spumed and fell, was caught by the wind, and Sharpe saw it, like musket smoke, drifting on to the assault troops.
Some of whom, safely over the moat, were dragging with their hands at the branches in the archway.
“Fire!” Harper bellowed the order to his squad and pulled the trigger of his seven-barrelled gun.
Bullets tore through pine and threw men backwards.
“Spike the bastards!” Harper dropped the gun and unslung his rifle. He rammed its bayonet forward, between two branches, and twisted the blade in a Frenchman’s arm.
Attackers were coughing, screaming, and clutching at their eyes as the lime drifted among the Grenadiers.
“Fire!” Sharpe yelled and a score of muskets hammered down into the crowd below.
The conscripts on the counterguard fired at the fort, but most fired high. Some balls struck. A Marine corporal, hit in the shoulder, went on loading his musket despite the pain.
“You’ve got them beat!” Frederickson hurled a third shell that exploded among half-blinded men. “Now kill the bastards, kill them!” Men loaded as fast as cut, grazed hands would work. Bullet after bullet spat down into the French mass that was still pushed forward by the rear ranks.
Sharpe fired his own rifle down into the chaos. “Cheer, you buggers! Let them know they’ve lost! Cheer!”
Lieutenant Fytch, blood filling his mouth, tried to cheer and died instead.
“Fire!” Frederickson shouted over the cheer.
The area about the gate was flames and smoke and bullets heavy with death. Men screaming, men blinded, men bleeding, men crawling.
“Fire!”
Men stumbled, the pain in their eyes like fire, to fall from the makeshift causeway on to the spikes. Blood drifted on the muddy waters.
“Fire!”
Harper’s men, the lodgement beneath the archway cleared, knelt with reloaded weapons and poured bullets at point-blank range into defeated men. “Fire, you bastards, fire!” Harper was keening with the joy of battle, lost in it, revelling in it, spitting hatred at men he had never met, men he would drink with on a summer’s day if life had been different, but men who now folded over his bullets and shed bright blood onto a blood-soaked road. “Fire!”
The last shell was thrown far to explode where the roadway narrowed between the glacis’ shoulders and the men at the column’s rear, at last sensing that the front ranks had recoiled in screaming agony, faltered.
“Fire!” Rifles spat at conscripts on the counterguard. Farm-boys, who five weeks before had never seen an army musket, now choked their blood on to sand.
“Cheer! Cheer!” Men whose mouths were dry with gritty powder raised a cheer.
“Keep firing! Drive them back!”
Men’s faces were black with powder. Their nails bled where they had dragged at cartridges, levered stiff frizzens, and torn on flints. Their teeth, showing skull-white in the powder-dark faces, grinned as if in rictus. Breath came short. The whole world now was a few smoky yards, stinking of fire, in which a man rammed and loaded, fired and killed, rammed and loaded and other men screamed and some men crawled bleeding along the ramparts and another man slipped in spilt brains and swore because his musket fell into the courtyard.
The French inched back. The bullets cracked at them, thudded into flesh and still the bullets came. No troops fired muskets faster and no troops had been given such a target.
“Fire!” Sharpe, his rifle re-loaded, pulled the trigger. The smoke of his men’s weapons obscured individuals, but he knew where the enemy was and his bullet twitched the smoke as it flashed through.
Harper, no more enemy visible, shouted for his men to hold their fire. He hauled a pine tree aside, crouched, then beckoned to Taylor. “Ammunition.”
They went to the edge of the ditch, found the men they had killed, and cut their cartridge bags away. They tossed the bags through the archway then went back and re-blocked the arch. There had been no time to run the one remaining cannon into a firing position and Harper, regretting the lost chance, went to check that the quickfuse still led through the cleared venthole to the charge. It was safe and, reassured, he began the laborious process of re-charging the seven-barrelled gun.
A French officer, galloping his horse across the esplanade to see why the attack had faltered, was seen by two riflemen frorn the south-western bastion. They both fired. Man and horse shuddered, blood spat to sand, then the wounded horse, screaming and tossing, dragged its dead master in a great circle towards the column’s rear.
“Fire!” Frederickson shouted and more heavy bullets tore into the smoke and drove the column further back. The drums hesitated, a single rattle sounded defiance, then was silent.
“Hold your fire! Hold it!” Sharpe could see the enemy going, running, and though he wished he could have fired till the last enemy was out of sight, he had ammunition to conserve. “Hold your fire! Hold your fire!” He felt the wild elation of a battle won, of an enemy broken. The space before the fort’s gate was foul with dead and wounded men, and smeared with a great, white smudge of lime that was mixed with blood. “Cease firing!”
At which point Calvet’s real attack burst on to the north-western corner of the Teste de Buch.
Black clouds were coming from the north. Captain Palmer had watched them, had seen the grey blur of rain beneath them and judged that by this night the Teste de Buch would once again be crouching beneath dirty weather. Biscay, he thought, was living up to its reputation for sudden storms and uneasy calms.
Then the attack had struck at the fort’s gate.
Men on the northern rampart turned to watch. It seemed to them that a cauldron boiled around the gate, a cauldron that billowed smoke into the sky.
The musketry had fused into a single, sustained crackle. Screams punctuated it. The smell of rotten eggs, powder smoke stench, came over the courtyard. Palmer saw Fytch struck, saw him fall, imagined him dying. Blood, flowing from the lieutenant’s mouth, trickled to the firestep’s edge then, with obscene slowness, ran down the inner wall.
Palmer watched Harper’s group sprint across the courtyard, trampling the useless, burned abatis, and fire like men possessed into the darkness of the arch.
The fort stank of blood and smoke, the soldier’s smell.
Palmer, grateful that the coughing shells no longer fell into the fort, turned back towards the north. Gulls fought above the channel’s beach a quarter mile away. The rain seemed no closer. Beneath the diving, screaming gulls two men in a rowing boat planted fish traps of woven willow.
The noise and carnage at the Teste de Buch might have been a whole world away for all they seemed to care.
The sea was empty. Not one grey sail offered hope.
Palmer was thinking of a wife left in Gravesend, of two children who went hungry three days out of seven, of his hopes for that family when this war ended. An orchard, he thought, far from the sea and never fouled with smoke, would be a fitting place. Somewhere with a small cottage, not too big, but with a room where the children could sleep, another for himself and Betty, and a room where his few books could justify the name of study. A horse, for no gentleman walked where he could ride, and perhaps his father-in-law, who had mightily disapproved of Betty marrying a Marine, might lend some money to make the Marine into a market-gardener.
“Sir?” A Rifleman close to Palmer stared towards the channel.
“What is it?”
“Thought I saw something.”
Palmer stared, saw nothing, and put it down to gulls fighting by the fish-traps.
He was sure, thinking about it, that his eldest child’s feeble health was due to living in a town. Gravesend was filthy with coal-smoke and in winter the sea-fog could lie heavily on a small chest. Two of Palmer’s children had died as infants and were buried in the pauper’s graveyard, for a Marine officer had no money to spare on lavish funerals for the barely baptized. An orchard would be a place to grow up, Palmer thought, an orchard heavy with apples and with espaliered pear-trees growing against a sun-warmed crinkle-crankle wall.
A cheer from the gate made him turn. The men on the ramparts still fired, but the cheer told Palmer that this round was won. God alone knew how, except that the Marines and Riflemen had loaded and fired in practised
