A woman who was suckling a baby looked up at the Rifleman who had shouted the question. ‘Second.’
‘Where’s the Fifth?’
‘Christ knows.’
Which answer, Sharpe reflected, he deserved. He spurred Carbine forward. ‘Lieutenant! Lieutenant!’
A Lieutenant of infantry turned. He saw a tall, suntanned man on a horse. The man wore a tattered uniform of the 95th Rifles. At his hip was a sword, which seemed to suggest that the unshaven man was an officer. ‘Sir?’ The Lieutenant sounded tentative.
‘Where’s Wellington?’
‘I think he’s over the river.’
‘Fifth Division?’
‘On the left, sir. I think.’
‘Are you the right?’
‘I think so, sir.’ The Lieutenant sounded dubious.
Sharpe turned his horse. The defile was jammed with men and he could hear the sound of guns that told him this road led only to the battlefield.
He did not care about Wellington. Now was not the time to find the General and speak of the treaty that La Marquesa had betrayed to him in Burgos. He had written down everything that she had told him, and he would make sure that the letter reached Hogan: But now Sharpe had caught up with the army on a day of battle, he was a soldier, and vindicating his name could wait until the fighting was done. He looked at Angel, mounted on^an ugly horse that they had stolen in Pancorvo. ‘Come on!’
He led the boy back to the village where a bridge crossed to the western bank. He would find the South Essex, he would come back from the dead, and he would fight.
CHAPTER 21
The French guns fired all morning. Their sound rattled the windows in the city. It was like a thunder that had no ending.
The smoke grew like a cloud. The women who sat on the tiers of seats above the city wall grumbled because their view was obscured. They could not see the enemy. They could only see the great cloud that grew and spread and drifted southwards with the breeze. Some of them strolled on the ramparts, flirting with the officers of the town guard. Others, their parasols raised against the sun, dozed on the benches.
The gunners fired, aimed and fired again. They dragged the guns forward after each shot, levered the trails round with handspikes, and pushed the ammunition into the hot muzzles that steamed from the sponging out. Men were sent to the small streams of the plain for buckets of water to soak the sponges. The roads from the city were loud with the galloping limbers that brought new ammunition to feed the guns that hammered at the killing ground.
The French infantry sat on the ridges, slicing sausage and bread, drinking the raw, red wine that filled their canteens. The guns were doing their work. Good luck to the guns.
The guns bucked, their wheels jarring from the ground with each shot. As each gun thudded down the gunner ran forward to put his leather-covered thumb over the smoking touch-hole. With the touch-hole covered if was safe to ram the wet sponge down the barrel and kill the last red sparks before the next powder charge was pushed home. Without the touch-hole blocked the rush of air forced by the plunging sponge could flare pockets of unexploded powder that had been known to erupt with enough force to blast the sponge back and impale its handle through the body of a gunner.
The guns had names embossed on the barrels beneath the proudly wreathed ‘N’s. Egalite fired next to Liberte, while Fortune and Defi were being sponged out.
The gunners sweated and heaved and grinned; listened to their officers call the aim and they knew they were filling the western plain with death. They could not see their enemy, the smoke hid all to the west, but each shot lanced a spear of flame into the smoke that would twitch with the canister’s passing and then the gunners would reload, would haul the gun back into a true aim, then stand back as the chief gunner rammed his spike through the touch-hole into the canvas bag of powder, as the second man pushed the quill of fine powder into the hole made by the spike. The quill carried the fire down tp the powder from the linstock held by the chief gunner.
All gunners were deaf, they said. They were the kings of the battlefield and they never heard the applause.
Sometimes, rarely, a battery would pause. The smoke would clear slowly from its front and the officers would peer at their target. The British had been stopped.
The red lines were cowering in the crops, hiding behind stone walls or crouching in ditches filthy with the summer’s rain. The gunners knew the British were beaten. No troops in the world would dare advance into the horror of round-shot and canister that the guns poured into the killing ground.
For the British it was a nightmare of sound. The round-shot rumbled like giant barrels on planks overhead, the canister whistled, the screams of the wounded riding over it all. The musket balls from the broken canister rattled on stone or cracked through corn or thudded into flesh and always there was the rolling thunder from the white cloud ahead. Sometimes, when a gun was short of shot or canister, a shell would be fired instead. The shell would land in the broken crops. It would spin, its fuse smoking wildly, then the casing would crack apart in flame, smoke and iron fragments to add to the noise of death.
The British died in ones and twos. They sheltered where they could, but sheltering men won no battles. Yet these men could not go forward. No man could go into that storm of shot. They crouched, they lay in shallow scoops of land, they cursed their officers, they cursed their General, they cursed the French, they cursed the slow, — crawling time, and they cursed the lack of help on the plain’s edge. They were alone in a storm of death and they could see no help. The Colours were shredded with shot.
The lucky ones were in the small village, the first village of the plain, for there the stone walls were a shield. Even so, some roundshot smashed the houses flat, carving bloody paths in the packed rooms, and always the air outside the hovels was loud with the sound of death.
The attack was stalled.
‘We have him, by God, we have him!’ Marshal Jourdan, who like all the French Marshals had begun to think of Wellington as unbeatable, knew that his enemy had underestimated him. Jourdan guessed that Wellington, secure for the first time by having greater numbers than the French, had committed his army to a frontal attack. The guns, the pride of the French army, were shredding the enemy.
He looked north. A few English cavalrymen were in sight on the river’s far bank and the sight of them had alarmed some of his officers. Jourdan clapped his hands for attention and raised his voice.
‘Gentlemen! The cavalry is a feint! If they planned to attack from there they would have done so already! They want us to weaken our left! We shall not!’
Indeed, he strengthened it. The reserves who guarded the northern river bank were marched south, behind the Arinez Hill, to reclaim the Puebla Heights. Jourdan planned more for them. When the British broke, and when he unleashed his lancers and sabres onto the killing ground, the men from the heights could sweep down to block the defile. The
British, broken and bloodied, would be trapped. But first, Jourdan knew, he must let Wellington send more men onto the plain, more men to be killed and cut off, more corpses and prisoners for the Emperor’s glory. Jourdan knew he‘ must wait. In another two hours, perhaps, the heights would be retaken and the moment would have come when he would destroy Wellington’s reputation for ever. The Marshal called for food, for a little wine. Another two hours, he thought, and he would send the Eagles forward to take Spain back for France. He smiled at King Joseph. ‘I trust, sir, you have invited no one to sit on your right this evening?’
Joseph frowned in puzzlement, not understanding why Jourdan spoke about the victory feast which had been ordered in Vitoria. ‘I hope you will take that place of honour, my dear Marshal.’