Sharpe's Havoc (33 page)

“Aim at the officers!” Sharpe called to his riflemen. “Muskets, don’t fire! This order
is for rifles only.” He made the distinction because a musket, fired at this range, was a
wasted shot, but his riflemen would be lethal. He waited a second, took a breath.
“Fire!”

Hagman’s officer jerked back, both arms in the air, sword cartwheeling back over the
column. Another officer was down on his knees clutching his belly, and a third was
holding his shoulder. The front of the column stepped over the corpse and the blue-coated
line seemed to shudder as more bullets slammed into them, and then the long leading French
ranks, panicked by the whistle of rifled bullets about their ears, fired up at the seminary.
The volley was ear-splitting, the smoke smothered the slope like sea fog and the musket balls
rattled on the seminary walls and shattered its glass windows. The volley at least served to
hide the French for a few yards, but then they reappeared through the smoke and more rifles
fired and another officer went down. The column divided to pass the solitary tree, then
the long ranks reunited when they were past it.

The men in the garden began firing, then the redcoats crammed into the seminary windows
and arrayed with Sharpe’s men on the roof pulled their triggers. Muskets crashed, smoke
thickened, the balls plucked at men in the column’s front ranks and put them down and the men
advancing behind lost their cohesion as they tried not to step on their dead or wounded
colleagues.

“Fire low!” a sergeant of the Buffs called to his men. “Don’t waste His Majesty’s lead!”

Colonel Waters was carrying spare canteens about the roof for men who were parched by
biting the cartridges. The saltpeter in the gunpowder dried the mouth fast and men gulped
the water between shots.

The column attacking the seminary’s western face was already shredded. Those Frenchmen
were being assailed by rifle and musket fire, but the cannonade from the southern bank of
the river was far worse. Gunners had rarely been offered such an easy target, the chance to
rake the flank of an enemy’s infantry column, and they worked like demons. Spherical case
cracked in the air, shooting fiery strands of smoke in crazy trajectories, round shots
bounced and hammered through the ranks and shells exploded in the column’s heart. Three
drummers were hit by case shot, then a round shot whipped the head off another drummer boy,
and when the instruments went silent the infantrymen lost heart and began to edge backward.
Musket volleys spat from the seminary’s three upper floors and the big building now looked
as though it was on fire because powder smoke was writhing thick from every window. The
loopholes fet-ted flame, the balls struck wavering ranks, and then the French in the western
column began to retreat faster and the backward movement turned to panic and they
broke.

Some of the French, instead of retreating to the cover of the houses on the valley’s far
side, houses that were even now being struck by round shot so that their rafters and masonry
were being splintered and the first fires were burning in the wreckage, ran to join the
northern attack which was shielded by the seminary from the cannon fire. That northern
column kept coming. It was taking dreadful punishment, but it was soaking up the bullets
and musket balls, and the sergeants and officers continually pushed men into the front
ranks to replace the dead and the wounded. And so the column came ponderously uphill, but
no one in the French ranks had really thought what they would do when they reached the hilltop
where there was no door facing them. They would have to skirt the building and try to break
through the big gates leading to the garden and when the men in the front ranks saw no place to
go they simply stopped advancing and began shooting instead. A ball plucked at Sharpe’s
sleeve. A newly arrived lieutenant of the Northamptonshire regiment fell back with a sigh,
a bullet in his forehead. He lay on his back, dead before he fell, looking strangely
peaceful. The redcoats had placed their cartridges and propped their ramrods on the red-tiled
parapet to make loading quicker, but there were now so many on the roof that they jostled
each other as they fired down into the dim mass of Frenchmen who were wreathed in their own
smoke. One Frenchman ran bravely forward to fire through a loophole, but he was hit before
he could reach the wall. Sharpe had fired one shot, then he just watched his men. Pendleton and
Perkins, the youngest, were grinning as they fired. Cooper and Tongue were reloading for
Hagman, knowing he was a better shot, and the old poacher was calmly picking off one man
after the other.

A cannonball screamed overhead and Sharpe twisted round to see that the French had placed
a battery on the hill to the west, at the city’s edge. There was a small chapel there with a
bell tower and Sharpe saw the bell tower vanish in smoke, then crumble into ruin as the
British batteries at the convent hammered the newly arrived French guns. A Berkshire man
turned to watch and a bullet whipped through his mouth, mangling his teeth and tongue and he
swore incoherently, spitting a stream of blood.

“Don’t watch the city!” Sharpe bellowed. “Keep shooting! Keep shooting!”

Hundreds of Frenchmen were firing muskets uphill and the vast majority of the shots
were simply wasted against stone walls, but some found targets. Dodd had a flesh wound in his
left arm, but he kept firing. A redcoat was hit in the throat and choked to death. The
solitary tree on the northern slope was twitching as it was struck by bullets and shreds of
leaf were flying away with the French musket smoke. A sergeant of the Buffs fell back with a
bullet in his ribs, and then Sir Edward Paget sent men from the western side of the roof, who
had already seen their column defeated, to add their fire to the northern side. The muskets
flared and coughed and spat down, the smoke thickened, and Sir Edward grinned at Daddy Hill.
“Brave bastards!” Sir Edward had to shout over the noise of muskets and rifles.

“They won’t stand, Ned,” Hill called back. “They won’t stand.”

Hill was right. The first Frenchmen were already backing down the hill because of the
futility of shooting at stone walls. Sir Edward, exultant at this easy victory, went to
the parapet to look at the retreating enemy and he stood there, gold braid catching the
smoke-dimmed sun, watching the enemy column disintegrate and run away, but a few stubborn
Frenchmen still fired and suddenly Sir Edward gasped, clapped a hand to his elbow and Sharpe
saw that the sleeve of the General’s elegant red coat was torn and that a jagged piece of
white bone was showing through the ripped wool and bloody mangled flesh.

“Jesus!” Paget swore. He was in terrible pain. The ball had shattered his elbow and
seared up through his biceps. He was half bent over with the agony and very pale.

“Take him down to the doctors,” Hill ordered. “You’ll be all right, Ned.”

Paget forced himself to stand straight. An aide had taken off a neckcloth and was trying
to bind his General’s wound, but Paget shook him off. “The command is yours,” he said to Hill
through clenched teeth.

“So it is,” Hill acknowledged.

“Keep firing!” Sharpe shouted at his men. It did not matter that the rifle barrels were
almost too hot to touch, what mattered was to drive the remaining French back down the hill
or, better still, to kill them. Another rush of feet announced that more reinforcements
had arrived at the seminary for the French had yet to find any way of stopping the traffic
across the river. The British artillery, kings of this battlefield, were hammering any
French gunner who dared show his face. Every few moments a brave French crew would run to the
abandoned guns on the quay in hope of putting a round shot into one of the barges, but every
time they were struck by spherical case and even by canister, for the new British battery,
down at the water’s edge, was close enough to use the deadly ammunition across the river.
The musket balls flared from the cannons’ mouths like duck shot, killing six or seven men at a
time, and after a while the French gunners abandoned their efforts and just hid in the
houses at the back of the quay.

And then, quite suddenly, there were no Frenchmen firing on the northern slope. The grass
was horrid with dead men and wounded men and with fallen muskets and with little
flickering fires where the musket wadding had set light to the grass, but the survivors had
fled to the Amarante road in the valley. The single tree looked as though it had been
attacked by locusts. A drum trundled down the hill, making a rattling noise. Sharpe saw a
French flag through the smoke, but could not see whether the staff was topped by an eagle. “Stop
firing!” Hill called.

“Clean your barrels!” Sharpe shouted. “Check your flints!” For the French would be back. Of
that he was certain. They would be back. 

More men came to the seminary. A score of Portuguese civilians arrived with hunting guns
and bags of ammunition, escorted by a plump priest who was cheered by the redcoats when he
arrived in the garden with a bell-mouthed blunderbuss like those carried by stage-coach
drivers to repel highwaymen. The Buffs had relit the fires in the kitchens and now fetched
great metal cauldrons of tea or hot water to the roof. The tea cleaned out the soldiers’
throats and the hot water swilled out their muskets and rifles. Ten boxes of spare
ammunition were also carried up and Harper filled his shako with the cartridges, which
were not as fine as those supplied for the rifles, but would do in a pinch. “And this is what
you call a pinch, sir, eh?” he asked, distributing the cartridges along the parapet where the
rifles and ramrods leaned. The French were thickening in the low ground to the north. If they
had any sense, Sharpe thought, the enemy would bring mortars to that low ground, but so far
none had appeared. Perhaps all the mortars were to the west of the city, guarding against the
Royal Navy, and too far away to be fetched quickly.

Extra loopholes were battered through the garden’s northern wall. Two of the
Northamptonshires had manhandled a great pair of rain butts to the wall and propped the door
of the garden shed across the barrels’ tops to make a fire step from which they could shoot
over the wall’s coping.

Harris brought Sharpe a mug of tea, then looked left and right before producing a leg of
cold chicken from his cartridge box. “Thought you might like this as well, sir.”

“Where did you get it?”

“Found it, sir,” Harris said vaguely, “and I got one for you too, Sarge.” Harris gave a leg
to Harper, then produced a breast for himself, brushed some loose powder from it and bit
into it hungrily.

Sharpe discovered he was famished and the chicken tasted delicious. “Where did it come
from?” he insisted.

“I think they were General Paget’s dinner, sir,” Harris confessed, “but he’s probably
lost his appetite.”

“I should think he has,” Sharpe said, “and a pity to let good chicken waste, eh?” He turned
as a drumbeat sounded and saw the French were forming their ranks again, but this time only
on the northern side of the seminary. “To your places!” he called, chucking the chicken bone
far out into the garden. A few of the French were now carrying ladders, presumably
plundered from the houses that were being battered by the British guns. “When they come,” he
called, “aim for the men with the ladders.” Even without the rifle fire he doubted the French
could get close enough to place the ladders against the garden wall, but it did no harm to make
certain. Most of his riflemen had used the lull in the fight to load their newly cleaned
barrels with leather-wrapped balls and prime powder which meant their first shots ought to be
lethally accurate. After that, as the French pressed closer and the noise rose and the smoke
thickened, they would use cartridges, leave the leather patches in their butt traps and so
sacrifice accuracy for speed. Sharpe now loaded his own rifle, using a patch, but no
sooner had he returned the ramrod to its slots than General Hill was beside him.

“I’ve never fired a rifle,” Hill said.

“Very like a musket, sir,” Sharpe said, embarrassed at being singled out by a
general.

“May I?” Hill reached for the weapon and Sharpe yielded it. “It’s rather beautiful,” Hill
said wistfully, caressing the Baker’s flank, “not nearly as cumbersome as a musket.”

“It’s a lovely thing,” Sharpe said fervently.

Hill aimed the gun down the hill, seemed about to cock and fire, then suddenly handed it
back to Sharpe. “I’d dearly like to try it,” he said, “but if I missed my aim then the whole
army would know about it, eh? And I’d never live that down.” He spoke loudly and Sharpe
understood he had been an unwitting participant in a little piece of theater. Hill had
not really been interested in the rifle, but rather in taking the men’s minds away from
the threat beneath them. In the process he had subtly flattered them by suggesting they
could do something he could not, and he had left them grinning. Sharpe thought about what he
had just seen. He admired it, but he also admired Sir Arthur Wellesley who would never have
resorted to such a display. Sir Arthur would ignore the men and the men, in turn, would fight
like demons to gain his grudging approval.

Sharpe had never wasted much time worrying why some men were born to be officers and
others not. He had jumped the gap, but that did not make the system any less unfair. Yet to
complain of the world’s unfairness was the same as grumbling that the sun was hot or that the
wind sometimes changed its direction. Unfairness existed, it always had and it always
would, and the miracle, to Sharpe’s eyes, was that some men like Hill and Wellesley, though
they had become wealthy and privileged through unfair advantages, were nevertheless
superb at what they did. Not all generals were good, many were downright bad, but Sharpe had
usually been lucky and found himself commanded by men who knew their business. Sharpe did
not care that Sir Arthur Wellesley was the son of an aristocrat and had purchased his way up
the ladder of promotion and was as cold as a lawyer’s sense of charity. The long-nosed
bugger knew how to win and that was what mattered.