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

‘You don’t have to be gentle with the bastards.’

Even Harris, who was accustomed to Sharpe, seemed shocked by his Captain’s tone. ‘No, sir.’

Sharpe walked back across the settlement’s tiny plaza. His men had searched the two cottages on the stream’s far side, but found no bodies there. The massacre had evidently been confined to the three houses on the nearer bank where Sergeant Harper was standing with a bleak, hurt look on his face. Patrick Harper was an Ulsterman from Donegal and had been driven into the ranks of Britain’s army by hunger and poverty. He was a huge man, four inches taller than Sharpe who was himself six feet tall. In battle Harper was an awesome figure, yet in truth he was a kind, humorous and easy-going man whose benevolence disguised his life’s central contradiction which was that he had no love for the king for whom he fought and little for the country whose flag he defended, yet there were few better soldiers in all King George’s army, and none who was more loyal to his friends. And it was for those friends that Harper fought, and the closest of his friends, despite their disparity in rank, was Sharpe himself. ‘They’re just wee kiddies,’ Harper now said. ‘Who’d do such a thing?’

‘Them.’ Sharpe jerked his head down the small valley to where the stream joined the wider waterway. The grey Frenchmen had stopped there; too far to be threatened by the rifles, but still close enough to watch what happened in the settlement where they had pillaged and murdered.

‘Some of those wee ones had been raped,’ Harper said.

‘I saw,’ Sharpe said bleakly.

‘How could they do it?’

‘There isn’t an answer, Pat. God knows.’ Sharpe felt sick, just like Harper felt sick, but inquiring into the roots of sin would not gain revenge for the dead children, nor would it save the raped girl’s sanity, nor bury the blood-soaked dead. Nor would it find a way back to the British lines for one small light company that Sharpe now realized was dangerously exposed on the edge of the French outpost line. ‘Ask a goddamn chaplain for an answer, if you can ever find one closer than the Lisbon brothels,’ Sharpe said savagely, then turned to look at the charnel houses. ‘How the hell are we going to bury this lot?’

‘We can’t, sir. We’ll just tumble the house walls down on top of them,’ Harper said. He gazed down the valley. ‘I could murder those bastards. What are we going to do with the two we’ve got?’

‘Kill them,’ Sharpe said curtly. ‘We’ll get an answer or two now,’ he said as he saw Harris duck out of the cottage. Harris was carrying one of the steel-grey dragoon helmets which Sharpe now saw were not cloth-covered, but were indeed fashioned out of metal and plumed with a long hank of grey horsehair.

Harris ran his right hand through the plume as he walked towards Sharpe. ‘I found out who they are, sir,’ he said as he drew nearer. ‘They belong to the Brigade Loup, the Wolf Brigade. It’s named after their commanding officer, sir. Fellow called Loup, Brigadier General Guy Loup. Loup means wolf in French, sir. They reckon they’re an elite unit. Their job was to hold the road open through the mountains this past winter and they did it by beating the hell out of the natives. If any of Loup’s men get killed then he kills fifty civilians as revenge. That’s what they were doing here, sir. A couple of his men were ambushed and killed, and this is the price.’ Harris gestured at the houses of the dead. ‘And Loup’s not far away, sir,’ he added in warning. ‘Unless these fellows are lying, which I doubt. He left a detachment here and took a squadron to hunt down some fugitives in the next valley.’

Sharpe looked at the cavalryman’s horse which was still tethered in the settlement’s centre and thought of the infantryman he had captured. ‘This Brigade Loup,’ he asked, ‘is it cavalry or infantry?’

‘The brigade has both, sir,’ Harris said. ‘It’s a special brigade, sir, formed to fight the partisans, and Loup’s got two battalions of infantry and one regiment of dragoons.’

‘And they all wear grey?’

‘Like wolves, sir,’ Harris said helpfully.

‘We all know what to do with wolves,’ Sharpe said, then turned as Sergeant Latimer shouted a warning. Latimer was commanding the tiny picquet line that stood between Sharpe and the French, but it was no new attack that had caused Latimer to shout his warning, but rather the approach of four French horsemen. One of them carried the tricolour guidon, though the swallow-tailed flag was now half obscured by a dirty white shirt that had been impaled on the guidon’s lance head. ‘Bastards want to talk to us,’ Sharpe said.

‘I’ll talk to them,’ Harper said viciously and pulled back the cock of his seven-barrelled gun.

‘No!’ Sharpe said. ‘And go round the company and tell everyone to hold their fire, and that’s an order.’

‘Aye, sir.’ Harper lowered the flint, then, with a baleful glance towards the approaching Frenchmen, went to warn the greenjackets to hold their tempers and keep their fingers off their triggers.

Sharpe, his rifle slung on his shoulder and his sword at his side, strolled towards the four Frenchmen. Two of the horsemen were officers, while the flanking pair were standard-bearers, and the ratio of flags to men seemed impertinently high, almost as if the two approaching officers considered themselves greater than other mortals. The tricolour guidon would have been standard enough, but the second banner was extraordinary. It was a French eagle with gilded wings outspread perched atop a pole that had a crosspiece nailed just beneath the eagle’s plinth. Most eagles carried a silk tricolour from the staff, but this eagle carried six wolf tails attached to the cross-piece. The standard was somehow barbaric, suggesting the far-off days when pagan armies of horse soldiers had thundered out of the Steppes to rape and ruin Christendom.

And if the wolf-tail standard made Sharpe’s blood run chill, then it was nothing compared to the man who now spurred his horse ahead of his companions. Only the man’s boots were not grey. His coat was grey, his horse was a grey, his helmet was lavishly plumed in grey and his grey pelisse was edged with grey wolf fur. Bands of wolf pelt encircled his boot tops, his saddle-cloth was a grey skin, his sword’s long straight scabbard and his carbine’s saddle holster were both sheathed in wolfskin while his horse’s nose band was a strip of grey fur. Even the man’s beard was grey. It was a short beard, neatly trimmed, but the rest of the face was wild and merciless and scarred fit for nightmare. One bloodshot eye and one blind milky eye stared from that weather-beaten, battle-hardened face as the man curbed his horse beside Sharpe.

‘My name is Loup,’ he said, ‘Brigadier General Guy Loup of His Imperial Majesty’s army.’ His tone was strangely mild, his intonation courteous and his English touched with a light Scottish accent.

‘Sharpe,’ the rifleman said. ‘Captain Sharpe. British army.’

The three remaining Frenchmen had reined in a dozen yards away. They watched as their Brigadier swung his leg out of the stirrup and dropped lightly down to the path. He was not as tall as Sharpe, but he was still a big man and he was well muscled and agile. Sharpe guessed the French Brigadier was about forty years old, six years older than Sharpe himself. Loup now took two cigars from his fur-edged sabretache and offered one to Sharpe.

‘I don’t take gifts from murderers,’ Sharpe said.

Loup laughed at Sharpe’s indignation. ‘More fool you, Captain. Is that what you say? More fool you? I was a prisoner, you see, in Scotland. In Edinburgh. A very cold city, but with beautiful women, very beautiful. Some of them taught me English and I taught them how to lie to their drab Calvinist husbands. We paroled officers lived just off Candlemaker Row. Do you know the place? No? You should visit Edinburgh, Captain. Despite the Calvinists and the cooking it is a fine city, very learned and hospitable. When the peace of Amiens was signed I almost stayed there.’ Loup paused to strike flint on steel, then to blow the charred linen tinder in his tinderbox into a flame with which he lit his cigar. ‘I almost stayed, but you know how it is. She was married to another man and I am a lover of France, so here I am and there she is and doubtless she dreams about me a lot more than I dream about her.’ He sighed. ‘But this weather reminded me of her. We would so often lie in bed and watch the rain and mist fly past the windows of Candlemaker Row. It is cold today, eh?’

‘You’re dressed for it, General,’ Sharpe said. ‘Got as much fur as a Christmas whore, you have.’

Loup smiled. It was not a pleasant smile. He was missing two teeth, and those that remained were stained yellow. He had spoken pleasantly enough to Sharpe, even charmingly, but it was the smooth charm of a cat about to kill. He drew on his cigar, making the tip glow red, while his single bloodshot eye looked hard at Sharpe from beneath the helmet’s grey visor.

Loup saw a tall man with a well-used rifle on one shoulder and a battered ugly-bladed sword at his hip. Sharpe’s uniform was torn, stained and patched. The jacket’s black cord hung in tatters between a few silver buttons that hung by threads, while beneath the jacket Sharpe wore a set of leather-reinforced French cavalry overalls. The remains of an officer’s red sash encircled Sharpe’s waist, while around his neck was a loosely knotted black choker. It was the uniform of a man who had long discarded the peacetime trappings of soldiering in exchange for the utilitarian comforts of a fighting man. A hard man, too, Loup guessed, not just from the evidence of the scar on Sharpe’s cheek, but from the rifleman’s demeanour which was awkward and raw-edged as though Sharpe would have preferred to be fighting than talking. Loup shrugged, abandoned his pleasantries and got down to business. ‘I came to fetch my two men,’ he said.

‘Forget them, General,’ Sharpe replied. He was determined not to dignify this Frenchman by calling him ‘sir’ or ‘monsieur’.

Loup raised his eyebrows. ‘They’re dead?’

‘They will be.’

Loup waved a persistent fly away. The steel-plated straps of his helmet hung loose beside his face, resembling the cadenettes of braided hair that French hussars liked to wear hanging from their temples. He drew on his cigar again, then smiled. ‘Might I remind you, Captain, of the rules of war?’

Sharpe offered Loup a word that he doubted the Frenchman had heard much in Edinburgh’s learned society. ‘I don’t take lessons from murderers,’ Sharpe went on, ‘not in the rules of war. What your men did in that village wasn’t war. It was a massacre.’

‘Of course it was war,’ Loup said equably, ‘and I don’t need lectures from you, Captain.’

‘You might not need a lecture, General, but you damn well need a lesson.’

Loup laughed. He turned and walked to the stream’s edge where he stretched his arms, yawned hugely, then stooped to scoop some water to his mouth. He turned back to Sharpe. ‘Let me tell you what my job is, Captain, and you will put yourself in my boots. That way, perhaps, you will lose your tedious English moral certainties. My job, Captain, is to police the roads through these mountains and so make the passes safe for the supply wagons of ammunition and food with which we plan to beat you British back to the sea. My enemy is not a soldier dressed in uniform with a colour and a code of honour, but is instead a rabble of civilians who resent my presence. Good! Let them resent me, that is their privilege, but if they attack me, Captain, then I will defend myself and I do it so ferociously, so ruthlessly, so comprehensively, that they will think a thousand times before they attack my men again. You know what the major weapon of the guerrilla is? It is horror, Captain, sheer horror, so I make certain I am more horrible than my enemy, and my enemy in this area is horrible indeed. You have heard of El Castrador?’

‘The Castrator?’ Sharpe guessed the translation.

‘Indeed. Because of what he does to French soldiers, only he does it while they are alive and then he lets them bleed to death. El Castrador, I am sorry to say, still lives, but I do assure you that none of my men has been castrated in three months, and do you know why? Because El Castrador’s men fear me more than they fear him. I have defeated him, Captain, I have made the mountains secure. In all of Spain, Captain, these are the only hills where Frenchmen can ride safely, and why? Because I have used the guerrilleros’ weapon against them. I castrate them, just as they would castrate me, only I use a blunter knife.’ Brigadier Loup offered Sharpe a grim smile. ‘Now tell me, Captain, if you were in my boots, and if your men were being castrated and blinded and disembowelled and skinned alive and left to die, would you not do as I do?’

‘To children?’ Sharpe jerked his thumb at the village.

Loup’s one eye widened in surprise, as though he found Sharpe’s objection odd in a soldier. ‘Would you spare a rat because it’s young? Vermin are vermin, Captain, whatever their age.’

‘I thought you said the mountains were safe,’ Sharpe said, ‘so why kill?’

‘Because last week two of my men were ambushed and killed in a village not far from here. The families of the murderers came here to take refuge, thinking I would not find them. I did find them, and now I assure you, Captain, that no more of my men will be ambushed in Fuentes de Oñoro.’

‘They will if I find them there.’

Loup shook his head sadly. ‘You are so quick with your threats, Captain. But fight me and I think you will learn caution. But for now? Give me my men and we shall ride away.’

Sharpe paused, thinking, then finally shrugged and turned. ‘Sergeant Harper!’

‘Sir?’

‘Bring the two Frogs out!’

Harper hesitated as though he wanted to know what Sharpe intended before he obeyed the order, but then he turned reluctantly towards the houses. A moment later he appeared with the two French captives, both of whom were still naked below the waist and one of whom was still half doubled over in pain. ‘Is he wounded?’ Loup asked.

‘I kicked him in the balls,’ Sharpe said. ‘He was raping a girl.’