‘Good morning, RSM. Thank you for last night.’ Harper cocked an ear to the morning’s sounds. ‘Doesn’t seem to have discouraged the bastards, sir.’
Sharpe left just a dozen men in the shelter of the citadels, mostly Riflemen, and the rest were put deep in the safe galleries of the fort. The offices would have to burn.
Sharpe stayed on the ramparts, as did Captain Palmer, but Frederickson was ordered unwillingly into shelter. The heavy canister balls rattled and scraped on the stones, bounced spinning from the glacis, and tore at the makeshift flag. Once a French gunner showed himself beside the mill, four rifles spat, but the man, with a derisive gesture, leaped to safety.
The shells had to be endured. They came with a horrid frequency, no longer spaced in batches of four because each French gun, finding its rhythm, fired at its own pace. Sometimes two or three would land together, sometimes there would be a pause as long as thirty seconds when no shell landed, but the morning seemed to Sharpe to be an unending thunder. Again and again the explosions cracked and shook and rumbled and the foul-smelling smoke soured the air and flames started again in the destroyed barracks to match the flames that shot up above the ramparts from the burning offices. Six men, led by Minver, had helped move the makeshift surgery into a ready magazine while another six, led by Harper, rescued the laboratory with its precious load of half-made cartridges.
A young Marine, crouching beside Sharpe in the dubious safety of the south-east citadel, flinched each time a shell exploded. ‘Bastards,’ he said, ‘bastards.’ Fragments of shell casing scrabbled on stone; one fragment came through the citadel door and dropped, still smoking, at Sharpe’s feet.
‘Bastards,’ the Marine said. A shell hit the citadel roof, making a noise like the ringing crack of a sledge-hammer, and Sharpe heard the shell scrape as it slid down the stone roof towards the ditch and he knew if it exploded outside the loopholes the iron would scythe this casement clean like a butcher’s cleaver swept at waist level, but the shell splashed harmlessly into the ditch.
‘Bastards,’ the Marine said.
The fortress shook with the explosions, the air thumped with them, the cobbles were scorched by them. One of Harper’s cannon, so lovingly restored, was blown from its carriage. A corpse, hit in the belly by an exploding shell, spattered flesh and blood on the walls. One of Sharpe’s walkways, circumventing the citadels, was lifted from its place and dropped into the barracks’ rubble. Another, at the south-western corner, was burned by the flames that climbed from Lassan’s offices.
The twelve-pounders, seeing no movement on the walls, changed to solid shot and the hammer blows rang like harsh bells throughout the Teste de Buch. At five hundred yards, over open sights, the gunners could not miss. Their iron shot skimmed the glacis to crack into the ramparts and the stones, laid with poor mortar, began to shift.
‘Bastards.’ The Marine’s knuckles, gripping the stock of his heavy musket, were white.
‘What’s your name?’ Sharpe asked.
The Marine, who looked about sixteen years old, blinked. ‘Moore, sir.’
‘Where are you from?’
‘Exminster, sir.’
‘Where’s that?’ Sharpe was peering through the loophole, watching for an attack, but when the boy did not reply, he turned to him. ‘Well?’
‘Near Exeter, sir. In Devon.’
‘Farmers?’
‘Father’s a publican, sir. The Stowey Arms.’
Two shells exploded, filling the air with smoke, thunder and the hot breath of flame, and Marine Moore, for once, did not swear.
‘One day,’ Sharpe said, ‘you and I will drink some pots of ale at your Stowey Arms in Exminster and no one will believe the tales we tell.’
The boy grinned. ‘Yes, sir.’
‘Is it a good alehouse?’
‘The best, sir.’
‘And the ale?’
‘Rare stuff, sir. Better than the muck you get here.’
‘French beer,’ Major Richard Sharpe said authoritatively,
‘is pissed by virgins.’ He saw the boy grin as he was supposed to, and slapped his shoulder. ‘You, Marine Moore, look through that hole. You see anything move, sing out. Understand?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘I’m relying on you.’ Sharpe, hiding his own terror that was quite as keen as Moore‘s, stepped out of the citadel’s shelter. He straightened his jacket and sword, then walked down the southern rampart. He saw the destruction in the courtyard, heard a roundshot shiver a merlon not six paces away, but walked on calmly. Men, sheltering in the arch-ways opening from the courtyard or crouching in the rampart’s citadels, should see him now. He must look calm in the face of this terror, he must let them know that the shells and shot, however loud, were not the end of the earth. He remembered how he, as a younger soldier, had watched his officers and sergeants and how he had believed that if they could take the murderous sounds, then so could he.
He stood at the midpoint of the rampart and stared south. He felt all the old symptoms of fear. His heart thumped in his ribcage, his belly seemed to be sinking, his throat was dry, he felt a muscle trembling in his thigh that he could not still, and sweat, though it was a cold day, pricked at his skin. He told himself he should not move from the spot until he had counted to twenty, then decided that a brave man would count to sixty.
He did this so his men would see him, not because he thought it safe. A roundshot glanced off the cordon of the parapet, and Sharpe knew the twelve-pounders, barrels heated, were firing higher. The mortars, he noticed, were both less frequent and less accurate and he guessed the wooden beds had shifted in the sandy soil. He reached fifty in his count, decided he was deliberately hurrying the numbers, so made himself start again from forty.
‘Sir! Mr Sharpe!’ It was Moore. The boy was pointing south-east, inland, and Sharpe, staring at that direction, saw the mass of men who had been drawn up behind the village and who now, drums beating and colours held high, emerged into plain view. The mortars, Sharpe realized with surprise, had stopped firing. He looked towards the field guns and those weapons, all eight of them, were silent. Their gunsmoke drifted over the meadows. He noticed that there was a touch of spring in the air and something beautiful in the way the sun glittered on the water.
Sharpe turned. ‘Captain Frederickson! To your places! All of you!’ He blew his whistle, watched as men debouched at a run from the stone tunnels, then turned back to see what his enemy might do.
The assault was coming.
General Calvet, a flitch of fat bacon in one hand and a watch in the other, grinned. ‘You think they’ll have manned the ramparts by now, Favier?’
‘I’m sure, sir.’
‘Give the signal, then. I’ll go back to lunch.’
Favier nodded to the trumpeter, who made the call, and the infantry immediately sat down.
The gunners, who had been hammering quoins into the shaken howitzer beds, leaped back as the portfires were lit and as the barrels thudded down again.
‘Lie down!’ Sharpe was furious. He had fallen for a trick like a raw officer fresh out of school and he had brought his men into the open, just as the French had wanted him to do, and now the shells were wobbling at the top of their arc, spiralling smoke, then were plunging towards the fort. ‘Lie down!’
The field guns fired, the shells exploded, and the nightmare of fire and banging and skull-splitting shrieks and flame and whistling fragments began again.
A solid shot, striking an embrasure, drove stone scraps into a man’s eyes. A shell, landing on the western wall between two Marines, took the belly of one and left the other unscathed but screaming.
‘They did that neatly,’ Frederickson said.
‘And I fell for it,’ Sharpe said with bitter self-digust.
Frederickson peered through an embrasure. The French infantry lay by the millstream as though on a holiday. ‘They’ll attack the gate when they do come.’
‘I imagine so.’
‘Confide
nt bastards, letting us know.’ Both officers ducked as a roundshot shivered dust and dry mortar from the stones above them. The great masonry block had been shifted a full inch by the blow.
Sharpe stared at the far rampart. ‘Lieutenant Minver!’
‘Sir?’
‘Get some bread and cold meat sent round!’
Minver, somewhat aghast at being ordered to brave the courtyard where most of the shells exploded, nodded. Sharpe would leave his men exposed for he had no way of telling just when the attack of massed infantry would start forward. They would come from the south-east and the howitzers could keep firing until the French were actually at the ramparts. The field guns, firing very close to the line of advance, would have to cease fire long before the attack struck home.
Sharpe wanted them to come. He wanted to hear the Old Trousers, the drummers’ pas de charge, he wanted to hear the screams of attacking men, the banging of muskets, for that would be preferable to this helpless waiting. He suddenly wanted to echo young Moore and swear uselessly at the gunners who sweated and fired and swabbed and fired again.
Harper, waiting on the western wall with Sharpe’s picked squad, went to the screaming Marine and slapped him into silence. ‘And shovel that mess over the side, lad.’ He gestured at the spilt guts of the dead man. ‘You don’t want flies here, do you?’
‘Flies in winter?’
‘Don’t be cheeky, lad. Do it.’
One of the Marines with Harper seemed untroubled by the shelling. He drew a stone along the fore-edge of a cutlass, doing it again and again in search of the perfect cutting blade. Another, leaning against the abandoned timber slide of one of Lassan’s guns, read a small book with evident fascination. From time to time he looked up, saw that his services were not yet required, and went back to the book. Captain Palmer, staring north and east from his allotted station, thought he saw movement in the dunes but when he examined the place with his spyglass he saw only sand and grass.
For a half hour more the bombardment continued. Screaming shells blasted apart in black ruin, flames roared from the rafters that collapsed in a shower of sparks into the ruins of the offices, and iron shards spat dirty death into the corners of the garrison. Men shivered. They stared at stone an inch before their face, they cursed the French, their officers, their luck, the whole rotten world that had brought them to this eye of a manmade hell, until at last, at long, long last, the trumpets sounded thin through the thunder’s noise and the far cheer betrayed that a mass of men moved towards the attack and the men in the fort, men in red and green and men with drawn and dirtied faces, prepared themselves to fight.
CHAPTER 16
Two Marines from Sharpe’s squad, judging the intervals between the fall of howitzer shells, darted around the courtyard to retrieve those shells that had not exploded. There were six. The fuses of two had failed to ignite in the howitzer barrels, two had half burned-fuses, while two had simply failed to explode. The four with usable fuses were carried to the bastion above the gatehouse where Lieutenant Fytch licked nervous lips and fingered the hilt of his pistol.
Bread and cold meat had been distributed, but most men found it hard to chew or swallow the food. As the French column came closer and the threat of its drums louder, the bread was abandoned beside the upturned shakoes that served as cartridge holders.
A shell, landing in the flooded ditch, fountained water on to an embrasure. A man laughed nervously. A sparrow, made bold by winter hunger, pecked at one of the discarded lumps of bread then flew off.
Marine Moore, for the twentieth time, lifted the pan lid to check that his musket was primed. For the twentieth time it was.
The French drums sounded clearly inside the fort, punctuated only by the fire of the big guns. Between the rattled passages of drumbeats there was a pause filled by hundreds of voices. ‘Vive l’Empereur!‘
‘Funny thing to hear for the first time,’ Fytch said.
‘I’ve heard it more times than I can remember,’ Sharpe said truthfully, ‘and we beat the buggers every time.’ He looked at the column, a great mass of men that advanced implacably over the sandy esplanade. It had been French columns like this, so huge and seemingly so irresistible, that had terrified half the nations of Europe into surrender, but it was also a formation that was designed to contain half-trained troops who could, therefore, be scared and bloodied into defeat. French skirmishers were deploying on the glacis and one of them put a bullet within six inches of Sharpe’s face. A rifle cracked and Sharpe saw the Frenchman slide back behind his mist of musket smoke.
Sharpe had drawn all his Riflemen to the southern or eastern walls. He waited till the enemy was two hundred paces away, then filled his lungs. ‘Rifles! Fire!’
More than a hundred rifles spat fire.
Perhaps a dozen men in the leading rank of the French column keeled over. Immediately, with a shiver, the column stepped over the bodies. A slow ripple seemed to move down the column as the succeeding ranks negotiated the dead and wounded.
Riflemen concentrated on reloading; working with fast, practised hands, ramming ball and wad and powder down clean barrels, aiming again, firing again, reloading again.
At a hundred paces Sharpe blew two blasts on his whistle. Those Riflemen whose places were on the other ramparts ran back to their stations.
The field guns stopped firing.
It seemed oddly quiet. The drumming and shouting still continued, but the ear-hammering percussion of the twelve-pounders was over. The howitzers, firing still, made a more muffled, coughing sound. A wounded man, under the razor, screamed from the surgery tunnel and a Marine, for no apparent reason, vomited.
‘At this range,’ Sharpe walked down the line of Marines and kept his voice as matter-of-fact as a drill-sergeant, ‘aim two feet above the target.’ He glanced at the enemy. ‘Take aim!’
The red-coated men pushed their muskets over the embrasures.
‘Fire! Reload!’
A Frenchman crawled across the sand of the glacis, trailing blood.
A Marine, hit by a skirmisher’s musket ball, spun backwards, teetered on the edge of the firestep, then fell into the burning branches of the pine abatis.
‘Fire!’
A howitzer shell cracked on the firestep beside Sharpe and span into the courtyard where its explosion made a ball of filthy smoke shot through with red flames.
‘Fire!’ Lieutenant Fytch shouted. He pointed his pistol at a French officer not fifty yards away and pulled the trigger. The gun rammed a shock up his arm and blotted his view with smoke.
A Marine’s musket hangfired and he threw the gun into the courtyard and picked up the weapon of a dead man. The ammunition left in the pouch of the corpse who had fallen into the burning abatis began to explode.
The Riflemen, knowing that survival depended on the speed of their work, no longer rammed shots home, but tap-loaded their guns by rapping the butts on the rampart then firing the weapon into the gap between the glacis’ shoulders. Musket balls and rifle bullets spat into the enemy, but still the column came forward. Sharpe, who had seen it so often before, was again amazed at how much punishment a French column would endure. Three of the Marines, issued with civilian blunderbusses taken from the surrounding villages, poured their fire into the column’s head.
The shape of the attack was clear now.
At the front of the column the French general had put raw recruits, musket-fodder; boys whose deaths would not damage the Empire and he had invited the British to slaughter them. Now, pushed by officers and sergeants, the survivors of those conscripts spread along the counter-guard or sheltered in the dry ditch and banged their muskets at the smoke-wreathed wall above them.
Behind were the veterans. Twenty or more men carried great fascines of roped branches, great mattresses of timber that sheltered them from bullet strike and which would be thrown into the ditch where the drawbridge should have been. Behind them, moustached faces grim, came the Grenadiers, the assault troops.
Frede
rickson had lit a candle sheltered in a lantern. He used a spill to take the flame from the candle to the first unexploded mortar shell. He watched the fuse hiss, waited till the fire had burned into the hole bored in the casing, then, with a grunt, heaved it over the edge.
‘Fire!’ Lieutenant Fytch, his pistol reloaded, wasted the bullet into a fascine.
The shell bounced on the road, disappeared beneath the leading rank, then exploded.
A hole seemed to be punched in the men carrying the great bundles, but as soon as the smoke cleared, the hole filled, and a French sergeant kicked dead men and discarded bundles into the ditch.
‘Patrick! The gate!’ Sharpe had waited till the last moment, believing that the volume of fire from the walls would hold the column’s head back, and now he wondered if he had waited too long. He had meant to attack with his own squad, but he preferred now to control this fight from the ramparts and he knew that any attack headed by Harper would be driven home with a professional savagery.
‘Fire!’ Frederickson shouted and a score of bullets thudded downward. Some spurted dust from the road, one span a Frenchman clear round, but the rest seemed to be soaked up in the surging, pushing mass that strained to reach the shelter of the archway. That arch was blocked by pine trees, but the barricade had been knocked about by roundshot, and the leading attackers, throwing their fascines down and jumping on to their uncertain footing, could see footholds among the branches.
One man toppled from the makeshift bridge and fell on to the hidden spikes. His screams were cut off as water flowed into his mouth.
Another mortar shell was thrown to explode on the roadway. The air was hissing with bullets, endless with the noise of muskets firing and the rattle of ramrods.