Sharpe's Christmas Read online

  Gudin did not bother to reply, but just kicked his horse towards the gate. He felt an immense sadness. Caillou was right, he thought, he was a failure. It had all begun in India, thirteen years before, when he had been a military adviser to the Tippoo Sultan, ruler of Mysore, and Gudin had held such high hopes that, with French help and advice, the Tippoo could defeat the British in southern India, but instead the British had won. The Tippoo’s capital, Seringapatam, had fallen, and Gudin had been a prisoner for a year until he was exchanged for a British officer held prisoner by the French. He had returned to France then and thought that his career would revive, but instead it had been one long failure. He had not received one promotion in all those years, but had gone from one misfortune to the next until now he was the commander of a useless fort in a bleak landscape where France was losing a war. And if he could escape successfully? That would be a victory, especially if he could take Caillou’s precious Eagle safe across the Pyrenees, but he doubted that even an Eagle was worth the life of so many women and children. And that, he knew all too well, was his handicap. The Emperor would sacrifice a hundred thousand women and children to preserve the glory of France, but Gudin could not do it. He reached the fort’s gate and nodded to the Sergeant of the guard. “You can open up,” he said, “and once we’ve left, Sergeant, light the fuses.”

  “The women, sir?” the Sergeant asked anxiously. “They are coming?”

  “They’re coming, Pierre. I promised, didn’t I?”

  The dragoons left first. It was dusk. Gudin planned to march all night in the hope that by dawn he would have left any partisans far behind. Until now he had hardly been aware of the fearsome Spanish guerilleros, but those savage men had few French enemies left in Spain and they were now closing on the remaining enemy fortresses like vultures scenting death. Gudin had spread a rumour that he intended to march his garrison to join the beleaguered French troops in the fortress city of Pamplona and he hoped that might keep the partisans away from the roads that led northwards, but he doubted the rumour would work. His best hope lay in marching at night, and God help any of his men or women who could not keep up for they would face a terrible, slow death. Some would be burned alive, some flayed, some … but no, it did not bear thinking about. It was not war as Gudin understood it, it was mere butchery, and what galled Gudin most was that the guerilleros were only doing to the French what the French had done to the Spaniards.

  The infantry marched through the gate behind their precious Eagle. The women followed. Gudin stayed as the sergeant lit the fuses, then he spurred away from his doomed fort. He paused a half mile up the road and turned to watch as the fire in the fuses burned towards the deep charges set in the fort’s magazines. He waited, wondering if the fuses had extinguished themselves, staring at the small fort that had been his home for so long, and then the night blossomed red, and a moment later the sound of the explosions punched through the damp darkness. Flame and smoke boiled above the fort’s ramparts as the heavy guns were tumbled from their emplacements. Scraps, trailing sparks like comets, arced across the glacis to start small fires in the winter grass, and then there was just silence and flame. Ochagavia had been gutted. Another failure, Gudin thought, watching the great fire rage.

  “If my Eagle is lost,” Colonel Caillou had ridden back to join Gudin and was still furious that the women had been allowed to join the column, “I shall blame you, Gudin.”

  “So pray that the British have not blocked the road,” Gudin answered. The fort was a dark mass of stone now in which the fire glowed bloody red.

  “It’s partisans I worry about, not the British,” Caillou sneered. “If the British are on the road, then General Picard will come from behind and they will be squeezed to death.”

  For that was the plan. General Picard was marching south from St Jean Pied-de-Port. He would climb the French side of the Pyrenees to make sure that the frontier pass was open for Gudin’s men and all Gudin needed to do was survive the forty kilometres of tortuous winter road that twisted up from Ochagavia to the pass where General Picard waited.

  At a place of misery in the mountains, a place called Irati.

  “It’s not such a bad place,” Sharpe said, and it was true that in the fading evening light Irati had a certain picturesque quality. It was a village of small stone houses, little more than huts, with stone roofs on which moss grew. The houses lay in a sheltered valley at the junction of two high streams and were clustered about a small church and a big tavern, the Casa Alta, that provided shelter for any folks travelling the high pass. “Can’t see why anyone would want to live here, though,” Sharpe added.

  “They’re mostly shepherds,” Captain Peter d’Alembord said.

  “Shepherds, eh?” Sharpe said, “that’s fitting for Christmas, isn’t it? I seem to recollect something about shepherds. Shepherds and wise men, isn’t that right?”

  “Quite right, sir,” d’Alembord said. He could never quite get used to the idea that Sharpe had received no education at all other than being taught to read while he was a prisoner in India and what he had picked up over his years in the army.

  “A fellow used to read the Christmas story to us in the foundling home,” Sharpe remembered. “A big fat parson, he was, with funny whiskers. Looked a bit like that Sergeant who caught a bellyful of canister at Salamanca. We had to sit and listen, and if we yawned the bugger used to jump off the platform and clout us round the face with the holy book. One minute it was all peace on earth, and the next you were flying across the floor with a thick ear.”

  “But at least you learned your Bible stories,” d’Alembord said.

  “I learned how to thieve,” Sharpe said cheerfully, “and how to slit a throat and cut a purse. Useful lessons, Dally. As for the Bible stories, I learned most of those in India. I worked with a Scottish Colonel who was a Bible thumper.” Sharpe smiled at the memory. He was walking north, climbing the road that led from Irati towards the nearby French frontier. He had already found a place south of the village where his batallion could stop the escaping garrison and now he wanted to be certain that no Frogs were lurking in his rear.

  “You liked India?” d’Alembord asked.

  “It was a bit hot,” Sharpe said, “and the food could turn you inside out quicker than a musket ball, but yes, I liked it. I served under the best colonel I ever had in India.”

  “The Scotsman?” d’Alembord asked.

  “Not McCandless, no.” Sharpe laughed. “He was a good fellow, McCandless, but a bit fussy, and his Bible thumping was a bloody bore. No, this man was a Crapaud. It’s a long story, Dally, and I don’t want to bore you, but I served with the enemy for a bit in India. On purpose, it was.”

  “On purpose?” d’Alembord sounded surprised.

  “All official,” Sharpe said, “and I ended up serving a fellow called Colonel Gudin. He was very good to me, Colonel Gudin. He even wanted me to go back to France with him, and I can’t say I wasn’t tempted.”

  “Truly?”

  “Gudin was a nice fellow,” Sharpe said, “but it was all a long time ago, Dally, a very long time ago,” and those words signalled that he would say no more of it. D’Alembord wished Sharpe would tell the whole story of Colonel Gudin, but he knew it was hopeless trying to get reminiscences out of Major Sharpe once he had declared it was all a long time ago. D’Alembord had seen men try to learn how Sharpe had taken the French Eagle at Talavera, but Sharpe would just shrug and say that anyone could have done it, it was just luck really, he had just happened to be there and the thing was looking for a new owner. Like hell, d’Alembord thought. Sharpe was quite simply the best soldier he had ever known or ever would know.

  Sharpe stopped at the head of the pass and pulled a telescope from a pocket of his green jacket. The telescope’s outer barrel had an ivory cover and an inscribed gold plate that read, in French, “To Joseph, King of Spain and the Indies, from his brother, Napoleon, Emperor of France.” Another story that Sharpe would not tell. Now he trained the expensiv
e glass northwards to search the misted slopes across the border. He saw rocks, stunted trees and the glint of a cold stream tumbling from a high place, and beyond the stream a fading succession of mountain peaks. A chill, damp and hard land, he thought, and no place to send soldiers at Christmastime. “Not a Frog to be seen,” Sharpe said happily and was about to lower the glass when he saw a movement in a cleft of rock on a distant slope. The road ran through the cleft and he held his breath as he stared at the narrow gap.

  “What is it?” d’Alembord asked.

  Sharpe did not answer. He just gazed at the split in the grey stone from which an army was suddenly appearing. At least it looked like an army. Rank after rank of infantry trudging northwards in dun grey coats. And they were coming from France. He handed the telescope to d’Alembord. “Tell me what you see, Dally.”

  D’Alembord aimed the glass, then swore quietly. “I’d guess a whole brigade, sir.”

  “Coming from the wrong direction, too,” Sharpe said. Without the telescope he could not see the distant enemy, but he could guess what they were about. The garrison would be escaping on this road, and the French brigade had been sent to make sure the frontier was open for them. “They’ll not make it this far tonight,” Sharpe said. The sun had already sunk beneath the western peaks and the night shadows were stretching fast.

  “But they’ll be here tomorrow,” d’Alembord said nervously.

  “Aye, tomorrow. Christmas Eve,” Sharpe said.

  “An awful lot of them,” d’Alembord said.

  “That’s true.” Sharpe took back the glass and stared at the approaching French. “No artillery,” he said, “no cavalry. Just infantry.” He watched through the fading light until he was satisfied that there were no cavalry or cannons approaching. “Puncheons, Dally,” he said, “that’s what we need. Puncheons.”

  “Puncheons, sir?” d’Alembord gazed at Sharpe as though the major had gone mad.

  “That tavern in Irati, Dally, has to be full of barrels. I want them here tonight, all of them.”

  Because tomorrow there would be an enemy behind, an enemy in front, a road to hold and a battle to win. At Christmastime.

  General Maximilien Picard was a disgruntled man. His brigade was late. He had expected to be at Irati by midday, but his men had marched like a herd of spavined goats and by nightfall they still had one steep-sided valley to cross and another precipitous hill to climb, and so he was forced to bivouac a half-day’s march from his destination. The camp was a deep, damp valley, bleak as hell, and he could see that his troops were miserable and that pleased the General. Most of his men were conscripts who needed to be toughened and a night among the cold rocks would help scour the mother’s milk from their gullets.

  The only fuel for fires was a few stunted trees in the hollows where the winter’s first snow lay drifted, but most of the conscripts had no idea how to light a fire from damp, tough wood and so they just suffered. Their only food was the rings of hard-baked bread they carried on strings about their necks, but at least the stream offered plenty of clean cold water. “Another fortnight,” Picard said, “and it’ll be frozen.”

  “As bad as Russia,” Major Santon, his chief of staff, commented.

  “Nothing was as bad as Russia,” Picard said, though in truth the General had rather enjoyed the Russian campaign. He was among the few men who had done well there, but Picard was a man accustomed to success. Not like Colonel Gudin, whose garrison he now marched to rescue. “He’s a useless piece of gristle, Gudin,” Picard said.

  “I’ve never met him,” Santon said.

  “Let’s hope you meet him tomorrow, but knowing Gudin he’ll mess things up.” Picard leaned close to the fire to light his pipe and the flames showed the hard lines on his tanned skin. He sucked smoke, then leaned back. “I knew Gudin way back. He promised well then, but ever since India?” Picard shrugged. “He’s unlucky, that’s what Gudin is, unlucky, and you know what the Emperor says about luck. It’s the only thing a soldier needs, luck.”

  “Luck can turn,” Santon observed.

  “Not for Gudin,” Picard said. “The man’s doomed. He means well, he knows his business, but fate doesn’t like him. If the 75th hadn’t taken refuge with him, we’d have left him to rot in Spain.”

  Santon looked towards the dark southern heights that marked the frontier. “Let’s hope the British aren’t waiting for him up there.”

  Picard sneered. “Let’s hope they are! What will they send? One batallion? Two? You think we can’t blast our way through a pair of God-damned batallions?” The thought of fighting made him smile. “We’ll put our grenadiers up front and let them shoot some rosbifs for breakfast.”

  “Conscript grenadiers,” Santon observed quietly.

  Picard growled and looked sour, but Santon was right, of course. You could dress a man in uniform, but that did not make him a soldier, and Picard’s men were young, frightened and inexperienced. These were not like the soldiers he had marched into Russia. Those had been real men, hard as iron, but not hard enough for a Russian winter. “The British won’t bother us,” he said dismissively, “we’ll find Irati empty. What’s there?”

  “Nothing,” Santon said, “a few shepherds.”

  “So it’s mutton and shepherd girls for Christmas,” Picard said, “a last taste of Spain, eh?” The General smiled in anticipation. Irati might be a miserable hovel on the frontier, but it was an enemy hovel and that meant plunder. And Picard still rather hoped there would be a few rosbifs guarding the small village, for he reckoned his conscripts needed a fight. Most were too young to shave and they needed a taste of blood before Wellington’s army spilled across the Pyrenees into the fields of France. Give a young soldier the taste of victory, Picard reckoned, and it gave him a hunger for more. That was the trouble with Colonel Gudin, he had become used to defeat, but Picard was a winner. He was a short man, like the Emperor, and just as ruthless; a soldier of France who had led a brigade through the slaughter-snows of Russia and left a trail of dead Cossacks to mark his passing, and in the morning, if any rosbifs dared oppose him, he would show them how a veteran of the Russian campaign made war. He would give them a Christmas to remember, a Christmas of blood in a high hard place, for he was General Maximilien Picard, and he did not lose.

  “Doesn’t seem right, somehow,” Sharpe said, “fighting at Christmas.”

  “Tomorrow’s Christmas, sir,” Harper said, as if that made today’s fight more acceptable.

  “If we do fight today,” Sharpe said, “keep an eye on young Nicholls. I don’t want to lose another Ensign.”

  “He seems a nice enough wee lad,” Harper said, “and I’ll make sure he gets home to his mother.”

  Ensign Nicholls was now standing at the centre of Sharpe’s line beneath the regiment’s twin colours. The Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers were fifty paces back from the frontier that was marked only by a cairn of stones and just far enough back so that any Frenchman coming from the south could not see them beyond the crest. Behind them, on the Spanish side of the frontier, the pass descended gently towards the village, while in front of the batallion the slope fell steeply away. The road zig-zagged up that slope and the enemy brigade would have a foul time climbing into Sharpe’s muskets. “It’ll be like shooting rats in a pit,” Harper said happily, and so it would, but the enemy brigade could still be a nuisance. Its very presence meant Sharpe had to keep his batallion on the frontier, leaving only a picquet to guard the road south of the village where he expected to see the escaping French garrison. Captain Smith commanded that picquet and he would give Sharpe warning if that garrison came into sight, but what would Sharpe do then? If he marched his men south then the French brigade would climb the slope and take him in the rear, while if he stayed on this high crest the garrison troops would appear in the valley behind him. Either way he would be caught between two larger forces and he just had to hope that the garrison did not come today.

  There was still no sign of the French who had ca
mped in the deep valley beyond the frontier. They would be bitterly cold by now. Cold and frightened and damp and unhappy, while Sharpe’s men were as comfortable as they could be in this miserable place. All his batallion, except the sentries, had spent the night inside Irati’s fire-warmed houses where they had made a decent breakfast from twice-baked bread, sour salt beef and strong tea.

  Sharpe stamped his feet and blew on his cold hands. When would the French come? He was not really in any hurry, for the longer they delayed, the more hope he had of keeping them out of the village all day, but he had a soldier’s impatience to get the grim business done. Grim, at least, for the French, for Sharpe had set them a trap on the road.

  That road twisted down from the frontier into a small hanging combe that overlooked the deeper valley where the French had spent their uncomfortable night and in that higher valley, which the dawn now touched with a grey damp light, there were twenty-one big wine puncheons. The barrels were arranged in seven groups of three, and each group blocked the narrow track up which the French must come.

  There were twenty-one barrels and above them, hidden among the rocks, were the sixteen riflemen who, like Sharpe, were now enrolled in the Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers. The French hated riflemen. They did not use the rifle themselves, reckoning that it took too long to load, but Sharpe loved the weapon. It might be slow in battle, but it could kill at five times the range of a smoothbore musket and he had more than once seen a handful of riflemen turn a battle’s fate. Sergeant Major Harper was commanding the riflemen in the lower valley and Sharpe knew they would fight with terrible skill.