Beside him now, screaming and shouting like men possessed of devils, the Grenadier Company was sweeping forward. Their blood was up now. They had endured the first blow, found they had survived, and now they were racing ahead of him, oblivious of the death which, just minutes before, had terrified them. The air was humming with musket balls, screams, the smoke thick as fog. The new men, Sharpe saw, their first terror conquered, were in the front ranks of the attack. The veterans, more cautious because more knowledgeable, let them lead.
Sharpe went left. The Colour party, trying to stay with him, followed. He heard the rifles again, then saw men busy with bayonets, driving the blades down into a trench while, beyond them, number three Company had outflanked d'Alembord to the left and supported his attack from that flank. That was what the supporting Companies were supposed to do, but three Company was led by Carline and Sharpe chalked up a good mark to the new officer.
Another stone wall, then another. The French lined them, but the attacks came first from the left, then the right, and the French reeled backwards. A splinter of stone hit Sharpe's cheekbone, a bayonet grazed his thigh, and a musket ball snatched and shattered his canteen. They were the moments that he would remember with terror later, but for now he kept the Battalion moving even closer towards the last defences, the walls that ringed the pinnacle. His men were fighting in deep trenches now, cornering the enemy in rock traps, driving on in the strange exultation of battle that will not let a man feel fear or mercy or anything but the anger to kill and survive.
He saw redcoats with white facings on his right, and knew that men from the other Battalions were following through the gap that had been punched in the hill's defences. No one had told them to come, no officers organised them, but this was Wellington's army and this was how they fought. The South Essex, Sharpe thought, could have held this hill against the legions of hell themselves, and then a crash spun him round and his hand flew to his face which had been punched by the air of a passing cannon-ball. The mountain guns, at the foot of the pinnacle, hammered a volley at the attackers and drove Sharpe, with his Colour party, into a trench. There was no sign of Lieutenant Colonel Girdwood.
He stepped over the dead and dying. He saw a British musket abandoned, its bayonet bent almost double by the force of a lunge that had struck rock. There were puddles of slippery blood. A dog licked at one, then ran on to catch up with its master. The French musket balls were thick overhead, the sound of the volleys like a raging fire among thorns, the crashes of the mountain guns deafening.
The attack was stalled. The trenches led to the pinnacle, zigzagging through the walls and were blocked, where they crossed the outer defences, by transverse stone barriers. As the French had been driven back their defences were thickened and strengthened by the fugitives from the captured positions. 'Move! Move! Sharpe forced his way to the front where men, kneeling in the trench, fired uselessly at the obstacles. Three bodies lay further up the trench, showing that the French, hidden by the upper walls, had the approach blanketed by guns.
The men seemed to be shivering, not with fear but impatience. They stared at him from eyes rimmed with powder stains, blood-smeared, and Sharpe knew they were still keen to attack, but that no man could go through the trench and live while the mountain guns, firing from the heart of the enemy position, made the upper ground a death trap. Sharpe heaved himself to the trench parapet to look right. The ground dropped precipitately away towards the road. There could be no outflanking that way. He wondered where d'Alembord's men were and was ashamed because he detected in himself a hope that the other column might lever the enemy out of this position and save him the necessity of attacking.
'Load! He waited as those men who had empty muskets loaded. 'We're going up there! He pointed to the left of the trench. 'Then straight at the buggers! One effort, lads, just one bloody effort. They grinned. Their knuckles were white where they gripped their weapons.
There was no point in waiting. Hesitation just gave the mind time to imagine what waited in that place where the musket balls juddered the air and the smoke rolled thick from the battery of guns. So thick, Sharpe suddenly noticed, that the enemy would be looking into a fog of their own making. 'Come on! Let them hear you! Let them hear you! Let them hear you! He was shouting it as a war cry as he scrambled up the trench's side.
He thought he was alone for a few seconds. He feared to stand up on the trench's parapet, fearing to lose the happiness that he had found, but he made himself do it, and he ran forward, shouting, hearing his voice alone in the din of guns, and then he heard the cheers behind him and saw, to his left, more men rising from the shelter of walls and trenches and heard their wild cheers.
Patrick Harper, in the centre of the line, saw Sharpe taking the right column forward and he screamed his own group at the wall. There was a boulder outside the enemy line, its flanks chipped white where bullets had struck it, and he ran for it, unslinging the vicious seven-barrelled gun as he drove himself forward, his voice keening in a strange, curdling chant of his own devising as he jumped, steadied himself on the boulder's summit, a huge target for every French musket in their rock citadel, and fired.
The seven bullets smashed outwards, clearing a stretch of the wall by flinging three enemy backwards and Harper jumped, gun flailing like a club, and his men were beside him, screaming like banshees from hell, their blades ripping and gouging and the wall was taken. Sharpe was across it to the right and the trench was outflanked: he shouted the Companies forward to the next wall that was shrouded in the fog of the battery. 'Come on! Come on! Come on! Speed was all. There was no time to form line, or dress ranks, only time to carry the bloodstained bayonets up to the next defence and kill again. A British corporal, his jaw blown away by a mountain gun, wept into his bloodsoaked hands. A dog, shot in the rump, yelped helplessly for its dead master.
Charlie Weller, in his first fight, listened to the screams and the noise and he thought that he would never be able to go forward. He did, somehow. It helped to be at the back of the Company, following the man in front, not certain what terrible things caused the screams that came from the leading ranks. Once, through a shifting curtain of smoke, he saw a French flag flying on the pinnacle, and somehow this battle did not seem anything like he had imagined. He could hear the enemy's shouts, louder than he had ever thought they would be, and he had already seen what they had done to men bigger than he, yet he went forward, listening to the sergeants but not truly hearing them. Boney, whimpering because of the noise, stayed loyally close. A musket ball struck Weller's shako, knocking it over his left eye, and he nervously straightened it. He crouched when his squad stopped, stared at his unbloodied bayonet inches before his eyes and thought that he would never make a soldier.
'Mr Price! A voice shouted from the front of the column. 'Take your squad right!
'That's us, Charlie. Private Clayton, a fly rogue whose wife was the envy of the rest of the Battalion, grinned at Weller. 'Say your prayers and don't piss yourself. Ready?
A crash of musketry sounded at the column's front, then Lieutenant Price, his sword clumsy in his hand, was shrieking at his men to follow him. 'Come on, lads! This is what they pay us for! Weller, thinking that he would be dead within seconds, and thinking of his mother who had told him he would come to a miserable end if he went for a soldier, found his legs moving in obedience to the officer's shout. He held the musket ahead of him, copying the other men, and then he heard them shout, tried to shout himself, though it came out more like a child's whimper of terror, and suddenly, in a trench behind a low parapet of piled rocks, he saw moustached men who aimed their huge muskets right at him.