Bernard Cornwell - Sharpe’s Regiment - The Invasion of France, June to November 1813

Slowly Sharpe uncurled the fingers. He laid the hand on the breast, wiped the tears from the face, then stood. ‘Captain Thomas?’

‘Sir?’

‘RSM’s dead. Take him for burial. Captain d’Alembord!’

‘Sir?’

‘Push those picquets fifty yards further up the hill, this isn’t a god-damn field-training day! Move!’ The picquets were perfectly positioned, and everyone knew it, but Sharpe was venting an anger where he could.

The ground was wet, soaked by overnight rain. There were puddles on the track, some discoloured with blood. To Sharpe’s left, where the hillside fell away, a party of men hacked at the thin soil to make graves. Ten bodies, stripped of their jackets and boots that were too valuable to be buried, waited beside the shallow trench. ‘Lieutenant Andrews!’

‘Sir?’

‘Two Sergeants! Twenty men! Collect rocks!’

‘Rocks, sir?’

‘Do it!’ Sharpe turned and bellowed the order. In this mood men were foolish who crossed the tall, dark-haired officer who had risen from the ranks. His face, always savage, was tight with anger.

He walked to the sheltered place by the big rocks where the wounded were sheltered from wind’s knife-edge. Sharpe’s scabbard, which held the big, Heavy Cavalry blade that he wielded with the force of an axe, clanged on the ground as he crouched. ‘Dan?’

Daniel Hagman, Rifleman and ex-poacher, grinned at him. ‘I ain’t bad, sir.’ His left shoulder was bandaged, his jacket and shirt draped over the bound wound like cloaks. ‘I just can’t fill my pipe, sir.’

‘Here.’ Sharpe took the short clay stump, fished in Hagman’s ammunition pouch for the plug of dark, greasy tobacco, and bit a lump free that he crumbled and pushed into the bowl. ‘What happened?’

‘Bloody skirmisher. I thought the bastard was dead, sir.’ Hagman was the oldest man in the Battalion; perhaps he was over fifty, no one really knew. He was also the best marksman in the Regiment. He took the pipe from Sharpe and watched as the officer brought out a tinder-box. ‘I shot the bugger, sir. Went forward, and he cracks me. Bastard.’ He sucked on the pipe, blew smoke, and sucked again. ‘Angel got him. Knifed the bastard proper.’ He shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, sir.’

‘Don’t be a fool, Dan. Not your fault. You’ll be back.’

‘We beat the buggers, sir.’ Hagman, like Sharpe, was a Rifleman; one of a Company who, like flotsam in this ocean of war, had ended up in the red-jacketed ranks of the South Essex. Yet, out of cussedness and pride, they still wore their green jackets. They were Riflemen. They were the best. ‘We always beat the buggers, sir.’

‘Yes.’ Sharpe smiled, and the sardonic, mocking look that his face wore because of the scar on his left cheek suddenly disappeared. ‘We beat the bastards, Dan.’ They had, too. The South Essex, a Battalion under half its full strength, worn down by war the way a bayonet is thinned by use and sharpening, had beaten the bastards. Sharpe thought of Leroy, the American who had been the Battalion’s commanding officer. Leroy would have been proud of them today.

But Leroy was dead, killed last week at Vitoria, and soon, Sharpe knew, there would be a new Lieutenant Colonel, new officers, new men. Those new men were coming from England and Sharpe would give up his temporary command of this shrunken force that should not even have fought a battle this day.

They had been marching to Pasajes, ordered there in the wake of the great victory at Vitoria, when orders had come, brought on a sweating, galloped horse, that asked the South Essex to block this track from the mountains. The staff officer had not known what was happening, had only given a panicked account of a French force erupting from the frontier, and the South Essex, by chance, were closest to the threat. They had left their women and baggage on the main road and gone north to stop the French.

They succeeded. They had lined the track and their muskets had cracked in the deadly rhythm of platoon fire, flaying the northern approach, shredding the blue-jacketed enemy ranks.

The South Essex had not given ground. Their wounded had crawled to shelter or bled where they fell. Even when the enemy mountain gun had opened its fire, hurling back whole files in bloody shambles, they had not stepped back. They had fought the bastards to a standstill and seen them off, and now Major Richard Sharpe, the taste of tobacco still sour in his mouth, could see what price he had paid.

Eleven dead, and more would yet die of their wounds. At least twelve of the wounded would never return to the ranks. Another dozen, like Hagman, should live to fight again, unless their wounds turned filthy, and that fevered, slow death did not bear thinking about.

Sharpe spat. He had no water, for an enemy bullet had smashed his canteen open. ‘Sergeant Harper!’

‘Sir?’ The huge Irishman walked towards him. Perhaps alone in the Battalion this Rifleman would not fear Richard Sharpe’s anger, for Harper had fought beside Sharpe in every battle of this long war. They had marched the length of Spain until, in this summer of 1813, they were close to the French frontier itself. ‘How’s Dan, sir?’

‘He’ll live. Do you have any water?’

‘I did, but someone worked a miracle on it.’ Harper, who illicitly had red wine in his canteen, offered it to Sharpe. The Major drank, then pushed the cork home.

‘Thank you, Patrick.’

‘Plenty more if you need it, sir.’

‘Not for that. For being here.’ Harper had married just two days before and Sharpe had ordered the huge Irishman to stay with his new Spanish wife when the order to fight had come, but Harper had refused. Now Harper stared northwards at the empty horizon. ‘What were the buggers doing here?’

‘They were lost.’ Sharpe could think of no other explanation. He knew that a number of French units, cut off by the defeat of Joseph Bonaparte at Vitoria, were straggling back to France. This one had outnumbered Sharpe, and he had been puzzled why they had broken off the fight when they did. The only explanation he could find was that the enemy must have suddenly realised that the South Essex did not bar the way to France and thus there was no need to go on fighting. The French had been lost, they had blundered into a useless fight, and they had gone. ‘Bastards.’ Sharpe said it with anger, for his men had died for nothing.

Harper, who at six feet four inches, was taller even than Sharpe, frowned. ‘Terrible about the RSM, sir.’

‘Yes.’ Sharpe was looking at the sky, wondering whether more rain was coming. This summer had been the worst in Spanish memory. ‘You’ve got his job.’

‘Sir?’

‘You heard.’ Sharpe, while he commanded the Battalion, could at least give it the best Regimental Sergeant Major it would ever have. The new Colonel would be in no position to change the appointment. Sharpe turned away. ‘Lieutenant Andrews!’

‘Sir?’ The Lieutenant was leading a morose party of men who staggered under the weight of small boulders.

‘Put them on the graves!’ The stones would stop animals scrabbling down to the shallowly buried flesh.

‘All the graves, sir?’

‘Just ours.’ Sharpe did not care if the foxes and ravens gorged themselves on rotting French flesh, but his own men could lie in peace for whatever it was worth. ‘Sergeant Major?’

‘Sir?’ Harper was half grinning, half unsure whether a grin was acceptable at this moment. ‘Yes, sir?’

‘We’ll need a god-damned cart for our wounded. Ask a mounted officer to fetch one from the baggage. Then perhaps we can get on with this damned march.’

‘Yes, sir.’

That night rain fell on the pass where the South Essex had stood and suffered, and where their dead lay, and from which place the living had long gone. The night’s rain washed the scanty soil from the French dead who had not been buried but just covered with soil. The teeming water exposed white, hard flesh, and in the morning the scavengers came for the carrion. The pass had no name.