Yet they were the best infantry in the world. They had not always been and, without the right leaders, would not be so again. Harper instinctively knew that this army that faced Badajoz was a superb instrument, better than anything the great Napoleon could muster, and Harper knew why. Because there were just enough officers like Sharpe who trusted the failures. It started at the top, of course, with Wellington himself, and went right through the ranks to the junior officers and Sergeants, and the trick of it was very simple. Take a man who has failed at everything, give him a final chance, show him trust, lead him to one success, and there is a sudden confidence that will lead to the next success. Soon they will believe they are unbeatable, and become unbeatable, but the trick was still to have officers like Sharpe who kept on offering trust. Of course the Light Company missed him! He had expected great things of them and trusted them to win. Perhaps the new man would one day learn the trick, but until he did, if ever, the men would miss Sharpe. Hell, thought Harper, they even like him. And the fool did not realize it. Harper shook his head to himself and offered the bottle to Sharpe. ‘Here’s to Ireland, sir, and death to Hakeswill.’
‘I’ll drink to that. How is the bastard?’
‘I’ll kill him one day. ‘
Sharpe gave a humorless laugh. ‘You won’t. I will.’
‘How the hell is he still alive?’
Sharpe shrugged. ‘He says he can’t be killed. ‘ It was cold on the hill and Sharpe hunched his shoulders beneath the greatcoat. ‘And he never turns his back. Watch yours.’
I’m growing eyes in my bum with that bastard around.’
‘What does Captain Rymer think of him?’
Harper paused, took the bottle from Sharpe, drank, and passed it back. ‘God knows. I think he’s scared of him, but so are most.’ He shrugged. ‘The Captain’s not a bad fellow, but he’s not exactly confident.’ The Sergeant was feeling awkward. He did not like to sound critical of one officer in front of another. ‘He’s young.’
‘None of us are old. How’s that new Ensign?”
‘Matthews? He’s fine, sir. Sticks to Lieutenant Price like a kid brother.’
‘And Mr. Price?’
Harper laughed. ‘He keeps us cheerful, sir. Drunk as a cross-eyed stoat, but he’ll survive.’
It began raining, small, spitting drops that stung their faces. Behind them, on the Seville road, the bugles called the battalions to the evening lines. Sharpe turned up his collar. ‘We’d better be getting back.’ He stared at the small, blue-uniformed figures on the city parapets, three-quarters of a mile away. ‘Those sods will be warm tonight.’ He suddenly thought of Teresa and Antonia inside the walls and looked at the big, square, battlemented Cathedral tower. It was odd to think they were so close to her. The rain became heavier and he turned away, back towards the sprawling, makeshift British camp.
‘Sir?’
‘Yes?’
The Sergeant seemed embarrassed. ‘Major Hogan stopped by the other day.’
‘So?’
‘He was telling us about Miss Teresa, sir.’
Sharpe frowned. ‘What about her?’
‘Only, sir, that she’d asked you to look out for her. In the city. In case the lads go a bit wild.’
‘So?’
‘Well, the men are keen to help, so they are.’
‘You mean they don’t think I can manage?’
Harper was tempted to tell Sharpe not to be so foolish, but decided it might be one step too many over the subtle boundaries of rank and friendship. He sighed. ‘No, sir. Just that they’re keen to help. They’re fond of her, sir, so they are.’ And of you, he might have added.
Sharpe shook his head ungratefully. Teresa and Antonia were his problem, not the Company’s, and he did not want a horde of grinning men to witness his emotion at first seeing his child. ‘Tell them no.’
Harper shrugged. ‘They may try and help anyway.’
‘They’ll have a problem finding her in the city.’
The Sergeant grinned. ‘It won’t be difficult. We’ll be trying the house with two orange trees, just behind the Cathedral.’
‘Go to hell, Sergeant.’
‘Follow you anywhere, sir.’
A few hours later the army seemed in hell, or a watery version of hell. The skies opened. Thunder cracked like the rumbling of field guns over wooden boards in the storm clouds. Lightning slashed, piercing and blue, to an earth soaked by great, slanting volleys of rain. Human noise was drowned by the seething water, a constant, crashing downpour in a darkness splintered by jagged, thundering light. Eighteen hundred men were on the hilltop, digging the first parallel; a trench six hundred yards long that would protect the besiegers and from which they would excavate the first gun batteries. The workers were soaked to the skin, shivering, made weary by the sheer weight of water, and sometimes peering through the deluge at the dark citadel starkly revealed in the lightning strikes.
The wind billowed the rain in huge, scything loops; suspended it, and then smashed it down even harder. It plucked greatcoats into fantastic, bat like shapes and drove the water in unstoppable rivulets that filled up the trench, seeped over the men’s boots, and sank their spirits down into the cold, sodden earth that yielded each spadeful with such reluctance.
All night they dug, and all night it rained, and in the cold morning it still rained and the French gunners came out of their warm shelters to see the scar of fresh earth curving over the shallow hill. The gunners opened fire, smashing solid shot across the wide ditch, over the glacis, over the floodwaters, and into the wet earth of the trench parapet. The work stopped. The first parallel was too shallow to give shelter and all day the rain weakened the trench and the guns hammered it. The excavation filled with sopping mud that would all have to be scooped out in the night.
They dug all night. It still rained, a rain like the rain before Noah’s flood. Uniforms doubled their weight with water, boots were sucked off in the glutinous slime, and shoulders were chafed raw and bleeding with the effort of sinking the trench. On this night the French gunners kept up a harassing and sporadic fire that turned some parts of the mud scarlet until the unending rain diluted the blood, but slowly, infinitely slowly, the spades hacked deeper and the parapet went higher.
The creeping dawn showed a trench deep enough to be worked by daylight. The exhausted battalions filed back through the zigzag trench that led to safety at the rear of the hill, and new battalions took their place. The South Essex, their packs and weapons discarded, went down the crooked way to the mud, the gunfire, and the spades.
Sharpe was left behind. Two dozen men were with him, the baggage guard, and they made crude shelters out of the piled packs and crouched, muskets between their knees, and stared at a wet, grey, dripping landscape. Sharpe could hear the French guns, muffled by rain and distance, and he hated the thought of not seeing what he could hear. He left an old Sergeant in charge of the guard and walked the trench to the hillside.
Badajoz was a dark rock in a sea of water and mud. The walls were fringed with cannon smoke that was lanced through by the leaping flames of each shot. The French gunners were concentrating their fire to Sharpe’s left where the first two British batteries were being dug. A whole battalion was working on the gun-pits. The round shot smacked into the parapets, destroyed the earth-filled wicker gabions, and sometimes smashed a bloody path through the men. The French even tried their howitzers whose short, squat barrels spat shells high into the air, so that the tiny smoke trail of the burning fuse disappeared into the low clouds before dropping on to the wet hillside. Most of the shells simply fell and lay silent, their fuses extinguished by mud or rain, but a few exploded in black smoke and jagged iron fragments. They did no damage; the range was too great, and after a time the French stopped the shell-fire and saved the howitzers for the digging of the second parallel, lower down the hill and much closer to the walls.
Sharpe walked along the hilltop and searched for the South Essex. He found them at the northern
end of the parallel where the hill had dropped away to the soaking plain beside the grey, swollen river. Any batteries dug here would be firing up at the castle that seemed vast and inviolable on its rock hill. Sharpe could see, as well, the San Roque Fort, the small fortress that Hogan had mentioned, which defended the dam across the Rivillas stream. If the British could blow up the dam, the lake would drain north into the river and the approach to the breach would be far easier. But to blow up the dam would be difficult. It looked to be no more than fifty yards from the city wall and built just beneath the San Pedro, the single bastion on the eastern side.
A figure jumped out of the trench in front of Sharpe. It was Sergeant Hakeswill. He stalked along the trench edge and cursed down at the men. ‘Dig, you bastards! You syphilitic pigs! Dig!’ He whirled round after a few paces to see if anyone was reacting to him and saw Sharpe. He snapped into a salute, his face twitching crazily. ‘Sir! Lieutenant, sir! Come to help, sir?’ He cackled, and turned back to the Light Company. ‘Get on with it, you pregnant sows! Dig!’ He was leaning over the trench, screaming at them, spittle flailing from his mouth.
It was an irresistible moment. Sharpe knew he should not do it, knew that it was inconsistent with the so-called dignity of an officer, but Hakeswill was bending by the trench, screaming obscenities, and Sharpe was close behind. The second that the temptation came, Sharpe acted, and pushed the Sergeant. Hakeswill’s arms beat at the air, he twisted, bellowed, and collapsed into the sopping mud at the bottom of the trench. The Light Company cheered. The Sergeant turned a furious face at Sharpe as he scrambled to his feet.
Sharpe held up a hand. ‘My apologies, Sergeant. I slipped. “ He knew it had been a childish thing to do, and unwise, but it was a small gesture that told the men he was still on their side. He walked on, leaving Hakeswill twitching, and saw Captain Rymer climbing from the trench to meet him.
If Rymer had seen the incident he said nothing, instead he nodded civilly. ‘Nasty day.’
Sharpe felt his usual paralysis in the face of small talk. He gestured at the men in the trench. ‘Digging keeps you warm. ‘ He suddenly realized that it sounded as if he were telling Rymer to pick up a spade and he scrabbled in his head for a sentence to correct the impression, ‘One of the advantages of being in the ranks, eh?’ He could hardly bring himself to call Rymer ‘sir’. Rymer did not seem to notice.
‘They hate digging.’
‘Wouldn’t you?’
Captain Rymer had never thought about it. Birth into the Rimes of Waltham Cross did not encourage a man to think about manual labor. He was a good-looking man, fair-haired, about twenty-five years old, and desperately nervous with Sharpe. The situation was not of Rymer’s making, not to his taste, and he was terrified of the time, that Colonel Windham had said was coming, when Sharpe would be returned to the Company as Lieutenant. The Colonel had told Rymer not to worry. ‘Won’t happen yet. Give you time to settle in, take charge. But you may want him in a fight, eh, Rymer?’ Rymer did not look forward to the event.
He looked up at the tall, scarred Rifleman, took a deep breath. ‘Sharpe?’
‘Sir?’ The word had to be said sooner or later, however much it hurt.
‘I wanted to say that... ‘ Whatever it was, would have to wait. A French round shot ploughed into the earth nearby, spumed up soaking mud, and then came a second and a third. Rymer’s mouth dropped open in astonishment, he froze, and Sharpe grabbed his elbow and pushed him towards the trench. He followed, jumping down the five feet and skidding on the trench floor.
The air was filled with the rumble of cannon balls, and the men stopped digging and looked at each other as if one of them might have the answer to this sudden cannonade. Sharpe looked over the parapet and saw the armed piquets running back for shelter. Every gun on Badajoz’s eastern wall, from the high castle, past the San Pedro, down to the Trinidad bastion at the south-east corner, seemed to be firing at the northern hundred yards of the parallel. Rymer stood beside him. ‘What’s happening?’ A piquet jumped over them, cursing the enemy. Sharpe looked at Rymer. ‘Do you have weapons?’ ‘No! Ordered to leave them behind. ‘ ‘There must be a company here. ‘
Rymer nodded, pointed to the right. ‘The Grenadier Company. They’re armed. Why?’
Sharpe pointed through the murk and the rain to the dark shadows at the foot of the fortress. Coming from the fort that guarded the Rivillas dam were lines of men, formed into marching blue ranks that melded into the shadows so they were difficult to see. Rymer shook his head. ‘What is it?’
‘The bloody French!’ They were coming in force, marching to attack and destroy the parallel, and suddenly they were visible because they drew their bayonets and the rows of steel glistened through the slanting rain.
The French gunners, fearful of hitting their own men, stopped firing. A bugle sounded and, on its note, the hundreds of steel bayonets dropped into the attack position and the French cheered and charged.
Chapter 12
It was unfortunate for Captain Rymer. He had been anticipating, with resolve and trepidation, the first time he would lead his own Company into action. He had not imagined it to be like this. Instead he had seen himself on a wide hillside, under a brilliant sky, with the standards snapping in the wind and himself, sabre drawn, taking a skirmish line against the very centre of the enemy’s battle. He sometimes considered a wound, nothing too ghastly, but enough to make him a hero back home and his imagination, leaping vast distances, saw him modestly telling the story to a group of admiring ladies, while other men, untested in battle, could only look on in jealousy.
Instead of which he was at the bottom of a muddy trench, soaked to the skin, in charge of men armed only with spades and facing one thousand fully-armed Frenchmen. Rymer froze. The Company looked to him and past him to Sharpe. The Rifleman hesitated for a second, saw Rymer’s indecision, and waved his arm. ‘Back!’
There was no point in trying to fight; not yet, not till the armed companies could come together and make a proper counter-attack. The working parties scrambled out of the trench, ran back over the wet grass, then turned to watch the enemy jump into the deserted workings. The French ignored them; they were interested in just two things. They wanted to capture and destroy as much of the parallel as they could and, more important, take back to the city every spade and pickaxe they could find. For each such mundane trophy, they had been promised a reward of one dollar.
Sharpe began walking to the top of the hill, parallel to the trench, keeping pace with the French who hurled spades and picks to their comrades beyond the parapet. In front of the enemy, like startled rabbits, other working parties leaped from the earth and scampered for safety. No one had been hurt in the attack. Sharpe doubted if any man had tried to fire a musket or lunge with a bayonet. It was almost farcical.
Above the enemy was chaos. The British, mostly unarmed, moved like a herd while the enemy, just yards away, systematically stripped the parallel. Some of the French tried to push the parapet down, but the earth was so sodden that it was impossible. The British, glad of a diversion from the unending digging, jeered at them. One or two Frenchmen leveled their muskets, but the British were fifty yards away, doubtful musket range, and the rain was still pouring down. The French were unwilling to unwrap their locks if there was not to be a real fight.
‘Bloody chaos, sir.’ Sergeant Harper had caught up with Sharpe, strode easily alongside with a spade gripped in his hand. He grinned cheerfully.
Sergeant Hakeswill, the front of his uniform still smeared with thick mud, ran past them. He gave them one malevolent glance and hurried on towards the rear of the hill. Sharpe wondered what the man was doing and then forgot about it as Captain Rymer caught him. ‘Shouldn’t we be doing something?’
Sharpe shrugged. ‘See if anyone’s missing?’ There was not much else to be done, not till the guard companies that had been ordered to carry weapons could organize an attack on the busy French.
An Engineer in blue coat and wearing an orna
te cocked hat ran towards the French. He was shouting at the working parties that were still scrambling for safety. ‘Keep your spades! Keep your spades!’ It had taken dozens of ox-carts to bring the precious tools from Lisbon and now they were beingcasually abandoned to the French. Sharpe recognized the blue-coated man as Colonel Fletcher, the Chief Engineer.
A few men turned back to pick up their discarded spades and the leading French troops tugged the rags off their muskets, aimed, and shot. It was a miracle that any fired, but three were dry enough, the smoke coughed and Colonel Fletcher fell backwards, hands clutching at his groin. There was a French cheer as the Colonel was carried away to safety.
The South Essex Grenadier Company came running past Sharpe, muskets at the trail, with Captain Leroy at their head. He had his inevitable cigar in his mouth, sodden and unlit, and as he ran past he raised an eyebrow to Sharpe in ironic acknowledgement of the chaos. There was another armed Company just ahead and Leroy lined his men up next to them. The American looked back to Sharpe. ‘Want to join in?’
The French had captured half the first parallel, three hundred yards of trench, and were still pushing up the hill. The two companies of British infantry, outnumbered ten to one, pulled out their bayonets and twisted the blades on to the muskets. Leroy looked at his men. ‘Don’t bother pulling your triggers. Just cut the bastards.’ He drew his sword and swished the thin blade through the rain. A third company, panting and hurried, attached themselves to the small line. The Captains nodded to each other and ordered the advance.