respectability, discovered Sharpe in a wineshop that lay close to Toulouse’s prefecture. The wineshop was crowded, but something about Sharpe’s scarred face had dissuaded anyone from sharing his table. It was just after dusk and two days after Soult had abandoned the city to the British. “Have you taken to drinking alone?” Frederickson asked.
“I never abandoned the habit.” Sharpe pushed the bottle of wine across the table. “You’re looking damned cheerful.”
“I am damned cheerful.” Frederickson paused because a loud and prolonged huzza sounded from the prefecture next door. Field-Marshal the Lord Wellington was giving a dinner to celebrate his capture of the city. All the prominent citizens of Toulouse were attending, and all wore the white cockade of the French monarchy and were swearing that they had never supported the upstart Corsican tyrant. “It makes one wonder just who it is we’ve been fighting all these years.” Frederickson straddled a back-to-front chair and nodded thanks for the wine. “But we’re fighting them no longer because the Emperor has abdicated. The Goddamned bloody Emperor has thrown in his hand. Allow me to toast your most excellent, and now quite safe, health.”
Frederickson had spoken in a most matter-of-fact tone, so much so that Sharpe did not really comprehend what his friend had just said.
“The war, my dear friend, is over,” Frederickson insisted.
Sharpe stared at Frederickson and said nothing.
“It’s true,” Frederickson said, “as I live and breathe, and may I be cursed if I lie, but a British officer has come from Paris. Think of that! A British officer from Paris! In fact a whole slew of British officers have come from Paris!
Bonaparte has abdicated, Paris has fallen, the war is over, and we have won!“ Frederickson could no longer contain his excitement. He stood and, ignoring the majority of the customers who were French, climbed on to the chair and shouted his news to the whole tavern. ”Boney’s abdicated! Paris has fallen, the war’s over, and we’ve won! By Christ, we’ve won!“
There was a moment’s silence, then the cheers began. Spanish and Portuguese officers sought a hasty translation, then added their own noise to the celebration. The only men who did not cheer were the civilian- clothed and moustached French veterans who stared sullenly into their wine cups. One such man, the news interpreted to him, wept.
Frederickson shouted to a serving girl that he wanted champagne, cheroots, and brandy. “We’ve won!” he exulted to Sharpe. “The damn thing’s over!”
“When did Boney abdicate?” Sharpe asked.
“Christ knows. Last week? Two weeks ago?”
“Before the battle?” Sharpe insisted.
Frederickson shrugged. “Before the battle, yes.”
“Jesus.” Sharpe momentarily closed his eyes. So Nairn’s death had been for nothing? All the blood on the high ridge had been spilt for nothing?
Then, suddenly, he forgot that irony in an overwhelming and astonishing wash of relief. The bells of Europe could ring because the war was over. There would be no more danger. No more summoning the nerve to assault an enemy-held wall, and no more standing rock still as an enemy battalion took aim. No more cannons, no more lancers, no more skirmish line. No more death. It was over. No more waking in the night sheeted with sweat and thinking of a sword blade’s threat. The war was over, and the last ranks had been closed up, and the whole damn thing was done. Europe had been rinsed with blood, and it was over. He would live for ever now, and that thought made Sharpe laugh, and suddenly he was shaking hands with allied officers who crowded about the table to hear the details of Frederickson’s news. Napoleon, the ogre, the tyrant, the scourge of Europe, the damned Corsican, the upstart, the beast, was finished.
Someone began singing, while other officers were dancing between the tables where the Emperor’s veterans sat keeping their thoughts hidden.
Brandy and champagne arrived. Frederickson, without asking, poured the red wine from Sharpe’s cup on to the sawdust covered floor and replaced it with champagne. “A toast! To peace!”
“To peace!”
“To Dorset!” Frederickson beamed.
“To Dorset!” Sharpe wondered whether a letter had come from England, then forgot the thought to savour this astounding news. It was over! No more canister, no more bayonets, no more shivering on long night marches, no more stench of French cavalry, no more sabres chopping down, no more bullets. Easter had triumphed and death was defeated. “I must write to Jane,” Sharpe said, and he wondered whether she was celebrating the news in some Dorset village. There would be oxen roasting, hogsheads of ale, church bells ringing. It was over.
“You can write to Jane tomorrow,” Frederickson ordered, “for tonight we get drunk.”
“Tonight we get drunk,” Sharpe agreed, and by one o’clock they were on the city’s walls where they sang nonsense and shouted their triumph towards the British bivouac fires that lay to the city’s west. By two o’clock they were searching for another wineshop, but instead found a group of cavalry sergeants who insisted on sharing some plundered champagne with the Rifle officers. At three o’clock, arm in arm to keep themselves upright, Sharpe and Frederickson staggered through the abandoned French fortifications and crossed the wooden bridge over the canal where two friendly sentries prevented them from falling into the water. At four o’clock they arrested Sergeant Harper on a charge of being sober, and at five o’clock they found him not guilty because he no longer was. At six o’clock Major Richard Sharpe was being sick, and at seven o’clock he staggered to Nairn’s vacant tent and gave instructions that he was not to be woken up ever again. Ever.
Because a war was over, and it was won, and at long long last there was peace.
PART TWO
CHAPTER 4
Nairn’s Brigade was no more. Broken by battle and leaderless, its shrunken battalions were attached to other brigades. The reason was purely administrative, for now the army was to be run by bureaucrats instead of by fighting men, and the bureaucrats had been ordered to disband the army that had fought from the Portuguese coast to deep inside France. Frederickson was curious to discover just how far the army had marched and found his answer with the help of some old maps that he uncovered in a Toulouse bookseller’s shop. “As the crow flies,” he told Sharpe in an aggrieved voice, “it’s only six hundred and sixty miles, and it took us six years.”
Or ten thousand miles as a soldier reckoned miles, which was as bad roads that froze in winter, were quagmires in spring and choked the throat with dust in summer. Soldiers’ miles were those that were marched under the weight of back-breaking packs. They were miles that were marched over and over again, in advance and retreat, in chaos and in fear. Soldiers’ miles led to sieges and battles, and to the death of friends, but now those soldiers’ miles were all done and the army would travel the crow’s one hundred and twenty miles to Bordeaux where ships waited to take them away. Some battalions were being sent to garrisons far across the oceans, some were being ordered to the war in America, and a few were being sent home where, their duty done, they would be disbanded.
Frederickson’s company was ordered to England where, along with the rest of its battalion, the company would be broken up and the men sent to join other battalions of the Goth. Most of the Spaniards who had enlisted in the company during the war had already deserted. They had joined the Greenjackets only to kill Frenchmen, and, that job efficiently done, Frederickson gladly turned his blind eye to their departure. Sharpe, without a battalion of his own or even a job, received permission to travel back to England with the Riflemen and so, three weeks after the French surrender, he found himself clambering on to one of the flat-bottomed river barges that had been hired to transport the army up the River Garonne to the quays of Bordeaux.
Seconds before the barge was poled away from the wharf a messenger arrived from Divisional
