Sharpe 3-Book Collection 4. Bernard Cornwell
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morning. He felt as if he had been fighting all day, but back in England some folk would not even have finished their breakfasts yet.
It was a pity about Iliffe, he thought, then drank some water, listened to the guns, and waited.
‘Now!’ General Craufurd shouted and the two battalions stood, appearing to the French as though they had suddenly sprung from the bare ground. ‘Ten paces forward!’ Craufurd bellowed, and they marched smartly, hefting loaded muskets. ‘Fifty-second!’ Craufurd called to the battalion nearest him in a voice that was raw with anger and savage with resolve. ‘Avenge Moore!’ The 52nd had been at Corunna where, in defeating the French, they had lost their beloved general, Sir John Moore.
‘Present!’ the Colonel of the 52nd shouted.
The enemy were close, less than twenty-five yards away. They were staring upwards where the long red line had so unexpectedly appeared. Even the novices in the battered French ranks knew what was coming. The British line overlapped the columns, every musket was aimed at the leading French files, and a French officer made the sign of the cross as the red line seemed to take a quarter turn to the right as the guns went up into men’s shoulders.
‘Fire!’
The ledge vanished in smoke as over a thousand musket balls thumped into the columns. Dozens of men fell and the living, still marching upwards in obedience to the drumbeats, found they could not get across the writhing pile of injured men. Ahead of them they could hear the scrape of ramrods going into musket barrels. The British gunners of the remaining battery shot four barrel-loads of canister that tore into the survivors, clouding the columns’ head with sprays of blood. ‘Fire by half companies!’ a voice shouted.
‘Fire!’
The volley fire began: the rippling, merciless, incessant clockwork drill of death. The British and Portuguese skirmishers had reformed on the left and added their own fire so that the heads of the columns were ringed by flame and smoke, pummelled by bullets, flayed by the canister spitting down from the ledge. A hundred fires began in the grass as flaming wadding spat from the barrels.
The fire was not just coming from the front. The skirmishers and the outer companies of the 43rd and the 52nd had wheeled down the slope to wrap themselves around the beleaguered French, who were now being shot at from three sides. The smoke of the half-company volleys rippled up and down the red lines, the balls slapped into flesh and banged into muskets, and the French advance had been stopped. No troops could advance into the bank of smoke that was ripped by flame as the volleys flared.
‘Bayonets! Bayonets!’ Craufurd shouted. There was a pause as men took out the seventeen-inch blades and slotted them over blackened musket muzzles. ‘Now kill them!’ Black Bob shouted. He was feeling exultant, watching his hard-trained men tear four times their number into ruin.
The men with loaded muskets fired, and the redcoats were going down the hill, steadily at first, but then the two ranks met the French dead and they lost their cohesion as they negotiated the bodies, and there, just yards away, were the living. The British gave a great shout of rage and charged. ‘Kill them!’ Black Bob was right behind the ranks, sword drawn, glaring at the French as the redcoats lunged with their blades.
It was slaughterhouse work. Most of the French in the leading ranks who had survived the musketry and the canister were wounded. They were also crammed together, and now the redcoats came at them with bayonets. The long blades stabbed forward, were twisted and pulled back. The loudest noise on the ridge was screaming now, men shouting for mercy, calling for God, cursing the enemy, and still the half-company volleys whipped in from the flanks so that no Frenchmen could deploy into line. They had been marched up a hill of death and were penned like sheep just below its summit and the bullets killed them from the flanks and the blades took them at the front, and the only escape from the torment was back down the hill.
They broke. One moment they were a mass of men cowering under an onslaught of steel and lead, and the next, starting with the rearmost ranks, they were a rabble. The front ranks, trapped by the men behind, could not escape and they were easy meat for the savage seventeen-inch blades, but the men at the back fled. Drums rolled down the hill, abandoned by boys too terrified to do anything except escape, and, as they went, the British and Portuguese skirmishers came from the flanks to pursue them. The last of the Frenchmen broke, pursued by redcoats, and some were caught in the village where the blades went to work again and the cobbles and the white stones of the houses were painted with more blood and the screams could be heard down in the valley where Masséna watched, open-mouthed. Some Frenchmen became entangled in the vines and the cazadores caught them there and slit their throats. Riflemen poured bullets after the fugitives. A man shouted for mercy in a village house and the shout turned into a terrible scream as two bayonets took his life.
And then the French were gone. They had been swamped by panic and the slope around the village was littered with abandoned muskets and bodies. Some of the enemy were fortunate. Two riflemen rounded up prisoners and prodded them up towards the windmill where the British gunners had reclaimed their battery. A French captain, who had only kept his life by pretending to be dead, yielded his sword to a lieutenant of the 52nd. The Lieutenant, a courteous man, bowed in acknowledgement and gave the blade back. ‘You will do me the honour of accompanying me up the hill,’ the Lieutenant said, and he then tried to make conversation in his school French. The weather had gone suddenly cold, had it not? The French Captain agreed it had, but he also would have agreed if the Englishman had remarked how warm it was. The Captain was shaking. He was covered in blood, none of it his own, but all from wounds inflicted by canister on men who had climbed near him. He saw his men lying dead, saw others dying, saw them looking up from the ground and trying to call for help he could not give. He remembered the bayonets coming at him and the joy of the killing plain on the faces of the men who held them. ‘It was a storm,’ he said, not knowing what he said.
‘Not now the heat’s broken, I think,’ the Lieutenant said, misunderstanding his captive’s words. The bandsmen of the 43rd and 52nd were collecting the wounded, almost all of them French, and carrying them up to the mill where those that survived would be put on carts and taken to the monastery where the surgeons waited. ‘We were hoping for a game of cricket if tomorrow stays fine,’ the Lieutenant said. ‘Have you had the privilege of watching cricket, monsieur?’
‘Cricket?’ The Captain gaped at the redcoat.
‘The Light Division officers hope to play the rest of the army,’ the Lieutenant said, ‘unless war or the weather intervenes.’
‘I have never seen cricket,’ the Frenchman said.
‘When you get to heaven, monsieur,’ the Lieutenant said gravely, ‘and I pray that will be many happy years hence, you will find that your days are spent in playing cricket.’
Just to the south there was more sudden firing. It sounded like British volleys, for they were regular and fast, but it was four Portuguese battalions that guarded the ridge to the right of the Light Division. The smaller French column, meant to reinforce the success of the two that had climbed through Sula, had swung away from the village and found itself split from the main attack by a deep, wooded ravine, and so the men climbed on their own, going through a grove of pines, and when they emerged onto the open hillside above they saw nothing but Portuguese troops ahead. No redcoats. The column outnumbered the Portuguese. They also knew their enemy for they had beaten the Portuguese before and did not fear the men in brown and blue as they feared the British muskets. This would be a simple victory, a hammer blow against a despised enemy, but then the Portuguese opened fire and the volleys rippled like clockwork and the musket balls were fired low and the guns were reloaded swiftly and the column, like those to the north, found itself assailed from three sides and suddenly the despised enemy was driving the French ignominiously downhill. And so the last French column ran, defeated by men fighting for their homeland, and then the whole ridge was empty of the Emperor’s men except for the dead and the wounded and the captured. A drummer boy cried as he lay in the vines. He was eleven years old and had a bullet in his lung. His father, a sergeant, was lying dead twenty paces away where a bird pecked at his eyes. Now that the guns had stopped the black feathered birds were coming to the ridge and its feast of flesh.