Sharpe's Fury - 11 (37 page)

An Irishman’s bayonet was trapped in the ribs of a Frenchman. It would not come out and in desperation he pulled his trigger and was surprised that the weapon was loaded. The blast of gas and ball jerked the bayonet free. “In the belly!” the sergeant shouted, for a bayonet was far less likely to be trapped in an enemy’s stomach than in his ribs. Those officers still mounted were firing pistols over their men’s shakos. Men lunged, recovered, lunged again, and some were so battle-maddened that they did not care how they fought and just clubbed with their musket butts. “Rip it out, boy!” the sergeant shouted. “Don’t just prick the bastard! Do some damage! Lunge! Recover!”

They were the despised of England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. They were the drunks and the thieves, the scourings of gutters and jails. They wore the red coat because no one else wanted them, or because they were so desperate that they had no choice. They were the scum of Britain, but they could fight. They had always fought, but in the army they were taught how to fight with discipline. They discovered sergeants and officers who valued them. They punished them too, of course, and swore at them, and cursed them, and whipped their backs bloody and cursed them again, but valued them. They even loved them, and officers worth five thousand pounds a year were fighting alongside them now. The redcoats were doing what they did best, what they were paid a shilling a day less stoppages to do: they were killing.

The French advance was stopped. There was no edging forward now. Their front ranks were dying and the ranks behind were trying to escape the wild men with bloody faces, men who were screaming like fiends. “
Faugh a ballagh! Faugh a ballagh!
” Gough kicked his horse through his men and hacked down with his sword at a French sergeant. The color party was behind him, the ensigns carrying the two flags and the sergeants armed with nine-foot-long spontoons, razor-pointed pikes that were meant to protect the colors, though now the sergeants were on the offensive, savaging the French with the long narrow blades. Sergeant Patrick Masterson was one of the pikemen and he was almost as big as Harper. He thrust the spontoon into French faces, one after the other, driving them down where bayonets could kill them. He lunged a path through the first French rank, had the blade parried by a bayonet, withdrew it, lunged again, but at the last second dropped the spontoon’s head so that it punched through cloth and skin and muscle into an enemy belly. The thrust was so hard that the blade sank to the crosspiece, which stopped an enemy’s corpse, trapping itself on the shaft. He kicked the dying Frenchman off the blade and thrust again and redcoats cut their way into the gap he made. Some Frenchmen lay unwounded, their hands over their heads, just praying that the screaming fiends would spare them. Ensign Keogh sliced his sword at a mustachioed Frenchman, opening a slashing wound from one cheek to the other and almost hitting a redcoat beside him as the wild swing hissed backward. Keogh’s hat was gone. He was shouting the 87th’s war cry, “
Faugh a ballagh!
” Clear the way, and the blades were carving the way through the tight-packed French ranks.

All along the line it was the same. Bayonets against conscripts, savagery against sudden, bowel-loosening terror. The fight had been poised, it had even tilted toward the French as their greater numbers told, but Wheatley had made the move and the laws of mathematics had been taken over by the crueler laws of hard-training and harder men. The redcoats were going forward, slowly forward because they were fighting against a press of enemy and were stumbling on the bodies they had put on the blood-slicked grass, but they were still going forward.

Then a curricle appeared at the tree’s edge, and Sharpe saw Vandal again.

O
N THE
Cerro del Puerco the French advanced to take their victory. The four battalions that had lined the hill’s summit came first, with the two grenadier battalions hurrying to join their left flank. The only worry of the general of the grenadiers, Rousseau, was that his men would arrive too late to share in the victory.

The British were still on the slope and their line was still ragged. They had been hit hard by the canister, though the French guns could no longer fire because the blue-coated infantry had advanced to mask the guns’ red-coated targets. But Victor knew the guns would not be needed. The emperor’s bayonets would seal this victory. The drummers beat the
pas de charge
and the eagles were lifted high as three thousand Frenchmen spilled over the northern crest of the hill and gave a cheer as they charged to victory.

They faced the British foot guards, half a battalion of men from Hampshire, two companies of riflemen, and the remnants of the flank companies who had marched to battle from Gibraltar. Those red- and green-coated men, outnumbered two to one, had marched all night and were downhill from the enemy.

“Present!” Sir Thomas Graham roared. He had miraculously survived the blast of canister that had snatched three Scotsmen from the ranks immediately in front of him. Lord William Russell had brought him back his battered hat and Sir Thomas now held it aloft, then brought it sharply down to point at the two unbroken columns that came charging from the hill with bayonets fixed. “Fire!”

Twelve hundred muskets and two hundred rifles fired. The range was mostly less than sixty paces, though it was a good deal more at the flanks, and the balls drove into the three hundred men in the leading rank of the French columns and stopped them. It was as though an avenging angel had struck the head of the French columns with a giant sword. Their front ranks were bloody and broken, and even men in the second ranks were down. The carnage was enough to halt the charge as men in the third and fourth ranks stumbled and fell on the dead and dying men in front of them. The redcoats could not see what their volley had done because the smoke of their own muskets shrouded them. They expected the two columns to burst through that smoke with bayonets and so they did what they were trained to do: they reloaded. Ramrods scraped in barrels. The proper order of files and ranks had been broken by the climb and though some officers shouted at companies to fire as platoons, most men just fired for their lives. They did not wait for an officer or a sergeant to time the rolling volleys; they just reloaded, brought up the musket, pulled the trigger, and then reloaded again.

The drill books insisted on at least ten actions to charge a musket. It began with Handle Cartridge First Movement and ended with the command to fire. In some battalions the drill sergeants managed to find as many as seventeen different actions, all of which had to be learned and mastered and practiced. Some men, a few, came to the training with an understanding of firearms. They were mostly country boys who knew how to charge a fowling piece, but it all had to be unlearned. It might take a recruit a whole minute, even longer, to load a musket, but by the time they donned the red coat and were sent to fight for their king, they could do it in fifteen or twenty seconds. This was, above all other things, the necessary skill. The guards on the hill could look superb and there was no infantry unit that looked more splendid when taking post outside St. James’s Palace or Carlton House, but if a man could not bite a cartridge, prime the lock, load the gun, ram it, and fire within twenty seconds, then he was not a soldier. There were nearly a thousand guardsmen still living on the hill, and they fired for their lives. They put shot after shot into the cloud of smoke and Sir Thomas Graham, mounted just behind them, could tell that they were hurting the French, not just hurting them but killing them.

The French had come in column again. They always came in column. This one was three hundred men wide and nine ranks deep, and that meant most of the French could not use their muskets while every redcoat and every greenjacket could fire his weapon. The balls converged on the French, they drove inward, and in front of the guards and in front of the men from Hampshire there were small flames in the grass where the wadding had started fires.

Sir Thomas held his breath. This was a moment, he knew, when orders would do nothing, when even to encourage the men would be a waste of breath. They knew what they were doing and they were doing it so well that he was even tempted to think he might snatch a victory from what had seemed like certain defeat. But then the crash of a well-orchestrated volley made him ride toward the right of his line and he saw the unbroken ranks of the French grenadiers coming downhill through the smoke of their opening volley. He saw the Scottish guards turning to take on this new enemy, and the riflemen, who were in more extended order around the seaward flank of the hill, drew closer together to pour their fire at the French reinforcements.

Sir Thomas still said nothing. He held his hat in his hand and he watched the grenadiers come down the slope. He saw how each man in the French ranks had a short saber as well as a musket. These were the enemy’s elite, the men chosen to do the hardest work, and they were coming fresh to the fight, but again they came in a column, and the right of his own line, without any orders from Sir Thomas or anyone else, had half turned toward them to give them the benefit of their training. The half battalion of the 67th was right in front of the grenadiers who, unlike the first four battalions, were not checked by the first shots to hit them, but kept coming.

And this, Sir Thomas knew, was how a column should fight. It was a battering ram, and though the head of the column must suffer horribly, the momentum of its mass should take it through an enemy to bloody victory. On battlefield after battlefield across a suffering Europe the emperor’s columns had taken their punishment and marched on to win. And this column, all of them elite troops, was coming downhill and getting ever closer. If it broke through the thin line of red and green, it would turn to its right and murder Sir Thomas’s men with sabers and musket butts. And still it came. Sir Thomas rode behind the 67th, ready to slash with his sword and die with his men if the grenadiers succeeded. Then an officer shouted the command to fire.

Smoke billowed in front of Sir Thomas. Then more smoke. The 67th was firing platoon volleys now, and the Sweeps were up on their right, not bothering to wrap their bullets with leather because at this range they could not miss, and so their fire was almost as quick as the redcoats beside them. On Sir Thomas’s left were his Scotsmen, and he knew they would not break. The noise of the musketry was like a great fire of dry wood. The air stank of rotten eggs. Somewhere a seagull cried, and far behind Sir Thomas the cannons crashed on the heath, but he could not spare a glance for what happened behind him. It was here and now that the battle would be decided. He suddenly realized he was holding his breath and he let it out, glanced at Lord William, and saw His Lordship staring wide-eyed and motionless into the musket smoke. “You can breathe, Willie.”

“Dear Lord,” Lord William said, letting out his breath. “You know there’s a Spanish brigade behind us?” he asked Sir Thomas.

Sir Thomas turned and saw the Spanish troops on the beach. They made no move to reinforce him and even if he ordered them up the hill he knew they would arrive too late to be of any help. This fight could not last that long and so he shook his head. “Damn them, Willie,” he said. “Just damn them.”

Lord William Russell held a pistol, ready to shoot the first grenadier to come through the smoke, but the grenadiers had been stopped by the rifle and musket fire. Their front ranks were dead and the men behind were now trying to reload and fire back, but once a column stopped moving it became a giant target, and Sir Thomas’s men were firing into its heart. Even though the grenadiers were elite troops, they could not fire as fast as the redcoats.

General Dilkes, his horse bleeding in the rump and shoulder, came to Sir Thomas’s side. He said nothing, just stared, then glanced up the hill to where Marshal Victor sat on his horse with his white-plumed hat held low. Marshal Victor was watching three thousand men held by musket fire. He said nothing. It was up to his men now.

On the left of the British line, beyond the First Foot Guards, Major Browne fought his remnant of flankers. Fewer than half the men who had climbed the hill were still able to fire a musket, but they poured their volleys at the nearest French column and, in their eagerness, went higher up the hill to assail the column’s flank.

“Don’t you love the rogues?” Sir Thomas shouted at General Dilkes, and Dilkes was so surprised by the question that he gave a bark of laughter. “Time to give them the bayonet,” Sir Thomas said.

Dilkes nodded. He was watching the redcoats fire their murderous volleys and he reckoned he had just watched his men perform a miracle.

“They’ll run, I vouch,” Sir Thomas said, and hoped he was right.

“Fix bayonets!” Dilkes found his voice.

“On to them, boys!” Sir Thomas waved his hat and galloped back behind the line. “On to them! Push them off my hill! Off my hill!”

And the redcoats, like hounds released, went uphill with bayonets. Marshal Victor, at the crest, heard the screams as the blades began their work. “For God’s sake, fight!” he said to no one in particular, but his six battalions were recoiling. Panic had infected their ranks. The rearmost men, those least in danger, were edging back and the foremost ranks were being savaged by redcoats. The band, well behind the line and still playing the forbidden “Marseillaise,” sensed the disaster coming and the music faltered. The bandmaster tried to rally his musicians, but the loudest noise now was the hoarse war cries of the British. Instead of playing, the band broke and ran. The infantry followed. “The guns,” Victor said to an aide, “get the guns off the hill.” It was one thing to lose a fight, but another to have the emperor’s beloved guns captured, so the gunners brought up their teams and dragged four of the cannons eastward, off the hill. Two could not be saved because the redcoats were too close, so those guns were lost. Marshal Victor and his aides followed the four guns, and the remnants of his six battalions ran for their lives, ran across the hilltop and down its eastern face, and behind them the redcoats and greenjackets came with bayonets and victory.