aides-decamp and the small group trotted delicately away, past the firing squad who now lifted the bodies into the coffins, and off towards Oropesa. Hill’s face was expressionless. Sharpe had never met ’Daddy‘ Hill but he knew, as did the rest of the army, that the General had a reputation as a kind and considerate officer and Sharpe wondered what he thought of Simmerson and his methods. Rowland Hill commanded six Battalions but Sharpe was certain none would offer him as many problems as the South Essex.
Simmerson rode his horse to the graves, wrenched the beast round, and stood in his stirrups. His face was suffused with blood, his rage obvious and throbbing, his voice shrill in the silence. “There will be a parade for punishment at six o’clock this evening. Full equipment! You will pay for that display!” The men stood silent. Simmerson lowered his rump onto the saddle. “Major Forrest! Carry on!”
Company by company, the Battalion marched past the open coffins, and the men were made to stare at the mangled bodies waiting by their graves. There, said the army, is what will happen to you if you run away; and more than that, because the names of the dead men would be sent home to be posted on their parish notice boards so that shame could descend on their families as well. The companies marched past in silence.
When the Battalion was gone and the other spectators had gawped at the remains, a working party lowered the coffins into the graves. Earth was shovelled into the holes, the grass turves carefully replaced so that to a casual eye there were no visible signs of the burials. They were deliberately left unmarked, the final insult, but when all the soldiers had gone Spanish peasants found the graves and hammered wooden crosses into the turf. It was no measure of respect, just the precaution of sensible men. The dead were Protestants, buried in unhallowed ground, and the crude crosses were there to keep the unquiet spirits firmly underground. The people of Spain had enough problems with the war; the armies of France, Spain, and now Britain crossed and recrossed their land. There was little a peasant could do about that, or about the men who fought the Guerilla, the little war. But the ghosts of heathen Englishmen were another matter. Who needed them to scare the cattle and stalk the fields by night? They hammered the crosses deep and slept easy.
CHAPTER 15
One man in ten was to be flogged. Sixty men from the Battalion, six from each company, the Captain of each company to deliver his six men, stripped to the waist, ready to be tied to the flogging triangles that Simmerson was having made by local carpenters. The Colonel had made his announcement, and then he glared with his small red eyes round the assembled officers. Were there any comments?
Sharpe took a breath. To say anything was useless, to say nothing was cowardly.
“I think it a bad idea, sir.”
“Captain Sharpe thinks it a bad idea.” Simmerson dripped acid with every word. “Captain Sharpe, gentlemen, can tell us how to command men. Why is it a bad idea, Captain Sharpe?”
“To shoot two men in the morning and flog sixty in the afternoon seems to me to be doing the work of the French for them, sir.”
“You do. Well, damn you, Sharpe, and damn your ideas. If the discipline in this Battalion was as strictly enforced by the Captains as I demand, then this punishment would not be necessary. I will have them flogged! And that includes your precious Riflemen, Sharpe! I expect three of them in your six! There’ll be no favouritism.”
There was nothing to be said or done. The Captains told their companies and, like Sharpe, cut straws and drew lots to determine who should be Simmerson’s victims. Three dozen strokes each for sixty men. By two o’clock the victims were scrounging for spirits that might dull their flesh, and their sullen companions began the long afternoon of cleaning and polishing their kit for Simmerson’s inspection. Sharpe left them to their work and went back to the house that served as the Battalion’s headquarters. There was trouble in the air, a mood reminiscent of the heaviness before a thunderstorm; Sharpe’s happiness of the morning was replaced by apprehension, and he found himself wondering what might happen before he went back to the house where Josefina waited for him and dreamed of Madrid.
He spent the afternoon laboriously filling in the company books. Each month the Day Book had to be copied into the Ledger, and the Ledger was due for Simmerson’s inspection in a week. He found ink, sharpened a quill, and with his tongue between his teeth began writing the details. He could have delegated the job to the Sergeant who looked after the books, but he preferred to do the job himself and then no one could accuse the Sergeant of favouritism. To Thomas Cresacre, Private, was debited the cost of one new shoe-brush. Fivepence. Sharpe sighed; the entry in the columns hid some small tragedy. Cresacre had hurled the brush at his wife, and the wooden back had split against a stone wall. Sergeant McGivern had seen it happen and reported the man, and so on top of his marital troubles Thomas Cresacre would now lose fivepence from a day’s pay of twelvepence. The next entry in the small Day Book that lived in Sharpe’s pocket was for a pair of shoes for Jedediah Horrell. Sharpe hesitated. Horrell claimed the shoes had been stolen, and Sharpe was inclined to believe him. Horrell was a good man, a sturdy labourer from the Midlands, and Sharpe always found his musket cared for and his equipment orderly. And Horrell had already been punished. For two days he had marched in borrowed boots, and his feet were blistered and burst. Sharpe crossed the entry from his Day Book and wrote in the Ledger ‘Lost in Action’. He had saved Private Horrell six shillings and sixpence. He drew the Accoutrement Book towards him and laboriously copied the information from the ledger into the book. He was amused to see that Lennox had already described every man in the company as having lost a stock ‘in Action’, so officially the stocks, like Horrell’s boots, were now a charge on the government rather than on the individual who had lost them. For an hour he kept copying from Day Book to Ledger to Accoutrement Book, the small change of daily soldiering. When he had finished he drew the Mess Book towards him. This was easier. Sergeant Read, who kept the books, had already crossed out the names of the men who had died at Valdelacasa and written in the new names, Sharpe’s Riflemen and the six men who had been drafted into the Light Company when Wellesley made them the new Battalion of Detachments. Against each of the names Sharpe wrote the figure three shillings and sixpence, the sum that was debited each week for the cost of their food. It was unfair, he knew, because the men were already on half rations, and the word was that the supply situation was worsening. The Commissary officers were scouring the Tagus valley; there were frequent clashes between British and French patrols to decide which side could search a village for hidden food. There were even battles between the British and their Spanish allies, who had failed to deliver a hundredth part of the supplies they had promised, yet they daily drove in herds of pigs, sheep, cattle or goats for their own men. But it was not in Sharpe’s power to reduce the amount the men paid, even if the rations were not delivered in full. Instead he noted at the bottom of the page that the sum was double the food delivered and hoped that he would be ordered to redress the balance later. In the next column he wrote fourpence in each line, the cost of having the men’s clothes washed by the wives on the strength. A man’s washing cost him seventeen shillings and fourpence a year, his rations over eight pounds. Each private earned a shilling a day, seventeen pounds and sixteen shillings a year, but by the time he had been deducted for food, for washing, for pipeclay and blackball, for soling and heeling, and the one day’s pay each year that went to the Military hospitals at Chelsea and Kilmainham, each man was left with the three sevens. Seven pounds, seven shillings and seven pence, and Sharpe knew from bitter experience that they were lucky to get even that. Most men lost further sums to replace missing equipment, and the truth was that each private was paid about fourpence halfpenny a day to fight the French.
As a Captain, Sharpe received ten shillings and sixpence a day. It seemed like a fortune but more than half was deducted for his food and then the officers’ mess demanded a further levy of two shillings and eightpence a day to pay for wine, luxury foods, and the mess servants. He paid more for cleaning, for the hospitals, and he knew the sums backwards. They simply did not add up. And now Josefina was looking to him for money. Hogan had lent him money and, added to the contents of his leather bag, he had enough for the next fortnight, but after that? His only hope was to find a rich corpse on the battlefield. A very rich corpse.
Sharpe finished with the books, shut them, laid the quill on the table and yawned as a clock in the town struck four. He opened the Weekly Mess Book again and looked down at the names, wondering morbidly how many would still be there in a week’s time and how many would have the word ‘deceased’ entered against them. Would his name be crossed out? Would some other officer look at the ledger and wonder who had written fivepence, one shoe-brush‘, against the name Thomas Cresacre? He shut the books again. It was all academic. The army had not been paid for a month, and even then they had not been paid up to date. He would give the books to Sergeant Read, who would store them on the company mule and when, and if, the pay arrived, Read
