frenzy and the cheer swelled again and suddenly there was an unnatural silence because all the muskets had gone quiet and there was just the wind sighing over cold stone, the crying of the injured, and a sudden, startled shout from Palmer’s right. He ran.
Three hundred Frenchmen had left the village before dawn and groped their way in the darkness. They had marched in a great circle, east and north and west, to come, an hour after first light, to the channel’s edge north of the fortress.
One hundred of the men were new conscripts, brought along to fire their muskets when ordered.
The other two hundred were among the best in Calvet’s force. They were led by a Captain Briquet whose warlike name, meaning sabre, gave the force an odd confidence. They were guided to their assault by Henri Lassan who saw, in this attack, his chance of redemption.
Briquet, though a junior officer compared to many in Calvet’s force, had a reputation. He was brave, thorough, and a firebrand.
His task was to approach the fort once the larger battle began. Under the cover of its noise, and trusting to the distraction offered by its existence, he planned to come close beneath the fort’s vulnerable north-western corner. Lassan had promised the approach could be made unseen because the sand-dunes offered hiding, and Lassan had been proved right.
Once in place, hidden close to the fortress, a Forlorn Hope would charge across the masonry bridge of the dam, put ladders to the closest embrasures, and climb. The Hope, who expected death, would be led by Briquet who expected to be a major when the sun went down.
The conscripts, under experienced sergeants, would flay the walls left and right of the assault with musket fire.
The Forlorn Hope, gaining the ramparts, would hold a small section while the other veterans, with more ladders, flooded on to the sand strip between the fort and the channel to place more ladders. Briquet, knowing that the ramparts facing the channel would have the fewest defenders, aimed to take that wall. The stone ramp, that Lassan had drawn on his careful plan, would then lead into the heart of the Teste de Buch.
Two hundred men, Briquet said, could capture this fort. It would take, if the first lodgement was successful, no more than twenty minutes.
Yet for that lodgement to work the British sentries must be drawn to look the other way, and in that cause men must die at the main gate. General Calvet had ordered it thus, but Captain Briquet’s fear, for he was a man who thirsted for glory, was that the larger attack would pierce the fortress before his Forlorn Hope could rush the stone dam. The colonel leading the main attack, Briquet knew, was desperate to succeed and there was not a man marching with the drummers who did not believe that the British would be swept ignominiously aside once the fascines were in place and the moustaches stormed over the ditch.
Briquet’s force, with stealth and care, crept southwards between the dunes and the water. Two men, ostensibly planting fish-traps from a tiny boat, gave warning when faces appeared at the fort’s north-western corner, but their warnings were few.
Briquet listened to the turmoil at the gate. Not once did he raise his head to look at the fort, not once did he risk discovery. That could wait for the last moment, the dash over the dam.
“This is as close as we can get unseen,” Lassan said.
The firing at the main gate was dying and Briquet knew this was the moment or there would be no moment at all. „Veneer“
His feet scrambled for footing in the sand, a sergeant shoved him upwards, and suddenly the fort loomed above him and Briquet had an impression that no men guarded the ramparts, but he dared not search for the enemy because there was a task to do. He saw the stone dam, exactly as Lassan had described it, and he leaped the small wooden fence that straggled to the sea, then his bootnails were loud on the stone that was lightly covered with sand.
A musket banged somewhere, then another, but Briquet took no notice. He jumped the rusted cogs of the sluice-gear and steadied himself with a hand on the fortress wall. “One!” He pointed right, “Two!” Left.
The ladders, carried with such care down the channel’s edge, were dragged forward. There were four men to each ladder, two planted the rails in the sand and the others swung the ladders up and over so that the timbers crashed on to the stonework. Briquet shouldered a sergeant aside with a snarl and climbed the first ladder as if the dogs of hell were at his heels.
A man appeared above him, startled, but a musket shot from below dissolved the man’s face in blood and Briquet, spattered by the gore, spat as his head cleared the embrasure’s lip.
He reached up, grasped the top of a merlon, and heaved himself over. He tripped on an empty gun slide, recovered, and already the sergeant was beside him.
Briquet drew his sword, the steel whispering at the scabbard’s throat. “Follow me!”
Men poured up the ladders. More men, cheering, followed with new ladders and Briquet, leading his charge along the western walls, knew that the fort was his.
He had achieved surprise, he had gained the wall, and he would be a major by sundown.
Captain Palmer saved the north wall. The pine-lashed walkway was still in place, circumventing the citadel, and he seized the timbers, grunted, then shoved the heavy pine-trunks into the courtyard beneath. Now the only access was through the citadel that was blocked by a barrel of lime.
“Fire!” Palmer, crammed into the tiny sentry-chamber with five Marines, fired over the barrel at the blue uniforms who had appeared with such suddenness on the gun-platform.
“William! Stay!” Sharpe needed a man above the gate. If the French, sensing that the defenders were being stripped away by the new threat, attacked again, then it would need a man like Frederickson to hold them.
“Marines! Marines!” He shouted the word like a battle-cry.
Sharpe was running towards the western wall. “Marines!” The Marines, trained for the bloody business of boarding enemy ships, were the troops he needed now. The Rifles could defend the gate, but the Marines could show their worth in the close-quarter work. “Marines!”
Sharpe threw down his rifle and tugged the Heavy Cavalry sword from its ungainly scabbard. How in Christ’s name had the French sneaked into the fort? A musket ball snicked the wall beside him, fired by a Frenchman on the west wall. Sharpe could see red uniforms bunched at the far citadel, showing that the north wall held. Sharpe’s job, and the task of the Marines who ran behind him, was to throw the enemy off the western bastions.
The walkway across the corner of the ramparts was gone, burned by the fire, so Sharpe must lead his men through the zig-zag of the citadel. The enemy would know it, their muskets would be waiting for men coming from that narrow doorway, but it was no use dwelling on fear. Sharpe saw a French officer, sword drawn, leading his men in a rush down the western rampart and Sharpe knew it would be a race to see who reached the citadel first and he ran harder, ammunition pouch bouncing, then slammed through the door to check his speed by thumping on the inner wall.
Frederickson, left with the Riflemen, sent a volley at the French who had climbed the ladders. At this range, across the angle of the fort, the rifle fire was deadly.
Marines crushed into the citadel and Sharpe, trusting they would follow him, jumped through the doorway. “Come on!”
He emerged into winter sunlight to see a space of five empty, stone-flagged yards beyond which, screaming and threatening, the front rank of the French charged at him.
The enemy had the impetus here. They were running, and Sharpe had just emerged from the obstacle of the citadel. This was the second of pure, naked fear prompted by the sight of steel, then Sharpe snarled his challenge and hissed his blade in a glittering arc to check the French rush.
“Bayonets!” Sharpe shouted at the two men who had followed him on to the ramparts. Other Marines pushed behind, but it was up to Sharpe to clear a space for them. “Now kill them!” He jumped forward to anticipate the French attack. The French officer, a short man with a fierce face, lunged with his sword. The man was flanked by moustached giants with bayonets.
The Heavy Cavalry sword, a butcher’s blade, swept one musket aside. The French officer’s sword skewered past Sharpe’s swerve and a Marine, instinctively seizing the blade, screamed as Briquet withdrew and cut the Marine’s fingers to the joints.
Sharpe hit the soldier nearest him with the guard of the sword, then sawed the blade downwards on to the
