Sharpe’s Enemy: The Defence of Portugal, Christmas 1812

Congreve’s rockets looked just like the fireworks that celebrated Royal days in London, except these were much bigger. Gilliland’s smallest rocket was fully eleven feet long, two feet of which was the cylinder containing the powder propulsion and tipped with a roundshot or shell, the rest made up of the rocket’s stout stick. The largest rocket, according to Gilliland, was twenty-eight feet long, its head taller than a man, and its load more than fifty pounds of explosive. If such a rocket could be persuaded to go even vaguely near its target it would be a fearful weapon.

For two hours again, beneath a cloudless sky in which the December sun was surprisingly warm, Sharpe exercised Gilliland’s men. It was probably, he thought, a waste of all their time for Sharpe doubted if Gilliland would ever need to liaise with infantry in battle, yet there was something about this new weapon that fascinated Sharpe.

Perhaps, he thought as he cleared his thin skirmish line for the fourth time from the front of the battery, it was the mathematics of the rockets. A battery of artillery had six guns, yet it needed a hundred and seventy-two men and a hundred and sixty-four horses to move it and serve it. In battle the battery could deliver twelve shots a minute.

Gilliland had the same number of men and horses, yet at full fire he could deliver ninety missiles in the same minute. He could sustain that rate of fire for a quarter of an hour, firing his full complement of one thousand and four hundred rockets, and no artillery battery could hope to rival that power.

There was another difference, an uncomfortable fact. Ten of the twelve cannon-fired shots would hit their target at five hundred yards. Even at three hundred yards Gilliland was lucky if one rocket in fifty was even close.

For the last time that day Sharpe cleared his skirmish line. Price waved from the far side of the valley. ‘Clear, sir!’

Sharpe looked at Gilliland and shouted. ‘Fire!’

Sharpe’s men grinned in anticipation. This time only twelve small rockets would be fired. Each lay in an open-ended trough so that it would skim the ground when it was ignited. The artillerymen touched the fire to the fuses, smoke curled into the quiet air, and then, almost together, the twelve missiles exploded into movement. Great trails of smoke and sparks slammed backwards, the grass behind the troughs was scorched by fire, and the rockets were moving, faster and faster, rising slightly above the winter-pale field, filling the valley with their tangled roar, screaming above the pasture as Sharpe’s men whooped with joy.

One struck the ground, cartwheeled, its stick broke and the loose head smashed down into the earth spraying flame and dark smoke into the valley. Another veered right, collided with a second, and both dived into the grass. Two seemed to be going perfectly, searing above the field, while the rest wandered and made intricate patterns in smoke above the grass.

All except one. One rocket thrust itself in a perfect curve, higher and higher, pushing up so that it was hidden by the smoke that was pumped out and seemed to stack itself beneath its fiery tail. Sharpe watched it, squinting into the brightness of the sky, and he thought he saw the stick flicker in the smoke, turning, then he saw flame again. The rocket had flipped over and was plunging earthward, accelerating before the rush of fire, screaming down at the men who had fired it.

‘Run!’ Sharpe yelled at the artillerymen.

Harper, his indignation at the massacre temporarily forgotten, was laughing.

‘Run, you idiots!’

Horses bolted, men panicked, and the sound grew louder, a thunderbolt from the December sky, and Gilliland’s shrill voice was shrieking confusion at his men. The artillerymen dived to the earth, hands over their heads, and the noise grew and suddenly crashed into nothing as the solid six-pound shot of the twelve pound rocket buried itself in the soil. The stick quivered above it. For a second the rocket propellant still flamed hungrily at the cylinder’s base, then it died and there were only flickering blue flames licking at the stick.

Harper wiped his eyes. ‘God save Ireland!’

‘The others?’ Sharpe was looking upfield.

Sergeant Huckfield shook his head. ‘All over the place, sir. Nearest to the target area was probably thirty yards.’ He licked the pencil and made a note in the book he was carrying, then shrugged. ‘About average, sir.’

Which was, sadly for Gilliland, true. The rockets seemed to have a mind of their own once they were in motion. As Lieutenant Harry Price had said, they were superb for frightening horses so long as no one cared which horses were frightened, French or British.

Sharpe walked Captain Gilliland up the valley among the smoking remains of his missiles. The air was bitter with powder smoke. The notebook said it all, the rockets were a failure.

Gilliland, a small, young man, his face thin but lit with a fanatical passion for his weapon, pleaded with Sharpe. Sharpe had heard all the arguments before. He half listened, the other part of his mind sympathetic to Gilliland’s desperate eagerness to be part of the 1813 campaign. This year was ending sourly. After the great victories of Ciudad Rodrigo, Badajoz and Salamanca the campaign had ground to a halt before the French fortress of Burgos. The autumn had seen a British retreat back to Portugal, back to the foodstocks that would keep an army alive through the winter, and the retreat had been hard. Some fool had sent the army’s supplies by a different road so that the troops slogged westward, through pouring rain, hungry and angry. Discipline had broken down. Men had been hung by the roadside for looting. Sharpe had stripped two drunks stark naked and left them to the mercies of the pursuing French. No man in the South Essex became drunk after that and it was one of the few Battalions that had marched back into Portugal in good order. Next year they would avenge that retreat and for the first time the armies of the Peninsula would march under one General. Wellington was head now of the British, the Portuguese and the Spanish armies, and Gilliland, pleading with Sharpe, wanted to be part of the victories that unity seemed to promise. Sharpe cut the speech short. ‘But they don’t hit anything, Captain. You can’t make them accurate.’

Gilliland nodded, shrugged, shook his head, flapped his hands in impotence, then turned again to Sharpe. ‘Sir? You once said a frightened enemy is already half beaten, yes?’

‘Yes.’

‘Think of what these will do to an enemy! They’re terrifying!’

‘As your men just found out.’

Gilliland shook his head in exasperation. ‘There’s always a rogue rocket or two, sir. But think of it! An enemy that’s never seen them? Suddenly the flames, the noise! Think, sir!’

Sharpe thought. He was required to test these rockets, test them thoroughly, and he had done that in four hard days work. They had started the rockets at their full range of two thousand yards and quickly brought the range down, down to just three hundred yards and still the missiles were hopelessly inaccurate. And yet! Sharpe smiled to himself. What was the effect on a man who had never been exposed to them? He looked at the sky. Midday. He had hoped for an easy afternoon before going to see the performance of Hamlet that the officers of the Light Division were staging in a barn outside the town, but perhaps there was just one test that he had forgotten. It need not take long.

An hour later, alone with Sergeant Harper, he watched Gilliland make his preparations six hundred yards away. Harper looked at Sharpe and shook his head. ‘We’re mad.’

‘You don’t have to stay.’

Harper sounded glum. ‘I promised your wife I’d look after you, sir. Here I am, keeping the promise.’

Teresa. Sharpe had met her two summers ago when his Company had fought alongside her band of Partisans. Teresa fought the French in her own way, with ambush and knife, with surprise and terror. They had been married eight months and in that time Sharpe doubted if he had spent more than ten weeks with her. Their daughter, Antonia, was nineteen months old now, a daughter he loved because she was his only blood relative, but a daughter he did not know and who would grow to speak a different language, but still his daughter. He grinned at Harper. ‘We’ll be all right. You know they always miss.’

‘Nearly always, sir.’

Maybe they were mad to try this test, yet Sharpe wanted to deal fairly with Gilliland’s enthusiasm. The rockets were inaccurate, so much so that they had become a joke to Sharpe’s men who loved to watch the veering, crashing and burning of Gilliland’s toys. Yet most of the rockets did travel towards the enemy, however curious their path, and perhaps Gilliland was right. Perhaps they would terrify and there was only one way to find out. To become the target himself.

Harper scratched his head. ‘If my Mother knew, sir, that I was standing against a wall with thirty bloody rockets aimed at me …’ He sighed, touched the crucifix around his neck.

Sharpe knew the artillerymen were jointing the sticks. Each twelve pounder needed two lengths of stick. The first length was slotted into a metal tube on the side of the rocket head and then fixed in place by crimping the metal with pliers. A similar metal tube, similarly crimped, joined the two sticks into a ten-foot shaft that balanced the rocket head. The shaft had another use, a use that intrigued and impressed Sharpe. Each trooper in the Rocket Cavalry kept a lance-head in a special holster on his saddle. The lance-head could be hammered onto the jointed sticks and then carried into battle on horseback. Gilliland’s men were not trained to fight with the lance, any more than they were trained in the use of the sabres they all carried, but there was an ingenuity about the detached lance-head that pleased Sharpe. He had appalled Gilliland by insisting that the Rocket Troop rehearse cavalry charges.

‘Portfires alight!’ Harper seemed determined to keep up a commentary on his own death. Sharpe could see his own Company sitting by Gilliland’s rocket ‘cars’, his specially fitted supply wagons. ‘Oh, God!’ Harper crossed himself.

Sharpe knew the portfires were going down to touch the rocket fuses. ‘You said yourself they couldn’t hit a house at fifty yards.’

‘I’m a big target.’ Harper was six feet and four inches tall.

There was a wisp of smoke far down the field. That one rocket would already be moving, burning the grass, leaping like quickfire above the soil, hammering in front of its fire and smoke. The others burst into life.

‘Oh, God,’ Harper groaned.

Sharpe grinned. ‘If they’re close, just jump over the wall.’

‘Anything you say, sir.’

For a second or two the rockets were curious twisting dots, haloed by fire, centred on their pulsing smoke trails. The trails weaved as the missiles climbed and wandered and then, so fast that Sharpe would have had no time to throw himself behind the low stone wall, the rockets seemed to leap towards the two men. The sound filled the valley, the fire blazed behind the spread of missiles, and then they were past, screaming above the wall and Sharpe found he had ducked even though the closest rocket had been thirty yards away.

Harper swore, looked at Sharpe.

‘Not so funny here, eh?’ Sharpe found himself feeling relieved that the rockets had gone. Even at thirty yards the noise and fire was alarming.

Harper grinned. ‘Wouldn’t you say our duty was done, sir?’

‘Just the big ones, then it’s done.’

‘For what we are about to receive.’

The next volley was not to be ground fired, but to be aimed upwards in firing tubes supported by a tripod. Gilliland, Sharpe knew, would be working at the mathematics of the trajectory. Sharpe had always supposed mathematics to be the most exact of all the sciences and he did not clearly see how it could be applied to the inexact nature of rocketry, but Gilliland would be busy with angles and equations. The wind had to be ascertained, for if a breeze was blowing across the rockets’ path then they had a perverse habit of turning into the wind. That, Gilliland had explained, was because the wind put more pressure on the long stick than on the cylinder head, and so the tubes had to be aimed down-wind for an upwind target. Another calculation was the stick length, a longer stick giving more height and a longer flight, and at six hundred yards Sharpe knew the artillerymen would be sawing off a length of each rocket’s tail. A third imponderable was the angle of launch. A rocket travelled relatively slowly as it left the firing tube and so the head fell towards the ground in the first few feet of flight and the angle of launch had to be increased to compensate. Modern science at war.

‘Hold your hat, sir.’

The smoke and flames were easily visible beneath the firing tubes, even at six hundred yards, and then, with appalling suddenness, the missiles leaped into the air. These were eighteen-pounder rockets, a dozen of them, and they sliced the air above the lingering smoke trails of the first volley, climbing, climbing, and Sharpe saw one slam off to the left, hopelessly off course, while the others seemed to have coalesced into a living flame-shot cloud that grew silently over the valley.

‘Oh, God.’ Harper was holding the crucifix.

The rockets, strangely, seemed not to be moving. The cloud grew, the flame surrounded dots were still and hovering, and Sharpe knew it was an illusion caused by the trajectory bringing the missiles in a curve pointing straight at the two of them. Then a single dot dropped from the cloud, fire at its edges, smoke dark against the clear sky behind. The noise burst on them; a screaming roar, flame-born, and the dot grew larger. ‘Down!’

‘Christ!’ Harper dived right, Sharpe left, and Sharpe clung to the soil by the wall and the noise hammered at him, growing, seeming to make the stones of the wall shake, and the air was throbbing with the noise that came closer and closer and filled their whole world with terror as the rocket slammed into the wall.

‘Jesus.’ Sharpe rolled over and sat up. The rocket, the most accurate of the week, had demolished the stone wall where he and Harper had been standing. The broken stick toppled slowly off the wreckage. The cylinder smoked innocently in the next field. Smoke drifted over the burned grass.

They started laughing, beating the dirt off their uniforms, and suddenly it seemed hilarious to Sharpe so that he rolled onto his side, helpless with laughter. ‘Holy Jesus!’

‘You’d better thank Him. If that had been a shell instead of roundshot.’ Harper left the thought unfinished. He was standing and staring at the ruins of the wall.

Sharpe sat up again. ‘Is that frightening?’

Harper grinned. ‘You’d regret having a full belly, that’s for sure, sir.’ He bent down and picked up his shako.

‘So maybe there is something to the mad Colonel’s invention.’

‘Aye, sir.’

‘And think if you could fire a whole volley at fifty paces.’

Harper nodded. ‘True, but there’s a lot of maybes and ifs there, sir.’ He grinned. ‘You’re fond of them, aren’t you? You fancy trying them out, yes?’ He laughed. ‘Toys for Christmas.’

A figure in blue uniform, leading a second horse, was riding towards them from the firing point. Harper pulled his battered shako low over his eyes and nodded towards the galloping man. ‘I think he’s worried he’s murdered us, sir.’

Clods of earth flew up behind the galloping horses. Sharpe shook his head. ‘That’s not Gilliland.’ He could see a cavalryman’s pelisse across the blue uniform shoulders.

The cavalryman skirted a burning rocket wreck, urged his horse on, waved as he came close. His shout was urgent. ‘Major Sharpe?’

‘Yes.’

‘Lieutenant Rogers, sir. Headquarters. Major General Nairn’s compliments, sir, and would you report at once.’

Sharpe took the reins of the spare horse from Rogers, looped them over the horse’s head. ‘What’s it about?’

‘About, sir? Haven’t you heard?’ Rogers was impatient, his horse fretful. Sharpe put his left foot in the stirrup, reached for the saddle, and Harper helped by heaving him upwards. Rogers waited as the Sergeant retrieved Sharpe’s shako. ‘There’s been a massacre, sir, at some place called Adrados.’

‘Massacre?’

‘God knows, sir. All hell’s loose. Ready?’

‘Lead on.’

Sergeant Patrick Harper watched Sharpe lurch as his horse took off after the Lieutenant. So the rumour was true and Harper smiled in satisfaction. Not a satisfaction because he had been proved right, but because Sharpe had been summoned and where Sharpe went, Harper followed. So what if Sharpe was a Major now, supposedly detached from the South Essex? He would still take Harper, as he always took Harper, and the giant Irishman wanted to help take revenge on the men who had offended his decency and his religion. He began walking back towards the Company, whistling as he went, the prospect of a fight pleasant in his soul.

CHAPTER THREE

‘Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn, damn, damn.’ Major General Nairn, still in a dressing gown, still with a cold, stared out of the window. He turned as Lieutenant Rogers, having announced Sharpe, left the room. The eyes, under the straggling eyebrows, looked at Sharpe. ‘Damn.’

‘Sir.’

‘Cold as a parson’s bloody heart.’

‘Sir?’

‘This room, Sharpe.’ It was an office, one table smothered in maps which, in turn, were littered with empty cups and plates, snuff boxes, two half eaten pieces of cold toast, a single spur and a marble bust of Napoleon on which someone, presumably Nairn, had inked embellishments which made the Emperor of the French look like a simpering weakling. The Major General crossed to the table and lowered himself into a leather chair. ‘So what have you heard about this bloody massacre, Major? Cheer an old man up and tell me you’ve heard nothing.’

‘I’m afraid I have, sir.’

‘Well what, man?’

Sharpe told him what had been preached in the church that morning and Nairn listened with fingers steepled in front of his closed eyes. When Sharpe finished Nairn groaned. ‘God in his heaven, Major, it couldn’t be bloody worse, could it?’ Nairn swivelled in the chair and stared across the roofs of the town. ‘We’re unpopular enough as it is with the Spanish. They don’t forget the seventeenth century, blast their eyes, and the fact that we’re fighting for their bloody country doesn’t make us any better. Now the priests are preaching that the heathen British are raping anything that’s Catholic with a skirt on. God! If the Portuguese are believing it, what the hell are they believing over the border? They’ll be petitioning the Pope to declare war on us next.’ He turned back to the desk, leaned back and closed his eyes. ‘We need the co-operation of the Spanish people and we are hardly likely to get it if they believe this story. Come!’ This last word was to a clerk who had knocked timidly on the door. He handed Nairn a sheet of paper which the Scotsman looked through, grunting approval. ‘I need a dozen, Simmons.’

‘Yes, sir.’

When the clerk had gone Nairn smiled slyly at Sharpe. ‘Be sure your sins will find you out, eh? I burn a letter from that great and good man, the bloody Chaplain General, and today I have to write to every Bishop and Archbishop inside spitting distance.’ He mimicked a cringing voice. ‘The story is not true, your Grace, the men were not from our army, your Holiness, but nevertheless we will apprehend the bastards and turn them inside out. Slowly.’

‘Not true, sir?’

Nairn flashed a look of annoyance at Sharpe. ‘Of course it’s not bloody true!’ He leaned forward and picked up the bust of Napoleon, staring it between its cold eyes. ‘You’d like to believe it, wouldn’t you? Splash it all over your bloody Moniteur. How the savage English treat Spanish women. That would take your mind off all those good men you left in Russia.’ He slammed the bust onto the table. ‘Damn.’ He blew his nose noisily.

Sharpe waited. He was alone with Nairn, but he had seen much coming and going as he entered the Headquarters. The rumour, whatever its truth, had stirred Frenada into activity. Sharpe was part of it, or else Nairn would not have sent for him, but the Rifleman was content to wait until he was told. The moment had evidently come, for Nairn waved Sharpe into a chair by the small fireplace and took the chair opposite. ‘I have a problem, Major Sharpe. In brief it is this. I have a nasty mess on my doorstep, a mess I must clear up, but I don’t have the troops to do it.’ He held up a hand to stop an interruption. ‘Oh yes, I know. I have a whole bloody army, but that’s under Beresford’s control.’ Beresford was in nominal command of the Army while Wellington politicked in the south. ‘Beresford’s up north, with his Portuguese, and I don’t have time to write a “please, sir” note to him. If I ask for help from one of the Divisions then every General inside ten miles is going to want a finger in this pie. I’m in charge of this Headquarters. My job is to pass the papers and make sure the cooks don’t piss in the soup. However, I do have you, and I do have the so-called garrison battalion of Frenada, and if you’re willing then we might put the lid on this peculiarly nasty pot of snakes.’

‘Willing, sir?’

‘You will be a volunteer, Sharpe. That’s an order.’ He grinned. ‘Tell me what you know of Pot-au-Feu. Marshal Pot-au-Feu.’

Sharpe shook his head. ‘Nothing.’

‘An army of deserters?’

That did ring faint bells. Sharpe remembered a night on the retreat from Burgos, a night when the wind flung rain at the roofless barn where four hundred wet, miserable and hungry soldiers had sheltered. There had been talk there of a haven for soldiers, an army of deserters who were defying the French and the English, but Sharpe had dismissed the stories. They were like other rumours that went through the army. He frowned. ‘Is that true?’

Nairn nodded. ‘Yes.’ He told the story that he had gleaned that morning from Hogan’s papers, from the priest of Adrados, and from a Partisan who had brought the priest to Frenada. It was a story so incredible that Sharpe, at times, stopped Nairn simply to ask for confirmation. Some of the wildest rumours, it seemed, turned out to be fact.

For a year now, perhaps a few months longer, there had been an organized band of deserters, calling themselves an army, living in the mountains of southern Galicia. Their leader was a Frenchman whose real name was unknown, an ex-Sergeant who now styled himself as Marshal Pot-au-Feu. Nairn grinned. ‘Stockpot, I suppose that translates. There’s a story that he was once a cook.’ Under Pot-au-Feu the ‘army’ had prospered. They lived in territory that was unimportant to the French Marshals or to Wellington, they subsisted by terrorizing the countryside, taking what they wanted, and their numbers grew as deserters from every army in the Peninsula heard of their existence. French, British, Portuguese and Spanish, all were in Pot-au-Feu’s ranks.

‘How many, sir?’

Nairn shrugged. ‘We don’t know. Numbers vary between four hundred and two thousand. I’d guess six or seven hundred.’

Sharpe raised his eyebrows. That could be a formidable force. ‘Why have they come south, sir?’

‘That’s a question.’ Nairn blew his nose into the huge wrinkled handkerchief. ‘It seems that the Frogs are being pretty lively in Galicia. I don’t know, bloody rumour again, but there’s a whisper that they might try a winter attack on Braganza then on to Oporto. I don’t believe it for a second, but there’s a school of thought which maintains that Napoleon is in need of some victory, any victory, after the Russian catastrophe. If they capture the north of Portugal then they can trumpet that as some kind of achievement.’ Nairn shrugged. ‘I can’t think why, but we’re told to take the possibility seriously and certainly there’s a lot of Frog cavalry lumbering about in Galicia and our belief is that they drove our friend Pot-au-Feu towards us. And he promptly sends his British deserters to attack a village called Adrados where they murder a small Spanish garrison and go on to make themselves free with all the ladies. Now half of bloody Spain thinks that the Protestant English are reverting to the Wars of Religion. That, Sharpe, is the story in its rancid little nutshell.’