Bernard Cornwell - Sharpe’s Honour - The Vitoria Campaign, February to June 1813

Major Richard Sharpe, on a damp spring day when a cold wind whipped down a rocky valley, stood on an ancient stone bridge and stared at the road which led southwards to a low pass in the rocky crest. The hills were dark with rain.

Behind him, standing at ease, with their musket locks wrapped with rags and the muzzles plugged with corks to stop the rain soaking into the barrels, stood five companies of infantry.

The crest, Sharpe knew, was five hundred yards away. In a few moments there would be enemy on that crest and his job was to stop them crossing the bridge. A simple job, a soldier’s job. It was made easier because the spring of 1813 was late, the weather had brought these border hills nothing but rain, and the stream beneath the bridge was deep, fast, and impassable. The enemy would have to come to the bridge where Sharpe waited or not cross the watercourse at all.

‘Sir?’ D’Alembord, Captain of the Light Company, sounded apprehensive, as if he did not want to provoke Major Sharpe’s ill temper.

‘Captain?’

‘Staff officer coming, sir.’

Sharpe grunted, but said nothing. He heard the hooves slow behind him, then the horse was in front of him and an excited cavalry Lieutenant was looking down on him. ‘Major Sharpe?’

A pair of dark eyes, hard and angry, looked from the Lieutenant’s gilt spurs, up his boots, up the rich, mud-spattered, blue woollen cloak till they met the excited staff officer’s eyes. ‘You’re in my way, Lieutenant.’

‘Sorry, sir.’

The Lieutenant hastily moved his horse to one side. He had ridden hard, making a circuit of difficult country, and was proud of his ride. His mare was restless, matching the rider’s exhilarated mood. ‘General Preston’s compliments, sir, and the enemy is coming your way.’

‘I’ve got picquets on the ridge.’ Sharpe said it ungraciously. ‘I saw the enemy a half-hour since.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Sharpe stared at the ridge. The Lieutenant was wondering whether he ought to quietly ride away when suddenly the tall Rifleman looked at him again. ‘Do you speak French?’

The Lieutenant, who was nervous of meeting Major Richard Sharpe for the first time, nodded. ‘Yes, sir.’

‘How well?’

The cavalryman smiled. ‘ Très bien, Monsieur, je parle …’

‘I didn’t ask for a goddamned demonstration! Answer me.’

The Lieutenant was horrified by the savage reproof. ‘I speak it well, sir.’

Sharpe stared at him. The Lieutenant thought that this was just such a stare that an executioner might give a plump and once-privileged victim. ‘What’s your name, Lieutenant?’

‘Trumper-Jones, sir.’

‘Do you have a white handkerchief?’

This conversation, Trumper-Jones decided, was becoming increasingly odd. ‘Yes, sir.’

‘Good.’ Sharpe looked back to the ridge, and to the saddle among the rocks where the road came over the skyline.

This had become, he was thinking, a bastard of a day’s work. The British army was clearing the roads eastward from the Portuguese frontier. They were driving back the French outposts and prising out the French garrisons, making the roads ready for the army’s summer campaign.

And on this day of fitful rain and cold wind five British Battalions had attacked a small French garrison on the River Tormes. Five miles behind the French, on the road that would be their retreat, was this bridge. Sharpe, with half a Battalion and a Company of Riflemen had been sent by a circuitous night march to block the retreat. His task was simple; to stop the French long enough to let the other Battalions come up behind and finish them off. It was as simple as that, yet now, as the afternoon was well advanced, Sharpe’s mood was sour and bitter.

‘Sir?’ Sharpe looked up. The Lieutenant was offering him a folded linen handkerchief. Trumper-Jones smiled nervously. ‘You wanted a handkerchief, sir?’

‘I don’t want to blow my nose, you fool! It’s for the surrender!’ Sharpe scowled and walked two paces away.

Michael Trumper-Jones stared after him. It was true that fifteen hundred French were approaching this small force of less then four hundred men, but nothing that Trumper-Jones had heard of Richard Sharpe had prepared him for this sudden willingness to surrender. Sharpe’s fame, indeed, had reached England, from whence Michael Trumper-Jones had so recently sailed to join the army, and the closer he had come to the battle lines, the more he had heard the name. Sharpe was a soldier’s soldier, a man whose approval was eagerly sought by other men, whose name was used as a touchstone of professional competence, and apparently a man who now contemplated surrender without a fight.

Lieutenant Michael Trumper-Jones, appalled at the thought, looked surreptitiously at a face made dark by sun and wind. It was a handsome face, marred only by a scar that pulled down Sharpe’s left eye to give him a mocking, knowing expression. Trumper-Jones did not know it, but that scar-pulled expression would disappear with a smile.

What astonished Trumper-Jones most was that Major Richard Sharpe bore no marks of rank, neither sash nor epaulettes; indeed nothing except the big battered cavalry sword at his side indicated that he was an officer. He looked, Trumper-Jones thought, the very image of a man who had taken the first French Eagle captured by the British, who had stormed the breach at Badajoz, and charged with the Germans at Garcia Hernandez. His air of confidence made it hard to believe that he had started his career in the ranks. It made it even harder to believe that he would surrender his outnumbered men without a fight.

‘What are you staring at, Lieutenant?’

‘Nothing, sir.’ Trumper-Jones had thought Sharpe was watching the southern hills.

Sharpe was, but he had become aware of the Lieutenant’s gaze, and he resented it. He hated being pointed out, being watched. He was comfortable these days only with his friends. He was also aware that he had sounded unnecessarily harsh to the young cavalry officer. He looked up at him. ‘We counted three guns. You agree?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Four-pounders?’

‘I think so, sir.’

Sharpe grunted. He watched the crest. He hoped the two questions would make him appear friendlier to the officer, though in truth Sharpe did not feel friendly to any strangers these days. He had been oppressed since Christmas, swinging between violent guilt and savage despair because his wife had died in the snows at the Gateway of God. Unbidden into his mind came the sudden picture of the blood at her throat. He shook his head, as if to drive the picture away. He felt guilty that she had died, he felt guilty that he had been unfaithful to her, he felt guilty that her love had been so badly returned, he felt guilty that he had let his daughter become motherless.

He had become poor through his guilt. His daughter, still not two years old, was growing up with her uncle and aunt, and Sharpe had taken all his savings, that he had stolen from the Spanish government in the first place, and given them to Antonia, his daughter. He had nothing left, except his sword, his rifle, his telescope, and the clothes on his back. He found himself resenting this young staff officer with his expensive horse and gilt scabbard furnishings and new leather boots.

There was a murmur in the ranks behind him. The men had seen the small figures who suddenly appeared on the southern crest. Sharpe turned round. ‘’Talion!’ There was silence. ‘’Talion! ’Shun!’

The men’s boots crashed on the wet rocks. They were in two ranks, stretched across the mouth of the small valley which carried the road northwards.

Sharpe stared at them, knowing their nervousness. These were his men, of his Battalion, and he trusted them, even against this outnumbering enemy. ‘Sergeant Huckfield!’