Читать книгу Sharpe’s Revenge: The Peace of 1814 - Bernard Cornwell - Страница 11

Over the next few days it seemed as if Wellington was offering peace an opportunity, for he broke off his direct advance on Toulouse and instead ordered the army into a confusing series of manoeuvres that could only delay any confrontation with Marshal Soult’s army. If the manoeuvres were designed to offer the French a chance to retreat, they did not take it, but just waited at Toulouse while the British, Spanish and Portuguese forces made their slow and cumbersome advance. One night Nairn’s brigade was marched through pelting rain to where Engineers were laying a pontoon bridge across a wide river. Sharpe knew the river was the Garonne, for his orders said as much, but he had no idea where in France the Garonne ran. Nor did it much matter for the night became a fiasco when the Engineers discovered their bridge was too short. Nairn’s men slept by the roadside as the Engineers swore and wrestled with the clumsy tin boats that should have carried the wooden roadway. Eventually the crossing was abandoned.

Three days later a bridge was successfully laid elsewhere on the river, troops crossed, but it seemed the bridge led to nothing but swampland in which the artillery floundered up to its axles. In Spain no such mistake would have happened, for in Spain there had always been willing local guides eager to lead the British army towards the hated French, but here, on the Emperor’s own soil, there was no such help. Neither was there any opposition from the local population who merely seemed numbed by the years of war.

The troops who struggled in the swamps were called back and their bridge was dismantled. There had been no interference from Marshal Soult’s army that was entrenched about the city’s outskirts; A German deserter reported on the enemy dispositions, and also said that the Emperor Napoleon had committed suicide. ‘A German soldier will say anything to get a decent meal,’ Nairn grumbled, ‘or an English one to get a bottle of rum.’

No confirmation came of the Emperor’s death. It seemed that Napoleon still lived, Paris was uncaptured, and so the war went on. Wellington ordered a new bridge made and this time almost the whole army crossed to find itself north of Toulouse and between two rivers. They marched south and by Good Friday they were close enough to smell the cooking fires of the city. Next day the army marched even closer and Sharpe, riding ahead with Nairn, saw what obstacles protected the city. Between the British and Toulouse there lay a long hog-backed ridge. Beyond the ridge was a canal, but the ridge provided the city’s real protection for it was the high ground, and whoever possessed it could pour a killing fire down on to their enemies. Sharpe drew out his telescope and gazed at the ridge’s summit where he saw fresh scars of newly dug earth which betrayed that the French, far from being ready to surrender, were still fortifying the hill’s top. ‘I hate God-damned bloody trenches,’ he said to Nairn.

‘You’ve faced them before?’

‘In the Pyrenees. It wasn’t pleasant.’

It began to rain as the two men rode back to the British lines. ‘Tomorrow’s Easter Day,’ Nairn said moodily.

‘Yes.’

Nairn took a long swig of rum from his flask, then offered it to Sharpe. ‘Even for a disbeliever like me it’s a bloody inappropriate day to fight a battle, wouldn’t you say?’

Sharpe did not reply for a gun had boomed behind him. He twisted in his saddle and saw the dirty puff of smoke on the crest of the ridge and, just a second later, he saw a spurt of water splash and die in the western marshes. The French were sighting in their twelve-pounders; the killing guns with their seven foot barrels.

The thought of those efficiently served weapons gave Sharpe a quick sudden pain in his belly. He had somehow convinced himself that there would be no fight, that the French would see how hopeless their cause was, yet the enemy gunners were even now ranging their batteries and Sharpe could hear the whining scrape of blades being whetted on stones in the British cavalry lines. At luncheon, which Nairn’s military family ate inside a large tent, Sharpe found himself hoping that peace would be announced that very afternoon, yet when a message arrived it proved to be orders for the brigade to prepare itself for battle the next day.

Nairn solemnly toasted his aides. ‘An Easter death to the French, gentlemen.’

‘Death to the French,’ the aides repeated the old toast, then stood to drink the King’s health.

Sharpe slept badly. It was not work that kept him awake, for the last marching orders had been copied and dispatched well before nightfall. Nor was it the supper of salt beef and sour wine that had made him restless. It was the apprehension of a man before battle; that same apprehension which had kept him awake on the nights before the duel with Bampfylde. The apprehension was fear; pure naked fear, and Sharpe knew that battle by battle the fear was getting worse for him. When he had first joined the army as a private he had been young and cocksure; he had even felt exhilarated before a fight. He had felt himself to be immortal then, and that had made him confident that he could maul and claw and kill any man who opposed him. Now, as an officer, and married, he possessed more knowledge and so had more fear. Tomorrow he could die.

He tried the old tricks to conquer the knowledge; attempting to snatch an augury of life or death from the commonplace. If a sparrow alighted this side of a puddle, he would live. He despised such superstitious obsessions, yet could not help but indulge them, though he had made the attempt too often in the past to believe in any such trivial portents. Indeed, every man in both armies, Sharpe knew, was trying to snatch just such prophecies from their fears, but there were few who would allow themselves to see death written in their stars, yet many must die. The eve of battle was a time for talismans and amulets and charms and prayers, but the dawn would bring the kick of musket-butts, the hiss of sabres and the skull-shattering sound of artillery firing. So Sharpe shivered in the night and hoped his death would be quick, and that he would not scream beneath the surgeon’s knife.

By dawn the rain had stopped and a drying wind blew across the countryside. High clouds scudded away from the sun’s rising as Sharpe walked through the smoking bivouac fires in search of a cavalry armourer who could put an edge on to his sword. It was the sword of a trooper of the Heavy Cavalry; a long-bladed, heavy, and unbalanced weapon. It was far too unwieldy for most men, even for the burly men who rode the big horses and trained with dumb-bells to give strength to their sword arms, but Sharpe liked the sword and was strong enough to make it into a responsive and murderous weapon.

He found an armourer who ran the blade up his treadled wheel and afterwards stropped it on his leather apron. Sharpe gave the man a coin, then shared a tin mug of tea. Afterwards, with the oiled sword-blade safe in its scabbard, he went back to Nairn’s tent outside of which he found the old Scotsman breakfasting on bread, cold salt-beef, and strong tea. Nairn watched with amusement as Sharpe unrolled the ancient and threadbare jacket from his pack. ‘While you were gone,’ Nairn said, ‘I was vouchsafed a new glimpse of our noble Colonel Taplow.’

Sharpe was grateful for the distraction from his fears. ‘Tell me, please?’

‘He’s holding a service of Holy Communion, for officers only, mark you, behind the latrines in ten minutes. You are invited, but I took the liberty of declining on your behalf. And on mine, as it happens.’

Sharpe laughed. He sat opposite Nairn and wondered whether his right hand was shaking as he reached for a slice of twice-baked bread. The butter was rancid, but the salt on the beef smothered the sour taste.

Nairn picked a shred of salt-beef from his teeth. ‘The thought of Taplow at his sacred offices is quite loathsome. Do you think God listens to such a man?’ Nairn poured rum into his tea.

‘I don’t know, sir.’

‘You’re not a believer, Sharpe?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Nor am I, of course, but I was still half tempted to attend Taplow’s magical incantations. Just in case they helped. I’m damned nervous, Sharpe.’

Sharpe felt a sudden strong surge of affection for Nairn. ‘Me too, sir.’

‘You? Truly?’

Sharpe nodded. ‘Truly. It doesn’t get easier.’

‘How many battles have you fought?’

Sharpe was dunking a lump of hard bread into his tea. He left it there as he thought, then shrugged. ‘God knows, sir. Dozens of the damn things. Too many.’

‘Enough to entitle you to be cautious, Richard. You don’t have to be heroic today. Leave that to some wet-behind-the-ears Lieutenant who needs to make his name.’

Sharpe smiled his thanks. ‘I’ll try, sir.’

‘And if I do anything foolish today, you will tell me?’

Sharpe looked up at the Scotsman, surprised by this confession of uncertainty. ‘You won’t need that, sir.’

‘But you’ll tell me?’ Nairn insisted.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Not that I’ll share any of the glory with you, Sharpe, you mustn’t think that, though I might say afterwards that you were moderately useful.’ Nairn laughed, then waved a greeting to two of his other aides who came to the breakfast table. ‘Good morning, gentlemen! I was thinking last night that perhaps Paris doesn’t count.’

‘Paris?’ One of the puzzled aides asked.

Nairn was evidently thinking of the war’s ending. ‘Perhaps the northern allies will take Paris, but Napoleon might just fall back and fall back, and we’ll keep matching on, and someday this summer the whole damned lot of us will meet in the very middle of France. There’ll be Boney himself in the centre, and every French soldier left alive with him, and the rest of Europe surrounding him, and then we’ll have a proper battle. One last real bastard of a killing. It seems unfair to have come this far and never actually fought against Napoleon himself.’ Nairn gazed wistfully across the bivouacs where the smoke of the cooking fires melded into skeins like a November mist. ‘I’ll keep the Highlanders in reserve, Sharpe. That way no one can accuse me of showing them favouritism.’

It was a strange world, Sharpe thought, in which to keep a battalion out of the battle line was construed as an insult. ‘Yes, sir.’

‘I suppose there’s no point in giving Captain Frederickson direct orders?’

‘Not if you want those orders obeyed, sir. But he knows what to do, and his men would appreciate a visit from you.’

‘Of course, of course.’ Nairn added more rum to his tea, then frowned. ‘Frederickson’s Rifles are the only men in this brigade who eat properly. They never have salt beef! Why do we never catch them looting?’

‘Because they’re Riflemen, sir. They’re much too clever.’

Nairn smiled. ‘At least there’ll be no more salt beef once this battle’s won. We’ll have French rations.’

The other aides arrived, faces gleaming from their razors. Sharpe had still not shaved, and he had a sudden irrational conviction that he would survive the day if he did not shave, then another equally strong impulse said that he would only live if he did shave, and he felt the reptilian squirm of fear in his belly. He stared up at the long, long ridge that, just like the British bivouacs, was topped by a shifting layer of smoke. The smoke was thick enough to suggest the large numbers of Frenchmen who would be defending the high ground this day. Sharpe thought of Jane and suddenly longed for the Dorset house with its implicit promise of a nursery. He was about to ask whether any mail had arrived when a light flashed from the ridge top and Sharpe knew it was the sun reflecting from a telescope as an enemy officer gazed down at the British lines. The fear stirred in Sharpe. He was tempted to take some of Nairn’s rum, but resisted.

The waiting abraded the fear. The first Spanish, Portuguese and British brigades had marched long before dawn, their long lines uncoiling from the encampment in a sluggishly macabre motion, but Nairn’s brigade would be one of the last to leave the lines. They could only wait, pretending confidence, as the minutes wore on. Nairn inspected his battalions and tossed gruff encouragement to the soldiers. Some of the Highlanders sang psalms, but their tunes were so dirge-like that Sharpe went out of earshot. He had decided that his survival lay in not shaving.

It took another half hour before the orders came from Division and Nairn at last could order his men forward. Taplow’s battalion led, and the Highlanders marched at the rear. The brigade followed the other battalions who were already marching to the ridge’s southern slopes. Sharpe, mounted on his mare Sycorax, could see the Spanish Divisions that waited at the ridge’s northern end. Today those Spaniards had the place of honour, for they would comprise the major attack up the ridge’s spine. They had asked for the honour. As they attacked, so the British and Portuguese, under Marshal Beresford, would assault the ridge’s southern end to split the French defences. Other British troops were ringed about the city to make threatening feints designed to stop Marshal Soult concentrating his army on the ridge.

The French, secure on their heights, could see all that Wellington planned. There could be no deception this day, no sleight of arms to blind the enemy and cheat him. This would be work, hard work, work for the bayonet and the bullet, work for the infantry.

The southward march was not easy for the ground was soft. Nairn’s brigade, among the last in Beresford’s long column, found the tracks churned into a morass. At first that clinging mud was their only problem, but as their route angled ever closer to the ridge the brigade came within range of the French gunners. Nairn ordered his men to march through the marshy fields to the west of the tracks, but still the roundshot slashed into his battalion columns. The British artillery tried to reply, but they were shooting uphill at enemy batteries well dug in behind thick emplacements.

‘Close up, you scum!’ Lieutenant-Colonel Taplow bellowed at his leading company after a cannonball had crashed through a file to leave three men bloody and twitching on the soaking ground. ‘Leave them there!’ he shouted at two men who stooped to help the victims. ‘Leave them, I say, or I’ll have you flogged!’ At the rear of Taplow’s fusiliers a band played, their music made ragged by their stumbling progress over the tussocky soft ground. Drummer boys were ordered to attend to the three men, but two were already dead and the third had not long to live. The battalion surgeon finished the man with a quick knife cut, then, shrugging, wiped his bloody hands on his grey breeches.

The French artillery pumped smoke from the ridge crest. Sharpe, staring eastwards, could sometimes see the trace of a dark line in the sky and he knew he watched a cannonball at the top of its arcing flight, and he also knew that such a pencil line was only visible in the sky when the ball was coming straight at the observer. At those moments he felt a temptation to spur Sycorax onwards, feigning some urgent duty, but he restrained himself in case any man should think him cowardly. Instead he rode steadily, flinching inwardly, and hid his relief as the balls missed. One roundshot thumped into the mud just ahead of Sycorax, making the mare rear frantically. Somehow Sharpe kept his feet in the stirrups and his arse on the saddle as the gobbets of wet mud fountained about him. The mare was not properly trained to battle, but she was a good steady horse. She had been a gift from Jane, and that thought gave Sharpe a sentimental longing to see his wife. He wondered if her mail had become lost, because no letter had yet arrived, then a cannonball went just over his shako to decapitate a redcoat marching to Sharpe’s left and he forgot his wife in the sudden surge of fear.

‘Close up!’ a Sergeant shouted. ‘Close up!’ It was the litany of battle and the only obituary of the common soldier.

‘You’re used to this, I suppose?’ A Lieutenant, one of Nairn’s junior aides, spurred alongside Sharpe. Ahead of them a man’s entrails were being trodden into the mud, but either the Lieutenant did not notice or did not recognize what he saw.

‘I don’t think you ever get used to it,’ Sharpe said, though it was not true. One did get used to it, but that did not help the fear. The Lieutenant, who was new to the war, was clearly terrified, though he was trying hard not to show it. ‘It’s better,’ Sharpe said truthfully, ‘once you can fire back. It’s much less frightening then.’

‘Bless you, sir, I’m not frightened.’

‘I am.’ Sharpe grinned, then looked to his right and saw that Frederickson’s men were so far unscathed. Frederickson had taken his Riflemen closer to the enemy, which had been a shrewd move for the Greenjackets made a small and seemingly negligible target compared to the long and cumbersome column of redcoats. The French were firing over the Riflemen’s heads.

A cavalry officer galloped past Frederickson’s men towards the head of Beresford’s column. Sharpe recognized the man as one of Wellington’s aides, and assumed from his haste that he carried an urgent message. A clue to the message came when the ridge’s northern end suddenly exploded with cannon fire. Sharpe twisted in his saddle and saw that the French had unmasked a dozen batteries that were hammering their missiles down the hill at the attacking Spaniards.

The Lieutenant frowned. ‘I thought we were supposed to attack at the same time as the Dagoes, sir?’

‘We were.’

God only knew what had gone wrong, but gone wrong it had. The Spaniards, instead of waiting until Beresford’s diversionary attack was in position to the south, had precipitately charged up the ridge’s northern slopes. Their bright uniforms and gaudy colours made a brave show, but it was a gallant display being eviscerated by the concentrated fire of the deadly twelve-pounders.

‘Halt! Halt!’ Divisional officers were galloping back down Beresford’s column. ‘Face right! Face right!’

Battalion officers and sergeants took up the cry and the great column halted and clumsily turned to face the bleak, steep slope at the ridge’s centre.

Nairn, who had been riding at the head of his brigade, spurred back. ‘Column of half companies!’ he ordered. It seemed that Marshal Beresford must be contemplating an immediate assault on the ridge. Certainly, if Beresford was to divert attention from the Spanish attack then he could not wait till he reached the gentler slopes at the ridge’s southern end, but would be forced to launch his eleven thousand men on a desperate uphill scramble against the French entrenchments.

The French batteries, seeing the British and Portuguese battalions shake into their attack columns, kept firing. ‘Lie down!’ Nairn shouted. ‘Lie down!’

The battalions dropped, making themselves a smaller and lower target for the enemy gunners, but leaving the officers on horseback feeling horribly exposed. Sharpe stared at the ridge and feared its muscle-sapping steepness. The sun, just rising above the summit, was suddenly dazzling.

‘Wait here, Sharpe!’ Nairn was excited. ‘I’ll discover what’s happening. You wait here!’

Sharpe waited. After breakfast he had pushed some bread and beef into a saddle bag and now, suddenly hungry, he gnawed at a lump of the meat.

‘They’ve cocked it up!’ Colonel Taplow, his red face as bad-tempered as ever, rode to Sharpe’s side. ‘The Spanish have cocked it up, Sharpe!’

‘So it seems, sir.’ A cannonball thumped the earth to Sharpe’s left. Sycorax skittered sideways until Sharpe soothed her.

‘Seems?’ Taplow was incensed by the mild word. ‘They’ve cocked it up, that’s what they’ve done. Cocked it up!’ He gestured to the north where a new sound erupted as French musketry began flaying the Spaniards. The crackle of musketry was a thick, splintering sound that gave witness to just how many defenders had been waiting for the Spanish. ‘They went too early.’ Taplow seemed to revel in the Spanish mistake. ‘They couldn’t keep their breeches up, could they? Too much damned eagerness, Sharpe. No whippers-in, that’s their problem. No bottom. Not like the English. It’ll be up to us now, Sharpe, you mark my words. It’ll be up to us!’

‘Indeed it will, sir.’

The musketry was unending; a sustained terror of sound just like a million snapping rails of wood. And every snap meant another lead bullet flicking down the slope to strike home in the bunched Spanish ranks.

‘Ah ha! Told you so! No bottom!’ Taplow crowed triumphantly for the Spanish had begun to retreat. The movement was slow at first, merely a slight edging backwards, but it swiftly turned into a quick scramble to escape the flailing bullets. Sharpe was astonished that the Spaniards had climbed as far as they had, and he doubted whether any troops in the world could have gone further, but Colonel Taplow was not so generous. ‘All priming and no charge, that’s the Dago’s problem. No bottom, Sharpe, no bottom. Have a boiled egg.’

Sharpe accepted a hard-boiled egg which he ate as Beresford’s column patiently waited. The sun’s warmth was detectable now, and the small mist that had cloaked the western marshes was quite gone. A heron flapped clumsily into the air and flew southwards. A cannonball struck into Taplow’s bandsmen and Sharpe watched a blood-spattered trumpet fly into the air.

‘It’ll be up to us now!’ Taplow said with immense satisfaction. ‘It’s no good relying on foreigners, Sharpe, they only cock things up. Let me salute you.’

Sharpe suddenly realized that the irascible Taplow was offering a hand. He shook it.

‘Good man!’ Taplow said. ‘Proud to know you! Sorry you didn’t take communion, though. A fellow ought to square things with the Almighty before he kills the King’s enemies. Only decent thing to do. Had you realized that your servant forgot to shave you this morning? Flog the fellow. Let me wish you well of the day now!’ Taplow galloped southwards towards his men while Sharpe sighed. The egg had taken the edge from his hunger, so he pushed the lump of salt beef back into his pouch. Sycorax dropped her head to crop at the trampled grass.

New orders came. The southwards march was to resume, for there was clearly no advantage to be gained in assaulting the ridge’s centre now that the Spanish attack had been repulsed. Nairn said there was a hope that the Spanish would re-form and attack again, but he could offer no explanation as to why their first attack had been premature. ‘Perhaps they wanted to end the war without us?’

Beresford’s column re-formed and trudged onwards. The French long-range cannonade continued. The men marched silently, not even singing, for they all knew that they would soon have to turn eastwards and assault the ridge. They had seen one attack bloodily repulsed, and they could guess that Marshal Soult was even now reinforcing the ridge’s southern slopes. From the city’s north and east came the dull crump of gunfire as allied cannon fired at the defences, but it was doubtful if the French would be fooled by such obvious feints. They knew the importance of the ridge, which was doubtless why its summit would prove a hellish place of trenches and batteries. The fears writhed in Sharpe, made worse by the cannonade that echoed in the sky like giant hammer blows.

Beresford’s infantry marched for one more hour before they turned to their right to face the ridge’s southern slopes. The long march across the enemy’s front had at least brought Beresford’s men to a place that the French had not fortified. No cannons faced down these southern slopes which stretched invitingly up to the bright, pale sky. What lay beyond the horizon, though, was another matter.

The brigades were ordered to form into three vast lines; each line consisting of two brigades arrayed just two men deep. Nairn’s men would form the right hand end of the second line. It took time to make the formation, which was a job best left to Sergeants, and so the officers stared at the empty skyline and pretended they felt no fear. The only enemy in sight, besides the occasional glimpse of an officer riding forward to stare down the slope, was a force of cavalry that spilt right down the ridge’s centre. The enemy cavalry had been sent to threaten the right flank of Beresford’s assault, but an even larger cavalry force of British and German horsemen rode to block them.

‘Skirmishers forward!’ An aide cantered down the first line.

‘I think we’ll put our light chaps on the flank,’ Nairn said. ‘Will you see to it, Sharpe?’

‘Can I stay with them, sir?’

Nairn hesitated, then nodded. ‘But let me know if anything threatens.’ He held out his hand. ‘Remember you’re dining with me tonight, so take care. I don’t want to write a sad letter to Jane.’

‘You take care as well, sir.’

Sharpe collected the brigade’s three Light Companies and sent them running to the right flank where they would join Frederickson’s Riflemen. As the attack advanced those skirmishers would scatter to fight their lonely battles with the French light troops. Sharpe, a skirmisher by nature, wanted to fight with them and, as ever, he wanted to fight on foot. He summoned a headquarters’ clerk and gave the man Sycorax’s reins. ‘Keep her out of trouble.’

‘Yes, sir.’

A drummer made a flurry of sound as Taplow uncased his battalion’s colours. Sharpe, walking past the colour party, took his shako off in salute to the two heavy flags of fringed silks. A French roundshot, fired blind and at extreme range from one of the ridge’s centre batteries, smacked into the wet ground and, instead of bouncing, drove a slurry-filled furrow across Sharpe’s front. He wiped the mud from his face and unslung his rifle.

The rifle was another of Sharpe’s eccentricities. Officers might be expected to carry a pistol into battle, but not a longarm, yet Sharpe insisted on keeping the ranker’s weapon. He loaded it as he walked, tested the flint’s seating in its leather-lined doghead, then slung it back on his shoulder.

‘A nice day for a battle.’ Frederickson greeted Sharpe cheerfully.

‘You think Easter is an appropriate day?’

‘It has an implicit promise that we’ll rise from the grave. Not that I have any intention of testing the promise.’ Frederickson turned his one eye to the skyline. ‘If you were Marshal Soult, what would you have waiting up there?’

‘Every damned field gun in my army.’ The knot was tying itself in Sharpe’s belly as he imagined the efficient French twelve-pounders lined wheel to wheel.

‘Let us hope he doesn’t have sufficient guns.’ Frederickson did not sound hopeful. He, like Sharpe, could imagine the horse-teams dragging the field guns from where the Spanish had been repulsed to where they could decimate this new attack.

Trumpet calls sounded far to Sharpe’s left, were repeated ever closer, and the first line of Beresford’s attack started forward. The second line was held for a moment before it too was ordered into motion. Almost at once the careful alignments of the thin lines wavered because of the ground’s unevenness. Sergeants began bellowing orders for the men to watch their dressing. The officers’ horses, as if sensing what waited for them, became skittish.

‘Are you here to take command?’ Frederickson asked Sharpe as the skirmishers started forward.

‘Are you the senior Captain?’

Frederickson cast a dour look at the Captains of the three redcoat Light Companies. ‘By a very long way.’

The sour tone told Sharpe that Frederickson was resenting the lack of promotion. Rank was clearly more important to a man who planned to stay in the army, and Frederickson well knew how slow promotion could be in peacetime when there were no cannons and muskets to create convenient vacancies. And Frederickson, more than any man Sharpe knew, deserved promotion. Sharpe made a mental note to ask Nairn if he could help, then smiled. ‘I won’t interfere with you, William. I’ll just watch, so fight your own battle.’

‘The last one,’ Frederickson said almost in wonder. ‘I suppose that’s what it will be. Our last battle. Let us make it a good one, sir. Let’s send some souls to hell.’

‘Amen.’

The three advancing lines seemed very fragile as they climbed upwards. The sweep of the lines was interrupted by the battalions’ colours; splashes of bright cloth guarded by the long, shining-bladed halberds. Following the three lines were the battalion bands, all playing different tunes so that the belly-jarring thump of their big drums clashed. The music was jaunty, rhythmic and simple; the music for death.

Frederickson’s Riflemen were mingled with the redcoats of the other three Light companies. Those redcoats carried the quick-firing but short-ranged muskets, while the Greenjackets had the more accurate, longer-ranged rifle that was slow to reload. The mixture of weapons could be lethal; the rifles killed with precision and were protected by the muskets. The men were scattered now, making a screen to repel the attack of any French skirmishers.

Yet so far no enemy had threatened the cumbersome advance. Even the ridge’s centre batteries had ceased their speculative firing. Sharpe could see nothing but the empty skyline and a wisp of high cloud. The thin turf on the slope was dryer than the bottom-ground. A hare raced across the advance’s front, then slewed and scampered downhill. A hawk hovered for a few seconds above Taplow’s colours, then slid disdainfully westwards. From beyond the crest came the sound of a French band playing a quick march; the only evidence that a real enemy waited for Beresford’s thin lines.

The slope steepened and Sharpe’s breath shortened. The enemy’s invisibility seemed ominous. Marshal Soult had been given three hours to observe the preparations for this attack; three hours in which he could prepare a devil’s reception for the three lines that struggled up the ridge. Somewhere ahead of the attack, beyond the empty skyline, the enemy waited with charged barrels and drawn blades. The old game was about to be played once more; the Goddamns against the Crapauds. The game of Crecy and Agincourt, Ramillies and Blenheim. The air was very clear; so clear that when Sharpe turned he could see a woman driving two cows to pasture a half mile beyond the western river. The sight of the woman made Sharpe think of Jane. He knew that he could have accompanied Jane home without any shame, and that even now he could be sitting in England, but instead he was on a French hillside and on the brink of battle’s horror.

He turned back to the east just in time to see a redcoat among Frederickson’s flank skirmishers bend double, clutch his belly, and start gasping for breath. At first Sharpe thought the man was winded, then he saw the puff of dirty white smoke higher on the slope. The redcoat toppled backwards, blood drenching his grey breeches. More French skirmishers fired from positions that had been concealed in a tumble of rocks. The enemy would soon be on the flank of the advance unless they were shifted.

‘We’re going to clear those scum out of there!’ Frederickson had seen the danger just as soon as Sharpe. He had a company of redcoats offer rapid fire to keep the enemy subdued while Sergeant Harper led a squad with fixed sword-bayonets in a flanking charge. The Frenchmen did not stay to contest the rocks, but retreated nimbly up towards the empty skyline. One of the retreating Frenchmen was hit in the back by a rifle bullet, and Marcos Hernandez, one of Frederickson’s Spanish Riflemen, grinned with pleasure at his own deadly marksmanship.

‘Cease fire!’ Frederickson called. ‘Well done, lads. Now don’t bunch up! You’re not in love with each other, so spread out!’ Sweet William had taken off his eye-patch and removed his false teeth so that he looked like some monstrous being from the grave. He seemed much happier now that the first shots had been fired. Hernandez reloaded, then scored a line on the butt of his rifle to mark another hated Frenchman killed.

The surviving French skirmishers ran over the skyline from where, though the source of the noise stayed hidden, came the sudden sound of massed French drums. The instruments rattled the sky. Sharpe had first heard that malicious sound when he was sixteen and he had heard it on unnumbered battlefields since. He knew what it portended. He was listening to the pas de charge, the heartbeat of an Empire and the sound that drove French infantry to the attack.

‘D’you see guns, Sergeant?’ Frederickson shouted to Harper who was some yards further up the slope.

‘Not a one, sir!’

Then the skyline, as though sown by dragon’s teeth, sprouted men.

‘Christ in his Scottish heaven.’ Major-General Nairn, surrounded by his junior aides, sounded disgusted with the enemy. ‘You’d have thought the woollen-headed bastards would have learned by now.’ He sheathed his sword and glowered dour disapproval at the two enemy columns.

‘Learned, sir?’ the young aide, whose first battle this was, asked nervously.

‘You are about to see the God-damned Frogs damned even further.’ Nairn took a watch from his fob pocket and snapped open the lid. ‘Good God! If they’re going to offer battle, then they might as well do it properly!’

The aide did not understand, but every veteran in the British attack knew what was about to happen and felt relieved because of it. They had climbed in fear of waiting artillery that would have gouged bloody ruin in the three attacking lines. Even more they had feared the conjunction of artillery and cavalry, for the cavalry would have forced the attacking infantry into protective squares that would have made choice targets for the French gunners. Instead they were faced with the oldest French tactic; a counter-attack by columns of massed infantry.

Two such columns were advancing over the skyline. The two columns were immense formations of crammed soldiers, rank after rank of infantrymen assembled into human battering rams that were aimed at the seemingly fragile British lines. These were the same columns that the Emperor Napoleon had led across a continent to smash his enemies’ armies into broken and panicked mobs, but no such column had ever broken an army led by Wellington.

‘Halt!’ All along the British and Portuguese lines the order was shouted. Sergeants dressed the battalions while the skirmishers readied themselves to beat off the French light troops who, advancing in front of the columns, were supposed to unsettle the British line with random musketry.

The French light troops offered no threat to Beresford; instead it was the momentum of the two great columns that was supposed to drive his men into chaos. Yet, like Wellington, Beresford had faced too many columns to be worried now. His first line would deal with their threat, while his second and third lines would merely be spectators. That first line stood to attention, muskets grounded, and gazed up the long sloping sward over which the two giant formations marched. The French columns looked irresistible, their weight alone seeming sufficient to drive them through the thin skeins of waiting men. Above the Frenchmen’s heads waved their flags and eagles. In the centre of the formations the drummer boys kept up the pas de charge, pausing only to let the marching men shout ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ between each flurry of drumbeats. The veterans among the waiting British and Portuguese battalions, who had seen it all before, seemed unmoved.

The skirmishers fell slowly back before the weight of enemy light troops, but they had done their job which was to keep the French skirmish fire off the waiting line. French officers, swords drawn, marched confidently ahead of the columns. Major-General Nairn gazed at the closest column through a telescope, then slammed the tubes shut. ‘Not many moustaches there!’ The old moustached veterans, the backbone of France, were in their graves, and Nairn had seen how young these counter-attacking Frenchmen were. Perhaps that was why Soult had launched them in column, for raw green troops took courage from the sheer closeness of their comrades in the tightly packed mass of men. It was a formation suited to a conscripted, citizen army, but those citizen conscripts were now closing on the professional killers of Britain and Portugal.

When the columns were eighty paces from Beresford’s forward line, the British and Portuguese officers stirred themselves to give a single laconic order. ‘Present!’

Four thousand heavy muskets came up in a single rippling movement. The leading ranks of the two French columns, seeing their death, checked their pace, but the weight of men behind forced them onwards.

‘Hold your fire!’ Sergeants warned redcoats who dragged back the cocks of their weapons. The French, made nervous by the silent threat, opened fire as they marched. Only the men in the first two ranks could actually fire, the rest were there merely to add weight. Here and there along the red-coated line a man might fall, but the French aim was spoiled by the need to fire while marching.

‘Close up!’ A British Sergeant dragged a dead man back from the line.

‘Hold your fire!’ An officer, slim sword drawn, watched the blue-coated French column come closer. Four thousand muskets were aimed at the heads of the two columns.

A rattle of drums, a pause, ‘Vive l’Empereur!’

One heartbeat. The British muskets were steady, the officers’ swords raised, while the men in either army were close enough now to see the expressions on the others’ faces.

‘Fire!’

Like a great cough, or like a gigantic throttling explosion, four thousand muskets flamed smoke and lead, and four thousand brass-bound butts mule-kicked back into men’s shoulders. The smoke spewed to hide the French.

‘Reload!’

Sharpe, still off to the right flank, saw the nearer enemy column quiver as the heavy bullets struck home. Blue coats were speckled by blood. The whole front rank crumpled and fell, and most of the second rank too. Only one officer was left standing, and he was wounded. The succeeding French ranks were baulked by the barrier of their own dead and wounded, but then the sheer mass of the deep column forced the new front rank to clamber over the bodies and continue the advance. ‘Vive l’Empereur!’

‘Fire!’

Now it was the deadly platoon fire that rippled out of the British and Portuguese lines. Hours of training had made these men into clockwork killers. Each platoon of a battalion fired a couple of seconds after the platoon on its left, and so the bullets seemed never-ending as they flicked through the screen of smoke to strike at the French. The fire flayed at the enemy, flensing men off the front and flanks of the column, so that it seemed as if the enemy marched into an invisible mincing machine. The French survivors, inexorably forced to the front ranks, tried to struggle into the storm of musketry, but no man could live against that fire. In the past, in the glorious days when the Emperor’s name struck fear into Europe, the columns had won by overaweing their enemies, but Wellington’s men had long mastered the grim art of bloodying French glory. They did it with musket-fire, the fastest musket-fire in the world. They blackened their faces with the explosions of the priming in their weapons’ pans, they bruised their shoulders with the slamming kicks, and they broke the enemy. Cartridge after cartridge was bitten open, loaded and fired, while in front of the British line the musket wadding burned pale in the scorched grass.

The columns could not move. A few brave men tried to advance, but the bullets cut them down. The survivors edged back and the drumroll faltered.

‘Cease fire!’ a British voice called. ‘Fix bayonets!’

Four thousand men drew their seventeen-inch blades and slotted them on to hot muzzles.

‘Present!’ The voices of the officers and sergeants were calm. Most of these men were veterans and they took pride in sounding unmoved by the carnage of battle. ‘Battalions will advance! Forward!’

All along the front line the battalions marched stolidly into their own fog of smoke. They had fired blind through the choking screen, but a column could hardly be missed even by men obscured by smoke. Now, at last, they broke through the smoke to see what carnage their disciplined fire had done.

Officers’ swords swept downwards. ‘Charge!’

Now, and only now, did the British and Portuguese soldiers cheer. Till this moment they had kept silent, but now, with blackened faces and bayonets levelled, they cheered and broke into a quick march.

The French broke. They ran. They left two blood-soaked heaps of dead, dying and wounded men behind and raced back towards safety. A drummer boy wept because a bullet was in his guts. He would die before noon, and his drum would be chopped up for firewood.

‘Halt!’ The British did not press their charge home. There was no need, for the columns had fled in panic.

‘Dress ranks! Unfix bayonets! Skirmishers forward! Reload!’

Major-General Nairn looked down at his watch and noted that it had taken precisely three minutes and twenty seconds to break the French attack. In the past, he reflected, when more moustaches had filled the enemy ranks, it would have taken about six minutes longer. He put the watch away. ‘Advance the brigade.’

‘Battalion will advance!’

‘Silence in the ranks!’

‘Forward!’

The seemingly tenuous lines started forward again. In two gory places the men stepped clumsily over the piles of enemy dead. The men, long practised in the art, dragged their enemies’ bodies with them for a few paces; giving themselves just enough time to loot the pockets and pouches of the dead or wounded. They took food, coins, talismans and drink. One redcoat kicked the wounded drummer boy’s instrument downhill. The drum’s snares twanged as it bounced and rolled down the long hill.

‘Looks like it’s going to be an easy Easter!’ Frederickson said happily.

But then the skyline was reached, and the plateau of the ridge’s summit was revealed, and nothing looked easy any more.