Sharpe’s Rifles: The French Invasion of Galicia, January 1809

Sharpe knew the Sergeant was trying to make peace, but his embarrassment at his loss of dignity made his response harsh. ‘You mean you were all agreed?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘You all agreed to murder an officer?’

Williams flinched from the accusation. ‘It wasn’t like that, sir.’

‘Don’t tell me what it was like, you bastard! If you were all agreed, Sergeant, then you all deserve a flogging, even if none of you had the guts to help Harper.’

Williams did not like the charge of cowardice. ‘Harps insisted on doing it alone, sir. He said it should be a fair fight or none at all.’

Sharpe was too angry to be affected by this curious revelation of a mutineer’s honour. ‘You want me to weep for him?’ He knew he had handled these men wrongly, utterly wrongly, but he did not know how else he could have behaved. Perhaps Captain Murray had been right. Perhaps officers were born to it, perhaps you needed privileged birth to have Vivar’s easy authority, and Sharpe’s resentment made him snap at the greenjackets who shambled past him on the wet road. ‘Stop straggling! You’re bloody soldiers, not prinking choirboys. Pick your bloody feet up! Move it!’

They moved. One of the greenjackets muttered a word of command and the rest fell into step, shouldered arms, and began to march as only the Light Infantry could march. They were showing the Lieutenant that they were still the best. They were showing their derision for him by displaying their skill and Major Vivar’s good humour was restored by the arrogant demonstration. He watched the greenjackets scatter his own men aside, then called for them to slow down and resume their place at the rear of the column. He was still laughing when Sharpe caught up with him.

‘You sounded like a Sergeant, Lieutenant,’ Vivar said.

‘I was a Sergeant once. I was the best God-damned bloody Sergeant in the God-damned bloody army.’

The Spaniard was astonished. ‘You were a Sergeant?’

‘Do you think the son of a whore would be allowed to join as an officer? I was a Sergeant, and a private before that.’

Vivar stared at the Englishman as though he had suddenly sprouted horns. ‘I didn’t know your army promoted from the ranks?’ Whatever anger he had felt with Sharpe an hour or so before evaporated into a fascinated curiosity.

‘It’s rare. But men like me don’t become real officers, Major. It’s a reward, you see, for being a fool. For being stupidly brave. And then they make us into Drillmasters or Quartermasters. They think we can manage those tasks. We’re not given fighting commands.’ Sharpe’s bitterness was rank in the cold morning, and he supposed he was making the self-pitying confession because it explained his failures to this competent Spanish officer. ‘They think we all take to drink, and perhaps we do. Who wants to be an officer, anyway?’

But Vivar was not interested in Sharpe’s misery. ‘So you’ve seen much fighting?’

‘In India. And in Portugal last year.’

Vivar’s opinion of Sharpe was changing. Till now he had seen the Englishman as an ageing, unsuccessful Lieutenant who had failed to either buy or win promotion. Now he saw that Sharpe’s promotion had been extraordinary, far beyond the dreams of a common man. ‘Do you like battle?’

It seemed an odd question to Sharpe, but he answered it as best he could. ‘I have no other skill.’

‘Then I think you will make a good officer, Lieutenant. There’ll be much fighting before Napoleon is sent down to roast in hell.’

They climbed another mile, until the slope flattened out and the troops trudged between immense rocks that loomed above the road. Vivar, his friendliness restored, told Sharpe that a battle had been fought in this high place where the eagles nested. The Moors had used this same road and the Christian archers had ambushed them from the rocks on either side. ‘We drove them back and made the very road stink with their blood.’ Vivar stared at the towering bluffs as if the stone still echoed with the screams of dying pagans. ‘That must be nearly nine hundred years ago.’ He spoke as if it were yesterday, and he himself had carried a sword to the fight. ‘Each year the villagers celebrate a Mass to remember the event.’

‘There’s a village here?’

‘A mile beyond the gorge. We can rest there.’

Sharpe saw what a magnificent site the canyon made for an ambush. The Christian forces, hidden in the high rocks, would have had an eagle’s view of the road and the Moors, climbing to the gorge, would have been watched every step of the way to the killing arrows. ‘And how do you know the French aren’t waiting for us?’ Emboldened by Vivar’s renewed affability, he raised the question which had worried him earlier. ‘We’ve got no picquets.’

‘Because the French won’t have reached this far into Spain,’ Vivar said confidently, ‘and if they had, then the villagers would have sent warning down all the roads, and even if the warnings missed us, we’d smell the French horses.’ The French, always careless of their cavalry horses, drove them until their saddle and crupper sores could be smelt half a mile away. ‘One day,’ Vivar added cheerfully, ‘the French will flog their last horse to death and we’ll ride over that loathsome country.’ The thought gave him a renewed energy and he turned towards the marching men. ‘Not far before you can rest!’

At which point, from above the gorge where the Moors had been ambushed, and in front of Sharpe where the road led down towards the pilgrim way, the French opened fire.

CHAPTER FOUR

Sharpe saw Vivar dive to the right side of the road, and threw himself to the left. The big, unfamiliar sword at Sharpe’s hip clanged on a rock, then the rifle was at his shoulder and he tore away the scrap of rag that kept rain from the gunpowder in the rifle’s pan. A French bullet gouged wet snow two inches to his right, another slapped with a vicious crack into the stone face above him. A man screamed behind him.

Dragoons. God-damned bloody Dragoons. Green coats and pink facings. No horses. Dismounted Dragoons with short carbines. Sharpe, recovering from his astonishment at the ambush, tried to make sense of the chaos of fear and noise that had erupted in the winter’s cold. He saw puffs of grey smoke, dirty as the thawing snow, in an arc about his front. The French had thrown a low barricade of stones across the road about sixty paces from the canyon’s mouth. It was long range for the French carbines, but that did not matter. The dismounted Dragoons who lined the peaks of the immense and sheer cliffs either side of the gorge were the men doing the damage.

Sharpe rolled onto his back. A bullet cracked into the snow where his head had been a second before. He could see the Dragoons standing on the lips of the chasm, firing down into the deathtrap of the road where, nine hundred years before, the Moors had been slaughtered.

Vivar’s men had scattered. They crouched at the base of the rocks and fired upwards. Vivar was shouting at them, calling for them to form a line, to advance. He was planning to charge the men who barred the road. Instinctively Sharpe knew that the French had foreseen that move, which was why they had not made their barricade in the gorge, but beyond it. They wanted to lure the ambushed out into the plateau, and there could only be one reason for that. The French had cavalry waiting, cavalry with long straight swords that would butcher unprotected infantry.

Even as that realization struck him, Sharpe also realized that he was acting like a Rifleman, not like an officer. He had taken shelter, he was looking for a target, and he did not know what his men were doing back in the gorge. Not that he had any desire to go back into that trap of rock and bullets, but such was an officer’s duty and so he picked himself up and ran.

He shouldered through the assembling Spaniards, saw that the mule lay kicking and bleeding, then was aware of a buzzing and cracking about his ears. The carbine bullets were spitting down into the gorge, ricocheting wildly, filling the air with a tangle of death. He saw a greenjacket lying on his belly. Blood had spewed from the man’s mouth to stain a square yard of melting snow. A rifle cracked to Sharpe’s left, then one to his right. The greenjackets had taken what cover they could and were trying to kill the Frenchmen above. It occurred to him that the French should have put more men on the heights, that the volume of their fire was too small to overwhelm the road. The thought was so surprising that he stood quite still and gaped at the high skyline.

He was right. The French had just enough men on the heights to pin the ambush down, yet the killing would not be done by those men, but by others. That knowledge gave Sharpe hope, and told him what he must do. He began by striding down the road’s centre and shouting for his men. ‘Rifles! To me! To me!’

The Riflemen did not move. A bullet slapped into the snow beside Sharpe. The French cavalrymen, more used to the sword than the carbine, were aiming high, but that common fault was small consolation amidst their bullets. Sharpe again shouted for the Riflemen to come to him but, naturally enough, they preferred the small shelter offered at the base of the cliffs. He dragged one man out of a rock cleft. ‘That way! Run! Wait for me at the end of the gorge.’ He rousted others. ‘On your feet! Move!’ He kicked more men to their feet. ‘Sergeant Williams?’

‘Sir?’ The reply came from further down the chasm, somewhere beyond the skeins of rifle smoke that were trapped by the rock walls.

‘If we stay here we’re dead ’uns. Rifles! Follow me!’

They followed. Sharpe had no time to reflect on the irony that men who had so recently tried to kill him now obeyed his orders. They obeyed because Sharpe knew what needed to be done, and the certainty of his knowledge was strong in him, and it was that certainty which fetched the greenjackets out of their scanty shelter. They also followed because the only other man they might have trusted, Harper, was not with them, but still tied to the wounded mule’s tail.

‘Follow! Follow!’ Sharpe jumped a wounded Spaniard, twisted as a bullet slashed past his face, then turned to his right. He had led his men almost to the mouth of the canyon, just behind the place where Vivar still formed his own dismounted cavalrymen into line. Once, years before, a fall of rock had slid down to make a shoulder of scree and turf and, though the slope was perilously steep, and made even more perilous by the melting snow, it offered a short cut to the hillside which, in turn, led to the heights above. Sharpe scrambled up the rockfall, using his rifle as a staff, and behind him, in ones and twos, the Riflemen followed.

‘Skirmish order!’ Sharpe paused at the top of the first steep slope to shrug off his encumbering pack. ‘Spread out!’

Some of the Riflemen suddenly realized what was expected of them. They were supposed to assault a steep and slippery slope at the top of which the French would be protected by the natural bastions of jumbled rock. Some of them hesitated and looked for cover. ‘Move!’ Sharpe’s voice was louder than the gunfire. ‘Move! Skirmish order! Move!’

They moved, not because of any confidence in Sharpe, but because the habit of obedience under fire ran deep.

Sharpe knew that to stay in the gorge was to die. The French wanted them in there, pinned by the carbines above to be slaughtered by the Dragoons who would charge from the roadblock. The only way to prise this ambush apart was to attack one of its jaws. Men would die in the attempt, but not so many as would die in the blood-reeking sludge and horror on the roadway.

Sharpe heard Vivar shout a word of command in Spanish, but he ignored it. The Major must do what he thought fit, and Sharpe would do as he thought best, and the strange exaltation of battle suddenly gripped him. Here, in the filthy stench of powder smoke, he felt at home. This had been his life for sixteen years. Other men learned to plough fields or to shape wood, but Sharpe had learned how to use a musket or rifle, sword or bayonet, and how to turn an enemy’s flank or assault a fortress. He knew fear, which was every soldier’s familiar companion, but Sharpe also knew how to turn the enemy’s own fear to his advantage.

High above Sharpe, silhouetted against the grey clouds, a French officer redeployed his men to face the new threat. The dismounted Dragoons who had lined the canyon’s edge must now scramble to their right to face this unexpected attack on their flank. They moved urgently, and the first French bullets hissed whip-quick in the freezing air.

‘I want fire! I want fire!’ Sharpe shouted as he climbed, and was rewarded by the cracks of the Baker rifles. The Riflemen were doing what they were trained to do. One man fired as his partner moved. The Dragoons, still searching for new positions in the high rocks, would hear the bullets spin past their ears. The French did not use rifles, preferring the faster musket, but a musket was a clumsy weapon compared to the slow-loading Baker.

A bullet hissed by Sharpe. He thought it must have been a rifle bullet fired from behind him and he wondered if one of his men, hating him, had aimed at his back. There was no time for that fear now though it was a real fear, for in India he had known more than one unpopular officer shot in the back. ‘Faster! Faster! Left! Left!’

Sharpe was gambling on his instinct that the men who had been positioned on the heights were only enough to hold the ambush down, and he hoped he was stretching those men too thin. He went further left, forcing the French to move again. He saw a face in the rocks ahead, a moustached face framed by the odd pigtails of the French Dragoons. Dragons was the French and Spanish name for them, and that thought wisped by Sharpe as the face disappeared behind a puff of smoke and again he heard the distinctive smack of a rifle bullet. A rifle! A Baker! He suddenly knew these must be the same men who had split apart Dunnett’s four companies of Riflemen at the bridge; they were using captured British rifles, and the memory of that defeat gave him a new anger which drove him onwards.

Sharpe turned abruptly towards the centre of the enemy’s weakened line. Somewhere on the hillside behind he had abandoned his unfired rifle and drawn his new sword. The weapon would make him a mark to the Dragoons, an officer to be shot, but it also made him visible to his men.

His legs were hurting with the effort of climbing. The slope was steep and ice-slick, and every footfall slid back before it took purchase. Anger had driven him up the hill, but now fear made him frail. Sharpe was panting, too out of breath to shout any more, conscious only of the need to close the gap on the French. He had a sudden certainty that he would die. He would die here, because even a Dragon could not fail to kill him at this short range. But still he climbed. What mattered was to prise open this jaw of the trap so that Vivar’s men could escape up the hill. Sharpe’s heart pounded in his chest, his muscles burned, his bruises ached, and he wondered whether he would feel the bullet that killed him. Would it strike clean, throwing him back to slide in blood and thawing snow down the slope? At least his men would know he was no coward. He would show the bastards how a real soldier died.

A Spanish volley sounded beneath him, but that was another battle. Further off a trumpet sounded, but it had nothing to do with Sharpe. His world was a few yards of slush with rocks beyond. He saw a shard of white struck by a bullet from a rock and knew some of his men were firing to give cover. He could hear other Riflemen following him, cursing as they slipped on the icy slope. He saw flashes of pale green in the rocks – Dragoons – and he jerked aside from a puff of smoke and the crash of the carbine rang in his ears. He wondered if he was dreaming, if he was already dead, then his left boot found a firm foothold on an outcrop of stone and he pushed desperately upwards.