Lennox was still alive. He spoke softly and quickly to Sharpe and Harper, who looked at each other, then back at the Scotsman, but promised him his last request. Sharpe remembered the moment on the battlefield when he had watched the French drag away the King’s Colour, he remembered now the nature of that fleeting idea which had eluded him, and he squeezed Lennox’s hand.
“I had already promised that to myself.”
Lennox smiled. “You’ll not let me down, I know. And Harper and you can do it, I know you can.”
They had to leave him to die alone, there was no choice, but the Scotsman’s only other request was that he should die with a sword in his hand. They walked reluctantly away and the big Sergeant looked at Sharpe.
“Can we do it, sir?”
“We promised, didn’t we?”
“Aye, but it’s never been done.”
“Then we’ll be the first!” Sharpe spoke fiercely. “Now come on, we’ve got work to do!” He stared at the gun. It crept closer and closer, and he knew now that his idea could work. It had loose ends, there always were unanswered questions, and he put himself in the place of his enemies and tracked the answers down. Harper saw the excitement on his Lieutenant’s face, watched his hand grip and regrip the sword hilt, and waited patiently for the orders.
Sharpe measured distances, angles, lines of fire. He was excited, the elation returning; there was hope despite the field gun. He summoned the Lieutenants, the Sergeants, faced them and slammed a fist into his open palm.
“Listen… “
Chapter 9
The time for regrets would come later, the time to be saddened by the carnage, to reflect on being alive and unwounded, most of all to regret that he could not have spent more time with the dying Lennox. Sharpe drew the great sword, hefted his rifle in his left hand, turned to the one hundred and seventy men who paraded in three ranks across the road.
“Forward!”
As they marched Sharpe let his thoughts dwell briefly on the conversation with Lennox. Had he convinced the dying man? He thought so. Lennox was a soldier, he understood that Sharpe had so little time, and the Rifleman was convinced he had seen relief in the Scotsman’s face. Keeping the promise was another matter: first there was this day’s business to complete. Forrest marched beside him, the two of them a few paces in front of the solitary colour that once again waved over the small formation; the Major was distinctly nervous.
“Will it work, Sharpe?”
The tall Rifleman grinned. “So far it has, Major. They think we’re mad.”
Forrest had insisted on coming along rather than stay with the wounded by the bridge. He was still a little dazed, shaken by the blow on his head, and he had refused Sharpe’s offer to command the survivors in the face of the new French onslaught. “I’ve never been in battle before today, Sharpe,” Forrest had said. “Except that I once suppressed a food riot in Chelmsford, and I don’t think that counts.”
Sharpe could understand the Major’s nervousness, was grateful that Forrest had given his blessing to what seemed to be an act of utter folly, yet Sharpe’s instincts told him the plan would work. To the watching and waiting Chasseurs it looked as if the small British force was intent on committing suicide by a death-or-glory charge that stood no hope of success but would at least save them from the attrition of dying piecemeal from the blows of the French gunners. Forrest had asked, almost plaintively, why the enemy were continuing the fight, had they not already won a big enough victory? Sharpe was now offering them the chance to capture a second British colour that could be paraded in the French camp to persuade the soldiers of the fragility of the new enemy.
“Is it time, Sharpe?” Forrest was anxious.
“No, sir, no. A minute yet.”
They marched straight up the track towards the gun three hundred yards away. Sharpe’s plan had depended on two things, and the enemy had obliged by doing both. First they had brought the small four-pounder as close to the British as safety allowed. They would not want to use solid round shot against the infantry; instead Sharpe knew they would load the gun with canister, the deadly metal container of musket balls and scrap iron that shattered as soon as it left the barrel and sprayed its lethal mixture like bent nails fired from a coachman’s blunderbuss. No doubt the French expected the British to lie down in the broken ground by the waterside, sheltered by the falling river-bank, but the canisters would have sought them out even there and killed them two by two, three by three. Instead the British were marching straight for the gun, like sheep walking into a slaughterhouse, and the French gunners would probably need no more than three rounds to tear them apart and let the cavalry finish the dazed survivors off. Sharpe’s second guess was about the cavalry. He had felt an enormous relief when they paraded to the British right. He had expected that, but if they had gone to the left the plan could never have been started, and they would have had no option but to die by the bridge. The ground to the right was thinly strewn with bodies, unlike the left which was an obstacle course of dead men and horses, and Sharpe had guessed that the French Colonel, charging obliquely to the fire of his cannon, would want an unobstructed path for the horsemen who now waited for the gun to open fire.
He watched the French gunners. They were unhurried, there was no need for haste, and they glanced constantly at the British force, which marched conveniently towards their gun. It was pointing directly at Sharpe. He could see the dirty green-painted carriage, the dulled brass barrel, and the blackened muzzle. He had watched the efficient gun crew lever the three-quarters of a ton until the four and a half feet of barrel pointed straight down the road. Now a blue-coated gunner was putting the serge bag with its one and a half pounds of black powder in the cannon. A second man rammed it down, and Sharpe saw a third man lean over the touch-hole and thrust down with a spike so that the serge bag was pierced and the powder could be set off by the fuse. Another gunner was walking forward with the metal canister. It was only seconds now before the gun would be ready to fire. He lifted his rifle into the air and pulled the trigger.
“Now!”
His one hundred and seventy men began to run, a shambling lung-bursting run in their broken shoes. Each soldier carried three loaded muskets, two slung on their shoulders, one carried in their hands. They kept roughly aligned; if the cavalry moved they could close ranks in seconds, form the impenetrable wall of bayonets. The French gunners heard the rifle shot, paused to watch their enemy break into their cumbrous run, and grinned at the futility of the men who thought they could charge a field gun. Then everything changed.
In the twenty minutes after the visit of the Chasseur Captain the British had continued to collect their wounded. Sharpe was certain the French had noticed nothing odd about the stream of men who went to and from the bodies that lay thickly around the spot where he and Harper had saved the Regimental Colour. In those twenty minutes Sharpe had hidden thirty men among the dead, ten Riflemen who lay crumpled in borrowed red jackets, and twenty men of the South Essex. Each Rifleman carried two rifles, one borrowed from a comrade, and every redcoat lay with three loaded muskets. The French had ignored them. They unlimbered the gun and lined it on target and had taken no notice of the scattered bodies that lay thickly just a hundred paces to their right. The time for looting would be later; first the gunners would destroy the presumptuous English who were half running, half walking, towards them.
Harper sweated in his borrowed jacket. It was much too small for him and he had ripped the seams in both armpits, but even so he could feel the sweat trickling down to the small of his back. The red jackets were essential. The French had become accustomed to the sight of the dead men and would have been certain to notice if suddenly ten bodies in green uniforms had appeared among the corpses. Harper’s biggest fear had been that the French might wander over to loot the bodies, but they had been ignored. He watched Sharpe march towards them, still two hundred and fifty yards away, and heard Lieutenant Knowles sigh with relief as Sharpe lifted his rifl
e in the air. Knowles was nominally in charge of the thirty men but Harper was satisfied the inexperienced Lieutenant would do nothing without first talking to him, and he suspected Sharpe had told Knowles, in no uncertain way, to leave the decisions to Harper.
The sound of the shot came flatly up the field. With relief Harper stretched his muscles and knelt upwards. “Take your time, lads, make the shots tell.”
To hurry would destroy their purpose. The Riflemen aimed deliberately, let the cramp ease in their arms; the first shots would be the most important. Hagman was first, Harper had expected that, and he watched approvingly as the Cheshire poacher grunted over his back sight and pulled the trigger. The gunner who was on the point of inserting the fuse spun away from the barrel and fell. In the next two seconds another eight bullets slaughtered three more of the French gun crew; the four survivors scrambled desperately for the scanty cover provided by the trail and the spokes of the gun’s wheels. The gun could not be fired now. The canister was still not loaded, Harper could see it lying beside a dead gunner who had fallen by the brass muzzle, and any man who dared to try to thrust the projectile into the barrel would be sure to be cut down by the deadly rifles. The French had stopped using rifles on the battlefield; they had abandoned them because they were too slow to load, but these gunners were learning that even the slow rifle had its advantages over the speedy musket, which could never hope to be accurate at a hundred paces.
“Cease firing!” The Riflemen looked at Harper. “Hagman!”
“Sarge?”
“Keep them busy. Gataker, Sims, Harvey!” The three looked at him expectantly. “You load for Hagman. You others, aim for the cavalry officers.”
Lieutenant Knowles ran and crouched beside the Sergeant. “Is there anything we can do?”
“Not yet, sir. We’ll move in a minute.”
Knowles and the twenty men with muskets were there to protect the Riflemen if the French cavalry charged them, as surely they must. Harper stared at the horsemen. They seemed as surprised as the gunners and sat on their horses staring at the slaughtered artillerymen as if not believing their eyes. They had expected the gun to blow the British infantry into ragged ruin, and now it dawned on them that there was no gun, no easy victory. Harper raised his first rifle, snapped the backsight into the upright position, and guessed the horsemen were three hundred yards away. It was a long shot for a rifle, but not impossible, and the French had conveniently bunched their senior officers in a small group forward of their first line. As he pulled the trigger he heard other rifles fire; he saw the group pull apart, a horse went down, two officers fell dead or wounded. The French were temporarily leaderless. The initiative, as Sharpe had planned, had gone totally to the British. Harper stood up.
“Hagman’s group! Keep firing. You others! Follow me!”
He ran towards the gun, curving wide so that Hagman had an uninterrupted field of fire, and the men followed him. The plan had been for the Riflemen to destroy the gunners and let Sharpe’s company capture the gun, but Harper could see his Lieutenant still had a long way to go and neither he nor Sharpe had expected the gun to be placed so conveniently close to the ambush party. Knowles felt astonished at the rush for the gun, but the huge Irishman was so infectious that he found himself urging the redcoats on as they dodged the bodies and ran for the gun that loomed larger and larger. The surviving artillerymen took one look at the seeming dead who had come to life, and fled. As Harper sprinted the final few yards he was aware of Hagman’s spaced shots ceasing and then he was there, his hands actually on the brass muzzle, the men surrounding him.
“Sir?”
“Sergeant?” Knowles was panting.
“Two ranks between the gun and the cavalry?” Harper made it sound like a request, but Knowles nodded as if it had been an order. The young Lieutenant was frantically nervous. He had seen his new Battalion destroyed by cavalry, watched the King’s Colour dragged from the field, and fought off the sabres with the sword his father had bought him for fifteen guineas at Kerrigan’s in Birmingham. He had watched Sharpe and Sergeant Harper recover the Regimental Colour and had been astonished by their action. Now he wanted to prove to the Riflemen that his men could fight just as effectively, and he lined up his small force and stared at the cavalry, which was at last moving. It seemed as if a hundred horsemen were advancing towards the gun; the rest were slanting off towards Sharpe, and Knowles remembered the sabres, the smell of fear, and gripped his sword tightly. He was determined not to let Sharpe down. He thought of Sharpe’s last words to him, the hands that gripped his shoulders and eyes that bored into him. “Wait!” Sharpe had said. “Wait until they’re forty paces away, then fire the volley. Wait, wait, wait!” Knowles found it incredible that he was the same rank as Sharpe; he felt sure he would never have the easy manner of command that seemed so natural to the tall Rifleman. Knowles was awed by the French, they were the conquerors of Europe, yet Sharpe saw them as men to be outwitted and outfought, and Knowles desperately wanted the same confidence. Instead he felt nervous. He wanted to fire his first volley now, to stop the French horses while they were a hundred paces away, but he controlled the fear and watched the horsemen walk forward, watched as a hundred sabres rasped from their scabbards and caught the afternoon sun in ranks of curved light. Harper came and stood beside him.
“We’ve got a treat for the bastards, sir.”
He sounded so cheerful! Knowles swallowed, kept his sword low. Wait, he told himself, and was surprised to hear that he had spoken out loud and that his voice had sounded calm. He looked at his men. They were trusting him!
“Well done, sir. May I?” Harper had spoken softly. Knowles nodded, not sure what was happening.
“Platoon!” Harper was in front of the tiny line of men. He pointed to the ten men on the right. “Sideways, four paces. March!” Then on the left the same order.
“Platoon! Backwards. March!”
Knowles stepped back with them, watching as the French eased their horses into a trot, and then understood. While he had been standing watching the French, the Riflemen had moved the gun! Instead of pointing down the track it was now aimed at the French cavalry; somehow they had loaded it, and the canister which should have swept the British off the road like a housewife scattering roaches with a broom was now threatening the cavalry instead. Harper stood at the back of the gun, well clear of the wheel. The gunners had done most of the loading, the Riflemen had thrust the canister into the barrel and found the slow match that burned red at the end of the pole. The fuse was in the touch-hole. It was a reed filled with fine powder, and when Harper touched it the fire would flash down the tube and ignite the powder charge in its serge bag.
“Hold your fire!” Harper shouted clearly; he did not want the inexperienced men of the South Essex to fire when the gun went off. “Hold your fire!”
The cavalry were seventy yards away, just urging their horses into the canter, ten riders in the first rank. Harper guessed that fifty men were aimed at the tiny party round the gun, and there were fifty more in reserve. He touched the fuse onto the reed. There was a fizzing, a puff of smoke from the touch-hole, and then the enormous explosion. Grey-white smoke belched from the muzzle; the gun, on its five-foot wheels, lurched back its fifteen hundredweight that dug the trail into the soil and bounced the wheels off the ground. The thin metal canister split apart as it left the muzzle, and Harper watched through the smoke as the musket balls and scrap iron snatched the cavalry off the field. The first three ranks were destroyed; the other two were dazed, unable to advance over the bloody corpses and the wounded who staggered upright, bleeding and shocked. Harper heard Knowles shouting.
“Hold your fire! Hold your fire!”
Good lad, thought the Irishman. The cavalry had split either side of the carnage; some of the reserve was galloping forward, but the horsemen seemed dazed by the sudden blow. They came on towards the gun but stayed clear of its line of fire, and Knowles watched the two wings of horsemen as they drew ne
arer. He waited, waited until they put spurs to their horses and tried to gallop the last few paces, and slashed his sword down.
„Fire!“
The muskets coughed out flame and smoke. The leading horses dropped, making a barrier to those behind.
“Change muskets!” Knowles felt the stirrings of confidence, the realisation that he could do it!
“Fire!”
A second volley destroyed the horsemen trying to close on the two sides of the gun. More horses fell, more men were pitched from their saddles in a flurry of arms, legs, sabres and scabbards. The horsemen behind went on, lapped round the back of the gun, and the rifles started their sharper reports and more horses were shot. Knowles was startled to see no more horsemen in front of the cannon; he turned his men round, changed to the third musket, and blasted a third volley over the heads of the kneeling Riflemen.
“Thank you, sir!”
Harper grinned at the Lieutenant. The cavalry had gone, shattered by the canister, bloodied by the close volleys, prevented from closing with the infantry because of the barriers of dead and wounded horses. Harper watched as Knowles started his men reloading their muskets. He turned back to the gun. There was so much to remember! Sponge out, stop the vent; he summoned the Riflemen to reload their captured cannon.
Sharpe had seen the four-pounder fire, watched the horsemen cut down in a bloody swathe, then he had turned to the Chasseurs attacking his own formation. As the cavalry had come closer he had halted the three ranks, turned them to face the French except for the rear rank that about-turned to deal with the horsemen who would envelop the small formation. The horsemen were in savage mood. An easy victory had been snatched away from them, the gun had been captured, but there was still the insolent colour waving from the small group of infantry. They spurred towards Sharpe, their discipline ragged, their mood simply one of revenge and a determination to crush this tiny force like a boot heel stamping on a scorpion. Sharpe watched them come. Forrest glanced nervously at him and cleared his throat, but Sharpe shook his head.