And then the rifle fire began. Shot after shot, coming from the north, from a ditch there, and hussars were thrown back or bent over.
'We'll charge them! ' Pailleterie pushed into the front rank and drew his sabre. The rifles were not so far away, maybe sixty yards, and he would sabre the bastards into the dry ground. 'Draw sabres!»
There were some sixty men on the bridge and they drew their sabres.
It was Pailleterie's last chance to hold the bridge.
And Sharpe shouted 'Fire!»
«Fire!» Sharpe shouted, and Lieutenant Price's redcoats who had run from the village to form two ranks across the road, fired a volley southwards into the hussars and there was suddenly blood on the road, and men crumpling and staggering.
«Charge!» Sharpe shouted. 'Come on! ' And he was running ahead of them, sword drawn, and the tower was belching smoky flames to his right and the hussars were edging backwards, those that still stood, and Sharpe was simply filled with an utter fury. How dare these bastards have defeated him? And all he wanted to do was kill them, to take his revenge, but they were running now, fleeing from the glitter of bayonets. Not one man stood.
The wounded hussars crawled on the road, the dead lay still, but the living fled back to the southern bank to escape the vengeful infantry.
And Captain Pailleterie was also filled with a single-minded rage. How dare these bastards deny him his victory? All night he had ridden, and he had evaded the picquets in the sierra's foothills and defeated the infantry garrison of a fort with cavalrymen. With cavalrymen! Men had received the Legion d'honneur for less, and now the bastards had come back from the dead to cheat him of his glory. 'Coignet! Coignet! Come back!
Hussars! Turn! Turn! For the Emperor.'
Bugger the Emperor. It was pride that checked them, not the Emperor. They were an elite company, and when they saw the Captain turning back onto the bridge, at least half of them followed. Two bands of angry men, pride at stake, were clashing above the Tormes.
'Now kill the bastards! ' Sharpe said, filled with a ridiculous elation that the crapauds were going to fight after all, and he scythed the heavy-cavalry sword down onto the neck of a Frenchman, twisted the blade free as he kicked the falling man in the face, then stabbed the bloody blade forward. It was sabres against bayonets, and wild as a tavern brawl.
Gutter fighting with government issue weapons. Stab and slash and snarl and kick, and in truth the two sides were too close together for either to have an advantage. The redcoats were crammed against hussars and did not have room to bring their bayonets back, and when the hussars cut down with sabres they risked having their sword arms seized. Some men fired pistols, and that would create a small gap, but it would immediately be filled.
Sergeant Coignet tried to reach the tall rifle officer, but he tripped on a dead body and the rifle officer kicked him in the face, then kicked him again, and Coignet tried to roll over, spitting out teeth, to stab his sabre up into the bastard's groin, but Sharpe stabbed down first. The sword blade scraped on ribs, then broke through to splash blood onto Sharpe's boots. Then Pailleterie was carving space for himself by slashing his sabre from side to side, and Sharpe stepped back from Coignet's body and wrenched the sword free, and then leaped back because Pailleterie had lunged, but a sabre is a poor lunging weapon and Sharpe smacked it aside with his sword and ran at the hussar captain, just ran at him, and gripped him in a bear hug and thrust him against the parapet and then pushed.
Pailleterie shouted as he fell into the river, then another voice shouted, much louder. 'The hell out the way! Out the way! ' And Sergeant Harper had arrived with his seven-barrelled gun, the vicious cluster of barrels held at his hip and the redcoats twisted aside as the big Irishman came straight up the bridge's centre. «Bastards!» He shouted at the hussars, then pulled the trigger and it was as if a cannon had been fired. Blood misted over the Tormes, and Harper was charging into the bloody space he had made, swinging the stubby seven-barrelled gun like a club. He was chanting in Irish, lost in a saga of old when heroes had counted their enemy dead in the scores.
And the hussars, their beloved captain gone, gave ground. 'Keep after them! ' Sharpe snarled, 'don't let them breathe! Kill them! ' And men stepped over bodies, slipped in blood and carried the bayonets forward and Sharpe broke a sabre clean in two with a cut of the sword and then stabbed the blade into a pigtailed face, and then the French really did break.
Break and run. Back the way they had come.
'Hold it there! ' Sharpe called. 'Stop! Stop!»
The bridge was his. The French were running. A dripping Pailleterie was clambering up the southern bank, but the fight had been drenched out of him and his men were running.
'Form ranks! ' Sharpe shouted. Form ranks, count the dead, bind up the wounded, and then he looked south and his mouth dropped open. 'Bloody hell, ' he said.
'God save Ireland, ' Patrick Harper spoke beside him.
Because every bloody cavalryman in France was on the road. All the Emperor's horses and all the Emperor's men. With lances, swords and sabres. In blue coats, green coats, white coats and brown coats. With plumes and braid and lace and pelisses and sabretaches and glitter.
Polished blades catching the sun like a field of steel.
And all coming straight at the South Essex Light Company.
'God save Ireland, ' Harper said again.
«Back!» Sharpe said, «back!» Back to the northern side of the bridge. Not that retreating would do him much good, but it might give him time to think.
To think about what? Death?
Just what the hell could he do?
General Herault did not have all his men, for some of the horses had simply collapsed during the long night march, but he had close to twelve hundred cavalrymen and he had come down from the Sierra de Gredos to see the fort at San Miguel de Tormes belching smoke like a furnace, and to see his beloved elite company of hussars thrust off the bridge by a ragtag collection of redcoats and greenjackets.
But there was only a handful of British infantry, and one glance at the northern bank showed Herault that there were no more British troops at hand. No artillery, no cavalry, no more infantry, just the one small band of men who even as he watched scuttled back over the bridge's hump to form a double rank at the far end of the roadway. The riflemen were scattering along the bank, plainly intending to rake the flank of any cavalry charge with their horribly accurate marksmanship.
So that was what stood between him and victory. Two ranks and a handful of grasshoppers. That was what the French called the riflemen, grasshoppers.
The bastards were always darting about in the grass, sniping away, then moving on. Sauterelles.
Herault paused. No need to go bald-headed at the bridge. Even a handful of redcoats could do damage in the confined space of a bridge's roadway, and two dead horses dropped between the parapets would make a horribly effective barricade. No, these rosbifs and sauterelles must be thinned out, and then he would release a company of Polish lancers at them.
Infantry hated lancers. Herault loved them.
He summoned his green-jacketed dragoons first. Dragoons were supposed to be mounted infantry, and they all carried longarms as well as swords, and Herault had three hundred of them. 'Dismount your men, ' he ordered the dragoon colonel, 'and make a skirmish line. Get them close to the river and smother those bastards with fire.' He reckoned the dragoons could silence the riflemen, though the redcoats could probably find shelter by crouching under the bridge parapets. Which is where he wanted them.
'You want me to charge the bridge on foot?' The dragoon Colonel asked.
'I shall charge the bridge, ' Herault said. The dragoons would make the redcoats cower and Herault would burst across the bridge with the dreaded Polish horsemen.
The dragoons dismounted, leaving their horses with the hussars. Herault trotted his horse to where the Poles, in their dark blue uniforms, fronted with yellow and their square-sided, black leather, yellow topped tsapka hats waited. He chose a company that wore the single white epaulettes to show they were an elite unit, and he borrowed a lance from a trooper in another company. It was an ash pole, fourteen feet long, with a narrow steel
