Sharpe's Havoc (23 page)

“The very bloody best,” Sharpe said fervently and then, seeing that his words had not
really encouraged hope, he made Harper busy. All the food that had been brought up to the
watchtower had been stored in one corner of the ruin where Sharpe could keep an eye on it,
but the men had taken no breakfast so he had Harper supervise the distribution. “Give
them hunger rations, Sergeant,” he ordered, “for God alone knows how long we’ll be up
here.”

Vicente followed Sharpe onto the small terrace outside the watch-tower entrance from
where he stared at the distant dragoons. He looked distracted and began fiddling with a
scrap of the white piping that decorated his dark-blue uniform and the more he fidgeted,
the more piping was stripped away from his jacket. “Yesterday,” he suddenly blurted out.
“Yesterday was the first time that I killed a man with a sword.” He frowned as he pulled
another inch or two of the piping from his jacket’s hem. “A hard thing to do.”

“Especially with a sword like that,” Sharpe said, nodding at Vicente’s scabbard. The
Portuguese officer’s sword was slim, straight and not particularly robust. It was a sword
for parades, for show, not for gutter fights in the rain. “Now a sword like this”-Sharpe
patted the heavy cavalry sword that hung from his belt-”batters the bastards down. It don’t
cut them to death so much as it bludgeons them. You could batter an ox to death with this
blade. Get yourself a cavalry sword, Jorge. They’re made for killing. Infantry officers’
swords are for dance floors.”

“I mean it was difficult to look in his eyes,” Vicente explained, “and still use the
blade.”

“I know what you mean,” Sharpe said, “but it’s still the best thing to do. What you want to do
is to watch the sword or bayonet, isn’t it? But if you keep watching their eyes you can tell
what they’re going to do next by where they look. Never look at the place you’re going to hit
them, though. Keep looking at their eyes and just hit.”

Vicente realized he was stripping the piping from his jacket and tucked the errant
length into a buttonhole. “When I shot my own sergeant,” he said, “it seemed unreal. Like
theater even. But he was not trying to kill me. That man last night? It was frightening.”

“Bloody well ought to be frightening,” Sharpe responded. “A fight like that? In the rain
and dark? Anything can happen. You just go in fast and dirty, Jorge, do the damage and keep on
doing it.”

“You have done so much fighting,” Vicente said sadly, as though he pitied Sharpe.

“I’ve been a soldier for a long time,” Sharpe said, “and our army does a lot of fighting.
India, Flanders, here, Denmark.”

“Denmark! Why were you fighting in Denmark?”

“God knows,” Sharpe said. “Something about their fleet. We wanted it, they didn’t want us to
have it, so we went and took it.” He was gazing down the northern slope at a group of a dozen
Frenchmen who had stripped to the waist and now began to shovel at a patch of ferns a hundred
yards from the edge of the wood. He took out the replacement telescope Luis had brought him.
It was little more than a toy and the outer lens was loose which meant it kept blurring, and
it was only half as powerful as his own glass, but he supposed it was better than nothing.
He focused the glass, steadied the outer lens with a fingertip and stared at the French work
party. “Shit,” he said.

“What?”

“Bastards have got a cannon,” Sharpe said. “Just pray it isn’t a bloody mortar.”

Vicente, looking bewildered, was trying and failing to see a gun. “What happens if it’s
a mortar?”

“We all die,” Sharpe said, imagining the pot-like gun lobbing its shells into the sky so
that they would drop almost vertically onto his position. “We all die,” he said again, “or
else we run away and get captured.”

Vicente made the sign of the cross again. He had not made that gesture at all in the first
weeks Sharpe had known him, but the further Vicente traveled from his life as a lawyer the
more the old imperatives returned to him. Life, he was beginning to learn, was not
controlled by law or reason, but by luck and savagery and blind unfeeling fate. “I can’t see
a cannon,” he finally admitted.

Sharpe pointed to the French working party. “Those buggers are making a nice flat patch
so they can aim properly,” he explained. “You can’t fire a gun on a slope, not if you want to
be accurate.” He took a few steps down the northern path. “Dan!”

“Sir?“

“See where the bastards are going to put a cannon? How far away is it?”

Hagman, ensconced in a crevice of stone, peered down. “Bit under seven hundred paces,
sir. Too far.”

“We can try?”

Hagman shrugged. “I can try, but maybe save it for later?”

Sharpe nodded. Better to reveal the rifle’s range to the French when things were more
desperate.

Vicente again looked bewildered so Sharpe explained. “A rifle bullet can carry that
far, but it would take a genius to be accurate. Dan’s close to genius.” He thought about
taking a small party of riflemen halfway down the slope and he knew that at three or four
hundred yards they could do a lot of damage to a gun crew, but the gun crew, at that range,
would answer them with canister and though the lower slope of the hill was littered with
rocks few were of a size to shelter a man from canister. Sharpe would lose soldiers if he
went down the hill. He would do it, he decided, if the gun turned out to be a mortar, for
mortars never carried canister, but the French were bound to answer his foray with a
strong skirmish line of infantry. Stroke and counter-stroke. It felt frustrating. All he
could do was pray the gun was not a mortar.

It was not a mortar. An hour after the working party began making a level platform the
cannon appeared and Sharpe saw it was a howitzer. That was bad enough, but it gave his men a
chance, for a howitzer shell would come at an oblique angle and his men would be safe behind
the bigger boulders on the hilltop. Vicente borrowed the small telescope and watched the
French gunners unlimber the gun and prepare its ammunition. A caisson, its long
coffin-like lid cushioned so that the gun crew could travel on it, was being opened and the
powder bags and shells piled by the leveled ground. “It looks like a very small gun,” Vicente
said.

“Doesn’t have to be long-barrelled,” Sharpe explained, “because it isn’t a precision gun.
It just lobs shells on us. It’ll be noisy, but we’ll survive.” He said that to cheer Vicente
up, but he was not as confident as he sounded. Two or three lucky shells could decimate his
command, but at least the howitzer’s arrival had taken his men’s minds off their larger
predicament and they watched as the gunners made ready. A small flag had been placed fifty
paces in front of the howitzer, presumably so the gun captain could judge the wind which
would tend to drift the shells westward. Sure enough Sharpe saw them edge the howitzer’s trail
to compensate, and then watched through the telescope as the quoins were hammered under the
stubby barrel. Field guns were usually elevated with a screw, but howitzers used the
old-fashioned wooden wedges. Sharpe reckoned the skinny officer who supervised the gun
must be using his largest wedges, straining to get maximum elevation so that his shells
would drop into the rocks on the hill’s summit. The first powder bags were being brought to
the weapon and Sharpe saw the flash of reflected sunlight glance off steel and he knew the
officer must be trimming the shell’s fuse. “Under cover, Sergeant!” Sharpe shouted.

Every man had a place to go to, a place that was well protected by the great boulders.
Most of the riflemen were in the redoubts, walled with stone, but half a dozen, including
Sharpe and Harper, were inside the old watchtower where a stairway had once led to the
ramparts. Only four of the steps were left and they merely climbed to a gaping cavity in the
stonework of the northern wall and Sharpe positioned himself there so he could see what the
French were doing.

The gun vanished in a cloud of smoke, followed a heartbeat later by the massive boom of
the exploding powder. Sharpe tried to find the missile in the sky, then saw the tiny,
wavering trail of smoke left by the burning fuse. Then came the sound of the shell, a thunder
rolling overhead, and the smoke trail whipped only a couple of feet above the ruined
watchtower. Everyone had been holding their breath, but now let it out as the shell
exploded somewhere above the southern slope.

“Cut his fuse too long,” Harper said.

“He won’t next time,” Tongue said.

Daniel Hagman, white-faced, sat against the wall with his eyes closed. Vicente and most of
his men were a little way down the slope where they were protected by a boulder the size of a
house. Nothing could reach them directly, but if a shell bounced off the face of the
watchtower it would probably fall among them. Sharpe tried not to think of that. He had done
his best and he knew he could not provide absolute safety for every man.

They waited.

“Get on with it,” Harris said. Harper crossed himself. Sharpe looked through the hole in
the wall and saw the gunner carrying the portfire to the barrel. He said nothing to the
men, for the noise of the gun would be warning enough and he was not looking down the hill to
see when the howitzer was fired, but the moment when the French put in an infantry attack.
That seemed the obvious thing for them to do. Fire the howitzer to keep the British and
Portuguese heads down and then send their infantry to make an assault, but Sharpe saw no sign
of any such attack. The dragoons were keeping their distance, the infantry was out of sight
and the gunners just kept working.

Shell after shell arced to the hilltop. After the first shot the fuses were cut to the
precise length and the shells cracked on rocks, fell and exploded. Monotonously, steadily,
shot after shot, and each explosion sent shards of hot iron crackling and whistling through
the jumble of boulders on the hilltop, yet the French seemed unaware of how much shelter the
boulders provided. The summit stank of powder, the smoke drifted like mist through the
rocks and clung to the lichen-covered stones of the watchtower, but miraculously no one was
badly hurt. One of Vicente’s men was struck by a sliver of iron that cut his upper arm, but
that was the only casualty. Yet even so the men hated the ordeal. They sat hunched,
counting down the shots that came at a regular pace, one a minute, and the seconds stretched
between each one and no one spoke and each shot was a boom from the base of the hill, a crash or
thump as the shell struck, the ragged explosion of the powder charge and the shriek of its
fragmented casing. One shell failed to explode and they all waited breathless as the
seconds passed and then realized that its fuse must have been faulty.

“How many bloody shells do they have?” Harper asked after a quarter-hour.

No one could answer. Sharpe had a vague recollection that a British six-pounder carried
more than a hundred rounds of ammunition in its limber, caisson and axle boxes, but he was
not sure of that and French practice was probably different, so he said nothing. Instead he
prowled round the hilltop, going from the tower to the men in the redoubts and then watching
anxiously down the other flanks of the hill, and still there was no sign that the French
contemplated an assault.

He went back to the tower. Hagman had produced a small wooden flute, something he had
whittled himself during his convalescence, and now he played trills and snatches of old
familiar melodies. The scraps of music sounded like birdsong, then the hilltop would
reverberate to the next explosion, the shell fragments would batter against the tower and
as the brutal sound faded so the flute’s breathy sound would re-emerge. “I always wanted to
play the flute,” Sharpe said to no one in particular.

“The fiddle,” Harris said, “I’ve always wanted to play the fiddle.”

“Hard that,” Harper said, “because it’s fiddly.”

They groaned and Harper grinned proudly. Sharpe was mentally counting the seconds,
imagining the gun being pushed back into place and then being sponged out, the gunner’s
thumb over the touchhole to stop the rush of air forced by the incoming sponge from setting
fire to any unexploded powder in the breech. When every lingering scrap of fire had been
extinguished inside the barrel they would thrust home the powder bags, then the six-inch
shell with its carefully cut fuse protruding from the wooden bung, and the gunner would ram
a spike down the touchhole to pierce a canvas powder bag and afterward push a reed filled
with more powder down into the punctured bag. They would stand back, cover their ears and the
gunner would touch the linstock to the reed and just then Sharpe heard the boom and almost
instantly there was an almighty crash inside the tower itself and he realized the shell
had come right through the hole at the top of the truncated staircase and now it fell down,
fuse smoking in a wild spiral, to lodge between two of the packs that held their food and
Sharpe stared at it, saw the wisp of smoke shivering upward, knew they must all die or be
terribly maimed when it exploded and he did not think, just dived. He scrabbled at the fuse,
knew he was too late to extract it and so he dropped onto the shell, his belly smothering
it, and his mind was screaming because he did not want to die. It will be quick, he thought, it
will be quick, and at least he would not have to make decisions any more and no one else would
be hurt and he cursed the shell because it was taking so long to explode and he was staring
at Daniel Hagman who was staring back at him, eyes wide and the forgotten flute held just an
inch from his mouth.

“Stay there much longer,” Harper said in a voice that could not quite hide the strain he was
feeling, “and you’ll hatch the bloody thing.”

Hagman started to laugh, then Harris and Cooper and Harper joined in, and Sharpe climbed
off the shell and saw that the wooden plug that held the fuse was blackened by fire, but
somehow the fuse had gone out and he picked up the damned missile and hurled it out of the hole
and listened to it clatter down the hill.