Sharpe’s Battle: The Battle of Fuentes de Oñoro, May 1811. Bernard Cornwell
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the small house was drenched in blood, its walls spattered and its floor soaked with it, while on the floor were sprawled the limp bodies of children. Sharpe tried to count the little bodies, but could not always tell where one blood-boltered corpse began and another ended. The children had evidently been stripped naked and then had their throats cut. A small dog had been killed too, and its blood-matted, curly-haired corpse had been tossed onto the children whose skins appeared unnaturally white against the vivid streaks of black-looking blood.
‘Oh, sweet Jesus,’ Sharpe said as he backed out of the reeking shadows to draw a breath of fresh air. He had seen more than his share of horror. He had been born to a poorhouse whore in a London gutter and he had followed Britain’s drum from Flanders to Madras and through the Indian wars and now from the beaches of Portugal to the frontiers of Spain, but never, not even in the Sultan Tippoo’s torture chambers in Seringapatam, had he seen children tossed into a dead pile like so many slaughtered animals.
‘There’s more here, sir,’ Corporal Jackson called. Jackson had just vomited in the doorway of a hovel in which the bodies of two old people lay in a bloody mess. They had been tortured in ways that were only too evident.
Sharpe thought of Teresa who was fighting these same scum who gutted and tormented their victims, then, unable to bear the unbidden images that seared his thoughts, he cupped his hands and shouted up the hill, ‘Harris! Down here!’
Rifleman Harris was the company’s educated man. He had once been a schoolmaster, even a respectable schoolmaster, but boredom had driven him to drink and drink had been his ruin, or at least the cause of his joining the army where he still loved to demonstrate his erudition. ‘Sir?’ Harris said as he arrived in the settlement.
‘You speak French?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘There’s two Frogs in that house. Find out what unit they’re from, and what the bastards did here. And Harris!’
‘Sir?’ The lugubrious, red-haired Harris turned back.
‘You don’t have to be gentle with the bastards.’
Even Harris, who was accustomed to Sharpe, seemed shocked by his Captain’s tone. ‘No, sir.’
Sharpe walked back across the settlement’s tiny plaza. His men had searched the two cottages on the stream’s far side, but found no bodies there. The massacre had evidently been confined to the three houses on the nearer bank where Sergeant Harper was standing with a bleak, hurt look on his face. Patrick Harper was an Ulsterman from Donegal and had been driven into the ranks of Britain’s army by hunger and poverty. He was a huge man, four inches taller than Sharpe who was himself six feet tall. In battle Harper was an awesome figure, yet in truth he was a kind, humorous and easy-going man whose benevolence disguised his life’s central contradiction which was that he had no love for the king for whom he fought and little for the country whose flag he defended, yet there were few better soldiers in all King George’s army, and none who was more loyal to his friends. And it was for those friends that Harper fought, and the closest of his friends, despite their disparity in rank, was Sharpe himself. ‘They’re just wee kiddies,’ Harper now said. ‘Who’d do such a thing?’
‘Them.’ Sharpe jerked his head down the small valley to where the stream joined the wider waterway. The grey Frenchmen had stopped there; too far to be threatened by the rifles, but still close enough to watch what happened in the settlement where they had pillaged and murdered.
‘Some of those wee ones had been raped,’ Harper said.
‘I saw,’ Sharpe said bleakly.
‘How could they do it?’
‘There isn’t an answer, Pat. God knows.’ Sharpe felt sick, just like Harper felt sick, but inquiring into the roots of sin would not gain revenge for the dead children, nor would it save the raped girl’s sanity, nor bury the blood-soaked dead. Nor would it find a way back to the British lines for one small light company that Sharpe now realized was dangerously exposed on the edge of the French outpost line. ‘Ask a goddamn chaplain for an answer, if you can ever find one closer than the Lisbon brothels,’ Sharpe said savagely, then turned to look at the charnel houses. ‘How the hell are we going to bury this lot?’
‘We can’t, sir. We’ll just tumble the house walls down on top of them,’ Harper said. He gazed down the valley. ‘I could murder those bastards. What are we going to do with the two we’ve got?’
‘Kill them,’ Sharpe said curtly. ‘We’ll get an answer or two now,’ he said as he saw Harris duck out of the cottage. Harris was carrying one of the steel-grey dragoon helmets which Sharpe now saw were not cloth-covered, but were indeed fashioned out of metal and plumed with a long hank of grey horsehair.
Harris ran his right hand through the plume as he walked towards Sharpe. ‘I found out who they are, sir,’ he said as he drew nearer. ‘They belong to the Brigade Loup, the Wolf Brigade. It’s named after their commanding officer, sir. Fellow called Loup, Brigadier General Guy Loup. Loup means wolf in French, sir. They reckon they’re an elite unit. Their job was to hold the road open through the mountains this past winter and they did it by beating the hell out of the natives. If any of Loup’s men get killed then he kills fifty civilians as revenge. That’s what they were doing here, sir. A couple of his men were ambushed and killed, and this is the price.’ Harris gestured at the houses of the dead. ‘And Loup’s not far away, sir,’ he added in warning. ‘Unless these fellows are lying, which I doubt. He left a detachment here and took a squadron to hunt down some fugitives in the next valley.’
Sharpe looked at the cavalryman’s horse which was still tethered in the settlement’s centre and thought of the infantryman he had captured. ‘This Brigade Loup,’ he asked, ‘is it cavalry or infantry?’
‘The brigade has both, sir,’ Harris said. ‘It’s a special brigade, sir, formed to fight the partisans, and Loup’s got two battalions of infantry and one regiment of dragoons.’
‘And they all wear grey?’
‘Like wolves, sir,’ Harris said helpfully.
‘We all know what to do with wolves,’ Sharpe said, then turned as Sergeant Latimer shouted a warning. Latimer was commanding the tiny picquet line that stood between Sharpe and the French, but it was no new attack that had caused Latimer to shout his warning, but rather the approach of four French horsemen. One of them carried the tricolour guidon, though the swallow-tailed flag was now half obscured by a dirty white shirt that had been impaled on the guidon’s lance head. ‘Bastards want to talk to us,’ Sharpe said.
‘I’ll talk to them,’ Harper said viciously and pulled back the cock of his seven-barrelled gun.
‘No!’ Sharpe said. ‘And go round the company and tell everyone to hold their fire, and that’s an order.’
‘Aye, sir.’ Harper lowered the flint, then, with a baleful glance towards the approaching Frenchmen, went to warn the greenjackets to hold their tempers and keep their fingers off their triggers.
Sharpe, his rifle slung on his shoulder and his sword at his side, strolled towards the four Frenchmen. Two of the horsemen were officers, while the flanking pair were standard-bearers, and the ratio of flags to men seemed impertinently high, almost as if the two approaching officers considered themselves greater than other mortals. The tricolour guidon would have been standard enough, but the second banner was extraordinary. It was a French eagle with gilded wings outspread perched atop a pole that had a crosspiece nailed just beneath the eagle’s plinth. Most eagles carried a silk tricolour from the staff, but this eagle carried six wolf tails attached to the cross-piece. The standard was somehow barbaric, suggesting the far-off days when pagan armies of horse soldiers had thundered out of the Steppes to rape and ruin Christendom.
And if the wolf-tail standard made Sharpe’s blood run chill, then it was nothing compared to the man who now spurred his horse ahead of his companions. Only the man’s boots were not grey. His coat was grey, his horse was a grey, his helmet was lavishly plumed in grey and his grey pelisse was edged with