piece and Soult’s reputation would be destroyed along with his men. The Marshal stood, knocking over his chair in his anger. „Tell General Foy to push them back into the river!” he roared. „Now! Go! Push them into the river!”
The men hurried from the room, leaving Kate and Christopher alone, and Kate saw the look of utter panic on her husband’s face and felt a fierce joy because of it. The windows rattled, the chandeliers shivered and the British were coming.
„Well, well, well! We have Rifles among our congregation! We are blessed indeed. I didn’t know any of the 95th were attached to the 1st Brigade.” The speaker was a burly, rubicund man with a balding head and an affable face. If it were not for his uniform he would have looked like a friendly farmer and Sharpe could imagine him in an English market town, leaning on a hurdle, prodding plump sheep and waiting for a livestock auction to begin. „You are most welcome,” he told Sharpe.
„That’s Daddy Hill,” Harris told Pendleton.
„Now, now, young man,” General Hill boomed, „you shouldn’t use an officer’s nickname within his earshot. Liable to get you punished!”
„Sorry, sir.” Harris had not meant to speak so loudly.
„But you’re a rifleman so you’re forgiven. And a very scruffy rifleman too, I must say! What is the army coming to when we don’t dress for battle, eh?” He beamed at Harris, then fished in his pocket and brought out a handful of almonds. „Something to occupy your tongue, young man.”
„Thank you, sir.”
There were now two generals on the seminary roof. General Hill, commander of the 1st Brigade, whose forces were crossing the river and whose kindly nature had earned him the nickname of „Daddy,” had joined Sir Edward Paget just in time to see three French battalions come from the city’s eastern suburbs and form into two columns that would assault the seminary hill. The three battalions were in the valley, being pushed and harried into their ranks by sergeants and corporals. One column would come straight up at the seminary’s facade while the other was forming near the Amarante road to assault the northern flank. But the French were also aware that British reinforcements were constantly arriving at the seminary and so they had sent a battery of guns to the river bank with orders to sink the three barges. The columns waited for the gunners to open fire, probably hoping that once the barges were sunk the gunners would turn their weapons onto the seminary.
And Sharpe, who had been wondering why Sir Arthur Wellesley had not put guns at the convent across the river, saw that he had worried about nothing, for no sooner did the French batteries appear than a dozen British guns, which had been parked out of sight at the back of the convent terrace, were wheeled forward. „That’s the medicine for Frenchmen!” General Hill exclaimed when the great row of guns appeared.
The first to fire was a five-and-a-half-inch howitzer, the British equivalent of the cannon that had bombarded Sharpe on the watchtower hill. It was loaded with a spherical case shot, a weapon that only Britain deployed, which had been invented by Lieutenant Colonel Shrapnel and the manner of its working was kept a closely guarded secret. The shell, which was packed with musket balls about a central charge of powder, was designed to shower those balls and the scraps of its casing down onto enemy troops, yet to work properly it had to explode well short of its target so that the shot’s forward momentum carried the lethal missiles on to the enemy, and that precision demanded that the gunners cut their fuses with exquisite skill. The howitzer’s gunner had that skill. The howitzer boomed and rocked back on its trail, the shell arced over the river, leaving the telltale wisp of fuse smoke in its wake, then exploded twenty yards short and twenty feet above the leading French gun just as it was being unlimbered. The explosion tore the air red and white, the bullets and shattered casing screamed down and every horse in the French team was eviscerated, and every man in the French gun crew, all fourteen of them, was either killed or wounded, while the gun itself was thrown off its carriage.
„Oh dear,” Hill said, forgetting the bloodthirsty welcome with which he had greeted the sight of the British batteries. „Those poor fellows,” he said, „dear me.”
The cheers of the British soldiers in the seminary were drowned by the huge bellow of the other British guns opening fire. From their eyrie on the southern bank they dominated the French position and their spherical case, common shells and round shot swept the French guns with dreadful effect. The French gunners abandoned their pieces, left their horses squealing and dying, and fled, and then the British guns racked their elevating screws or loosened the howitzer quoins and started to pour shot and shell into the massed ranks of the nearest French column. They raked it from the flank, pouring round shot through close-packed files, exploding case shot over their heads and killing with a terrible ease.
The French officers took one panicked look at their broken artillery and ordered the infantry up the slope. Drummers at the heart of the two columns began their incessant rhythm and the front rank stepped off as another round shot whipped through the files to plough a red furrow in the blue uniforms. Men screamed and died, yet still the drums beat and the men chanted their war cry,
Sharpe had seen columns before and was puzzled by them. The British army fought against other infantry arrayed in two ranks and every man could use his musket, and if cavalry threatened they marched and wheeled into a square of four ranks, and still every man could use his musket, but the soldiers at the heart of the two French columns could never fire without hitting the men in front.
These columns both had around forty men in a rank and twenty in each file. The French used such a formation, a great battering block of men, because it was simpler to persuade conscripts to advance in such an array and because, against badly trained troops, the very sight of such a great mass of men was daunting. But against redcoats? It was suicide.
„God save our good King George,” General Hill sang in a surprisingly fine tenor voice, „long live our noble George, don’t shoot too high.” He sang the last four words and the men on the roof grinned. Hagman hauled back the flint of his rifle and sighted on a French officer who was laboring up the slope with a sword in his hand. Sharpe’s riflemen were on the northern wing of the seminary, facing the column that was not being flayed by the British guns on the convent terrace. A new battery had just deployed low on the river’s southern bank and it was adding its fire to the two batteries on the convent hill, but none of the British guns could see the northern column, which would have to be thrown back by rifle and musket fire alone. Vicente’s Portuguese were manning the loopholes on the northern garden wall and by now there were so many men in the seminary that every loophole had three or four men so that each could fire, then step back to reload while another took his place. Sharpe saw that some of the redcoats had green facings and cuffs. The Berkshires, he thought, which meant the whole of the Buffs were in the building and new battalions were now arriving.
„Aim at the officers!” Sharpe called to his riflemen. „Muskets, don’t fire! This order is for rifles only.” He made the distinction because a musket, fired at this range, was a wasted shot, but his riflemen would be lethal. He waited a second, took a breath. „Fire!”
Hagman’s officer jerked back, both arms in the air, sword cartwheeling back over the column. Another officer was down on his knees clutching his belly, and a third was holding his shoulder. The front of the column stepped over the corpse and the blue-coated line seemed to shudder as more bullets slammed into them, and then the long leading French ranks, panicked by the whistle of rifled bullets about their ears, fired up at the seminary. The volley was ear-splitting, the smoke smothered the slope like sea fog and the musket balls rattled on the seminary walls and shattered its glass windows. The volley at least served to hide the French for a few yards, but then they reappeared through the smoke and more rifles fired and another officer went down. The column divided to pass the solitary tree, then the long ranks reunited when they were past it.
The men in the garden began firing, then the redcoats crammed into the seminary windows and arrayed with Sharpe’s men on the roof pulled their triggers. Muskets crashed, smoke thickened, the balls plucked at men in the column’s front ranks and put them down and the men advancing behind lost their cohesion as they tried not to step on their dead or wounded colleagues.
„Fire low!” a sergeant of the Buffs called to his men. „Don’t waste His Majesty’s lead!”
Colonel Waters was carrying spare canteens about the roof for men who were parched by biting the cartridges. The saltpeter in the gunpowder dried the mouth fast and men gulped the water between shots.
The column attacking the seminary’s western face was already shredded. Those Frenchmen were being assailed by rifle and musket fire, but the cannonade from the southern bank of the river was far worse. Gunners had rarely been offered such an easy target, the chance to rake the flank of an enemy’s infantry column, and they
