Sharpe’s Regiment: The Invasion of France, June to November 1813

For a few seconds Sharpe thought he had misheard Nairn. A Spanish muleteer shouted outside the window, from the harbour came the cranking sound of a windlass, and in Sharpe’s head echoed the words ‘broken up’.

‘Broken up, sir?’ Sharpe felt a chill in this warm room.

‘Lord Fenner suggests, Sharpe, that your men be given to other Battalions, that your Colours be sent home, that your officers either exchange into other regiments, sell their commissions, or make themselves available for our disposal.’

Sharpe was incredulous. ‘They can’t do it!’

Nairn gave a sour laugh. ‘Sharpe! They’re politicians! You can’t expect sense from the bastards!’ He leaned forward. ‘We’re going to need all the experienced units we can scrape together; all of them, but don’t expect Lord Fenner to understand that! He’s the Secretary of State at War and he wouldn’t know a bayonet from a ramrod. He’s a civilian! He controls the army’s money, which is why there isn’t any.’

Sharpe said nothing. He was thinking of the Battalion’s Colours laid up in some English church, hanging high in a dusty chancel while the men who had fought for them were scattered in penny-packets around the army. He was feeling anger, bitter anger, that his men, who had fought for those flags, who had suffered, whose comrades were in unmarked graves on a dozen battlefields would be broken up, disbanded. He was thinking of a Battalion that, like a family, had its quarrels and laughter, its warmth and pride, all to be sacrificed!

‘Breaking you up.’ Nairn said it brutally. ‘Bloody shame. Busaco, Talavera, Fuentes d’Onoro, Ciudad Rodrigo, Badajoz, Salamanca, Vitoria, hell of a way to finish! Like sending a pack of hounds to the shambles, eh?’

‘But we had eight recruiting sergeants out!’

‘It’s no good telling me, Sharpe, I’m just a dogsbody.’ Nairn sniffed. ‘And even if we make you into a provisional Battalion you’ll go on losing men. You need a draft of replacements!’ It was true. If the South Essex was joined to another Battalion they would still take casualties, until the joint Battalion was shrunken and diluted again. Instead of being broken up, the South Essex would simply wither and die, its Colours forgotten, its morale wasted.

‘No!’ Sharpe almost howled the word in agonised protest. ‘They can’t do it!’

‘Let us hope not,’ Nairn smiled. ‘The Peer is not happy. He is damned crusty about it, Sharpe.’ Nairn spoke of Wellington. ‘He has this strange idea that the South Essex could be useful to him in France.’ The compliment was truthful. A veteran Battalion like the South Essex, even if its ranks were half-filled with raw replacements, had a morale and knowledge that doubled its fighting value. The South Essex had become a killing machine that could be guaranteed to face anything the French threw against it, while a fresh Battalion, however well trained in England, could take months to reach the same efficiency. Nairn splashed more brandy into the two glasses. ‘The Peer, Sharpe, does not trust those bastards in London. War Office! Horse Guards! Foreign Office! Ordnance Department! We’ve got more damned offices running this damned war than we’ve got Battalions! They’ve made a mess of it, they’ve lost their paperwork, they’ve got their breeches round their ankles and they can’t find mother to pull them up. Who’s in charge at Chelmsford?’

Sharpe had to think. His brain was in a turmoil of anger and astonishment that his Battalion could be broken up! ‘In Chelmsford, sir? Man called Girdwood. Lieutenant Colonel Girdwood.’

‘Ever met him?’

‘Never set eyes on him.’

‘He’s got men! He just doesn’t want to lose them! Happens all the time, Sharpe! Man has a Second Battalion, trains them, makes them into toy soldiers, and he can’t bear sending them abroad where the First Battalion will make them dirty! So go and see this Girdwood.’ Nairn said the name with mocking relish. ‘Persuade Girdwood to give you some men from this so-called Holding Battalion! Lick Girdwood’s boots! Get Girdwood drunk! Offer to pleasure Girdwood’s wife! You’ll find some men in Chelmsford!’ Nairn laughed at Sharpe’s expression, then tossed a sealed packet of orders to him. ‘Authorisation for you and three others to go to England to select replacements. Be back by October. That gives you nearly four months.’

Sharpe stared at the Scotsman. ‘Go to England?’

‘I know it’s a grim thought, Sharpe,’ Nairn grinned, ‘but nothing’s going to happen here, nothing! Boody politicians won’t let us invade France until Prussia makes up its mind whether to join the dance again. All we’re going to do is take San Sebastian and Pamplona then sit on our backsides doing nothing! You might as well go home, you’ll miss nothing. Go to Chelmsford.’

‘I can’t go home!’ He meant he could not leave his men.

‘You bloody well have to! You want the South Essex to die? You want to be a storekeeper?’ Nairn drank his brandy. ‘The Peer doesn’t want to break you up. He’ll make you into a Provisional Battalion if he must, but he’d rather you brought yourself up to strength. Go to Chelmsford, find men! If there are none there, then find other men!’

‘And if there aren’t any men?’

The Scotsman drew his finger across his throat. ‘Death of a regiment. Damned shame.’

And now of all times? Now, when the army gathered its strength at the edge of Napoleon’s heartland, on the border of France? Soon, perhaps this autumn or next spring, the men who had first landed at Lisbon would march into France and the South Essex should march with them. They had earned that privilege. On the day when the enemy’s empire was finally brought down, the flags of the South Essex should be flying in victory. Sharpe gestured at Lord Fenner’s letter. ‘How do I oppose that?’

Nairn shook his head. ‘It’s a mistake, Sharpe! Has to be! But you can’t put mistakes right by sending letters! We’ve written to the useless bastards, but letters to the Horse Guards are put in a drawer marked Urgent Business to be Ignored. But they can’t ignore you. You’re a hero!’ He said it with friendly mockery. ‘Go to Chelmsford, find your men, and bring them back. It will take half the time of doing it by letter.’

‘Yes, sir.’ Sharpe sounded dazed. Go to England?

‘And bring me back some whisky, that is a direct order! There’s a shop on Cornhill that gets the stuff from Scotland.’

‘Yes, sir.’ Sharpe spoke distractedly. Going home? England? He did not want to go, but if the alternative was to watch a Battalion die that had earned its right to tramp the roads of France, then he would go through hell itself. For his Regiment, and for its Colours that had flown through the cannon smoke of half a continent, he would go to England so that he could march into France. He would go home.

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

Sharpe, arriving in Chelmsford, could not remember the way to the South Essex’s depot. He had only visited the barracks once, a brief visit in ’09, and he was forced to ask directions from a vicar who was watering his horse at a public trough. The vicar looked askance at Sharpe’s unkempt uniform, then thought of a happy explanation for the soldier’s vagabond appearance. ‘You’re back from Spain?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Well done! Well done! First class!’ The vicar pointed eastwards, directing the soldiers out into the open country. ‘And God bless you!’

The four men walked eastwards. Sharpe and Harper earned odd glances, just as they had in London, for they looked as if they had come straight from a Spanish battlefield and still expected, even in this county town’s quiet streets, to meet a French patrol. Captain d’Alembord was dressed more elegantly than Sharpe or Harper, yet even his uniform, like Lieutenant Price’s, showed the ravages of battle. ‘It ought to work wonders with the ladies.’ D’Alembord fingered a rent in his scarlet jacket, made by a French bayonet at Vitoria.

‘Speaking of which,’ Lieutenant Harry Price had drawn his sword as they left the town behind and now slashed with the blade at the cow-parsley that grew thick in the lane, ‘are you going to give us some leave, sir?’

‘You don’t want leave, Harry. You’ll only get into trouble.’

‘All those girls in London!’ Price said wistfully. ‘Most of them haven’t met a hero like me! Back from the wars and what are you smiling at, Sergeant?’

Harper grinned broadly. ‘Just having a grand day, sir.’

Sharpe laughed. He was beginning to think that this journey was entirely unnecessary. He was convinced now that Lord Fenner’s letter was a mistake, and that there were, indeed, replacements waiting in Chelmsford. In London Sharpe had visited the Horse Guards, reporting his presence to the authorities, and the clerk in the dusty, impatient office had confirmed that the Second Battalion was indeed at Chelmsford. The man could offer no explanation as to why it was now called a Holding Battalion, suggesting wearily to Sharpe that it was, perhaps, merely an administrative convenience, but he could confirm that it was drawing rations and pay for seven hundred men.

Seven hundred! That figure gave Sharpe hope. He was certain now that the First Battalion was saved, that within weeks, even days, he would lead the replacements south to Pasajes. He walked towards the barracks with high hopes, his optimism made yet more buoyant by the splendour of this summer countryside.

It seemed like a dream. Sharpe knew that England was as heavy with beggars and slums and horror as any city in Spain, yet after the plains of Leon or the mountains of Galicia, this landscape seemed like a foretaste of heaven.

They walked through an England heavy with food and soft with foliage, a country of ponds and rivers and streams and lakes. A country of pink-cheeked women and fat men, of children who were not wary of soldiers or strangers. It was unnatural to see chickens pecking the road-verges undisturbed, their necks not wrung by soldiers; to see cows and sheep that were in no danger from the Commissary officers, to see barns unguarded, and cottage doors and windows not broken apart for firewood, nor marked with the chalk hieroglyphs of the billeting sergeants. Sharpe still found himself judging every hill, every wood, every turn in the road as a place to fight. That hedgerow, with its sunken lane behind, would be a deathtrap to cavalry, while an open meadow, bright with buttercups and rising towards a fat farm on a gentle hill, would be a place to avoid like the plague if French cuirassiers were in the area. England seemed to Sharpe to be a plump country, lavish and soft. Yet if he found it strange it was nothing to the reaction of Harper’s wife.

Harper had asked that Isabella should come with them. She was pregnant, and the big Irishman did not want her following the army into strange, hostile France. He had a cousin who lived in Southwark, and there Isabella had been deposited until the war should end. ‘A man doesn’t need his wife on his coat-tails,’ Harper had declared with all the authority of a man married less than a month.

‘You didn’t mind her there before you were married,’ Sharpe had said.

‘That’s different!’ Harper said indignantly. ‘The army’s no place for a married woman, nor is it.’

‘Will she be happy in England?’ Sharpe asked.

‘Of course she’ll be happy!’ Harper was astonished at the question. Happiness to him was being alive and fed, and the thought that Isabella might be fearful of life in a strange country did not seem to have occurred to him.

And, to Isabella, England seemed most strange. On the journey from Portsmouth to London she had shyly whispered questions to her husband. Where were the olive trees? Were there no oranges? No vines? No Catholic churches? She could not believe how full and plentiful were the rivers, how carelessly the villagers spilt water, how green, thick and tangled was the vegetation, how fat were the cows.

And even three days later, walking out of Chelmsford, it still seemed unreal to Sharpe that a country could be so plump. They passed ripening orchards, grain fields bright with poppies, and pigs running free that could have fed an army corps for a week. The sun shone, the land was warmed and fragrant, and Sharpe felt the careless joy of a man who knew that a task he had thought difficult or even impossible was suddenly proving so simple.

His optimism was dashed at the barracks. It was dashed as suddenly as if Napoleon’s Imperial Guard had appeared in Chelmsford’s marketplace. He had come here in hope, expecting to find seven hundred men, and the depot seemed deserted.

There was not even a guard on the gate. The wind stirred the dust, weeds grew between the paving stones, and a door creaked back and forth on ungreased hinges. ‘Guard!’ Sharpe’s voice bellowed angrily and was met by silence.

The four soldiers walked into the archway’s shadow. The depot was not entirely abandoned for, on the far side of the wide parade ground, a file of cavalrymen walked their horses. Sharpe pushed open the creaking door and looked into an empty guardroom. For a few seconds he wondered if the Battalion had been shipped to Spain, if somewhere on the wind-fretted ocean he had crossed their path on this useless mission, but surely the Horse Guards would have known if the Battalion had moved?