Sharpe 3-Book Collection 5: Sharpe's Company, Sharpe's Sword, Sharpe's Enemy (49 page)

The sun rose higher, its heat stronger, and it dried the killing ground and baked the rocks till they could not be touched. It hazed the horizon and made the air shimmer above the flat rock summits of the two Arapile hills. The gunners spat on the barrels of their cannon and watched the spittle hiss and boil away, and that was before the guns fired. Insects were busy in the grass and wheat, butterflies flickered above the poppies and cornflowers, and the last ragged clouds of the rainstorm died and disappeared. The land crouched beneath the heat and it was seemingly empty. From the ridge or the escarpment, from any of the hills, a man could not see more than one hundredth of the hundred thousand men who had gathered at the Arapiles that day. Wednesday, July 22nd, 1812.

Auguste Marmont was thirty-six years old. He was Duke of Ragusa, which meant little to him compared with being the youngest Marshal of France, and he was impatient. The Englishman, Wellington, had beaten every French General who had opposed him, but he had not beaten Marmont, nor would he. Auguste Marmont, son of an ironmaster, had outmanoeuvred the Englishman, outmarched him, and all that had to be done now was to outrun him to Portugal. Yet now, as the morning came towards its end, he was uncertain.

He rode his horse to the rear of the Greater Arapile, dismounted, and climbed the steep slope on foot. He used the wheel of a cannon for his telescope rest and he stared long and hard at the Lesser Arapile, at the village, and at the farm buildings at the southern end of the ridge. Other officers were using their glasses and one of them, a staff officer, pointed at the farm on the ridge. “There, sir.”

Marmont squinted as the sun flashed off the brass of his telescope, trained it, and there, clear in the lens’ circle, was a man in a long blue coat, grey trousers, and a plain dark hat. Marmont grunted. Wellington was on the ridge. “So what’s he doing?”

“Lunch, sir?” The staffofficers laughed.

Marmont frowned at the hint. “Going or staying?”

No one answered. Marmont panned the telescope to his left and saw two British guns on the Lesser Arapile and then more guns, perhaps four, on the hill behind the village. That was not many guns and he did not fear them. He straightened up from his glass and stared westward. “How’s the ground?”

‘Dry, sir.“

The plain stretched invitingly to the west. It was empty; a great golden road that might take him ahead of Wellington. Marmont itched to be moving, to be outmarching the British so he could block the road and win the victory that would tell France, Europe, the world, that Auguste Marmont had destroyed Britain’s army. He could taste that victory already. He would choose the battlefield, he would force the red-jacketed infantry to attack up some impossible slope that he would have lined with his beloved artillery, and he could already see the roundshot and canister flailing at the hopeless British lines. Yet now, on the Greater Arapile, he could feel doubt in his mind. He could see redcoats in the village, guns on the hills, but were they just a rearguard, or something more? “Is he going or staying?”

No one answered. A Marshal of France was a fine fellow, second only to the Emperor, and he wore the dark blue uniform edged with golden leaves, and his collar and shoulders were heavy with gilt decorations. A Marshal of France was given privileges, riches, and honour, but they had to be earned by answering the difficult questions. Was he going or staying?

Marmont stumped about the top of the Greater Arapile. He was thinking. His boots were tight and that annoyed him, any man who took one hundred and fifty pairs of boots to war was entitled to find a pair that fitted. He pulled his mind back to the British. Surely they were marching? Wellington had not offered battle in a month, so why should he on this day? And why should Wellington wait? Marmont went back to the gun and peered again through the telescope. He could see the unadorned figure of his enemy talking to a tall man in the green jacket of a Rifleman. The Rifles. Britain’s light troops. Fast marchers, even faster than the French. Suppose Wellington had left his Light Division at this village? Suppose that the rest of the army was already on the road, marching west, escaping the vengeance of the French Gribeauval guns? Marmont put himself in his enemy’s place. He would want to steal this day’s march. He would want the French to stay here, thinking that the British army threatened them, and how would he do that? He would leave his finest troops at the village, stay himself, because if the General is present, then the enemy assumes the army is present, and still Marmont knew he had to make a decision. Damn these boots!

To do something was better than doing nothing. He turned to his staff officers and ordered an attack on the village itself. It was, he knew, a holding move. It would discourage the British rearguard from venturing onto the plain and it would form a screen behind which he could march west; yet he knew he still had to make the decision, the big choice, and he was frightened of it. His servant was spreading a linen tablecloth on the grass, setting it with the silver cutlery that travelled everywhere with the Marshal and his one hundred and fifty pairs of boots, and Marmont decided the war would have to wait till after an early lunch. He rubbed his hands together. “Cold duck! Excellent, excellent!”

A horseman rode down the southern slope of the escarpment, past the troops that waited for the orders that would send them west or keep them waiting for a day. His horse splashed through a shallow ford, past an ancient footbridge that spanned the stream with flat stone slabs, and then he spurred towards the strange Arapile hill where he had been told Marmont waited. He carried a letter in his sabretache. He put the horse at the slope, urged it as high as it could climb, and then he dismounted, threw the reins to an infantryman, and scrambled up the last few steep feet. He ran to the Marshal, saluted, and handed over the folded, sealed paper.

Marmont smiled when he saw the wax seal. He knew that seal, knew it could be trusted, and he tore the paper open and called for Major Berthon. “Decode it. Quick!”

He looked again at the enemy held hills. If only he could see what was on the far side! And maybe the letter would tell him, or maybe, his thoughts became pessimistic, it was merely some piece of political news, or a report on Wellington’s health, and he fretted while Berthon worked at the numbers written on the paper. Marmont pretended to be calm. He offered the cavalryman who had brought the message on the last lap of its journey some wine. He complimented him on his uniform, and then, at last, Berthon brought him the paper. “The British march west today. A single Division remains to persuade you that they plan to fight for Salamanca. They are in a great hurry and fear to be overtaken.”

He had known it! The message merely confirmed his instinct, but he had known it! And then, as if in confirmation of his sudden certainty, he saw the tell-tale plume of dust that was rising in the western sky. They were marching! And he would overtake them! He tore La Marquesa’s note into shreds of paper, finer and finer, and he scattered them on the hilltop and he grinned at his officers. “We’ve got him, gentlemen! At last, we’ve got him!”

Five miles away the British Third Division, which had been left to screen Salamanca on the north bank of the Tormes, marched through the city and across the Roman bridge. It was an uncomfortable march. The citizens of Salamanca jeered them, accused them of running away, and the officers and sergeants kept a tight rein on their men. They marched beneath the small fortress on the bridge and turned right onto the Ciudad Rodrigo road. Out of sight of the city they turned off the road, to their left, and went further south till they had reached a village called Aldea Tejada. They were close now to the great wheat plain that could yet become a killing ground.

It took the Third Division more than two hours to march past a single point on the road. The men were tired, dispirited at a further retreat, and ashamed that they were deserting the city. Some of them, in their tiredness, dragged their feet. The dust began to move. The road had dried and the dust rose, was stirred, and the air over the Ciudad Rodrigo road was misted with fine, white powder. The army’s baggage, sent ahead in case the British did have to retreat, added to the mist that smeared the western horizon.

Marmont had the message, had seen the dust, and now his tight boots were forgotten. He would have his victory!

There was no such elation on the British ridge. The waiting had made Wellington’s officers irritable. Sharpe had slept for a while, for he had had little rest the previous night, and now he stared at the great plain and it was empty beneath the hawks that slid against the steel-blue sky. There was no sign that Marmont had extended his left, that he had fallen into the trap, and Sharpe knew it must be past midday. He had been woken by the cannons firing on the French attack on the village. He had watched for a while as the British roundshot ploughed through the ranks of the enemy Battalions, as the skirmishers met for their private war in the wheat stalks, but the French attack was stopped at the village’s outskirts. Marmont did have one success. His guns on the Greater Arapile drove the British guns off the summit of the Lesser Arapile. Sharpe watched the gunners, helped by infantry, manhandle the great weapons down the steep slope. Round one to France.

The French attack was not heavy. About five thousand men had come from behind the Greater Arapile and advanced on the village. Sharpe could hear the sharper sound of the Baker Rifles from the plain and he knew that the French skirmishers would be cursing the British Riflemen, that Voltigeurs would be dying in the wheat, and it all seemed so far away, like a child’s battle with toy soldiers seen from an upstairs window. The blue uniforms came forward, stopped, and the white smoke rills showed where the musket volleys were fired, puffs showed where shrapnel burst over the enemy, and the sound would come seconds after the smoke appeared.

The attack stopped just outside the village. This was not a true battle, not yet. If the French had been serious, if they had really wanted to capture the miserable cottages, they could have marched in their great columns, the Eagles bright above, and the massed drums would have driven them on and the artillery would have blasted a path ahead of them, and the noise would have swelled to a great crescendo in the afternoon heat while the French wave swept over the village, up the small valley, and then there would be a battle. Sharpe dozed off again.

Hogan woke him with an offer of lunch; two legs of cold chicken and diluted wine. Sharpe ate in the shadow of the farmhouse wall and he listened to the small sounds of the skirmishers bickering by the village. Still the great plain was empty to the west, the French were not taking the bait, and Hogan had gloomily admitted that in a couple of hours the Peer would probably order a full scale retreat. Another day gone.

Wellington was pacing up and down in front of the farm. He had been down to the village once, seen that the defenders were in no trouble, and now he fretted as he ate cold chicken and waited for Marmont to show his hand. He had noticed Sharpe, welcomed him back ‘to the living’, but the Peer was in no mood for small talk. He paced, he watched, and he worried.

“Sir! Sir!” A horseman was spurring up the ridge, coming from the west, and his horse was lathered with sweat. He jumped from the saddle, saluted, and offered a scrap of paper to the General. He was an aide-de-camp to General Leith and he did not wait for Wellington to read the paper. “Sir! They’re extending their left!”

“The devil they are! Give me a glass! Quickly!”

There was dead ground on the rolling plain, hollows in the wheat that hid themselves from the ridge, and the French were in the hollows. General Leith, off to the west, had seen the movement first, but now the French could be seen, climbing a track from the dead ground, and Sharpe, his own telescope extended, saw that the enemy was marching. The sheep were on the wolf-ground. Wellington rammed his glass shut, threw the chicken leg he had been eating over his shoulder, and his face was jubilant. “By God! That will do.!”

His horse was ready, he mounted, and he spurred off to the west, outrunning his staffofficers, and the dust spurted from behind his horse. Sharpe kept staring to the south-west, at the great plain that stretched so invitingly in front of the French, and he saw the troops come out of the dead ground and into plain view. It was a beautiful sight. Battalion after enemy Battalion had turned themselves into the order of march and they were going westward in the blistering heat. The attack on the village was supposed to do no more than pin down the British rearguard while the French left, safe in the knowledge that their foes had already marched, were now eagerly trying to outmarch them. The heat simmered the air above the plain, yet the French were full of heart, full of ambition, and they swung along the dirt tracks between the thistles and the wheat, and their weapons were slung and their hopes high. They marched further and further west, stringing the French army finer and finer, and none of them could know that their enemy was waiting, ready for battle, hidden to their north.

Hogan was replete with happiness. “We’ve got him! At last, Richard we’ve got him!”

Battles rarely start quickly. They grow like grass fires. A piece of musket wadding, red hot, is spat onto grass, it smoulders, is fanned, and a hundred other such tiny sparks flicker on the dry ground. Some fade, others catch into flame and may be stamped out by an irritable skirmisher, but suddenly two will join and the wind catches the fire, blows it, swirls the smoke and then, quite suddenly, the little wadding sparks have become a raging flame that roasts the wounded and eats the dead. There was no battle yet at the Arapiles. There were sparks that could yet turn into an inferno, but the afternoon wore on and the officers watching from the farm at the southern end of the great ridge felt their elation turn to boredom. The French batteries still fired at the village over the heads of their troops who had settled in the grass and wheat, but the cannonade was slower, almost half-hearted, and the British used the lull to manhandle two guns back up the Lesser Arapile.

The afternoon smouldered. Three o’clock passed, then four, and to the men on the ridge, to the Battalions behind the ridge, the sound of battle was like a distant storm that had no effect on them. The French left wing, a quarter of the army, was marching westwards and it heard the guns behind and thought it was merely the bickering of the rearguard.

The British gunners of the Royal Horse Artillery who had dragged and forced two guns to the crest of the Lesser Arapile served their bucking monsters in the muck sweat of the heat. The guns crashed back on their trails, splintered rocks on the other Arapile hill, and after each shot the gunners had to lever the trails back into position, the monster had to be fed, and the smoke stung their eyes and fouled their breath. A gunner pushed a spherical case-shot into the barrel. It was Britain’s secret weapon, invented twenty-eight years before by Lieutenant Shrapnell, and still no other country had succeeded in copying the shell. This was a small case-shot because the gun, a six pounder, was the biggest that could be worked up the steep hill-slope. The hollow iron ball of Shrapnell’s invention had sixty musket balls packed round its central powder charge. The fuse had been cut so that the ball would explode over the Greater Arapile and the rammer thrust it down the gun’s throat, stood back, and the Sergeant who ruled this gun checked his crew, touched fire to fuse, and the gun wheels jarred off the rock, the trail slewed, the smoke slammed forward and the case shot thundered over the plain.

The battle was smouldering. It could ignite at any moment and Fate, who is the soldiers’ Goddess, was taking an interest in the sparks that flickered and threatened about the Arapiles. An artillery officer on the Lesser Arapile saw the case-shot leave the smoke, he saw it as the faintest trace of a grey pencil-like line in the air and then it exploded, just over the far edge of the Greater Arapile, and it was a black-grey air burst shot through with deep red and the ground beneath and ahead of the explosion was spattered by the lead balls and the shattered casing. Most went harmlessly to ground, some ricocheted off the hot stone, but two balls, with Fate’s malevolence, took Auguste Marmont in the side and France’s youngest Marshal was down. He was not killed, but he would not lead his army again this day, an army he had already pointed to destruction.

Wellington was far away. He had ridden to the Third Division and he had pointed them in a new direction, eastwards, and they had begun their march. The French marched west, thinking they were in a race to head off the

British, but the British were coming towards them, and waiting behind them, and they could not know it. And the British, soured by the weeks of march and counter-march, of retreat, wanted to fight.

Between the Third Division and the Arapiles, hidden in a deep fold of ground, there were more British. Horsemen. The Heavy Cavalry, newly come from Britain and eager to try out their mounts and their long thirty-five inch straight blades, blades they said were too heavy for a swift parry, but wonderful for killing infantrymen.

The sun had bleached the plain pale. The killing ground was beginning to fill, as a stage might fill, but still it waited for the spark that would fan into a battle. It came in the west as the Third Division hit the head of the French column and to the men, up on the ridge by the farmhouse, it came as the distant muffled sound of muskets that were like a far-off thornbush fire. Smoke came from the west, and sound, and the dust that added to the smoke, and then the telescopes could make out a little of what was happening. The French column was being crumpled, thrown back, and the battle, that had started in the west was coming east, back to the Arapiles.

The French battalions recoiled. They were outnumbered, outgunned and outgeneralled. They had thought they were the vanguard of a march, and found they were the front line of a battle, and their defeat was about to become disaster.

Sharpe watched it. He hated the cavalry as all infantrymen hated cavalry and he was used to seeing the British cavalry ill-led and ineffective, but Fate was capricious to the French on that hot Spanish afternoon. The British Heavy Dragoons, some from the King’s own bodyguard, came on the French from the north. They wanted to fight. They came up from their dead ground in two ranks, trotting to keep their order, and the black horsetail plumes on their shining crested helmets rippled as they moved. Sharpe, watching through the glass, saw a shiver of light, a glitter, and the swords were up and the horsemen were booted knee to booted knee.

He did not hear the trumpet that put them into the canter, but he saw the line go faster, and still they kept their discipline, and he knew what they must be feeling. All men fear the moment of going into battle, but these men were on their big horses and the smell of the powder was in their nostrils and the trumpet was setting their blood on fire and the swords in their hands were hungry. The French were not ready. Infantry can form square and the textbooks say that no cavalry in the world can break a well-formed square, but the French had not known the danger and they were not in square. They were falling back from a massive infantry attack and they were firing and loading, cursing their General, when the earth shook.

A thousand horses, the best horses in the world, and a thousand swords came from the dust and the trumpets spurred the horsemen into the final charge, the moment when the horse is released to run like the devil and the line will stagger and bend, but it does not matter because the enemy is so close. And the horsemen, who had been given a target that every cavalryman dreamt of, opened their mouths in a triumphant scream and the great, heavy, edged blades came into the French with all the weight of man and horse. The fear had turned to anger, to craziness, and the British killed and killed, split the Battalions, rode down the French and the huge blades fell and the horses bit and reared, and the French, who could do no other, broke and ran.

The horses ran with them. The swords came from behind. The Heavy Dragoons drove paths of blood and dust through the fugitives and there was no difficulty in killing. The French had their backs to the horses so the swords could take them in the neck or over the skull and the horsemen revelled in it, snarled at their enemies, and the swords had so many targets. The musket sound had gone. It was replaced by the thunder of hooves, by screams, and by the cleaving sound of a butcher’s block.

Some French ran for help to the British infantry. The red ranks opened up, helped them in, because all infantry feared that moment when they were not in square and when the cavalry hit them at the full charge. The British soldiers shouted at the French, told them to run to the British lines, and the red-coated men watched in awe what the Heavy Dragoons were doing and knew that Fate could have decreed it otherwise and so they helped their enemy to escape the common enemy of all infantry. The spark had turned into a running flame.

Sharpe watched from the hill, privileged as a spectator, and he saw the French left wing chewed into fragments between the horses and the Third Division. He watched the Heavy Dragoons, superbly led, reform again and again, charge again and again, and they fought till the troopers were too weary to hold the heavy swords.

Eight French Battalions had been broken. An Eagle had been lost, five guns captured, and hundreds of prisoners, their faces blackened by the powder and their heads and arms sliced by the swords, had been taken. The French left had been split, shattered, and massacred. Now the horsemen were spent. Fate was not all on the British side. She had decreed the death of the Heavy Dragoons’ General who would never again be able to show British cavalry how to fight, but their job this day had been done. Their blades were thick with blood, they had ridden to glory, and they would remember the moments for ever when all a man had to do was lean right, cut down, and spur on.

Wellington was launching his attacks, one by one, from the west to the east. The Third Division had marched, then the cavalry, and now more men were launched onto the great plain. They came from both sides of the Teso San Miguel and they drove southwards, aiming at the hinge of the French line, its centre, dominated by the Greater Arapile. Sharpe watched. He saw infantry spread out from the small valley between the ridge and the Teso San Miguel and march past the village. Their colours had been stripped of the leather casings and they flew over the Battalions and Sharpe felt the pang of extraordinary pride that the sight of the colours gave every soldier.

The guns on the Greater Arapile shifted their aim, fired, and the first gaps were blown in the British lines, the Sergeants shouted at men to close up, close up, and they marched on, attacking in line, and Sharpe saw the yellow colour of the South Essex.

It was the first time ever that he had not fought with them and he felt a deep guilt as he watched his men, the skirmishers, run ahead into the wheat. He watched them fearful for them, and he knew that the wound still hurt, that the doctors had said that it could re-open and bleed, and that the next time it might fester and he would die.

Portuguese troops were marching for the Greater Arapile. The Fourth Division, survivors of the main breach at Bada-joz like Sharpe’s own South Essex, were marching to the right of the French hill. The shots kept coming. The French had arrayed guns on the plain beside the hill and the batteries bellowed at the British and Portuguese lines and the gaps appeared, were filled, and small knots of red or blue coated men were left behind on the trampled wheat. The French troops who had been attacking the village fell back in the face of the Fourth Division. It marched on, its colours high, and they threatened the French guns in the plain, the troops who retreated in front of them, and the troops who were coming back from the carnage in the west. Sharpe rested his telescope on Hogan’s shoulder and found his own men, paired in the wheat, and he saw Harper and kept him in the glass. The Sergeant was gesticulating to the Company, keeping them spread out, keeping them moving, and Sharpe felt a terrible guilt that he was not there. They would have to fight without him, and he could not bear the thought that some would die and that he might have saved them. He knew that there was little he could have done that Lieutenant Price and the Sergeants were not already doing, but that was small comfort.

So far, he knew, the battle was falling to the British. The French left had gone, and now the centre was being assailed and Sharpe could npt see how the centre could hold out against the attacks. Surely the Fourth Division would take the ground to the right of the Greater Arapile, the French guns would limber up and go, and it seemed to Sharpe, watching from the thyme-scented hilltop, that the French had somehow lost the will to fight back. The wheat and grass were skeined with smoke, the air thundered with the round-shot, canister and shrapnel, and the thousands and thousands of men marched into the plain and the red jackets, everywhere, beat back the French. It seemed that, this day, Wellington’s men were remorseless, unbeatable, and that only nightfall would save a few Frenchmen. The sun was already sinking towards evening, still bright, but the night was coming.

Marmont did not know what was happening. He had been taken away, treated by the surgeons, and his second in command was wounded, and a third man, General Clausel, took over the army. He could see what was happening and he had not lost the will to fight. He was still a young man and he had been a soldier for half his life and he did not intend to lose this battle. His left was gone, surprised and broken, and the centre was threatened, but he was playing his own game. He had been taught to fight by a master, Napoleon himself, and Clausel was content to let the centre fight while he collected his reserves, massed them, and drew them up behind the shelter of the Greater Arapile. He commanded a massive force, thousands of bayonets, and he held them back, waiting for the moment when he would release them like a huge counterpunch that would be aimed at the very centre of Wellington’s army. The battle was not yet lost, either side could win it.

The Portuguese climbed the steep slope of the Greater Arapile and Clausel watched them and timed his counterattack so that they would be the first to suffer. The signal went. The crest of the hill was lined with infantry, the muskets could not miss at a few paces, and the Portuguese, helpless in the face of the last precipitous feet, were tumbled backwards. No bravery could compensate for those last sheer feet. The Portuguese were blasted away by the French muskets, and even their defeat would not have mattered if the Fourth Division had been able to attack past the hill and surround it, for then the French on the Greater Arapile would have fled.

The Fourth Division did not get past the hill. From behind it, coming out to Sharpe’s right, the counter-attack rose from the small patch of dead ground next to the hill’s western end. The French columns came forward. Twelve thousand men, their Eagles aloft, their blades as thick as the wheat they trampled flat, and Sharpe heard, through the guns, the drums of the French beating the pas-de-charge. This was war as France had taught the world war. This was the mass attack, the irresistible force, driven by blurred drumsticks, the collection of men turned into a great human battering ram that would be marched against the enemy to smash through the enemy’s centre and make a hole through which the cavalry would pour and tear at the flanks.