It was not just the way that Lieutenant Colonel Girdwood's men had stolen the bounty from each recruit, but the way that, day after day, the debts piled up. At every inspection Sergeant Lynch would find a fault with a man's Necessaries; a torn knapsack strap, a holed sock, and each fault would be noted and the cost of the item deducted against future pay, Sharpe guessed that no man at the camp received pay, that all of it was channelled into the hands of Girdwood. Such raids on men's pay were quite normal in the army; half of every man's wages was deducted for food alone; yet Sharpe had never seen it done on such a scale or with such enthusiastic rapacity.
Only the training was pursued with more enthusiasm, and Sharpe had not seen any camp in which recruits were worked so hard. They drilled from morning till sundown. The grammar of soldiering was hammered into them until the clumsiest recruit, after one week, could perform all the manoeuvres of Company drill. Only Tom, the half-wit, was considered untrainable and he was given to the Sergeants' Mess as a cleaner.
The object of their life, from the cold mornings when they were roused before dawn until the sun was set and the bugle called the lights-out, was to avoid punishment. Even after the bugle there was still danger, for it was a maxim with Lieutenant Colonel Girdwood that mutinies were plotted at night. He made the Sergeants and officers patrol the tent lines, listening for voices, and it was rumoured that Girdwood himself had been seen, on hands and knees, threading his body between the tent guy ropes to put an ear close to the canvas.
The punishments were as varied as the crimes that occasioned them. A whole squad or tent could fetch a normal fatigue duty; digging latrines, clearing one of the many drainage channels that ran to the mudflats, or mending, with stiff twine and a leatherworker's needle, the stiff canvas of the tents. Sergeant Lynch favoured a swift beating, and sometimes used a knapsack filled with bricks as his instrument of punishment, either worn for extra drill, or else held at arm's length while he stood behind ready to cut with his cane at the first quiver of fatigue in the outstretched arms.
There were beatings and floggings and, savage though they were, they could all be avoided by the simple expedient of obedience and anonymity. Most of the recruits learned fast. Even when it rained, and it seemed impossible to keep the mud from their uniforms, or from the tarpaulins that formed the groundsheets of their tents, they learned to scrape and wash the mud entirely away, and even though the cleaning water, that was blessedly abundant in the low, marshy land, soaked their thin straw palliasses, it was better to sleep shivering and damp than to incur the wrath of Lieutenant Colonel Girdwood's inspection.
Yet Giles Marriott, who had joined the army in a mood of self-destruction because his girl had jilted him for a richer man, earned punishment after punishment. Morning after morning, at the dawn inspection, Sergeant Lynch would find a speck of mud on Marriott's pipeclay and the Sergeant's voice would snap at the terrified man. 'Strip!
Marriott would strip. He would stand shivering.
'Run!
He would run the tent lines, stumbling in the mud, jeered on his way by sergeants and corporals who would slash at his bare buttocks with their canes or steel-tipped pacing sticks. 'Faster! Faster! He would come back to Sergeant Lynch with tears in his eyes and his pale flesh scarred by the welts of the blows.
'Just keep your bloody mouth shut, Harper told him.
'We're not animals. We're men.
'No you're not. You're a bloody soldier now. Never look the bugger in the eyes, never argue, and never complain.
Marriott listened, but did not hear. The other recruits did both, for in only a few hours Sharpe had become their unofficial leader and guide within the army. On their very first day Sharpe had calmed Charlie Weller down, gripping the boy's shoulders till it hurt. 'You do nothing, Charlie!
'He killed him!
'You do nothing! You bloody endure, that's all. It gets better, lad.
'I'll kill him! Weller, with all the passion of his seventeen years, could not hold back the tears caused by Buttons' death.
'After Patrick's torn his head off, maybe, Sharpe grinned. He liked Weller. The boy was one of those rare recruits who had joined the army, not out of desperation, but because he wanted to serve his country. Weller, given time, would rise in the army, but Sharpe knew that first the seventeen year old must survive this place.
A place where, to his astonishment, he discovered that there were more than seven hundred men in training. Some were close to finishing, almost ready to take their place in the ranks that must fight the French, others, like his own squad, still learned the basic grammar of the trade. Yet there were more than enough men here to save the First Battalion in Pasajes and to form the core of a properly constituted Second as well.
He discovered too where the camp was. On a rainy, drizzling day he was ordered to the kitchens where he unloaded a cart of half rotted cabbages. A Mess-corporal, leaning in the doorway and staring at the low cloud to the south, grumbled what a godawful bloody place it was.
'What place? Sharpe asked.
The corporal lit a pipe and, when it was drawing to his satisfaction, spat into the mud. 'End of the bleeding world, Called Foulness.'
'Foulness?
'Bloody foul too, yes? The corporal laughed. 'Christ knows why they sent us here. Chelmsford was all right, but the buggers want us here.
The corporal was happy to talk. Foulness, he said, was an island, joined by the wooden bridge to the mainland, and on the island there was a single, small, poor village and this army camp. To the south, the corporal said, was the Thames Estuary. At low tide it was a great desert of mud. To the east was the North Sea and to the north and west were the tangling tidal creeks and rivers of the Essex coast.
'It's like a prison, Sharpe said.
The corporal laughed. 'You won't be here long. Six weeks and they ship you out! You should feel sorry for me. Stuck out here!
Sharpe had guessed already that the corporal, like the two senior Companies in the camp that, alone on Foulness, were dressed in red jackets, was one of the men who were here to guard the recruits against escape. It truly was like a prison, with water as its walls and troops as its jailers. Sharpe chopped a cabbage in half. 'Where do they ship us to?
'Wherever the buggers want you. You know that, you're an old soldier.
And being an old soldier was to Sharpe's advantage, for it kept him out of trouble and spared him the punishments that racked the less experienced men. No sergeant wanted to punish Sharpe or Harper, for the simple reason that both men gave the appearance of being able to take any punishment that was handed to them. Instead it was Marriott, always Marriott, who, with his tuppence worth of education, was unable to rid himself of the idea that he was superior to the illiterate men who were his fellow recruits. He argued stubbornly, wept when he was punished, and even at night, in the stillness of the tent lines, when the soft tread of the patrolling sergeants and officers listening for mutiny could be heard outside, Marriott cried.
Harper's view was simple. 'It's his own bloody fault.
'He thinks he's too clever to be sensible. Sharpe was the only man to whom Marriott would listen, but even Sharpe could not drive into the ex-clerk's head that the only route to survival lay in acceptance and submission.
'I'm going to get out. I'll run! Marriott had told him. He had only been in the army a week.
'Don't be a fool. There was a snap in Sharpe's voice that made Marriott's head jerk up, the snap of an officer. 'You're not running away!
'They can't do this to people!
That night, before the bugle called the lights-out, Sharpe told Harper that Marriott wanted to run. Harper shrugged. 'What about us?
'Us?
'Bugger Marriott, it's time we got the hell out of here.
'We don't even know what they're doing here. Sharpe knew that the camp did not exist solely to steal the men's pay. If that was its sole purpose, why were they trained so hard?
'Still time we got out. Harper said it stubbornly.
'Give it another week, Patrick. Just one more week.
