English wounded were propped against the wicker baskets filled with earth that made the cannon embrasures. One such basket seemed to explode into dirty shreds under the impact of a roundshot and Sharpe realized that French guns, further up the ridge, had begun to fire into the captured battery.
“You’re the reserve now!” Sharpe shouted at the Major. “Form your men and fall in behind the Highlanders!”
He did not wait to see if he was obeyed, but spurred after the Scots who were marching onwards. To their left, beyond Nairn’s second battalion, another brigade was going forward. The attack seemed to have broken the outer French crust, but as the British advanced so they would squeeze the French into an ever thicker and more impenetrable defence.
Sharpe rode past a dead Rifleman and was relieved to see it was not Harper. Nairn’s attack, spirited and bloody, was going well. The Highlanders’ Grenadier Company was in an enemy trench, led by a group of officers and sergeants who used their massive claymore swords to scour the French out. Frederickson’s sharpshooters picked
“Taplow’s dead!” Sharpe found Nairn.
Nairn stared at Sharpe as though he had not heard, then he sighed. “So much for prayer before battle. Poor man.”
The neighbouring brigade had stormed a small redoubt and Sharpe could see its ramparts swarming with British and Portuguese infantry. Bayonets rose and fell. The attack, Sharpe decided, had gone beyond the ability of any one man to control it; now it was just a mass of maddened men released to battle, and so long as they could be kept moving forward, then so long was victory possible.
Sharpe lost sense of time. The fear was gone, as it always seemed to vanish once the danger was present. Nairn’s men, thinned out and bloodied, pushed forward into gunfire. Smoke thickened. Knots of men lay in blood where canister had struck. The wounded crawled for help, or vomited, or cried, or just lay softly to let death come. Order seemed to have gone. Instead of battalions marching proudly to the attack, it now seemed to Sharpe that the assault consisted of small groups of men who dashed a few yards forward, then summoned up the courage for another quick advance. Some men sought shelter and had to be rousted back into the advance. Somewhere a colour showed through the smoke. Sometimes a cheer announced an enemy trench taken. A British galloper gun unlimbered and fired fast into the blinding fog.
The defence thickened. The enemy gunfire, which had been shattering at the start of the assault, seemed to double in its intensity. Nairn’s men, broken into leaderless units, went to ground. Nairn tried to force them on, but the brigade was exhausted, yet Division judged the moment to perfection for, just as Nairn knew he could ask no more of his men, a reserve brigade came up behind and swept through the scattered remnants of his three battalions.
The Scotsman had tears in his eyes; perhaps for the dead, or perhaps for pride. His men had done well.
“Congratulations, sir,” Sharpe said, and meant it, for Nairn’s men had driven deep into the horrid defences.
Nairn shook his head. “We should have gone further.” He frowned, listening to the battle. “Some poor bastard’s fetching it rough, though.”
“The big redoubt, sir.” Sharpe pointed forward and left to where, amidst the shifting scrim of gunsmoke, there was a thicker patch of white smoke which betrayed the position of the large central redoubt. Musketry cracked about its earthen walls.
“If we take that fort,” Nairn said, “the battle’s won.”
But other men would have to take the redoubt. They were fresh men, Highlanders of the reserve brigade who marched into the maelstrom with their pipes playing. Nairn could only watch. He sheathed his sword as though he knew it would not be wanted again in this battle, nor, indeed, in this war. “We’ll advance behind the attack, Sharpe.”
“Yes, sir.”
Sharpe rode to reorganize the shattered battalions. Bullets hissed near him, a shell dropped just over his head, and once he seemed to be bracketed by a shrill whistling of canister, yet he somehow led a charmed existence. Around him an army bled, but Sharpe lived. He thought of Jane, of Dorset, and of all the pleasures that waited with peace, and he prayed that victory would come soon, and safely.
The French gunners ripped bloody gaps in the Highlanders who charged the redoubt. Canister coughed at point-blank range, reinforced by the musketry of infantry who lined the palisade to fire down into the swarm of men who scrambled across the dry ditch and over the bodies of their clansmen.
“Rather them than me.” Sergeant Harper stood beside Sharpe’s horse.
Frederickson’s company had come well through the horror. They’d lost six men only. Taplow’s battalion had suffered far worse and, when Sharpe had re-formed it, there seemed only to be half as many men as had started on the attack, and that half so dazed as to be in a trance. Some of the men wept because Taplow was dead. “They liked him,” the Light Company’s Captain had explained to Sharpe. “He flogged them and swore at them, but they liked him. They knew where they were with him.”
“He was a brave man,” Sharpe said.
“He was frightened of peace. He thought it would be dull.”
The Highlanders scrabbled at the earth wall. French muskets clawed at them, but somehow the Scotsmen hauled themselves up and thrust their bayonets over the barricade. One man dragged himself to the top, fell, another took his place, and suddenly the Scots were tearing the palisade to scrap and flooding through the gaps. The cheers of the attackers sounded thin through the smoke. The supporting companies were crossing the ditch of dead men, and the redoubt was taken.
Sharpe sheathed his sword. He noted, with some surprise, that it was unbloodied. Perhaps, he thought, he would not have to kill in this last battle, then a superstitious certainty suggested that he would only survive if he did not try to kill. He touched his unshaven chin, then forgot the auguries of life and death as a massive volley hammered from the far side of the captured redoubt.
“God save Ireland.” Harper’s voice had awe in it.
A French counter-attack, as desperate as the Highland assault, had been launched on the redoubt and Sharpe saw with horror how the blue-coated enemy was clearing the newly taken ramparts. Men fought hand to hand, but the French had the advantage of numbers and they were winning by sheer weight alone.
Survivors of the Scottish regiments jumped down to escape from the fort, French cheers scorned them, then the reserve battalions, more Scotsmen, were snarling forward with bayonets outstretched.
“We’ll form as a reserve!” Nairn shouted at Sharpe.
“Skirmishers forward!” Sharpe shouted.
Nairn’s brigade had marched three battalions strong, but now it formed in only two. The shrunken Highlanders were on the left, and the remains of the two English battalions paraded as one on the right. The men crouched, praying they would not be needed. Their faces were blackened by powder residue through which sweat carved dirty white lines.
The second Scottish attack clawed its way into the redoubt. Once again the bayonets rose and fell on the parapet, and once again the Scots drove the French out.
Smoke drifted to obscure the fight, but the pipes still played and the cheers were again in Gaelic.
Sharpe kept his sword sheathed as he rode Sycorax towards Nairn. Above him, incongruous on this day of struggle, two larks climbed high above the smoke. Sycorax shied away from a dead Scottish Sergeant. The battle had become quiet, or at least it seemed so to Sharpe. Men fought and died not two hundred paces northwards, and all around the guns still thundered their gut-thumping menace into the smoke-cloud, but it seemed unthreatening to Sharpe. He remembered the remains of the salt beef in his pouch, and was astonished to find that a French musket bullet had lodged in the tough, gristly meat. He prised the ball free, then bit hungrily into the food.
“There’s another brigade a quarter mile behind us,” Nairn said. “They’ll go on to the end of the ridge if the
