Sharpe’s Revenge: The Peace of 1814

Nairn seemed to shiver as he stared at the ridge’s summit, then he asked to borrow Sharpe’s glass through which he gazed long and hard at the enemy positions. He said nothing when he closed the tubes, except to express surprise at the evident quality of the spyglass. ‘Where did you get it?’

‘Vitoria,’ Sharpe said. The telescope had been a gift from the Emperor Napoleon to his brother, King Joseph of Spain, who had lost it when his baggage had been captured by the British after the battle at Vitoria. A small brass plate, let into the ivory of the barrel, recorded the gift.

Nairn held the glass out to Sharpe. ‘I hate to spoil your enjoyment, Major, but I need you.’

Sharpe retrieved his horse. His task, once the advance began, would be to relay Nairn’s orders. The junior aides would be doing the same thing, but Sharpe’s rank and reputation would give him an authority that could be useful to Nairn. At times, Sharpe knew, he would have to use his own judgement, then claim that his decision was a verbal order from Nairn himself.

It was another hour before the order to advance was given. The French had spasmodically shelled the waiting men during the prolonged delay, but the very sparseness of the cannonade was evidence that the real artillery effort would wait until the British and Portuguese troops had marched closer to the guns. Some men grumbled at the wait, others averred that it was necessary so that the Spanish could regroup and attack again from the ridge’s far end. Two chaplains led mules loaded with spare water canteens around the waiting troops. The Irishmen in the ranks crossed themselves. The loudest noise on the ridge, apart from the occasional bang of a French gun, were the pipes of the Highland Regiments.

‘It’s going to be a bloody business, right enough. A bloody, bloody business,’ Nairn said for the fourth or fifth time to Sharpe. The Scotsman was nervous. He knew this would be his one chance to fight his brigade in battle, and he feared he would be found wanting.

Yet the true responsibility did not lie with Nairn, nor even with Wellington who commanded the battle from its northern flank, but with the ordinary soldier. It was the redcoat and greenjacket who had to march forward in the certain knowledge that the best artillery in Europe waited to decimate his ranks. A shilling, a third of a pint of rum and two pounds of twice baked bread each day were the wages for this moment, and in return they must march into hell and come out victors.

‘It won’t be long now,’ Nairn said, as if to comfort the aides who bunched around him.

Divisional aides were galloping across the ridge’s southern spur. Bands were forming into ranks and colours were being hoisted. The British gunners gave their cannon trails a last adjustment.

‘The General’s compliments, sir,’ a cavalry Captain reined in close to Nairn, ‘and if you are ready?’

‘My compliments to the General.’ Nairn drew his sword. No actual order to advance had been given, nor was it necessary, for as soon as the leading battalions saw the arrival of the Divisional aide, they were ordered to their feet. What waited for them on the ridge was a foretaste of hell, so it seemed best to get it done fast.

‘My compliments to Colonel Taplow,’ Nairn said to Sharpe, ‘and tell him not to let his men fall off to the right.’

‘Indeed, sir.’ Sharpe put his spurs to Sycorax’s flanks. Nairn’s concern about the right flank was justified for, as the attack met opposition, there would be a temptation for the right-hand men to seek safety down the ridge’s western slope.

Taplow did not wait for Sharpe’s arrival, but had already ordered his men forward. They advanced in two lines behind their chain of skirmishers. The front line was composed of five companies, and the rear of four. The battalion’s bayonets were fixed, and their colours lofted between the two lines. Sharpe found Taplow on a grey horse just in front of the colour party. ‘The General’s compliments, sir.’

‘He’ll not find us wanting!’ Taplow interrupted Sharpe. ‘I told you it would be up to us!’ Taplow was in high spirits.

‘He’s eager, sir, that your men don’t deviate too far to the right.’ Sharpe phrased Nairn’s warning as tactfully as he could.

‘Damn your eyes! Does he think we’re amateurs?’ Taplow’s rage was instant and overwhelming. ‘Tell him we shall march to the guns. Direct to the guns! We’ll die like Englishmen, not like skulking Scotchmen. Damn your eyes, Major, and good day to you.’

The other English battalion of Nairn’s brigade marched on Taplow’s left, while behind came the Highlanders who advanced to the eerie skirl of their pipers. They were a secretive, proud battalion who followed their clan chief to war. Many spoke no English, just the Gaelic. In battle they could be terrifying, while off the battlefield they had a grave courtesy. To the left of Nairn’s brigade, and straddling the spine of the ridge’s summit, another brigade advanced.

Frederickson, with the skirmishers of the two English battalions, was far ahead of the leading battalions. The French gunners, waiting with smoking linstocks, ignored the skirmish line. They would wait till the plumper targets of the close-formed battalions were nearer.

The wait was not long. Sharpe, back at Nairn’s side just a few paces ahead of the Highlanders, saw a French gunner give the elevating screw of his cannon one last turn, then jump clear as the linstock came down to hover near the portfire.

‘God help us,’ said the agnostic Nairn, then, much louder, ‘steady, lads, steady!’

‘Tirez!’ shouted the battery’s commander.

The ridge erupted with gunfire. Flames lanced from barrels to pump smoke thick as fog over the hilltop. The roundshot slashed through the advancing battalions. Sharpe saw one ball carve a bloody hole in Taplow’s first line, kill another man in his second, then graze the turf and, on its upward rebound, strike down a file of Highlanders. The one ball had turned four men to meat and blood and splintered bone. The screams of the wounded began to rival the music of the bands and the crashing of the enemy guns. It was not just the closest battery that fired, but the gunners in the central redoubt, and other gunners too, further and higher up the ridge, who could launch their missiles over the heads of their own infantry to plunge and bounce and tear among the British troops.

‘Those poor lads.’ Nairn watched Taplow’s battalion that was dropping dead and wounded behind its ranks.

‘Close up! Close up!’ the Sergeants shouted. An Ensign, fifteen years old, and proud to be in his first battle, was disembowelled. A Sergeant, marching behind and to the dead boy’s flank, filched six guineas from the corpse’s tail pocket without even breaking step. ‘Close up, you bastards! Close up!’

A howitzer shell landed just in front of Taplow’s rear line and, because its fuse still smoked, the closest men scattered. The shell exploded harmlessly as Taplow berated the men for cowards.

Frederickson’s Riflemen had advanced far forward and were now trying to pick off the enemy gunners, but the cannon smoke made a perfect screen to hide the enemy. The smoke also served to obscure the aim of the French gunners, but so long as they fired level and ahead, they could scarcely miss. French skirmishers, armed with muskets, were threatening Frederickson’s men, though even the bravest enemy was loath to come too close to the deadly rifles. Harper was calling targets to his men. ‘See that officer, Marcos? Kill the bugger.’

‘Tell Taplow to double forward at the battery!’ Nairn shouted to Sharpe over the noise of the enemy guns. ‘I’ll put the Highlanders in behind him!’

Sharpe spurred Sycorax forward again. The mare was nervous of the horrid noises. The guns made a deep percussive, ear-thumping bang, while the passage of the roundshot overhead sounded just like heavy barrels being rolled across a wooden floor. A cannonball that came too close sounded like the tearing of cloth, but much more sudden and overwhelming, making a man flinch in the wake of its air-splitting astonishment. Behind all the noises was the sound of the bands and the gut-wrenching music of the pipes. Men screamed, Sergeants shouted, then a new ingredient joined the cacophony: the crackling thunder of an infantry volley. It was a French volley. The enemy battalion was hidden by the cannon smoke, but Sharpe, as he rode towards Taplow, saw the smoke twitch as the bullets flicked through from the ridge’s centre.

‘Steady now! Steady!’ Taplow was riding immediately behind his front line. His horse sheered away from a wounded man who vomited blood, and Taplow slashed his crop down on to the animal’s rump to keep it steady and obedient. Behind him the battalion’s colours twitched from the strike of musket bullets.

‘Major-General Nairn’s compliments, sir …’ Sharpe began.

‘Damn Nairn!’

‘If you’d double, sir, towards the battery …’

‘In my own time, sir, in my own time. Damn you.’ Taplow twisted his horse away from Sharpe. ‘Well done!’ he exhorted his men. ‘Close up, my lads! Be steady now! Our turn will come! We’ll kill the bastards in a minute! Close up! Steady now, steady!’

When the attacking line was a hundred paces from the French guns, the enemy changed from roundshot to canister. The tin- encased canisters split apart in the muzzle-flames to scatter a charge of lead-balls like birdshot. Now, instead of the surgical strike of a roundshot, each discharge tore a ragged and gaping red hole in the advancing ranks. Taplow’s line was shrinking fast and littering its wide path with a scatter of dead and injured. The carnage and the noise at last made the advancing battalion check, and that evidence of his men’s fear spurred Taplow to ram his horse through the ranks. ‘Charge, you buggers! Charge for England!’

Released, the battalion charged. They screamed in fear, but they ran forward, and the smoke of the guns served to hide them from their enemies. A small dip in the ground helped to save them from the worst of the canister as they scrambled towards the smoke and the enemy’s gun line.

‘Come on, you bastards! Kill the buggers!’ Taplow was ahead of his men, charging like a cavalryman with his sword aloft, when two canisters exploded full in his face so that man and horse were turned instantly into scraps of bloody flesh that ribboned back in the guns’ gale to spatter the ranks behind.

‘Charge!’ It was a Colour Sergeant who took up the cry.

There was nothing left of Taplow, except blood, bones and gobbets of flesh spread across the ridge. His men charged over the ragged ruin of their Colonel and his horse then plunged into the smoke. A shell, fired from further up the ridge, exploded ten yards behind Sycorax and the mare, terrified, bolted forward into the thick fog of gunsmoke.

The smoke was acrid. Sharpe wanted to draw his sword, but he needed both hands to curb Sycorax’s panic. She burst through the smoke and Sharpe saw a mass of snarling redcoats hacking and thrusting at the French gunners. This was revenge, and none of the Fusiliers would take an enemy’s surrender. The gunners would pay for the damage they had done, and so the bayonets ripped and thrust.

Sycorax stopped, quivering, because a French trench blocked her path. The trench was shallow, as if it had only been half finished. A redcoat and two Frenchmen lay dead inside. Sharpe scraped his sword free and tried to make sense of the chaos beyond the trench. Taplow’s men were brawling, stabbing and clawing their way through the battery while, just seventy paces to their left, a fresh enemy battalion was marching through the gunsmoke. The only man to have seen that threat was Frederickson, who had spread his skirmishers in a tenuous line to block the enemy’s approach, but a handful of Riflemen could not hope to stop a determined charge by a whole battalion. Taplow’s men were in utter disorder, seeking only vengeance, yet at any moment the enemy’s counter-attack would come on them like thunder.

‘Form companies!’ Sharpe shouted at the fusiliers. He spurred Sycorax over the shallow trench, then used the flat of his sword on men hunting down the last gunners who were trying to find refuge beneath the hot barrels of their guns. ‘Form companies!’ He found a Major. ‘Are you in command now?’

‘Command?’ The man was dazed.

‘Taplow’s dead.’

‘Good God!’ The Major gaped at Sharpe.

‘For Christ’s sake, form your men! You’re about to be attacked.’

‘We are?’

Sharpe twisted to his left and saw that the French battalion had checked their advance while they fixed bayonets yet, despite the small delay, there could not be more than half a minute before the French advanced into the captured battery where they would make mincemeat of the redcoats. Sharpe shouted for the men to form, and a few Sergeants saw the danger and took up the cry, but Sharpe knew it was hopeless. Taplow’s men were oblivious of everything but the captured battery and its small plunder. In less than a minute they would be overwhelmed. He swore under his breath. No one had even thought to spike the enemy guns, and Sharpe wished he had remembered to put a hammer and a few nails in his saddlebag.

Then, blessedly, he heard a crashing volley and he saw the Highlanders coming out of the smoke bank. Nairn had brought them in to the left of Taplow’s charge, and now the Scots fell on the flank of the advancing French battalion. It took just two Scottish volleys before the French gave up the counter-attack.

Sharpe found Taplow’s senior Major. ‘Form your battalion!’

‘I can’t …’

‘Do it. Now! Or else I’ll have you arrested! Move!’

A French gunner, wounded from a dozen blades, collapsed beside Sharpe’s horse. Redcoats were drinking the powder-stained water from the gun-buckets in which the cannon swabs were soaked between shots. The English wounded were propped against the wicker baskets filled with earth that made the cannon embrasures. One such basket seemed to explode into dirty shreds under the impact of a roundshot and Sharpe realized that French guns, further up the ridge, had begun to fire into the captured battery.

‘You’re the reserve now!’ Sharpe shouted at the Major. ‘Form your men and fall in behind the Highlanders!’

He did not wait to see if he was obeyed, but spurred after the Scots who were marching onwards. To their left, beyond Nairn’s second battalion, another brigade was going forward. The attack seemed to have broken the outer French crust, but as the British advanced so they would squeeze the French into an ever thicker and more impenetrable defence.

Sharpe rode past a dead Rifleman and was relieved to see it was not Harper. Nairn’s attack, spirited and bloody, was going well. The Highlanders’ Grenadier Company was in an enemy trench, led by a group of officers and sergeants who used their massive claymore swords to scour the French out. Frederickson’s sharpshooters picked off the fleeing enemy. Two pipers, apparently oblivious of the horror, calmly played their instruments. There was something about that music, Sharpe thought, that suited a battlefield. The noise was like that which a man might make if he was being skinned alive, but it seemed to fill the enemy with fear just as it inspired the Scots to savagery. A riderless horse, its neck sheeted with blood, galloped in panic towards the enemy lines.

‘Taplow’s dead!’ Sharpe found Nairn.

Nairn stared at Sharpe as though he had not heard, then he sighed. ‘So much for prayer before battle. Poor man.’

The neighbouring brigade had stormed a small redoubt and Sharpe could see its ramparts swarming with British and Portuguese infantry. Bayonets rose and fell. The attack, Sharpe decided, had gone beyond the ability of any one man to control it; now it was just a mass of maddened men released to battle, and so long as they could be kept moving forward, then so long was victory possible.

Sharpe lost sense of time. The fear was gone, as it always seemed to vanish once the danger was present. Nairn’s men, thinned out and bloodied, pushed forward into gunfire. Smoke thickened. Knots of men lay in blood where canister had struck. The wounded crawled for help, or vomited, or cried, or just lay softly to let death come. Order seemed to have gone. Instead of battalions marching proudly to the attack, it now seemed to Sharpe that the assault consisted of small groups of men who dashed a few yards forward, then summoned up the courage for another quick advance. Some men sought shelter and had to be rousted back into the advance. Somewhere a Colour showed through the smoke. Sometimes a cheer announced an enemy trench taken. A British galloper gun unlimbered and fired fast into the blinding fog.

The defence thickened. The enemy gunfire, which had been shattering at the start of the assault, seemed to double in its intensity. Nairn’s men, broken into leaderless units, went to ground. Nairn tried to force them on, but the brigade was exhausted, yet Division judged the moment to perfection for, just as Nairn knew he could ask no more of his men, a reserve brigade came up behind and swept through the scattered remnants of his three battalions.

The Scotsman had tears in his eyes; perhaps for the dead, or perhaps for pride. His men had done well.

‘Congratulations, sir,’ Sharpe said, and meant it, for Nairn’s men had driven deep into the horrid defences.

Nairn shook his head. ‘We should have gone further.’ He frowned, listening to the battle. ‘Some poor bastard’s fetching it rough, though.’

‘The big redoubt, sir.’ Sharpe pointed forward and left to where, amidst the shifting scrim of gunsmoke, there was a thicker patch of white smoke which betrayed the position of the large central redoubt. Musketry cracked about its earthen walls.

‘If we take that fort,’ Nairn said, ‘the battle’s won.’

But other men would have to take the redoubt. They were fresh men, Highlanders of the reserve brigade who marched into the maelstrom with their pipes playing. Nairn could only watch. He sheathed his sword as though he knew it would not be wanted again in this battle, nor, indeed, in this war. ‘We’ll advance behind the attack, Sharpe.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Sharpe rode to reorganize the shattered battalions. Bullets hissed near him, a shell dropped just over his head, and once he seemed to be bracketed by a shrill whistling of canister, yet he somehow led a charmed existence. Around him an army bled, but Sharpe lived. He thought of Jane, of Dorset, and of all the pleasures that waited with peace, and he prayed that victory would come soon, and safely.

The French gunners ripped bloody gaps in the Highlanders who charged the redoubt. Canister coughed at point-blank range, reinforced by the musketry of infantry who lined the palisade to fire down into the swarm of men who scrambled across the dry ditch and over the bodies of their clansmen.

‘Rather them than me.’ Sergeant Harper stood beside Sharpe’s horse.

Frederickson’s company had come well through the horror. They’d lost six men only. Taplow’s battalion had suffered far worse and, when Sharpe had re-formed it, there seemed only to be half as many men as had started on the attack, and that half so dazed as to be in a trance. Some of the men wept because Taplow was dead. ‘They liked him,’ the Light Company’s Captain had explained to Sharpe. ‘He flogged them and swore at them, but they liked him. They knew where they were with him.’

‘He was a brave man,’ Sharpe said.

‘He was frightened of peace. He thought it would be dull.’

The Highlanders scrabbled at the earth wall. French muskets clawed at them, but somehow the Scotsmen hauled themselves up and thrust their bayonets over the barricade. One man dragged himself to the top, fell, another took his place, and suddenly the Scots were tearing the palisade to scrap and flooding through the gaps. The cheers of the attackers sounded thin through the smoke. The supporting companies were crossing the ditch of dead men, and the redoubt was taken.

Sharpe sheathed his sword. He noted, with some surprise, that it was unbloodied. Perhaps, he thought, he would not have to kill in this last battle, then a superstitious certainty suggested that he would only survive if he did not try to kill. He touched his unshaven chin, then forgot the auguries of life and death as a massive volley hammered from the far side of the captured redoubt.

‘God save Ireland.’ Harper’s voice had awe in it.

A French counter-attack, as desperate as the Highland assault, had been launched on the redoubt and Sharpe saw with horror how the blue-coated enemy was clearing the newly taken ramparts. Men fought hand to hand, but the French had the advantage of numbers and they were winning by sheer weight alone.

Survivors of the Scottish regiments jumped down to escape from the fort, French cheers scorned them, then the reserve battalions, more Scotsmen, were snarling forward with bayonets outstretched.

‘We’ll form as a reserve!’ Nairn shouted at Sharpe.

‘Skirmishers forward!’ Sharpe shouted.

Nairn’s brigade had marched three battalions strong, but now it formed in only two. The shrunken Highlanders were on the left, and the remains of the two English battalions paraded as one on the right. The men crouched, praying they would not be needed. Their faces were blackened by powder residue through which sweat carved dirty white lines.

The second Scottish attack clawed its way into the redoubt. Once again the bayonets rose and fell on the parapet, and once again the Scots drove the French out. Smoke drifted to obscure the fight, but the pipes still played and the cheers were again in Gaelic.

Sharpe kept his sword sheathed as he rode Sycorax towards Nairn. Above him, incongruous on this day of struggle, two larks climbed high above the smoke. Sycorax shied away from a dead Scottish Sergeant. The battle had become quiet, or at least it seemed so to Sharpe. Men fought and died not two hundred paces northwards, and all around the guns still thundered their gut-thumping menace into the smoke-cloud, but it seemed unthreatening to Sharpe. He remembered the remains of the salt beef in his pouch, and was astonished to find that a French musket bullet had lodged in the tough, gristly meat. He prised the ball free, then bit hungrily into the food.

‘There’s another brigade a quarter mile behind us,’ Nairn said. ‘They’ll go on to the end of the ridge if the fort falls.’

‘Good.’

‘Thank you for all you did,’ Nairn said.

Sharpe, embarrassed by the praise, shook his head. ‘I didn’t even get my sword wet, sir.’

‘Nor me.’ Nairn stared up into the sky.

A French cannonball, fired blind from the left flank, and aimed at the Scotsmen who had captured the redoubt, flew wide. It took off the head of Sharpe’s horse in an eruption of warm blood. For a second Sharpe sat on the headless mare, then the body tipped forward and he frantically kicked his feet out of the stirrups and threw himself sideways as the animal’s corpse threatened to roll on to him. ‘God damn it!’ Sharpe sprawled in a puddle of warm horse blood, then clambered to his feet. ‘God damn it!’

Nairn governed his impulse to laugh at Sharpe’s undignified fall. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said instead.

‘She was a present from Jane.’ Sharpe stared at the charnel mess that had been Sycorax. The headless body was still twitching.

‘She was a good horse,’ Nairn said. ‘Save the saddle.’ He turned in his own saddle to see if one of his spare horses was in sight, but a sudden volley of musketry turned him back.

Another French counter-attack was sweeping forward, this one outflanking and assaulting the redoubt, and again the Scots were being forced backwards by a superior number of men. Blue-coated infantry swarmed at the redoubt’s walls, muskets crashed, and for the second time the French retook the fort. Screams sounded as Highlanders were hunted down inside the courtyard. ‘The bloody French are fighting well today.’ Nairn sounded puzzled.

The enemy scrambled along the palisade, bayoneting wounded Scotsmen. These Frenchmen were, indeed, fighting with a verve that the earlier attack, in column, had not displayed. An eagle standard shone among the smoke and, beneath its brightness, Sharpe saw a French General. The man was standing with legs straddled wide on the fort’s southern parapet. It was an arrogant pose, suggesting that the Frenchman was lord of this battlefield and more than equal to anything the British could throw against him. Frederickson’s Riflemen must have seen the enemy General, for a dozen of them fired, but the Frenchman had a charmed life this day.