Sharpe’s Havoc: The Northern Portugal Campaign, Spring 1809

The Portuguese soldiers had kept pace with Sharpe’s riflemen and their officer, who had tried to talk to Sharpe before, now approached again. He was very young and very slender and very tall and wearing what looked like a brand-new uniform. His officer’s sword hung from a white shoulder sash edged with silver piping and at his belt was a holstered pistol that looked so clean Sharpe suspected it had never been fired. He was good-looking except for a black moustache that was too thin, and something about his demeanour suggested he was a gentleman, and a decent one at that, for his dark and intelligent eyes were oddly mournful, but perhaps that was no surprise for he had just seen Oporto fall to invaders. He bowed to Sharpe. ‘Senhor?’

‘I don’t speak Portuguese,’ Sharpe said.

‘I am Lieutenant Vicente,’ the officer said in good English. His dark-blue uniform had white piping at its hems and was decorated with silver buttons and red cuffs and a high red collar. He wore a barretina, a shako with a false front that added six inches to his already considerable height. The number 18 was emblazoned on the barretina’s brass front plate. He was out of breath and sweat was glistening on his face, but he was determined to remember his manners. ‘I congratulate you, senhor.’

‘Congratulate me?’ Sharpe did not understand.

‘I watched you, senhor, on the road beneath the seminary. I thought you must surrender, but instead you attacked. It was’ – Vicente paused, frowning as he searched for the right word – ‘it was great bravery,’ he went on and then embarrassed Sharpe by removing the barretina and bowing again, ‘and I brought my men to attack the French because your bravery deserved it.’

‘I wasn’t being brave,’ Sharpe said, ‘just bloody stupid.’

‘You were brave,’ Vicente insisted, ‘and we salute you.’ He looked for a moment as though he planned to step smartly back, draw his sword and whip the blade up into a formal salute, but Sharpe managed to head off the flourish with a question about Vicente’s men. ‘There are thirty-seven of us, senhor,’ the young Portuguese answered gravely, ‘and we are from the eighteenth regiment, the second of Porto.’ He gave Oporto its proper Portuguese name. The regiment, he said, had been defending the makeshift palisades on the city’s northern edge and had retreated towards the bridge where it had dissolved into panic. Vicente had gone eastwards in the company of these thirty-seven men, only ten of whom were from his own company. ‘There were more of us,’ he confessed, ‘many more, but most kept running. One of my sergeants said I was a fool to try and rescue you and I had to shoot him to stop him from spreading, what is the word? Desesperança? Ah, despair, and then I led these volunteers to your assistance.’

For a few seconds Sharpe just stared at the Portuguese Lieutenant. ‘You did what?’ he finally asked.

‘I led these men back to give you aid. I am the only officer of my company left, so who else could make the decision? Captain Rocha was killed by a cannonball up on the redoubt, and the others? I do not know what happened to them.’

‘No,’ Sharpe said, ‘before that. You shot your Sergeant?’

Vicente nodded. ‘I shall stand trial, of course. I shall plead necessity.’ There were tears in his eyes. ‘But the Sergeant said you were all dead men and that we were beaten ones. He was urging the men to shed their uniforms and desert.’

‘You did the right thing,’ Sharpe said, astonished.

Vicente bowed again. ‘You flatter me, senhor.’

‘And stop calling me senhor,’ Sharpe said. ‘I’m a lieutenant like you.’

Vicente took a half step back, unable to hide his surprise. ‘You are a … ?’ he began to ask, then understood that the question was rude. Sharpe was older than he was, maybe by ten years, and if Sharpe was still a lieutenant then presumably he was not a good soldier, for a good soldier, by the age of thirty, must have been promoted. ‘But I am sure, senhor,’ Vicente went on, ‘that you are senior to me.’

‘I might not be,’ Sharpe said.

‘I have been a lieutenant for two weeks,’ Vicente said.

It was Sharpe’s turn to look surprised. ‘Two weeks!’

‘I had some training before that, of course,’ Vicente said, ‘and during my studies I read the exploits of the great soldiers.’

‘Your studies?’

‘I am a lawyer, senhor.’

‘A lawyer!’ Sharpe could not hide his instinctive disgust. He came from the gutters of England and anyone born and raised in those gutters knew that most persecution and oppression was inflicted by lawyers. Lawyers were the devil’s servants who ushered men and women to the gallows, they were the vermin who gave orders to the bailiffs, they made their snares from statutes and became wealthy on their victims and when they were rich enough they became politicians so they could devise even more laws to make themselves even wealthier. ‘I hate bloody lawyers,’ Sharpe growled with a genuine intensity for he was remembering Lady Grace and what had happened after she died and how the lawyers had stripped him of every penny he had ever made, and the memory of Grace and her dead baby brought all the old misery back and he thrust it out of mind. ‘I do hate lawyers,’ he said.

Vicente was so dumbfounded by Sharpe’s hostility that he seemed to simply blank it out of his mind. ‘I was a lawyer,’ he said, ‘before I took up my country’s sword. I worked for the Real Companhia Velha, which is responsible for the regulation of the trade of port wine.’

‘If a child of mine wanted to become a lawyer,’ Sharpe said, ‘I’d strangle it with my own hands and then piss on its grave.’

‘So you are married then, senhor?’ Vicente asked politely.

‘No, I’m bloody not married.’

‘I misunderstood,’ Vicente said, then gestured towards his tired troops. ‘So here we are, senhor, and I thought we might join forces.’

‘Maybe,’ Sharpe said grudgingly, ‘but make one thing clear, lawyer. If your commission is two weeks old then I’m the senior man. I’m in charge. No bloody lawyer weaselling around that.’

‘Of course, senhor,’ Vicente said, frowning as though he was offended by Sharpe’s stating of the obvious.

Bloody lawyer, Sharpe thought, of all the bloody ill fortune. He knew he had behaved boorishly, especially as this courtly young lawyer had possessed the courage to kill a sergeant and lead his men to Sharpe’s rescue, and he knew he should apologize for his rudeness, but instead he stared south and west, trying to make sense of the landscape, looking for any pursuit and wondering where in hell he was. He took out his fine telescope which had been a gift from Sir Arthur Wellesley and trained it back the way they had come, staring over the trees, and at last he saw what he expected to see. Dust. A lot of dust being kicked up by hooves, boots or wheels. It could have been fugitives streaming eastwards on the road beside the river, or it could have been the French, Sharpe could not tell.

‘You will be trying to get south of the Douro?’ Vicente asked.

‘Aye, I am. But there’s no bridges on this part of the river, is that right?’

‘Not till you reach Amarante,’ Vicente said, ‘and that is on the River Tamega. It is a … how do you say? A side river? Tributary, thank you, of the Douro, but once across the Tamega there is a bridge over the Douro at Peso da Régua.’

‘And are the Frogs on the far side of the Tamega?’

Vicente shook his head. ‘We were told General Silveira is there.’

Being told that a Portuguese general was waiting across a river was not the same as knowing it, Sharpe thought. ‘And there’s a ferry over the Douro,’ he asked, ‘not far from here?’

Vicente nodded. ‘At Barca d’Avintas.’

‘How close is it?’

Vicente thought for a heartbeat. ‘Maybe a half-hour’s walk? Less, probably.’

‘That close?’ But if the ferry was close to Oporto then the French could already be there. ‘And how far is Amarante?’

‘We could be there tomorrow.’

‘Tomorrow,’ Sharpe echoed, then collapsed the telescope. He stared south. Was that dust thrown up by the French? Were they on their way to Barca d’Avintas? He wanted to use the ferry because it was so much nearer, but also riskier. Would the French be expecting fugitives to use the ferry? Or perhaps the invaders did not even know it existed. There was only one way to find out. ‘How do we get to Barca d’Avintas?’ he asked Vicente, gesturing back down the track that led through the cork oaks. ‘The same way we came?’

‘There is a quicker path,’ Vicente said.

‘Then lead on.’

Some of the men were sleeping, but Harper kicked them awake and they all followed Vicente off the road and down into a gentle valley where vines grew in neatly tended rows. From there they climbed another hill and walked through meadows dotted with the small haystacks left from the previous year. Flowers studded the grass and twined about the witch-hat haystacks, while blossom filled the hedgerows. There was no path, though Vicente led the men confidently enough.

‘You know where you’re going?’ Sharpe asked suspiciously after a while.

‘I know this landscape,’ Vicente assured the rifleman, ‘I know it well.’

‘You grew up here, then?’

Vicente shook his head. ‘I was raised in Coimbra. That’s far to the south, senhor, but I know this landscape because I belong’ – he checked and corrected himself – ‘belonged to a society that walks here.’

‘A society that walks in the countryside?’ Sharpe asked, amused.

Vicente blushed. ‘We are philosophers, senhor, and poets.’

Sharpe was too astonished to respond immediately, but finally managed a question. ‘You were what?’

‘Philosophers and poets, senhor.’

‘Jesus bloody Christ,’ Sharpe said.

‘We believe, senhor,’ Vicente went on, ‘that there is inspiration in the countryside. The country, you see, is natural, while towns are made by man and so harbour all men’s wickedness. If we wish to discover our natural goodness then it must be sought in the country.’ He was having trouble finding the right English words to express what he meant. ‘There is, I think,’ he tried again, ‘a natural goodness in the world and we seek it.’

‘So you come here for inspiration?’

‘We do, yes.’ Vicente nodded eagerly.

Giving inspiration to a lawyer, Sharpe thought sourly, was like feeding fine brandy to a rat. ‘And let me guess,’ he said, barely hiding his derision, ‘that the members of your society of rhyming philosophers are all men. Not a woman among you, eh?’

‘How did you know?’ Vicente asked in amazement.

‘I told you, I guessed.’

Vicente nodded. ‘It is not, of course, that we do not like women. You must not think that we do not want their company, but they are reluctant to join our discussions. They would be most welcome, of course, but …’ His voice tailed away.

‘Women are like that,’ Sharpe said. Women, he had found, preferred the company of rogues to the joys of conversation with sober and earnest young men like Lieutenant Vicente who harboured romantic dreams about the world and whose thin black moustache had patently been grown in an attempt to make himself look older and more sophisticated and only succeeded in making him look younger. ‘Tell me something, Lieutenant,’ he said.

‘Jorge,’ Vicente interrupted him, ‘my name is Jorge. Like your saint.’

‘So tell me something, Jorge. You said you had some training as a soldier. What kind of training was it?’

‘We had lectures in Porto.’

‘Lectures?’

‘On the history of warfare. On Hannibal, Alexander and Caesar.’

‘Book learning?’ Sharpe asked, not hiding his derision.

‘Book learning,’ Vicente said bravely, ‘comes naturally to a lawyer, and a lawyer, moreover, who saved your life, Lieutenant.’

Sharpe grunted, knowing he had deserved that mild reproof. ‘What did happen back there,’ he asked, ‘when you rescued me? I know you shot one of your sergeants, but why didn’t the French hear you do that?’

‘Ah!’ Vicente frowned, thinking. ‘I shall be honest, Lieutenant, and tell you it is not all to my credit. I had shot the Sergeant before I saw you. He was telling the men to strip off their uniforms and run away. Some did and the others would not listen to me so I shot him. It was very sad. And most of the men were in the tavern by the river, close to where the French made their barricade.’ Sharpe had seen no tavern; he had been too busy trying to extricate his men from the dragoons to notice one. ‘It was then I saw you coming. Sergeant Macedo’ – Vicente gestured towards a squat, dark-faced man stumping along behind – ‘wanted to stay hidden in the tavern and I told the men that it was time to fight for Portugal. Most did not seem to listen, so I drew my pistol, senhor, and I went into the road. I thought I would die, but I also thought I must set an example.’

‘But your men followed you?’

‘They did,’ Vicente said warmly, ‘and Sergeant Macedo fought very bravely.’

‘I think,’ Sharpe said, ‘that despite being a bloody lawyer you’re a remarkable bloody soldier.’

‘I am?’ The young Portuguese sounded amazed, but Sharpe knew it must have taken a natural leader to bring men out of a tavern to ambush a party of dragoons.

‘So did all your philosophers and poets join the army?’ Sharpe asked.

Vicente looked embarrassed. ‘Some joined the French, alas.’

‘The French!’

The Lieutenant shrugged. ‘There is a belief, senhor, that the future of mankind is prophesied in French thought. In French ideas. In Portugal, I think, we are old-fashioned and in response many of us are inspired by the French philosophers. They reject the church and the old ways. They dislike the monarchy and despise unearned privilege. Their ideas are very exciting. You have read them?’

‘No,’ Sharpe said.

‘But I love my country more than I love Monsieur Rousseau,’ Vicente said sadly, ‘so I shall be a soldier before I am a poet.’

‘Quite right,’ Sharpe said, ‘best choose something useful to do with your life.’ They crossed a small rise in the ground and Sharpe saw the river ahead and a small village beside it and he checked Vicente with an upraised hand. ‘Is that Barca d’Avintas?’

‘It is,’ Vicente said.

‘God damn it,’ Sharpe said bitterly, because the French were there already.

The river curled gently at the foot of some blue-tinged hills, and between Sharpe and the river were meadows, vineyards, the small village, a stream flowing to the river and the goddamned bloody French. More dragoons. The green-coated cavalrymen had dismounted and now strolled about the village as if they did not have a care in the world and Sharpe, dropping back behind some gorse bushes, waved his men down. ‘Sergeant! Skirmish order along the crest.’ He left Harper to get on with deploying the rifles while he took out his telescope and stared at the enemy.

‘What do I do?’ Vicente asked.

‘Just wait,’ Sharpe said. He focused the glass, marvelling at the clarity of its magnified image. He could see the buckle holes in the girth straps on the dragoons’ horses which were picketed in a small field just to the west of the village. He counted the horses. Forty-six. Maybe forty-eight. It was hard to tell because some of the beasts were bunched together. Call it fifty men. He edged the telescope left and saw smoke rising from beyond the village, maybe from the river bank. A small stone bridge crossed the stream which flowed from the north. He could see no villagers. Had they fled? He looked to the west, back down the road which led to Oporto, and he could see no more Frenchmen, which suggested the dragoons were a patrol sent to harry fugitives. ‘Pat!’

‘Sir?’ Harper came and crouched beside him.

‘We can take these bastards.’

Harper borrowed Sharpe’s telescope and stared south for a good minute. ‘Forty of them? Fifty?’

‘About that. Make sure our boys are loaded.’ Sharpe left the telescope with Harper and scrambled back from the crest to find Vicente. ‘Call your men here. I want to talk to them. You’ll translate.’ Sharpe waited till the thirty-seven Portuguese were assembled. Most looked uncomfortable, doubtless wondering why they were being commanded by a foreigner. ‘My name is Sharpe,’ he told the blue-coated troops, ‘Lieutenant Sharpe, and I’ve been a soldier for sixteen years.’ He waited for Vicente to interpret, then pointed at the youngest-looking Portuguese soldier, a lad who could not have been a day over seventeen and might well have been three years younger. ‘I was carrying a musket before you were born. And I mean carrying a musket. I was a soldier like you. I marched in the ranks.’ Vicente, as he translated, gave Sharpe a surprised look. The rifleman ignored it. ‘I’ve fought in Flanders,’ Sharpe went on, ‘I’ve fought in India, I’ve fought in Spain and I’ve fought in Portugal, and I’ve never lost a fight. Never.’ The Portuguese had just been run out of the great northern redoubt in front of Oporto and that defeat was still sore, yet here was a man telling them he was invincible and some of them looked at the scar on his face and the hardness in his eyes and they believed him. ‘Now you and I are going to fight together,’ Sharpe went on, ‘and that means we’re going to win. We’re going to run these damned Frenchmen out of Portugal!’ Some of them smiled at that. ‘Don’t take any notice of what happened today. That wasn’t your fault. You were led by a bishop! What bloody use is a bishop to anyone? You might as well go into battle with a lawyer.’ Vicente gave Sharpe a swift and reproving glance before translating the last sentence, but he must have done it correctly for the men grinned at Sharpe. ‘We’re going to run the bastards back to France,’ Sharpe continued, ‘and for every Portuguese and Briton they kill we’re going to slaughter a score.’ Some of the Portuguese thumped their musket butts on the ground in approbation. ‘But before we fight,’ Sharpe went on, ‘you’d better know I have three rules and you had all better get used to those rules now. Because if you break these three rules then, God help me, I’ll goddamn break you.’ Vicente sounded nervous as he interpreted the last few words.

Sharpe waited, then held up one finger. ‘You don’t get drunk without my permission.’ A second finger. ‘You don’t thieve from anyone unless you’re starving. And I don’t count taking things off the enemy as thieving.’ That got a smile. He held up the third finger. ‘And you fight as if the devil himself was on your tail. That’s it! You don’t get drunk, you don’t thieve and you fight like demons. You understand?’ They nodded after the translation.

‘And right now,’ Sharpe went on, ‘you’re going to start fighting. You’re going to make three ranks and you’ll fire a volley at some French cavalry.’ He would have preferred two ranks, but only the British fought in two ranks. Every other army used three and so, for the moment, he would too, even though thirty-seven men in three ranks offered a very small frontage. ‘And you won’t pull your trigger until Lieutenant Vicente gives the order. You can trust him! He’s a good soldier, your Lieutenant!’ Vicente blushed and perhaps made some modest changes to his interpretation, but the grins on his men’s faces suggested the lawyer had conveyed the gist of Sharpe’s words. ‘Make sure your muskets are loaded,’ Sharpe said, ‘but not cocked. I don’t want the enemy knowing we’re here because some careless halfwit lets off a cocked musket. Now, enjoy killing the bastards.’ He left them on that bloodthirsty note and walked back to the crest where he knelt beside Harper. ‘Are they doing anything?’ he asked, nodding towards the dragoons.

‘Getting drunk,’ Harper said. ‘Gave them the talk, did you?’

‘Is that what it is?’

‘Don’t get drunk, don’t thieve and fight like the devil. Mister Sharpe’s sermon.’

Sharpe smiled, then took the telescope from the Sergeant and trained it at the village where a score of dragoons, their green coats unbuttoned, were squirting wineskins into their mouths. Others were searching the small houses. A woman with a torn black dress ran from one house, was seized by a cavalryman and dragged back indoors. ‘I thought the villagers were gone,’ Sharpe said.

‘I’ve seen a couple of women,’ Harper said, ‘and doubtless there are plenty more we can’t see.’ He ran a huge hand over the lock of his rifle. ‘So what are we going to do with them?’

‘We’re going to piss up their noses,’ Sharpe said, ‘till they decide to swat us away and then we’re going to kill them.’ He collapsed the glass and told Harper exactly how he planned to defeat the dragoons.

The vineyards gave Sharpe the opportunity. The vines grew in close thick rows that stretched from the stream on their left to some woodland off to the west, and the rows were broken only by a footpath that gave labourers access to the plants which offered dense cover for Sharpe’s men as they crawled closer to Barca d’Avintas. Two careless French sentries watched from the village’s edge, but neither saw anything threatening in the spring countryside and one of them even laid his carbine down so he could pack a small pipe with tobacco. Sharpe put Vicente’s men close to the footpath and sent his riflemen off to the west so that they were closer to the paddock in which the dragoons’ horses were picketed. Then he cocked his own rifle, lay down so that the barrel protruded between two gnarled vine roots and aimed at the nearest sentry.

He fired, and the butt slammed back into his shoulder and the sound was still echoing from the village’s walls when his riflemen began shooting at the horses. Their first volley brought down six or seven of the beasts, wounded as many again and started a panic among the other tethered animals. Two managed to pull their picketing pins out of the turf and jumped the fence in an attempt to escape, but then circled back towards their companions just as the rifles were reloaded and fired again. More horses screamed and fell. A half-dozen of the riflemen were watching the village and began shooting at the first dragoons to run towards the paddock. Vicente’s infantry remained hidden, crouching among the vines. Sharpe saw that the sentry he had shot was crawling up the street, leaving a bloody trail, and, as the smoke from that shot faded, he fired again, this time at an officer running towards the paddock. More dragoons, fearing they were losing their precious horses, ran to unpicket the beasts and the rifle bullets began to kill men as well as horses. An injured mare whinnied pitifully and then the dragoons’ commanding officer realized he could not rescue the horses until he had driven away the men who were slaughtering them and so he shouted at his cavalrymen to advance into the vines and drive the attackers off.

‘Keep shooting the horses!’ Sharpe shouted. It was not a pleasant job. The screams of the wounded beasts tore at men’s souls and the sight of an injured gelding trying to drag itself along by its front legs was heartbreaking, but Sharpe kept his men firing. The dragoons, spared the rifle fire now, ran towards the vineyard in the confident belief that they were dealing with a mere handful of partisans. Dragoons were supposed to be mounted infantry and so they were issued with carbines, short-barrelled muskets, with which they could fight on foot, and some carried the carbines while others preferred to attack with their long straight swords, but all of them instinctively ran towards the track which climbed among the vines. Sharpe had guessed they would follow the track rather than clamber over the entangling vines and that was why he had put Vicente and his men close by the path. The dragoons were bunching together as they entered the vines and Sharpe had an urge to run across to the Portuguese and take command of them, but just then Vicente ordered his men to stand.

The Portuguese soldiers appeared as if by magic in front of the disorganized dragoons. Sharpe watched, approvingly, as Vicente let his men settle, then ordered them to fire. The French had tried to check their desperate charge and swerve aside, but the vines obstructed them and Vicente’s volley hammered into the thickest press of cavalrymen bunched on the narrow track. Harper, off on the right flank, had the riflemen add their own volley so that the dragoons were assailed from both sides. Powder smoke drifted over the vines. ‘Fix swords!’ Sharpe shouted. A dozen dragoons were dead and the ones at the back were already running away. They had been convinced they fought against a few undisciplined peasants and instead they were outnumbered by real soldiers and the centre of their makeshift line had been gutted, half their horses were dead and now the infantry was coming from the smoke with fixed bayonets. The Portuguese stepped over the dead and injured dragoons. One of the Frenchmen, shot in the thigh, rolled over with a pistol in his hand and Vicente knocked it away with his sword and then kicked the gun into the stream. The unwounded dragoons were running towards the horses and Sharpe ordered his riflemen to drive them off with bullets rather than blades. ‘Just keep them running!’ he shouted. ‘Panic them! Lieutenant!’ He looked for Vicente, ‘Take your men into the village! Cooper! Tongue! Slattery! Make these bastards safe!’ He knew he had to keep the Frenchmen in front moving, but he dared not leave any lightly wounded dragoons in his rear and so he ordered the three riflemen to disarm the cavalrymen injured by Vicente’s volley. The Portuguese were in the village now, banging open doors and converging on a church that stood next to the bridge that crossed the small stream.