Bernard Cornwell - Sharpe’s Christmas

“I hope not,” Sharpe said.

“No, sir?” Nicholls sounded disappointed.

“It’s Christmas in three days,” Sharpe said, “would you want to die at Christmas?”

“I don’t suppose I would, sir.” Nicholls admitted.

The Ensign was seventeen, but looked fourteen. He wore a second-hand uniform coat on which his mother had sewn loops of tarnished gold lace, then turned up the yellow-tipped sleeves so that they did not hang down over his hands. “I was worried,” Nicholls had explained to Sharpe when he arrived at the batallion just a week before, “that I would miss the war. Awful bad luck to miss a war.”

“Sounds like good luck to me.”

“No, sir! A fellow must do his duty,” Nicholls had said earnestly, and the Ensign did try very hard to do his duty and was never discouraged when the veterans of the regiment laughed at his eagerness. He was, Sharpe thought, like a puppy. Wet nose, tail up and raring to bare his milk teeth at the enemy. But not at Christmas, Sharpe thought, not at Christmas, and so he hoped Hogan was wrong and that the Frogs were not moving, for Christmas was no time to be killing.

“You probably won’t have to fight,” Colonel Hogan said, then sneezed violently. He pummelled his nose with a giant red handkerchief, then blew scraps of snuff from the map he had spread on the farmhouse table of his billet. “It could be rumour, Richard, nothing but rumour. Did you murder your bullock now?”

“Never got round to it, sir. And how did you know we were going to shoot one anyway?”

“I am the Peer’s Chief of Intelligence,” Hogan said grandly, “and I know everything. Or almost everything. What I don’t know, Richard, is whether these damned Frogs are going to use the east road or the west, so Wellington insists we have to cover both. Or rather the Spaniards will block the east road, and you and your merry men will guard the west. Here.” He stabbed a finger down and Sharpe peered at the map to see a tiny mark close to the French frontier and next to it, in Hogan’s extravagant handwriting, the name Irati. “You’ll like Irati,” Colonel Hogan said. “It’s a nothing place, Richard. Hovels and misery, that’s all it is and all it ever will be, but that’s where you’re going for Christmas.”

Because maybe the French were going there. Wellington’s victory at Vitoria had thrown their armies out of Spain, but a handful of French forts still remained south of the frontier and Hogan’s agents had learned that the garrison at Ochagavia was about to attempt an escape back into France. The garrison planned to march at Christmas in the hope that their enemies would be too bloated with beef and wine to fight, but Hogan had got wind of their plans and was now setting his snares on the only two routes that the escaping French could use. One, the eastern road, was by far the easier, for it entered France through a low pass, and Hogan guessed it was that route that the French would choose, but there was a second road, a tight, hard, steep road, and that had to be blocked as well and so the Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers, Sharpe’s regiment, would climb into the hills and spend their Christmas at a place of hovels and misery called Irati.

“There’re over a thousand men in the fort at Ochagavia,” Hogan told Sharpe, “and we don’t want Boney to get those men back, Richard. You have to stop them.”

“If they use the western road, sir.”

“Which they probably won’t,” Hogan said comfortingly, “but if they do, Richard, stop them. Kill me some Frogs for Christmas. That’s why you joined the army, isn’t it? To kill Frogs? So go and do it. I want you out of here in an hour.”

In truth Richard Sharpe had not joined the army to kill Frogs. He had joined because he was hungry and on the run from the constables, and because once a man had taken the shilling and pulled on the King’s coat he was reckoned safe from the law. And so Private Richard Sharpe had joined the 33 rd, fought with them in Flanders and in India where, at Assaye, a bloody battlefield between two rivers where a small British army had trounced a vast Indian horde, he had become an officer. That was almost ten years ago now, and he had spent a good many of those years fighting the French in Portugal and Spain. Only now he fought in a dark green coat, for he was a Rifleman, though by an accident of war he now found himself commanding a batallion of redcoats. They had once been called the South Essex, but now they were the Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers, though on this dank, grey morning they were anything but willing. They were comfortable in their Spanish billets, they liked the local girls and none were of a mind to go soldiering in a cold Spanish winter. Sharpe ignored their displeasure. Men did not join the army to be comfortable.

They marched on the hour. Four hundred and twenty-two men swinging east out of the town and down into the valley. It had begun to rain heavily, filling the small ditches that edged the fields and flooding the furrows left in the road by the big guns. No one else in the army was moving, just Sharpe’s regiment that was going to plug a gap in the high mountains to stop the French escaping. Not that Sharpe believed he would fight this Christmas. Even Hogan was not certain that the Ochagavia garrison would march, and if they did they would probably choose the eastern road, the main road, so all Sharpe expected was a long march and a cold Christmas. But King George wanted him to be at Irati, so to Irati he would go. And God help the Frogs if they did the same.

Colonel Jean Gudin watched as the tricolour was lowered. The Fort at Ochagavia, that he had commanded for four years, was being abandoned and it hurt. It was another failure, and his life had been nothing but failure.

Even the Fort at Ochagavia was a failure for, as far as Gudin could see, it guarded nothing. True, it dominated a road in the mountains, but the road had never been used to bring supplies from France and so it had never been haunted by the dreaded partisans who harried all the other French garrisons in Spain. Time and again Gudin had pointed this out to his superiors, but somewhere in Paris there was a pin stuck into a map of Spain, and the pin represented the garrison of Ochagavia and no one had been willing to surrender the pinprick until now, when some bureaucrat had suddenly remembered the fort’s existence and realised that it held a thousand good men who were needed to defend the homeland.

Those men now made ready for their escape. Three hundred were Gudin’s garrison and the others were fugitives who had taken refuge in Ochagavia after the disaster at Vitoria. Some of those refugees were dragoons, but most were infantrymen from the 75 thregiment who paraded in the fort’s courtyard beneath their Eagle and under the eye of their irascible chef de batallion , Colonel Caillou. Behind the 75 th, clustered about two horse-drawn wagons, was a crowd of women and children.

“Those damned women aren’t coming with us,” Caillou said. He was mounted on a black charger that he curbed beside Gudin’s horse. “I thought we agreed to abandon the women.”

“I didn’t agree,” Gudin said curtly.

Caillou snorted, then glared at the shivering women. They were mostly the wives and girlfriends of Gudin’s garrison, and between them the ninety women had almost as many children, some of them no more than babes in arms. “They’re Spaniards!” he snapped.

“Not all of them,” Gudin said, “some are French.”

“But French or Spanish,” Caillou insisted, “they will slow us down. The essence of success, Gudin, is to march fast. Audacity! Speed! There lies safety. We cannot take women and children.”

“If they stay,” Gudin said stubbornly, “they will be killed.”

“That’s war, Gudin, that’s war!” Caillou declared. “In war the weak die.”