was extraordinary how men could claw savagely at each other, fight like demented fiends, yet in a few moments become polite, generous even about the damage an enemy had inflicted. The French Captain smiled briefly.
“Thank you, M’sieu.” He paused a moment, looked at the bodies lying near the bridge, and when he turned back to Sharpe his expression had changed; it had become less formal and more curious. “Why did you come across the river?”
Sharpe shrugged. “I don’t know.”
The Frenchman dismounted and looped his reins on his wrist. “You were unlucky.” He smiled at Sharpe. “But you and your men fought well and now this?” He nodded at the bridge.
Sharpe shrugged again. The Chasseur Captain with the big moustache looked at him for a moment. “I think perhaps you are most unlucky in your Colonel, yes?” He spoke quietly so that the men who were staring curiously at their erstwhile enemy should not hear. Sharpe did not react, but the Frenchman spread his hands. “We have them, too. My regrets, M’sieu.”
It was all getting too polite, too cosy. Sharpe looked at the bodies lying untended in the field. “You wish to discuss the wounded?”
“I did, M’sieu, I did. Not that I think we have too many, but we need your permission to search this piece of the field. As for the rest,” he bowed slightly to Sharpe. “We are the masters of it.”
It was true. Chasseurs were now riding around the field corralling the stray horses. They were gaining a bonus, for there were half a dozen English thoroughbreds, lost by officers of the South Essex, and Sharpe knew they would be better remounts than anything the French could hope to buy in Spain. But there was something curious about the wording the Captain had used.
“You did, sir? Did?” Sharpe looked into the sympathetic brown eyes of the Frenchman, who shrugged slightly.
“The situation, M’sieu, has changed.” He waved a hand at the destroyed bridge. “I think you will have problems reaching the other side? Yes?” Sharpe nodded, it was undeniable. “I think, M’sieu, my Colonel will want to renew the fight after a suitable period.”
Sharpe laughed. He pointed at the muskets, the rifles, the long bayonets. “When you are ready, sir, when you are ready.”
Trie Frenchman laughed too. “I will enquire, M’sieu, and inform you in ample time.” He pulled out a watch. “Shall we say that we have one hour in which to look after our wounded? After that we shall talk again.”
He was giving Sharpe no choice. An hour was not nearly enough for his two hundred men to collect the wounded, carry them despite their agony, bring them to the entrance of the bridge and devise a way of getting them to safety. On the other hand an hour was far more than the French needed, and he knew there was no point in asking for more time. The Captain unlooped his reins and prepared to mount.
“My congratulations again. Lieutenant?” Sharpe nodded. “And my sincere regrets. Bonne chancel‘ He mounted and cantered back towards the skyline.
Sharpe took stock of his new company. The survivors from the square had added some seventy men to his small command. Leroy was the senior officer, of course, but his wound forced him to leave the decisions to Sharpe. There were two more Lieutenants, Knowles from the Light Company and a man called John Berry. Berry was overweight with fleshy lips, a young man who petulantly demanded the date of Sharpe’s commission, and, on finding Sharpe was his senior, complained sulkily that his horse had been shot. Sharpe suspected that it was the only reason Berry had stayed with the colours.
The working parties took jackets from the dead, threaded the sleeves onto abandoned muskets, and made crude stretchers on which wounded men were carried to the bridge. Half the men worked on the piles round the spot where Sharpe and Harper had clambered across the blood and corpses to rescue the colour; the other half worked among the bodies that formed a fan shape ending at the entrance to the bridge. The French were swiftly finished and started rummaging through the blue-coated bodies of the Spanish. It was not mercy they were showing but a desire to loot the dead and the wounded. The British did the same, there was no stopping them; the spoils of a fight were the one reward of the survivors. The Riflemen, on Sharpe’s orders, collected abandoned muskets, dozens of them, and took ammunition pouches from the dead. If the French should attack then Sharpe planned to arm each man with three or four loaded guns and meet the horsemen with a continuous volley that would destroy the attackers. It would not bring back the lost colour. That had gone for ever or until in some unimaginable future the army might march into Paris and take back the trophy. As he moved among the carnage, directing the work, he doubted if the French really meant to attack again. The losses they would incur would hardly be worth the effort; perhaps instead they were hoping for his surrender. He helped Leroy to the bridge, propped him against the parapet, and cut away the white breeches. There was a bullet wound in the American’s thigh, dark and oozing, but the carbine ball had gone clean through, and, despite Leroy’s evident disgust, Sharpe summoned Harper to put maggots in the wound before binding it with a strip torn from the shirt of a dead man. Forrest was alive, stunned and bleeding, found where the colours had fallen with his sword still gripped in his hand. Sharpe propped him next to Leroy. It would be minutes before Forrest recovered himself, and Sharpe doubted whether the Major, who looked like a vicar, would want to take any more military action that day. He put the colour with the two wounded officers, propped its great yellow flag over the parapet as a symbol of defiance to the French, but what about the British? Twice he had walked gingerly to the edge of the broken roadway and hailed the far bank, but it was as if the men there inhabited a different world, went about their business oblivious of the carnage just a few hundred feet away. For the third time Sharpe walked out onto the bridge through the broken stones.
“Hello!” There could only be thirty minutes of the hour left. He cupped his hands again. “Hello!”
Hogan appeared, waved to him, and came across the other part of the broken bridge. It was reassuring to see the Engineer’s blue coat and cocked hat, but there was something different about the uniform. Sharpe could not place the oddity but it was there. He waved at the gap between them.
“What happened?”
Hogan spread his hands. “Not my doing. Simmerson lit the fuse.”
“For God’s sake, why?”
“Why do you think? He got frightened. Thought the French would swarm all over him. I’m sorry. I tried to stop him but I’m under arrest.” That was it! Hogan wore no sword. The Irishman grinned happily at Sharpe. “So are you, by the way.”
Sharpe swore viciously and at length. Hogan let him finish. “I know, Sharpe, I know. It’s just plain stupid. It’s all because we refused to let your Riflemen form a skirmish line, remember?”
“He thinks that would have saved him?”
“He has to blame someone. He won’t blame himself, so you and I are the scapegoats.” Hogan took off his hat and scratched his balding pate. “I couldn’t give a damn, Richard. It’ll just mean enduring the man’s spleen till we get back to the army. After that we’ll hear no more about it. The General will tear him apart! Don’t worry yourself!”
It seemed ridiculous to be discussing their mutual arrest in shouts across the gap where the water broke white on the shattered stonework. Sharpe waved his hand at the wounded.
“What about this lot? We’ve got dozens of wounded and the French are coming back soon. We need help. What’s he doing?”
“Doing?” Hogan shook his head. “He’s like a chicken with its head chopped off. He’s drilling the men, that’s what he’s doing. Any poor sod who doesn’t have a musket will be lucky if he only gets three dozen lashes. The bastard doesn’t know what to do!”
“But for Christ’s sake!”
Hogan held up his hand. “I know, I know. I’ve told him he’s got to get timber and ropes.” He pointed at the forty-foot gap. “I can’t hope to get timber to bridge this, but we can make rafts and float them across. But there’s no timber here. He’ll have to send back for it!”
“Has he done it?”
“No.” Hogan said no more. Sharpe could imagine the argument he had had with Simmerson, and he knew the Engineer would have done his best. For a moment they discussed names, who was dead, who was wounded. Hogan asked after Lennox but Sharpe had no news, and he wondered whether the Scotsman was lying dead on the field. Then there was the clatter of hooves and Sharpe saw Lieutenant Christian Gibbons ride onto the bridge behind Hogan. The blond lieutenant stared down at the Engineer.
“I thought you were under arrest, Captain, and confined?”
