Sharpe's Battle Part 12

Irishmen who must have been feeling all kinds of confusion at being attached to the British army. They had volunteered for the Real Compania Irlandesa to protect a Most Catholic King, yet here they were being harried by the army of a Protestant monarch. Worse still, many of them would be avid Irish patriots, fierce for their country as only exiles can be, yet now they were being asked to fight alongside the ranks of that country's foreign oppressors. Yet, as

Sharpe walked down the rank, he sensed more nervousness than anger and he wondered if these men were simply fearful of being asked to become proper soldiers for, if their muskets were any indication, the Real Compania

Irlandesa had long abandoned any pretensions to soldiering. Their muskets were a disgrace. The men carried the serviceable and st.u.r.dy Spanish-issue musket with its straight-backed hammer; however these guns were anything but serviceable, for there was rust on the locks and fouling caked inside the barrels. Some of them had no flints, others had no leather flint-seatings, while one gun did not even have the doghead screw to hold the flint in place.

"Did you ever fire this musket, son?" Sharpe asked the soldier.

"No, sir."

"Have you ever fired a musket, son?"

The boy looked nervously towards his own sergeant. "Answer the officer, lad!"

Harper growled.

"Once, sir. One day," the soldier said. "Just the once."

"If you wanted to kill someone with this gun, son, you'd have to beat them over the head with it. Mind you"-Sharpe pushed the musket back into the soldier's hands - "you look big enough for that."

"What's your name, soldier?" Harper asked him.

"Rourke, sir."

"Don't call me "sir". I'm a sergeant. Where are you from?"

"My da's from Galway, Sergeant."

"And I'm from Tangaveane in County Donegal and I'm ashamed, boy, ashamed, that a fellow Irishman can't keep a gun in half decent order. Jesus, boy, you couldn't shoot a Frenchman with that thing, let alone an Englishman." Harper unslung his own rifle and held it under Rourke's nose. "Look at that, boy!

Clean enough to pick the dirt out of King George's nose. That's how a gun should look! 'ware right, sir." Harper added the last three words under his breath.

Sharpe turned to see two hors.e.m.e.n galloping across the waste ground towards him. The horses' hooves spurted dust. The leading horse was a fine black stallion being ridden by an officer who was wearing the gorgeous uniform of the Real Compania Irlandesa and whose coat, saddlecloth, hat and trappings fairly dripped with gold ta.s.sels, fringes and loops. The second horseman was equally splendidly uniformed and mounted, while behind them a small group of other riders curbed their horses when Hogan intercepted them. The Irish Major, still on foot, hurried after the two leading hors.e.m.e.n, but was too late to stop them from reaching Sharpe. "What the h.e.l.l are you doing?" the first man asked as he reined in above Sharpe. He had a thin, tanned face with a moustache trained and greased into fine points. Sharpe guessed the man was still in his twenties, but despite his youth he possessed a sour and ravaged face that had all the effortless superiority of a creature born to high office.

"I'm making an inspection," Sharpe answered coldly.

The second man reined in on Sharpe's other side. He was older than his companion and was wearing the bright-yellow coat and breeches of a Spanish dragoon, though the uniform was so crusted with looped chains and gold frogging that Sharpe a.s.sumed the man had to be at least a general. His thin, moustached face had the same imperious air as his companion's. "Haven't you learned to ask a commanding officer's permission before inspecting his men?" he asked with a distinct Spanish accent, then snapped an order in Spanish to his younger companion.

"Sergeant Major Noonan," the younger man shouted, evidently relaying the older man's command, "close order, now!"

The Real Compania Irlandesa's Sergeant Major obediently marched the men back into close order just as Hogan reached Sharpe's side. "There you are, my

Lords"-Hogan was addressing both hors.e.m.e.n - "and how was your Lordships' luncheon?"

"It was s.h.i.t, Hogan. I wouldn't feed it to a hound," the younger man, whom

Sharpe a.s.sumed was Lord Kiely, said in a brittle voice that dripped with aloofness but was also touched by the faint slur of alcohol. His Lordship,

Sharpe decided, had drunk well at lunch, well enough to loosen whatever inhibitions he might have possessed. "You know this creature, Hogan?" His

Lordship now waved towards Sharpe.

"Indeed I do, my Lord. Allow me to name Captain Richard Sharpe of the South

Ess.e.x, the man Wellington himself chose to be your tactical adviser. And

Richard? I have the honour to present the Earl of Kiely, Colonel of the Real

Compania Irlandesa."

Kiely looked grimly at the tattered rifleman. "So you're supposed to be our drillmaster?" He sounded dubious.

"I give lessons in killing too, my Lord," Sharpe said.

The older Spaniard in the yellow uniform scoffed at Sharpe's claim. "These men don't need lessons in killing," he said in his accented English. "They're soldiers of Spain and they know how to kill. They need lessons in dying."

Hogan interrupted. "Allow me to name His Excellency Don Luis Valverde," he said to Sharpe. "The General is Spain's most valued representative to our army." Hogan gave Sharpe a wink that neither horseman could see.

"Lessons in dying, my Lord?" Sharpe asked the General, puzzled by the man's statement and wondering whether it sprang from an incomplete mastery of

English.

For answer the yellow-uniformed General touched his horse's flanks with the tips of his spurs to make the animal walk obediently along the line of the

Real Compania Irlandesa's front rank and, superbly oblivious of whether Sharpe was following him or not, lectured the rifleman from his saddle. "These men are going to war, Captain Sharpe," General Valverde said in a voice loud enough for a good portion of the guard to hear him. "They are going to fight for Spain, for King Ferdinand and Saint James, and fighting means standing tall and straight in front of your enemy. Fighting means staring your enemy in the eye while he shoots at you, and the side that wins, Captain Sharpe, is the side that stands tallest, straightest and longest. So you don't teach men how to kill or how to fight, but rather how to stand still while all h.e.l.l comes at them. That's what you teach them, Captain Sharpe. Teach them drill. Teach them obedience. Teach them to stand longer than the French. Teach them"-the General at last twisted in his saddle to look down on the rifleman-"to die."

"I'd rather teach them to shoot," Sharpe said.

The General scoffed at the remark. "Of course they can shoot," he said.

"They're soldiers!"

"They can shoot with those muskets?" Sharpe asked derisively.

Valverde stared down at Sharpe with a look of pity on his face. "For the last two years, Captain Sharpe, these men have stayed at their post of duty on the sufferance of the French." Valverde spoke in the tone he might have used to a small and unintelligent child. "Do you really think they would have been allowed to stay there if they had posed a threat to Bonaparte? The more their weapons decayed, the more the French trusted them, but now they are here and you can provide them with new weapons."

"To do what with?" Sharpe asked. "To stand and die like bullocks?"

"So how would you like them to fight?" Lord Kiely had followed the two men and asked the question from behind Sharpe.

"Like my men, my Lord," Sharpe said, "smartly. And you begin fighting smartly by killing the enemy officers." Sharpe raised his voice so that the whole of the Real Compania Irlandesa could hear him. "You don't go into battle to stand and die like bullocks in a slaughteryard, you go to win, and you begin to win when you drop the enemy officers dead." Sharpe had walked away from Kiely and

Valverde now and was using the voice he had developed as a sergeant, a voice pitched to cut across windy parade grounds and through the deadly clamour of battlefields. "You start by looking for the enemy officers. They're easy to recognize because they're the overpaid, overdressed b.a.s.t.a.r.ds with swords and you aim for them first. Kill them any way you can. Shoot them, club them, bayonet them, strangle them if you must, but kill the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds and after that you kill the sergeants and then you can begin murdering the rest of the poor leaderless b.a.s.t.a.r.ds. Isn't that right, Sergeant Harper?"

"That's the way of it, sure enough," Harper called back.

"And how many officers have you killed in battle, Sergeant?" Sharpe asked, without looking at the rifle Sergeant.

"More than I can number, sir."