Sharpe’s Battle: The Battle of Fuentes de Oñoro, May 1811

‘Maybe you’re right,’ Sharpe said, ‘maybe the buggers have run out of dye.’

‘I wish they’d run out of musket balls,’ Harper said. ‘So what do we do?’

‘Bugger off,’ Sharpe said. ‘No point in having a fight for the hell of it.’

‘Amen to that, sir.’ Harper began to slither down from the skyline. ‘Are we going now?’

‘Give me a minute,’ Sharpe said and felt behind his back for his telescope which was stored in a pouch of his French oxhide pack. Then, with the telescope’s hood extended to shade the outer lens and so stop even this day’s damp light from being reflected downhill, he trained the glass on the tiny cottages. Sharpe was anything but a wealthy man, yet the telescope was a very fine and expensive glass made by Matthew Berge of London, with a brass eyepiece, shutters and a small engraved plate set into its walnut tube. ‘In Gratitude,’ the plate read, ‘AW. September 23rd, 1803.’ AW was Arthur Wellesley, now the Viscount Wellington, a lieutenant general and commander of the British and Portuguese armies which had pursued Marshal Masséna to Spain’s frontier, but on September 23rd, 1803, Major General the Honourable Arthur Wellesley had been astride a horse that was piked in the chest and so pitched its rider down into the enemy’s front rank. Sharpe could still remember the shrill Indian cries of triumph as the red-jacketed General had fallen among them, though he could remember precious little else about the seconds that followed. Yet it was those few seconds that had plucked him from the ranks and made him, a man born in the gutter, into an officer in Britain’s army.

Now he focused Wellington’s gift on the French beneath and watched as a dismounted cavalryman carried a canvas pail of water from the stream. For a second or two Sharpe thought that the man was carrying the water to his picketed horse, but instead the dragoon stopped between two of the houses and began to pour the water onto the ground. ‘They’re foraging,’ Sharpe said, ‘using the water trick.’

‘Hungry bastards,’ Harper said.

The French had been driven from Portugal more by hunger than by force of arms. When Wellington had retreated to Torres Vedras he left behind him a devastated countryside with empty barns, poisoned wells and echoing granaries. The French had endured five months of famine partly by ransacking every deserted hamlet and abandoned village for hidden food, and one way to find buried jars of grain was to pour water on the ground, for where the soil had been dug and refilled the water would always drain away more quickly and so betray where the grain jars were hidden.

‘No one would be hiding food in these hills,’ Harper said scornfully. ‘Who do they think would carry it all the way up here?’

Then a woman screamed.

For a few seconds both Sharpe and Harper assumed the sound came from an animal. The scream had been muffled and distorted by distance and there was no sign of any civilians in the tiny settlement, but as the terrible noise echoed back from the far hillside so the full horror of the sound registered on both men. ‘Bastards,’ Harper said softly.

Sharpe slid the telescope shut. ‘She’s in one of the houses,’ he said. ‘Two men with her? Maybe three? Which means there can’t be more than thirty of the bastards down there.’

‘Forty of us,’ Harper said dubiously. It was not that he was frightened by the odds, but the advantage was not so overwhelming as to guarantee a bloodless victory.

The woman screamed again.

‘Fetch Lieutenant Price,’ Sharpe ordered Harper. ‘Tell everyone to be loaded and they’re to stay just back from the crest.’ He turned round. ‘Dan! Thompson! Cooper! Harris! Up here.’ The four were his best marksmen. ‘Keep your heads down!’ he warned the four men, then waited till they reached the crest. ‘In a minute I’m taking the rest of the rifles down there. I want you four to stay here and pick off any bastard who looks troublesome.’

‘Bastards are going already,’ Daniel Hagman said. Hagman was the oldest man in the company and the finest marksman. He was a Cheshire poacher who had been offered a chance to enlist in the army rather than face transportation for stealing a brace of pheasants from an absentee landlord.

Sharpe turned back. The French were leaving, or rather most of them were, for, judging from the way that the men at the rear of the infantry column kept turning and shouting towards the houses, they had left some of their comrades inside the cottage where the woman had screamed. With the half-dozen cavalrymen in the lead, the main group was trudging down the stream towards the larger valley.

‘They’re getting careless,’ Thompson said.

Sharpe nodded. Leaving men in the settlement was a risk and it was not like the French to run risks in wild country. Spain and Portugal were riddled with guerrilleros, the partisans who fought the guerrilla, the little war, and that war was far more bitter and cruel than the more formal battles between the French and the British. Sharpe knew just how cruel for only the previous year he had gone into the wild north country to find Spanish gold and his companions had been partisans whose savagery had been chilling. One of them, Teresa Moreno, was Sharpe’s lover, only now she called herself La Aguja, the Needle, and every Frenchman she knifed with her long slim blade was one small part of the endless revenge she had promised to inflict on the soldiers who had raped her.

Teresa was now a long way off, fighting in the country around Badajoz, while in the settlement beneath Sharpe another woman was suffering from the attentions of the French and again Sharpe wondered why these grey-uniformed soldiers thought it safe to leave men to finish their crime in the isolated village. Were they certain that no partisans lurked in these high hills?

Harper came back, breathing hard after leading Price’s redcoats up the hill. ‘God save Ireland,’ he said as he dropped beside Sharpe, ‘but the bastards are going already.’

‘I think they’ve left some men behind. Are you ready?’

‘Sure I am.’ Harper eased back his rifle’s doghead.

‘Packs off,’ Sharpe told his riflemen as he shrugged his own pack off his shoulders, then he twisted to look at Lieutenant Price. ‘Wait here, Harry, and listen for the whistle. Two blasts mean I want you to open fire from up here, and three mean I want you down at the village.’ He looked at Hagman. ‘Don’t open fire, Dan, until they see us. If we can get down there without the bastards knowing it’ll be easier.’ He raised his voice so the rest of his riflemen could hear. ‘We go down fast,’ Sharpe said. ‘Are you all ready? Are you all loaded? Then come on! Now!’

The riflemen scrambled over the crest and tumbled headlong down the steep hill behind Sharpe. Sharpe kept glancing to his left where the small French column retreated beside the stream, but no one in the column turned and the noise of the horses’ hooves and the infantrymen’s nailed boots must have smothered the sound of the greenjackets running downhill. It was not until Sharpe was just yards away from the nearest house that a Frenchman turned and shouted in alarm. Hagman fired at the same instant and the sound of his Baker rifle echoed first from the small valley’s far slope, then from the distant flank of the larger valley. The echo crackled on, fainter and fainter, until it was drowned as the other riflemen on the hill top opened fire.

Sharpe jumped down the last few feet. He fell as he landed, picked himself up and ran past a dunghill heaped against a house wall. A single horse was tethered to a steel picket pin driven into the ground beside one of the small houses where a French soldier suddenly appeared in the doorway. The man was wearing a shirt and a grey coat, but nothing below the waist. He raised his musket as Sharpe ran into view, but then saw the riflemen behind Sharpe and so dropped the musket and raised his hands in surrender.

Sharpe had drawn his sword as he ran to the house door. Once there he shouldered the surrendering man aside and burst into the hovel that was a bare stone chamber, beamed with wood and roofed with stone and turf. It was dark inside the cottage, but not so dark that Sharpe could not see a naked girl scrambling over the earth floor into a corner. There was blood on her legs. A second Frenchman, this one with cavalry overalls round his ankles, tried to stand and reach for his scabbarded sword, but Sharpe kicked him in the balls. He kicked him so hard that the man screamed and then could not draw breath to scream again and so toppled onto the bloody floor where he whimpered and lay with his knees drawn tight up to his chest. There were two other men on the beaten earth floor, but when Sharpe turned on them with his drawn sword he saw they were both civilians and both dead. Their throats had been cut.

Musketry sounded ragged in the valley. Sharpe went back to the door where the bare-legged French infantryman was crouching with his hands held behind his head. ‘Pat!’ Sharpe called.

Harper was organizing the riflemen. ‘We’ve got the buggers tamed, sir,’ the Sergeant said reassuringly, anticipating Sharpe’s question. The riflemen were crouching beside the cottages where they fired, reloaded and fired again. Their Baker rifle muzzles gouted thick spurts of white smoke that smelt of rotted eggs. The French returned the fire, their musket balls smacking on the stone houses as Sharpe ducked back into the hovel. He picked up the two Frenchmen’s weapons and tossed them out of the door. ‘Perkins!’ he shouted.

Rifleman Perkins ran to the door. He was the youngest of Sharpe’s men, or was presumed to be the youngest for though Perkins knew neither the day nor the year of his birth, he did not yet need to shave. ‘Sir?’

‘If either of these bastards move, shoot them.’

Perkins might be young, but the look on his thin face scared the unhurt Frenchman who reached out a placating hand as though begging the young rifleman not to shoot. ‘I’ll look after the bastards, sir,’ Perkins said, then slotted his brass-handled sword bayonet onto his rifle’s muzzle.

Sharpe saw the girl’s clothing which had been tossed under a crudely sawn table. He picked up the greasy garments and handed them to her. She was pale, terrified and crying, a young thing, scarcely out of childhood. ‘Bastards,’ Sharpe said to the two prisoners, then ran out into the damp light. A musket ball hissed over his head as he ducked down into cover beside Harper.

‘Bastards are good, sir,’ the Irishman said ruefully.

‘I thought you had them tamed?’

‘They’ve got different ideas on the matter,’ Harper said, then broke cover, aimed, fired and ducked back. ‘Bastards are good,’ he said again as he started to reload.

And the French were good. Sharpe had expected the small group of Frenchmen to hurry away from the rifle fire, but instead they had deployed into a skirmish line and so turned the easy target of a marching column into a scattered series of difficult targets. Meanwhile the half-dozen dragoons accompanying the infantry had dismounted and begun to fight on foot while one man galloped their horses out of rifle range, and now the assorted dragoon carbines and infantry muskets were threatening to overwhelm Sharpe’s riflemen. The Baker rifles were far more accurate than the Frenchmen’s muskets and carbines, and they could kill at four times the distance, but they were desperately slow to load. The bullets, each one wrapped in a leather patch that was designed to grip the barrel’s rifling, had to be forced down the tight grooves and lands of the barrel, whereas a musket ball could be rammed fast down a smoothbore’s unrifled gullet. Sharpe’s men were already abandoning the leather patches in order to load faster, but without the leather the rifling could not impart spin to the ball and so the rifle was robbed of its one great advantage: its lethal accuracy. Hagman and his three companions were still firing down from the ridge, but their numbers were too few to make much difference and all that was saving Sharpe’s riflemen from decimation was the protection of the village’s stone walls.

Sharpe took the small whistle from its pouch on his crossbelt. He blew it twice, then unslung his own rifle, edged round the corner of the house and aimed at a puff of smoke down the valley. He fired. The rifle kicked back hard just as a French musket ball cracked into the wall beside his head. A fleck of stone slashed across his scarred cheek, drawing blood and missing his eyeball by half an inch. ‘Bastards are bloody good.’ Sharpe echoed Harper’s tribute grudgingly, then a crashing musket volley announced that Harry Price had lined his redcoats on the hill top and was firing down at the French.

Price’s first volley was enough to decide the fight. Sharpe heard a French voice shouting orders and a second later the enemy skirmish line began to shred and disappear. Harry Price only had time for one more volley before the grey-coated enemy had retreated out of range. ‘Green! Horrell! McDonald! Cresacre! Smith! Sergeant Latimer!’ Sharpe called to his riflemen. ‘Fifty paces down the valley, make a picquet line there, but get the hell back here if the bastards come back for more. Move! Rest of you stay where you are.’

‘Jesus, sir, you should see in here.’ Harper had pushed open the nearest house door with the muzzle of his seven-barrel gun. The weapon, originally designed to be fired from the fighting tops of Britain’s naval ships, was a cluster of seven half-inch barrels fired by a single flint. It was like a miniature cannon and only the biggest, strongest men could fire the gun without permanently damaging their shoulders. Harper was one of the strongest men Sharpe had ever known, but also one of the most sentimental and now the big Irishman looked close to tears. ‘Oh, sweet suffering Christ,’ Harper said as he crossed himself, ‘the living bastards.’

Sharpe had already smelt the blood, now he looked past the Sergeant and felt the disgust make a lump in his throat. ‘Oh, my God,’ he said softly.

For the small house was drenched in blood, its walls spattered and its floor soaked with it, while on the floor were sprawled the limp bodies of children. Sharpe tried to count the little bodies, but could not always tell where one blood-boltered corpse began and another ended. The children had evidently been stripped naked and then had their throats cut. A small dog had been killed too, and its blood-matted, curly-haired corpse had been tossed onto the children whose skins appeared unnaturally white against the vivid streaks of black-looking blood.

‘Oh, sweet Jesus,’ Sharpe said as he backed out of the reeking shadows to draw a breath of fresh air. He had seen more than his share of horror. He had been born to a poorhouse whore in a London gutter and he had followed Britain’s drum from Flanders to Madras and through the Indian wars and now from the beaches of Portugal to the frontiers of Spain, but never, not even in the Sultan Tippoo’s torture chambers in Seringapatam, had he seen children tossed into a dead pile like so many slaughtered animals.

‘There’s more here, sir,’ Corporal Jackson called. Jackson had just vomited in the doorway of a hovel in which the bodies of two old people lay in a bloody mess. They had been tortured in ways that were only too evident.

Sharpe thought of Teresa who was fighting these same scum who gutted and tormented their victims, then, unable to bear the unbidden images that seared his thoughts, he cupped his hands and shouted up the hill, ‘Harris! Down here!’

Rifleman Harris was the company’s educated man. He had once been a schoolmaster, even a respectable schoolmaster, but boredom had driven him to drink and drink had been his ruin, or at least the cause of his joining the army where he still loved to demonstrate his erudition. ‘Sir?’ Harris said as he arrived in the settlement.

‘You speak French?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘There’s two Frogs in that house. Find out what unit they’re from, and what the bastards did here. And Harris!’

‘Sir?’ The lugubrious, red-haired Harris turned back.