Sharpe’s Company: The Siege of Badajoz, January to April 1812

Harper watched the howling mob flow into the city. ‘You think we’re invited?’

‘Why not?’

The Sergeant grinned. ‘God knows, we’ve deserved it.’ He was dangling a gold watch and chain and he started forward towards the ramp that led down towards the houses. Sharpe followed and suddenly stopped. He froze.

Down where the second mine had exploded, lit by a flickering length of old timber, was a mangled body. One side seemed sleek with new blood, a sleekness speckled with the ivory of bone, but the other side was gorgeous in yellow facings and gold lace. A fur-trimmed cavalry cloak covered the legs. ‘Oh God!’

Harper heard him and saw where he was looking. Then both men were racing down the ramp, slipping on ice and slushy snow, and running towards Lawford’s body.

Ciudad Rodrigo was won; but not at this price, Sharpe thought, dear God, not at this price.

CHAPTER FOUR

There was a scream from inside the town, shots as men blew open the doors of houses, and over it all the sound of triumphant voices. After the fight, the reward.

Harper reached the body first, plucked the cloak to one side, and bent over the bloodied chest. ‘He’s alive, sir.’

It seemed to Sharpe like a parody of life. The explosion had sheared Lawford’s left arm almost clean from his body, crushed the ribs and flicked them open so they protruded through the remnants of skin and flesh. The blood was flowing beneath the once immaculate uniform. Harper began tearing the cloak into strips, his mouth a tight line of anger and sorrow. Sharpe looked towards the breach where men still clambered towards the houses. ‘Bandsmen!’

The bands had played during the assault. He remembered hearing the music and now, idiotically, he could suddenly identify the tune he had heard. ‘The Downfall of Paris’. By now the bandsmen should be doing their other job, of caring for the wounded, but he could see none. ‘Bandsmen!’

Miraculously Lieutenant Price appeared, pale and unsteady, and with him a small group of the Light Company. ‘Sir?’

‘A stretcher. Fast! And send someone back to battalion.’

Price saluted. He had forgotten the drawn sword in his hand so that the blade, a curved sabre, nearly sliced into Private Peters. ‘Sir.’ The small group ran back.

Lawford was unconscious. Harper was binding the chest, his huge fingers astonishingly gentle with the tattered flesh. He looked up at Sharpe. ‘Take the arm off, sir.’

‘What?’

‘Better now than later, sir.’ The Sergeant pointed at the Colonel’s left arm, held by a single, glistening shred of tissue. ‘He might live, sir, so he might, but the arm will have to go.’

A splintered piece of bone protruded from the stump. The arm was bent unnaturally upwards, pointing towards the city, and Harper was binding the brief stump to stop the weakly pulsing blood. Sharpe picked his way to Lawford’s head, treading carefully for the ground was slick, though whether with blood or ice it was impossible to see. The only light came from the burning timber. He put the point of his sword down into the bloodied mess and Harper moved the blade till it was in the right place. ‘Leave the skin, sir. It’ll flap over.’

It was no different from butchering a pig or a bullock, but it felt different. He could hear crashes from the city, punctuating the screams. ‘Is that right?’ He could feel Harper manipulating the blade.

‘Now, sir. Straight down.’

Sharpe pushed down, with both hands, almost as if he was driving a stake into mud. Human flesh is resilient, proof against all but the hottest stroke, and Sharpe felt the gorge rise in his throat as the sword met resistance and he heaved down so that Lawford tipped in the scarlet slush and the Colonel’s lips grimaced. Then it was done, the arm free, and Sharpe stooped to the dead fingers and pulled off a gold ring. He would give it to Forrest to be sent home with the Colonel or, God forbid, to be sent to his relatives.

Lieutenant Price was back. ‘They’re coming, sir.’

‘Who?’

‘The Major, sir.’

‘A stretcher?’

Price nodded, looking sick. ‘Will he live, sir?’

‘How the hell do I know?’ It was not fair to vent his anger on Price. ‘What was he doing here anyway?’

Price shrugged miserably. ‘He said he was going to find you, sir.’

Sharpe stared down at the handsome Colonel and swore. Lawford had no business in the breach. The same, perhaps, could have been said of Sharpe and Harper, but the tall Rifleman saw a difference. Lawford had a future, hopes, a family to protect, ambitions that were within his grasp, and soldiering was not where those ambitions finally lay. They might all be thrown away for one mad moment in a breach, a moment to prove something. Sharpe and Harper had no such future, no such hopes, only the knowledge that they were soldiers, as good as their last battle, useful as long as they could fight. They were both, Sharpe thought, adventurers, gambling with their lives. He looked at the Colonel. It was such a waste.

Sharpe listened to the great noise coming from the city, a noise of rampage and victory. Once, perhaps, he thought, an adventurer had a future, back when the world was free and a sword was the passport to any hope. Not now. Everything was changing with a suddenness and pace that was bewildering. Three years before, when the army had defeated the French at Vimiero, it had been a small army, almost an intimate army, and the General could inspect all his troops in a single morning and have time to recognize them, remember them. Sharpe had known most officers in the line by face, if not by name, and was welcome at their evening fires. Not now. Now there were generals of this and generals of that, of division and brigade, and provost-marshals and senior chaplains, and the army was far too large to see on a single morning or even march on a single road. Wellington, perforce, had become remote. There were bureaucrats with the army, defenders of files, and soon, Sharpe knew, a man would be less important than the pieces of paper like that folded, forgotten gazette in Whitehall.

‘Sharpe!’ Major Forrest was shouting at him, waving, hurrying over the rubble. He was leading a small group of men, some of whom carried a door, Lawford’s stretcher. ‘What happened?’

Sharpe gestured at the ruin about them. ‘A mine, sir. He was caught by it.’

Forrest shook his head. ‘Oh God! What do we do?’ The question was not surprising from the Major. He was a kind man, a good man, but not a decisive man.

Captain Leroy, the loyalist American, leaned down to light his thin, black cigar from the flickering flames of the timber baulk. ‘Must be a hospital in town.’

Forrest nodded. ‘Into town.’ He stared in horror at the Colonel. ‘My God! He’s lost his arm!’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Will he live?’

Sharpe shrugged. ‘God knows, sir.’

It was suddenly freezing cold, the wind reaching over the breach to chill the men who rolled the Colonel, still mercifully unconscious, on to the makeshift stretcher. Sharpe wiped the sword blade on a scrap of Lawford’s cloak, sheathed it, and pulled the collar of his greatcoat high up his neck.

It was not the entry into Ciudad Rodrigo that he had imagined. It was one thing to fight through a breach, overcome the last obstacle, and feel the elation of victory, but to follow Lawford in a slow, almost funeral march was destroying the triumph. Inevitably, too, though Sharpe hated himself for thinking of it, there were other questions that hung on this moment.

There would be a new Colonel of the South Essex, a stranger. The Battalion would be changed, maybe for the better, but probably not for the betterment of Sharpe. Lawford, whose own future was seeping into the crude bandages, had learned to trust Sharpe years before; at Seringapatam, Assaye, and Gawilghur, but Sharpe could expect no favours from a new man. Lawford’s replacement would bring his own debts to be repaid, his own ideas, and the old ties of loyalty, friendship, and even gratitude that had held the Battalion together would be untied. Sharpe thought of the gazette. If it was refused, and the thought persisted that it might, then Lawford would have ignored the refusal. He would have kept Sharpe as Captain of the Light Company, come what may, but no longer. The new man would make his own dispositions and Sharpe felt the chill of uncertainty.

They pushed deeper into the town, through crowds of men intent on recompense for the night’s effort. A group of the 88th had hacked open a wine-shop, splintering the door with bayonets, and now had set up their own business selling the stolen wine. Some officers tried to restore order, but they were outnumbered and ignored. Bolts of cloth cascaded from an upper window, draping the narrow street in a grotesque parody of a holiday as soldiers destroyed what they did not want to loot. A Spaniard lay beside a door, blood trickling in a dozen spreading streams from his scalp, while in the house behind were screams, shouts, and the sobbing of women.

The main square was like a bedlam let loose. A soldier of the 45th reeled past Sharpe and waved a bottle in the Rifleman’s face. The man was hopelessly drunk. ‘The store! We opened the store.’ He fell down.

The French spirit store had been broken apart. Shouts came from the building’s interior, thumps as the casks were stove in, and musket shots as crazed men fought for the contents. A house nearby was in flames and a soldier, his red jacket decorated with the 45th’s green facings, staggered in agony, his back burning, and he tried to douse the flames by pouring a bottle over his shoulder. The spirit flared, scorched his hand, and the man fell, writhing, to die on the stones. Across the plaza a second house was burning and men shouted for help from its upper windows. On the pavement outside women screamed, pointing at their trapped men, but the women were scooped up by redcoats and carried shrieking into an alley. Nearby a shop was being looted. Loaves and hams were slung from the door, to be caught on outstretched bayonets, and Sharpe could see the flicker of flame deep inside the building.

Some troops had kept their discipline and followed their officers in futile attempts to stop the riot. One horseman rode at a group of drunks, and flailing down with a scabbarded sword, split the group apart, and rode out with a young girl, screaming, clinging to his saddle. The horseman took the girl to a growing huddle of women, sheltered by sober troops, and turned his horse back into the melee. Shrieks and screams, laughter and tears, the sound of victory.

Watching it all, in silent awe, the survivors of the French garrison had gathered in the centre of the plaza to surrender. They were mostly still armed, but submitted patiently to the British troops who systematically worked their way down the losers’ ranks and pillaged them. Some women clung to their French husbands or lovers, and those women were left alone. No one was taking revenge on the French. The fight had been short and there was little ill will. Sharpe had heard a suggestion, floating as a rumour before the assault, that all surviving Frenchmen were to be massacred, not as revenge, but as a warning to the garrison at Badajoz what to expect if they chose to resist in their larger fortress. It was no more than a rumour. These French, silent in the midst of rampage, would be marched into Portugal, over the winter roads to Oporto, and then back by ships to the foetid prison hulks or even the brand new prison, built for prisoners of war, in the bleakness of Dartmoor.

‘Good God.’ Major Forrest’s eyes widened as he stared at the rioting troops. ‘They’re animals! Just animals!’

Sharpe said nothing. There were few rewards for a soldier. The pay would make no man rich, and the battlefields that yielded booty were few and far between. A siege was the hardest fighting and soldiers had always regarded victory in a breach as reason for losing all discipline and taking their reward from the conquered fortress. And if the fortress was a city, so much the more loot, and if the inhabitants of the city were your allies, then that was bad luck; they were in the wrong place, at the wrong time. Life had always been like that, and always would, because this was ancient custom, soldiers’ custom. In truth Ciudad Rodrigo was not suffering much. There were, to Sharpe’s eyes, plenty of sober, disciplined troops who had not joined the riot and who would, by morning, have swept up the drunks, disposed of the corpses, and the city’s ordeal would soon end in alcoholic exhaustion. He looked round, trying to identify a hospital.

‘Sir! Sir!’ Sharpe turned. It was Robert Knowles, who had been his Lieutenant till the previous year, but was now a Captain himself. The ‘sir’ was pure habit. ‘How are you?’ Knowles smiled in delight. He wore the uniform of his new Regiment. Sharpe gestured at Lawford’s body and the young Captain’s face fell. ‘How?’

‘A mine.’