Sharpe's Regiment (15 page)

Of course it was not fair, but the army would have no recruits unless it made the extravagant promise, and no money to fight the war if it kept it. Nevertheless, Sharpe had never known so much to be stripped from the bounty. Someone, he reflected as Marriott’s shrill protest continued, was making a fine profit from each recruit.

‘Filth!’ The voice came from behind them, startling them, making them turn to see a small, immaculately uniformed Sergeant pacing towards them with a face of such concentrated fury and hatred that the recruits instinctively shrank back, letting the small, dark-faced man stride into the clerk’s hut.

There was a shriek from inside, followed by a yelp of protest, then Marriott came backwards from the door, tripped, fell, and the Sergeant followed, slashed him about the head with his cane and kicked him in the shins with his gleaming boots.

‘Up, filth! Up!’

Marriott, shaking, stood. He was a head taller than the Sergeant who, once Marriott was standing, punched him in the belly. ‘You’ve got a complaint, filth?’

‘They promised us ...’

The sergeant punched him again, harder. ‘You’ve got a complaint, filth?’

‘No, Sergeant.’

‘I can’t hear you, filth!’

‘No, Sergeant!’ There were tears on Marriott’s cheeks.

The Sergeant snapped his head round to look at the other recruits, then past them to where Lieutenant Colonel Girdwood approached with his retinue. ‘Filth!’ He shouted at them all. ‘Fall in!’ I’

 

 

Lieutenant Colonel Bartholomew Girdwood was a man soured by life, a man mistreated by life, a man that few understood. He was a soldier, he regarded himself as a great soldier, but he had never, not once, been allowed to go into battle. The closest he had come to war had been in Ireland, but he despised fighting against peasants; and even when the peasants had decimated his troops and run him ragged round the damp countryside, he had still despised them. Those he caught, he hanged, those he did not catch, he ignored. He dreamed only of fighting the French, and could not understand an army that had not allowed him to go to Spain.

‘Filth!’ The Sergeant screamed the word. ‘Shun!’

The recruits shuffled to attention. Lieutenant Colonel Girdwood, with his eye for military punctilio, noticed the two men who did it properly, whose thumbs were against the seams of their ragged trousers and whose heads and shoulders were back and whose feet were angled at a precise thirty degrees. Two old soldiers, two men easy to train, and two men who, because they knew all the tricks, he must watch like a hawk. He watched them now, seeing the scarred face of the older man and the hugeness of the younger, and he made the strange, snarling noise in his throat that was supposed to be a warning to them. He glared at the scarred man. ‘What regiment were you?’

Sharpe, who knew better than to stare into an officer’s face, was nevertheless fascinated by the rock hard, gleaming black moustache that contrasted so oddly with the white, scraped skin of Girdwood’s face. ‘Thirty-third, sir!’

‘Discharged?’

‘Sir!’

Girdwood glanced at the huge man, instinctively disliking Harper because he was so tall. ‘You?’

‘Fourth Dragoon Guards, sir!’

Sharpe, who was amused that Harper had chosen such an elegant regiment for his supposed past, sensed that Lieutenant Colonel Girdwood’s hostility had been increased by the big man’s answer. Girdwood made the odd, snarling noise in his throat once more, then tapped his left palm with the silver-topped cane. ‘The Royal Irish!’ He said it slowly, with savage dislike. ‘Then listen to me, soldier, this is not an Irish regiment. I’ll have none of your damned insolence here, do you understand me?’

‘Sir!’

‘None of it!’ Girdwood’s voice was a harsh shriek that startled the other recruits whom he glared at, staring at them one by one as if, by the sheer force of his dark, harsh gaze, he could fill them with fear and respect.

He seemed to stare at them for a long, long time, saying nothing, but in his head the angry thoughts uncoiled. Peasants, he thought, nothing but peasants! Scum, filth. Horrid, stinking, foul, stupid, lax, undisciplined scum. Civilians!

His gaze came back to Harper’s stolid, expressionless face. ‘Who’s the King of Ireland?’

‘King George, sir!’

Girdwood’s polished black moustache was level with the second button of Harper’s fatigue jacket. The Colonel glared up at the huge man. ‘And what are the rebels?’

Harper paused. Sharpe, standing next to him, prayed that the Irishman would lie. Harper, if an accident of hunger and fate had not driven him into the British Army, would doubtless have been one of the rebels who had fought so hopelessly against the British in Ireland. Harper, who liked his job, and who fought the French as enthusiastically as any man, had never lost his love for Ireland, any more than had most of the Irishmen who made up a third of Wellington’s army in Spain.

‘Well?’ Girdwood asked.

Harper chose dumb stupidity as his best tactic. ‘Don’t know, sir!’

‘Scum! Pig-shit! Bastards! Irish! That’s what they are! Sergeant Lynch!’

‘Sir!’ The small Sergeant who had so effectively silenced Giles Marriott took one pace forward. He looked as if he could have been Girdwood’s twin; they were two moustached, small, black-haired, manikins.

Girdwood pointed with his cane at Harper. ‘You’ll note this man, Sergeant Lynch?’

‘I’ll do that, sir!’

‘I’ll not have Irish tricks, by Christ I will not!’

‘No, sir!’

Sharpe, who was feeling relief that the Colonel had not demanded that Harper repeat his litany against the Irish rebels, now saw that the Colonel was staring with apparent shock towards the end of the line of recruits. Girdwood raised his cane. It was shaking. ‘Sergeant Lynch! Sergeant Lynch!’

Lynch turned. He too froze. When he spoke, in seemingly equal shock, his voice had a sudden touch of the Irish accent that he had worked so hard to lose. ‘A dog, sir? One of the filth has a dog, sir!’

Buttons, sensing the sudden interest in him, wagged his muddy tail, ducked his head, and started forward to be petted by these new men who stared at him.

Girdwood stepped back. ‘Get it away from me!’ His voice betrayed true panic.

Sergeant Lynch darted forward. Charlie Weller stepped forward too, but a corporal tripped him just as Sergeant Lynch kicked the dog, a brutal, rib-breaking kick that forced a yelp out of the animal and lifted it into the air to fly, screaming as it went, a full five yards away. Charlie Weller, his face aghast, tried to stand up, but the corporal kicked him in the head, and kicked again to keep the boy down.

Buttons, his ribs broken, came whimpering and limping back towards his master. He flinched away from Sergeant Lynch, but the Sergeant stood over the dog, lifted his heel and smashed it down onto the dog’s skull. Buttons shrieked again, the heel was forced slowly, grindingly down, and the recruits stood in horror as the dog slowly died.

It seemed to take a long time. No one spoke. The corporal pulled Weller upright, blood on the boy’s face, and pushed him, too stunned to resist, back into the line.

Sergeant Lynch smiled as the small dog stopped moving and Lieutenant Colonel Girdwood breathed a sigh of relief. Girdwood hated dogs. They were undisciplined, messy, and savage. He had been bitten as a child, after throwing a half-brick at a mastiff, and the terror had never gone. ‘Thank you, Sergeant!’

There was blood on Lynch’s right boot. ‘Only my duty, sir!’

The death of the dog had lifted Lieutenant Colonel Girdwood’s spirits from the depression caused by hearing Harper’s accent. Depression, for Lieutenant Colonel Girdwood had cause to hate Ireland. It was in that country, as a Captain, that he had been reprimanded by a Court of Enquiry held in Dublin Castle. Not just reprimanded, but dismissed from the Dublin garrison.

It had not been his fault! He had been ambushed! By God, it was not his fault! If His Majesty’s troops could not march in decent close order down an Irish highway, where could they march? They had been traitorous peasants, the men who shot from behind hedges and who had tumbled his men in blood on the sunken road while Captain Girdwood, screaming in anger, had ordered his redcoats to form line and fix bayonets, but by the time he had imposed decent order on his Company, the Irish bastards had gone. Gone! Run away! In other words, as he had told the Court, he had defeated them! ‘I was left master of the field,’ he had said, and was it not true?

The Court had thought not. They had passed him over for promotion, dismissed him from the garrison, reprimanded him, and recommended that Captain Bartholomew Girdwood be no longer employed in the service of His Majesty’s army.

He had taken his reprimand to Sir Henry Simmerson, Member of Parliament, Commissioner of the Excise, a man known to be a scourge of the lax discipline that was creeping into the army. And from that fortuitous meeting, in which their two minds were of such sweet accord, had come promotion and this opportunity. Sir Henry, with his friend, Lord Fenner, had purchased a Majority for Girdwood, then promoted him to Lieutenant Colonel, and presented him with a Battalion and with a chance to become wealthy. There was more to come. The war, Girdwood was assured by both Sir Henry and Lord Fenner, was ending, and he could look forward, thanks to their generosity and patronage, to a peacetime career of eminence and comfort. He would be married to Sir Henry’s niece; he would become rich, powerful, and, until then, he would continue to do the job that he believed he did better than any man alive; the job of turning undisciplined, lax civilians into soldiers. He shivered as he remembered the shock of seeing a dog, then smiled at his rescuer, Sergeant Lynch. ‘Carry on, Sergeant, and well done!’

 

One man in this camp hated the Irish more than the Colonel, and that was Sergeant John Lynch. He had been christened Sean, but, just as he tried to lose the accent of his native Kerry, so he had lost his native name.

He modelled himself on Girdwood, seeing in the Lieutenant Colonel the quality of rigid discipline that had made Britain’s army victorious over the Irish rebels. Sergeant John Lynch wanted to be with the winners, and not just with them, but of them. Instead of being an Irish peasant forced to show unwilling respect to the English, he wished to be a man to whom that respect was shown. He had turned against his country with all the passion of a convert, exactly as he had abandoned his parents’ faith to become an Anglican. There could have been no man better suited to attract Patrick Harper’s hatred, or, indeed, the hatred of every man in the squad, for Sergeant John Lynch was a most harsh trainer of troops. Yet, as Sharpe grudgingly allowed, an effective one.

The training was done the old-fashioned way, by brutal discipline, punishment, and unrelenting hard work. Girdwood believed that what made a man stand in the musket line and fight outnumbering enemies was not pride, nor loyalty, nor patriotism, but fear of the alternative. He made soldiers, and, it was apparent, he made money too.

Indeed, within three days, it seemed to Sharpe that perhaps money was the reason for the camp’s secrecy. It was not just the way that Lieutenant Colonel Girdwood’s men had stolen the bounty from each recruit, but the way that, day after day, the debts piled up. At every inspection Sergeant Lynch would find a fault with a man’s Necessaries; a torn knapsack strap, a holed sock, and each fault would be noted and the cost of the item deducted against future pay. Sharpe guessed that no man at the camp received pay, that all of it was channelled into the hands of Girdwood. Such raids on men’s pay were quite normal in the army; half of every man’s wages was deducted for food alone; yet Sharpe had never seen it done on such a scale or with such enthusiastic rapacity.

Only the training was pursued with more enthusiasm, and Sharpe had not seen any camp in which recruits were worked so hard. They drilled from morning till sundown. The grammar of soldiering was hammered into them until the clumsiest recruit, after one week, could perform all the manoeuvres of Company drill. Only Tom, the half-wit, was considered untrainable and he was given to the Sergeants’ Mess as a cleaner.

The object of their life, from the cold mornings when they were roused before dawn until the sun was set and the bugle called the lights-out, was to avoid punishment. Even after the bugle there was still danger, for it was a maxim with Lieutenant Colonel Girdwood that mutinies were plotted at night. He made the Sergeants and officers patrol the tent lines, listening for voices, and it was rumoured that Girdwood himself had been seen, on hands and knees, threading his body between the tent guy ropes to put an ear close to the canvas.

The punishments were as varied as the crimes that occasioned them. A whole squad or tent could fetch a normal fatigue duty; digging latrines, clearing one of the many drainage channels that ran to the mudflats, or mending, with stiff twine and a leatherworker’s needle, the stiff canvas of the tents. Sergeant Lynch favoured a swift beating, and sometimes used a knapsack filled with bricks as his instrument of punishment, either worn for extra drill, or else held at arm’s length while he stood behind ready to cut with his cane at the first quiver of fatigue in the outstretched arms.

There were beatings and floggings and, savage though they were, they could all be avoided by the simple expedient of obedience and anonymity. Most of the recruits learned fast. Even when it rained, and it seemed impossible to keep the mud from their uniforms, or from the tarpaulins that formed the groundsheets of their tents, they learned to scrape and wash the mud entirely away, and even though the cleaning water, that was blessedly abundant in the low, marshy land, soaked their thin straw palliasses, it was better to sleep shivering and damp than to incur the wrath of Lieutenant Colonel Girdwood’s inspection.

Yet Giles Marriott, who had joined the army in a mood of self destruction because his girl had jilted him for a richer man, earned punishment after punishment. Morning after morning, at the dawn inspection, Sergeant Lynch would find a speck of mud on Marriott’s pipeclay and the Sergeant’s voice would snap at the terrified man. ‘Strip!’