‘Now!’ The fifth barrel went, then the sixth.
Sharpe had come to the head of the ramp. He could see Minver’s men scrambling up the Thuella’s side, but the French could not be held for long. Some were trying to climb the inner wall to the ramparts, using debris from the burned offices as scaling ladders, and Sharpe ran back to stop them. He drove his sword down once, twice, and a man screamed as the blade raked his face.
‘Now!’ The last barrel was thrown by Harper. It did not bounce, but flew full tilt to smash into a fresh charge of men. The Thuella’s boats had still not started their return journey.
‘Swords!’ Frederickson shouted the order.
The French, exhilarated by their victory in the breach and seeing that no more barrels could plunge into their ranks, charged. A single rank of Riflemen, sword-bayonets in place, awaited them.
Then Harper broke the line.
With a shout that filled the whole courtyard with its echo, Patrick Harper charged down the stone slope. He carried the great, bright-bladed axe, and in his veins there was the keening of a thousand Irish warriors. He was shouting in his Gaelic now, daring the French to have at him, and the leading Frenchmen dared not.
Harper was six feet four, a giant, and had muscles like a mainmast’s cables. He did not attack cautiously, feeling for his enemy’s weakness, but screamed his challenge at the full run. The axe took two men with its first blow then Harper turned the blade as though it weighed less than a sword, brought it back, blade dripping blood, while his voice, chanting its ancient language, drove the Frenchmen backwards.
A French captain, eager for glory and knowing that the ramp must be taken, lunged, and the axe-blade slit his belly open to the rain. Harper screamed triumph, defying the French, daring them to come to challenge his blade. He stopped a few feet from the bottom of the ramp, victorious, and the rain dripped pink from the broad-bladed axe that he held in his right hand. He laughed at the French.
‘Sergeant!’ Sharpe bellowed. ‘Patrick!’
The longboats, at last, were pushing back to the shore.
‘Patrick!’ Sharpe cupped his hands. ‘Come back!’
Harper shouldered the axe. He turned, disdaining to run, and walked slowly up the stone ramp to where Frederickson waited. He turned there and stared down into the courtyard. The officer with the percussion pistol, its barrel charged with powder from a dry horn, slipped a percussion cap over the gun’s nipple, but Calvet, who recognized bravery when he saw it, shook his head. That Rifleman, Calvet thought, should be in the Imperial Guard.
‘Citadels!’ Sharpe’s shout was sudden in the odd silence that followed Harper’s lone attack. ‘Retreat! Retreat!’
The Riflemen who had guarded the extremities of the west wall scrambled from their strongholds and ran to the ladders.
Calvet, seeing it, knew his enemy was finished. ‘Charge!’
‘Back! Back! Back!’ Sharpe pushed his men away. Now the French could have the fort, but now came the worst moment, the difficult moment, the end of Sharpe’s battle and the race for the boats.
The Riflemen had no time to queue at the ladders, instead they jumped from the walls and fell headlong in the sand. Sharpe waited, standing in one of the embrasures with his sword drawn. Harper came to his side but Sharpe snarled at him to go.
The French charged over the bodies of the dead. They wanted revenge, but found an empty rampart. Empty but for the one officer, sword drawn, whose face was like death. That face checked them for a few seconds, enough to let Sharpe’s men scramble towards the sea’s edge.
Then Sharpe turned and jumped.
The landing knocked all the breath from him. He pitched forward, rifle falling from his shoulder, and his face hit the wet sand.
A hand grabbed his collar and hauled him up. Harper’s voice shouted, ‘Run!’
Sharpe’s mouth was filled with gritty sand. He spat. He stumbled on the body of one of the Frenchmen dumped on this strip of sand the day before, sprawled, then ran again. His shako was gone. Frenchmen were standing on the ramparts above while to his right, from the north, the cavalry appeared.
The two longboats, oars rising and falling with painful slowness, inched towards the small breaking waves of the channel’s beach. The first Riflemen were in the water, wading towards the boats, reaching for them.
Cornelius Killick, in the leading boat, bellowed an order and Sharpe saw the oars back, saw the clumsy boats swing, and he knew that Killick was turning the craft so that the wider sterns would face the shore.
‘Form line!’ Frederickson was shouting.
Sharpe swerved towards the shout, pawing sand from his eyes. Thirty Riflemen were bumping into a crude line at the very edge of the sea. Sharpe and Harper joined it.
‘Front rank kneel! Present!’ Frederickson, as if on a battlefield, faced the cavalry with two ranks that bristled with blades. The leading horseman, an officer, leaned from his saddle to swing his sabre, but the light blade clanged along the sword bayonets like a child’s stick dragged on iron palings.
‘Back! Back!’ Sharpe shouted it.
The small line marched backwards, step by step, into the sea. Waves drove at their calves, their thighs, and the shock of the cold water reached for their groins.
Horsemen spurred into the sea. The horses, frightened by the blades and waves, reared.
‘Come on, you bastards!’ Killick shouted. ‘Swim!’
‘Break ranks!’ Sharpe shouted it. ‘Go!’ He stayed as rearguard. His rifle encumbered him and he let it drop into the water.
A horseman swung a sabre at Sharpe and the Rifleman’s long sword, used with both Sharpe’s hands, broke the man’s forearm. The Frenchman hissed with pain, dropped his sabre, then his horse jerked back towards dry land. Another horseman was twisting his sabre’s point in a Rifleman’s neck. There was blood, splashes, and more yellow-teethed horses plunging into the foam. Harper, still holding the axe, swung it at the horseman who sheered clumsily away while the body of a Rifleman was tugged by the tide. Harper dragged the body towards the boats, not knowing that the man was already dead.
The infantry had jumped from the ramparts and shouted at the cavalry to make way. Sharpe, teeth snarling, dared them to come. He taunted them. He stepped towards them, wanting one of them to try, just one.
‘Sir!’ a voice shouted from behind. ‘Sir!’
Sharpe stepped backwards and, seeing it, the French attacked.
A sergeant led them. He was old in war, toughened by years of campaigning, and he knew the Englishman would lunge.
Sharpe lunged. The Frenchman jerked his musket aside, parrying, and bellowed his victory as he thrust forward.
He was still shouting as Sharpe’s sword, which had been twisted over the bayonet’s stab, punctured his belly. Sharpe turned the blade, pushing, and the blood spewed into the breaking foam as the blade seemed to be swallowed by the big belly. Sharpe stepped back, jerked the sword, and the blade came free in a welter of new blood.
‘Sir!’
He went backwards. Another horseman drove into the water and Sharpe swung his blade at the horse’s head, it reared, then a man came from his other side, an officer in a darker uniform, and Sharpe turned, parried a clumsy thrust, and drew his sword back for the killing thrust.
‘Not him! Not him!’ Killick shouted it.
Sharpe checked his thrust.
Lassan, knowing that he would not die on this day of rain and savagery, lowered his sword into the water. ‘Go.’
Sharpe went. He turned and plunged further into the sea. The longboats were already pulling away. Men clung to the transom of the nearest boat while other men, safely in the craft, reached hands and rifles towards him.
A pistol bullet spat in a plume beside Sharpe’s face. He was up to his chest now, half wading and half swimming, and he reached with his left hand, lunged, and caught an outstretched rifle barrel.
‘Pull!’ Killick shouted. ‘Pull!’
A last cavalryman charged into the sea,
but an oarblade, slapped down on to the water, frightened the horse. The French, their muskets made useless by rain, could only watch.
Sharpe clung to the rifle with his left hand. The weapon’s foresight dug into his palm. The sword in his right hand was dragging him down, as was the heavy scabbard. He kicked with his feet, water slopped into his mouth and he gagged.
‘Pull! Pull! Pull!’ Killick’s voice roared over the clanking of the Thuella’s windlass that dragged the anchor clear of the channel’s silt. The sails were dropping into the small wind and the Thuella was stirring in the water.
The boats bumped on the ship’s side and men pushed the Riflemen towards the deck. Someone took Sharpe’s collar and hauled him dripping and heavy into the longboat. ‘Up!’
A ladder was built into the ship’s side. Sharpe, unsteady in the rocking longboat, thrust his sword into his scabbard that squirted water as the blade went home. He reached for the ladder, climbed, then American hands hauled him on to the Thuella’s deck. He had swallowed sea-water and, with a sudden spasm, he vomited it on to the scrubbed deck. He gasped for breath, vomited more, then lay, chest heaving, in the scuppers.
He heard cheers, German and Spanish and British cheers, even American cheers, and Sharpe twisted, looked through a gunport, and saw the coastline already sliding past. French gunners were wrestling the twelve-pounders through wet sand, but too late and to no avail. The longboats were being towed at ropes’ ends, the Thuella’s wet sails were filling with a new, easterly breeze, and the French were left behind, impotent.
They had escaped.
EPILOGUE
Cavalry was nervous on wet fields. French horsemen would summon courage, ride a few yards forward, then swerve away from a threatened British volley. Unseen artillery, firing at unseen targets, punched the drizzling air, while infantry, shivering in the February cold, waited for orders.
Sharpe’s force, pushing four handcarts loaded with wounded, came to the skirmish from the north. A squadron of French cavalry saw them, wheeled right, then drew curved sabres for the charge.
‘Two ranks! Fix swords!’ Sharpe sensed the enemy would not press the charge home, but he went through the dutiful motions and the enemy officer, seeing the waiting bayonets, and not knowing that there was not a single loaded musket or rifle in the twin ranks, dutifully withdrew. The battle, if battle it was, seemed too scattered and tentative for a cavalry charge that might leave the horsemen exposed to a sudden counter-attack. Besides, Sharpe could see that the French were dreadfully outnumbered, outnumbered as heavily as he had been at the Teste de Buch. The enemy, scarce more than a heavy picquet line, was everywhere being pushed back before a burgeoning number of British and Portuguese troops.
A mile ahead there was a sudden, rushing sound like a huge wave breaking on a beach and Sharpe saw a rocket rise into the air and plummet towards the east. It had been over a year since he had seen the Rocket Artillery and he supposed it was as inaccurate as ever. Yet somehow the odd sight made him feel at home. ‘Remember those?’ he asked Frederickson.
Sweet William, who had been with Sharpe when the rockets were first used against the astonished French, nodded. ‘Indeed I do.’
A mounted infantry captain, red coat bright, galloped up the track towards Sharpe. His voice, as he curbed his spirited horse, was peremptory with a staff officer’s vicarious authority. ‘Who the devil are you? What are you doing here?’
‘My name is Sharpe, my rank is Major, and you call me “sir”.’
The captain stared with incredulity, first at Sharpe, then at the dirty, draggled mixture of Riflemen and Marines who stared dully towards the rocket’s smoking trail. ‘Sharpe?’ The captain seemed to have lost his voice. ‘But you’re ...’ he checked. ‘You’ve come from the north, sir?’
‘Yes ’ It seemed too difficult to explain it all; to explain how an American privateer captain had agreed to rescue a garrison and to land that garrison as close as he dared to the British lines. To explain how the Thuella had flogged her way south through a wet night, and how Riflemen and Marines had thumped the schooner’s pump-handles till their muscles burned in the cold, or how Sharpe, his turn at the pumps over, had drunk brandy with an American enemy in a small cabin and promised, that when this damn fool war was done, to drink even more in a place called Marblehead. Or to explain how, in the rain-misted dawn, Cornelius Killick had landed Sharpe’s men north of the Adour estuary.
‘I wish I could take you further,’ the American had said.
‘You can’t.’ A strange sail had been spotted to the south, merely a scrap of ghostly white above a blurred horizon, but the sail meant danger to the Thuella and so Killick had turned for the shore.
Now Sharpe, marching south, had met British troops north of the river which could only mean that Elphinstone had built his bridge. ‘Who are you?’ Sharpe asked the staff captain.
‘First Division, sir.’
Sharpe nodded towards another racing plume of rocket smoke. ‘The Adour?’
‘Yes, sir.’
They were safe. There would be surgeons for the wounded and a precious bridge across the river; a bridge leading south to St Jean de Luz and to Jane.
The bridge was there. The miraculous bridge, the bridge that only a clever man could build, a bridge to outflank the French Army, a bridge of boats.
The bridge was made from chasse-marées. A whole fleet of the luggers was moored side-by-side in the wide river mouth and, stretching from deck to deck and supported by vast cables, was a wide roadway of planks. Over the bridge marched red-coated Companies, Company after Company, an Army outflanking an enemy and going further into France. The Divisional headquarters, the staff officer said, was still south of the river.
Sharpe took his men to the northern bank where a surgeon had erected a tent and waited for customers. ‘Best if you wait here,’ Sharpe said to Frederickson.
‘Yes, sir.’
Sharpe looked at his Marines and Riflemen, at Harper and Minver and Rossner and Palmer and all the men who had fought as no men should be asked to fight. ‘I’ll come back for you,’ he said lamely.
Sharpe left them. He walked against the tide of the invading Division, edging his way across the plank bridge that rose and fell with the small waves of the estuary. It was for this bridge that his men had taken the Teste de Buch. They had drawn the enemy to the wrong place so that the bridge could be built undisturbed.
The bridge was nearly a quarter-mile in length and had to resist the massive rise and fall of ocean tides. Seamen, under naval officers, manned windlasses that governed the anchors of the moored boats. The windlasses balanced the long bridge against the currents of river and ocean and against the vast, surging tide that swept into the Adour. The bridge, guarded by a fleet of brigs, was a miracle of engineering.
And the man who had built it waited on the southern sea-wall where a vast capstan, built into a cage of wooden beams, could compensate the roadway’s cables against the estuary’s tidefall. Colonel Elphinstone, standing on the capstan’s platform, watched the dirty, blood- and powder-stained Rifleman approach. The expression on Elphinstone’s face was one of sheer disbelief that slowly turned to pleasure. ‘He said you were captured!’
The small rain stung Sharpe’s face as he looked up to the colonel. ‘Who, sir?’
‘Bampfylde.’ Elphinstone’s eyes took in the blood on Sharpe’s thigh and head. ‘You escaped!’
‘We all did, sir. Every last goddamn man that Bampfylde abandoned. Except for the dead, of course. There were twenty-seven dead, sir.’ Sharpe paused, remembering that more had died since his last count. Two of the wounded had died on the Thuella and had been slid into a grey sea. And Sharpe supposed that the American Rifleman, Taylor, must be numbered with the dead, even though he lived and was even now sailing westwards.
‘Maybe thirty, sir. But the French sent a brigade against us, and we fought the bastards to a standstill, sir.’ Sharpe heard the anger in his own voice and knew that this honest man did not de
serve it. ‘I’m sorry, sir. I need a horse.’
‘You need a rest.’ Elphinstone, with surprising agility for a heavy, middle-aged man, swung himself down the cage of beams. ‘A brigade, you say?’
‘A demi-brigade,’ Sharpe said. ‘But with artillery.’
‘Good God Almighty.’
Sharpe turned to watch a Battalion of Portuguese infantry scramble down the sea-wall towards the rope-held planks. ‘I see Bampfylde brought you the chasse-marées. The bastard did something right.’
‘He says he took the fort!’ Elphinstone said. ‘He said you went inland and were defeated.’
‘Then he’s a poxed, lying bastard. We took the fort. Then we went inland, beat the Frogs by the river, and came back to find the fort abandoned. We beat them there, too.’
‘Not too loud, Sharpe,’ Elphinstone said, “ware right flank.‘
Sharpe twisted round. Yards down the river bank was a party of some two dozen officers, both Army and Navy, who had come to see this prodigy; a floating bridge that crossed an estuary. With them were ladies who had been invited to witness the far smoke of battle. Gleaming carriages were parked on a marshy road two hundred yards to the rear. ‘Is that Bampfylde?’
‘Gently now, Sharpe!’ Elphinstone said.
‘Bugger Bampfylde.’ Sharpe was streaked with mud, spattered with dried blood, salt-stained, and scorched with powder burns. He walked along the sea-wall’s narrow path towards the spectators who clustered about two tripod-mounted telescopes. A spatter of applause and admiration sounded as another rocket arched towards the grey clouds.
Two naval lieutenants blocked Sharpe’s progress. One of them, seeing the soldier’s tattered, dirty state, suggested that Sharpe make a detour. ‘Go down there.’ The naval officer pointed to the swampy mud inland of the wall.
‘Get out of my way. Move!’ The sudden command startled all of the spectators. A woman dropped her umbrella and gave a small scream at Sharpe’s bloody, dirty appearance, but Captain Horace Bampfylde, explaining at length how he had captured a fortress and brought these chasse-marées south to help out the Army, fell into a terrified silence.