the bodies that lay thickly around the spot where he and Harper had saved the Regimental Colour. In those twenty minutes Sharpe had hidden thirty men among the dead, ten Riflemen who lay crumpled in borrowed red jackets, and twenty men of the South Essex. Each Rifleman carried two rifles, one borrowed from a comrade, and every redcoat lay with three loaded muskets. The French had ignored them. They unlimbered the gun and lined it on target and had taken no notice of the scattered bodies that lay thickly just a hundred paces to their right. The time for looting would be later; first the gunners would destroy the presumptuous English who were half running, half walking, towards them.
Harper sweated in his borrowed jacket. It was much too small for him and he had ripped the seams in both armpits, but even so he could feel the sweat trickling down to the small of his back. The red jackets were essential. The French had become accustomed to the sight of the dead men and would have been certain to notice if suddenly ten bodies in green uniforms had appeared among the corpses. Harper’s biggest fear had been that the French might wander over to loot the bodies, but they had been ignored. He watched Sharpe march towards them, still two hundred and fifty yards away, and heard Lieutenant Knowles sigh with relief as Sharpe lifted his rifle in the air. Knowles was nominally in charge of the thirty men but Harper was satisfied the inexperienced Lieutenant would do nothing without first talking to him, and he suspected Sharpe had told Knowles, in no uncertain way, to leave the decisions to Harper.
The sound of the shot came flatly up the field. With relief Harper stretched his muscles and knelt upwards. “Take your time, lads, make the shots tell.”
To hurry would destroy their purpose. The Riflemen aimed deliberately, let the cramp ease in their arms; the first shots would be the most important. Hagman was first, Harper had expected that, and he watched approvingly as the Cheshire poacher grunted over his back sight and pulled the trigger. The gunner who was on the point of inserting the fuse spun away from the barrel and fell. In the next two seconds another eight bullets slaughtered three more of the French gun crew; the four survivors scrambled desperately for the scanty cover provided by the trail and the spokes of the gun’s wheels. The gun could not be fired now. The canister was still not loaded, Harper could see it lying beside a dead gunner who had fallen by the brass muzzle, and any man who dared to try to thrust the projectile into the barrel would be sure to be cut down by the deadly rifles. The French had stopped using rifles on the battlefield; they had abandoned them because they were too slow to load, but these gunners were learning that even the slow rifle had its advantages over the speedy musket, which could never hope to be accurate at a hundred paces.
“Cease firing!” The Riflemen looked at Harper. “Hagman!”
“Sarge?”
“Keep them busy. Gataker, Sims, Harvey!” The three looked at him expectantly. “You load for Hagman. You others, aim for the cavalry officers.”
Lieutenant Knowles ran and crouched beside the Sergeant. “Is there anything we can do?”
“Not yet, sir. We’ll move in a minute.”
Knowles and the twenty men with muskets were there to protect the Riflemen if the French cavalry charged them, as surely they must. Harper stared at the horsemen. They seemed as surprised as the gunners and sat on their horses staring at the slaughtered artillerymen as if not believing their eyes. They had expected the gun to blow the British infantry into ragged ruin, and now it dawned on them that there was no gun, no easy victory. Harper raised his first rifle, snapped the backsight into the upright position, and guessed the horsemen were three hundred yards away. It was a long shot for a rifle, but not impossible, and the French had conveniently bunched their senior officers in a small group forward of their first line. As he pulled the trigger he heard other rifles fire; he saw the group pull apart, a horse went down, two officers fell dead or wounded. The French were temporarily leaderless. The initiative, as Sharpe had planned, had gone totally to the British. Harper stood up.
“Hagman’s group! Keep firing. You others! Follow me!”
He ran towards the gun, curving wide so that Hagman had an uninterrupted field of fire, and the men followed him. The plan had been for the Riflemen to destroy the gunners and let Sharpe’s company capture the gun, but Harper could see his Lieutenant still had a long way to go and neither he nor Sharpe had expected the gun to be placed so conveniently close to the ambush party. Knowles felt astonished at the rush for the gun, but the huge Irishman was so infectious that he found himself urging the redcoats on as they dodged the bodies and ran for the gun that loomed larger and larger. The surviving artillerymen took one look at the seeming dead who had come to life, and fled. As Harper sprinted the final few yards he was aware of Hagman’s spaced shots ceasing and then he was there, his hands actually on the brass muzzle, the men surrounding him.
“Sir?”
“Sergeant?” Knowles was panting.
“Two ranks between the gun and the cavalry?” Harper made it sound like a request, but Knowles nodded as if it had been an order. The young Lieutenant was frantically nervous. He had seen his new Battalion destroyed by cavalry, watched the King’s Colour dragged from the field, and fought off the sabres with the sword his father had bought him for fifteen guineas at Kerrigan’s in Birmingham. He had watched Sharpe and Sergeant Harper recover the Regimental Colour and had been astonished by their action. Now he wanted to prove to the Riflemen that his men could fight just as effectively, and he lined up his small force and stared at the cavalry, which was at last moving. It seemed as if a hundred horsemen were advancing towards the gun; the rest were slanting off towards Sharpe, and Knowles remembered the sabres, the smell of fear, and gripped his sword tightly. He was determined not to let Sharpe down. He thought of Sharpe’s last words to him, the hands that gripped his shoulders and eyes that bored into him. “Wait!” Sharpe had said. “Wait until they’re forty paces away, then fire the volley. Wait, wait, wait!” Knowles found it incredible that he was the same rank as Sharpe; he felt sure he would never have the easy manner of command that seemed so natural to the tall Rifleman. Knowles was awed by the French, they were the conquerors of Europe, yet Sharpe saw them as men to be outwitted and outfought, and Knowles desperately wanted the same confidence. Instead he felt nervous. He wanted to fire his first volley now, to stop the French horses while they were a hundred paces away, but he controlled the fear and watched the horsemen walk forward, watched as a hundred sabres rasped from their scabbards and caught the afternoon sun in ranks of curved light. Harper came and stood beside him.
“We’ve got a treat for the bastards, sir.”
He sounded so cheerful! Knowles swallowed, kept his sword low. Wait, he told himself, and was surprised to hear that he had spoken out loud and that his voice had sounded calm. He looked at his men. They were trusting him!
“Well done, sir. May I?” Harper had spoken softly. Knowles nodded, not sure what was happening.
“Platoon!” Harper was in front of the tiny line of men. He pointed to the ten men on the right. “Sideways, four paces. March!” Then on the left the same order.
“Platoon! Backwards. March!”
Knowles stepped back with them, watching as the French eased their horses into a trot, and then understood. While he had been standing watching the French, the Riflemen had moved the gun! Instead of pointing down the track it was now aimed at the French cavalry; somehow they had loaded it, and the canister which should have swept the British off the road like a housewife scattering roaches with a broom was now threatening the cavalry instead. Harper stood at the back of the gun, well clear of the wheel. The gunners had done most of the loading, the Riflemen had thrust the canister into the barrel and found the slow match that burned red at the end of the pole. The fuse was in the touch-hole. It was a reed filled with fine powder, and when Harper touched it the fire would flash down the tube and ignite the powder charge in its serge bag.
“Hold your fire!” Harper shouted clearly; he did not want the inexperienced men of the South Essex to fire when the gun went off. “Hold your fire!”
The cavalry were seventy yards away, just urging their horses into the canter, ten riders in the first rank. Harper guessed that fifty men were aimed at the tiny party round the gun, and there were fifty more in reserve. He touched the fuse onto the reed. There was a fizzing, a puff of smoke from the touch-hole, and then the enormous explosion. Grey-white smoke belched from the muzzle; the gun, on its five-foot wheels, lurched back its fifteen hundredweight that dug the trail into the soil and bounced the wheels off the ground. The thin metal canister split apart as it left the muzzle, and Harper watched through the smoke as the musket balls and scrap iron snatched the cavalry off the field. The first three ranks were destroyed; the other two were dazed, unable to advance over the bloody corpses and the wounded who staggered upright, bleeding and shocked. Harper heard Knowles shouting.
