Sharpe's Battle Part 55

"Then go over to Wellington, General," Sharpe said, "and ask his Lordship's permission to lead the Real Compania Irlandesa into battle."

Runciman blanched. "You mean... ?" he began, but could not articulate the horror. He glanced down at the village that had been turned into a slaughterhouse. "You mean... ?" he began again and then his mouth fell slackly open at the very thought of going down into that smoking h.e.l.l.

"I'll ask if you don't," Sharpe said. "For Christ's sake, sir! Gallantry forgives everything! Gallantry means you're a hero. Gallantry gets you a wife.

Now for Christ's sake! Do it!" he shouted at Runciman as though the Colonel was a raw recruit.

Runciman looked startled. "You'll come with me, Sharpe?" He was as frightened of approaching Wellington as he was of going towards the enemy.

"Come on!" Sharpe snapped, and led a fl.u.s.tered Runciman towards the sombre knot of staff officers who surrounded Wellington. Hogan was there, watching anxiously as the tide of struggle in the village turned against the allies once again. The French were inching uphill, forcing the redcoats and the

Portuguese and the German infantry back out of the village, only this time there were no ranks of muskets waiting at the crest of the ridge to blast the enemy as they climbed the road and overran the churned-up graveyard.

Runciman hung back as the two men reached the staff officers, but Sharpe pushed his way through the horses and dragged the reluctant Colonel with him.

"Ask him," Sharpe said.

Wellington heard the words and frowned at the two men. Colonel Runciman hesitated, s.n.a.t.c.hed off his hat, tried to speak and only managed an incoherent stutter.

"General Runciman wants permission, my Lord-' Sharpe began coldly.

"-To take the Irish into battle." Runciman managed to complete the sentence in a barely coherent rush. "Please, my Lord!"

Some of the staff officers smiled at the thought of the Wagon Master General leading troops, but Wellington twisted in his saddle to see that the red- jacketed Real Compania Irlandesa had formed column. It looked a pathetically small unit, but it was there, formed, armed and evidently eager. There was no one else. The General looked at Sharpe and raised an eyebrow. Sharpe nodded.

"Carry on, Runciman," Wellington said.

"Come on, sir." Sharpe plucked the fat man's sleeve to pull him away from the

General.

"One moment!" The General's voice was frigid. "Captain Sharpe?"

Sharpe turned back. "My Lord?"

"The reason, Captain Sharpe, why we do not execute enemy prisoners, no matter how vile their behaviour, is that the enemy will reciprocate the favour on our men, no matter how small their provocation." The General looked at Sharpe with an eye as cold as a winter stream. "Do I make myself clear, Captain Sharpe."

"Yes, sir. My Lord."

Wellington gave a very small nod. "Go."

Sharpe dragged Runciman away. "Come on, sir!"

"What do I do, Sharpe?" Runciman asked. "For G.o.d's sake, what do I do? I'm not a fighter!"

"Stay at the back, sir," Sharpe said, "and leave everything else to me."

Sharpe sc.r.a.ped his long sword free. "Captain Donaju!"

"Captain Sharpe?" Donaju was pale.

"General Wellington requests," Sharpe shouted loudly enough for every man in the Real Compania Irlandesa to hear him, "that the King of Spain's bodyguard goes down to the village and kills every G.o.dd.a.m.n Frenchman it finds. And the

Connaught Rangers are down there, Captain, and they need a morsel of Irish help. Are you ready?"

Donaju drew his own sword. "Perhaps you would do the honour of taking us down,

Captain?"

Sharpe beckoned his riflemen into the ranks. There would be no skirmishers here, no delicate long-range killing, only a blood-soaked brawl in a G.o.dforsaken village on the edge of Spain where Sharpe's sworn enemy had come to turn defeat into victory. "Fix bayonets!" Sharpe called. For a second or two he was a.s.sailed with the strange thought that this was just how Lord Kiely had wanted his men to fight. His Lordship had simply wanted to throw his men into a suicidal battle, and this place was as good as any for that kind of gesture. No training could prepare a man for this battle. This was gutter fighting and it was either born into a man's bones or it was absent for ever.

"And forward!" Sharpe shouted. "At the double!" And he led the small unit up the road to the ridge's crest where the soil was torn by enemy roundshot, then over the skyline and down. Down into the smoke, the blood and the slaughter.

CHAPTER 11.

Bodies lay sprawled on the upper slope. Some were motionless, others still stirred slowly with the remnants of life. A Highlander vomited blood, then collapsed across a grave that had been so churned by sh.e.l.l and roundshot that the pelvic and wrist bones of a corpse lay among the soil. A French drummer boy sat beside the road with his hands clasped over his spilt guts. His drumsticks were still stuck in his crossbelt. He looked up mutely as Sharpe ran past, then began to cry. A greenjacket lay dead from one of the very first attacks. A bent French bayonet was stuck in his ribs just above a distended, blackened belly that was thick with flies. A sh.e.l.l cracked apart beside the body and sc.r.a.ps of its casing whistled past Sharpe's head. One of the guardsmen was. .h.i.t and fell, tripping two men behind him. Harper shouted at them to leave the man alone. "Keep running!" he called harshly. "Keep running!

Let the b.u.g.g.e.r look after himself! Come on!"

Halfway to the village the road curved sharply to the right. Sharpe left the road there, jumping down a small embankment into a patch of scrubland. He could see the Loup Brigade not far ahead. The grey infantry had plunged into the village from the north and were now threatening to cut the 88th into two parts. Loup's attack had first arrested the momentum of the British counterattack then reversed it, and to Sharpe's right he could see redcoats retreating out of the village to find shelter behind the remnants of the graveyard wall. A swarm of Frenchmen was pushing up from the village's lower houses, roused to one last brave effort by the example of Loup's brigade.

But Loup's brigade now had an enemy of its own, a small enemy, but one with something to prove. Sharpe led the Real Compania Irlandesa through the scrubland, over a tiny plot of parched beans, then he was leaping down another low embankment and running hard towards the flank of the nearest grey infantry battalion. "Kill them!" Sharpe shouted, "kill them!" It was a horrid, savage and appropriate battle cry for the Real Compania Irlandesa was outnumbered and unless they fell on the enemy with a hungry ferocity they would be repelled and broken. This fight would depend on savagery. "Kill the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds!" Sharpe screamed. Fear was huge inside him, making his voice harsh and desperate. His belly was sour with terror, but he had long learned that the enemy suffered just the same fear and that to yield to it was to invite disaster. The key to this fight's survival lay in closing on the enemy fast, in crossing the open s.p.a.ce where their muskets could kill and so getting his men hard into the enemy's ranks where the fight would degenerate into a street brawl.

And so he screamed his awful encouragement even as he wondered if his courage would fail and drive him to seek shelter behind one of the broken walls, but at the same time he was judging the enemy ahead. There was an alley crammed with enemy immediately in front of Sharpe, and to its left a low wall enclosing a garden. Some of Loup's men had crossed a fallen wall into the garden, but most were pushing through the alley towards the bigger fight raging in the village's centre. Sharpe headed for the alley. Frenchmen turned and called in warning. One man fired his musket to shroud the alley's entrance with white smoke, then Sharpe crashed into the rearmost grey ranks and slammed his sword forward. The relief of contact was enormous, releasing a terrible energy that he poured into the wickedly sharp sword blade. Men arrived either side of him with bayonets. They were screaming and stabbing, men in whom terror was similarly being turned into a barbaric frenzy. Other guardsmen had gone to clear the garden, while Donaju was fighting his way into another alley lower down the slope.

It was a gutter fight, and if for the first few moments Sharpe's men found it easier than they had expected that was because they had a.s.saulted the rearmost of Loup's ranks, the place where the men least enthusiastic about fighting like animals in narrow streets had taken refuge. Yet the longer Sharpe's men fought, the closer they came to Loup's best fighters and the harder the fight proved.

Sharpe saw a big moustached sergeant working his way back through the ranks and rallying the men as he came. The Sergeant was shouting, hitting men, forcing the cowardly to turn and use their bayonets on the new attackers, but then his head snapped back and was surrounded with a momentary red mist of blood droplets as a rifle bullet killed him. Hagman and Cooper had found a rooftop from which to serve as sharpshooters.

Sharpe stepped over bodies, hammered muskets aside, then stabbed with his sword. There was no room for slashing strokes, only a tight s.p.a.ce in which to jab and ram and twist the blade. The only leadership required of him now was to be seen fighting and the Real Compania Irlandesa followed him willingly. It was as if they had been let off a leash and they fought like fiends as they cleared first one alley and then the next. The French retreated from the bitter attack, looking for an easier place to defend. Donaju, his face and uniform spattered with blood, rejoined Sharpe in a small triangular plaza where the two alleys met. A dead Frenchman lay on a dungheap, another blocked a door. There were bodies shoved into the gutters, bodies piled inside houses and bodies heaped against walls. The piles of dead showed the battle's progression, with skirmishers from the first day covered with Frenchmen, then

Highlanders, then French grenadiers in their ma.s.sive bearskin hats beneath more redcoats and now Loup's grey uniforms made a new top layer. The stench of death was thick as fog. The ruts in the earthen road, where they showed between the corpses, were flooded with blood. The streets were glutted by death and choked with men seeking to glut them more.

Hagman and Cooper jumped from one broken roof to another. "b.a.s.t.a.r.ds to your left, sir!" Cooper called from his eyrie, indicating an alley that ran crookedly downhill from the small triangular plaza. The French had withdrawn far enough to give Sharpe's men a pause in which they could reload or else wrap dirty strips of cloth round slashed hands and arms. Some men drank from their h.o.a.rded rum issue. A few were wholly drunk, but they would fight all the better for it and Sharpe did not mind. "b.a.s.t.a.r.ds are coming, sir!" Cooper called in warning.

"Bayonets!" Sharpe called. "Now come on!" He drew out the last word as he led his men into the alley. It was scarcely six feet wide, no room to swing a sword. The first bend was just ten feet away and Sharpe reached it at the same time as a rush of Frenchmen. Sharpe felt a bayonet catch in his jacket, heard the cloth rip, then he was punching the iron hilt of his sword into a moustached face. He was fighting a grenadier who snarled through bleeding lips with yellow rotted teeth as he tried to kick Sharpe in the crotch. Sharpe hammered the sword down, but the blow was cushioned by the black greasy fur of the thick bearskin. The man's breath was fetid. The grenadier had let go of his musket and was trying to throttle Sharpe, but Sharpe seized the upper blade of his sword with his left hand, kept tight hold of the hilt with his right and rammed the blade hard into the Frenchman's throat. He pushed the grenadier's head back so far that he could see the whites of his eyes and still the man would not let go of his throat so Sharpe just slid the blade to his right, slid once and his world turned red as the sword sliced into the

Frenchman's jugular.

He clambered over the twitching body of the dying grenadier. Rum-crazed guardsmen were slashing with bayonets, hitting with musket stocks, kicking and screaming at an enemy who could not match this ferocity. Guardsman Rourke had broken his musket and had picked up a blackened roof beam instead and was now ramming the heavy timber forward at the Frenchmen's faces. The enemy began to edge backwards. An officer from Loup's brigade tried to rally them, but Hagman picked him off from a rooftop and the enemy's grudging retreat turned into a sudden rout. One Frenchman took refuge in a house where he lost his head by firing from a window on the advancing guardsmen. A rush of Irishmen stormed the house and killed every French fugitive inside.

"G.o.d save Ireland." Harper dropped down beside Sharpe. "Jesus, but it's hard work." He was breathing hoa.r.s.ely. "Christ, sir, have you seen yourself?

Drenched in blood, so you are."

"Not mine, Pat." Sharpe cuffed blood out of his eyes. He had reached the corner of a street which led into the village's heart. A dead French officer lay in the centre of the street, his mouth open and crawling with flies.