Harper, who at six feet four inches, was taller even than Sharpe, frowned. ‘Terrible about the RSM, sir.’
‘Yes.’ Sharpe was looking at the sky, wondering whether more rain was coming. This summer had been the worst in Spanish memory. ‘You’ve got his job.’
‘Sir?’
‘You heard.’ Sharpe, while he commanded the Battalion, could at least give it the best Regimental Sergeant Major it would ever have. The new Colonel would be in no position to change the appointment. Sharpe turned away. ‘Lieutenant Andrews!’
‘Sir?’ The Lieutenant was leading a morose party of men who staggered under the weight of small boulders.
‘Put them on the graves!’ The stones would stop animals scrabbling down to the shallowly buried flesh.
‘All the graves, sir?’
‘Just ours.’ Sharpe did not care if the foxes and ravens gorged themselves on rotting French flesh, but his own men could lie in peace for whatever it was worth. ‘Sergeant Major?’
‘Sir?’ Harper was half grinning, half unsure whether a grin was acceptable at this moment. ‘Yes, sir?’
‘We’ll need a god-damned cart for our wounded. Ask a mounted officer to fetch one from the baggage. Then perhaps we can get on with this damned march.’
‘Yes, sir.’
That night rain fell on the pass where the South Essex had stood and suffered, and where their dead lay, and from which place the living had long gone. The night’s rain washed the scanty soil from the French dead who had not been buried but just covered with soil. The teeming water exposed white, hard flesh, and in the morning the scavengers came for the carrion. The pass had no name.
Pasajes was a port on the northern coast of Spain, close to where the shoreline bent north to France. It was a deep passage cleft in the rocks, leading to a safe, sheltered harbour that was crammed with shipping from Britain. The stores that fed Wellington’s army came to Pasajes now, no longer going to Lisbon to be carried by ox-carts over the mountains. At Pasajes the army gathered the stores that would let it invade France, but the South Essex who, even before the fight in the nameless pass had been considered too shrunken by war to take its place in the battle-line, had been ordered to Pasajes instead. Their job, until their reinforcements arrived, was to guard the wharves and warehouses against thieves. They were fighting soldiers, and they had become Charlies, watchmen.
‘Bloody country. Bloody stench. Bloody people.’ Major General Nairn punctuated each remark by tossing an orange out of the window. He paused, waiting hopefully for a cry of pain or protest from beneath, but there was only the sound of the fruit thumping onto the cobbles. ‘You must be bloody disappointed, Sharpe.’
Sharpe shrugged. He knew that Nairn referred to the task of guarding the storehouses. ‘Someone has to do it, sir.’
Nairn scoffed at Sharpe’s meekness. ‘All you can do here is stop the bloody Spanish from pissing in our broth. I’m disappointed for you!’ He lumbered to his feet and crossed to the window. He watched two high-booted Spanish Customs officers slowly pace the wharves. ‘You know what those bastards are doing to us?’
‘No, sir.’
‘We liberate their bloody country and now they want to charge us bloody Customs duty on every barrel of powder we bring to Spain! It’s like saving a man’s wife from rape, then being asked to pay for the privilege! Foreigners! God knows why God made foreigners. They aren’t any bloody use to anyone.’ He glared at the two Customs men, debating whether to shy his last orange at them, then turned back to Sharpe. ‘What’s your strength?’
‘Two hundred and thirty-four effectives. Ninety-six in various hospitals.’
‘Jesus!’ Nairn stared incredulously at Sharpe. He had first met the Rifleman at Christmas and the two men had liked each other from the first. Now Nairn had ridden to Pasajes from the army headquarters in search of Sharpe. The Major General grunted and went back to his chair. He had white, straggly eyebrows that grew startlingly upwards to meet his shock of white hair. ‘Two hundred and thirty-four effectives?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘I suppose you lost some the other day?’
‘A good few.’ Three more men had already died of the wounds they received in the pass. ‘But we’ve got replacements coming.’
Major General Nairn closed his eyes. ‘He’s got replacements coming. From where, pray?’
‘From the Second Battalion, sir.’ The South Essex, for much of the war, had only possessed one Battalion, but now, in their English depot at Chelmsford, a second Battalion had been raised. Most regiments had two Battalions, the first to do the fighting, the second to recruit men, train them, then send them as needed to the First Battalion.
Nairn opened his eyes. ‘You have a problem, that’s what you’ve got. You know how to deal with problems?’
‘Sir?’ Sharpe felt the fear of uncertainty.
‘You dilute them with alcohol, that’s what you do. Thank God I stole some of the Peer’s brandy. Here, man.’ Nairn had pulled the bottle from his sabretache and poured generous tots into two dirty glasses he found on the table. ‘Tell me about your bloody replacements.’
There was not much to tell. Lieutenant Colonel Leroy, before he died, had conducted a lively correspondence with the Chelmsford depot. The letters from England, during the previous winter, told of eight recruiting parties on the roads, of crowded barracks and enthusiastic training. Nairn listened. ‘You asked for men to be sent?’
‘Of course!’
‘So where are they?’
Sharpe shrugged. He had been wondering exactly that, and had been consoling himself that the replacements could easily have been entangled in the chaos that had resulted from moving the army’s supply base from Lisbon to Pasajes. The new men could be at Lisbon, or at sea, or marching through Spain, or, worst of all, still waiting in England. ‘We asked for them in February. It’s June now; they must be coming.’
‘They’ve been saying that about Christ for eighteen hundred years,’ Nairn grunted. ‘You heard for certain they were being sent?’
‘No,’ Sharpe shrugged. ‘But they have to be!’
Nairn stared into his brandy as though it was a fortune-teller’s bauble. ‘Tell me, Sharpe, have you ever heard of a man called Lord Fenner? Lord Simon Fenner?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Bastard politician, Sharpe. Bloody bastard politician. I’ve always hated politicians. One moment they’re grovelling all over you, tongues hanging out, wanting your vote, the next minute they’re too bloody pompous to even see you. Insolent bastard jackanapes! Hate them! Hope you hate politicians, Sharpe. Not fit to lick your jakes out.’
‘Lord Fenner, sir?’ Sharpe knew bad news was coming. He knew that Major Generals, however friendly, did not ride long distances to share brandy with Majors.
‘Foul little pompous bastard, he is.’ Nairn spat the insult out. ‘Secretary of State at War, works to the Secretary of State of War, and probably neither would know what a war was even if it stuck itself in their back passages. So he wrote to us.’ Nairn took a piece of paper from his sabretache. ‘Or rather one of his poxed clerks wrote to us.’ He was staring at Sharpe rather than the letter. ‘He claims, Sharpe, that there are no reinforcements available to the South Essex. That none have been sent, and none are going to be sent. None. There.’ He handed the letter to Sharpe.
Sharpe could not believe it. He took the letter, fearing it, to find that it was a long list, sent by the War Office via the Horse Guards, of the replacements that could be expected in the next few weeks. At the end of the list was the South Essex, against whose name was written; ‘2nd Batt now Hold’g Batt. No Draft available.‘ That was all and, if it was true, it meant that the South Essex’s Second Battalion had become a mere Holding Battalion; a place where boys of thirteen and fourteen, too young to fight, waited for their birthdays, or where men in transit or wounded men were put to wait for new postings. A rag-tag Battalion, without pride and of small purpose.
‘It can’t be true! There are recruits! We had eight recruiting parties!’
Nairn grunted. ‘In a covering letter, Sharpe, dictated by his bloody Lordship himself, but which I won’t offend you by showing to you, he recommends that your Battalion be broken up.’
For a few seconds Sharpe thought he had misheard Nairn. A Spanish muleteer shouted outside the window, from the harbour came the cranking sound of a windlass, and in Sharpe’s head echoed the words ‘broken up’.
‘Broken up, sir?’ Sharpe felt a chill in this warm room.
‘Lord Fenner suggests, Sharpe, that your men be given to other Battalions, that your Colours be sent home, that your officers either exchange into other regiments, sell their commissions, or make themselves available for our disposal.’
Sharpe was incredulous. ‘They can’t do it!’
Nairn gave a sour laugh. ‘Sharpe! They’re politicians! You can’t expect sense from the bastards!’ He leaned forward. ‘We’re going to need all the experienced units we can scrape together; all of them, but don’t expect Lord Fenner to understand that! He’s the Secretary of State at War and he wouldn’t know a bayonet from a ram-rod. He’s a civilian! He controls the army’s money, which is why there isn’t any.’
Sharpe said nothing. He was thinking of the Battalion’s Colours laid up in some English church, hanging high in a dusty chancel while the men who had fought for them were scattered in penny-packets around the army. He was feeling anger, bitter anger, that his men, who had fought for those flags, who had suffered, whose comrades were in unmarked graves on a dozen battlefields would be broken up, disbanded. He was thinking of a Battalion that, like a family, had its quarrels and laughter, its warmth and pride, all to be sacrificed!
‘Breaking you up.’ Nairn said it brutally. ‘Bloody shame. Busaco, Talavera, Fuentes d’Onoro, Ciudad Rodrigo, Badajoz, Salamanca, Vitoria, hell of a way to finish! Like sending a pack of hounds to the shambles, eh?‘
‘But we had eight recruiting sergeants out!’
‘It’s no good telling me, Sharpe, I’m just a dogsbody.’ Nairn sniffed. ‘And even if we make you into a provisional Battalion you’ll go on losing men. You need a draft of replacements!’ It was true. If the South Essex was joined to another Battalion they would still take casualties, until the joint Battalion was shrunken and diluted again. Instead of being broken up, the South Essex would simply wither and die, its Colours forgotten, its morale wasted.
‘No!’ Sharpe almost howled the word in agonised protest. ‘They can’t do it!’
‘Let us hope not,’ Nairn smiled. ‘The Peer is not happy. He is damned crusty about it, Sharpe.’ Nairn spoke of Wellington. ‘He has this strange idea that the South Essex could be useful to him in France.’ The compliment was truthful. A veteran Battalion like the South Essex, even if its ranks were half-filled with raw replacements, had a morale and knowledge that doubled its fighting value. The South Essex had become a killing machine that could be guaranteed to face anything the French threw against it, while a fresh Battalion, however well trained in England, could take months to reach the same efficiency. Nairn splashed more brandy into the two glasses. ‘The Peer, Sharpe, does not trust those bastards in London. War Office! Horse Guards! Foreign Office! Ordnance Department! We’ve got more damned offices running this damned war than we’ve got Battalions! They’ve made a mess of it, they’ve lost their paperwork, they’ve got their breeches round their ankles and they can’t find mother to pull them up. Who’s in charge at Chelmsford?’
Sharpe had to think. His brain was in a turmoil of anger and astonishment that his Battalion could be broken up! ‘In Chelmsford, sir? Man called Girdwood. Lieutenant Colonel Girdwood.’
‘Ever met him?’
‘Never set eyes on him.’
‘He’s got men! He just doesn’t want to lose them! Happens all the time, Sharpe! Man has a Second Battalion, trains them, makes them into toy soldiers, and he can’t bear sending them abroad where the First Battalion will make them dirty! So go and see this Girdwood.’ Nairn said the name with mocking relish. ‘Persuade Girdwood to give you some men from this so-called Holding Battalion! Lick Girdwood’s boots! Get Girdwood drunk! Offer to pleasure Girdwood’s wife! You’ll find some men in Chelmsford!’ Nairn laughed at Sharpe’s expression, then tossed a sealed packet of orders to him. ‘Authorisation for you and three others to go to England to select replacements. Be back by October. That gives you nearly four months.’
Sharpe stared at the Scotsman. ‘Go to England?’
‘I know it’s a grim thought, Sharpe,’ Nairn grinned, ‘but nothing’s going to happen here, nothing! Bloody politicians won’t let us invade France until Prussia makes up its mind whether to join the dance again. All we’re going to do is take San Sebastian and Pamplona then sit on our backsides doing nothing! You might as well go home, you’ll miss nothing. Go to Chelmsford.’
‘I can’t go home!’ He meant he could not leave his men.
‘You bloody well have to! You want the South Essex to die? You want to be a storekeeper?’ Nairn drank his brandy. ‘The Peer doesn’t want to break you up. He’ll make you into a Provisional Battalion if he must, but he’d rather you brought yourself up to strength. Go to Chelmsford, find men! If there are none there, then find other men!’
‘And if there aren’t any men?’
The Scotsman drew his finger across his throat. ‘Death of a regiment. Damned shame.’
And now of all times? Now, when the army gathered its strength at the edge of Napoleon’s heartland, on the border of France? Soon, perhaps this autumn or next spring, the men who had first landed at Lisbon would march into France and the South Essex should march with them. They had earned that privilege. On the day when the enemy’s empire was finally brought down, the flags of the South Essex should be flying in victory. Sharpe gestured at Lord Fenner’s letter. ‘How do I oppose that?’
Nairn shook his head. ‘It’s a mistake, Sharpe! Has to be! But you can’t put mistakes right by sending letters! We’ve written to the useless bastards, but letters to the Horse Guards are put in a drawer marked Urgent Business to be Ignored. But they can’t ignore you. You’re a hero!’ He said it with friendly mockery. ‘Go to Chelmsford, find your men, and bring them back. It will take half the time of doing it by letter.’