Sharpe’s Havoc: The Northern Portugal Campaign, Spring 1809

Christopher sighed at his servant’s stupidity and decided to make things simpler for Luis to understand. ‘You want to rid Portugal of the French?’

‘You know I do!’

‘Then serve dinner this afternoon. Be courteous, hide your thoughts and have faith in me.’

Because Christopher had seen the light and now he would rewrite the rules.

Sharpe stared ahead to where the dragoons had lifted four skiffs from the river and used them to make a barricade across the road. There was no way round the barricade which stretched between two houses, for beyond the right-hand house was the river and beyond the left was the steep hill where the French infantry approached, and there were more French infantry behind Sharpe, which meant the only way out of the trap was to go straight through the barricade.

‘What do we do, sir?’ Harper asked.

Sharpe swore.

‘That bad, eh?’ Harper unslung his rifle. ‘We could pick some of those boys off the barricade there.’

‘We could,’ Sharpe agreed, but it would only annoy the French, not defeat them. He could defeat them, he was sure, because his riflemen were good and the enemy’s barricade was low, but Sharpe was also sure he would lose half his men in the fight and the other half would still have to escape the pursuit of vengeful horsemen. He could fight, he could win, but he could not survive the victory.

There really was only one thing to do, but Sharpe was reluctant to say it aloud. He had never surrendered. The very thought was horrid.

‘Fix swords,’ he shouted.

His men looked surprised, but they obeyed. They took the long sword bayonets from their scabbards and slotted them onto the rifle muzzles. Sharpe drew his own sword, a heavy cavalry blade that was a yard of slaughtering steel. ‘All right, lads. Four files!’

‘Sir?’ Harper was puzzled.

‘You heard me, Sergeant! Four files! Smartly, now.’

Harper shouted the men into line. The French infantry who had come from the city were only a hundred paces behind now, too far for an accurate musket shot though one Frenchman did try and his ball cracked into the whitewashed wall of a cottage beside the road. The sound seemed to irritate Sharpe. ‘On the double now!’ he snapped. ‘Advance!’

They trotted down the road towards the newly erected barricade which was two hundred paces ahead. The river slid grey and swirling to their right while on their left was a field dotted with the remnants of last year’s haystacks which were small and pointed so that they looked like bedraggled witches’ hats. A hobbled cow with a broken horn watched them pass. Some fugitives, despairing of passing the dragoons’ roadblock, had settled in the field to await their fate.

‘Sir?’ Harper managed to catch up with Sharpe, who was a dozen paces ahead of his men.

‘Sergeant?’

It was always ‘Sergeant’, Harper noted, when things were grim, never ‘Patrick’ or ‘Pat’. ‘What are we doing, sir?’

‘We’re charging that barricade, Sergeant.’

‘They’ll fillet our guts, if you’ll pardon me saying so, sir. The buggers will turn us inside out.’

‘I know that,’ Sharpe said, ‘and you know that. But do they know that?’

Harper stared at the dragoons who were levelling their carbines across the keels of the upturned skiffs. The carbine, like a musket and unlike a rifle, was smoothbore and thus inaccurate, which meant the dragoons would wait until the last moment to unleash their volley, and that volley promised to be heavy for still more of the green-coated enemy were squeezing onto the road behind the barricade and aiming their weapons. ‘I think they do know that, sir,’ Harper observed.

Sharpe agreed, though he would not say so. He had ordered his men to fix swords because the sight of fixed bayonets was more frightening than the threat of rifles alone, but the dragoons did not seem to be worried by the menace of the steel blades. They were crowding together so that every carbine could join the opening volley and Sharpe knew he would have to surrender, but he was unwilling to do it without a single shot being fired. He quickened his pace, reckoning that one of the dragoons would fire at him too soon and that one shot would be Sharpe’s signal to halt, throw down his sword and so save his men’s lives. The decision hurt, but it was the only option he had unless God sent a miracle.

‘Sir?’ Harper struggled to keep up with Sharpe. ‘They’ll kill you!’

‘Get back, Sergeant,’ Sharpe said, ‘that’s an order.’ He wanted the dragoons to fire at him, not at his men.

‘They’ll bloody kill you!’ Harper said.

‘Maybe they’ll turn and run,’ Sharpe called back.

‘God save Ireland,’ Harper said, ‘and why would they do that?’

‘Because God wears a green jacket,’ Sharpe snarled, ‘of course.’

And just then the French turned and ran.

CHAPTER TWO

Sharpe had always been lucky. Maybe not in the greater things of life, certainly not in the nature of his birth to a Cat Lane whore who had died without giving her only son a single caress, nor in the manner of his upbringing in a London orphanage that cared not a jot for the children within its grim walls, but in the smaller things, in those moments when success and failure had been a bullet’s width apart, he had been lucky. It had been good fortune that took him to the tunnel where the Tippoo Sultan was trapped, and even better fortune that had decapitated an orderly at Assaye so that Richard Sharpe was riding behind Sir Arthur Wellesley when that General’s horse was killed by a pike thrust and Sir Arthur was thrown down among the enemy. All luck, outrageous luck sometimes, but even Sharpe doubted his good fortune when he saw the dragoons twisting away from the barricade. Was he dead? Dreaming? Concussed and imagining things? But then he heard the roar of triumph from his men and he knew he was not dreaming. The enemy really had turned away and Sharpe was going to live and his men would not have to march as prisoners to France.

He heard the firing then, the stuttering chatter of muskets and realized that the dragoons had been attacked from their rear. There was powder smoke hanging thick between the houses that edged the road, and more coming from an orchard halfway up the hill on which the great white flat-topped block of a building stood, and then Sharpe was at the barricade and he leaped up onto the first skiff, his foot half sticking in some new tar that had been smeared on its lower hull. The dragoons were facing away from him, shooting up at the windows, but then a green-coated man turned and saw Sharpe and shouted a warning. An officer came from the door of the house beside the river and Sharpe, jumping down from the boat, skewered the man’s shoulder with his big sword, then shoved him hard against the limewashed wall as the dragoon who had shouted the warning fired at him. The ball plucked at Sharpe’s heavy pack, then Sharpe kneed the officer in the groin and turned on the man who had fired at him. That man was going backwards mouthing ‘non, non’, and Sharpe slammed the sword against his head, drawing blood but doing more damage with the blade’s sheer weight so that the dazed dragoon fell and was trampled by riflemen swarming over the low barricade. They were screaming slaughter, deaf to Harper’s shout to give the dragoons a volley.

Maybe three rifles fired, but the rest of the men kept charging to take their sword bayonets to an enemy that could not stand against an attack from front and back. The dragoons had been ambushed by troops coming from a building some fifty yards down the road, troops who had been hidden in the building and in the garden behind, and the French were now being attacked from both sides. The small space between the houses was veiled in powder smoke, loud with screams and the echo of shots, stinking of blood, and Sharpe’s men were fighting with a ferocity that both astonished and appalled the French. They were dragoons, schooled to fight with big swords from horseback, and they were not ready for this bloody brawl on foot with riflemen hardened by years of tavern fights and barrack-room conflicts. The men in rifle-green jackets were murderous in close combat and the surviving dragoons fled back to a grassy space on the river bank where their horses were picketed and Sharpe roared at his men to keep going eastwards. ‘Let them go!’ he shouted. ‘Drop ’em! Drop ’em!’ The last four words were those used in the rat pit, the instruction shouted to a terrier trying to kill a rat that was already dead. ‘Drop ’em! Keep going!’ There was French infantry close behind, there were more cavalrymen in Oporto and Sharpe’s priority now was to get as far away from the city as he possibly could. ‘Sergeant!’

‘I hear you, sir!’ Harper shouted and he waded down the alley and hauled Rifleman Tongue away from a Frenchman. ‘Come on, Isaiah! Move your bloody bones!’

‘I’m killing the bastard, Sergeant, I’m killing the bastard!’

‘The bastard’s already dead! Now move!’ A brace of carbine bullets rattled in the alleyway. A woman screamed incessantly in one of the nearby houses. A fleeing dragoon stumbled over a pile of woven wicker fish traps and sprawled in the house’s backyard where another Frenchman was lying among a pile of drying washing that he had pulled from a line as he died. The white sheets were red with his blood. Gataker aimed at a dragoon officer who had managed to mount his horse, but Harper pulled him away. ‘Keep running! Keep running!’

Then there was a swarm of blue uniforms to Sharpe’s left and he turned, sword raised, and saw they were Portuguese. ‘Friends!’ he shouted for the benefit of his riflemen. ‘Watch out for the Portuguese!’ The Portuguese soldiers were the ones who had saved him from an ignominious surrender, and now, having ambushed the French from behind, they joined Sharpe’s men in their headlong flight to the east.

‘Keep going!’ Harper bawled. Some of the riflemen were panting and they slowed to a walk until a flurry of carbine shots from the surviving dragoons made them hurry again. Most of the shots went high, one banged into the road beside Sharpe and ricocheted up into a poplar, and another struck Tarrant in the hip. The rifleman went down, screaming, and Sharpe grabbed his collar and kept running, dragging Tarrant with him. The road and river curved leftwards and there were trees and bushes on its bank. That woodland was not far away, too close to the city for comfort, but it would provide cover while Sharpe reorganized his men.

‘Get to the trees!’ Sharpe yelled. ‘Get to the trees!’

Tarrant was in pain, shouting protests and leaving a trail of blood on the road. Sharpe pulled him into the trees and let him drop, then stood beside the road and shouted at his men to form a line at the wood’s edge. ‘Count them, Sergeant,’ he called to Harper, ‘count them!’ The Portuguese infantry mingled with the riflemen and began reloading their muskets. Sharpe unslung his rifle and fired at a cavalryman who was wheeling his horse on the river bank, ready to pursue. The horse reared, throwing its rider. Other dragoons had drawn their long straight swords, evidently intent on a vengeful pursuit, but then a French officer shouted at the cavalrymen to stay where they were. He at least understood that a charge into thick trees where infantry was loaded and ready was tantamount to suicide. He would wait for his own infantry to catch up.

Daniel Hagman took out the scissors that had cut Sharpe’s hair and sliced Tarrant’s breeches away from the wounded hip. Blood spilled down as Hagman cut, then the old man grimaced. ‘Reckon he’s lost the joint, sir.’

‘He can’t walk?’

‘He won’t walk never again,’ Hagman said. Tarrant swore viciously. He was one of Sharpe’s troublemakers, a sullen man from Hertfordshire who never lost a chance to become drunk and vicious, but when he was sober he was a good marksman who did not lose his head in battle. ‘You’ll be all right, Ned,’ Hagman told him, ‘you’ll live.’

‘Carry me,’ Tarrant appealed to his friend, Williamson.

‘Leave him!’ Sharpe snapped. ‘Take his rifle, ammunition and sword.’

‘You can’t just leave him here,’ Williamson said, and obstructed Hagman so that he could not unbuckle his friend’s cartridge box.

Sharpe seized Williamson by the shoulder and hauled him away. ‘I said leave him!’ He did not like it, but he could not be slowed down by the weight of a wounded man, and the French would tend for Tarrant better than any of Sharpe’s men could. The rifleman would go to a French army hospital, be treated by French doctors and, if he did not die from gangrene, would probably be exchanged for a wounded French prisoner. Tarrant would go home, a cripple, and most likely end in the parish workhouse. Sharpe pushed through the trees to find Harper. Carbine bullets pattered through the branches, leaving shreds of leaf sifting down the shafts of sunlight behind them. ‘Anyone missing?’ Sharpe asked Harper.

‘No, sir. What happened to Tarrant?’