Sharpe's Regiment (41 page)

The right hand column, led by the Grenadier Company, disappeared in a maze of trenches and walls that had been taken by the first attackers. The left hand column, with less cover, became a target for the French gunners. Cannon-balls, smaller than a man’s fist, whipped horror through the files.

‘Close up! Close up!’ The Sergeants shouted. Lieutenant Colonel Girdwood stared in shock at four men lying on the ground, all struck by the same plunging cannon-ball. One, coughing and bleeding, tried to rejoin his file.

Muskets blazed from ahead, the flames stabbing through the smoke that blossomed from a stone wall. Balls plucked at the Colours, thrummed the air over Sharpe’s head, and he watched approvingly as d‘Alembord inclined right to flank the threat. The Irish squad fired a volley at the wall, charged it with blood-chilling screams, but the French were gone, back to the next barrier, and Sharpe knew that the Battalion was committed now, that it must press on into the heart of this defensive tangle. ’Cheer, you buggers! Let them hear you!‘

He jumped the wall behind the Irish. A shallow trench angled forward, its sides heightened by stone walls. A Frenchman was dying in the puddles of the trench bed, his clothes torn where Harper’s squad had searched him for money. A musket sounded ahead of Sharpe, a man screamed, and Sharpe climbed out of the trench to search to his right for a sign of his easternmost column.

The Colours halted behind him. He could hear d‘Alembord’s Company firing, the sharper crack of the rifles distinctive in the constant noise of musketry that filled the air. Bullets were striking the rock beside him, whistling up in ricochets, humming and throbbing about him, and still he could not see the right-hand column. He heard the crash of musketry from their direction, a cheer, and then the cough of explosions that sounded like small artillery shells breaking apart. ’Sergeant Major! Right! Right!‘

Someone shouted the order on to Harper. Sharpe was already crossing the open rock, looking for the Grenadiers. He went through a bank of musket smoke and saw them, crouching in a rock gully, their advance held up by two Companies of French troops who lined a stone wall above them and poured musketry into the packed ranks and rolled the shells, fuses lit and smoking, down to the stalled attack where, in gouts of dark red and dirty smoke, the shells exploded to drive the Grenadier Company back. ‘Forward, you bastards! Forward!’ He went forward himself, coming towards the flank of the French line, and he saw the muskets moving towards him, knew that a volley would tear him ragged in just seconds, but then he heard the shouts to his left and, from the smoke, with bayonets reaching and shining, Harper’s men came like furies onto the right of the French line.

The enemy line broke. Harper’s men were using bayonets, grunting and shouting, the blood splashing their grey trousers.

‘Forward! Move! Move!’ Sharpe watched the Grenadiers climb the wall. Sergeant Lynch, his bayonet unbloodied, was walking behind Harper’s men and Sharpe shouted at him to catch up.

The ensign holding the King’s Colour was shot, the banner fell and was caught by a sergeant, and Sharpe saw that the next barrier was thick with musket smoke. Harper’s men were reloading, crouching behind a wall, and Sharpe bellowed at the Grenadiers to attack fast. The Frenchmen who had fled to the new position were still settling in. They were nervous, and this was the time to strike.

‘Forward! Forward!’ He had lost sight of the left hand column now, but he had known the fight would be like this. ‘Come on, you buggers! Cheer!’

They cheered. They ran with him, their bayonets bright, and Harper’s men put a volley in front of them, driving stone splinters into the faces of the defenders, then Sharpe heard the coughing bellow of the French muskets, saw the billow of dirty smoke, greyer than the British, and felt the balls whip past him to strike into men behind, but he was safe, the sword was in his hand, and he shouted for the sheer splendour of it as he jumped the wall and hacked down with the sword.

A Frenchman tried to parry the blow with his musket, succeeding only in deflecting it so that the huge sword cut into his forearm, smashing the bone and shearing to the elbow joint. The man screamed, Sharpe was past him, and a French officer, slim sword bright, challenged him. The man was shouting at his own men, whether to go back or counter-attack Sharpe could not tell. He screamed his war-scream, saw the fear in the Frenchman, and lunged forward with his sword, his hand already twisting so that the blade, as it stabbed the enemy’s stomach, would not be trapped by the suction of flesh. He ripped the blade free, backhanded the Frenchman’s feeble, dying riposte, and stepped over the fallen man and bellowed at his men to keep going. Speed was everything here, speed that would drive the attack through the successive walls before the defenders could settle and aim.

Beside him now, screaming and shouting like men possessed of devils, the Grenadier Company was sweeping forward. Their blood was up now. They had endured the first blow, found they had survived, and now they were racing ahead of him, oblivious of the death which, just minutes before, had terrified them. The air was humming with musket balls, screams, the smoke thick as fog. The new men, Sharpe saw, their first terror conquered, were in the front ranks of the attack. The veterans, more cautious because more knowledgeable, let them lead.

Sharpe went left. The Colour party, trying to stay with him, followed. He heard the rifles again, then saw men busy with bayonets, driving the blades down into a trench while, beyond them, number three Company had outflanked d‘Alembord to the left and supported his attack from that flank. That was what the supporting Companies were supposed to do, but three Company was led by Carline and Sharpe chalked up a good mark to the new officer.

Another stone wall, then another. The French lined them, but the attacks came first from the left, then the right, and the French reeled backwards. A splinter of stone hit Sharpe’s cheekbone, a bayonet grazed his thigh, and a musket ball snatched and shattered his canteen. They were the moments that he would remember with terror later, but for now he kept the Battalion moving even closer towards the last defences, the walls that ringed the pinnacle. His men were fighting in deep trenches now, cornering the enemy in rock traps, driving on in the strange exultation of battle that will not let a man feel fear or mercy or anything but the anger to kill and survive.

He saw redcoats with white facings on his right, and knew that men from the other Battalions were following through the gap that had been punched in the hill’s defences. No one had told them to come, no officers organised them, but this was Wellington’s army and this was how they fought. The South Essex, Sharpe thought, could have held this hill against the legions of hell themselves, and then a crash spun him round and his hand flew to his face which had been punched by the air of a passing cannon-ball. The mountain guns, at the foot of the pinnacle, hammered a volley at the attackers and drove Sharpe, with his Colour party, into a trench. There was no sign of Lieutenant Colonel Girdwood.

He stepped over the dead and dying. He saw a British musket abandoned, its bayonet bent almost double by the force of a lunge that had struck rock. There were puddles of slippery blood. A dog licked at one, then ran on to catch up with its master. The French musket balls were thick overhead, the sound of the volleys like a raging fire among thorns, the crashes of the mountain guns deafening.

The attack was stalled. The trenches led to the pinnacle, zigzagging through the walls and were blocked, where they crossed the outer defences, by transverse stone barriers. As the French had been driven back their defences were thickened and strengthened by the fugitives from the captured positions. ‘Move! Move!’ Sharpe forced his way to the front where men, kneeling in the trench, fired uselessly at the obstacles. Three bodies lay further up the trench, showing that the French, hidden by the upper walls, had the approach blanketed by guns.

The men seemed to be shivering, not with fear but impatience. They stared at him from eyes rimmed with powder stains, blood-smeared, and Sharpe knew they were still keen to attack, but that no man could go through the trench and live while the mountain guns, firing from the heart of the enemy position, made the upper ground a death trap. Sharpe heaved himself to the trench parapet to look right. The ground dropped precipitately away towards the road. There could be no outflanking that way. He wondered where d‘Alembord’s men were and was ashamed because he detected in himself a hope that the other column might lever the enemy out of this position and save him the necessity of attacking.

‘Load!’ He waited as those men who had empty muskets loaded. ‘We’re going up there!’ He pointed to the left of the trench. ‘Then straight at the buggers! One effort, lads, just one bloody effort.’ They grinned. Their knuckles were white where they gripped their weapons.

There was no point in waiting. Hesitation just gave the mind time to imagine what waited in that place where the musket balls juddered the air and the smoke rolled thick from the battery of guns. So thick, Sharpe suddenly noticed, that the enemy would be looking into a fog of their own making. ‘Come on! Let them hear you! Let them hear you! Let them hear you!’ He was shouting it as a war cry as he scrambled up the trench’s side.

He thought he was alone for a few seconds. He feared to stand up on the trench’s parapet, fearing to lose the happiness that he had found, but he made himself do it, and he ran forward, shouting, hearing his voice alone in the din of guns, and then he heard the cheers behind him and saw, to his left, more men rising from the shelter of walls and trenches and heard their wild cheers.

Patrick Harper, in the centre of the line, saw Sharpe taking the right column forward and he screamed his own group at the wall. There was a boulder outside the enemy line, its flanks chipped white where bullets had struck it, and he ran for it, unslinging the vicious seven-barrelled gun as he drove himself forward, his voice keening in a strange, curdling chant of his own devising as he jumped, steadied himself on the boulder’s summit, a huge target for every French musket in their rock citadel, and fired.

The seven bullets smashed outwards, clearing a stretch of the wall by flinging three enemy backwards and Harper jumped, gun flailing like a club, and his men were beside him, screaming like banshees from hell, their blades ripping and gouging and the wall was taken. Sharpe was across it to the right and the trench was outflanked: he shouted the Companies forward to the next wall that was shrouded in the fog of the battery. ‘Come on! Come on! Come on!’ Speed was all. There was no time to form line, or dress ranks, only time to carry the bloodstained bayonets up to the next defence and kill again. A British corporal, his jaw blown away by a mountain gun, wept into his bloodsoaked hands. A dog, shot in the rump, yelped helplessly for its dead master.

Charlie Weller, in his first fight, listened to the screams and the noise and he thought that he would never be able to go forward. He did, somehow. It helped to be at the back of the Company, following the man in front, not certain what terrible things caused the screams that came from the leading ranks. Once, through a shifting curtain of smoke, he saw a French flag flying on the pinnacle, and somehow this battle did not seem anything like he had imagined. He could hear the enemy’s shouts, louder than he had ever thought they would be, and he had already seen what they had done to men bigger than he, yet he went forward, listening to the sergeants but not truly hearing them. Boney, whimpering because of the noise, stayed loyally close. A musket ball struck Weller’s shako, knocking it over his left eye, and he nervously straightened it. He crouched when his squad stopped, stared at his unbloodied bayonet inches before his eyes and thought that he would never make a soldier.

‘Mr Price!’ A voice shouted from the front of the column. ‘Take your squad right!’

‘That’s us, Charlie.’ Private Clayton, a fly rogue whose wife was the envy of the rest of the Battalion, grinned at Weller. ‘Say your prayers and don’t piss yourself. Ready?’

A crash of musketry sounded at the column’s front, then Lieutenant Price, his sword clumsy in his hand, was shrieking at his men to follow him. ‘Come on, lads! This is what they pay us for!’ Weller, thinking that he would be dead within seconds, and thinking of his mother who had told him he would come to a miserable end if he went for a soldier, found his legs moving in obedience to the officer’s shout. He held the musket ahead of him, copying the other men, and then he heard them shout, tried to shout himself, though it came out more like a child’s whimper of terror, and suddenly, in a trench behind a low parapet of piled rocks, he saw moustached men who aimed their huge muskets right at him.

The muskets fired. He screamed in sheer terror, and somehow the scream turned into anger, and he saw Clayton jumping into the trench, bayonet searing down on one of the enemy. They seemed huge to Charlie, who suddenly felt very young, and then he was at the trench’s edge himself and a Frenchman, a great brute of a man who reminded Charlie of the blacksmith at home, lunged up with his bayonet.

Desperately, as though it was a pitchfork, Weller parried the blow. The crack of the two muskets meeting was satisfyingly loud and, even more satisfying, Weller’s farm bred strength drove the enemy’s weapon to one side and he suddenly heard Clayton shrieking at him. ‘Kill the bugger, Charlie! Kill him!’

He drove the bayonet down, screaming in fear as much as anger, and the blade went into the enemy’s neck. The man turned, wrenching Weller off balance, and he fell onto the wounded man. The Frenchman hit him, and Weller pounded his fist into the moustached face, and then a blade came over his shoulder and into the Frenchman’s chest. The man heaved once beneath Weller, choked, and was suddenly still. ‘Not bad, Charlie, but hang onto your gun.’ Clayton pulled him up. ‘Get the bugger’s pack. Quick!’

‘His pack?’ Charlie had entirely forgotten Harper’s advice.