And what mattered now was to beat these Frenchmen. The column, much larger than the first, was surging forward, driven by the drumsticks. The Frenchmen cheered, perhaps to give themselves confidence, and they must have been encouraged by the fact that the British guns on the river’s far side could not see them. But then, provoking a British cheer, a spherical case shot fired by a howitzer exploded just ahead of the column’s center. The British gunners were firing blind, arching their shots over the seminary, but they were firing well and their first shot killed the French cheering dead.
„Rifles only!” Sharpe called. „Fire when you’re ready. Don’t waste the patch! Hagman? Go for that big man with the saber.”
„I see him, sir,” Hagman said and shifted his rifle to aim at the officer who was striding ahead, setting an example, asking to be rifle meat.
„Look for the ladders,” Sharpe reminded the others, then walked to the parapet, put his left foot on the coping and the rifle to his shoulder. He aimed at a man with a ladder, sighting on the man’s head in the expectation that the bullet would fall to take him in the lower belly or groin. The wind was in Sharpe’s face so would not drift the shot. He fired and was immediately blinded by the smoke. Hagman fired next, then there was the crackle of the other rifles. The muskets kept silent. Sharpe went to his left to see past the smoke and saw that the saber-carrying officer had vanished, as had any other man struck by a bullet. They had been swallowed by the advancing column that stepped over and past the victims, then Sharpe saw a ladder reappear as it was snatched up by a man in the fourth or fifth rank. He felt in his cartridge box for another round and began to reload.
He did not look at the rifle as he reloaded. He just did what he had been trained to do, what he could do in his sleep, and just as he primed the rifle so the first musket balls were shot from the garden wall, then the muskets opened fire from the windows and roof, and the seminary was again wreathed in smoke and noise. The cannon shots rumbled above, so close that Sharpe almost ducked once, and the case shot banged above the slope. Bullets and musket balls ripped into the French files. Close to a thousand men were in the seminary now and they were protected by stone walls and given a wide open target. Sharpe fired another shot down the hill, then walked up and down behind his men, watching. Slattery needed a new flint and Sharpe gave him one, then Tarrant’s mainspring broke and Sharpe replaced the weapon with Williamson’s old rifle which Harper had been carrying ever since they left Vila Real de Zedes. The enemy’s drums sounded nearer and Sharpe reloaded his own rifle as the first French musket bullets rattled against the seminary’s stones. „They’re firing blind,” Sharpe told his men, „firing blind! Don’t waste your shots. Look for targets.” That was difficult because of the smoke hanging over the slope, but vagaries of wind sometimes stirred the fog to reveal blue uniforms and the French were close enough for Sharpe to see faces. He aimed at a man with an enormous mustache, fired and lost sight of the man as the smoke blossomed from his rifle’s muzzle.
The noise of the fight was awesome. Muskets crackling incessantly, the drumbeats thumping, the case shots banging overhead, and beneath all that violence was the sound of men crying in distress. A redcoat slumped down near Harper, blood puddling by his head until a sergeant dragged the man away from the parapet, leaving a smear of bright red on the roofs lead. Far off-it had to be on the river’s southern bank-a band was playing „The Drum Major” and Sharpe tapped his rifle’s butt in time to the tune. A French ramrod came whirling through the air to clatter against the seminary wall, evidently fired by a conscript who had panicked and pulled his trigger before he cleared his barrel. Sharpe remembered how, in Flanders, at his very first battle as a red-coated private, a man’s musket had misfired, but he had gone on reloading, pulling the trigger, reloading, and when they drilled out his musket after the battle they found sixteen useless charges crammed down the barrel. What was the man’s name? He had been from Norfolk, despite being in a Yorkshire regiment, and he had called everyone „bor.” Sharpe could not remember the name and it annoyed him. A musket ball whipped past his face, another hit the parapet and shattered a tile. Down in the garden Vicente’s men and the redcoats were not aiming their muskets, but just pushing the muzzles into the loopholes, pulling the triggers, and getting out of the way so the next man could use the embrasure. There were some green-jackets in the garden now and Sharpe guessed a company of the 60th, the Royal American Rifles, must be attached to Hill’s brigade and was now joining the fight. They would do better, he thought, to climb to the roof than try to fire their Bakers through the loopholes. The single tree on the northern slope was thrashing as though in a gale and there was scarcely one leaf left on its splintered branches. Smoke drifted through the winter-bare twigs that twitched continually from the bullet strikes.
Sharpe primed his rifle, put it to his shoulder, looked for a target, saw a knot of blue uniforms very close to the garden wall and put the bullet into them. The air hissed with bullets. God damn it, but why didn’t the bastards pull back? A brave group of Frenchmen tried to run down the seminary’s western face to reach the big gate, but the British guns at the convent saw them and the shells cracked black and red, smearing blood across the paved terrace and up the garden wall’s whitewashed stones. Sharpe saw his men grimacing as they tried to force the new bullets down the powder-fouled barrels. There was no time to clean the rifles, they just hammered the bullets down and pulled the trigger. Fire and fire again, and the French were doing the same, a mad duel of bullets, and above the smoke, across the northern valley, Sharpe saw a horde of new French infantry streaming out of the city.
Two men in shirtsleeves were carrying boxes of ammunition round the roof. „Who needs it?” they shouted, sounding like London street traders. „Fresh lead! Who needs it? Fresh lead! New powder!” One of General Hill’s aides was carrying canteens of water to the parapet while Hill himself, red-faced and anxious, stood close to the redcoats so he was seen to share their danger. He caught Sharpe’s gaze and offered a grimace as if to suggest that this was harder work than he had anticipated.
More troops came to the roof, men with fresh muskets and full cartridge boxes, and with them were the riflemen of the 60th whose officer must have realized he had been in the wrong place. He gave Sharpe a companionable nod, then ordered his men to the parapet. Flames jetted down, smoke thickened, and still the French tried to blast their way through stone walls with nothing but musket fire. Two Frenchmen succeeded in scaling the garden wall, but hesitated at the top and were seized and dragged across the coping to be battered to death by musket butts on the path beneath. Seven dead redcoats were laid out on another gravel path, their hands curling in death and the blood of their wounds slowly hardening and turning black, but most of the British dead were in the seminary’s corridors, dragged away from the big windows that made the best targets for the frustrated French.
A whole new column was now climbing the slope, coming to swell the shattered ranks of the first, but though the beleaguered men in the seminary could not know it, these newcomers were the symptom of French defeat. Marshal Soult, desperate for fresh troops to attack the seminary, had stripped the city itself of infantry, and the people of Oporto, finding themselves unguarded for the first time since the end of March, swarmed down to the river and dragged their boats out of warehouses, shops and back-yards where the occupiers had kept them under guard. A swarm of those small craft now rowed across the river, past the shattered remnants of the pontoon bridge, to the quays of Vila Nova de Gaia where the Brigade of Guards was waiting. An officer peered anxiously across the Douro to reassure himself that the French were not waiting in ambush on the opposite quay, then shouted at his men to embark. The Guards were rowed back to the city and still more boats appeared and more redcoats crossed. Soult did not know it, but his city was filling with the enemy.