Sharpes command, p.18
Sharpe's Command, page 18
‘Or turn a gunner into paste,’ Harris said wolfishly.
El Sacerdote’s men would assemble on the hillside above the encampment, but to the west so they could approach on the angle that was not covered by any of the huge twenty-four-pounder siege guns. There was a four-pounder in that angle, but Sharpe suspected the barrage of masonry would dissuade the artillerymen from manning the small cannon. ‘How will I know when to stop chucking rocks, Mister Sharpe?’ Harris asked.
‘When I tell you to.’
‘And that will be?’
‘When we reach the embrasure.’
‘Ah, right,’ Harris said.
‘And don’t mess it up, Harris. I don’t want my skull crushed by a rock.’
‘That would be a crying shame, Mister Sharpe.’
‘It would, Harris, it would. And one last thing, try not to hit the huts.’
‘The huts, Mister Sharpe?’
‘The women are there and they’re probably not volunteers.’
‘Spare the women – got it, Mister Sharpe. Good idea, sir.’ Harris paused, looking over Sharpe’s shoulder, ‘Company coming, sir.’
Sharpe turned to see Major Hogan approaching on horseback. He went to meet him. ‘Sir!’
‘No need for “sir”,’ Hogan said cheerfully. ‘I just came to see how you were faring.’ He dismounted and patted his horse’s neck. ‘Sorry I wasn’t with you when you met Daddy, but I went with a cavalry patrol to see if any Frog bastards are coming to reinforce the forts.’
‘And are they?’
‘None from the south that we could see. Of course there might be men coming from the north, but we don’t have time to worry about that. And General Howard wants to know when you’ve put the guns here out of action. Think of me as your messenger to take him the good news.’
‘A very welcome messenger,’ Sharpe said. He had been worrying how he was to send a message to General Howard. The obvious answer was to send a partisan on horseback, but a nervous sentry could well shoot at a man on horseback whose English was foreign or non-existent.
‘Daddy Hill tells me you’re starting tonight’s dance?’
‘We are.’
‘And earlier than he’d like?’
‘Midnight, probably. Maybe later, but before dawn.’
‘And how on earth did you persuade him of that?’
‘Teresa did.’
Hogan looked at Teresa and smiled. ‘You are a cunning bugger, Richard, and a lucky one.’
Hogan walked to the parapet and craned over. He stared for a few seconds, then pulled back. ‘That’s a nasty set of guns waiting for you.’
‘We have our own artillery, sir.’
‘You do?’ Hogan sounded surprised, then followed Sharpe’s gaze to look at the masonry blocks stacked beside the parapet. He smiled. ‘Cunning, lucky and very nasty. Won’t they be expecting that?’
‘I would,’ Sharpe said, ‘but what can they do?’
‘Umbrellas?’ Hogan said.
‘All they can do to avoid it,’ Sharpe went on, ‘is either get the hell out of the encampment now, or else try to drive me from the bridge.’
Hogan took another look over the parapet. ‘And they seem to be doing neither.’
‘They haven’t thought enough about it,’ Sharpe said.
‘I’m tempted to ride now and tell Howard he needn’t worry about those guns,’ Hogan said, ‘but I shall do my duty and stay to see the evil deed done.’
‘Is that why you were sent? To make sure I did my duty?’
‘Generals are very touchy beasts, Richard, nervous as hell and needing much reassurance. Except for the Peer, of course. But doubtless one day you’ll be the same! Enjoy the night! But there is one suggestion?’
‘Of course.’
‘Dropping that masonry is a wondrously vicious idea, Richard. But if you were to approach the fort under a flag of truce I’ve a mind they might surrender. And while you’re down there a demonstration of one falling rock would surely persuade them?’
‘Are you ordering me to do that?’
‘I would never order you to relinquish a fight, Richard. But think about it. You’ll suffer no casualties and still win the fort. A wise man once said that the best way to win a war is to do it without fighting.’
Sharpe thought briefly. ‘How far is it from here to the French frontier?’
‘Oh Lord,’ Hogan was momentarily surprised by the question. ‘At a rough guess, Richard, I’d say around four hundred miles?’
‘And we have to fight our way through all four hundred to drive the buggers out of Spain. And I want them terrified of facing us. Every time they see a green jacket or a red coat, I want them scared witless.’
‘I won’t argue with that,’ Hogan said, ‘but think on it, Richard. Why lose men in an action you can win without bloodshed?’
‘I’ll think,’ Sharpe said, and tried to forget the conversation. Yet part of him suspected Hogan had been right, that he could achieve a bloodless capture of the encampment. So why not follow Hogan’s advice? Even the most rabid Frenchman would understand the horror that would ensue if half a ton of masonry was tipped onto his position and, given the choice, would capitulate rather than suffer. So why not offer that choice? Because, Sharpe knew, he wanted to tip the stone over the parapet. He wanted to unleash the weapon. Hogan had even offered to negotiate the French surrender himself, but Sharpe had turned him down. He wanted to fight.
‘And if they surrender,’ Teresa said brutally after Sharpe had told her of Hogan’s suggestion, ‘you’ll have over a hundred prisoners, and what will you do with them?’
‘Keep them quiet,’ Sharpe said.
‘Not while the priest and I are here,’ she snarled. ‘They will all die.’
‘La Aguja is right.’ El Sacerdote had been listening. ‘I do not take prisoners, though I do attempt to send them to heaven rather than to hell.’
‘They deserve hell,’ Teresa said.
‘And those that do,’ El Sacerdote said calmly, ‘will go there. The few who might be good men will wait for us in heaven. The choice is not ours, but belongs to God.’
Sharpe sighed, knowing he could be facing an argument. ‘But, Padre, tonight you fight with the British army, and we do believe in taking prisoners. If you massacre them, the bloody French will start treating us the same way. Whatever prisoners we take tonight are mine to deal with.’
‘We shall respect that,’ El Sacerdote said to Sharpe’s relief. The priest saw Teresa’s reaction. ‘My dear,’ he said in English, ‘we must respect Major Sharpe’s orders. The French take their British enemies as prisoners and we must not change that.’
‘They don’t take us prisoner,’ Teresa objected, plucking at her red scarf.
‘You are right, my dear,’ El Sacerdote said sympathetically, ‘but tonight the final judgement will be left to God, not to us.’
Sharpe waited until it was full dark, then led his eleven riflemen out of his makeshift fort and along the road. The clouds had reached the east and they were in their shadow, though there were star-filled gaps where the half-moon’s light edged the clouds a dull silver. Sharpe knew other men were moving through the night; thousands of men following the sheep tracks over the hills, ready to assemble in the woods above Fort Napoleon, while others were preparing to position the cannon to face Miravete Castle. Colonel Aubert, whoever he was, must know the British were close, but had no idea what a torrent of fire and steel he would face in the dawn.
Sharpe followed the road that first led southwards, then looped back north to the riverbank. The big loop was necessary to carry the road from the low ground at the river’s edge to the approach to the bridge, which was over a hundred feet higher. It was a gravel road that crunched beneath the riflemen’s feet so Sharpe led them onto the grass, yet still thought the noise was loud. He paused where the road turned. ‘We’re going down the road as far as the cannon the bastards abandoned,’ he said in a loud whisper. ‘Keep off the road, go softly and no talking.’
‘So it’s not a garden ornament?’ Harper asked quietly.
‘Hush, Pat.’
They went very slowly. Hagman led, claiming he had the best eyesight, and Sharpe was a pace or two behind the old poacher. The half-moon emerged from the clouds after some minutes and bathed the landscape with a silvery light, but by then Sharpe and his men were far enough down the road to be in the shadow cast by the high embankment leading to the bridge. He nevertheless stopped and crouched.
He could hear men above and behind him and knew it was El Sacerdote’s partisans following the road before going further west to the place where they would launch their attack, though Sharpe suspected he and his riflemen would be sufficient if the bombardment of masonry did its job. He tried to imagine the horror of being beneath the falling stones, then wondered if Hogan had been right and he should have offered whoever commanded the French beneath the bridge a chance to surrender.
He started forward again, keeping to the left of the road. There was just enough light for him to see the big box-shape of the abandoned limber, some two hundred paces from the French encampment. He moved towards it, then tripped on one of the bodies of the men who had been dragging the gun uphill. He fell and the stock of his rifle clanged against a tin cup that had been hanging from the dead Frenchman’s pack. He froze, sure the noise must have alerted the enemy. He also cursed himself silently. He had demanded stealth and silence from his riflemen, then had caused the loudest noise of the night himself. His men had gone still, and all Sharpe could now hear were mutters from the French defenders and the crackle of a watch-fire burning in the encampment. None of the enemy sounded alarmed, so he picked himself up and, using the rifle to feel his way across the dark, corpse-littered ground, made his way to the cannon itself.
‘Buggers are asleep,’ Pat Harper appeared beside Sharpe.
‘Don’t count on it, Pat.’
‘We’re going to fire this thing?’ Harper asked, excitement evident in his whisper.
‘If we can. Feel around for the portfire, probably in the limber.’
Sharpe had always planned to capture the abandoned four-pounder and use it against its previous owners. The appeal of that idea had been one of the reasons to reject Hogan’s suggestion of a negotiated truce. The French had fled from the gun and made no effort to recover the weapon, not even to take away the men killed by his riflemen, and Sharpe had seen how the abandoned gun was more or less pointing straight at the encampment’s southern face where the big twenty-four-pounder and its two accompanying four-pounders stood behind their embrasures. He flinched as a slight creak sounded as Harper raised the limber’s lid. The limber would contain ammunition and, Sharpe hoped, the tools needed to keep the gun serviceable; the wadhook, sponge, priming wire, reliever and searcher. He felt along the black-painted barrel and, as he expected, found the vent had a firing tube already installed. He had half expected it because he was certain the French would have loaded the gun before attempting to drag it uphill. Once in position to fire at his men, the gun would have taken a few seconds to load and his riflemen could have turned those few seconds into a massacre of the gunners. It made much more sense to drag the ready-loaded cannon almost into position, turn it, then heave it forward until the barrel just cleared the small rise in the road facing the bridge. One touch of the portfire to the firing tube and the cannon would have lacerated his men and recoiled far enough for it to be reloaded safe from rifle fire. But what, he wondered, had the gunners loaded into the barrel? He drew his sword-bayonet and clipped it onto his rifle, then went to the muzzle and slid the rifle into the cannon. The tip of the bayonet hit whatever was loaded and he moved it carefully to explore the shape. Roundshot. He could feel the curve of the cannon ball.
So the cannon was ready to fire, but loaded with the wrong ammunition. Presumably the French had thought to batter down his wall with their first shot. Sharpe stepped back to the limber. ‘Can’t find a bloody thing, sir,’ Harper muttered.
‘It’ll be fine, Pat, there’s already a firing tube, we just have to light it. Keep the lads away from the gun.’
A canister round was easy to find in the dark, the shape alone giving it away. Sharpe heaved one round from its slot in the limber and carried it to the cannon. He felt along the tin cylinder to find the wooden shoe, the sabot, strapped to its base and put that end into the cannon’s barrel before using his rifle’s brass butt as the rammer. The canister made a scraping noise as he slid it home, then Sharpe rammed it hard against the waiting roundshot. Loading canister on top of roundshot was common practice, and at two hundred yards would provide a blizzard of musket balls around the heavy cannon ball.
‘We’re ready,’ he whispered to Harper, ‘have the lads put flints in their rifles.’
‘Let me fire the cannon, sir, please.’
‘Flints first,’ Sharpe said, amused at Harper’s eagerness. He stooped to the cannon’s rear and saw it was pointing more or less where he wanted it; towards where the glow from the French watch-fire illuminated the cannons’ embrasures. The problem was that the cannon’s trail was still attached to the limber. If he detached it the trail would drop to rest on the hillside and the cannon would be aimed much too high and Sharpe had no idea how to change the barrel’s elevation. On British cannons there was a big elevating screw beneath the breech, and he could feel something similar beneath the four-pounder. The threads of the screw were as broad as his thumb and thickly greased, but he had no clue how the gadget was turned or even if it could be turned far enough to lower the gun’s muzzle. For the first time since coming to the Tagus he wished Lieutenant Love was with him, the Lieutenant would know exactly how to aim the gun, but Love had joined the other artillerymen who would be arriving with General Hill. But how difficult could it be? He wiped the grease from his fingers and decided to leave the cannon attached to the limber; uncoupling it would make too much noise and he doubted he could lower the barrel before the enemy’s canister blew them all away. The four-pounder’s recoil would smash the limber into splinters, but he only wanted one shot from the gun and leaving it attached to the limber meant it was pointing more or less where he needed it.
There was one last task before he tried to fire the gun. He leaned over to the firing tube that had been inserted into the vent. By touch it seemed to be made of thin metal, presumably filled with finely mealed powder. He pushed it down, feeling the tube’s lower end grind into the coarser powder of the charge, then used his powder horn to pour still more powder around the vent. He had little faith in the notoriously bad French gunpowder and wanted some of his own to make certain the gun fired.
‘Rifles are loaded, flints in place.’ Harper came back to Sharpe’s side.
‘In that case you can fire the bloody cannon,’ he murmured to Harper, and crouched beside the gun. ‘Shelter me,’ he said, and hissed for two more men to crouch with him so their bodies provided a shield which would hide the inevitable light from the enemy down the slope. ‘I don’t know if this will work,’ he muttered, ‘but we must try.’
He laid his rifle flat, then opened his tinderbox and took out the small crumpled piece of dried linen which was the kindling. He threaded the linen onto the tip of the rifle’s sword-bayonet by feel, then struck the flint against the steel just beneath the fragile cloth. ‘Keep well away from the gun wheel,’ he muttered to Harper, ‘just reach over and put the fire on the powder.’ It took three strikes of the flint for the fire to catch and flare up. ‘Quickly, Pat! Before the buggers see the light and fire at us. Move to the sides, lads!’ Sharpe scrambled away from the gun, frightened that the burning linen would invite an opening volley from the French.
Harper lifted the rifle. The tip of the sword-bayonet was now a small burning mass of linen which the Irishman stretched towards the cannon’s breech. The small flames threatened to die, but provided just enough light to see the powder heaped round the vent. ‘Quickly!’ Sharpe hissed. The linen was almost burned through, but then a smouldering patch fell from the bayonet onto the powder.
The powder hissed and crackled, burning bright. Sharpe was about to curse because the gun did not fire and then the fire streaked down the tube and the charge in the barrel exploded. ‘God save Ireland!’ Harper said, though no one could hear him.
Back in Truxillo the young artillery officer had observed that the French had stopped using the four-pounder because it did not make enough noise to scare the enemy. To Sharpe that sounded ridiculous, because the explosion was huge, the noise deafening, loud enough to scare the devil in his lair. His ears rang, but he distinctly heard the clang of canister glancing off the cannon barrels in the French defences, though he could see nothing of the shot’s effect because the ground in front of the cannon was now shrouded in thick pungent smoke. The gun itself had crashed backwards and, because the cannon’s trail was not resting on the ground, but instead was latched to the two-wheeled limber, the gun had shattered the limber, splintering the ammunition chest into fragments. Sharpe’s ears were ringing, but he gradually became aware that his men were cheering. ‘Stop your noise!’ he shouted. ‘And open fire!’
He took his rifle back from an excited Harper, cocked it, then remembered he had not put a flint back in the doghead jaws. His men were snapping shots through the smoke towards the French encampment and Sharpe, as he groped for a flint, feared that the big twenty-four-pounder and its two companion guns would retaliate. ‘Spread out and lie down!’
His intent was to charge the encampment, but he wanted to be sure the enemy cannons were out of action first and the smoke cloud was reluctant to fade in the still night. Then he heard the screams.
