irresponsible even. He poured himself wine. That child upstairs, improving in health, God be praised, but a bastard! And in his house! Moreno sipped the wine. The neighbors did not know, he had seen to that. They thought she was a widow whose husband had died in last year's battles between the French and the disintegrating Spanish armies. He heard the clock in the cathedral tower begin wheezing as it wound itself up to strike the bell. Ten o'clock in Badajoz. He emptied his glass and called for a servant to refill it.
The bell sounded, and below, in the cathedral, beneath the vaulted ceiling and the gold ledges, below the huge, dark chandelier, and beneath the sad eyes of the Virgin, the women heard the crackle of muskets begin far away. They looked up, over the glow of the candles, at the Mother of God. Be with us now and in the hour of our need.
Sharpe heard the first toll of the hour, and then no more. As it sounded, so the first fireball rose from the battlements, arced its spark-path in the blackness, and then plummeted to the ditch. It was the first of a storm, the tight packed balls flaming and falling as the carcasses were rolled on to the breach, and suddenly the breaches, the ditch, the ravelin, the obstacles, and the tiny figures of the Forlorn Hope were swamped in light, light poured from above, by flames that caught on the obstacles in the ditch, and the Hope began to climb as the fire was bright on their bayonets.
The battalions behind cheered. Silence was done. The front ranks reached the ditch and the ladders scraped over. Men hurled themselves after the hay-bags and scrambled down ladders, a flow of men in desperate haste to cross the ditch and climb the huge ramps of the breaches. They were cheering, urging themselves on, even as the first tongues of quicksilver flame raced down the breaches of the Santa Maria and Trinidad.
Sharpe dropped as the mines exploded. Not one or two, but tons of powder packed in the ditch, on the lower slopes of the ramps, was ignited and exploded outwards, and the Forlorn Hope was gone. Taken in an instant, ground into fragments of wet horror, all dead, as the first files of the first battalions were hurled backwards by the flame and flying stone.
The French cheered. They lined the parapets, the bastions; and the guns that had been handled round to fire down into the ditch, guns which had been double shotted with canister, were unmasked. Muskets spat, were drowned by the cannon flames. The enemy cheered and shouted obscenities, and all the time the carcasses were thrown, lighting the targets, and the ditch was slopping with fire, a container of flames that would only be drowned in blood, and still the men went down the ladders and into the ditch.
The third breach was silent, the new breach. It lay between the bastions, a huge fresh scar that could lead into the city, but Sharpe saw the French had worked well. The ditch in front of the wall was huge, as wide as a parade ground, but filled with the squat, half-finished ravelin. The ravelin was twenty feet high, shaped like a diamond, and the only way to the new breach was to go round it. The way was blocked. Carts had been tipped over in the approach ditches, then covered with timbers, and the fireballs had lit the obstacles so that they flamed huge and fierce, and no attacker could get close. Only the breaches in the bastions, the Santa Maria and the Trinidad, could be approached, and those were dominated by the enemy guns. They fired again and again, the ammunition hoarded against this night, and still the British tried, and still they died yards from the breaches' base.
Sharpe went back down the glacis, into the shadows, and turned once to see the high, great walls of the battle lit by fire. Flames jetted from the embrasures, writhing smoke into the maelstrom below, and in the light of the fires he saw strange patterns at the top of the breaches. He stopped and stared, trying to make sense of the shapes glimpsed through the harrowing fire and smoke, and saw that the French had crowned each breach with Ckevaux de Prise. Each one was a timber, thick as a battleship's main mast, and from each chained timber there sprang a thousand sabre blades; the blade barrier, thick as a porcupine's coat, to hook and tear any man who reached the summit. If any did.
He found the Colonel of his next battalion, standing with drawn sword, staring at the fire-edged glacis. The Colonel glared at Sharpe. 'What's happening?
'Guns, sir. Come on. Not that the Colonel needed to be told, or to be guided. The face of the Santa Maria bastion was a sheet of reflected flame and they marched towards it as, suddenly, the canister whistled down the slope and cut huge swathes through the Battalion. The men closed ranks, marched on, nearer the lip, and the gunners doused the glacis with bursting canister and the Colonel waved his sword. 'Come on!
They ran, order disappearing, and hurled themselves at the ditch. Bodies littered the glacis, twitched by new blasts of shot, and still more men climbed the slope and poured into the vast fire bowl. Men jumped towards hay-bags and landed, instead, on the dead or wounded. The living pushed forward towards the breach, trying to claw their way to the shattered stone, and each time the French gunners, high on the terrifying walls, swatted them back so that the ditch floor was thick with blood. Sharpe watched, appalled. His orders were to go back to where the reserve waited, to guide more men forward, but no man needed to be guided this night. He stayed.
Not one man had reached a breach. The ditch between the glacis and the ravelin was black with men, disorganized men, the mingling of the Fourth and Light Divisions. Some cowered there for safety, thinking the shadow of the ravelin would give them protection from the guns that scorched down at them. But there was no safety. The guns could reach every inch of the ditch, firing in scientific patterns, killing, killing, killing, but for the moment they fired only where the British moved, towards the breaches, and the spaces before the great, stone ramps were thickening with dead. The guns fired canister, tin cans that burst apart in the muzzle flame and scattered musket balls like giant duck-shot, while other guns were loaded with grapeshot, naval ammunition, that rattled against the ditch wall.
It was not just the guns. The defenders hurled anything that would kill from the ramparts. Stone lumps, the size of a man's head, crashed down into the ditch; gun-shells, their fuses cut to a quarter inch and lit by hand, fizzed down and sent red hot fragments scything on the ditch's floor, and even kegs of powder, fused and lit, were rolled down the breach slope. Sharpe watched one barrel, bouncing and tumbling, its fuse spinning madly red, finally leap into the ditch and explode in the face of a dozen Riflemen who were running for the Santa Maria breach. Only three lived, blinded and screaming, and one of them wandered, insensate with pain, into the burning timbers that blocked the path to the new breach. Sharpe fancied he could hear the man's dying screams bubble with the flames, but there were so many dying, and so much noise, that he could not be certain.
The noise of the living in the ditch was a growl and, suddenly, it rose to a sound of fury and Sharpe looked right to see a wave of men, Riflemen and red-jackets, charging forward. He groaned. They had stormed their way up the ravelin's sloping face, desperate for victory, and the burgeoning attack spread out on the diamond's top flat surface and ran with leveled bayonets towards the new breach. The French were waiting. Guns that had not fired were touched with flame, the grapeshot ripped in from three sides and the attack died in a dancing horror as men were struck as by contrary iron winds. A few lived, ran on, and found that the ravelin led to another sheer drop, into another ditch before the breach and, as they hesitated, the French infantry dropped them with musket fire and there was nothing but bodies left on the ravelin's top, bodies that had fallen and left unrecognizable dark smears on the stone.
The guns were winning the night. The ditch was blocked by fire. Men could not go right or left because of the flaming timbers that jammed the main ditch on either side of the two bastions, just as the approaches to the third breach were blocked. The four fires, fed with fresh timber from the walls, defined where the British could go, a space that was terrible with gunfire. Yet still more men went over the edge, hurrying down the ladders as if there was some safety in the milling, scrambling horde that bulged at the edges as fresh groups charged towards a breach. The ditch was filling with men, hundreds and hundreds of men, shouting men, holding their bayonets above the crush, and the grapeshot would lick down and clear a space of the living and the space would be filled again as men trampled the dying. The guns would belch again, and again, and the metal scraps turned the ditch into a charnel house. Still they went forward, incoherently brave, trying to reach an enemy they could not see or touch, and they died as they cursed and struggled forward.
They went in small groups and Sharpe, crouched on the glacis, watched as an officer or Sergeant led them forward. Mostly they died in the ditch, but some, at last, reached the breach and clambered upwards. A dozen men would go and, in seconds, there would be six, and three would reach the stone and begin to climb while the men on the glacis lip, next to Sharpe, knelt up and fired their muskets at the walls as if they could clear the path for the scrambling men. Sharpe wondered if the French were playing with them. Sometimes no gun would fire on the small, desperate groups, even though guns swept the approach to the breach, and he would watch them struggle, higher and higher until, casually almost, the enemy would pluck them off the stone, tumble them dead,
