Then the French, who had been ripped by the round shot and torn by the dreadful canister, realized that the battery had been abandoned. They gave a great cheer and scrambled over rocks to touch the hot cannon, and officers shouted at them to ignore the guns. The guns could be taken away later, but for now all that mattered was to reach the crest and so win Portugal. Beneath them Marshal Masséna wondered whether Henriette would find the beds in the monastery comfortable, and whether he would be named Prince of Portugal and whether his cook could find something palatable among the discarded British rations to make for supper. Pertinent questions all, for the Army of Portugal was on the very brink of victory.
Then Black Bob took a breath.
“FORWARD!” SHARPE CALLED. He had concentrated the riflemen, British and Portuguese, on the spur’s center from where they could pour an accurate fire on the voltigeurs crouching among the knoll’s jumbled rocks. “Make it fast,” he shouted. He knelt and fired his rifle, the smoke hiding whatever damage he did. “Forward! Forward!” If this damned attack was to be done, he thought, then do it quickly, and he chivvied the riflemen on, then beckoned at the redcoats and the rest of the Portuguese who advanced in a two-deep line behind. The guns helped. One was firing canister, the balls rattling on the rocks, while the second was cutting its fuses desperately short so that the shells exploded just above the knoll. It would be hell there, Sharpe thought. The French were being assailed by rifle fire, canister and shell fragments, yet they stubbornly clung to the promontory.
He slung his rifle. He did not have time to reload and, besides, he wanted the attack over quickly and so, in anticipation, he drew his sword. Why the hell did the bastards not run? “Forward!” he shouted and felt a ball smack past his cheek, the wind of it like a small hot puff of air. More smoke showed among the rocks as the voltigeurs opened on the riflemen, but none of the musket balls hit for the range was long. The rifles made a deeper, quicker noise than the muskets. “Forward!” Sharpe shouted again, conscious that Vicente had brought the three-company line close behind the skirmishers. The riflemen darted forward, knelt, aimed and fired, and a musket ball whipped through the heather to Sharpe’s left. A Frenchman firing low, he thought, a man with experience, and he was a hundred paces from the knoll now and fear had dried his mouth. The enemy was hidden, his own men were in the open, and another ball went close enough for him to feel the wind of its passing. A cazador was down, clutching his right thigh, his rifle fallen in the heather. “Leave him!” Sharpe shouted at two men going to help the man. “Keep firing! Forward! Forward!” The noise of the big attack to the north was at full intensity, guns and muskets, then the two artillery pieces supporting Sharpe’s attack fired together and he saw a shell burst right at the edge of the rocks and heard the canister strike stone and a Frenchman seemed to stand up slowly, his blue coat turning red before he jerked back down.
“Aim true!” Sharpe shouted at his men. In the excitement of battle there was a temptation to snatch at shots, to waste bullets, and he was close enough now to see the crouching enemy. Hagman fired, then took a loaded rifle from young Perkins and fired again. More musket smoke puffed from the rocks. God, they were stubborn! The riflemen ran another ten paces forward, knelt, fired and reloaded. Another cazador was hit, this time in the shoulder and the man stumbled down the spur’s side. A ball hit Sharpe’s shako, jerking it back on its cords so that it hung from his neck. Harper fired his rifle, then unslung the seven-barreled gun, anticipating the order to rush the rocks and Sharpe turned to find Vicente almost on his heels.
“Let me give one volley,” the Portuguese said.
“Rifles!” Sharpe bellowed. “Down! Down!”
The riflemen flattened themselves, Vicente halted his men. “Present!” The orders in the Portuguese army were given in English, a concession to the many British officers. Sharpe edged into their ranks.
“Fire!” Vicente shouted, and the volley cracked on the spur, pumping out smoke, just as the two cannon fired and the knoll was suddenly a tangled hell of bullets, shell scraps and blood.
“Charge!” Sharpe shouted and he ran ahead, saw Ensign Iliffe off to his left with his saber drawn. The Portuguese were shouting as they advanced, their words indistinguishable, but plainly full of hate for the French. They all began to run. It was all fury now, fury and hate and terror and anger, and smoke showed in the rocks as the French fired and a man screamed behind Sharpe who found Harper beside him, the big man running clumsily, and they were just ten paces from the nearest rocks when suddenly a rank of a dozen Frenchmen stood up, an officer in their center, and presented muskets.
Harper had the volley gun low, at his hip, but he instinctively pulled the trigger and the seven bullets smacked into the row of Frenchmen, blasting a hole in the center of their small line. The officer was hit hard, falling backwards, and the others seemed more shocked by the noise of the gun than by its bullets, for suddenly they were turning and running. One or two shot first, but no bullet came anywhere near Sharpe who jumped onto the rocks and saw that the voltigeurs had taken enough. They were spilling over the spur’s steep edges while the wounded French officer, who had been hit by Harper’s bullet, was screaming at them to stay and fight. Sharpe silenced the man with a back blow of the sword that half stunned him. Cazadores and riflemen and redcoats were scrambling onto the knoll now, desperate to catch the French before they escaped. Some of the enemy were slow and they screamed as they were caught by the bayonets. A sergeant, reckoning escape was impossible, turned and lunged his own bayonet at Harper, who knocked it aside with the seven-barrel gun and then hit the man on the jaw with a fist and the French Sergeant went back as if he had been hit by a nine-pounder ball. Harper made sure of him by banging the volley gun’s butt on his forehead.
A score of Frenchmen were still on the knoll, some trapped by fear of the drop off its eastern edge. “Put your guns down!” Sharpe roared at them, but none spoke English and instead they turned, bayonets leveled, and Sharpe cracked a musket aside with the heavy sword and then stabbed it forward into a man’s belly, twisting the steel so the flesh did not grip the blade, and then yanking the weapon back so that blood splashed onto the stones. He slipped on the blood, heard a musket bang, swept the sword at another Frenchman and Vicente was there, his own big sword hacking down on a corporal. Sharpe pushed himself up, saw a Frenchman standing on the edge of the rocks and lunged the sword at the man’s back so that he seemed to dive off the cliff. There was a heartbeat’s silence after the man vanished, then a sound from far below like a sack of offal falling onto stone from a high roof.
And silence again, blessed silence, except for the percussive sound of the guns to the north. The French were gone from the knoll. They were running down the ridge, pursued by rifle fire, and Vicente’s Portuguese began to cheer.
“Sergeant Harper!” Sharpe shouted.
“Sir?” Harper was searching a dead man’s clothes.
“Butcher’s bill,” Sharpe ordered. He wiped his sword on a blue jacket, then thrust it back into his scabbard. A French shell exploded harmlessly below the rocks as Sharpe sat, suddenly tired, and remembered the half sausage in his pouch. He ate it, then pushed his bullet-riddled shako into some kind of order before putting the hat back on. It was strange, he thought, but in the last few minutes he had been quite unaware of his damaged ribs, but now the pain stabbed at him. There was a dead voltigeur at his feet and the corpse was wearing one of the old-fashioned short sabers that all French skirmishers used to carry, but had abandoned because the blades were useful for nothing except reaping crops. The man looked oddly peaceful, not a mark visible on his body, and Sharpe wondered if he was feigning death and prodded him with his boot. The man did not react. A fly crawled on the voltigeur’s eyeball and Sharpe reckoned the man had to be dead.
Harper picked his way back through the rocks. “Mister Iliffe, sir,” he said.
“What about him?”
“He’s dead, sir,” Harper said, “and none of the others are even
scratched.”
“Iliffe? Dead?” For some reason it did not make sense to Sharpe.
“He wouldn’t have felt a thing, sir.” Harper tapped his forehead. “Straight in.”
Sharpe swore. He had not liked Iliffe until today, but in battle the boy had shown courage. He had been terrified, so terrified he had vomited at the prospect of fighting, but once the bullets began to fly he had conquered that fear and that was admirable. Sharpe walked to the body, took off his hat and stared down at Iliffe who looked vaguely surprised. “He would have made a good soldier,” Sharpe said, and the men of the light company murmured agreement.
Sergeant Read took four men and carried Iliffe’s body back to battalion. Lawford would not be pleased, Sharpe thought, then wondered why the hell it could not have been Slingsby shot through the forehead. That would have been a good morning’s work for a voltigeur, Sharpe thought, and wondered why the hell his own bullet had missed. He glanced up at the sun and realized it was still mid-morning. He felt as if he had been fighting all day, but back in England some folk would not even have finished their breakfasts yet.
It was a pity about Iliffe, he thought, then drank some water, listened to the guns, and waited.
“NOW!” GENERAL CRAUFURD SHOUTED and the two battalions stood, appearing to the French as though they had suddenly sprung from the bare ground. “Ten paces forward!” Craufurd bellowed, and they marched smartly, hefting loaded muskets. “Fifty-second!” Craufurd called to the battalion nearest him in a voice that was raw with anger and savage with resolve. “Avenge Moore!” The 52nd had been at Corunna where, in defeating the French, they had lost their beloved general, Sir John Moore.
“Present!” the Colonel of the 52nd shouted.
The enemy were close, less than twenty-five yards away. They were staring upwards where the long red line had so unexpectedly appeared. Even the novices in the battered French ranks knew what was coming. The British line overlapped the columns, every musket was aimed at the leading French files, and a French officer made the sign of the cross as the red line seemed to take a quarter turn to the right as the guns went up into men’s shoulders.
“Fire!”
The ledge vanished in smoke as over a thousand musket balls thumped into the columns. Dozens of men fell and the living, still marching upwards in obedience to the drumbeats, found they could not get across the writhing pile of injured men. Ahead of them they could hear the scrape of ramrods going into musket barrels. The British gunners of the remaining battery shot four barrel-loads of canister that tore into the survivors, clouding the columns’ head with sprays of blood. “Fire by half companies!” a voice shouted.
“Fire!”
The volley fire began: the rippling, merciless, incessant clock-work drill of death. The British and Portuguese skirmishers had reformed on the left and added their own fire so that the heads of the columns were ringed by flame and smoke, pummeled by bullets, flayed by the canister spitting down from the ledge. A hundred fires began in the grass as flaming wadding spat from the barrels.
The fire was not just coming from the front. The skirmishers and the outer companies of the 43rd and the 52nd had wheeled down the slope to wrap themselves around the beleaguered French, who were now being shot at from three sides. The smoke of the half-company volleys rippled up and down the red lines, the balls slapped into flesh and banged into muskets, and the French advance had been stopped. No troops could advance into the bank of smoke that was ripped by flame as the volleys flared.
“Bayonets! Bayonets!” Craufurd shouted. There was a pause as men took out the seventeen-inch blades and slotted them over blackened musket muzzles. “Now kill them!” Black Bob shouted. He was feeling exultant, watching his hard-trained men tear four times their number into ruin.
The men with loaded muskets fired, and the redcoats were going down the hill, steadily at first, but then the two ranks met the French dead and they lost their cohesion as they negotiated the bodies, and there, just yards away, were the living. The British gave a great shout of rage and charged. “Kill them!” Black Bob was right behind the ranks, sword drawn, glaring at the French as the redcoats lunged with their blades.
It was slaughterhouse work. Most of the French in the leading ranks who had survived the musketry and the canister were wounded. They were also crammed together, and now the redcoats came at them with bayonets. The long blades stabbed forward, were twisted and pulled back. The loudest noise on the ridge was screaming now, men shouting for mercy, calling for God, cursing the enemy, and still the half-company volleys whipped in from the flanks so that no Frenchmen could deploy into line. They had been marched up a hill of death and were penned like sheep just below its summit and the bullets killed them from the flanks and the blades took them at the front, and the only escape from the torment was back down the hill.
They broke. One moment they were a mass of men cowering under an onslaught of steel and lead, and the next, starting with the rearmost ranks, they were a rabble. The front ranks, trapped by the men behind, could not escape and they were easy meat for the savage seventeen-inch blades, but the men at the back fled. Drums rolled down the hill, abandoned by boys too terrified to do anything except escape, and, as they went, the British and Portuguese skirmishers came from the flanks to pursue them. The last of the Frenchmen broke, pursued by redcoats, and some were caught in the village where the blades went to work again and the cobbles and the white stones of the houses were painted with more blood and the screams could be heard down in the valley where Masséna watched, open-mouthed. Some Frenchmen became entangled in the vines and the cazadores caught them there and slit their throats. Riflemen poured bullets after the fugitives. A man shouted for mercy in a village house and the shout turned into a terrible scream as two bayonets took his life.
And then the French were gone. They had been swamped by panic and the slope around the village was littered with abandoned muskets and bodies. Some of the enemy were fortunate. Two riflemen rounded up prisoners and prodded them up towards the windmill where the British gunners had reclaimed their battery. A French captain, who had only kept his life by pretending to be dead, yielded his sword to a lieutenant of the 52nd. The Lieutenant, a courteous man, bowed in acknowledgment and gave the blade back. “You will do me the honor of accompanying me up the hill,” the Lieutenant said, and he then tried to make conversation in his school French. The weather had gone suddenly cold, had it not? The French Captain agreed it had, but he also would have agreed if the Englishman had remarked how warm it was. The Captain was shaking. He was covered in blood, none of it his own, but all from wounds inflicted by canister on men who had climbed near him. He saw his men lying dead, saw others dying, saw them looking up from the ground and trying to call for help he could not give. He remembered the bayonets coming at him and the joy of the killing plain on the faces of the men who held them. “It was a storm,” he said, not knowing what he said.
“Not now the heat’s broken, I think,” the Lieutenant said, misunderstanding his captive’s words. The bandsmen of the 43rd and 52nd were collecting the wounded, almost all of them French, and carrying them up to the mill where those that survived would be put on carts and taken to the monastery where the surgeons waited. “We were hoping for a game of cricket if tomorrow stays fine,” the Lieutenant said. “Have you had the privilege of watching cricket, monsieur?”
“Cricket?” The Captain gaped at the redcoat.
“The Light Division officers hope to play the rest of the army,” the Lieutenant said, “unless war or the weather intervenes.”
“I have never seen cricket,” the Frenchman said.
“When you get to heaven, monsieur,” the Lieutenant said gravely, “and I pray that will be many happy years hence, you will find that your days are spent in playing cricket.”
Just to the south there was more sudden firing. It sounded like British volleys, for they were regular and fast, but it was four Portuguese battalions that guarded the ridge to the right of
the Light Division. The smaller French column, meant to reinforce the success of the two that had climbed through Sula, had swung away from the village and found itself split from the main attack by a deep, wooded ravine, and so the men climbed on their own, going through a grove of pines, and when they emerged onto the open hillside above they saw nothing but Portuguese troops ahead. No redcoats. The column outnumbered the Portuguese. They also knew their enemy for they had beaten the Portuguese before and did not fear the men in brown and blue as they feared the British muskets. This would be a simple victory, a hammer blow against a despised enemy, but then the Portuguese opened fire and the volleys rippled like clockwork and the musket balls were fired low and the guns were reloaded swiftly and the column, like those to the north, found itself assailed from three sides and suddenly the despised enemy was driving the French ignominiously downhill. And so the last French column ran, defeated by men fighting for their homeland, and then the whole ridge was empty of the Emperor’s men except for the dead and the wounded and the captured. A drummer boy cried as he lay in the vines. He was eleven years old and had a bullet in his lung. His father, a sergeant, was lying dead twenty paces away where a bird pecked at his eyes. Now that the guns had stopped the black feathered birds were coming to the ridge and its feast of flesh.