Sharpe’s Escape: The Bussaco Campaign, 1810

‘A quarter to six, sir.’

‘The fog’s lifting, don’t you think?’ Masséna stared into the vapour with his one eye. The Emperor had taken the other in a shooting accident while they were hunting, and, ever since, Masséna had worn a patch.

‘Perhaps a little, sir,’ the aide said doubtfully.

Tonight, Masséna thought, he would sleep in the monastery said to be on the ridge’s far slope. He would send a troop of dragoons to escort Henriette from Tondela from where he had been so abruptly summoned the previous night, and he smiled as he recalled her white arms reaching playfully for him as he dressed. He had slept an hour or two with the army, and risen early to find a cold, foggy dawn, but the fog, he reckoned, was France’s friend. It would let the troops get most of the way up the slope before the British and Portuguese could see them, and once the Eagles were close to the summit the business should not take long. Victory by midday, he thought, and he imagined the bells ringing out in Paris to announce the triumph of the Eagles. He wondered what new honours would come to him. He was already the Prince of Essling, but by tonight, he thought, he might have earned a dozen other royal titles. The Emperor could be generous in such things, and the Emperor expected great things of Masséna. The rest of Europe was at peace, cowed into submission by the armies of France, and so Napoleon had sent reinforcements into Spain, had formed this new Army of Portugal that had been entrusted to Masséna, and the Emperor expected Lisbon to be captured before the leaves fell. Victory, Masséna thought, victory by midday, and then the enemy’s remnants would be pursued all the way to Lisbon.

‘You’re sure there’s a monastery across the ridge?’ he enquired of one of his Portuguese aides, a man who fought for the French because he believed they represented reason, liberty, modernity and rationality.

‘There is, sir.’

‘We shall sleep there tonight,’ Masséna announced, and turned his one eye to another aide. ‘Have two squadrons ready to escort Mademoiselle Leberton from Tondela.’ That essential comfort assured, the Marshal spurred his horse forward through the fog. He stopped close to the stream and listened. A single cannon sounded to the south, the signal that the first attack was under way, and when the cannon’s reverberating echo had died away Masséna could hear the drums fading in the distance as the four southern columns climbed the slope. It was the sound of victory. The sound of the Eagles going into battle.

It had taken over two hours to form the four columns. The men had been roused in the dark, and the reveille had been sounded an hour later to fool the British into thinking that the French had slept longer, but the columns had been forming long before the bugles sounded. Sergeants with flaming torches served as guides, and the men formed on them, company by company, but it had all taken much longer than expected. The fog confused the newly woken men. Officers gave orders, sergeants bellowed, shoved, and used their musket stocks to force men into the ranks, and some fools mistook their orders and joined the wrong column, and they had to be pulled out, cursed, and sent to their proper place, but eventually the thirty-three battalions were assembled in their four assault columns in the small meadows beside the stream.

There were eighteen thousand men in the four columns. If those men had been paraded in a line of three ranks, which was how the French made their lines, they would have stretched for two miles, but instead they had been concentrated into the four tight columns. The two largest led the attack, while the two smaller came behind, ready to exploit whatever opening the first two made. Those two larger columns had eighty men in their front ranks, but there were eighty more ranks behind and the great blocks made two battering rams, almost two miles of infantry concentrated into two moving squares that were designed to be hammered against the enemy line and overwhelm it by sheer weight. ‘Stay close!’ the sergeants shouted as they began to ascend the ridge. A column was no good if it lost cohesion. To work it had to be like a machine, every man in step, shoulder to shoulder, the rear ranks pushing the front rank on into the enemy guns. That front rank would probably die, as would the one behind, and the one behind that, but eventually the impetus of the massive formation should force it across its own dead and through the enemy line and then the real killing could begin. The battalions’ drummers were concentrated at the centre of each column and the boys played the fine rhythm of the charge, pausing every so often to let the men call out the refrain, ‘Vive l’Empereur!’

That refrain became breathless as the columns climbed. The ridge was horribly steep, lung-sapping, and men tired and so began to lag and stray. The fog was still thick. Scattered gorse bushes and stunted trees obstructed the columns which split to pass them, and after a while the fragments did not join up again, but just struggled up through the silent fog, wondering what waited for them at the summit. Before they were halfway up the hill both the leading columns had broken into groups of tired men, and the officers, swords drawn, were shouting at the groups to form ranks, to hurry, and the officers shouted from different parts of the hill and only confused the troops more so that they went first one way and then the other. The drummer boys, following the broken ranks, beat more slowly as they grew more tired.

Ahead of the columns, way ahead, and scattered in their loose formation, the French skirmishers climbed towards the light. The fog thinned as they neared the ridge’s top. There was a swarm of French light troops, over six hundred voltigeurs in front of each column, and their job was to drive away the British and Portuguese skirmishers, force them back over the ridge top and then start shooting at the defending lines. That skirmish fire was designed to weaken those lines ready for the hammer blows coming behind.

Above the disordered columns, unseen in the fog, the Eagles flew. Napoleon’s Eagles, the French standards, the gilt statuettes shining on their poles. Two had their tricolour flags attached, but most regiments took the flags off the poles and stored them at the depot in France, relying on the Emperor’s Eagle to be the mark of honour. ‘Close on the Eagle!’ an officer shouted, and the scattered men tried to form their ranks and then, from above them, they heard the first staccato snapping as the skirmishers began their fight. A gun fired from the valley, then another, and suddenly two batteries of French artillery were firing blind into the fog, hoping their shells would rake the defenders at the ridge top.

‘God’s teeth!’ The exclamation was torn from Colonel Lawford who, peering down the slope, saw the horde of French skirmishers break out of the fog. The voltigeurs far outnumbered the British and Portuguese light companies, but those redcoats, cazadores and greenjackets fired first. Puffs of smoke jetted from the hillside. A Frenchman twisted and fell back and then the voltigeurs went down onto one knee and aimed their muskets. The volley splintered the morning, thickening the fog with powder smoke, and Sharpe saw two redcoats and a Portuguese go down. The second men of the allied skirmishing pairs fired, but the voltigeurs were too numerous and their musket fire was almost continuous and the red, green and brown jackets were falling back. The voltigeurs advanced in short rushes, at least two of them for every allied skirmisher, and it was plain the French were winning this early contest by sheer weight of numbers.

Lieutenant Slingsby and the South Essex light troops had deployed ahead of the battalion and now found themselves on the flank of the French advance. Ahead of them was mostly empty hillside, but the voltigeurs were thick to their right and for a few moments the company was able to stand and drive in that enemy flank, but a French officer saw what was happening and shouted for two companies to chase the redcoats and greenjackets away. ‘Back away now,’ Sharpe muttered. He was mounted on Portia, Slingsby’s horse, and the extra height gave him a clear view of the fight that was some three hundred paces away. ‘Back off!’ he said louder, and the Colonel gave him an irritated look. But then Slingsby understood the danger and gave eight whistle blasts. That told the light company to retreat while inclining to their left, an order that would bring them back up the slope towards the battalion, and it was the right order, the one Sharpe would have given, but Slingsby had his blood up and did not want to fall too far back too soon and thus yield the fight to the French and so instead of slanting back up the hill as he had ordered he ran straight across the slope’s face.

The men had started back up the ridge, but seeing the Lieutenant stay lower down, they hesitated. ‘Keep firing!’ Slingsby shouted at them. ‘Don’t bunch! Smartly now!’ A ball struck a rock by his right foot and ricocheted up to the sky. Hagman shot the French officer who had led the move against the South Essex and Harris put down an enemy sergeant who fell into a gorse bush, but the other Frenchmen kept advancing and Slingsby slowly backed away, yet instead of being between the French and the South Essex he was now on the enemy’s flank, and another French officer, reckoning that the South Essex’s light company had been brushed aside, shouted at the voltigeurs to climb straight up the hill towards the right flank of the South Essex line. Cannon opened fire from the ridge top, shooting from the left of the battalion down into the fog behind the voltigeurs. ‘They must have seen something,’ Lawford said, patting Lightning’s neck to calm the stallion, which had been frightened by the sudden crash of the six-pounders. ‘Hear the drums?’

‘I can hear them,’ Sharpe said. It was the old sound, the French pas de charge, the noise of attacking Eagles. ‘Old trousers,’ he said. That was the British nickname for the pas de charge.

‘Why do we call it that?’

‘It’s a song, sir.’

‘Do I want to hear it?’

‘Not from me, sir. Can’t sing.’

Lawford smiled, though he had not really been listening. He took off his cocked hat and ran a hand through his hair. ‘Their main body can’t be far off now,’ he said, wanting the confrontation over. The voltigeurs were no longer advancing, but shooting at the line to weaken it before the column arrived.

Sharpe was watching Slingsby who, seeing the French turn away from him, now seemed momentarily bereft. He had not done badly. All his men were alive, including Ensign Iliffe who, when he had returned Sharpe’s sword, had been pale with nervousness. The boy had stood his ground, though, and that was all that could be expected of him, while the rest of Slingsby’s men had scored some hits on the enemy, but now that enemy climbed away from the company. What Slingsby should do, Sharpe thought, was climb the hill and spread his men across the face of the South Essex, but just then the first of the columns came into view from the fog.

They were shadows first, then dark shapes, and Sharpe could make no sense of it, for the column was no longer a coherent mass of men, but rather groups of men who emerged ragged from the whiteness. Two more cannons opened fire from the ridge, their round shot banging through files of men to spray the fog with blood, and still more men came, hundreds of men, and as they came into the light they hurried together, trying to reform the column, and the cannons, reloaded with canister, blasted great jagged holes in the blue uniforms.

Slingsby was still out on the flank, but the sight of the column prompted him to order his men to open fire. The voltigeurs saw what was happening and dozens ran to cut off the light company. ‘For Christ’s sake!’ Sharpe said aloud, and this time Lawford did not look irritated, just worried, but Slingsby saw the danger and shouted at his men to retreat as quickly as they could. They scrambled up the slope. It was not a dignified withdrawal, they were not firing as they backed, but just running for their lives. One or two, furthest down the slope, ran downhill to hide in the fog, but the rest managed to scramble their way back to the ridge’s summit where Slingsby barked at them to spread along the battalion’s face.

‘Too late,’ Lawford said quietly, ‘too damn late. Major Forrest! Call in skirmishers.’

The bugle sounded and the light company, panting from their near escape, formed at the left of the line. The voltigeurs who had chased the light company off the column’s flank were firing at the South Essex now and the bullets hissed close to Sharpe, for most of the Frenchmen were aiming at the colours and at the group of mounted officers clustered beside the two flags. A man went down in number four company. ‘Close ranks!’ a sergeant shouted, and a corporal, appointed as a file closer, dragged the wounded man back from the ranks.

‘Take him to the surgeon, Corporal,’ Lawford said, then watched as the great mass of Frenchmen, thousands of them now visible at the swirling margins of the fog, turned towards his ranks. ‘Make ready!’

Close to six hundred men cocked their muskets. The voltigeurs knew what was coming and fired at the battalion. Bullets twitched the heavy yellow silk of the regimental colour. Two more men were hit in front of Sharpe and one was screaming in pain. ‘Close up! Close up!’ a corporal shouted.

‘Stop your bleeding noise, boy!’ Sergeant Willetts of five company growled.

The column was two hundred paces away, still ragged, but in sight of the crest now. The voltigeurs were closer, just a hundred paces away, kneeling and firing, standing to reload and then firing again. Slingsby had let his riflemen go a few paces forward of the line and those men were hurting the voltigeurs, taking out their officers and sergeants, but a score of rifles could not blunt this attack. That would be a job for the redcoats. ‘When you fire,’ Lawford called, ‘aim low! Don’t waste His Majesty’s lead! You will aim low!’ He rode along the right of his line, repeating the message. ‘Aim low! Remember your training! Aim low!’

The column was coalescing, the ranks shuffling together as if for protection. A nine-pounder round shot seared through it, sending up a long fast spray of blood. The drummers were beating frantically. Sharpe glanced left and saw the Connaught Rangers were closing on the South Essex, coming to add their volleys, then a voltigeur’s bullet slapped off the top of his horse’s left ear and twitched at the sleeve of his jacket. He could see the faces of the men in the column’s front rank, see their moustaches, see their mouths opening to cheer their Emperor. A canister from a nine-pounder tore into them, twitching files red and ragged, but they closed up, stepped over the dead and dying, and came on with their long bayonets gleaming. The Eagles were bright in the new sunlight. Still more cannons opened fire, blasting the column with canisters loaded over round shot, and the French, sensing that there was no artillery off to their left, slanted that way, climbing now towards the Portuguese battalion on the right of the South Essex. ‘Offering themselves to us,’ Lawford said. He had ridden back to the battalion’s centre and now watched as the French turned away to reveal their right flank to his muskets. ‘I think we should join the dance, Sharpe, don’t you? Battalion!’ He took a deep breath. ‘Battalion will advance!’

Lawford marched the South Essex forward, only twenty yards, but the movement scared the voltigeurs who thought they might be the target of a regimental volley and so they hurried away to join the column that now marched slantwise across the front of the South Essex. ‘Present!’ Lawford shouted, and nearly six hundred muskets went into men’s shoulders.

‘Fire!’

The massive volley pumped out a long cloud of gun smoke that smelt like rotting eggs, and then the musket stocks thumped onto the ground and men took new cartridges and began to reload. ‘Platoon fire now!’ Lawford called to his officers, and he took off his hat again and wiped sweat from his forehead. It was still cold, the wind blowing chill from the far-off Atlantic, yet Lawford was hot. Sharpe heard the splintering crack of the Portuguese volley, then the South Essex began their own rolling fire, shooting half company by half company from the centre of the line, the bullets never ending, the men going through the well-practised motions of loading and firing, loading and firing. The enemy was invisible now, hidden from the battalion by its own gun smoke. Sharpe rode along the right of the line, deliberately not going left so no one could accuse him of interfering with Slingsby. ‘Aim low!’ he called to the men. ‘Aim low!’ A few bullets were coming back out of the smoke, but they were nearly all high. Inexperienced men usually shot high and the French, who were being flayed by the Portuguese and by the South Essex, were trying to fire uphill into a cloud of smoke and they were taking a terrible punishment from muskets and cannons. Some of the enemy must be panicking because Sharpe saw two ramrods go wheeling overhead, evidence that the men were too scared to remember their musket drill. He stopped by the grenadier company and watched the Portuguese and he reckoned they were firing as efficiently as any redcoat battalion. Their half-company volleys were steady as clockwork, the smoke rolling out from the battalion’s centre, and he knew the bullets must be striking hard into the disintegrating column’s face.

More muskets flared as the 88th, the feared Connaught Rangers, wheeled forward of the line to blast at the wounded French column, but somehow the French held on. Their outer ranks and files were being killed and injured, but the mass of men inside the column still lived and more were climbing the hill to replace the dead, and the whole mass, in no good order, but crowding together, tried to advance into the terrible volleys. More red- and brown-jacketed troops were moving towards the fight, adding their musketry, but still the French pushed against the storm. The column was dividing again, torn by the slashing round shots and ripped by canister, so now it seemed as though disorganized groups of men were struggling uphill past piles of dead. Sharpe could hear the officers and sergeants shouting them on, could hear the rattle of the frantic drums, which was now challenged by a British band that was playing ‘Men of Harlech’. ‘Not very appropriate!’ Major Forrest had joined Sharpe and had to shout to make himself heard over the dense sound of musketry. ‘We’re hardly in a hollow.’

‘You’re wounded,’ Sharpe said.

‘A scratch.’ Forrest glanced at his right sleeve, which was torn and bloodstained. ‘How are the Portuguese?’

‘Good!’

‘The Colonel was wondering where you were,’ Forrest said.

‘Did he think I’d gone back to the light company?’ Sharpe asked sourly.

‘Now, now, Sharpe,’ Forrest chided him.

Sharpe clumsily turned his horse and kicked it back to Lawford. ‘The buggers aren’t moving!’ the Colonel greeted him indignantly. Lawford was leaning forward in his saddle, trying to see through the smoke and, between the half-company volleys, when the foul-smelling cloud thinned a little, he could just make out the huge groups of stubborn Frenchmen clinging to the hillside beneath the crest. ‘Will bayonets shift them?’ he asked Sharpe. ‘By God, I’ve a mind to try steel. What do you think?’

‘Two more volleys?’ Sharpe suggested. It was chaos down the slope. The French column, broken again, was now clumps of men who fired uphill into the smoke, while more men, perhaps another column altogether or else stragglers from the first, were continually joining the groups. French artillery was adding to the din. They must have brought their howitzers to the foot of the slope and the shells, shot blind into the fog, were screaming overhead to crash onto the rear area where women, campfires, tents and tethered horses were the only casualties. A group of French voltigeurs had taken the rocky spur where Sharpe had placed his picquet in the night. ‘We should move those fellows away,’ Sharpe said, pointing to them.

‘They’re not harming us,’ Lawford shouted above the din, ‘but we can’t let those wretches stay here!’ He pointed to the smoke-wreathed Frenchmen. ‘That’s our land!’ He took a breath. ‘Fix bayonets! Fix bayonets!’

Colonel Wallace, commander of the 88th, must have had the same thought, for Sharpe was aware that the Irishmen had stopped firing, and they would only do that to fix the seventeen-inch blades on their muskets. Clicks sounded all along the South Essex line as the two ranks slotted their bayonets onto blackened muzzles. The French, with extraordinary bravery, used the lull in the musket fire to try and advance again. Men clambered over dead and dying bodies, officers shouted them forward, the drummers redoubled their efforts and suddenly the Eagles were moving again. The leading Frenchmen were among the bodies of the dead voltigeurs now and must have been convinced that one more hard push would break through the thin line of Portuguese and British troops, yet the whole hilltop must have seemed ripples of flame and rills of smoke to them. ‘South Essex!’ Lawford shouted. ‘Advance!’ The cannons jetted more powder smoke and flaming scraps of wadding deep into the tight French ranks. Sharpe could hear the screaming of wounded men now. Musket shots hammered from a knot of Frenchmen to the right, but the South Essex and the men of Connaught were going forward, bayonets bright, and Sharpe kicked the horse forward, following the battalion, which suddenly broke into the double and shouted their challenge. The Portuguese, seeing the redcoats advance, cheered and fixed their own blades.

The charge struck home. The French were not formed properly, most did not have loaded muskets and the British line closed on the clumps of blue-coated infantry and then wrapped around them as the redcoats lunged with bayonets. The enemy fought back and Sharpe heard the crack of muskets clashing, the scrape of blades, the curses and shouts of wounded soldiers. The enemy dead obstructed the British, but they clambered over the bodies to rip with long blades at the living. ‘Hold your lines! Hold your lines!’ a sergeant bellowed, and in some places the companies had split because some files were attacking one French group and the rest another, and Sharpe saw two French soldiers break clear through such a gap and start uphill. He turned the horse towards them and drew his sword, and the two men, hearing the blade’s long scrape against the scabbard’s throat, immediately threw down their muskets and spread their hands. Sharpe pointed the sword uphill, indicating they were prisoners now and should go to the South Essex colour party. One obediently set off, but the other snatched up his musket and fled downhill. Sharpe let him go. He could see the Eagles were being hurried down the slope, being carried away from the danger of capture, and more Frenchmen, seeing their standards retreat, broke from the unequal fight. The allied cannons had stopped their fire because their targets were masked by their own men, but the French guns still shot through the thinning fog and then, off to Sharpe’s right, more cannons opened and he saw a second column, even larger than the first, appearing on the lower slope.

The first French attack broke from the back. Most of the men in the front ranks could not escape because they were trapped by their comrades behind, and those men were being savaged by Portuguese and British bayonets, but the French rear ranks followed the Eagles and, as the pressure eased, the remnants of the column fled. They ran, leaping over the dead and wounded that marked their passage up the hill, and the redcoats and Portuguese pursued them. A man from the grenadier company rammed his bayonet into the small of a Frenchman’s back, stabbed him again when he fell, then kicked him and stabbed him a third time when the man obstinately refused to die. A drum, painted with a French Eagle, rolled downhill. A drummer boy, his arm shot off by a cannonball, hunched in misery beside a gorse bush. British redcoats and blue-jacketed Portuguese ran past him, intent on pursuing and killing the fleeing enemy. ‘Come back!’ Lawford shouted angrily. ‘Come back!’ The men did not hear him, or did not care; they had won and now they simply wanted to kill. Lawford looked for Sharpe. ‘Get them, Sharpe!’ the Colonel snapped. ‘Fetch them back!’