“Yes, sir.”
“An honor, Sharpe, ’pon my soul, an honor.” Tarrant thrust out a hand, thus releasing a cascade of paper. “Heard about the dickie-bird, Sharpe, and confess I was moved mightily.” It took Sharpe half a second to realize that Tarrant was talking about the eagle that Sharpe had captured at Talavera, but before he could respond the major was already talking again. “And you must be Donaju of the royal guard? ’Pon my soul, Gog, but we’re in elevated company! You’ll have to mind your manners today!”
“Private Hughes, sir,” Gog introduced himself to Sharpe, “and that’s my brother.” He gestured with his one arm at Magog.
“The Hughes brothers,” Tarrant explained, “were wounded in their country’s service and reduced to my servitude. Till now, Sharpe, they have been the sole guard for the ammunition. Gog would kick intruders and Magog shake his crutch at them. Once recovered, of course, they will return to duty and I shall be provided with yet more cripples to protect the powder and shot. Except today, Donaju, I have your fine fellows. Let us examine your duties!”
The duties were hardly onerous. The central reserve was just that, a place where hard-pressed divisions, brigades or even battalions could send for more ammunition. A motley collection of Royal Wagon Train drivers augmented by muleteers and carters recruited from the local population were available to deliver the infantry cartridges while the artillery usually provided their own transport. The difficulty of his own job, Tarrant said, was in working out which requests were frivolous and which desperate. “I like to keep the supplies intact,” the Scotsman said, “until we near the end of an engagement. Anyone requesting ammunition in the first few hours is either already defeated or merely nervous. These papers purport to describe the divisional reserves, though the Lord alone knows how accurate they are.” He thrust the papers at Sharpe, then pulled them back in case Sharpe muddled them. “Lastly, of course,” Tarrant went on, “there is always the problem of making certain the ammunition gets through. Drivers can be”—he paused, looking for a word—“cowards!” he finally said, then frowned at the severity of the judgment. “Not all, of course, and some are wonderfully stout-hearted, but the quality isn’t consistent. Perhaps, gentlemen, when the fighting gets bloody, I might rely on your men to fortify the drivers’ bravery?” He made this inquiry nervously, as though half expecting that Sharpe or Donaju might refuse. When neither offered a demurral, he smiled. “Good! Well, Sharpe, maybe you’d like to survey the landscape? Can’t despatch ammunition without knowing whither it’s bound.”
The offer gave Sharpe a temporary freedom. He knew that both he and Donaju had been shuffled aside as inconveniences and that Tarrant needed neither of them, yet still a battle was to be fought and the more Sharpe understood of the battlefield the better. “Because if things go bad, Pat,” he told Harper as the two of them walked toward the gun line on the misted plateau’s crest, “we’ll be in the thick of it.” The two carried their weapons, but had left their packs and greatcoats with the ammunition wagons.
“Still seems odd,” Harper said, “having nothing proper to do.”
“Bloody Frogs might find us work,” Sharpe said dourly. The two men were standing at the British gun line that faced east into the rising sun that was making the mist glow above the Dos Casas stream. That stream flowed south along the foot of the high, flat-topped ridge where Sharpe and Harper were standing and which barred the French routes to Almeida. The French could have committed suicide by attacking directly over the stream and fighting up the ridge’s steep escarpment into the face of the British guns, but barring that unlikely self-destruction there were only two other routes to the besieged garrison at Almeida. One led north around the ridge, but that road was barred by the still formidable ruins of Fort Concepción and Wellington had decided that Masséna would try this southern road that led through Fuentes de Oñoro.
The village lay where the ridge fell to a wide, marshy plain above which the morning mist now shredded and faded. The road from Ciudad Rodrigo ran white and straight across that flatland to where it forded the Dos Casas stream. Once over the stream, the road climbed the hill between the village houses to reach the plateau, where it forked into two roads. One road led to Almeida a dozen miles to the northwest and the other to Castello Bom and its murderously narrow bridge across the deep gorge of the Coa. If the French were to reach either road and so relieve the besieged town and force the redcoats back to the bottleneck of the narrow bridge, then they must first fight up the steep village streets of Fuentes de Oñoro, which was garrisoned with a mix of redcoats and greenjackets.
The ridge and the village both demanded that the enemy fight uphill, but there was a second and much more inviting option open to the French. A second road ran west across the plain south of the village. That second road ran through flat country and led to the passable fords that crossed the Coa further south. Those fords were the only place Wellington could hope to withdraw his guns, wagons and wounded if he was forced to retreat into Portugal, and if the French threatened to outflank Fuentes de Oñoro by looping deep around the southern plain, then Wellington would have to come down from the plateau to defend his escape route. If he chose not to come down from the heights, then he would abandon the only routes that offered a safe crossing of the River Coa. Such a decision to let the French cut the southern roads would commit Wellington’s army to victory or to utter annihilation. It was a choice Sharpe would not have wanted to make himself.
“God save Ireland,” Harper suddenly said, “but would you look at that?”
Sharpe had been looking south toward the inviting flat meadows that offered such an easy route around Fuentes de Oñoro’s flank, but now he looked east to where Harper was staring.
And to where the mist had thinned to reveal a long, dark grove of cork oaks and holm oaks, and out of that grove, just where the white road left the dark trees, an army was appearing. Masséna’s men must have bivouacked on the trees’ far side and the smoke of their morning fires had melded with the mist to look like cloud, but now, in a grimly threatening silence, the French army debouched onto the plain that lapped wide about the village.
Some of the British gunners leaped to their guns’ trails and began handspiking the cannons around so that the barrels were aimed at the place where the road came from the trees, but a gunner colonel trotted along the line and shouted at the crews to hold their fire. “Let them come closer! Hold your fire! Let’s see where they place their batteries! Don’t waste your powder. Morning, John! Nice one again!” the colonel called to an acquaintance, then touched his hat in a polite greeting to the two strange riflemen. “You boys will have some trade today, I don’t doubt.”
“You too, Colonel,” Sharpe said.
The colonel spurred on and Sharpe turned back to the east. He drew out his telescope and leaned on a gunwheel to steady the spyglass’s long barrel.
French infantry was forming at the tree line just behind the deploying batteries of French artillery. The guns’ teams of oxen and horses were being led back into the shelter of the oaks while squads of gunners hoisted the hugely heavy cannon barrels out of their rear traveling trunnion holes and moved them into the forward fighting holes where other men used hammers to fasten the capsquares over the newly placed trunnions. Other gunners were piling ammunition close to the guns: squat cylinders of roundshot ready-strapped to their canvas bags of gunpowder. “Looks like solid shot,” Sharpe told Harper. “They’ll be aiming for the village.”
The British gunners near Sharpe were making their own preparations. The guns’ ready magazines held a mixture of roundshot and case shot. The roundshot were solid iron balls that would plunge wickedly through advancing infantry, while the case shot was Britain’s secret weapon: the one artillery projectile that no other nation had learned to make. It was a hollow iron ball filled with musket bullets that were packed about a small powder charge that was ignited by a fuse. When the powder exploded it shattered the outer casing and spread the musket balls in
a killing fan. If the case shot was properly employed it would explode just above and ahead of the advancing infantry and the secret to that horror lay in the missile’s fusing. The fuses were wooden or reed tubes filled with powder and marked into lengths, each small division of the marked length representing half a second of burning time. The fuses were cut for the desired time, then pushed into the case shot and ignited by the firing of the gun itself, but a fuse that had been left too long would let the shot scream safely over the enemy’s heads while one cut too short would explode prematurely. Gunner sergeants were cutting the fuses in different lengths, then laying the ammunition in piles that represented the different ranges. The first shells had fuses over half an inch long that would delay the explosion until the shot had carried eleven hundred yards while the shortest fuses were tiny stubs measuring hardly more than a fifth of an inch that would ignite the charge at six hundred and fifty yards. Once the enemy infantry was inside that distance the gunners would switch to roundshot alone and after that, when the French had closed to within three hundred and fifty yards, the guns would employ canister: tin cylinders crammed with musket balls that spread apart at the very muzzle of the cannon as the thin tin was shredded by the gun’s powder charge.
These guns would be firing down the slope and over the stream so that the French infantry would be exposed to shell or shot for their whole approach. That infantry was now forming its columns. Sharpe tried to count the eagles, but there were so many standards and so much movement among the enemy that it was hard to make an accurate assessment. “At least a dozen battalions,” he said.
“So where are the others?” Harper asked.
“God knows,” Sharpe said. During his reconnaissance with Hogan the night before he had estimated that the French were marching to Almeida with at least eighty infantry battalions, but he could only see a fraction of that host forming their attack columns at the edge of the far woods. “Twelve thousand men?” he guessed.
The last mist evaporated from the village just as the French opened fire. The opening salvo was ragged as the gun captains fired in turn so that they could observe the fall of their shot and so make adjustments to their guns’ aim. The first shot fell short, then bounced up over the few houses and walled gardens on the far bank to plough into a tiled roof halfway up the village slope. The sound of the gun arrived after the crash of falling tiles and splintering beams. The second shot cracked into an apple tree on the stream’s eastern bank and scattered a small shower of white blossom before it ricocheted into the water, but the next few rounds were all aimed straight and hammered into the village houses. The British gunners muttered grudging approval of the enemy gunners’ expertise.
“I wonder what poor sods are holding the village,” Harper said.
“Let’s go and find out.”
“I’m honestly not that curious, sir,” Harper protested, but followed Sharpe along the plateau’s crest. The high ground ended just above the village where the plateau bent at a right angle to run due west back into the hills. In the angle of the bend, directly above the village, were two rocky knolls, on one of which was built the village church with its stork’s ragged nest perched precariously on the bell tower. The church’s graveyard occupied the east-facing slope between the church and the village, and riflemen were crouched behind the mounded graves and canted stones, just as they were crouched among the outcrops of the second rocky knoll. Between the two stone peaks, on a saddle of short springy turf where yellow ragweed grew and where the Almeida road reached the high ground after zigzagging up beside the graveyard, a knot of staff officers sat their horses and watched the French cannonade which had begun to cloud the distant view with a dirty bank of smoke that twitched each time a roundshot blasted through. The cannon balls were crashing remorselessly into the village, smashing tile and thatch, splintering beams and toppling walls. The sound of the gunfire was a pounding that was palpable in the warm spring air, yet here, on the high ground above Fuentes de Oñoro, it was almost as though the battle for the village was something happening far away.
Sharpe led Harper on a wide detour behind the group of staff officers. “Nosey’s there,” he explained to Harper, “and I don’t need him glaring at me.”
“In his bad books, are we?”
“More than that, Pat. I’m facing a bloody court of inquiry.” Sharpe had not been willing to confess the truth to Donaju, but Harper was a friend and so he told him the story, and the bitterness of his plight could not help but spill over. “What was I supposed to do, Pat? Let those raping bastards live?”
“What will the court do to you?”
“Christ knows. At worst? Order a court-martial and have me thrown out of the army. At best? Break me down to lieutenant. But that’ll be the end of me. They’ll make me a storekeeper again, then put me in charge of bloody lists at some bloody depot where I can drink myself to death.”
“But they have to prove you shot those buggers! God save Ireland, but none of us will say a word. Jesus, I’d kill anyone who said different!”
“But there are others, Pat. Runciman and Sarsfield.”
“They won’t say a word, sir.”
“May be too late anyway. General bloody Valverde knows, and that’s all that matters. He’s got his knife stuck into me and there’s bugger all I can do about it.”
“Could shoot the bastard,” Harper said.
“You won’t catch him alone,” Sharpe said. He had dreamed of shooting Valverde, but doubted he would have the opportunity. “And Hogan says that bloody Loup might even send an official complaint!”
“It isn’t fair, sir,” Harper complained.
“No, Pat, it isn’t, but it hasn’t happened yet, and Loup might walk into a cannon ball today. But not a word to anyone, Pat. I don’t want half the bloody army discussing it.”
“I’ll keep quiet, sir,” Harper promised, though he could not imagine the news not getting round the army, nor could he imagine how anyone would think justice might be served by sacrificing an officer for shooting two French bastards. He followed Sharpe between two parked wagons and a brigade of seated infantry. Sharpe recognized the pale-green facings of the 24th, a Warwickshire regiment, while beyond them were the kilted and bonneted Highlanders of the 79th. The Highlanders’ pipers were playing a wild tune to the tattoo of drums, trying to rival the deeper percussive blasts of the French cannonade. Sharpe guessed the two battalions formed the reserve poised to go down into Fuentes de Oñoro’s streets if the French looked like capturing the village. A third battalion was just joining the reserve brigade as Sharpe turned toward the sound of breaking tiles and cracking stone.
“Right, down here,” Sharpe said. He had spotted a track that led beside the graveyard’s southern wall. It was a precipitous track, probably made by goats, and the two men had to use their hands to steady themselves on the steep top portion of the slope, then they ran down the last few yards to the scanty cover of an alleyway where they were greeted by the sudden appearance of a nervous redcoat who came round the corner with leveled musket. “Hold your fire, lad!” Sharpe called. “Anyone who comes down here is probably on your side, and if they’re not you’re in trouble.”
“Sorry, sir,” the boy said, then ducked as a scrap of tile whistled overhead. “They’re a bit lively, sir,” he added.
“Time to worry, lad, is when they stop firing,” Sharpe said, “because that means the infantry are on their way. Who’s in charge here?”
“Don’t know, sir. Unless it’s Sergeant Patterson.”
“I doubt it, lad, but thanks anyway.” Sharpe ran from the alley’s end, turned down a side street, dodged right into another street, jumped down a steep flight of stone stairs littered with broken tiles and so found himself in the main street which ran down the hill in a series of sharp twists. A roundshot hit the street’s center just as he ducked down beside a dungheap. The ball ploughed up a patch of stone and earth, then bounced to smash into a reed-thatched cattle byre as another roundshot splayed apart s
ome roof beams across the street. Still more shots crashed home as the French gunners put in a sudden energetic spell. Sharpe and Harper took temporary cover in a doorway that bore the fading chalk marks from both armies’ billeting officers; one mark read 5/4/60 meaning that five men of number four company of the 60th Rifles had been billeted in the tiny cottage, while just above it was a legend saying that seven Frenchmen, the mark carried the enemy’s strange crossbar on the shank of the 7, of the 82nd of the Line had once been posted to the house that now lacked its roof. Dust drifted like mist in what had been the front room where a torn sacking curtain fluttered forlornly at a window. The village’s inhabitants and their belongings had been carried in army wagons to the nearby town of Frenada, but inevitably some of the villagers’ possessions had been left behind. One doorway was barricaded with a child’s cot while another had a pair of benches as a firestep. A mixture of riflemen and redcoats garrisoned the town and they were sheltering from the cannonade by crouching behind the thickest walls of the deserted houses. The stone walls could not stop every French roundshot and Sharpe had already passed three dead men put out in the street and seen a half-dozen wounded men making their slow way back up toward the ridge. “What unit are you?” he called to a sergeant sheltering behind the cot across the street.
“Third Division Light Companies, sir!” the sergeant called back.
“And the First Division!” another voice chimed in. “Don’t forget the First Division!”
It seemed the army had collected the cream of two divisions, their skirmishers, and put them into Fuentes de Oñoro. Skirmishers were the brightest men, the ones trained to fight independently, and this village was no place for men who could only stand in the battle line and fire volleys. This was going to be a place of sharpshooting and street brawls, a place where men would be separated from their officers and forced to fight without orders. “Who’s in charge of you all?” Sharpe asked the sergeant.