be close, damned close. “Take your flag, Captain,” Sharpe said to Killick.
The American was watching the French column reform. “There’s hundreds of the bastards.”
“Only two thousand.” Sharpe was scraping with a stone at a nick on the fore-edge of his sword.
“I wish…” Killick began instinctively.
“You can’t,” Sharpe said. “This is our fight. And if we don’t make it, sail without us. Lieutenant Minver!”
“Sir?”
“Your men next! Get them down to the water. Regimental Sergeant Major!”
Harper was inside the fortress at the foot of the breach. “Sir?”
“Block it!”
Harper waited with a squad of men beside a cheval-de-frise made from a scorched beam to which had been lashed and nailed fifty captured French bayonets. The blades jutted at all angles to make a savage barricade that Harper, with six Riflemen, now struggled to carry to the breach’s crest. As they did, so the renewed fire of the twelve-pounders struck the breach’s outer face. A chip of stone whistled over Harper’s head, but he heaved at his end of the beam, bellowed at the Riflemen to push, and the great spiked bulwark was slammed into place.
Sharpe was on the west wall. Minver’s men were climbing down ladders to the sand, while the first of Killick’s longboats was pushing away from the Thuella. Sharpe guessed it would take ten minutes to board Minver’s company safely, and another five before the longboats would return for the last of the Teste de Buch’s defenders. The tide in the channel swept far too strongly to risk swimming to the safety of the schooner, so Sharpe must fight until the boats could carry all his men away. Killick, carrying his American flag to safety, paused by Sharpe and stared at the French horde. “Do I wish you luck, Major?”
“No.”
Killick seemed torn by his desire to stay and witness what promised to be a rare fight, and his need to hasten the longboats in the rain-flecked channel. „I’ll have a bottle of brandy waiting in my cabin, Major.“
“I’ll look forward to it.” Sharpe was unable to express his emotions, instead, awkwardly, he thanked the American for keeping their pact.
Killick shrugged. “Why thank me? Hell, I get a chance to fight you bastards again!”
“But your government. They’ll make trouble because you helped me?”
“As long as I make money,” Killick said, “the American government won’t give a damn.“ The French drums began their sound, then, just as suddenly, stopped. The American stared at the column. ”Two thousand of them, and fifty of you?“
That’s about it.“
Killick laughed, and his voice was suddenly warm. “Hell, Major, I’m glad I’m not one of those poor bastards. I’ll have the brandy waiting, just make sure you come and drink it.” He nodded, then walked towards his boats.
Sharpe walked to the broken end of the rampart above the breach where half of Frederickson’s company was stationed. The other half, with Frederickson himself, was in the courtyard.
Harper was still on the breach, jamming captured bayonets among the stones. The rain still crashed down, washing mortar and dust away from the breach and spreading dirty yellow floodwater out of the ditch.
The French drums, made soggy by rain, sounded again from the south. A Rifleman licked cracked lips. The rain, grey and depressing, blurred the massed French bayonets above which, glinting gold, Sharpe saw an enemy standard. Such, he thought, was the vision of death in the morning. The French were coming.
Commandant Henri Lassan would march, at his own request, in the front rank of the column. He had written to his mother, apologizing to her that he had lost the fortress and telling her that she could nevertheless be proud of her son. He had sent her his rosary and asked that the shining, much-fingered beads be laid to rest in the family’s chapel.
“They’re boarding the schooner,” Favier reported to Calvet. The northern attack had been abandoned and everything would be thrown into this one, final storm. Favier thought that was a mistake. The northern attack could have driven itself between the fortress and the water, blocking the garrison’s escape, but Calvet was not worried.
“The cavalry can play on the beach. Send them an order.” Calvet dismounted, then drew his sword that had once impaled two Cossacks together like chickens on a spit. The general shrugged off his cloak so that his men could see the gold braid on his jacket, then walked to the column’s head and raised his stubby, muscular arms. “Children! Children!” The drummers, hushed by officers, rested their sticks.
Calvet’s voice reached to the very last rank of the column. “They’re colder than you are! They’re wetter than you are! They’re more frightened than you are! And you’re French! In the name of the Emperor! In the name of France! Follow!”
The drummers hauled leather rings up ropes to tighten wet skins then, as the cheer caught like fire in the ranks, the sticks started their tattoo again. Like a monster, lurching and shuddering, driven by the heartbeat of the drumsticks and bright with bayonets and given courage by a brave general, the column marched forward.
One of the German Riflemen, his left arm bandaged, played a flute. The tune came thin through the pouring rain to fill Sharpe with melancholy. He had always wanted to play the flute, but had never learned. There was small comfort in such thoughts so he dismissed them, wondering instead whether the boats had reached the shore to pick up Minver’s men, but he could not see from beside the breach, nor could he spare the time to go and look.
The French column, swaying left and right as it marched in step, was halfway to the fortress. Sharpe’s men knew not to fire, but Sharpe guessed half of the rain-sodden rifles would not fire at all when the time came. The rain dripped down his sleeves, soaked his overalls, and squelched in his boots. Goddamned bloody treacherous mucky rain.
Harper, Frederickson, and a dozen Riflemen were crouching high on the breach, just behind the cheval-de- frise. Frederickson watched Sharpe, who shook his head. Not yet, not yet. The German flautist carefully wrapped his instrument in wash-leather, tucked it into his jacket, and picked up his rifle that had layers of sacking wrapped round the lock.
The French twelve-pounder guns had ceased firing. The gunners, knowing that this was no weather for Riflemen, had come outside the mill’s sheltering walls to watch the assault.
The rain glittered like polished blades. It seethed down vertically. Water flowed in great swathes off the battlements to flood the inner ditch. A bolt of lightning, sudden and scaring, cracked to the east.
The French were a hundred yards away. They shouted their ‘Vive I’Empereur’ in the drumbeat’s pause, but the great shout was drowned by the hammering, silver rain that bounced in fine spray from the scorched and battered stones of the fort.
Sharpe turned. The west wall was ready. He could do no more there. That was his refuge, the place where he must hold the French just long enough to get his men down to the boats. He turned back to see the French skirmishers, red shoulder-wings darkened by rain, running clumsily up the glacis slope. He wondered if Calvet had sent men to the north who might cut between the west wall and the water and so bar the Riflemens’ escape.
The French were nervous now. Some would be hoping that the rain had destroyed every rifle charge, but the veterans would know that even in this rain some guns would spark. They began to hurry, eager to get this first shock over. The skirmishers were spreading on the glacis and the first muskets banged smoke from the lip.
“Charge! Charge!” Calvet roared the words like a challenge as he led his ‘grumblers’, his veterans, through the gap in the glacis.
They charged. The column lost its order now. Some men, the timorous, sheltered in the outer ditch and pretended to fire upwards, but most, the brave, swarmed along the road towards the chaos of stone that was their shattered bridge to revenge.
Sharpe looked at Frederickson. “Now!” Frederickson’s men, ripping rags from locks, stood to fire directly over the breach’s summit, while from the ramparts every man who could fire a weapon knelt or stood. “Fire!”
Perhaps half the guns fired, while on the other weapons the leather-gripped flints sparked on to damp powder. Sharpe’s rifle kicked back, then he was shouting at the men who guarded the broken edge of the battlement.
The lead torn from the church roof and not needed for bullets had been piled on the ramparts with cobblestones, dead howitzer shells, and broken masonry. It was all hurled down at the attackers. The French muskets were as useless as the defenders’ rifles. One carefully protected charge of dry powder might spark, but
