Richard Sharpe, though he did not know it, galloped within two hundred yards of Wellington. He went north, following the river, shouting at the villagers who watched the battle from the track to clear a path. Across the water he could see the smoke pumping from the French gun line. The canister twitched and tore at the trampled crops.
He slowed at the river bend, forced to negotiate a village street crowded with Battalions who waited to cross the bridges. He shouted at one mounted officer, asking where the Fifth was, and the man waved Sharpe on. ‘The left!’
A Rifle officer, lighting a cigar from the pipe of one of his men, saw Sharpe and his mouth dropped open. The cigar fell to the ground. Sharpe smiled. ‘Morning, Harry. Good luck!’ He put his heels back, leaving the man stupefied by the sight of a disgraced, hanged, and buried man come back from the dead. Sharpe laughed, cleared the village, and put Carbine into a canter that took them due east along the Zadorra’s northern bank.
Ahead of him the Third and Seventh Divisions were launched at the river. They attacked at the double, skirmishers in front, the huge formations splitting apart to stream over the unblown bridges and unguarded fords. Angel was awed by the sight. More than ten thousand infantry were moving, a red tide that assaulted the southern French positions.
A Major galloped towards Sharpe. Behind him a Brigade of infantry were standing, their General impatient at their head. ‘Are you staff?’
‘No!’ Sharpe reined in.
‘God damn it!’ The Major’s sword was drawn. ‘The Peer’s forgotten us! God damn it!’
‘Just go!’
‘Go?’
‘Why not?’ Sharpe grinned at the man. ‘Where’s the Fifth?’
‘Keep going!’ The Major had turned his horse and now waved his sword towards the river in a signal to his General. The Brigade picked up its muskets.
‘Come on, Angel!’ Sharpe feared the battle would be over before he could join it.
To Sharpe’s right, as he circled the rear of the now advancing brigade, the British attack reformed on the Zadorra’s southern bank. Ahead of the attack, spread out in the untrodden wheat that was thick with flowers, the Rifles, men of the 95th, went ahead in the skirmish line. They could see the French guns on the Arinez Hill and they knelt, fired, reloaded and advanced.
The bullets, flickering out of the smoke cloud and clanging on the black-muzzled barrels of the French guns, were the first warning the battery had of their danger. ‘Spikes!’
The gunners desperately slewed the guns round, the men heaving on the handspikes as yet more bullets came from the north. ‘Canister!’ the officer shouted, and then a bullet span him round, he clapped a hand to his shoulder, and suddenly his men were running because the Riflemen were charging up the slope. ‘Load it!’
It was too late. The Riflemen, their weapons tipped with the long sword-bayonets, were in the battery. The blades stabbed at the few Frenchmen who tried to swing rammers at the British Riflemen. Some gunners crawled under the barrels of their guns, waiting for a prudent moment to surrender.
Behind the Rifles, spreading in the wheat with their Colours overhead, came the lines of red-jacketed men.
‘Back! Back!’ A French gunner Colonel, seeing his northern battery taken, shouted for the limbers and horses. Men hurled ready ammunition into chests, picked up trails, the trace chains were linked on, the horses were whipped, and the French guns went thundering and rocking and bouncing back towards the second line.
‘Ready!’ Now the French infantry, who had thought the guns had done their task, had to come forward to blunt the British attack. ‘Present! Fire!’ Over the fields that had been flayed with canister came the sound of musketry, the clash of infantry.
The Marquess of Wellington opened his watch case. He had his lodgement on the plain, he had driven the first French line into confusion, but now, he knew, there would be a pause.
Prisoners were being herded back, the wounded were being carried to the surgeons. In the smoke of the battlefield Colonels and Generals were looking for landmarks, seeking out units on their flanks, waiting for orders. The attack had worked, but now the attack had to be re-aligned. The men who had suffered under the French guns must be relieved, new Battalions marched onto the plain to link up with the northern attacks.
Wellington crossed the river. He spurred forward to take command of the next attack, the one that would drive the French army due east, towards Vitoria, and he wondered what was happening to the small finger of his plan’s hand. That finger was the Fifth Division. It marched to a village called Gamarra Mayor, and if it could take that village, cross the river, and cut the Great Road, then it would turn French defeat into a rout. There, Wellington knew, the battle would be hardest, and to that place, as the sun rose to its zenith, Sharpe rode.
CHAPTER 22
Lieutenant Colonel Leroy fiddled with his watch. ‘God damn them!’
No one spoke.
To their right, three miles away, the other columns had struck over the river. The battle there was a roiling cloud of musket and cannon smoke.
The Fifth Division waited.
Three Battalions, the South Essex one of them, would head the attack on Gamarra Mayor. Ahead of Leroy’s men was a gentle slope that led down to the village, beyond which was a stone bridge that crossed the river. Beyond the river was the Great Road. If the Division could cut the road, then the French army was cut off from France.
He snapped open the lid of his watch again. ‘What’s keeping the bloody man?’ Leroy wanted the General of Division to order the attack quickly.
The French were in Gamarra Mayor. This was the only river crossing they had garrisoned, and they had loopholed the houses, barricaded the alleys, and Leroy knew this would be grim work. Three years before, on the Portuguese frontier, he had fought at Fuentes d‘Onoro and he remembered the horrors of fighting in small, tight streets.
‘Christ on his cross!’ Across the river, where the lane from the bridge rose to the Great Road, he could see French guns unlimbering. The attack would now be harder. The guns were just high enough to fire over the village and, even if the British took Gamarra Mayor, the guns would make the bridge murderous with canister.
‘Sir?’ Ensign Bascable gestured to the right. A staff officer had ridden to the centre Battalion of the attack.
‘About god-damned time.’ Leroy rode forward, his face, scarred dreadfully at Badajoz, looking grimmer than ever. ‘Mr d’Alembord?‘
‘Sir?’
‘Skirmish line out!’
‘Sir!’
Then the Colonel of the centre Battalion waved his hat, the band of that Battalion struck into a jauntier tune, and the Light Companies were going forward. Leroy looked at his watch. It was one o‘clock. He closed the watch’s lid, thrust it into a pocket, and shouted the orders that would march the South Essex’s line towards the enemy. Leroy was taking them into battle for the first time.
The Colours had been unsheathed. The silk looked crumpled after its long confinement in the leather tubes, but the Ensigns shook the flags out so that the tassels danced and the great emblems spread out above their heads. On the right was the King’s Colour, a huge Union Flag that was embroidered with the badge of the South Essex at its centre. The badge showed a chained eagle, commemorating Sharpe and Harper’s capture of the French standard at Talavera.
On the left was the Regimental Colour, a yellow flag that listed the South Essex’s battle honours about the badge at its centre and with the Union flag sewn into its upper corner. Both flags were holed, both scorched, both had been in battle before, and it was to the flags, more than to King or country, that a man gave his love and allegiance. Around the two Ensigns who carried the standards were the Sergeants, halberd-blades shining in the sun. If the French wanted to take the flags they would have to get past the men with the long, savage, axe-headed spears.
The Battalion marched with bayonets fixed and muskets loaded. They trampled the wheat flat.
Ahead of them, sprea
d out like beaters, was the Light Company. Sergeant Patrick Harper shouted at them to spread out more. He had waited all morning for an officer to come with black hair and a scar on his left cheek, but there had been no sign of Sharpe. Yet Harper refused to give up hope. He stubbornly insisted that Sharpe was alive, that he would come today, that Sharpe would never let the South Essex fight without being present. If Sharpe had to come out of the grave, he would come.
Captain d‘Alembord listened to the thunder of guns to his right. British guns were on the plain now, firing from the Arinez Hill at the second French line. D’Alembord, who was at his first great battle, thought the sound was more terrible than any he had ever heard. He knew that soon the six French guns across the river would open fire. It seemed to Peter d‘Alembord, as he marched ever closer to the silent, barricaded village, that each of the French guns was pointing directly at him. He glanced at Harper, taking comfort from the apparent stolidity of the huge Irishman.
Then the guns disappeared in smoke.
Lieutenant Colonel Leroy saw a pencil line go up and down in the sky and knew that a roundshot was coming towards him. He kept his horse going straight, held his breath, and watched with relief as the ball thumped into the grass ahead of the Battalion, bounced overhead and rolled behind them.
The shots came over the village and plunged onto the meadow that the British Battalions crossed. The first volley did no damage, except for the ball that had bounced over Leroy’s head. It bounced again, once more, and rolled towards the South Essex’s bandsmen who waited at the rear for the wounded. A drummer boy, seeing the ball roll slow as a cricket ball that might not make the boundary, ran to check it with his foot.
‘Stop!’ A Sergeant shouted at the boy, but he was too late. The drummer put his foot in the ball’s path, it seemed to roll so innocuously, so slowly, and, as the boy grinned, it took his foot off in blood and pain.
‘You stupid bastard!’ The Sergeant slapped him and hauled him upright. ‘You stupid god-damned bastard! How many god-damn times have you been told?’ The other drummer boys watched silently as their comrade was carried sobbing back to the surgeons. The drummer’s foot, still in the boot that he had polished in honour of the battle, lay in the grass.
The guns fired again and this time a ball plucked through the South Essex’s number six Company, throwing two men sideways and down, spattering blood onto the wheat and poppies. The line stolidly closed up.
The Light Company had opened fire. The rifles cracked. The French cannon smashed back again, and once again the lines had to close and once again the meadow behind the attackers was littered with bodies and blood.
Leroy lit a cheroot with his tinder box. The men were doing well. They were not flinching from the artillery, they marched silently and in good order, but still he feared the village. It was too well barricaded, too thickly loopholed, and he knew that the muskets of Gamarra Mayor’s defenders could do far more damage than the six field guns on the far side of the river. Not a French musket had sounded yet. They waited for the British to get close. Leroy had begged for permission to attack in column, but the Brigadier had refused. ‘We always attack in line, man! Don’t be a fool!’ The Brigadier, knowing Leroy to be an American, wondered if he was touched in the head. Attack in column, indeed!
Leroy put his tinder box away and spurred past the Colours. ‘Captain d’Alembord?‘
‘Sir?’
‘Form on us!’
The South Essex was now protected from the field guns by the houses in the village. Still the French did not fire. The Light Company scrambled to their place on the left of the Battalion. They marched forward.
Leroy frowned. He knew what would happen when the defenders fired. He feared it. The South Essex was still under strength, and the next few moments could destroy his command. He muttered at the enemy under his breath, begging them to fire too soon, begging them to give his men a chance.
But the French waited. They waited till every shot could count, and when the fire order was given Leroy almost flinched from the sound and from the destruction.
The heavy musket bullets tore at the British line, jerking and twisting men, chopping them down, spinning them, and then new men took over at the loopholes and more bullets came tearing into the red-jacketed attack and it seemed to Leroy that the air was filled with the noise of muskets and bullets as he shouted into the wind of fire to keep his men going forward.
‘Forward,’ the officers shouted, but they could not go forward. The musketry from the village had jarred the South Essex backwards. Men fired their muskets in reply and wasted the bullets against the stone walls and barricades. The Colours fell, the Ensigns shot by French marksmen.
‘Forward! Come on!’ Leroy spurred ahead of the line. ‘Forward!’ His horse reared, screaming, was struck by another bullet, and Leroy cursed as his right boot would not leave the stirrup. His cigar fell, he flailed for balance, then his right foot was free and he slid clumsily over the rump of his falling, dying horse. He climbed to his feet, drew his sword, and shouted the men on.
The meadow was laced with smoke. Men crawled backwards, blood staining their tracks. Men cried for God or their mothers. Officers’ horses, wounded, died in the wheat or stampeded towards the rear. Some men, seeing a chance to escape the carnage, helped the wounded towards the bandsmen and the surgeons. Other men reloaded and aimed at the loopholes, and still the French fired at them and still the enemy bullets twitched the thickening musket smoke and made the meadow a place of death and screams and wounded.
‘Forward!’ Leroy shouted. He wondered when new Battalions would be sent up to help his men, and he felt a rage that a Battalion under his command might need help. ‘Forward!’
The Colours were lifted up by new men. They went into the fire, and the King’s Colour fell again, was lifted again, and it twitched like a live thing as the bullets plucked at it.
The smoke was spoiling the French aim. From the village they could see a mist that surrounded their positions and, at the far side of the mist, the dim shapes of men who came forward, were thrown back, and still the French fired, thickening the mist, sending their bullets to pluck at the British line that had wrapped itself about the village but could not break in.
The Regimental Colour fell; this time a Sergeant picked it up, but the movement in the mist attracted a dozen French marksmen and the Sergeant was hurled back and the flag was down again.
‘Forward!’ Leroy ran, sword in hand, and he heard the shot plucking at the grass and thrumming in the air, and he heard the cheer behind and knew the companies were coming with him, and the wall ahead of him flickered with flame, someone screamed behind him, and suddenly Leroy was at the village, safe between two loopholes in a barn wall, and more men joined him, crouching beneath loopholes, feverishly reloading their muskets.
Leroy grinned at them. ‘We’ve got to go for a barricade.’
‘Yes, sir.’
He wondered again, for the hundredth hundredth time, why these men, reckoned by their country to be the dregs of society, fought so well, so willingly, so bravely.
Leroy recongised a Lieutenant from Three Company. ‘Where’s Captain Butler?’
‘Dead, sir.’
A French musket sounded deafening beside Leroy. He ignored it. They were safe here, hard against the wall, though he glanced up to make sure that no Frenchmen were on the barn roof. To his right he could see a farm wagon on its side. If enough men could drag it out of the way then he could lead a party into the alley. He organized a firing party, their job to fire over the barricade while other men pulled at it. Then, with fixed bayonets, the rest of the Company would follow Leroy into the alley. He grinned at them. ‘Are you ready, lads?’
‘Yes, sir.’
They looked nervously at him. The battle, for them, had become ten yards of murderous wall, nothing more.
Lieutenant Colonel Leroy, who had no intention of being defeated in his first battle as Battalion Commander, wiped his hand on his breeches and r
egripped his sword. ‘First man in gets a guinea!’ He listened to their cheer, knew they were ready, and straightened up. ‘Come on!’
He ran to the barricade. Behind him the men came, cheering, but a single bullet, planted in Leroy’s brain, finished the attack before it began. The Company, demoral ised by his death, huddled back against the wall and wondered if they dared run back through the smoke before the victorious French, sallying from the village, slaughtered them with bayonets. Gamarra Mayor was being held. Ten yards from the alley, his scarred face spattered with blood, Thomas Leroy lay dead. His watch, ticking in his pocket, gave the time as ten past one.
‘You’re staying here!’ Sharpe said to Angel.
‘No!’
‘If I die no one else knows about the god-damned treaty! You stay here and make sure the letter reaches Hogan!’ Sharpe saw Angel nod reluctantly
The Band Sergeant was staring at Sharpe with a white face. ‘Mr Sharpe?’
‘You make sure this boy doesn’t move, Sergeant!’
‘Yes, sir.’ The Sergeant was shaking. ‘It is you, Mr Sharpe?’
‘Of course it’s me!’ Sharpe was watching the village, seeing a Battalion broken. ‘You two!’ he pointed at two unwounded men who helped a comrade back.
‘Sir?’
‘You’re not bloody wounded! Get back! Sergeant?’
‘Sir?’ The Band Sergeant was staring at Sharpe in utter disbelief.
‘Shoot the next unwounded bastard who comes back here.’
‘Yes, Mr Sharpe.’
Sharpe drew the sword. He went forward into the wheat that was trampled and blood-stained, littered with broken bodies, the scene of disaster. He had come back.
Captain d‘Alembord never knew who first shouted for the line to retreat. The panic seemed to spread from the centre of the line, he heard an officer shout for the men to stand, to fire, to attack again, but the shouting was no good. The smoke isolated the men, they could not see the Colours, then came the news that the Colonel was dead, and suddenly the South Essex was running back through the smoke and the French cheered and sent them on their way with another volley of bullets.