Sharpe's Skirmish (6 page)

Hussars! Turn! Turn! For the Emperor."

Bugger the Emperor. It was pride that checked them, not the Emperor. They were an elite company, and when they saw the Captain turning back onto the bridge, at least half of them followed. Two bands of angry men, pride at stake, were clashing above the Tormes.

"Now kill the bastards!" Sharpe said, filled with a ridiculous elation that the crapauds were going to fight after all, and he scythed the heavy-cavalry sword down onto the neck of a Frenchman, twisted the blade free as he kicked the falling man in the face, then stabbed the bloody blade forward. It was sabres against bayonets, and wild as a tavern brawl.

Gutter fighting with government issue weapons. Stab and slash and snarl and kick, and in truth the two sides were too close together for either to have an advantage. The redcoats were crammed against hussars and did not have room to bring their bayonets back, and when the hussars cut down with sabres they risked having their sword arms seized. Some men fired pistols, and that would create a small gap, but it would immediately be filled.

Sergeant Coignet tried to reach the tall rifle officer, but he tripped on a dead body and the rifle officer kicked him in the face, then kicked him again, and Coignet tried to roll over, spitting out teeth, to stab his sabre up into the bastard's groin, but Sharpe stabbed down first. The sword blade scraped on ribs, then broke through to splash blood onto Sharpe's boots. Then Pailleterie was carving space for himself by slashing his sabre from side to side, and Sharpe stepped back from Coignet's body and wrenched the sword free, and then leaped back because Pailleterie had lunged, but a sabre is a poor lunging weapon and Sharpe smacked it aside with his sword and ran at the hussar captain, just ran at him, and gripped him in a bear hug and thrust him against the parapet and then pushed.

Pailleterie shouted as he fell into the river, then another voice shouted, much louder. "The hell out the way! Out the way!" And Sergeant Harper had arrived with his seven-barrelled gun, the vicious cluster of barrels held at his hip and the redcoats twisted aside as the big Irishman came straight up the bridge's centre. "Bastards!" He shouted at the hussars, then pulled the trigger and it was as if a cannon had been fired. Blood misted over the Tormes, and Harper was charging into the bloody space he had made, swinging the stubby seven-barrelled gun like a club. He was chanting in Irish, lost in a saga of old when heroes had counted their enemy dead in the scores.

And the hussars, their beloved captain gone, gave ground. "Keep after them!" Sharpe snarled, "don't let them breathe! Kill them!" And men stepped over bodies, slipped in blood and carried the bayonets forward and Sharpe broke a sabre clean in two with a cut of the sword and then stabbed the blade into a pigtailed face, and then the French really did break.

Break and run. Back the way they had come.

"Hold it there!" Sharpe called. "Stop! Stop!"

The bridge was his. The French were running. A dripping Pailleterie was clambering up the southern bank, but the fight had been drenched out of him and his men were running.

"Form ranks!" Sharpe shouted. Form ranks, count the dead, bind up the wounded, and then he looked south and his mouth dropped open. "Bloody hell," he said.

"God save Ireland," Patrick Harper spoke beside him.

Because every bloody cavalryman in France was on the road. All the Emperor's horses and all the Emperor's men. With lances, swords and sabres. In blue coats, green coats, white coats and brown coats. With plumes and braid and lace and pelisses and sabretaches and glitter.

Polished blades catching the sun like a field of steel.

And all coming straight at the South Essex Light Company.

"God save Ireland," Harper said again.

"Back!" Sharpe said, "back!" Back to the northern side of the bridge. Not that retreating would do him much good, but it might give him time to think.

To think about what? Death?

Just what the hell could he do?

General Herault did not have all his men, for some of the horses had simply collapsed during the long night march, but he had close to twelve hundred cavalrymen and he had come down from the Sierra de Gredos to see the fort at San Miguel de Tormes belching smoke like a furnace, and to see his beloved elite company of hussars thrust off the bridge by a ragtag collection of redcoats and greenjackets.

But there was only a handful of British infantry, and one glance at the northern bank showed Herault that there were no more British troops at hand. No artillery, no cavalry, no more infantry, just the one small band of men who even as he watched scuttled back over the bridge's hump to form a double rank at the far end of the roadway. The riflemen were scattering along the bank, plainly intending to rake the flank of any cavalry charge with their horribly accurate marksmanship.

So that was what stood between him and victory. Two ranks and a handful of grasshoppers. That was what the French called the riflemen, grasshoppers.

The bastards were always darting about in the grass, sniping away, then moving on. Sauterelles.

Herault paused. No need to go bald-headed at the bridge. Even a handful of redcoats could do damage in the confined space of a bridge's roadway, and two dead horses dropped between the parapets would make a horribly effective barricade. No, these rosbifs and sauterelles must be thinned out, and then he would release a company of Polish lancers at them.

Infantry hated lancers. Herault loved them.

He summoned his green-jacketed dragoons first. Dragoons were supposed to be mounted infantry, and they all carried longarms as well as swords, and Herault had three hundred of them. "Dismount your men," he ordered the dragoon colonel, "and make a skirmish line. Get them close to the river and smother those bastards with fire." He reckoned the dragoons could silence the riflemen, though the redcoats could probably find shelter by crouching under the bridge parapets. Which is where he wanted them.

"You want me to charge the bridge on foot?" The dragoon Colonel asked.

"I shall charge the bridge," Herault said. The dragoons would make the redcoats cower and Herault would burst across the bridge with the dreaded Polish horsemen.

The dragoons dismounted, leaving their horses with the hussars. Herault trotted his horse to where the Poles, in their dark blue uniforms, fronted with yellow and their square-sided, black leather, yellow topped tsapka hats waited. He chose a company that wore the single white epaulettes to show they were an elite unit, and he borrowed a lance from a trooper in another company. It was an ash pole, fourteen feet long, with a narrow steel blade projecting another eighteen inches. Herault had seen a lancer at the full gallop take the top off a hard-boiled egg, and the eggcup had not even shivered as the lance blade struck and cut. "In a few moments,"

he told the Poles, pausing to let his words be translated, "we shall cross the bridge. Kill them all." He would lead them, because that was the tradition in the French army. Had not General Bonaparte made his name on the bridge at Arcole? So Herault would now add a bridge to his own legend.

The dragoons had opened a galling fire over the Tormes and Herault, twisting in his saddle, saw the sauterelles running back from their fire.

He pushed his right hand through the wrist loop that was fastened at the lance's midpoint.

It was time to swat the enemy aside.

Time to win.

Bloody hell, Sharpe thought, but what to do? If his men stood up they exposed themselves to the galling fire of the three hundred dragoons, and if they stayed crouching they could not see over the bridge's hump. They could fire one volley when the French came, but by then the big horses would be within forty feet and, though the volley might kill the leading cavalrymen, the dead and dying horses would slide forward on the roadway to smash their weight into the redcoats. Sharpe had seen the first French square break at Garcia Hernandez because the French held their fire an instant too long and the dead weight of the slaughtered horses had broken through the square's face like a battering ram. He stood, attracting a whistling volley of dragoon fire, but he endured it long enough to see a squadron of lancers trotting towards the road. "Bloody lancers," he said.

He hated lancers.

He needed to barricade the bridge, but the wagon was in the river and any timbers that might have been useful from the fort were now inside an inferno. The smoke and embers whirled around Sharpe. The upper floors had collapsed, spewing sparks high into the cloudless sky. The heat of the burning fort was like a furnace to Sharpe's right.

Mister MacKeon had equipped himself with a musket and cartridge pouch. He was crouching beside the wayside shrine and now beckoned Sharpe. Sharpe crossed to him and the Scotsman jerked a thumb through the iron-grille gate that protected the Virgin. "Your answer's there, Mister Sharpe," he said.

Prayer? Sharpe wondered, then he looked past the chipped plaster saint and saw that the back of the chapel was piled with the bottles of wine that Harper had been ordered to smash. "Wine?"

"Have you ever heard of caltrops?" MacKeon asked.

"No."

"Spiky things. Horses can't abide them. Get up in their hooves, Mister Sharpe, into the soft tissue."

"Harper! Harris! Cooper! Perkins!" Sharpe bellowed towards the olives where the riflemen had taken shelter. "Come here! Now! Fast!"

A trumpet sounded on the southern road and the lancers lowered their blades. General Herault walked his horse to the front of the squadron. The dragoons blasted a volley that ricocheted off the bridge parapet or flattened its bullets against the fort's stonework. If that bugger of a wall collapses, Sharpe thought, it could crush his men, but there was no time to worry about that. Only time for Harper to finish his work.

The four riflemen had sprinted over the field and dropped beside Sharpe as the bullets whipped overhead. "Every damn bottle, Pat," Sharpe said, "is to be broken."

"Now, sir?" Harper asked, staring at Sharpe as though he were mad.

"Throw them up onto the bridge," Sharpe said. "Do it now! Do it fast! Do it!"

Harris and Perkins crouched inside the shrine and pushed bottles out of the door, and Harper, Sharpe and Cooper hurled them up onto the bridge's hump. MacKeon helped, and then two of the redcoats came to assist because there were so many bottles. Hundreds! Harper must have saved four hundred!

Doubtless he had hoped Sharpe would not see them, and then he would have distributed the wine among the Light Company, and Sharpe was now damned grateful for the Irishman's disobedience. "Hurry!" He shouted, for the trumpet had sounded again and he could hear the thump of hooves.

They hurled the bottles until the bridge ran with wine. Wine that diluted the drying blood and trickled past the dead bodies left on the roadway.

But it was not the wine that would save Sharpe, but the thick layer of broken green glass that was beginning to build up in the bridge's centre, and still he threw more bottles that smashed apart in fountains of red, and every broken bottle left a handful of razor sharp shards. The scraps were just like the tops of the high walls that rich folk put round their property in Britain, and on the wall tops they would cement a thief's trap of broken glass, and Sharpe had crossed enough of those walls in his time.

Bloody sharp stuff, horrid stuff, and Harris and Perkins backed out of the shrine, their arms filled with the last bottles and they hurled them up onto the bridge and now the hooves were a thunder to fill the air and shake the ground, and the curb chains and scabbard chains clinked and Sharpe stood to see the lances coming straight at him, and even the dragoons had stopped to watch the Poles slaughter their way across the bridge.

"Stand up!" Sharpe shouted. "Present!" The muskets came up into mens's shoulders. Their bayonets, many still red with blood, pointed towards the bridge crest that glittered with a bed of green glass.

And the lancers were in a line now, narrowing to cross the bridge at full gallop, and Sharpe drew his sword, tugging it hard because the blood drying on the blade had crusted to the inside of the scabbard. Some of the dragoons had opened fire. A redcoat staggered, his musket dropping.

Sergeant Huckfield pulled him back out of the front rank. "Close up! Close up!" The riflemen were firing at the dragoons and the leading lancers were just on the bridge.

"Fire! Sharpe shouted, and his thirty muskets flamed and smoked and he had an impression of a horse falling and screaming. "Reload! Fast!" He shouted, "reload!" The sound of hooves were still loud on the stone and Sharpe ran to one side to see past the musket's smoke and an hussar was leading the charge, but this hussar had a lance and he reached the bridge's crest and there his horse reared, and the horse was screaming, green light flashing off its flailing front hooves, and a second horse was sliding in the glass, shaking, its rider desperately trying to regain control, and then a third horse reached the broken glass and it too reared up. The lancers piled in behind, unable to get past the panicking horses.

Those horses were in screaming agony, blood dripping from hooves, and Sharpe looked at his redcoats, watching the ramrods go back into the musket hoops. "Present!" He shouted. The muskets came up again as a dragoon's bullet whiplashed past Sharpe's shako. "Fire!" He called, and this time the three leading horses went down, struck by the volley, and the bridge was blocked. Two of the horses died within seconds, but the third lay on its side and screamed as it beat its hooves against the glass that had defeated the charge.

Sharpe bulled through the ranks and ran up onto the bridge that was slippery with wine. The hussar was trapped beneath his horse, and grimacing because he had fallen among the broken glass, but he tried to lift the lance as Sharpe approached, but Sharpe knocked the lance blade aside, then grabbed the hussar by the collar of his brown coat and just dragged him clear of his horse. Glass crunched under Sharpe's boots. The hussar screamed as his hip was pulled through the shattered bottles, then Sharpe tugged him clear and pulled the man's pistol from its holster. He cocked it, aimed it, fired and the screaming horse gave a shudder and died. Then Sharpe pushed his prisoner back down the bridge. "Harry!" He shouted at Lieutenant Price. "Take the redcoats up to the dead horses.