Sharpe’s Enemy: The Defence of Portugal, Christmas 1812

‘Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.’ God! The ‘Major’ sounded good in his ears.

The bells rang on, marking the feastday, while, fifty miles north and east, the first English soldiers, red coats untidy, filed into the quiet village of Adrados.

CHAPTER TWO

The rumour reached Frenada soon enough, yet in its passing through the Portuguese countryside the story twisted and curled in the same manner that Congreve’s rockets tangled their smoke trails above the shallow valley where Sharpe tested them.

Sergeant Patrick Harper was the first man of Sharpe’s Company to hear the story. He heard it from his woman, Isabella, who had heard it from the pulpit of Frenada’s Church. Indignation in the town flared, an indignation that Harper shared. English troops, not just English, but Protestants to boot, had gone to a remote village which they had looted, killed, raped, and defiled on a holy day.

Patrick Harper told Sharpe. They were sitting with Lieutenant Price and the Company’s two other Sergeants in the winter sunlight of the valley. Sharpe heard his Sergeant out, then shook his head. ‘I don’t believe it.’

‘Swear to God, sir. The priest talked of it, so he did, right there in the church!’

‘You heard it?’

‘Isabella heard it!’ Harper’s eyes, beneath the sandy-brown eyebrows, were belligerent. His indignation had thickened the Ulster accent. ‘Your man is hardly going to lie in his own pulpit! What’s the point of that?’

Sharpe shook his head. He had fought with Harper on a dozen battlefields, he would count the Sergeant as a friend, yet he was not used to this bitterness. Harper had the calm confidence of a strong man. He had an unconquerable humour that saw him through battlefields, bivouacs, and the malevolent fate that had forced him, an Irishman, into England’s army. Yet Donegal was never far from Harper’s mind and there was something in this rumour that had touched the patriotic nerve that smarted whenever Harper thought of how England had treated Ireland. Protestants raping and killing Catholics, a holy place defiled, the ingredients were seething in Harper’s head. Sharpe grinned. ‘Do you really believe, Sergeant, that some of our lads went to a village and killed a Spanish garrison and raped all the women? Truly! Does that sound right to you?’

Harper shrugged, thought reluctantly. ‘I give you it’s the first time, I give you that. But it happened!’

‘For God’s sake why would they do it?’

‘Because they’re Protestant, sir! Go a hundred miles just to kill a Catholic, so they will. It’s in the blood!’

Sergeant Huckfield, a Protestant from the English shires, spat a blade of grass from his lips. ‘Harps! And what about your bloody lot? The Inquisition? You never heard of the Inquisition in your country? Christ! You talk about killing! We learned it all from bloody Rome!’

‘Enough!’ Sharpe had endured this argument too often and certainly did not want it aired when Harper was filled with anger. He saw the huge Irishman about to utter again and he stopped it before tempers flared. ‘I said enough!’ He twisted round to see if Gilliland’s troop had finished their seemingly interminable preparations and vented his anger on their slowness.

Lieutenant Price was lying full length, his shako tipped over his eyes, and he smiled as he listened to Sharpe’s swearing. When it was done he pushed his shako back. ‘It’s because we’re working on a Sunday. Breaking the Lord’s Day. Nothing good ever came out of working on the Sabbath, that’s what my Father says.’

‘It’s also the 13th.’ Sergeant McGovern’s voice was gloomy.

‘We are working on Sunday,’ Sharpe said with forced patience, ‘because that way we will get this job done by Christmas and you can rejoin Battalion. Then you can eat the geese that Major Forrest has kindly purchased and get drunk on Major Leroy’s rum. If you’d prefer not to, then we’ll go back to Frenada now. Any questions?’

Price made his voice into that of a small lisping boy. ‘What are you buying me for Christmas, Major?’

The Sergeants laughed and Sharpe saw that Gilliland, at last, was ready. He stood up, brushing earth and grass from the French cavalry overalls he wore beneath his Rifleman’s jacket. ‘Time to go. Come on.’

For four days now he had practised and rehearsed with Gilliland’s rockets. He knew, or thought he knew, what he would have to say about them. They did not work. They were entertaining, even spectacular, but hopelessly inaccurate.

They were not new in war. Gilliland, who had a passion for the weapon, had told Sharpe they were first used in China hundreds of years before, and Sharpe himself had seen rockets used by Indian armies. He had hoped that these British rockets, the product of science and engineering, might prove to be better than those which had decorated the sky at Seringapatam.

Congreve’s rockets looked just like the fireworks that celebrated Royal days in London, except these were much bigger. Gilliland’s smallest rocket was fully eleven feet long, two feet of which was the cylinder containing the powder propulsion and tipped with a roundshot or shell, the rest made up of the rocket’s stout stick. The largest rocket, according to Gilliland, was twenty-eight feet long, its head taller than a man, and its load more than fifty pounds of explosive. If such a rocket could be persuaded to go even vaguely near its target it would be a fearful weapon.

For two hours again, beneath a cloudless sky in which the December sun was surprisingly warm, Sharpe exercised Gilliland’s men. It was probably, he thought, a waste of all their time for Sharpe doubted if Gilliland would ever need to liaise with infantry in battle, yet there was something about this new weapon that fascinated Sharpe.

Perhaps, he thought as he cleared his thin skirmish line for the fourth time from the front of the battery, it was the mathematics of the rockets. A battery of artillery had six guns, yet it needed a hundred and seventy-two men and a hundred and sixty-four horses to move it and serve it. In battle the battery could deliver twelve shots a minute.

Gilliland had the same number of men and horses, yet at full fire he could deliver ninety missiles in the same minute. He could sustain that rate of fire for a quarter of an hour, firing his full complement of one thousand and four hundred rockets, and no artillery battery could hope to rival that power.

There was another difference, an uncomfortable fact. Ten of the twelve cannon-fired shots would hit their target at five hundred yards. Even at three hundred yards Gilliland was lucky if one rocket in fifty was even close.

For the last time that day Sharpe cleared his skirmish line. Price waved from the far side of the valley. ‘Clear, sir!’

Sharpe looked at Gilliland and shouted. ‘Fire!’

Sharpe’s men grinned in anticipation. This time only twelve small rockets would be fired. Each lay in an open-ended trough so that it would skim the ground when it was ignited. The artillerymen touched the fire to the fuses, smoke curled into the quiet air, and then, almost together, the twelve missiles exploded into movement. Great trails of smoke and sparks slammed backwards, the grass behind the troughs was scorched by fire, and the rockets were moving, faster and faster, rising slightly above the winter-pale field, filling the valley with their tangled roar, screaming above the pasture as Sharpe’s men whooped with joy.

One struck the ground, cartwheeled, its stick broke and the loose head smashed down into the earth spraying flame and dark smoke into the valley. Another veered right, collided with a second, and both dived into the grass. Two seemed to be going perfectly, searing above the field, while the rest wandered and made intricate patterns in smoke above the grass.

All except one. One rocket thrust itself in a perfect curve, higher and higher, pushing up so that it was hidden by the smoke that was pumped out and seemed to stack itself beneath its fiery tail. Sharpe watched it, squinting into the brightness of the sky, and he thought he saw the stick flicker in the smoke, turning, then he saw flame again. The rocket had flipped over and was plunging earthward, accelerating before the rush of fire, screaming down at the men who had fired it.

‘Run!’ Sharpe yelled at the artillerymen.

Harper, his indignation at the massacre temporarily forgotten, was laughing.

‘Run, you idiots!’

Horses bolted, men panicked, and the sound grew louder, a thunderbolt from the December sky, and Gilliland’s shrill voice was shrieking confusion at his men. The artillerymen dived to the earth, hands over their heads, and the noise grew and suddenly crashed into nothing as the solid six-pound shot of the twelve pound rocket buried itself in the soil. The stick quivered above it. For a second the rocket propellant still flamed hungrily at the cylinder’s base, then it died and there were only flickering blue flames licking at the stick.

Harper wiped his eyes. ‘God save Ireland!’

‘The others?’ Sharpe was looking upfield.

Sergeant Huckfield shook his head. ‘All over the place, sir. Nearest to the target area was probably thirty yards.’ He licked the pencil and made a note in the book he was carrying, then shrugged. ‘About average, sir.’

Which was, sadly for Gilliland, true. The rockets seemed to have a mind of their own once they were in motion. As Lieutenant Harry Price had said, they were superb for frightening horses so long as no one cared which horses were frightened, French or British.

Sharpe walked Captain Gilliland up the valley among the smoking remains of his missiles. The air was bitter with powder smoke. The notebook said it all, the rockets were a failure.

Gilliland, a small, young man, his face thin but lit with a fanatical passion for his weapon, pleaded with Sharpe. Sharpe had heard all the arguments before. He half listened, the other part of his mind sympathetic to Gilliland’s desperate eagerness to be part of the 1813 campaign. This year was ending sourly. After the great victories of Ciudad Rodrigo, Badajoz and Salamanca the campaign had ground to a halt before the French fortress of Burgos. The autumn had seen a British retreat back to Portugal, back to the foodstocks that would keep an army alive through the winter, and the retreat had been hard. Some fool had sent the army’s supplies by a different road so that the troops slogged westward, through pouring rain, hungry and angry. Discipline had broken down. Men had been hung by the roadside for looting. Sharpe had stripped two drunks stark naked and left them to the mercies of the pursuing French. No man in the South Essex became drunk after that and it was one of the few Battalions that had marched back into Portugal in good order. Next year they would avenge that retreat and for the first time the armies of the Peninsula would march under one General. Wellington was head now of the British, the Portuguese and the Spanish armies, and Gilliland, pleading with Sharpe, wanted to be part of the victories that unity seemed to promise. Sharpe cut the speech short. ‘But they don’t hit anything, Captain. You can’t make them accurate.’

Gilliland nodded, shrugged, shook his head, flapped his hands in impotence, then turned again to Sharpe. ‘Sir? You once said a frightened enemy is already half beaten, yes?’

‘Yes.’

‘Think of what these will do to an enemy! They’re terrifying!’

‘As your men just found out.’

Gilliland shook his head in exasperation. ‘There’s always a rogue rocket or two, sir. But think of it! An enemy that’s never seen them? Suddenly the flames, the noise! Think, sir!’

Sharpe thought. He was required to test these rockets, test them thoroughly, and he had done that in four hard days work. They had started the rockets at their full range of two thousand yards and quickly brought the range down, down to just three hundred yards and still the missiles were hopelessly inaccurate. And yet! Sharpe smiled to himself. What was the effect on a man who had never been exposed to them? He looked at the sky. Midday. He had hoped for an easy afternoon before going to see the performance of Hamlet that the officers of the Light Division were staging in a barn outside the town, but perhaps there was just one test that he had forgotten. It need not take long.

An hour later, alone with Sergeant Harper, he watched Gilliland make his preparations six hundred yards away. Harper looked at Sharpe and shook his head. ‘We’re mad.’

‘You don’t have to stay.’