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

‘We shall call a halt.’ Captain Bampfylde did not do it for the men’s benefit, but his own. If they laboured, he suffered. His handmade boots had rubbed his right heel raw and raised blisters on his toes. The leather band of his bicorne hat was like a ring of steel and his white breeches were cutting into his crotch like a sawhorse.

The captain was regretting his intrepidity. He had been eager to lead these men into battle, and that could not be done from the deck of the Vengeance any more than it could be done from the quarterdeck of the Scylla . That frigate, under Captain Grant, would nose into the Arcachon channel to draw the fire of what few defenders might infest the fort’s bastions. Once those defenders were occupied with the frigate, and while their gaze was fastened seawards, the Marines would assault the empty landward ramparts. It was that assault which would capture the imagination of the British public when it was printed in the Naval Gazette , not the old story of a ship bombarding a battery.

Captain of Marines Palmer saluted Bampfylde. ‘We’re behind time, sir.’

‘God damn it, Palmer, if I require your contribution then I shall ask for it!’

‘Sir!’ Palmer was unmoved by Bampfylde’s anger. Neil Palmer was ten years older than Bampfylde and too experienced to be worried by the petulance of yet another ambitious young captain who resented the fame gained by Nelson’s band of brothers. ‘I’ll put picquets out, sir?’

‘Do it!’ Bampfylde subsided against the trunk of a tree. He wanted to haul off his precious boots and dabble his sore feet in the shallows of the sea, but he dared not betray such weakness in front of his men.

‘Water, sir?’ Lieutenant Ford offered a canteen.

‘After you, Ford.’ Bampfylde knew such behaviour was proper, and he was a man eager to be seen to behave heroically in all things.

He consoled himself that his discomfort was a small price to pay for the renown that he would win this day. The Marines might come late to the fortress, but the fortress would fall just the same, and the blisters on his feet would be forgotten in the blaze of glory. He opened his watch, saw they had already rested ten minutes, but decided a few more minutes could not hurt. He stretched out tired legs, tipped his hat forward, and polished the news of victory that he would write this night.

While a hundred yards away, standing on a sudden rise of sandy soil that made a bare ridge through the thin pines, Captain Palmer stared at the countryside through a heavy, ancient telescope. Far to the north, beyond the fading ridges of sand and conifers, a rainstorm misted the land like a vast curtain. The rain lifted for a brief instant and Palmer thought he saw the malevolent, dark shape of the fort hull-down on the horizon, but, as the rain closed again on his view, he could not be certain of what he had seen.

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