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

Loup seemed amused by the answer. ‘You’re squeamish about rape, Captain Sharpe?’

‘Funny in a man, isn’t it? Yes, I am.’

‘We have some officers like that,’ Loup said, ‘but a few months in Spain soon cures their delicacy. The women here fight like the men, and if a woman imagines that her skirts will protect her then she is wrong. And rape is part of the horror, but it also serves a secondary purpose. Release soldiers to rape and they don’t care that they’re hungry or that their pay is a year in arrears. Rape is a weapon like any other, Captain.’

‘I’ll remember that, General, when I march into France,’ Sharpe said, then he turned back towards the houses. ‘Stop there, Sergeant!’ The two prisoners had been escorted as far as the village entrance. ‘And Sergeant!’

‘Sir?’

‘Fetch their trousers. Get them dressed properly.’

Loup, pleased with the way his mission was going, smiled at Sharpe. ‘You’re being sensible, good. I would hate to have to fight you in the same way that I fight the Spanish.’

Sharpe looked at Loup’s pagan uniform. It was a costume, he thought, to scare a child, the costume of a wolfman walking out of nightmare, but the wolfman’s sword was no longer than Sharpe’s and his carbine a good deal less accurate than Sharpe’s rifle. ‘I don’t suppose you could fight us, General,’ Sharpe said, ‘we’re a real army, you see, not a pack of unarmed women and children.’

Loup stiffened. ‘You will find, Captain Sharpe, that the Brigade Loup can fight any man, anywhere, anyhow. I do not lose, Captain, not to anyone.’

‘So if you never lose, General, how were you taken prisoner?’ Sharpe sneered. ‘Fast asleep, were you?’

‘I was a passenger on my way to Egypt, Captain, when our ship was captured by the Royal Navy. That hardly counts as my defeat.’ Loup watched as his two men pulled on their trousers. ‘Where is Trooper Godin’s horse?’

‘Trooper Godin won’t need a horse where he’s going,’ Sharpe said.

‘He can walk? I suppose he can. Very well, I yield you the horse,’ Loup said magniloquently.

‘He’s going to hell, General,’ Sharpe said. ‘I’m dressing them because they’re still soldiers, and even your lousy soldiers deserve to die with their trousers on.’ He turned back to the settlement. ‘Sergeant! Put them against the wall! I want a firing squad, four men for each prisoner. Load up!’

‘Captain!’ Loup snapped and his hand went to his sword’s hilt.

‘You don’t frighten me, Loup. Not you nor your fancy dress,’ Sharpe said. ‘You draw that sword and we’ll be mopping up your blood with your flag of truce. I’ve got marksmen up on that ridge who can whip the good eye out of your face at two hundred yards, and one of those marksmen is looking at you right now.’

Loup looked up the hill. He could see Price’s redcoats there, and one greenjacket, but he plainly could not tell just how many men were in Sharpe’s party. He looked back to Sharpe. ‘You’re a captain, just a captain. Which means you have what? One company? Maybe two? The British won’t entrust more than two companies to a mere captain, but within half a mile I have the rest of my brigade. If you kill my men you’ll be hunted down like dogs, and you will die like dogs. I will exempt you from the rules of war, Captain, just as you propose exempting my men, and I will make sure you die in the manner of my Spanish enemies. With a very blunt knife, Captain.’

Sharpe ignored the threat, turning towards the village instead. ‘Firing party ready, Sergeant?’

‘They’re ready, sir. And eager, sir!’

Sharpe looked back to the Frenchman. ‘Your brigade is miles away, General. If it was any closer you wouldn’t be here talking to me, but leading the attack. Now, if you’ll forgive me, I’ve got some justice to execute.’

‘No!’ Loup said sharply enough to turn Sharpe back. ‘I have made a bargain with my men. You understand that, Captain? You are a leader, I am a leader, and I have promised my men never to abandon them. Don’t make me break my promise.’

‘I don’t give a bugger about your promise,’ Sharpe said.

Loup had expected that kind of answer and so shrugged. ‘Then maybe you will give a bugger about this, Captain Sharpe. I know who you are, and if you do not return my men I will place a price on your head. I will give every man in Portugal and Spain a reason to hunt you down. Kill those two and you sign your own death warrant.’

Sharpe smiled. ‘You’re a bad loser, General.’

‘And you’re not?’

Sharpe walked away. ‘I’ve never lost,’ he called back across his shoulder, ‘so I wouldn’t know.’

‘Your death warrant, Sharpe!’ Loup called.

Sharpe lifted two fingers. He had heard that the English bowmen at Agincourt, threatened by the French with the loss of their bowstring fingers at the battle’s end, had first won the battle and then invented the taunting gesture to show the overweening bastards just who were the better soldiers. Now Sharpe used it again.

Then went to kill the wolfman’s men.

Major Michael Hogan discovered Wellington inspecting a bridge over the River Turones where a force of three French battalions had tried to hold off the advancing British. The resulting battle had been swift and brutal, and now a trail of French and British dead told the skirmish’s tale. An initial tide line of bodies marked where the sides had clashed, a dreadful smear of bloodied turf showed where two British cannon had enfiladed the enemy, then a further scatter of corpses betrayed the French retreat across the bridge which their engineers had not had time to destroy. ‘Fletcher thinks the bridge is Roman work, Hogan,’ Wellington greeted the Irish Major.

‘I sometimes wonder, my Lord, whether anyone has built a bridge in Portugal or Spain since the Romans.’ Hogan, swathed in a cloak because of the day’s damp chill, nodded amicably to his Lordship’s three aides, then handed the General a sealed letter. The seal, which showed the royal Spanish coat of arms, had been lifted. ‘I took the precaution of reading the letter, my Lord,’ Hogan explained.

‘Trouble?’ Wellington asked.

‘I wouldn’t have bothered you otherwise, my Lord,’ Hogan answered gloomily.

Wellington frowned as he read the letter. The General was a handsome man, forty-two years old, but as fit as any in his army. And, Hogan thought, wiser than most. The British army, Hogan knew, had an uncanny knack of finding the least qualified man and promoting him to high command, but somehow the system had gone wrong and Sir Arthur Wellesley, now the Viscount Wellington, had been given command of His Majesty’s army in Portugal, thus providing that army with the best possible leadership. At least Hogan thought so, but Michael Hogan allowed that he could be prejudiced in this matter. Wellington, after all, had promoted Hogan’s career, making the shrewd Irishman the head of his intelligence department and the result had been a relationship as close as it was fruitful.

The General read the letter again, this time glancing at a translation Hogan had thoughtfully provided. Hogan meanwhile looked about the battlefield where fatigue parties were clearing up the remnants of the skirmish. To the east of the bridge, where the road came delicately down the mountainside in a series of sweeping curves, a dozen work parties were searching the bushes for bodies and abandoned supplies. The French dead were being stripped naked and stacked like cordwood next to a long, shallow grave that a group of diggers was trying to extend. Other men were piling French muskets or else hurling canteens, cartridge boxes, boots and blankets into a cart. Some of the plunder was even more exotic, for the retreating French had weighed themselves down with the loot of a thousand Portuguese villages and Wellington’s men were now recovering church vestments, candlesticks and silver plate. ‘Astonishing what a soldier will carry on a retreat,’ the General remarked to Hogan. ‘We found one dead man with a milking stool. A common milking stool! What was he thinking of? Taking it back to France?’ He held the letter out to Hogan. ‘Damn,’ he said mildly, then, more strongly, ‘God damn!’ He waved his aides away, leaving him alone with Hogan. ‘The more I learn about His Most Catholic Majesty King Ferdinand VII, Hogan, the more I become convinced that he should have been drowned at birth.’

Hogan smiled. ‘The recognized method, my Lord, is smothering.’

‘Is it indeed?’

‘It is indeed, my Lord, and no one’s ever the wiser. The mother simply explains how she rolled over in her sleep and trapped the blessed little creature beneath her body and thus, the holy church explains, another precious angel is born.’

‘In my family,’ the General said, ‘unwanted children get posted into the army.’

‘It has much the same effect, my Lord, except in the matter of angels.’

Wellington gave a brief laugh, then gestured with the letter. ‘So how did this reach us?’

‘The usual way, my Lord. Smuggled out of Valençay by Ferdinand’s servants and brought south to the Pyrenees where it was given to partisans for forwarding to us.’

‘With a copy to London, eh? Any chance of intercepting the London copy?’

‘Alas, sir, gone these two weeks. Probably there already.’

‘Hell, damn and hell again. Damn!’ Wellington stared gloomily at the bridge where a sling cart was salvaging the fallen barrel of a dismounted French cannon. ‘So what to do, eh, Hogan? What to do?’

The problem was simple enough. The letter, copied to the Prince Regent in London, had come from the exiled King Ferdinand of Spain who was now a prisoner of Napoleon in the French château at Valençay. The letter was pleased to announce that His Most Catholic Majesty, in a spirit of cooperation with his cousin of England and in his great desire to drive the French invader from the sacred soil of his kingdom, had directed the Real Compañía Irlandesa of His Most Catholic Majesty’s household guard to attach itself to His Britannic Majesty’s forces under the command of the Viscount Wellington. Which gesture, though it sounded generous, was not to the Viscount Wellington’s taste. He did not need a stray company of royal palace guards. A battalion of trained infantry with full fighting equipment might have been of some service, but a company of ceremonial troops was about as much use to the Viscount Wellington as a choir of psalm-singing eunuchs.

‘And they’ve already arrived,’ Hogan said mildly.

‘They’ve what?’ Wellington’s question could be heard a hundred yards away where a dog, thinking it was being reproved, slunk away from some fly-blackened guts that trailed from the eviscerated body of a French artillery officer. ‘Where are they?’ Wellington asked fiercely.

‘Somewhere on the Tagus, my Lord, being barged towards us.’

‘How the hell did they get here?’