Sharpe’s Rifles: The French Invasion of Galicia, January 1809

The mule was prodded across the stream and Sharpe noticed with what care the soldiers guarded the oil-cloth-covered chest. He supposed it contained Major Vivar’s clothes and belongings. Harper, still tied to the packmule, spat towards him, a gesture Sharpe chose to ignore.

‘Now we climb,’ Vivar said with a note of satisfaction, as if the coming hardship was to be welcomed.

They climbed. They struggled up a steeply rising valley where the rocks were glossed by ice and the trees dripped snow onto their heads. The wind rose and the sky clouded again.

It began to sleet. The wind howled about their muffled ears. Men were sobbing with the misery and effort, but somehow Vivar kept them moving. ‘Upwards! Upwards! Where the cavalry can’t go, eh? Go on! Higher! Let’s join the angels! What’s the matter with you, Marcos? Your father would have danced up this slope when he was twice your age! You want the Englishmen to think a Spaniard has no strength? Shame on you! Climb!’

By dawn they had reached a saddle in the hills. Vivar led the exhausted men to a cave that was hidden by ice-sheathed laurels. ‘I shot a bear here,’ he told Sharpe proudly. ‘I was twelve, and my father sent me out alone to kill a bear.’ He snapped off a branch and tossed it towards the men who were building a fire. ‘That was twenty years ago.’ He spoke with a kind of wonder that so much time had passed.

Sharpe noted that Vivar was exactly his own age but, coming from the nobility was already a Major, while Sharpe came from the gutter and only an extraordinary stroke of fate had made him into a Lieutenant. He doubted if he would ever see another promotion, nor, seeing how badly he had handled these greenjackets, did he think he deserved one.

Vivar watched as the chest was fetched from the mule’s back and placed in the cave-mouth. He sat beside it, with a protective arm over its humped surface, and Sharpe saw that there was almost a reverence in the way he treated the box. Surely, Sharpe thought, no man, having endured the frozen hell that Vivar had been through, would take such care to protect a chest if it only contained clothes? ‘What’s in it?’ Sharpe asked.

‘Just papers.’ Vivar stared out at the creeping dawn. ‘Modern war generates papers, yes?’

It was not a question that demanded an answer, but rather a comment to discourage further questions. Sharpe asked none.

Vivar took off his cocked hat and carefully removed a half-smoked cigar that was stored inside its sweatband. He gave an apologetic shrug that he had no cigar to offer Sharpe, then struck a flame from his tinder box. The pungent smell of tobacco teased Sharpe’s nostrils. ‘I saved it,’ Vivar said, ‘till I was close to home.’

‘Very close?’

Vivar waved the cigar in a gesture that encompassed the whole view. ‘My father was lord of all this land.’

‘Will we go to your house?’

‘I hope to see you safe on your southern road first.’

Sharpe, piqued by the curiosity the poor have about the lordly rich, felt oddly disappointed. ‘Is it a large house?’

‘Which house?’ Vivar asked drily. ‘There are three, all of them large. One is an abandoned castle, one is in the city of Orense, and one is in the country. They all belong to my brother, but Tomas has never loved Galicia. He prefers to live where there are kings and courtiers so, on his sufferance, I can call the houses mine.’

‘Lucky you,’ Sharpe said sourly.

‘To live in a great house?’ Vivar shook his head. ‘Your house may be more humble, Lieutenant, but at least you can call it your own. Mine is in a country taken by the French.’ He stared at Rifleman Harper who, still tied to the mule’s tail, hunched in the wet snow. ‘Just as his is in a country taken by the English.’

The bitterness of the accusation surprised Sharpe who, beginning to admire the Spaniard, was disconcerted to hear such sudden hostility. Perhaps Vivar himself thought he had spoken too harshly, for he offered Sharpe a rueful shrug. ‘You have to understand that my wife’s mother was Irish. Her family settled here to escape your persecution.’

‘Is that how you learned English?’

‘That, and from good tutors.’ Vivar drew on the cigar. A slip of snow, loosened by the fire in the cave, slid from the lip of rock. ‘My father believed that we should speak the language of the enemy.’ He spoke with a wry amusement. ‘It seems strange that you and I should now be fighting on the same side, does it not? I was raised to believe that the English are heathenish barbarians, enemies of God and the true faith, and now I must convince myself that you are our friends.’

‘At least we have the same enemies,’ Sharpe said.

‘Perhaps that is a more accurate description,’ he agreed.

The two officers sat in an awkward silence. The smoke from Vivar’s cigar whirled above the snow to disappear in the misting dawn. Sharpe, feeling the silence hang heavy between them, asked if the Major’s wife was waiting in one of the three houses.

Vivar paused before answering, and when he did so his voice was as bleak as the country they watched. ‘My wife died seven years ago. I was on garrison duty in Florida, and the yellow fever took her.’

Like most men to whom such a revelation is vouchsafed, Sharpe had not the first idea how to respond. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said clumsily.

‘She died,’ Vivar went on relentlessly, ‘as did both of my small children. I had hoped my son would come back here to kill his first bear, as I did, but God willed it otherwise.’ There was another silence, even more awkward than the first. ‘And you, Lieutenant? Are you married?’

‘I can’t afford to marry.’

‘Then find a wealthy woman,’ Vivar said with a grim earnestness.

‘No wealthy woman would have me,’ Sharpe said, then, seeing the puzzlement on the Spaniard’s face, he explained. ‘I wasn’t born to the right family, Major. My mother was a whore. What you call a puta.’

‘I know the word, Lieutenant.’ Vivar’s tone was level, but it could not disguise his distaste. ‘I’m not sure I believe you,’ he said finally.

Sharpe was angered by the imputation of dishonesty. ‘Why the hell should I care what you believe?’

‘I don’t suppose you should.’ Vivar carefully wrapped and stored the remains of his cigar, then leaned back against the chest. ‘You watch now, Lieutenant, and I’ll sleep for an hour.’ He tipped the hat over his eyes and Sharpe saw the bedraggled sprig of rosemary that was pinned to its crown. All Vivar’s men wore the rosemary, and Sharpe supposed it was some regimental tradition.

Below them the Irishman stirred. Sharpe hoped that the cold was slicing to the very marrow of Harper’s bones. He hoped the Irishman’s broken nose, hidden beneath a snow-whitened scarf, was hurting like the devil. Harper, as if sensing these malevolent thoughts, turned to stare at the officer and the look in his eyes, beneath their frosted brows, told Sharpe that so long as Harper lived, and so long as nights were dark, he should beware.

Two hours after dawn the sleet turned to a persistent rain that cut runnels in the snow, dripped from trees, and transformed the bright world into a grey and dirty place of cold misery. The strongbox was put back on the mule and the sentries posted on its flanks. Harper, who had finally been allowed into the cave’s shelter, was tied once more to the animal’s tail.

Their route lay downhill. They followed a streambed which tumbled to the bottom of a valley so huge that it dwarfed the hundred soldiers into insignificant dark scraps. In front of them was an even wider, deeper valley which lay athwart the first. It was an immense space of wind and sleet. ‘We cross that valley,’ Vivar explained, ‘climb those far hills, then we drop down to the pilgrim way. That will lead you west to the coast road.’

First, though, the two officers used their telescopes to search the wide valley. No horsemen stirred there, indeed no living thing broke the grey monotony of its landscape. ‘What’s the pilgrim way?’ Sharpe asked.

‘The road to Santiago de Compostela. You’ve heard of it?’

‘Never.’

Vivar was clearly annoyed by the Englishman’s ignorance. ‘You’ve heard of St James?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘He was an apostle, Lieutenant, and he is buried at Santiago de Compostela. Santiago is his name. He is Spain’s patron saint, and in the old days thousands upon thousands of Christians visited his shrine. Not just Spaniards, but the devout of all Christendom.’

‘In the old days?’ Sharpe asked.

‘A few still visit, but the world is not what it used to be. The devil stalks abroad, Lieutenant.’

They waded a stream and Sharpe noted how this time Vivar took no precautions against the water spirits. He asked why and the Spaniard explained that the xanes were only troublesome at night.

Sharpe scoffed at the assertion. ‘I’ve crossed a thousand streams at night and never been troubled.’

‘How would you know? Perhaps you’ve taken a thousand wrong turnings! You’re like a blind man describing colour!’

Sharpe heard the anger in the Spaniard’s voice, but he would not back down. ‘Perhaps you’re only troubled if you believe in the spirits. I don’t.’

Vivar spat left and right to ward off evil. ‘Do you know what Voltaire called the English?’

Sharpe had not even heard of Voltaire, but a man raised from the ranks to the officers’ mess becomes adept at hiding his ignorance. ‘I’m sure he admired us.’

Vivar sneered at his reply. ‘He said the English are a people without God. I think it is true. Do you believe in God, Lieutenant?’

Sharpe heard the intensity in the question, but could not match it with any responding interest. ‘I never think about it.’

‘You don’t think about it?’ Vivar was horrified.

Sharpe bridled. ‘Why the hell should I?’

‘Because without God there is nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing!’ The Spaniard’s sudden passion was furious. ‘Nothing!’ He shouted the word again, astonishing the tired men who twisted to see what had prompted such an outburst.

The two officers walked in embarrassed silence, breaking a virgin field of snow with their boots. The snow was pitted by rain and turning yellow where it thawed into ditches. A village lay two miles to their right, but Vivar was hurrying now and was unwilling to turn aside. They pushed through a brake of trees and Sharpe wondered why the Spaniard had not thought it necessary to throw picquets ahead of the marching men, but he assumed Vivar must be certain that no Frenchmen had yet penetrated this far from the main roads. He did not like to mention it, for the atmosphere was strained enough between them.

They crossed the wider valley and began to climb again. Vivar was using tracks he had known since childhood, tracks that climbed from the frozen fields to a treacherous mountain road which zigzagged perilously up the steep slope. They passed a wayside shrine where Vivar crossed himself. His men followed his example, as did the Irishmen among his greenjackets. There were fifteen of them; fifteen troublemakers who would hate Sharpe because of Rifleman Harper.

Sergeant Williams must have had much the same thoughts, for he caught up with Sharpe and, with a sheepish expression, fell into step with him. ‘It wasn’t Harps’s fault, sir.’

‘What wasn’t?’

‘What happened yesterday, sir.’

Sharpe knew the Sergeant was trying to make peace, but his embarrassment at his loss of dignity made his response harsh. ‘You mean you were all agreed?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘You all agreed to murder an officer?’

Williams flinched from the accusation. ‘It wasn’t like that, sir.’

‘Don’t tell me what it was like, you bastard! If you were all agreed, Sergeant, then you all deserve a flogging, even if none of you had the guts to help Harper.’

Williams did not like the charge of cowardice. ‘Harps insisted on doing it alone, sir. He said it should be a fair fight or none at all.’

Sharpe was too angry to be affected by this curious revelation of a mutineer’s honour. ‘You want me to weep for him?’ He knew he had handled these men wrongly, utterly wrongly, but he did not know how else he could have behaved. Perhaps Captain Murray had been right. Perhaps officers were born to it, perhaps you needed privileged birth to have Vivar’s easy authority, and Sharpe’s resentment made him snap at the greenjackets who shambled past him on the wet road. ‘Stop straggling! You’re bloody soldiers, not prinking choirboys. Pick your bloody feet up! Move it!’

They moved. One of the greenjackets muttered a word of command and the rest fell into step, shouldered arms, and began to march as only the Light Infantry could march. They were showing the Lieutenant that they were still the best. They were showing their derision for him by displaying their skill and Major Vivar’s good humour was restored by the arrogant demonstration. He watched the greenjackets scatter his own men aside, then called for them to slow down and resume their place at the rear of the column. He was still laughing when Sharpe caught up with him.

‘You sounded like a Sergeant, Lieutenant,’ Vivar said.

‘I was a Sergeant once. I was the best God-damned bloody Sergeant in the God-damned bloody army.’

The Spaniard was astonished. ‘You were a Sergeant?’

‘Do you think the son of a whore would be allowed to join as an officer? I was a Sergeant, and a private before that.’

Vivar stared at the Englishman as though he had suddenly sprouted horns. ‘I didn’t know your army promoted from the ranks?’ Whatever anger he had felt with Sharpe an hour or so before evaporated into a fascinated curiosity.

‘It’s rare. But men like me don’t become real officers, Major. It’s a reward, you see, for being a fool. For being stupidly brave. And then they make us into Drillmasters or Quartermasters. They think we can manage those tasks. We’re not given fighting commands.’ Sharpe’s bitterness was rank in the cold morning, and he supposed he was making the self-pitying confession because it explained his failures to this competent Spanish officer. ‘They think we all take to drink, and perhaps we do. Who wants to be an officer, anyway?’

But Vivar was not interested in Sharpe’s misery. ‘So you’ve seen much fighting?’

‘In India. And in Portugal last year.’

Vivar’s opinion of Sharpe was changing. Till now he had seen the Englishman as an ageing, unsuccessful Lieutenant who had failed to either buy or win promotion. Now he saw that Sharpe’s promotion had been extraordinary, far beyond the dreams of a common man. ‘Do you like battle?’

It seemed an odd question to Sharpe, but he answered it as best he could. ‘I have no other skill.’

‘Then I think you will make a good officer, Lieutenant. There’ll be much fighting before Napoleon is sent down to roast in hell.’

They climbed another mile, until the slope flattened out and the troops trudged between immense rocks that loomed above the road. Vivar, his friendliness restored, told Sharpe that a battle had been fought in this high place where the eagles nested. The Moors had used this same road and the Christian archers had ambushed them from the rocks on either side. ‘We drove them back and made the very road stink with their blood.’ Vivar stared at the towering bluffs as if the stone still echoed with the screams of dying pagans. ‘That must be nearly nine hundred years ago.’ He spoke as if it were yesterday, and he himself had carried a sword to the fight. ‘Each year the villagers celebrate a Mass to remember the event.’

‘There’s a village here?’

‘A mile beyond the gorge. We can rest there.’

Sharpe saw what a magnificent site the canyon made for an ambush. The Christian forces, hidden in the high rocks, would have had an eagle’s view of the road and the Moors, climbing to the gorge, would have been watched every step of the way to the killing arrows. ‘And how do you know the French aren’t waiting for us?’ Emboldened by Vivar’s renewed affability, he raised the question which had worried him earlier. ‘We’ve got no picquets.’

‘Because the French won’t have reached this far into Spain,’ Vivar said confidently, ‘and if they had, then the villagers would have sent warning down all the roads, and even if the warnings missed us, we’d smell the French horses.’ The French, always careless of their cavalry horses, drove them until their saddle and crupper sores could be smelt half a mile away. ‘One day,’ Vivar added cheerfully, ‘the French will flog their last horse to death and we’ll ride over that loathsome country.’ The thought gave him a renewed energy and he turned towards the marching men. ‘Not far before you can rest!’

At which point, from above the gorge where the Moors had been ambushed, and in front of Sharpe where the road led down towards the pilgrim way, the French opened fire.

CHAPTER FOUR

Sharpe saw Vivar dive to the right side of the road, and threw himself to the left. The big, unfamiliar sword at Sharpe’s hip clanged on a rock, then the rifle was at his shoulder and he tore away the scrap of rag that kept rain from the gunpowder in the rifle’s pan. A French bullet gouged wet snow two inches to his right, another slapped with a vicious crack into the stone face above him. A man screamed behind him.

Dragoons. God-damned bloody Dragoons. Green coats and pink facings. No horses. Dismounted Dragoons with short carbines. Sharpe, recovering from his astonishment at the ambush, tried to make sense of the chaos of fear and noise that had erupted in the winter’s cold. He saw puffs of grey smoke, dirty as the thawing snow, in an arc about his front. The French had thrown a low barricade of stones across the road about sixty paces from the canyon’s mouth. It was long range for the French carbines, but that did not matter. The dismounted Dragoons who lined the peaks of the immense and sheer cliffs either side of the gorge were the men doing the damage.

Sharpe rolled onto his back. A bullet cracked into the snow where his head had been a second before. He could see the Dragoons standing on the lips of the chasm, firing down into the deathtrap of the road where, nine hundred years before, the Moors had been slaughtered.

Vivar’s men had scattered. They crouched at the base of the rocks and fired upwards. Vivar was shouting at them, calling for them to form a line, to advance. He was planning to charge the men who barred the road. Instinctively Sharpe knew that the French had foreseen that move, which was why they had not made their barricade in the gorge, but beyond it. They wanted to lure the ambushed out into the plateau, and there could only be one reason for that. The French had cavalry waiting, cavalry with long straight swords that would butcher unprotected infantry.

Even as that realization struck him, Sharpe also realized that he was acting like a Rifleman, not like an officer. He had taken shelter, he was looking for a target, and he did not know what his men were doing back in the gorge. Not that he had any desire to go back into that trap of rock and bullets, but such was an officer’s duty and so he picked himself up and ran.

He shouldered through the assembling Spaniards, saw that the mule lay kicking and bleeding, then was aware of a buzzing and cracking about his ears. The carbine bullets were spitting down into the gorge, ricocheting wildly, filling the air with a tangle of death. He saw a greenjacket lying on his belly. Blood had spewed from the man’s mouth to stain a square yard of melting snow. A rifle cracked to Sharpe’s left, then one to his right. The greenjackets had taken what cover they could and were trying to kill the Frenchmen above. It occurred to him that the French should have put more men on the heights, that the volume of their fire was too small to overwhelm the road. The thought was so surprising that he stood quite still and gaped at the high skyline.

He was right. The French had just enough men on the heights to pin the ambush down, yet the killing would not be done by those men, but by others. That knowledge gave Sharpe hope, and told him what he must do. He began by striding down the road’s centre and shouting for his men. ‘Rifles! To me! To me!’

The Riflemen did not move. A bullet slapped into the snow beside Sharpe. The French cavalrymen, more used to the sword than the carbine, were aiming high, but that common fault was small consolation amidst their bullets. Sharpe again shouted for the Riflemen to come to him but, naturally enough, they preferred the small shelter offered at the base of the cliffs. He dragged one man out of a rock cleft. ‘That way! Run! Wait for me at the end of the gorge.’ He rousted others. ‘On your feet! Move!’ He kicked more men to their feet. ‘Sergeant Williams?’

‘Sir?’ The reply came from further down the chasm, somewhere beyond the skeins of rifle smoke that were trapped by the rock walls.

‘If we stay here we’re dead ’uns. Rifles! Follow me!’

They followed. Sharpe had no time to reflect on the irony that men who had so recently tried to kill him now obeyed his orders. They obeyed because Sharpe knew what needed to be done, and the certainty of his knowledge was strong in him, and it was that certainty which fetched the greenjackets out of their scanty shelter. They also followed because the only other man they might have trusted, Harper, was not with them, but still tied to the wounded mule’s tail.

‘Follow! Follow!’ Sharpe jumped a wounded Spaniard, twisted as a bullet slashed past his face, then turned to his right. He had led his men almost to the mouth of the canyon, just behind the place where Vivar still formed his own dismounted cavalrymen into line. Once, years before, a fall of rock had slid down to make a shoulder of scree and turf and, though the slope was perilously steep, and made even more perilous by the melting snow, it offered a short cut to the hillside which, in turn, led to the heights above. Sharpe scrambled up the rockfall, using his rifle as a staff, and behind him, in ones and twos, the Riflemen followed.

‘Skirmish order!’ Sharpe paused at the top of the first steep slope to shrug off his encumbering pack. ‘Spread out!’

Some of the Riflemen suddenly realized what was expected of them. They were supposed to assault a steep and slippery slope at the top of which the French would be protected by the natural bastions of jumbled rock. Some of them hesitated and looked for cover. ‘Move!’ Sharpe’s voice was louder than the gunfire. ‘Move! Skirmish order! Move!’

They moved, not because of any confidence in Sharpe, but because the habit of obedience under fire ran deep.

Sharpe knew that to stay in the gorge was to die. The French wanted them in there, pinned by the carbines above to be slaughtered by the Dragoons who would charge from the roadblock. The only way to prise this ambush apart was to attack one of its jaws. Men would die in the attempt, but not so many as would die in the blood-reeking sludge and horror on the roadway.

Sharpe heard Vivar shout a word of command in Spanish, but he ignored it. The Major must do what he thought fit, and Sharpe would do as he thought best, and the strange exaltation of battle suddenly gripped him. Here, in the filthy stench of powder smoke, he felt at home. This had been his life for sixteen years. Other men learned to plough fields or to shape wood, but Sharpe had learned how to use a musket or rifle, sword or bayonet, and how to turn an enemy’s flank or assault a fortress. He knew fear, which was every soldier’s familiar companion, but Sharpe also knew how to turn the enemy’s own fear to his advantage.

High above Sharpe, silhouetted against the grey clouds, a French officer redeployed his men to face the new threat. The dismounted Dragoons who had lined the canyon’s edge must now scramble to their right to face this unexpected attack on their flank. They moved urgently, and the first French bullets hissed whip-quick in the freezing air.

‘I want fire! I want fire!’ Sharpe shouted as he climbed, and was rewarded by the cracks of the Baker rifles. The Riflemen were doing what they were trained to do. One man fired as his partner moved. The Dragoons, still searching for new positions in the high rocks, would hear the bullets spin past their ears. The French did not use rifles, preferring the faster musket, but a musket was a clumsy weapon compared to the slow-loading Baker.