Sharpe’s Escape: The Bussaco Campaign, 1810

Sharpe wondered how the hell he was to stop such a chaotic pursuit, but he obediently kicked his borrowed horse, which immediately bolted downhill so violently that he was nearly thrown off the back of the saddle. He yanked the reins to slow the mare and she swerved to her left and Sharpe heard a bullet flutter past him and looked up to see that scores of voltigeurs still held the rocky knoll and were firing at him. The horse ran on, Sharpe clinging to the saddle’s pommel for dear life, then she stumbled and he felt himself flying. By a miracle his feet came clear of the stirrups and he landed on the slope with an almighty thump, rolled for a few yards and then banged against a boulder. He was sure he must have broken a dozen bones, but when he picked himself up he found he was only bruised. Ferragus had hurt him much worse, but the fall from the horse had exacerbated those injuries. He thought the mare must have been shot, but when he turned round to look for his fallen sword he saw the horse trotting calmly uphill without any apparent damage except her bullet-cropped ear. He swore at the mare, abandoned her, picked up his sword and rifle and went on downhill.

He shouted at redcoats to get back to the ridge. Some were Irishmen from the 88th, many of them busy plundering the bodies of French dead and, because he was an officer they did not know, they snarled, swore or simply ignored him, implicitly daring him to tangle with them. Sharpe let them be. If there was one regiment in the army that could look after itself it was the men of Connaught. He ran on down, shouting at troops to get the hell up to the ridge top, but most were halfway down the long slope, almost to where the fog had retreated, and Sharpe had to run hard to get within shouting distance and it was then, as the fog swirled away, that he saw two more French columns climbing from the valley. There was another column, he knew, somewhere near the summit, but these were new troops making a fresh attack. ‘South Essex!’ he shouted. He had been a sergeant once and still had a voice that could carry halfway across a city, though using it caused his ribs to bang pain into his lungs. ‘South Essex! Back! Back!’ A shell struck the hill not five paces away, bounced up and exploded in jets of hissing smoke. Two scraps of casing spun past his face so close that he felt the momentary warmth and the slap of the hot air. French cannon were at the foot of the slope, just visible in the thinning fog, and they were firing at the men who had pursued the broken column, but who now had checked their reckless downhill run to watch the new columns advance. ‘South Essex!’ Sharpe roared, and the anger in his voice was harsh, and at last men turned to trudge uphill. Slingsby, his sabre drawn, was watching the columns, but, hearing Sharpe, he suddenly snapped at men to turn around and go back to the ridge top. Harper was one of them and, seeing Sharpe, the big man angled across the slope. His seven-barrelled gun was slung on his back and in his hand was his rifle with its twenty-three-inch sword bayonet reddened to its brass handle. The rest of the light company, at last aware that more columns were attacking, hurried after Harper.

Sharpe waited to make sure that every redcoat and rifleman had turned back. French shells and round shot were banging onto the hill, but using artillery against such scattered targets was a waste of powder. One cannonball, spent after its bouncing impact, rolled down the hill to make Harper skip aside, then he grinned at Sharpe. ‘Gave it to them proper, sir.’

‘You should have stayed up top.’

‘It’s a hell of a climb,’ Harper said, surprised to see how far down the hill he had gone. He fell in beside Sharpe and the two climbed together. ‘Mister Slingsby, sir,’ the Irishman said, then fell silent.

‘Mister Slingsby what?’

‘He said you weren’t well, sir, and he was taking command.’

‘Then he’s a lying bastard,’ Sharpe said, careless that he ought not to say such a thing of another officer.

‘Is he now?’ Harper said tonelessly.

‘The Colonel told me to step aside. He wants Mister Slingsby to have a chance.’

‘He had that right enough,’ Harper said.

‘I should have been there,’ Sharpe said.

‘And so you should,’ Harper said, ‘but the lads are all alive. Except Dodd.’

‘Matthew? Is he dead?’

‘Dead or alive, I don’t know,’ Harper said, ‘but I couldn’t see him anywhere. I was keeping an eye on the boys, but I can’t find Matthew. Maybe he went back up the hill.’

‘I didn’t see him,’ Sharpe said. They both turned and counted heads and saw the light company were all present except for Corporal Dodd. ‘We’ll look for him as we climb,’ Sharpe said, meaning they would look for his body.

Lieutenant Slingsby, red-faced and sabre drawn, hurried over to Sharpe. ‘Did you bring orders, Sharpe?’ he demanded.

‘The orders are to get back to the top of the hill as quick as you can,’ Sharpe said.

‘Quick, men!’ Slingsby called, then turned back to Sharpe. ‘Our fellows did well!’

‘Did they?’

‘Outflanked the voltigeurs, Sharpe. Outflanked them, by God! We turned their flank.’

‘Did you?’

‘Pity you didn’t see us.’ Slingsby was excited, proud of himself. ‘We slipped past them, drove in their wing, then hurt them.’

Sharpe thought the light company had been led to one side where it had been about as much use as a kettle with a hole in it, and had then been ignominiously chased away, but he kept silent. Harper unclipped his sword bayonet, cleaned the blade on the jacket of a French corpse, then quickly ran his hands over the man’s pockets and pouches.

He ran to catch up with Sharpe and offered a half sausage. ‘I know you like Crapaud sausage, sir.’

Sharpe put it into his pouch, saving it for dinner. A bullet whispered past him, almost spent, and he looked up to see puffs of smoke from the rocky knoll. ‘Pity the voltigeurs took that,’ he said.

‘No trouble to us,’ Slingsby said dismissively. ‘Turned their flank, by God, turned their damn flank and then punished them!’

Harper glanced at Sharpe, looked as though he would start laughing, and managed to keep a straight face. The big British and Portuguese guns were hammering at the second big column, the one that had arrived just after the first had been defeated. That column was fighting at the top of the ridge and the two fresh columns, both smaller than the first pair, were climbing behind. Another bullet from the voltigeurs in their rocky nest whipped past Sharpe and he angled away from them.

‘You still have my horse, Sharpe?’ Slingsby demanded.

‘Not here,’ Sharpe said, and Harper made a choking sound which he turned into a cough.

‘You said something, Sergeant Harper?’ Slingsby demanded crisply.

‘Smoke in my throat, sir,’ Harper said. ‘It catches something dreadful, sir. I was always a sickly child, sir, on account of the peat smoke in our cottage. My mother made me sleep outside, God rest her soul, until the wolves came for me.’

‘Wolves?’ Slingsby sounded cautious.

‘Three of them, sir, big as you’d like, with slobbery great tongues the colour of your coat, sir, and I had to sleep inside after that, and I just coughed my way through the nights. It was all that smoke, see?’

‘Your parents should have built a chimney,’ Slingsby said disapprovingly.

‘Now why didn’t we think of that?’ Harper enquired innocently and Sharpe laughed aloud, earning a vicious look from the Lieutenant.

The rest of the light company was close now and Ensign Iliffe was among them. Sharpe saw the boy’s sabre was red at the tip. Sharpe nodded at it. ‘Well done, Mister Iliffe.’

‘He just came at me, sir.’ The boy had suddenly found his voice. ‘A big man!’

‘He was a sergeant,’ Harris explained, ‘and he was going to stick Mister Iliffe, sir.’

‘He was!’ Iliffe was excited.

‘But Mister Iliffe stepped past him neat as a squirrel, sir, and gave him steel in the belly. It was a good stroke, Mister Iliffe,’ Harris said, and the Ensign just blushed.

Sharpe tried to recall the first time he had been in a fight, steel against steel, but the trouble was he had been brought up in London and almost born to that kind of savagery. But for Mister Iliffe, son of an impoverished Essex gentleman, there had to be a shock in realizing that some great brute of a Frenchman was trying to kill him and Sharpe, remembering how sick the boy had been, reckoned he had done very well. He grinned at Iliffe. ‘Only the one Crapaud, Mister Iliffe?’

‘Only one, sir.’

‘And you an officer, eh? You’re supposed to kill two a day!’

The men laughed. Iliffe just looked pleased with himself.

‘Enough chatter!’ Slingsby took command of the company. ‘Hurry up!’ The South Essex colours had moved south along the ridge top, evidently going towards the fight with the second leading column, and the light company slanted that way. The French shells had stopped their futile harassment of the slope and were instead firing at the ridge top now, their fuses leaving small pencil traces in the sky above the light company. The sound of the second column was loud now, a cacophony of drums, war cries and the stutter of the skirmishers’ muskets.

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