Sharpe's Escape (19 page)

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.

Smoke drifted off the hill. Guns cooled. Men passed round water bottles.

The French were back in the valley. "There is a road around the north of the ridge," an aide reminded Marshal Masséna, who said nothing. He just stared at what was left of his attacks on the hill. Beaten, all of them. Beaten to nothing. Defeated. And the enemy, hidden once more behind the ridge's crest, waited for him to try again.

"YOU REMEMBER MISS SAVAGE?" Vicente asked Sharpe. They were sitting at the end of the knoll, staring down at the beaten French.

"Kate? Of course I remember Kate," Sharpe said. "I often wondered what happened to her."

"She married me," Vicente said, and looked absurdly pleased with himself.

"Good God," Sharpe said, then decided that probably sounded like a rude response. "Well done!"

"I shaved off my mustache," Vicente said, "as you suggested. And she said yes."

"Never did understand mustaches," Sharpe said, "must be like kissing a blacking brush."

"And we have a child," Vicente went on, "a girl."

"Quick work, Jorge!"