Sharpe 18 - Sharpe's Siege (14 page)

Behind the cavalry, squealing as such waggons always squealed, the heavy transport waggons lumbered on the roadway. Each was hauled by eight oxen. Behind the waggons were the infantry, and behind the infantry the two carriages that had their windows and curtains tight closed against the cold.

Sharpe pushed his telescope back into his pocket. In the beech wood, he knew, Frederickson's killers would be sliding loaded rifles forward. This was like shooting fish in a barrel, for the enemy, deep in their homeland, would be marching with unloaded muskets and absent minds. They would be thinking of sweethearts left behind, of the next night's billet, and of the enemy waiting at the far, far end of the long road.

A French cavalry officer, brass helmet shielded with canvas and with a black cloak covering his gaudy uniform, suddenly swung up into his saddle. He spurred ahead of the convoy, doubtless drawn to the town beyond the river where wineshops would be open and fires burning in brick hearths.

“Damn.” Sharpe said it under his breath. The man could not help but see the ambush and he would spring it fifty yards too soon. But nothing went as planned in war, and the disadvantage must be taken, then ignored. “Deal with the bugger, Patrick. Wait till he sees us.”

“Yes, sir.” Harper thumbed back the cock of his rifle.

Sharpe looked at Palmer. “On my order we advance. Two files.”

“Yes, sir.”

“No shouting, no cheering.” French and Spanish troops cheered as they advanced, but the silence of a British attack was an eerie and unsettling thing. The Marines, white-faced, crouched low. One crossed himself, while another, his eyes shut, seemed to be praying silently.

The French officer kicked his horse into a trot. The man had a cigar which dribbled smoke, and his broad, open face looked cheerfully at the sodden, misty countryside. He glanced at the farm, bent to pluck his cloak loose of his stirrup leather where it had wrapped itself as he mounted, then saw the red coats and white crossbelts where the Marines were concealed in the hedge-shadow that was still white with frost.

He was so astonished that he kept coming, mouth opening to shout an inquiry, and when he was still some fifteen yards short of the hedgerow, Harper shot him.

The rifle bullet struck a cuirass hidden by the cloak. The ball, squarely hitting the steel, punctured the armour and deflected upwards, through the Frenchman's throat and into his brain. Blood, bright as dawn, fountained from the man's open mouth.

“In line!” Sharpe bellowed. “Advance!”

The horse, terrified, reared.

The Frenchman, still incongruously holding his cigar, toppled backwards in the saddle. He was dead, but his knees still gripped the horse's flanks and, when the beast plunged its forefeet back down, the corpse nodded forward in a grotesque obeisance to the Marines who were scrambling from the ditch to form a double-line across the road.

“Forward!”

The horse turned, eyes showing white, and the dead Frenchman seemed to grin a bloodshot grin at Sharpe before the horse whirled the ghastly face away. The body slumped to the left, fell, but the man's boot was fast caught in the stirrup and the corpse was dragged, bouncing, behind the bolting horse.

“Hold your fire!” Sharpe cautioned the Marines. He wanted no nervous man to waste a musket shot. He drew his sword. “Double!”

The remaining cavalry had stopped, appalled. The waggons, with their vast weight, still trundled forward. The infantry seemed oblivious of the ambush's opening shot.

The Marines, their breath misting, ran up the road that was marked with great splashes of blood. Sharpe's boot crushed the dead cavalry officer's fallen cigar.

Two cavalrymen hauled carbines from their saddle holsters. “Halt!” Sharpe shouted.

He stood to one side of the road. “Front rank kneel!” That was not entirely necessary, but a kneeling rank always steadied raw troops and Sharpe knew that these Marines, for all their willingness, had small experience in land fighting. “Captain Palmer? Fire low, if you please.”

Palmer, a naval cutlass in his hand, seemed startled at Sharpe's sudden courtesy in allowing him to give the order to fire. He cleared his throat, measured the distance to the enemy, saw how the handful of cavalry were already climb-ing into saddles and spreading on to the verges, and shouted the order. Tire!"

Fifty musket balls crashed out of fifty muzzles.

“Reload!” a sergeant shouted. Lieutenant Fytch, a heavy brass-hilted pistol in his right hand, jiggled up and down on the balls of his feet with excitement.

Harper had gone right to clear the filthy, yellowish cloud of musket smoke. He saw six horses down, legs kicking on the roadway's stone. Two men had fallen, while two others crawled towards the beechwood. An ox from the leading waggon was bellowing with pain.

A carbine banged, then another. Far to the convoy's rear the French infantry were hurrying down the verges, officers shouting. The ox-waggons, brake blocks squealing, were juddering to a clumsy halt.

Harper was looking for officers. He saw one, a cavalryman with drawn sabre, who was bellowing at his men to form line and charge.

It took Harper twenty seconds to reload the Baker Rifle. Another Marine volley hammered forward, this one doing less damage because the redcoats, unsighted by their musket smoke, fired blind. Harper had the rifle at his shoulder, the officer in his sights, and he pulled the trigger.

Black powder flared, flaming debris lashed his cheek, then he unslung the seven-barrelled gun and jumped sideways again. The officer was turning away, hand clasped to a shoulder, but a half dozen cavalrymen were coming forward, sabres drawn and spurs slashing back at thin flanks.

“Ware cavalry, sir!” Harper shouted to Palmer then, hearing the wooden ramrods of the Marines still rattling in barrels, he fired his volley gun.

The impact threw him backwards, but the noise of the seven-barrelled gun, like a small cannon, seemed to stun the tiny battlefield. Two cavalrymen were snatched from their saddles, a horse swivelled to throw its rider, and the cavalry's small threat was finished. Then, beyond the wounded horses and the scatter of the day's first dead, the leading two Companies of French infantry appeared in front of the waggons. Their muskets were tipped with bayonets.

Frederickson opened fire.

The volley, stinging from the flank, flayed into the first infantry ranks, and Frederickson was bellowing commands as though he held more men under orders. The French were glancing nervously towards the beechwood as Captain Palmer loosed his third volley.

The mist remnants were thick with smoke now. The stench of blood mingled with powder-stink.

Sharpe had joined Harper. Minver's men, slower to deploy, were firing from the left.

“Stop loading!” Sharpe shouted at the Marines. “Front rank up! Fix swords!” The headache was forgotten now in the greater urgencies of life and death.

“Bayonets, sir,” Harper muttered. Only Green Jackets, who carried the sword bayonet, used the order to fix swords.

“Bayonets! Bayonets! Captain Palmer! I'll trouble you to go forward!”

Sharpe could sense this whole battle now, could feel it in his instincts and he knew it was won. There was an exultation, an excitement, a feeling that no other experience on God's earth could bring. It could bring death, too, and wounds so vile that a man would shudder in his sleep to dream of them, but war also gave this supreme feeling of imposing the will on an enemy and taking success in the face of disaster.

The French outnumbered Sharpe by three or four to one, but the French were dazed, disorganized, and shaken. Sharpe's men were keyed to the fight, ready for it, and if he struck now, if he behaved as though he had already won, then this half stunned enemy would break.

Sharpe looked at the Marines. “Advance. At the double! Advance!”

The cavalry was gone, destroyed by the seven-barrelled gun and by Frederickson's sharpshooters. Dead and wounded horses lay in the fields, dropped by rifle-fire, and their surviving riders had fled to the safety of the waggons that offered some small shelter from the bullets. In front of the waggons a rabble of infantry was being shaken into line and Sharpe's Marines, coming from the smoke with muskets tipped with bayonets, charged them.

If the enemy held, Sharpe knew, then the Marines would be slaughtered.

If the enemy held, then each Marine would be faced with three or four bayonets.

It would only take one enemy officer, one of those blue-coated men on horseback, to survey Sharpe's feeble charge and the Marines were done for.

“Charge!” Sharpe shouted it as though the volume of his voice alone would breed extra men to face down the enemy line that, uneven though it was, bristled with blades.

,Fire!" Frederickson, good Frederickson, had understood all. He had formed his Company into ranks, taken them from the trees' cover and now, at sixty yards range, poured a controlled volley of rifle fire into the infantry's flank.

That volley, with Sharpe's stumbling charge, broke the French. Just as scared Frenchmen began to see the paucity of the attacking force, so another enemy appeared and another voice was shouting charge, and then the sight of the bayonets, as it so often did, engendered panic.

The French infantry, mostly young conscripts who had no stomach for a fight, broke and fled. An officer beat at them with the flat of his sabre, but the French were running backwards. The officer turned, drew a pistol, but a rifle bullet buried itself in his belly and he folded forward, eyes gaping, and one of Frederickson's Riflemen grasped the bridle as the officer fell sideways to the cold earth.

“Form at the first waggon's rear!” Sharpe yelled it to Palmer as they ran forward. The Marines' line was now broken by the necessity for men to step around the dead and dying on the ground. Harper, who could not bear to see an animal suffer, picked up a fallen French pistol and shot a wounded, screaming horse between the eyes.

A carbine, fired by a dismounted cavalryman, threw down a Marine. Minver's men shot the cavalryman, six bullets striking at once and flinging him down like a puppet that lay suddenly still and bloodied on the pale grass.

There were fugitives under the first waggon. One still had a musket and Sharpe, thinking it loaded, struck with his sword to knock it clear. The boy, terrified, screamed, but Sharpe had gone on, jumping blue-jacketed dead. Ahead, in a foul panic, a mass of infantry tumbled in pell mell retreat. An officer, emerging from a coach, shouted at them, and some, braver than the rest, slowed, turned, and formed a new line.

“Captain Frederickson!”

“I see them, sir!”

Sharpe ran behind the rear of a waggon. On this left side of the road, where Minver's men stayed in hiding, a full Company of French infantry was formed in three ranks. “60th!” Sharpe had to shout twice to Minver as Frederickson's volley drowned his first shout. “Flank attack! Flank attack!”

Palmer's Marines were panting. Some had reddened bayonets, and others stabbed at Frenchmen cowering beneath the heavy waggon, but Palmer and his sergeants pushed them into line and shouted at them to load muskets.

The French Company fired first.

The range was seventy yards, too long for muskets, but two Marines were down, a third was screaming, and the others still thrust with wooden ramrods at powder and bullets. Sharpe supposed the Marines used wooden ramrods because metal rods would rust at sea, then forgot the idle speculation as more enemy bullets thumped into the heavy timber of the waggons. Stragglers from the first Company had joined the ranks where French muskets tipped up as the enemy began to reload.

“Aim!” Palmer shouted.

“Hold your fire! Hold your fire!” Sharpe took station at the head of the Marines. He made his voice steady. There was a time to rouse men in battle and a time to calm them. “Marines will advance. At the march! Forward!” Sharpe was taking the Marines down the left flank of the waggons, leaving Frederickson to control the right side of the road.

Minver's Riflemen were showing themselves on this French flank, green-jacketed men who appeared from behind trees and farm buildings, men who worked forward in the skirmishing chain, each man covering his partner, and their fire nibbled at the flank of the French Company.

A French officer looked sideways, judging whether to turn a file to flick the Riflemen away with a controlled volley, then he looked forward to where the redcoats advanced.

This was no mad charge, meant to panic, but a slow, steady advance to show confidence. Sharpe wanted to close the range, he wanted this volley of musketry to kill. He watched the enemy's movements. Ramrods, new and bright-metalled, flashed as they were raised. He heard the scraping rattle as they plunged downwards into muskets held between clenched knees. “Marines! Halt!”

The boots of the men who advanced on the road crashed to attention. The sound seemed unnaturally loud.

Minver's men still fired, their bullets spinning constantly from the flank. Carbine bullets, fired by dismounted cavalrymen, buzzed past Sharpe. An ox, oblivious of the carnage around, staled on the road and the smell of the steam pricked at Sharpe's nostrils. “To your front! Aim!” Sharpe wanted this slow and sure. He wanted the Frenchmen to see the shape of their death before it came. He wanted them scared.

The Marine line seemed to take a quarter turn to the right as the muskets went into the shoulders. One or two men who had not yet cocked their pieces pulled back the flints and the clicks seemed ominous.

Sharpe walked to the flank of the Marine formation and raised his sword. Some of the French were priming their muskets, but most were staring nervously at the small line of redcoats who seemed so deliberate and savage. Sharpe let them wait, giving their imaginations time to torment them.

Harper came to stand alongside Sharpe. He had his rifle loaded, aimed, and he waited for the order. To Harper's eyes these Frenchmen were boys, the scrapings of a countryside to bring Napoleon's armies up to strength. These were not the moustached, experienced veterans who had died in the appalling Spanish battles, but conscripts dragged unwilling from school or farm to die in a cause that was doomed anyway.