Sharpe’s rifles Read online

  Dunnett glanced up the hill at the cloud’s refuge. He stroked his small bristly moustache that was beaded with rain, then made his decision. “Uphill! Uphill! Keep ranks!”

  The square inched uphill. The wounded screamed as they were carried. French bullets still thumped home and the greenjacket formation became ragged as men stopped to return the fire or help the casualties. Their progress was desperately slow, too slow for Major Dunnett’s frayed nerves. “Break and run! Break and run!”

  “No!” The new Lieutenant shouted the countermand, but he was ignored. Dunnett’s order was given, and now it was a race. If the greenjackets could reach cover before the cavalry could reach them then they would live, but if the chasseur officer had judged his distance right, then he would win.

  The red-coated chasseur had judged very well indeed.

  The greenjackets ran, but over the sound of their hoarse breath and the pounding of their boots came the swelling thunder of the hooves.

  A man turned and saw the bared teeth of a horse. He heard a sword hissing above the sound of the trumpet. The Rifleman screamed.

  Then came chaos and slaughter.

  The horsemen split the greenjackets apart then wheeled to the killing. The great swords chopped and speared. The new Lieutenant had a glimpse of a man with pigtails swinging beneath his helmet’s rim. He twisted aside and felt the wind of the Dragoon’s sword on his face. Another horseman rode at him, but he swung his rifle by its muzzle to crack the horse over the mouth. The horse screamed, reared, and the Lieutenant ran on. He was shouting for men to close on him, but the greenjackets were scattered and running for their lives. The Battalion’s mule bolted eastwards and Cooper, stubbornly trying to save his belongings which were strapped to the beast’s panniers, was killed by a sword stroke.

  Major Dunnett was ridden down to the turf. A seventeen-year-old Lieutenant was caught by two Dragoons. The first blinded him with a slashing backstroke, the second stabbed into his chest. Still the horsemen came. Their horses stank with saddlesores because they had been ridden too hard, but they had been trained to this work. A Rifleman’s cheek Was flensed from his face and his mouth bubbled with blood and saliva. The French grunted as they hacked. This was a cavalryman’s paradise; broken infantry and firm ground.

  The new Lieutenant still shouted as he climbed. “Rifles! To me! To me! To me!” The chasseur must have heard him, for he turned his big black horse and spurred towards the Englishman.

  The Lieutenant saw him coming, slung his empty rifle, and drew his sabre. “Come on, you bastard!”

  The chasseur held his own sabre in his right hand and, to make his killing cut easy, directed his horse to the left of the Rifleman. The Lieutenant waited to swing his curved blade at the horse’s mouth. The cut would stop its charge dead, making it rear and twist away. He had seen off more horsemen than he could remember with such a stroke. The skill lay in the timing, and the Lieutenant hoped that the horse’s panicked evasion would shake the rider loose. He wanted that clever chasseur dead.

  A touch of the Frenchman’s spurs seemed to make the horse lunge forward for the killing stroke and the Lieutenant swung his sabre and saw he had been fooled. The horse checked and swerved in a manoeuvre which spoke of hours of patient training. The sabre hissed in empty space. The chasseur was not right-handed but left, and he had changed hands as his horse broke to the right. His blade glittered as it swept down, aimed at the Rifleman’s neck.

  The Lieutenant had been fooled. He had swung early and into nothing, and he was off balance. The chasseur, knowing this Englishman was dead, was planning his next kill even before his sabre stroke went home. He had killed more men than he could remember with this simple trick. Now he would add a Rifle officer to all the Austrians, Prussians, Russians, and Spaniards who had not been skilful enough.

  But the chasseur’s sabre did not cut home. With a speed that was astonishing, the Rifleman managed to recover his blade into the parry. The sabres met with a clash that jarred both men’s arms. The Lieutenant’s four-guinea blade shattered, but not before it had taken the force from the Frenchman’s slashing cut.

  The momentum of the chasseur’s horse took him past the Englishman. The Frenchman turned back, astonished by the parry, and saw him turning to run uphill. For a second he was tempted to follow, but there were other, easier, targets down the hill. He spurred away.

  The Lieutenant threw away his broken sabre and scrambled towards the low cloud. “Rifles! Rifles!” Men heard and closed on him. They scrambled uphill together and made a large enough group to deter the enemy. The Dragoons went for individuals, the men most easily killed, and they took pleasure in thus avenging all the horsemen who had been put down by rifle bullets, all the Frenchmen who had jerked and bled their lives away on the long pursuit, and all the jeers that the Riflemen had sent through the biting air in the last bitter weeks.

  Captain Murray joined the new Lieutenant. “Outfoxed us, by God!” He sounded surprised.

  The small group of Riflemen reached safety short of the clouds, up where the litter of rocks made the ground too uneven for the Dragoons to follow. There Murray stopped his men and stared, appalled, at the carnage beneath.

  The Dragoons rode among the dead and the defeated. Riflemen with slashed faces reeled among them, others lay motionless until grasping hands turned the dead bodies and began ripping at pouches and pockets. The Quartermaster watched as Major Dunnett was pulled to his feet and his uniform searched for plunder. Dunnett was lucky. He was alive and a prisoner. One Rifleman ran downhill, still trying to escape, and the man in the black coat and white boots rode after him and, with a chilling skill, chopped down once.

  “Bastards.” Murray, knowing there was no more fighting to do, sheathed his Heavy Cavalry sword. “God-damned bloody crapaud bastards!”

  Fifty Riflemen, survivors from all four companies, had been saved from the rout. Sergeant Williams was with them, as was Rifleman Harper. Some of the men were bleeding. A Sergeant was trying to staunch a terrible slash in his shoulder. A youngster was white-lipped and shaking. Murray and the new Lieutenant were the only officers to have escaped the massacre.

  “We’ll work our way east,” Murray said calmly. “Maybe we can reach the army after dark.”

  A morose swearword sounded from the big Irishman and the two officers glanced down the valley to see the British cavalry at last appear in the drizzle. The chasseur saw them at the same time, and the French trumpet called the Dragoons into order. The British, seeing the enemy’s preparedness, and finding no sign of infantry, withdrew.

  The Riflemen on the cloud’s edge jeered at their retreating cavalry. Murray whipped round. “Silence!”

  But the jeer had drawn the attention of the dismounted Dragoons on the slope below, and they believed the mocking sound had been aimed at them. Some of them seized carbines, others took up fallen rifles, and they fired a ragged volley at the small group of survivors.

  The bullets hissed and whiplashed past the greenjackets. The ragged volley missed, except for one fatal bullet that ricocheted from a rock into Captain Murray’s side. The force of the bullet spun him round and threw him face down onto the hillside. His left hand scrabbled at the thin turf while his right groped in the blood at his waist.

  “Go on! Leave me!” His voice was scarcely more than a whisper.

  Rifleman Harper jumped down the slope and plucked Murray into his huge arms. The Captain sighed a terrible moan of pain as he was lifted. Below him the French were scrambling uphill, eager to complete their victory by taking these last Riflemen prisoner.

  “Follow me!” The Lieutenant led the small group into the clouds. The French fired again, and the bullets flickered past, but the Riflemen were lost in the whiteness now. For the moment, at least, they were safe.

  The Lieutenant found a hollow among the rocks that offered some shelter from the cold. The wounded were laid there while picquets were set to guard its perimeter. Murray had gone as white as cartridge paper. “I didn’t thin
k they could beat us, Dick.”

  “I don’t understand where they came from.” The Lieutenant’s scarred face, Murray thought, made him look like an execution. “They didn’t get past us. They couldn’t!”

  “They must have done.” Murray sighed, then gestured to Rifleman Harper who, with a gentleness that seemed odd in a man so big, first unstrapped the Captain’s sword belt, then unpeeled his clothes from the wound. It was clear that Harper knew his business, and so the Lieutenant went to peer down the fogged hillside for a sight of the enemy. He could neither see nor hear anything. The Dragoons evidently thought the band of survivors too small to worry about. The fifty Riflemen had become the flotsam of war, mere splinters hacked from a sinking endeavour, and if the French had known that the fugitives were led by a Quartermaster, they might have been even more contemptuous.

  But the Quartermaster had first fought the French fifteen years before, and he had been fighting ever since. The stranded Riflemen might call him the new Lieutenant, and they might invest the word ‘new’ with all the scorn of old soldiers, but that was because they did not know their man. They thought of him as nothing more than a jumped-up Sergeant, and they were wrong. He was a soldier, and his name was Richard Sharpe.

  Chapter 2

  In the night, Lieutenant Sharpe took a patrol westwards along the high crest. He had hoped to determine whether the French held the place where the road crossed the ridge, but in the freezing darkness and among the jumble of rocks, he lost his bearings and grudgingly went back to the hollow where the Riflemen sheltered.

  The cloud lifted before dawn, letting the first wan light reveal the main body of the French pursuit in the valley which lay to the south. The enemy cavalry was already gone to the west, and Sharpe stared down at Marshal Soult’s infantry which marched in dogged pursuit of Sir John Moore’s army.

  “We’re bloody cut off.” Sergeant Williams offered his pessimistic assessment to Sharpe who, instead of replying, went to squat beside the wounded men. Captain Murray slept fitfully, shivering beneath a half-dozen greatcoats. The Sergeant who had been slashed across the neck and shoulders had died in the night. Sharpe covered the man’s face with a shako.

  “He’s a jumped-up bit of nothing.” Williams stared malevolently at Lieutenant Sharpe’s back. “He ain’t an officer, Harps. Not a real one.”

  Rifleman Harper was sharpening his sword-bayonet, doing the job with the obsessive concentration of a man who knows his life depends on his weapons.

  “Not a proper officer,” Williams went on. “Not a gentleman. Just a jumped-up Sergeant, isn’t he?”

  “That’s all.” Harper looked at the Lieutenant, seeing the scars on the officer’s face and the hard line of his jaw.

  “If he thinks he’s giving me orders, he’s a bugger. He ain’t no better than I am, is he?”

  Harper’s reply was a grunt, and not the agreement which would have given the Sergeant the encouragement he wanted. Williams waited for Harper’s support, but the Irishman merely squinted along the edge of his bayonet, then carefully sheathed the long blade.

  Williams spat. “Put a bloody sash and sword on them and they think they’re God Almighty. He’s not a real Rifle, just a bloody Quartermaster, Harps!”

  “Nothing else,” Harper agreed.

  “Bloody jumped-up storekeeper, ain’t he?”

  Sharpe turned quickly and Williams, even though it was impossible, felt that he had been overheard. The Lieutenant’s eyes were hard as flint. “Sergeant Williams!”

  “Sir.” Williams, despite his assertion of disobedience, stepped dutifully towards Lieutenant Sharpe.

  “Shelter.” Sharpe pointed down into the northern valley where, far beneath them and slowly being revealed by a shredding mist, a stone farmstead could be seen. “Get the wounded down there.”

  Williams hissed a dubious breath between yellowed teeth. “I dunno as how they should be moved, sir. The Captain’s…“

  “I said get the wounded down there, Sergeant.” Sharpe had stepped away, but now turned back. “I didn’t ask for a debate on the God-damned matter. Move.”

  It took the best part of the morning, but they succeeded in carrying the wounded down to the derelict farm. The dryest building was a stone barn, built on rock pillars that were meant to keep vermin at bay, and with a roof surmounted by crosses so that, from a distance, it looked like a small crude church. The ruined house and byres yielded damp and fungus-ridden timbers that, split and shredded with cartridge Powder, were coaxed into a fire that slowly warmed the wounded men. Rifleman Hagman, a toothless, middle-aged Cheshire man, went to hunt for food, while the Lieutenant put picquets on the goat tracks that led east and west.

  “Captain Murray’s in a poorly way, sir.” Sergeant Williams cornered Sharpe when the Lieutenant returned to the barn. “He needs a surgeon, sir.”

  “Hardly possible, is it?”

  “Unless we… that is…“ The Sergeant, a squat, red-faced man, could not say what was in his mind.

  “Unless we surrender to the French?” Sharpe asked acidly.

  Williams looked into the Lieutenant’s eyes. They were curious eyes, almost reptilian in their present coldness. The Sergeant found a truculence to brace his argument. “At least the crapauds have got surgeons, sir.”

  “In one hour,” Sharpe’s voice implied that he had not even heard Williams’s words, Til inspect every man’s rifle. Make sure they’re ready.“

  Williams stared belligerently at the officer, but could not summon the courage necessary for disobedience. He nodded curtly and turned away.

  Captain Murray was propped against a pile of packs inside the barn. He offered Sharpe a feeble smile. “What will you do?”

  “Sergeant Williams thinks I should take you to a French surgeon.”

  Murray grimaced. “I asked what you wanted to do.”

  Sharpe sat beside the Captain. “Rejoin.”

  Murray nodded. He was cradling a mug of tea, a precious gift from one of the Riflemen who had hoarded the leaves in the bottom of his ammunition pouch. “You can leave me here.”

  “I can’t…“

  “I’m dying.” Murray made a deprecatory shrug to show that he wanted no sympathy. His wound was not bleeding overmuch, but the Captain’s belly was swelling blue to show that there was bleeding inside. He nodded towards the other three badly wounded men, all of them with great sword cuts on their faces or chests. “Leave them too. Where will you go? The coast?”

  Sharpe shook his head. “We’ll never catch the army now.”

  “Probably not.” Murray closed his eyes.

  Sharpe waited. It had started to rain again and a leak in the stone roof dripped insistently into the fire. He was thinking of his options. The most inviting choice was to attempt to follow Sir John Moore’s army, but they were retreating so fast, and the French now controlled the road that Sharpe must take, and thus he knew he must resist that temptation for it would only lead into captivity. Instead he must go south. Sir John had marched from Lisbon, and a few troops had been left to protect the Portuguese capital, and perhaps that garrison still existed and Sharpe could find it. “How far is Lisbon?” he asked Murray.

  The Captain opened his eyes and shrugged. “God knows. Four? Five hundred miles?” He flinched from a stab of pain. “It’s probably nearer six hundred on these roads. D’you think we’ve still got troops there?”

  “We can at least find a ship.”

  “If the French don’t get there first. What about Vigo?”

  “The French are more likely to be there than Lisbon.”

  “True.” The Light Division had been sent to Vigo on a more southerly road. Only a few light troops, like these Riflemen, had been retained to protect Sir John Moore’s retreat. “Maybe Lisbon would be best.” Murray looked past Sharpe and saw how the men were brushing and oiling their rifle locks. He sighed. “Don’t be too hard on them.”

  “I’m not.” Sharpe was instantly defensive.

  Murray’s face flicke
red with a smile. “Were you ever commanded by an officer from the ranks?”

  Sharpe, smelling criticism, bridled for an instant, then realized that Murray was trying to be helpful. “No, sir, never.”

  “The men don’t like it. Stupid, really. They believe officers are born, not made.” Murray paused to take a breath that made him shudder with pain. He saw Sharpe about to enjoin him to silence, but shook his head. “I haven’t got much time. I might as well use what there is. Do you think I’m being damnably rude?”

  “No, sir.”

  Murray paused to sip at his tea. “They’re good lads.”

  “Yes.”

  “But they have an odd sense of what’s proper. They expect officers to be different, you see. They want them to be privileged. Officers are men who choose to fight, they aren’t forced to it by poverty. Do you understand that?”

  “Yes.”

  “They think you’re really one of them; one of the damned, and they want their officers to be touched by something more than that.” Murray shook his head sadly. “It isn’t very good advice, is it?”

  “It’s very good,” Sharpe lied.

  The wind sighed at the corners of the stone barn and flickered the flames of the small fire. Murray smiled sadly. “Let me think of some more practical advice for you. Something that will get you to Lisbon.” He frowned for an instant, then turned his red-rimmed eyes to Sharpe. “Get Patrick Harper on your side.”

  Sharpe turned to glance at the men who were crowded at the barn’s far end. The big Irishman seemed to sense that his name had been mentioned for he offered Sharpe a hostile glance.

  “He’s a troublemaker, but the men listen to him. I tried to make him a Chosen Man once,” Murray instinctively used the Rifle’s old term for a Corporal, “but he wouldn’t have it. He’d make a good Sergeant. Hell! Even a good officer if he could read, but he won’t have any of it. But the men listen to him. He’s got Sergeant Williams under his thumb.”