A group of redcoats charged. There were French muskets firing from the windows of the houses and some of the men burst through the doors to drive the French out. More enemy came up the main street. They came in small groups, stopping to fire, then running up into the square where the battle was ragged and desperate. One small group of redcoats was overrun by a rush of Frenchmen who came out of a side alley and there were screams as the enemy’s bayonets rose and fell. A boy somehow escaped the massacre and scrambled over the cobbles. “Where’s your musket, Sanders?” a sergeant shouted.
The boy swore, turned to look for his fallen weapon and was shot in the open mouth. The French, exhilarated by their victory over the small group, charged over the boy’s body to attack the larger mass of men who were trying to hold the mouth of the recaptured alley. They were met by bayonets. The clash of steel on steel and of steel on wood was louder than the muskets, for few men now had time to load a musket and so they used their blades or the stocks of their guns instead of bullets. The two sides stood poised just feet from each other and every now and then a brave group of men would summon the courage to make a charge into the enemy ranks. Then the voices would rise to hoarse shouts and the clash of steel would begin again. One such assault was led by a tall, bareheaded French officer who drove two redcoats aside with whip-quick slashes of his sword, then lunged at a British officer who was fumbling with his pistol. The red-coated officer stepped back and so exposed Sharpe. The tall Frenchman feinted left and managed to draw Sharpe’s sword away in the parry, then reversed his stroke and was already gritting his teeth for the killing lunge, but Sharpe was not fighting by the rules of some Parisian fencing master and so he kicked the man in the crotch, then hammered the heavy iron hilt of the sword down onto his head. He kicked the man out of the ranks, and back-cut his heavy sword at a French soldier who was trying to drag a musket and bayonet out of a redcoat’s hand. The blade’s edge, unsharpened, served as a cudgel rather than a sword, but the Frenchman reeled away with his head in his hands.
“Forward!” a voice shouted and the makeshift British line advanced down the street. The enemy retreated from Williams’s reserve who now threatened to take back the whole lower part of the village, but then a vagary of wind swirled away a patch of dust and gunsmoke and Sharpe saw a whole new wave of French attackers swarming over the gardens and walls on the stream’s eastern bank.
“Sharpe!” Colonel Williams called. “Are you spoken for?”
Sharpe elbowed back through the tight ranks of redcoats. “Sir?”
“I’d be damned grateful if you were to find Spencer on the ridge and tell him we could use a few reinforcements.”
“At once, sir.”
“Lost a couple of my aides, you see,” Williams began to explain, but Sharpe had already left on the errand. “Good man!” Williams called after him, then turned back to the fight that had degenerated into a series of bloody and desperate brawls in the murderous confines of the alleys and back gardens. It was a fight Williams feared losing, for the French had committed their own reserves and a new mass of blue-coated infantry was now pouring into the village.
Sharpe ran past wounded men dragging themselves uphill. The village was clouded with dust and smoke and he took one wrong turning and found himself in a blind alley of stone walls. He backtracked, found the right street again, and emerged on the slope above the village where a crowd of wounded men waited for help. They were too weak to climb the slope and some called out as Sharpe ran past.
He ignored them. Instead he climbed up the goat path beside the graveyard. A group of worried officers were standing beside the church and Sharpe shouted at them to see if any knew where General Spencer was. “I’ve got a message!” he called.
“What is it?” a man called back. “I’m his aide!”
“Williams wants reinforcements. Too many Frogs!”
The staff officer turned and ran toward the brigade that was waiting beyond the crest while Sharpe paused to catch his breath. His sword was in his hand and its blade was sticky with blood. He cleaned the steel on the edge of his jacket, then jumped in alarm as a bullet smacked hard into the stone wall beside him. He turned and saw a puff of musket smoke showing between some broken beams at the upper edge of the village and he realized the French had taken those houses and were now trying to cut off the defenders still inside Fuentes de Oñoro. The greenjackets in the graveyard opened fire, their rifles cutting down any enemy foolish enough to show himself at a window or door for too long.
Sharpe sheathed his cleaned sword, then went over the wall and crouched behind a slab of granite on which a rough cross had been chiseled. He loaded the rifle, then aimed it at the broken roof where he had seen the musket smoke. The flint had skewed in the doghead and he released the screw, adjusted the leather patch that gripped the flint, then tightened it down. He thumbed the cock back. He was bitterly thirsty, the usual fate of any man who had been biting into salty gunpowder cartridges. The air was foul with the stench of smoke.
A musket appeared between the beams and, a second later, a man’s head showed. Sharpe fired first, but the rifle’s smoke hid the bullet’s mark. Harper slid down the graveyard’s slope to land beside Sharpe. “Jesus,” the Irishman said, “Jesus.”
“Bad in there.” Sharpe nodded down to the village. He primed the rifle, then upended the weapon to charge the muzzle. He had left his ramrod conveniently propped against the grave.
“More of the buggers coming over the stream,” Harper said. He bit a bullet and was forced to silence until he could spit it into the rifle. “That poor lieutenant. Died.”
“It was a chest wound,” Sharpe said, ramming the ball and charge hard down the barrel. “Not many survive chest wounds.”
“I stayed with the poor bugger,” Harper said. “His mother’s a widow, he told me. She sold the family plate to buy his uniform and sword, then said he’d be as great a soldier as any there was.”
“He was good,” Sharpe said. “He kept his nerve.” He cocked the rifle.
“I told him that. Gave him a prayer. Poor wee bugger. First battle, too.” Harper pulled the trigger. “Got you, you bastard,” he said and immediately fished a new cartridge from his pouch while he pulled the hammer to half cock. More British defenders were emerging from between the houses, forced out of the village by the sheer weight of French numbers. “They should send some more men down there,” Harper said.
“They’re coming,” Sharpe said. He laid the rifle’s barrel on the gravestone and looked for a target.
“Taking their time, though,” Harper said. On this occasion he did not spit the bullet into the rifle, but first wrapped it in the small patch of greased leather that would grip the barrel’s rifling and so make the ball spin as it was fired. It took longer to load such a round, but it made the Baker rifle far more accurate. The Irishman grunted as he forced the patched bullet down the barrel that was caked with the deposits of gunpowder. “There’s some boiling water behind the church,” he said, telling Sharpe where to go if he needed to clean the fouled powder from his rifle’s barrel.
“I’ll piss down it if I have to.”
“If you’ve got any piss. I’m dry as a dead rat. Jesus, you bastard.” This was addressed at a bearded Frenchman who had appeared between two of the houses where he was beating down a greenjacket with a pioneer’s ax. Sharpe, already loaded, took aim through the sudden spray of the dying rifleman’s blood and pulled the trigger, but at least a dozen other greenjackets in the churchyard had seen the incident and the bearded Frenchman seemed to quiver as the bullets whipped home. “That’ll teach him,” Harper said, and laid his rifle on the stone. “Where the hell are those reinforcements?”
“Takes time to get them ready,” Sharpe said.
“Lose a bloody battle just because they want straight ranks?” Harper asked scornfully. He looked for a target. “Come on, someone, show yourself.”
More of Williams’s men retreated out of the village. They tried to form ranks on th
e rough ground at the foot of the graveyard, but by abandoning the houses they had yielded the stone walls to the French who could hide as they loaded, fire, then duck back into hiding again. Some British were still fighting inside the village, but the musket smoke betrayed that their fight had shrunk to a small group of houses at the very top of the main street. One more push by the French, Sharpe thought, and the village would be lost, and then there would a bitter fight up through the graveyard for mastery of the church and the rock outcrop. Lose those two summits, he thought, and the battle was done.
The French drumming rose to a new fervor. There were Frenchmen coming out of the houses to form small squads that tried to outflank the retreating British. The riflemen in the graveyard fired at the daring sallies, but there were too many French and not enough rifles. One of the wounded men tried to crawl away from the advancing enemy and was bayoneted in the back for his trouble. Two Frenchmen ransacked his uniform, searching for the small hoard of coins most soldiers hid away. Sharpe fired at the plunderers, then turned his rifle on the French who were threatening to find cover behind the graveyard’s lower wall. He loaded and fired, loaded and fired until his right shoulder felt like one massive bruise hammered into the bone by the rifle’s brutal recoil, then suddenly, blessedly, there was a skirl of pipes and a rush of kilted men spilled over the crest of the ridge between the church and the rocks to charge down the main road into the village.
“Look at the bastards!” Harper said with pride. “They’ll give the Frogs a right beating.”
The Warwicks appeared to Sharpe’s right and, like the Scots, just poured over the edge and scrambled down the steeper slope toward Fuentes de Oñoro. The leading French attackers paused for a second to judge the weight of the counterattack, then hurried back into the cover of the houses. The Highlanders were already in the village where their war cries echoed between the walls, then the Warwicks went into the western alleyways and drove hard and deep into the tangle of houses.
Sharpe felt the tension drain out of him. He was thirsty, he ached, he was tired and his shoulder was agony. “Jesus,” he said, “and it wasn’t even our fight.” The thirst was galling and he had left his canteen with the ammunition wagons, but he felt too tired and dispirited to go and find water. He watched the broken village, noting how the gunsmoke marked the British advance right back down to the stream’s edge, but he felt little elation. It seemed to Sharpe that all his hopes had stalled. He faced disgrace. Worse, he felt a sense of failure. He had dared to hope that he could turn the Real Compañía Irlandesa into soldiers, but he knew, staring down at the gunsmoke and the shattered houses, that the Irishmen needed another month of training and far more goodwill than Wellington had ever been prepared to give them. Sharpe had failed with them just as he had failed Hogan, and the twin failures raked at his spirits; then he realized he was feeling sorry for himself just as Donaju had felt self-pity in the morning mist. “Jesus,” he said, disgusted at himself.
“Sir?” Harper asked, not having heard Sharpe.
“Never mind,” Sharpe said. He felt the loom of disgrace and the bite of regret. He was a captain on sufferance and he supposed he would never now make major. “Bugger them all, Pat,” he said and wearily stood. “Let’s find something to drink.”
Down in the village a dying redcoat had found Harper’s rag doll jammed into the niche of the wall and had shoved it into his mouth to stop himself crying out in his pain. Now he died and his blood welled and spilled from his gullet so that the small, damaged doll fell in a welter of red. The French had pulled back beyond the stream where they took cover behind the garden walls to open fire on the Highlanders and the Warwicks who hunted down the last groups of trapped French survivors in the village. A disconsolate line of French prisoners straggled up the slope under a mixed guard of riflemen and Highlanders. Colonel Williams had been wounded in the counterattack and was now carried by his riflemen to the church which had been turned into a hospital. The stork’s nest on the bell tower was still an untidy tangle of twigs, but the adult birds had been driven out by the noise and smoke of the battle to leave their nestlings to starve. The sound of musketry crackled across the stream for a while, then died away as both sides took stock of the first attack.
But not, both sides knew, the last.
CHAPTER 8
The French did not attack again. They stayed on the stream’s eastern bank, while behind them, at the distant line of oaks that straddled the straight white road, the rest of their army slowly deployed so that by nightfall the whole of Masséna’s force was encamped and the smoke of their fires mingled to make a gray wash that darkened to a hellish black as the sun sank behind the British ridge. The fighting in the village had stopped, but the artillery kept up a desultory battle till nightfall. The British had the best of it. Their guns were emplaced just back from the plateau’s crest so that all the French could aim for was the skyline itself and most of their shots were fired too high and rumbled impotently over the British infantry concealed by the crest. Shots fired too low merely thumped into the ridge’s slope, which was too steep for the roundshot to bounce up to their targets. The British gunners, on the other hand, had a clear view of the enemy batteries, and one by one their long-fused case shot either silenced the French artillery or persuaded the gunners to drag their cannon back into the cover of the trees.
The last gun fired as the sun set. The flat echo of the sound crashed and faded across the shadowed plain while the smoke from the gun’s barrel curled and drifted in the wind. Small fires flickered in the village ruins, the flames glimmering luridly on broken walls and snapped beams. The streets were crammed with dead men and pitiful with the wounded who cried through the night for help. Behind the church, where the luckier casualties had been safely evacuated, wives searched for husbands, brothers for brothers and friends for friends. Burial parties looked for patches of soil on the rocky slopes while officers auctioned the possessions of their dead mess-fellows and wondered how long it would be before their own belongings were similarly knocked down for puny prices. Up on the plateau the soldiers stewed newly slaughtered beef in their Flanders cauldrons and sang sentimental songs of greenwoods and girls.
The armies slept with their weapons loaded and ready. Pickets watched the dark as the big guns cooled. Rats scampered through the fallen stones of Fuentes de Oñoro and gnawed at dead men. Few of the living slept well. The British footguards had been infected with Methodism and some of the guardsmen gathered for a midnight prayer meeting until a Coldstreamer officer growled at them to give God and himself a bloody rest. Other men prowled in the dark to seek the dead and wounded for plunder. Now and then an injured man would call out in protest and a bayonet would glint quickly in the starlight and a wash of blood would ebb into the soil as the newly dead man’s uniform was searched for coins.
Major Tarrant had at last heard about Sharpe’s impending ordeal by court of inquiry. He could hardly have avoided learning of it for a succession of officers came to the ammunition park to give Sharpe their condolences and to complain that an army which persecuted a man for killing the enemy must be an army led by idiots and administered by fools. Tarrant did not understand Wellington’s decision either. “Surely the two men deserved to die? I agree they hardly endured the proper processes of the law, but even so, can anyone doubt their guilt?” Captain Donaju, who was sharing Tarrant’s late supper with Sharpe, nodded agreement.
“It’s not about two men dying, sir,” Sharpe said, “but about bloody politics. I’ve given the Spanish reason to distrust us, sir.”
“No Spaniards died!” Tarrant protested.
“Aye, sir, but too many good Portuguese did, so General Valverde’s claiming that we can’t be trusted with other nations’ soldiers.”
“This is too bad!” Tarrant said angrily. “So what happens to you now?”
Sharpe shrugged. “There’s a court of inquiry, I’m blamed, which means a court-martial. The worst they can do to me, sir, is take away my commission.”
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Captain Donaju frowned. “Suppose I speak to General Valverde?”
Sharpe shook his head. “And ruin your career, too? Thank you, but no. What this is really about,” he explained, “is who should become Generalisimo of Spain. We reckon it should be Nosey, but Valverde doesn’t agree.”
“Doubtless because he wants the job himself!” Tarrant said scornfully. “It is too bad, Sharpe, too bad.” The Scotsman frowned down at the dish of liver and kidney that Gog and Magog had cooked for his supper. Traditionally the officers received the offal of newly slaughtered cattle, a privilege Tarrant would happily have forgone. He tossed a peculiarly nauseating piece of kidney to one of the many dogs that had attached themselves to the army, then shook his head. “Is there any chance at all that you might avoid this ridiculous court of inquiry?” he asked Sharpe.
Sharpe thought of Hogan’s sarcastic remark that Sharpe’s only hope lay in a French victory that would obliterate all memories of what had happened at San Isidro. That seemed a dubious solution, yet there was another hope, a very slender hope, but one Sharpe had been thinking about all day.
“Go on,” Tarrant said, sensing that the rifleman was hesitant about offering an answer.
Sharpe grimaced. “Nosey’s been known to pardon men for good behavior. There was a fellow in the 83rd who was caught red-handed stealing money from a poorbox in Guarda and he was condemned to be hanged for it, but his company fought so well at Talavera that Nosey let him go.”
Donaju gestured with his knife toward the village that was beyond the eastern skyline. “Is that why you fought down there all day?” he asked.
Sharpe shook his head. “We just happened to find ourselves down there,” he said dismissively.
“But you took an eagle, Sharpe!” Tarrant protested. “What more gallantry do you need to display?”