CHAPTER 16
Two Marines from Sharpe’s squad, judging the intervals between the fall of howitzer shells, darted around the courtyard to retrieve those shells that had not exploded. There were six. The fuses of two had failed to ignite in the howitzer barrels, two had half burned-fuses, while two had simply failed to explode. The four with usable fuses were carried to the bastion above the gatehouse where Lieutenant Fytch licked nervous lips and fingered the hilt of his pistol.
Bread and cold meat had been distributed, but most men found it hard to chew or swallow the food. As the French column came closer and the threat of its drums louder, the bread was abandoned beside the upturned shakoes that served as cartridge holders.
A shell, landing in the flooded ditch, fountained water on to an embrasure. A man laughed nervously. A sparrow, made bold by winter hunger, pecked at one of the discarded lumps of bread then flew off.
Marine Moore, for the twentieth time, lifted the pan lid to check that his musket was primed. For the twentieth time it was.
The French drums sounded clearly inside the fort, punctuated only by the fire of the big guns. Between the rattled passages of drumbeats there was a pause filled by hundreds of voices. „Vive I’Empereur!“
“Funny thing to hear for the first time,” Fytch said.
“I’ve heard it more times than I can remember,” Sharpe said truthfully, “and we beat the buggers every time.” He looked at the column, a great mass of men that advanced implacably over the sandy esplanade. It had been French columns like this, so huge and seemingly so irresistible, that had terrified half the nations of Europe into surrender, but it was also a formation that was designed to contain half-trained troops who could, therefore, be scared and bloodied into defeat. French skirmishers were deploying on the glacis and one of them put a bullet within six inches of Sharpe’s face. A rifle cracked and Sharpe saw the Frenchman slide back behind his mist of musket smoke.
Sharpe had drawn all his Riflemen to the southern or eastern walls. He waited till the enemy was two hundred paces away, then filled his lungs. “Rifles! Fire!”
More than a hundred rifles spat fire.
Perhaps a dozen men in the leading rank of the French column keeled over. Immediately, with a shiver, the column stepped over the bodies. A slow ripple seemed to move down the column as the succeeding ranks negotiated the dead and wounded.
Riflemen concentrated on reloading; working with fast, practised hands, ramming ball and wad and powder down clean barrels, aiming again, firing again, reloading again.
At a hundred paces Sharpe blew two blasts on his whistle. Those Riflemen whose places were on the other ramparts ran back to their stations.
The field guns stopped firing.
It seemed oddly quiet. The drumming and shouting still continued, but the ear-hammering percussion of the twelve-pounders was over. The howitzers, firing still, made a more muffled, coughing sound. A wounded man, under the razor, screamed from the surgery tunnel and a Marine, for no apparent reason, vomited.
“At this range,” Sharpe walked down the line of Marines and kept his voice as matter-of-fact as a drill- sergeant, “aim two feet above the target.” He glanced at the enemy. “Take aim!”
The red-coated men pushed their muskets over th,e embrasures.
“Fire! Reload!”
A Frenchman crawled across the sand of the glacis, trailing blood.
A Marine, hit by a skirmisher’s musket ball, spun backwards, teetered on the edge of the firestep, then fell into the burning branches of the pine abatis.
“Fire!”
A howitzer shell cracked on the firestep beside Sharpe and span into the courtyard where its explosion made a ball of filthy smoke shot through with red flames.
“Fire!” Lieutenant Fytch shouted. He pointed his pistol at a French officer not fifty yards away and pulled the trigger. The gun rammed a shock up his arm and blotted his view with smoke.
A Marine’s musket hangfired and he threw the gun into the courtyard and picked up the weapon of a dead man. The ammunition left in the pouch of the corpse who had fallen into the burning abatis began to explode.
The Riflemen, knowing that survival depended on the speed of their work, no longer rammed shots home, but tap-loaded their guns by rapping the butts on the rampart then firing the weapon into the gap between the glacis’ shoulders. Musket balls and rifle bullets spat into the enemy, but still the column came forward. Sharpe, who had seen it so often before, was again amazed at how much punishment a French column would endure. Three of the Marines, issued with civilian blunderbusses taken from the surrounding villages, poured their fire into the column’s head.
The shape of the attack was clear now.
At the front of the column the French general had put raw recruits, musket-fodder; boys whose deaths would not damage the Empire and he had invited the British to slaughter them. Now, pushed by officers and sergeants, the survivors of those conscripts spread along the counter-guard or sheltered in the dry ditch and banged their muskets at the smoke-wreathed wall above them.
Behind were the veterans. Twenty or more men carried ereat fascines of roped branches, great mattresses of timber that sheltered them from bullet strike and which would be thrown into the ditch where the drawbridge should have been. Behind them, moustached faces grim, came the Grenadiers, the assault troops.
Frederickson had lit a candle sheltered in a lantern. He used a spill to take the flame from the candle to the first unexploded mortar shell. He watched the fuse hiss, waited till the fire had burned into the hole bored in the casing, then, with a grunt, heaved it over the edge.
“Fire!” Lieutenant Fytch, his pistol reloaded, wasted the bullet into a fascine.
The shell bounced on the road, disappeared beneath the leading rank, then exploded.
A hole seemed to be punched in the men carrying the great bundles, but as soon as the smoke cleared, the hole filled, and a French sergeant kicked dead men and discarded bundles into the ditch.
“Patrick! The gate!” Sharpe had waited till the last moment, believing that the volume of fire from the walls would hold the column’s head back, and now he wondered if he had waited too long. He had meant to attack with his own squad, but he preferred now to control this fight from the ramparts and he knew that any attack headed by Harper would be driven home with a professional savagery.
“Fire!” Frederickson shouted and a score of bullets thudded downward. Some spurted dust from the road, one span a Frenchman clear round, but the rest seemed to be soaked up in the surging, pushing mass that strained to reach the shelter of the archway. That arch was blocked by pine trees, but the barricade had been knocked about by roundshot, and the leading attackers, throwing their fascines down and jumping on to their uncertain footing, could see footholds among the branches.
One man toppled from the makeshift bridge and fell on to the hidden spikes. His screams were cut off as water flowed into his mouth.
Another mortar shell was thrown to explode on the road-way. The air was hissing with bullets, endless with the noise of muskets firing and the rattle of ramrods.
“Now!” Sharpe shouted at Sergeant Rossner.
The sergeant, hiding beneath the ramparts at the southeastern corner of the fort, had a wooden baker’s peel which he dug into a barrel of lime. He scooped shovel-load after shovel-load of the white powder over the edge.
“Fire!” Frederickson shouted.
Lieutenant Fytch, aiming his pistol, was shot in the chest and thumped back, astonishment on his face and blood on his crossbelt. “I’m…” He could not say what he wanted to say, instead he began to gasp for breath; each exhalation a terrible, pitiful moan.
“Leave him!” Sharpe bellowed at a Marine. This was no time to rescue wounded men. This was a time to fight, or else they would all be wounded. “The whole barrel, sergeant!”
Rossner stooped, lifted the barrel, and tipped it over the rampart. Two bullets struck it, but the powder
