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

‘Christ! Will he live?’

‘God knows. We need a hospital.’

‘This way.’ Knowles had entered the town through the smaller breach, attacked by the Light Division, and he led the party north, through the crowds, and into a narrow street. ‘I passed it on the way here. A convent. Crauford’s there.’

‘Wounded?’ Sharpe had thought Black Bob Crauford to be indestructible. The General of the Light Division was the toughest man in the army.

Knowles nodded. ‘Shot. It’s bad. They don’t think he’ll live. There.’ He pointed to a big, stone building which was topped by a cross and fronted by an arched cloister lit by bracketed torches. Wounded men were lying outside, tended by friends, while screams came from the upper windows behind which the surgeons were already at work with their serrated blades.

‘Inside!’ Sharpe pushed through the men in the doorway, ignored a nun who tried to stop him, and forced a path for the Colonel’s stretcher. The tiled floor was gleaming with fresh blood that looked black in the candlelight. A second nun pushed Sharpe aside and looked down at Lawford. Her eyes saw the gold lace, the torn elegance of the blood-stained uniform, and she rapped orders at her sisters. The Colonel was carried through an arched doorway to whatever horrors the surgeons would inflict.

The small group of men looked at each other, saying nothing, but on each face there were deep lines of tiredness and sorrow. The South Essex, that had achieved so much under Lawford’s leadership, was about to change. Soldiers might belong to an army, wear the uniform of a Regiment, but they lived inside a battalion and the commander of the Battalion made or broke their happiness. Their thoughts were all the same.

‘What now?’ Forrest was weary.

‘You get some sleep, sir.’ Leroy spoke brutally.

‘Parade in the morning, sir?’ Sharpe suddenly realized that Forrest was in command until the new man was appointed. ‘The Brigade Major will have orders.’

Forrest nodded. He waved a hand towards the doorway where Lawford had disappeared. ‘I must report this.’

Knowles put a hand on Forrest’s elbow. ‘I know where the Headquarters will be, sir. I’ll take you.’

‘Yes.’ Forrest hesitated. He saw a severed hand lying on the checkered tiles and he nearly gagged. Sharpe kicked the hand out of sight beneath a dark wooden chest. ‘Go on, sir.’

Forrest, Leroy, and Knowles left. Sharpe turned to Lieutenant Price and Sergeant Harper. ‘Find the Company. Make sure they have billets.’

‘Yes, sir.’ Price seemed shocked. Sharpe tapped him on the chest.

‘Stay sober.’

The Lieutenant nodded, then pleaded. ‘Half sober?’

‘Sober.’

‘Come on, sir.’ Harper led Price away. There was no doubt about which man was in command.

Sharpe watched the men coming into the convent; the blinded, the lamed, the bleeding, French and British. He tried to blot the screaming from his ears, but it was impossible, the sound penetrated the senses like the acrid smoke that hung in the city’s streets this night. An officer of the 95th Rifles came down the main stairway, crying, and saw Sharpe. ‘He’s bad.’ He did not know who he was talking to, except that he saw in Sharpe another Rifleman.

‘Crauford?’

‘There’s a bullet in his spine. They can’t get it out. The bastard was standing in the middle of the breach, right in the bloody middle, and telling us to move our arses. They shot him!’

The Rifle officer went out into the cold night. Crauford never asked his men to do anything he would not do himself, and he would be there, cursing and spitting, leading his men on, and now he would die. The army would not be the same. Things were changing.

A clock struck ten o’clock and Sharpe thought it had been just three hours since they slipped over the snow towards the breach. Just three hours! The door through which Lawford had been carried was opened and a soldier dragged out a corpse. It was not the Colonel. The body, pulled by the heels, left a jellied slime of bloodied mud on the tiles. The door was left open and Sharpe crossed to it, leaned on the post, and stared into the candle-bright charnel house. He remembered the soldier’s prayer, morning and evening, that God keep him from the surgeon’s knife. Lawford was on the table strapped tight, his uniform cut away. An orderly leaned on his chest, obscuring the face, while a surgeon, his apron stiff with blood the colour of burnt ochre, grunted as he pushed in the knife. Sharpe saw Lawford’s feet, still encased in the boots with the swan-neck spurs, jerk in the leather straps. The surgeon was sweating. The candles guttered in the draught and he turned a blood-spattered face. ‘Shut the bloody door!’

Sharpe closed it, cutting off the view of severed limbs, the waiting bodies. He wanted a drink. Things were changing. Lawford under the knife, Crauford dying upstairs, the New Year mocking them. He stood in the hallway, in dark shadow, and remembered the gas lighting he had seen in London’s Pall Mall just two months ago. A wonder of the world, he had been told, but he did not think so. Gas lighting, steam power, and stupid men in offices with dirty spectacles and neat files, the new denizens of England that would tie up the world in pipes, conduits, paper, and above all order. Neatness above all. England did not want to know about the war. A hero was a week-long wonder, so long as he was not untidily scarred like the beggars in the streets of London. There were men with only half a face, covered in suppurating sores, rodent ulcers, men with empty eye sockets, torn mouths, ragged stumps who had cried out for a penny for an old soldier. He had watched them being moved on so they did not sully the pristine, hissing light in Pall Mall. Sharpe had fought beside some of them, watched them drop on a battlefield, but their country did not care. There were the military hospitals, of course, at Chelsea and Kilmainham, but it was the soldiers who paid for those, not the country. The country wanted the soldiers out of the way.

Sharpe wanted a drink.

The door of the surgeon’s room banged open and Sharpe turned to see Lawford being carried on a canvas stretcher to the wide staircase. He hurried to the orderlies. ‘How is he?’

‘If the rot doesn’t get him, sir …’ The man left the sentence unfinished. His nose was dripping, but he could not wipe it because both hands were on the stretcher. He sniffed. ‘Friend of yours, sir?’

‘Yes.’

‘Nothing you can do tonight, sir. Come back tomorrow. We’ll look after him.’ He jerked his head upwards. ‘Lieutenant Colonels and above are on the second floor, sir. Bleeding luxury. Not like those in the cellar.’ Sharpe could imagine it, had seen it often enough, the dank cellars where the wounded were crammed on verminous pallets, one part of the ‘ward’ always left as a death room where the hopeless could simply rot. He let them go, and turned away.

Ciudad Rodrigo had fallen, the great fortress of the north, and the history books would record the fact and, for years to come, the victory would be remembered with pride. In just twelve days Wellington had surprised, surrounded, assaulted and taken a city. A victory. And no one would remember the names of the men who had died in the breach, who had struggled to silence the great, killing guns sunk in the wide wall. The English would celebrate. They liked victories, especially those far from home that fortified their sense of superiority over the French, but they did not want to know about this; the screams of the wounded, the thump of severed limbs, the slow drip of thick blood from the hallway ceiling.

Sharpe pushed into the cold street and hunched down inside his collar against a sudden flurry of snow. There was no joy for him in this victory; only a sense of loss, of loneliness, and of some unfinished task he must perform in a breach. It could all wait.

He went in search of drink.

CHAPTER FIVE

It had begun to snow again, a thin sprinkling that flecked the greatcoats of the collapsed drunks in the street. It was cold. Sharpe knew he should find somewhere warm, somewhere to clean the big sword properly before the rust pits began, somewhere to sleep, but he wanted a drink first.

The city was quieter. There were still shouts echoing down empty alleyways, an odd musket shot, and once, inexplicably, a muffled explosion. Sharpe did not care. He wanted drink to drive away the self-pity, the nagging thought that, without Lawford, he could be a Lieutenant again under the orders of a Captain ten years younger than himself, without experience, and his mood turned savage as he made his way towards the flickering lights of the plaza where the French spirit store had been broken open.

The French prisoners were still in the square’s centre, though without their officers who had given their parole and gone off to bed or to drink with their captors. The French soldiers sat shivering and weaponless. Their guards watched them with curious eyes, their hands thrust into pockets, their loaded and bayoneted muskets slung on cold shoulders. Other sentries guarded the houses, stopping the last looters who still staggered, drunk, in the light of the burning buildings. Sharpe was stopped at the liquor store by a nervous sentry. ‘Can’t go in there, sir.’

‘Why not?’

‘General’s orders, sir. Orders.’

Sharpe snarled at him. ‘The General sent me. He’s thirsty.’

The sentry grinned, but still brought his musket down across the doorway. ‘I’m sorry, sir. It’s orders, sir.’

‘What’s going on?’ A Sergeant appeared, a big man, walking slowly. ‘Trouble?’

Sharpe faced the Sergeant. ‘I’m going in there for drink. Do you want to stop me?’

The Sergeant shrugged. ‘Up to you, sir, but I’d advise against it. Bloody raw alcohol, that is, sir. It’s killed a couple of lads.’ He looked Sharpe up and down, saw the blood on the uniform. ‘In the breach, were you, sir?’

‘Yes.’

The Sergeant nodded and unslung a canteen from his neck. ‘Here you are, sir. Brandy. Took it off a prisoner. Compliments of the 83rd.’

Sharpe took it, made his thanks, and the Sergeant let out a long, slow breath as he watched the Rifleman walk away. ‘You know who that was, lad?’

‘No, Sarge.’

‘Sharpe. That’s who that was. Lucky I was here.’

‘Lucky, Sarge?’