The French made no resistance to the west of Talavera or in the town itself. The armies marched through or past the town and on a mile until they stopped at dusk on the banks of a small river that flowed into the Tagus. The Battalion marched to the north of the town, and Sharpe wondered how Josefina would find a room there. Hogan had promised to look after her, and Sharpe stared at the crowds pressing into the narrow streets as though he might catch a glimpse of her. The men grumbled. They were tired and hungry and they resented being denied the pleasures of the town. They could see officers on horse-back riding towards the old walls, their wives and children walked there, but the troops went on to the Alberche and camped in the cork groves that sloped down to the shallow river. Tomorrow they must fight. If they survived tomorrow then would come the time to buy drink in Talavera, but first they must cross the River Alberche and defeat the army of Marshal Victor. Fires were lit throughout the trees, the Battalions swiftly settling in for the night, glancing apprehensively at the far river-bank where hundreds of smoke plumes mingled and shivered over the French camp. The armies had finally been brought together, British, Spanish and French, and tomorrow they must fight, and Sharpe’s company squatted by their fires and wondered about the men just across the river who sat by similar fires and made the same jokes in a different language.
Sharpe and Harper strolled to the river’s edge where the Battalion’s leading picquets were settling for a night’s guard duty. Two men of the Light Company, dressed in greatcoats, nodded at Sharpe and jerked their thumbs across the river. A French picquet stood watching them, three men smoking pipes, while another Frenchman filled his canteen at the water’s edge. The man looked up, saw the Riflemen, and raised a hand. He shouted something but they did not understand him. Sharpe shivered slightly. The sun had lost its heat, was reddening in the west, and the chill of the night was already making itself felt. He waved back at the Frenchman and turned back towards the cork grove.
Now was the time for the rituals before battle. Sharpe walked through the trees and chatted with men who prepared themselves with the obsessions for detail that all men thought might protect them in the chaos of the fight. The Riflemen had stripped their locks, pinned the massive rifle main springs with nails, and brushed every scrap of dirt from the machinery. Men put new flints in their muskets or rifles, unscrewed them and put them in again, looking for the perfect fit that would never come loose, turn sideways, or shatter in the pan. Pots of boiling water were carried carefully from the fires and poured into the barrels of the guns to flush out every last powder deposit, because tomorrow a man’s life might depend on how fast he could reload his musket. Joining the noise of the insects were the sounds of hundreds of stones rubbing endlessly on bayonets, the countrymen sharpening the blades as they used to sharpen reaping hooks or wide-bladed scythes. Men repaired uniforms, sewed on buttons, made new laces, as though to be comfortable was to be safer. Sharpe had been through the ritual a hundred times; he would go through it again tonight the way that a knight in times far past must have strapped every piece of armour, tightened each piece, delayed the next until the first was secure. Some Riflemen emptied all the fine powder from their horns and spread the black grains on clean white cloth to ensure there were no damp lumps that could clog the measuring spout in battle. There were the same jokes: ‘Don’t wear your hat tomorrow, Sarge, the French might see your face and die laughing.’ That one always worked as long as the Sergeant did not see which man had shouted from the shadows; other men were asked to go and sleep with the French so their snoring would keep the enemy awake; the stale jokes were as much a part of the battle as the bullets which would begin to fly at first light.
Sharpe walked past the fires, swapping jokes, accepting tots of hoarded spirits, feeling the edges of bayonets, telling the men that the next day would not be bad. Nor should it be. The combined British and Spanish far outnumbered the French; the allies had the initiative, the battle should be short, swift, and victory almost a certainty. He listened to men boasting of the deeds they would perform next day and knew that the words covered their fear; it was right that they should. Other men, more quietly, asked him what it would be like. He smiled and told them they would see in the morning, but it would not be as bad as they feared, and shrugged away his knowledge of the chaos they would all have to surmount when the attacking infantry walked into the storm of canister and musket shot. He left the fires behind, skirted the bigger blaze where the officers’ servants prepared the thin stew of salt beef that was the last of the hoarded supplies, and out of the trees altogether. In the last light of dusk he could see a farmhouse five hundred yards away where earlier he had seen the sixteenth Light Dragoons go with their horses. He crossed the fields and went into the yard. A line of troopers in blue and scarlet uniforms waited by the armourer. Sharpe waited for them to finish and then unsheathed the huge sword and carried it to the wheel. This was part of his ritual, to have the sword sharpened by a cavalry armourer because they made a finer edge, and the armourer looked at his Rifleman’s uniform and grinned. He was an old soldier, too old to ride into battle, but he had seen it all, done it all himself. He took the blade from Sharpe, tested it with a broad thumb, and then pressed it onto the pedalled stone. The sparks flowed off the wheel, the blade sang; the man swept it lovingly up and down the edge and then sharpened the top six inches of the back blade. He wiped the sword with an oily piece of leather.
‘Get yourself a German one, Captain.’ It was an old argument, whether the Kligenthal blades were better than the British. Sharpe shook his head. ‘I’ve eaten German swords with this one.’
The armourer cackled a toothless laugh and peered down the edge. ‘There you are, Captain. Take care of it.’
Sharpe put some coins on the wheel frame and held the sword up to the last light of the western sky. There was a new sheen on the edge, he felt it with his thumb and smiled at the armourer. ‘You’ll never get a Kligenthal as sharp as that.’
The armourer said nothing but from behind him he took out a sabre and handed it to Sharpe. Sharpe sheathed his sword and took the curved blade. It felt as if it had been made for him; its balance was a miracle, as if the steel were not there even though it flashed in the red light. He touched the blade. It would have sliced through silk as cleanly as it must cut through the breastplate of the French cavalry. ‘German?’ Sharpe asked.
‘Yes, Captain. Belongs to our Colonel.’ The armourer took the blade back. ‘And I haven’t begun to sharpen it yet!’
Sharpe laughed. The sabre must have cost two hundred guineas. One day, he promised himself, one day he would own such a sword, not taken from the dead, but a sword that was inscribed with his name, forged to his height, balanced for his grip. He went back to the trees and in the sky over the river he could see the glow of the enemy fires where twenty-two thousand Frenchmen were sharpening their own blades and wondering about the morning. Not many would sleep. Most would doze through the night, their wakefulness laced with apprehension, searching the eastern sky for a dawn that might be the last one they would ever see. Sharpe lay awake for part of the night and rehearsed the next day in his head. The plan was simple enough. The Alberche ran in a curve to join the River Tagus, and the French were on the inside of the bend. In the morning the Spanish trumpets would sound, their thirty guns be unleashed, and the infantry would splash across the shallow river to attack the outnumbered French. And as the French retreated, as assuredly they must, so Wellesley would throw the British onto their flank. And Marshal Victor would be destroyed, his army broken between the hammer of the Spanish and the anvil of the British, and as the blue infantry withdrew the cavalry would come through the water and turn retreat into carnage. And once that was done, all perhaps before the citizens of Talavera went to their Sunday morning mass, there would only be King Joseph Bonaparte’s twenty thousand men between the allies and Madrid. It was all so simple. Sharpe slept in his greatcoat, curled by the embers of a fire, a gilded eagle threading his sleep.
&nb
sp; There were no bugles to wake them in the morning, nothing that might alert the French to the dawn attack instead of the more civilised hour of mid-morning, when most men could be expected to fight. Sergeants and corporals shook the men awake; soldiers cursed the dew and the cold air that rasped in their throats. Every man glanced towards the river, but the far bank was shrouded in mist and darkness; there was nothing to be seen, no sound to be heard. They had been forbidden to relight the fires in case the sudden lights should warn the French, but somehow they managed to heat water and threw in the loose tea-leaves, and Sharpe gratefully accepted a tin mug of the scalding liquid from his Sergeant. Harper was kicking dirt onto the fire; the men had risked a small blaze rather than go without tea, and he looked up at Sharpe and grinned. ‘Permission to go to church, sir?’
Sharpe grinned back. It was Sunday. He tried to work out the date. They had left Plasencia on the seventeenth and that had been a Monday, and he counted the days forward on his fingers. Sunday 23 July, 1809. There was still no light in the eastern sky, the stars shone brightly, the dawn still two hours away. Behind them, on a track that ran between the cork grove and the fields, there was a rumbling and clanking and cursing as a battery of artillery unlimbered. Sharpe turned, the tea cradled in his hands, and watched the dim shapes as the horses were led away and the field guns pointed across the river. They would herald the attack, hurling their round shot at the French lines, tearing holes in the French Battalions as Sharpe led his skirmishers into the river. It was cold, too cold to feel any excitement; that would come later. Now were the hours to feel apprehensive, to tighten belts and buckles, to feel hungry. Sharpe shivered slightly in his greatcoat, nodded his thanks to Harper, and made his way down the grove between the lines of his men who stamped their feet and swung their arms and resurrected the more successful jokes of the previous evening. Somehow they were not as funny in the small hours before dawn.
He left the trees and walked onto the patch of grass that lay beside the river. His boots swished through the dew and warned the sentries of his coming. He was challenged, gave the password, and greeted as he jumped down onto the shingle at the water’s edge.
‘Anything happening?’
‘No, sir.’
The water slid blackly beneath the tendrils of mist. There was an occasional slap and swirl from the river as a fish twisted and disturbed the surface. Sharpe peered over his cupped hands and blew on his fingers; there was the faintest dot of red light on the far bank that suddenly glowed brighter. The French sentry was smoking a cigar or a pipe. Sharpe looked to his left. The eastern sky at last had a suspicion of colour, a flat silver grey that silhouetted the hills, the first sign of dawn. He clapped one of the sentries on the shoulder. ‘Not long now.’
He climbed the brief bank between the shingle and the grass and walked back to the trees. From the French lines he could hear a dog barking, the whinny of a horse, and then the sound of bugles. They would start lighting their fires, start cooking a breakfast, and hopefully they would be still eating it when the Spanish bayonets came at them from the west. He suddenly felt a longing for devilled kidneys and coffee, for any food other than the thin stew and the Tommies and the old ship’s biscuits that the Battalion had lived on for a week. He remembered the garlic sausage they had collected from the enemy dead at Rolica and hoped he would find some that morning on the bodies of the men who were grumbling round their fires just across the river.
Back in the grove he took off his greatcoat, rolled it tight, and strapped it to his pack. He shivered. He took the rag off the lock of his rifle that had protected it from the dew and tested the tension of the spring with his thumb. He slung it on his shoulder, slapped his sword, and started moving the Light Company down to the treeline. The skirmishers would go first, the thin line of Riflemen and redcoats wading the Alberche to drive off the sentries and lock up the French Voltigeurs so that they could not blunt the attack of the massed British Battalions which would follow on to the French flank. He made the men lie down a few feet inside the grove where they merged into the shadows of the trees, while behind he could see the other nine companies of the Battalion forming up for the assault that could not be far away.
Dawn crept over the mountains, flooding the valley with a silver-grey light, shrinking the pools of shadow and revealing the shapes of trees and bushes on the far bank. It would still be a few moments, Sharpe decided, before the Spanish would break the silence and start the attack. He walked along the treeline, nodded to the Captain of the Light Company of the 29th who was on his right flank, made the polite small talk, wishing each other luck, and then strolled back to stand beside Harper. They did not speak but Sharpe knew the big Irishman was thinking of the promise Lennox had extracted from them by the bridge. But for Sharpe the Eagle had more urgency. If he could not pluck it from its perch today there might not be another chance for months and that meant no chance at all. In a few weeks, unless he could blunt Simmerson’s letter, he might be on a ship for the West Indies and the inevitable fever that made the posting a virtual death warrant. He thought of Josefina, asleep in the town, her black hair spread on a pillow, and wondered why suddenly his life had been enmeshed in a series of problems that one month ago he had not even suspected existed.
Muskets banged erratically in the distance. The men cocked their ears, murmured to each other, listened to the sporadic firing that rattled up and down the French lines. Lieutenant Knowles came up to Sharpe and raised his eyebrows in a question. Sharpe shook his head. ‘They’re clearing their muskets, that’s all.’ The French sentries had been changed and the men going off duty were getting rid of their charges that might have become damp in the night air. Musket fire would not herald the attack. Sharpe was waiting for the red flashes that would illumine the western sky like summer lightning and show that the Spanish artillery was opening the battle. It could not be far off.
There were shouts from the river. Again the men pricked their ears, strained forward, but again it was a false alarm. A group of the enemy appeared, chasing and shouting at each other in horseplay, carrying buckets to the water’s edge. One of them held up his bucket and shouted something to the British bank; his companions all laughed, but Sharpe had no idea what the joke was.
‘Watering horses?’ Knowles asked.
‘No.’ Sharpe stifled a yawn. ‘Artillery buckets. There must be guns to our front.’ That was bad news. A dozen men were carrying buckets in which the sponges that damped out the sparks in discharged guns were dipped. The water in the pails would be black as ink after a few shots, and if the guns were directly ahead Sharpe knew that the South Essex might be marching into a storm of canister fragments. He felt tired, achingly tired; he wanted to begin the fight, he wanted the Eagle out of his dreams.
Simmerson and Forrest appeared, both on foot, and stared at the artillerymen filling their buckets. Sharpe said good morning and Simmerson, his antagonism blunted by nervousness, nodded back. ‘Those musket shots?’
‘Just clearing their charges, sir. Nothing else.’
Simmerson grunted. He was doing his best to be civil, as if he realised at this moment that he needed Sharpe’s skill on his side. He pulled out a vast watch, opened the lid, and shook his head. ‘Spanish are late.’
The light began to lose its greyness. There was a sparkle on the far bank, and behind them Sharpe could see the smoke of the hundreds of French cooking fires. ‘Permission to relieve the picquets, sir?’
‘Yes, Sharpe, yes.’ Simmerson was making a huge effort to sound normal, and Sharpe wondered if suddenly the Colonel was regretting the letter he had written. Sometimes the imminence of battle made seemingly intractable quarrels seem like things of no importance. Simmerson looked as if he would say more, but instead he shook his head again and led Forrest further down the line.
The sentries were changed, the minutes passed, the sun climbed over the mist, and the last vestiges of night disappeared like fading cannon smoke in the western sky. Damn the Spanish, thought Sharpe, a
s he listened to the bugles calling the French Regiments to parade. A group of horsemen appeared on the far bank and inspected the British side through telescopes. There would be no surprise now. The French officers would be able to see the batteries of guns, the saddled cavalry horses, the rows of infantry lined in the trees. All surprise had gone, vanished with the shadows and the cold, for the first time the French would know how many men opposed them, where the attack was planned, and how they should meet it.
The sound of church bells came from the town and Sharpe wondered what Josefina was doing: had the bells wakened her? He imagined her body stretching between warm sheets, a body that would not be his till after battle. The sound of the bells reminded him of England and he thought of all the village churches that would be filling with people. Would they be thinking of their army in Spain? He doubted it. The British were not fond of their army. They celebrated its victories, of course, but there had been no such celebrations for a long time. The navy was fêted, Nelson’s captains had been household names, but Trafalgar was a memory and Nelson was in his tomb, and the British went their way oblivious of the war. The morning became warm, the men somnolent; they leaned against the cork trees and slept with their muskets propped on their knees. From somewhere in the French camp was the harsh sound of a muleteer’s bell reminding Sharpe of normality.
‘Sir!’ A Sergeant was calling him from one of the companies higher in the grove. ‘Company officers, sir. To the Colonel!’
Sharpe waved his reply, picked up the rifle, left Knowles in charge and walked up the grove. He was late. The Captains stood in a bunch listening to a Lieutenant from Hill’s staff. Sharpe caught snatches of his words.