Бернард Корнуэлл - Sharpe's Siege

“But your government. They’ll make trouble because you helped me?”

“As long as I make money,” Killick said, “the American government won’t give a damn.“ The French drums began their sound, then, just as suddenly, stopped. The American stared at the column. ”Two thousand of them, and fifty of you?“

That’s about it.“

Killick laughed, and his voice was suddenly warm. “Hell, Major, I’m glad I’m not one of those poor bastards. I’ll have the brandy waiting, just make sure you come and drink it.” He nodded, then walked towards his boats.

Sharpe walked to the broken end of the rampart above the breach where half of Frederickson’s company was stationed. The other half, with Frederickson himself, was in the courtyard.

Harper was still on the breach, jamming captured bayonets among the stones. The rain still crashed down, washing mortar and dust away from the breach and spreading dirty yellow floodwater out of the ditch.

The French drums, made soggy by rain, sounded again from the south. A Rifleman licked cracked lips. The rain, grey and depressing, blurred the massed French bayonets above which, glinting gold, Sharpe saw an enemy standard. Such, he thought, was the vision of death in the morning. The French were coming.

Commandant Henri Lassan would march, at his own request, in the front rank of the column. He had written to his mother, apologizing to her that he had lost the fortress and telling her that she could nevertheless be proud of her son. He had sent her his rosary and asked that the shining, much-fingered beads be laid to rest in the family’s chapel.

“They’re boarding the schooner,” Favier reported to Calvet. The northern attack had been abandoned and everything would be thrown into this one, final storm. Favier thought that was a mistake. The northern attack could have driven itself between the fortress and the water, blocking the garrison’s escape, but Calvet was not worried.

“The cavalry can play on the beach. Send them an order.” Calvet dismounted, then drew his sword that had once impaled two Cossacks together like chickens on a spit. The general shrugged off his cloak so that his men could see the gold braid on his jacket, then walked to the column’s head and raised his stubby, muscular arms. “Children! Children!” The drummers, hushed by officers, rested their sticks.

Calvet’s voice reached to the very last rank of the column. “They’re colder than you are! They’re wetter than you are! They’re more frightened than you are! And you’re French! In the name of the Emperor! In the name of France! Follow!”

The drummers hauled leather rings up ropes to tighten wet skins then, as the cheer caught like fire in the ranks, the sticks started their tattoo again. Like a monster, lurching and shuddering, driven by the heartbeat of the drumsticks and bright with bayonets and given courage by a brave general, the column marched forward.

One of the German Riflemen, his left arm bandaged, played a flute. The tune came thin through the pouring rain to fill Sharpe with melancholy. He had always wanted to play the flute, but had never learned. There was small comfort in such thoughts so he dismissed them, wondering instead whether the boats had reached the shore to pick up Minver’s men, but he could not see from beside the breach, nor could he spare the time to go and look.

The French column, swaying left and right as it marched in step, was halfway to the fortress. Sharpe’s men knew not to fire, but Sharpe guessed half of the rain-sodden rifles would not fire at all when the time came. The rain dripped down his sleeves, soaked his overalls, and squelched in his boots. Goddamned bloody treacherous mucky rain.

Harper, Frederickson, and a dozen Riflemen were crouching high on the breach, just behind the cheval-de-frise. Frederickson watched Sharpe, who shook his head. Not yet, not yet. The German flautist carefully wrapped his instrument in wash-leather, tucked it into his jacket, and picked up his rifle that had layers of sacking wrapped round the lock.

The French twelve-pounder guns had ceased firing. The gunners, knowing that this was no weather for Riflemen, had come outside the mill’s sheltering walls to watch the assault.

The rain glittered like polished blades. It seethed down vertically. Water flowed in great swathes off the battlements to flood the inner ditch. A bolt of lightning, sudden and scaring, cracked to the east.

The French were a hundred yards away. They shouted their ‘Vive I’Empereur’ in the drumbeat’s pause, but the great shout was drowned by the hammering, silver rain that bounced in fine spray from the scorched and battered stones of the fort.

Sharpe turned. The west wall was ready. He could do no more there. That was his refuge, the place where he must hold the French just long enough to get his men down to the boats. He turned back to see the French skirmishers, red shoulder-wings darkened by rain, running clumsily up the glacis slope. He wondered if Calvet had sent men to the north who might cut between the west wall and the water and so bar the Riflemens’ escape.

The French were nervous now. Some would be hoping that the rain had destroyed every rifle charge, but the veterans would know that even in this rain some guns would spark. They began to hurry, eager to get this first shock over. The skirmishers were spreading on the glacis and the first muskets banged smoke from the lip.

“Charge! Charge!” Calvet roared the words like a challenge as he led his ‘grumblers’, his veterans, through the gap in the glacis.

They charged. The column lost its order now. Some men, the timorous, sheltered in the outer ditch and pretended to fire upwards, but most, the brave, swarmed along the road towards the chaos of stone that was their shattered bridge to revenge.

Sharpe looked at Frederickson. “Now!” Frederickson’s men, ripping rags from locks, stood to fire directly over the breach’s summit, while from the ramparts every man who could fire a weapon knelt or stood. “Fire!”

Perhaps half the guns fired, while on the other weapons the leather-gripped flints sparked on to damp powder. Sharpe’s rifle kicked back, then he was shouting at the men who guarded the broken edge of the battlement.

The lead torn from the church roof and not needed for bullets had been piled on the ramparts with cobblestones, dead howitzer shells, and broken masonry. It was all hurled down at the attackers. The French muskets were as useless as the defenders’ rifles. One carefully protected charge of dry powder might spark, but once that was gone it was hopeless to think of reloading in this rain.

Riflemen stood and hurled missiles and the attack faltered. There were dead at the breach’s foot, put there by Frederickson’s volley, but then the living, roared on by Calvet, surged over the bodies. A lead sheet sliced into a man’s skull and a howitzer shell bounced on the stones.

“On! On!” Calvet was alive. He did not know how many had died, but he felt the old joy of battle and his huge voice plucked men up the ramp of stones. He swung his sword at the cheval-de-frise and staggered sideways as a cobblestone hit his skull. “The Emperor! The Emperor!”

A tide of men scrambled on the breach. An officer, armed with an expensive percussion cap pistol that was proof against the rain, fired upwards and a Rifleman toppled from the ramparts and was torn apart by bayonets.

“Push!” Calvet was shoving the cheval-de-frise forward, forcing a gap. A howitzer shell, thrown from the ramparts, hit his left arm, stunning it, but he could see a space at the end of the spiked beam and he jumped for it. His sword-arm was still good and he pointed the way as he breasted the breach’s summit. “Charge!”

,The flood of men, pushed from behind and desperate to escape the rain of missiles from above, flowed over the breach.