Bernard Cornwell - Sharpe’s Siege - The Winter Campaign, 1814

‘Not to take the fort, perhaps,’ Sweet William lit a cheroot, ‘but a force of trained Riflemen will be damned useful for the march on Bordeaux.’

‘Damn his bloody soul!’ Sharpe understood now. Wigram had sent de Maquerre to force a decision, and Bampfylde had secreted the Marines to implement the decision. Come hell or high water Wigram and Bampfylde wanted to take Bordeaux, and Sharpe was caught in the middle. He watched the packed longboats pull towards the breaking surf and he felt a bitter anger at Bampfylde who had lied about a malady so that he could have trained skirmishers for his madcap scheme. Even the sun, showing through the clouds for the first time in weeks, could not alleviate Sharpe’s anger.

‘It’s my belief,’ Frederickson said, ‘that he wanted you personally.’

‘Me?’

‘He probably has an exalted view of your ability,’ Frederickson said drily. ‘If the celebrated Major Sharpe fails, then no reasonable man could expect Captain Bampfylde to succeed. On the other hand, of course, who better than yourself to guarantee success?’

‘Bugger Bampfylde,’ Sharpe said.

The longboats landed their red-coated troops, then were launched back through the surf. The oarsmen, tugging against wind and tide, jerked like small marionettes to pull the heavy boats free of the shore’s suction. They did not come to the Amelie ; instead they went to the Vengeance where still more Marines waited for disembarkation.

The morning ticked on. A breakfast of gravy-dipped bread was passed around the Riflemen who waited on the Amelie ’s deck. Those Marines already ashore formed up in ranks and, to Sharpe’s astonishment, a half Company was marched off the beach towards the shelter of the dark pines. Sharpe himself was supposed to command the land operations, yet he was being utterly ignored. ‘Captain Tremgar!’

‘Sir?’

‘Your boat can put me ashore?’

Tremgar, a middle-aged man wrapped in a filthy tarpaulin jacket, knocked the dottle from his pipe on the brass binnacle cover that was covered with tiny dents from just such treatment. ‘Ain’t got orders to do it, Major.’

‘I’m giving you orders!’

Tremgar turned. One of the longboats was pulling away from the Vengeance and carrying, instead of Marines, a group of blue-cloaked naval officers. Tremgar shrugged. ‘Don’t see why not, Major.’

It took twenty minutes to lower the Amelie ’s small tender into the water, and another five before Sharpe was sitting uncomfortably on the stern thwart. The Comte de Maquerre, seeing a chance to escape from the stinking collier, had insisted on sharing the boat. He had exchanged his British uniform for a suit of brown cloth.

From the Amelie ’s deck the sea had appeared benign, but here, in the tiny boat, it swelled and threatened and ran cold darts of fear up Sharpe’s back. The oars spattered him with water, the waves heaved towards the gunwales, and at any moment Sharpe expected the small rowboat to turn turtle. The Comte, wrapped in his cloak, looked seasick.

Sharpe twisted. The Amelie ’s tar- and salt-stained hull reared above him. A cook jettisoned a bucket of slops over the side and gulls, screaming like banshees, swooped from the air between the yards to fight over the scraps.

The Comte, offended by Sharpe’s cavalier treatment in the small hours, said not a word. Slowly, oar-tug by oar-tug, the four boatmen dragged the small craft away from the Amelie and the grumble of the surf, like the roar of a far-off, relentless battle, grew louder.

Sharpe instinctively touched his weapons. His rifle was muzzle-stopped against sea-water splashes, while the lock was wrapped in an old rag for protection. His sword was clumsy in the confines of the tiny boat. A surge heaved the boat up and ran it forward towards the breaking surf that betrayed itself to Sharpe as a spume of spray being whipped from a curling wave by the wind’s flick, then the boat dropped into a valley of sliding, glassy grey water that was flecked with floating seaweed.

This was the point of danger. This was the moment when the small boats must go from the sea’s cradle into the broken forces where the waves battered at the shore. Years ago, on a beach like this in Portugal, Sharpe had watched the longboats broach in the combers and spill their men like puppets into the killing sea. The bodies, he remembered, had come ashore white and swollen, uniforms split by the swelling flesh, and dogs had worried at the corpses for days.

‘Pull!’ the bo’sun shouted. ‘Pull, you bastards!’

The oarsmen pulled and, like a wagon loaded with cannon-shot, the boat fought the upward slope of the wave. The oars bent under the strain, then the vast power of the sea caught the boat’s transom and it was running, suddenly free of all constraint, and the bo’sun was shouting at the men to ship oars and was leaning his full weight on the tiller behind Sharpe.

The bo’sun’s shout seemed like a prolonged bellow that melded with the roar of the surf. The world was white and grey, streaked bottle green at its heart where the wave broke to carry the tiny boat surging forward. Sharpe’s right hand was a cold and bloodless white where it gripped the gunwale, then the boat’s bow was dipping, falling, and the water was smashing around Sharpe’s ears in scraps of freezing white and still the shout echoed in his ears and he felt the panic of a man caught in a danger that is uncontrollable.

The bow caught, the boat twisted and shuddered, and suddenly she was running amidst bubbling sea-streaks beneath which the sand made a hissing noise as tons of beach were drawn backwards by the sucking water.

‘Now!’ the bo’sun shouted, ‘now, you heathens!’ and the bow-men were overboard, up to their knees in churning water and dragging the small boat towards the safety of the shelving beach.

‘There, Major. That was easy,’ the bo’sun said calmly.

Sharpe, trying not to show the terror he had felt, stepped forward over the thwarts. The two remaining oarsmen, grinning at him, helped his unsteady progress. Another wave, breaking and running up the beach, lifted the boat and shifted it sideways so that Sharpe fell heavily on to a huge black man who laughed at the soldier’s predicament.

Sharpe stood again, balanced himself at the prow, then leaped into the receding wave. No firm ground, no lush soil of the most peaceful village green in England, had ever felt so good to him. He splashed to dry sand, breathing a silent thanks for safety as at last his boots crunched the small ridge of seaweed, shells, and timber scraps that marked the height of the winter tides.

‘Major!’ A voice hailed him. Lieutenant Ford, Bampfylde’s aide, walked through the clinging sand. ‘Welcome ashore. You’re precipitate, are you not, sir?’

‘Precipitate?’ Sharpe, taking the rag off his rifle-lock, had to shout over the noise of wind and surf.

‘You’d not been ordered ashore, sir.’ Ford spoke respectfully, but Sharpe was certain the young lieutenant had been sent by Bampfylde to deliver this reproof. The captain himself, resplendent in blue, white and gold, directed affairs fifty yards down the strand.

‘Let me remind you, Lieutenant,’ Sharpe said, ‘that proceedings ashore are under my command.’

The Comte de Maquerre, looking grey beneath the powder he had put on to his face, brushed at his cloak then stumped through the sand towards Bampfylde.

Ford glanced at the Comte, then back to Sharpe. ‘You can see, sir,’ the lieutenant could not hide his embarrassment, ‘that our Marines have had a miraculous recovery.’

‘Indeed.’ There must have been hundreds of Marines on the beach and Sharpe had seen at least another fifty march inland.