkness of the arch.
The fort stank of blood and smoke, the soldier’s smell.
Palmer, grateful that the coughing shells no longer fell into the fort, turned back towards the north. Gulls fought above the channel’s beach a quarter mile away. The rain seemed no closer. Beneath the diving, screaming gulls two men in a rowing boat planted fish traps of woven willow.
The noise and carnage at the Teste de Buch might have been a whole world away for all they seemed to care.
The sea was empty. Not one grey sail offered hope. Palmer was thinking of a wife left in Gravesend, of two children who went hungry three days out of seven, of his hopes for that family when this war ended. An orchard, he thought, far from the sea and never fouled with smoke, would be a fitting place. Somewhere with a small cottage, not too big, but with a room where the children could sleep, another for himself and Betty, and a room where his few books could justify the name of study. A horse, for no gentleman walked where he could ride,
and perhaps his father-in-law, who had mightily disapproved of Betty marrying a Marine, might lend some money to make the Marine into a market-gardener.
‘Sir?’ A Rifleman close to Palmer stared towards the channel.
‘What is it?’
‘Thought I saw something.’
Palmer stared, saw nothing, and put it down to gulls fighting by the fish-traps.
He was sure, thinking about it, that his eldest child’s feeble health was due to living in a town. Gravesend was filthy with coal-smoke and in winter the sea-fog could lie heavily on a small chest. Two of Palmer’s children had died as infants and were buried in the pauper’s graveyard, for a Marine officer had no money to spare on lavish funerals for the barely baptized. An orchard would be a place to grow up, Palmer thought, an orchard heavy with apples and with espaliered pear-trees growing against a sun-warmed crinkle-crankle wall.
A cheer from the gate made him turn. The men on the ramparts still fired, but the cheer told Palmer that this round was won. God alone knew how, except that the Marines and Riflemen had loaded and fired in practised frenzy and the cheer swelled again and suddenly there was an unnatural silence because all the muskets had gone quiet and there was just the wind sighing over cold stone, the crying of the injured, and a sudden, startled shout from Palmer’s right. He ran.
Three hundred Frenchmen had left the village before dawn and groped their way in the darkness. They had marched in a great circle, east and north and west, to come, an hour after first light, to the channel’s edge north of the fortress.
One hundred of the men were new conscripts, brought along to fire their muskets when ordered.
The other two hundred were among the best in Calvet’s force. They were led by a Captain Briquet whose warlike name, meaning sabre, gave the force an odd confidence. They were guided to their assault by Henri Lassan who saw, in this attack, his chance of redemption.
Briquet, though a junior officer compared to many in Calvet’s force, had a reputation. He was brave, thorough, and a firebrand.
His task was to approach the fort once the larger battle began. Under the cover of its noise, and trusting to the distraction offered by its existence, he planned to come close beneath the fort’s vulnerable north-western corner. Lassan had promised the approach could be made unseen because the sand-dunes offered hiding, and Lassan had been proved right.
Once in place, hidden close to the fortress, a Forlorn Hope would charge across the masonry bridge of the dam, put ladders to the closest embrasures, and climb. The Hope, who expected death, would be led by Briquet who expected to be a major when the sun went down.
The conscripts, under experienced sergeants, would flay the walls left and right of the assault with musket fire.
The Forlorn Hope, gaining the ramparts, would hold a small section while the other veterans, with more ladders, flooded on to the sand strip between the fort and the channel to place more ladders. Briquet, knowing that the ramparts facing the channel would have the fewest defenders, aimed to take that wall. The stone ramp, that Lassan had drawn on his careful plan, would then lead into the heart of the Teste de Buch.
Two hundred men, Briquet said, could capture this fort. It would take, if the first lodgement was successful, no more than twenty minutes.
Yet for that lodgement to work the British sentries must be drawn to look the other way, and in that cause men must die at the main gate. General Calvet had ordered it thus, but Captain Briquet’s fear, for he was a man who thirsted for glory, was that the larger attack would pierce the fortress before his Forlorn Hope could rush the stone dam. The colonel leading the main attack, Briquet knew, was desperate to succeed and there was not a man marching with the drummers who did not believe that the British would be swept ignominiously aside once the fascines were in place and the moustaches stormed over the ditch.
Briquet’s force, with stealth and care, crept southwards between the dunes and the water. Two men, ostensibly planting fish-traps from a tiny boat, gave warning when faces appeared at the fort’s north-western corner, but their warnings were few.
Briquet listened to the turmoil at the gate. Not once did he raise his head to look at the fort, not once did he risk discovery. That could wait for the last moment, the dash over the dam.
‘This is as close as we can get unseen,’ Lassan said.
The firing at the main gate was dying and Briquet knew this was the moment or there would be no moment at all. ‘Venez!’
His feet scrambled for footing in the sand, a sergeant shoved him upwards, and suddenly the fort loomed above him and Briquet had an impression that no men guarded the ramparts, but he dared not search for the enemy because there was a task to do. He saw the stone dam, exactly as Lassan had described it, and he leaped the small wooden fence that straggled to the sea, then his bootnails were loud on the stone that was lightly covered with sand.
A musket banged somewhere, then another, but Briquet took no notice. He jumped the rusted cogs of the sluice-gear and steadied himself with a hand on the fortress wall. ‘One!’ He pointed right, ‘Two!’ Left.
The ladders, carried with such care down the channel’s edge, were dragged forward. There were four men to each ladder, two planted the rails in the sand and the others swung the ladders up and over so that the timbers crashed on to the stonework. Briquet shouldered a sergeant aside with a snarl and climbed the first ladder as if the dogs of hell were at his heels.
A man appeared above him, startled, but a musket shot from below dissolved the man’s face in blood and Briquet, spattered by the gore, spat as his head cleared the embrasure’s lip.
He reached up, grasped the top of a merlon, and heaved himself over. He tripped on an empty gun slide, recovered, and already the sergeant was beside him.
Briquet drew his sword, the steel whispering at the scabbard’s throat. ‘Follow me!’
Men poured up the ladders. More men, cheering, followed with new ladders and Briquet, leading his charge along the western walls, knew that the fort was his.
He had achieved surprise, he had gained the wall, and he would be a major by sundown.
Captain Palmer saved the north wall. The pine-lashed walkway was still in place, circumventing the citadel, and he seized the timbers, grunted, then shoved the heavy pine-trunks into the courtyard beneath. Now the only access was through the citadel that was blocked by a barrel of lime.
‘Fire!’ Palmer, crammed into the tiny sentry-chamber with five Marines, fired over the barrel at the blue uniforms who had appeared with such suddenness on the gun-platform.
‘William! Stay!’ Sharpe needed a man above the gate. If the French, sensing that the defenders were being stripped away by the new threat, attacked again, then it would need a man like Frederickson to hold them.
‘Marines! Marines!’ He shouted the word like a battle-cry.
Sharpe was running towards the western wall. ‘Marines!’ The Marines, trained for the bloody business of boarding enemy ships, were the troops he needed now. The Rifles could defend the gate, but the Marines could show their worth in the close-quarter work. ‘Marines!’
Sharpe threw down his rifle and tugged the Heavy Cavalry sword from its ungainly scabbard. How in Christ’s name had the French sneaked into the fort? A musket ball snicked the wall beside him, fired by a Frenchman on the west wall. Sharpe could see red uniforms bunched at the far citadel, showing that the north wall held. Sharpe’s job, and the task of the Marines who ran behind him, was to throw the enemy off the western bastions.
The walkway across the corner of the ramparts was gone, burned by the fire, so Sharpe must lead his men through the zig-zag of the citadel. The enemy would know it, their muskets would be waiting for men coming from that narrow doorway, but it was no use dwelling on fear. Sharpe saw a French officer, sword drawn, leading his men in a rush down the western rampart and Sharpe knew it would be a race to see who reached the citadel first and he ran harder, ammunition pouch bouncing, then slammed through the door to check his s
peed by thumping on the inner wall.
Frederickson, left with the Riflemen, sent a volley at the French who had climbed the ladders. At this range, across the angle of the fort, the rifle fire was deadly.
Marines crushed into the citadel and Sharpe, trusting they would follow him, jumped through the doorway. ‘Come on!’
He emerged into winter sunlight to see a space of five empty, stone-flagged yards beyond which, screaming and threatening, the front rank of the French charged at him.
The enemy had the impetus here. They were running, and Sharpe had just emerged from the obstacle of the citadel. This was the second of pure, naked fear prompted by the sight of steel, then Sharpe snarled his challenge and hissed his blade in a glittering arc to check the French rush.
‘Bayonets!’ Sharpe shouted at the two men who had followed him on to the ramparts. Other Marines pushed behind, but it was up to Sharpe to clear a space for them. ‘Now kill them!’ He jumped forward to anticipate the French attack. The French officer, a short man with a fierce face, lunged with his sword. The man was flanked by moustached giants with bayonets.
The Heavy Cavalry sword, a butcher’s blade, swept one musket aside. The French officer’s sword skewered past Sharpe’s swerve and a Marine, instinctively seizing the blade, screamed as Briquet withdrew and cut the Marine’s fingers to the joints.
Sharpe hit the soldier nearest him with the guard of the sword, then sawed the blade downwards on to the officer. Briquet, sensing the flash of steel, ducked, but a Marine’s bayonet thumped on his ribs and the Heavy Cavalry sword took him in the side of the neck to end his hopes of glory.
A boot kicked at Sharpe’s groin and struck his upper thigh. His sword was tangled in the officer’s fall, but he ripped it clear and drove it forward with both hands so that the point was in his assailant’s throat.
A bayonet tried to reach Sharpe from the second French rank.
There were men grunting and kicking and slashing around him. He could smell their sweat, their breath, and he needed space. A musket fired, the noise huge, but it was impossible to tell which side had fired the shot.