Sharpe’s Battle: The Battle of Fuentes de Oñoro, May 1811. Bernard Cornwell
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not be said of its efficiency. The junta was notorious for its internal squabbles and touchy pride, and few matters had touched that pride more directly than the discreet request that Arthur Wellesley, Viscount Wellington, be made Generalisimo of all Spain’s armies. Wellington was already the General Marshal of Portugal’s army and commander of the British forces in Portugal, and no man of sense denied he was the best general on the allied side, not least because he was the only one who consistently won battles, and no one denied that it made sense for all the armies opposing the French in Spain and Portugal to be under a unified command, but nevertheless, despite the acknowledged sense of the proposal, the junta was reluctant to grant Wellington any such powers. Spain’s armies, they protested, must be led by a Spaniard, and if no Spaniard had yet proved capable of winning a campaign against the French, then that was no matter; better a defeated Spaniard than a victorious foreigner.
‘The junta, my Lord,’ Hogan answered carefully, ‘will think this is the thin end of a very broad wedge. They’ll think this is a British plot to take over the Spanish armies piecemeal, and they’ll watch like hawks, my Lord, to see how you treat the Real Compañía Irlandesa.’
‘The hawk,’ Wellington said with a sour twist, ‘being Don Luis.’
‘Precisely, my Lord,’ Hogan said. General Don Luis Valverde was the junta’s official observer with the British and Portuguese armies and the man whose recommendation was needed if the Spanish were ever to appoint Wellington as their Generalisimo. It was an approval that was highly unlikely, for General Valverde was a man in whom all the junta’s great pride and none of its small sense was concentrated.
‘God damn it,’ Wellington said, thinking of Valverde. ‘Well, Hogan? You’re paid to advise me, so earn your damned pay.’
Hogan paused to collect his thoughts. ‘I fear we have to welcome Lord Kiely and his men,’ he said after a few seconds, ‘even while we distrust them, and so it seems to me, my Lord, that we must do our best to make them uncomfortable. So uncomfortable that they either go back to Madrid or else march down to Cadiz.’
‘We drive them out?’ Wellington said. ‘How?’
‘Partly, my Lord, by bivouacking them so close to the French that those guardsmen who wish to desert will find it easy. At the same time, my Lord, we say that we have put them in a place of danger as a compliment to their fighting reputation, despite which, my Lord, I think we must assume that the Real Compañía Irlandesa, while undoubtedly skilled at guarding palace gates, will prove less skilled at the more mundane task of fighting the French. We should therefore insist that they submit to a period of strict training under the supervision of someone who can be trusted to make their life a living misery.’
Wellington gave a grim smile. ‘Make these ceremonial soldiers stoop, eh? Make them chew on humble pie till it chokes them?’
‘Exactly, my Lord. I have no doubt that they expect to be treated with respect and even privilege, so we must disappoint them. We’ll have to give them a liaison officer, someone senior enough to smooth Lord Kiely’s feathers and allay General Valverde’s suspicions, but why not give them a drillmaster too? A tyrant, but someone shrewd enough to smoke out their secrets.’
Wellington smiled, then turned his horse back towards his aides. He knew exactly who Hogan had in mind. ‘I doubt our Lord Kiely will much like Mister Sharpe,’ the General said.
‘I cannot think they’ll take to each other, my Lord, no.’
‘Where is Sharpe?’
‘He should be on his way to Vilar Formoso today, my Lord. He’s an unhappy recruit to the Town Major’s staff.’
‘So he’ll be glad to be cumbered with Kiely instead then, won’t he? And who do we appoint as liaison officer?’
‘Any emollient fool will do for that post, my Lord.’
‘Very well, Hogan, I’ll find the fool and you arrange the rest.’ The General touched his heels to his horse’s flank. His aides, seeing the General ready to move, gathered their reins, then Wellington paused. ‘What does a man want with a common milking stool, Hogan?’
‘It keeps his arse dry during wet nights of sentry duty, my Lord.’
‘Clever thought, Hogan. Can’t think why I didn’t come up with the idea myself. Well done.’ Wellington wheeled his horse and spurred west away from the battle’s litter.
Hogan watched the General go, then grimaced. The French, he was sure, had wished trouble on him and now, with God’s good help, he would wish some evil back on them. He would welcome the Real Compañía Irlandesa with honeyed words and extravagant promises, then give the bastards Richard Sharpe.
The girl clung to Rifleman Perkins. She was hurt inside, she was bleeding and limping, but she had insisted on coming out of the hovel to watch the two Frenchmen die. Indeed she taunted the two men, spitting and screaming at them, then laughed as one of the two captives dropped to his knees and lifted his bound hands towards Sharpe. ‘He says he wasn’t raping the girl, sir,’ Harris translated.
‘So why were the bastard’s trousers round his ankles?’ Sharpe asked, then looked at his eight-man firing squad. Usually it was hard to find men willing to serve on firing squads, but there had been no difficulty this time. ‘Present!’ Sharpe called.
‘Non, Monsieur, je vous prie! Monsieur!’ the kneeling Frenchman called. Tears ran down his face.
Eight riflemen lined their sights on the two Frenchmen. The other captive spat his derision and kept his head high. He was a handsome man, though his face was bruised from Harris’s ministrations. The first man, realizing that his begging was to go unanswered, dropped his head and sobbed uncontrollably. ‘Maman,’ he called pathetically, ‘Maman!’ Brigadier General Loup, back in his fur-edged saddle, watched the executions from fifty yards away.
Sharpe knew he had no legal right to shoot prisoners. He knew he might even be endangering his career by this act, but then he thought of the small, blood-blackened bodies of the raped and murdered children. ‘Fire!’ he called.
The eight rifles snapped. Smoke gusted to form an acrid, filthy-smelling cloud that obscured the skeins of blood splashing high on the hovel’s stone wall as the two bodies were thrown hard back, then recoiled forward to flop onto the ground. One of the men twitched for a few seconds, then went still.
‘You’re a dead man, Sharpe!’ Loup shouted.
Sharpe raised his two fingers to the Brigadier, but did not bother to turn round. ‘The bloody Frogs can bury those two,’ he said of the executed prisoners, ‘but we’ll collapse the houses on the Spanish dead. They are Spanish, aren’t they?’ he asked Harris.
Harris nodded. ‘We’re just inside Spain, sir. Maybe a mile or two. That’s what the girl says.’
Sharpe looked at the girl. She was no older than Perkins, maybe sixteen, and had dank, dirty, long black hair, but clean her up, he thought, and she would be a pretty enough thing, and immediately Sharpe felt guilty for the thought. The girl was in pain. She had watched her family slaughtered, then had been used by God knows how many men. Now, with her rag-like clothes held tight about her thin body, she was staring intently at the two dead soldiers. She spat at them, then buried her head in Perkins’s shoulder. ‘She’ll have to come with us, Perkins,’ Sharpe said. ‘If she stays here she’ll be slaughtered by those bastards.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘So look after her, lad. Do you know her name?’
‘Miranda, sir.’
‘Look after Miranda then,’ Sharpe said, then he crossed to where Harper was organizing the men who would demolish the houses on top of the dead bodies. The smell of blood was as thick as the mass of flies buzzing inside the charnel houses. ‘The bastards will chase us,’ Sharpe said, nodding towards the lurking French.
‘They will too, sir,’ the Sergeant agreed.