The French had stopped using rifles on the battlefield; they had abandoned them because they were too slow to load, but these gunners were learning that even the slow rifle had its advantages over the speedy musket, which could never hope to be accurate at a hundred paces.
“Cease firing!” The Riflemen looked at Harper. “Hagman!”
“Sarge?”
“Keep them busy. Gataker, Sims, Harvey!” The three looked at him expectantly. “You load for Hagman. You others, aim for the cavalry officers.”
Lieutenant Knowles ran and crouched beside the Sergeant. “Is there anything we can do?”
“Not yet, sir. We’ll move in a minute.”
Knowles and the twenty men with muskets were there to protect the Riflemen if the French cavalry charged them, as surely they must. Harper stared at the horsemen. They seemed as surprised as the gunners and sat on their horses staring at the slaughtered artillerymen as if not believing their eyes. They had expected the gun to blow the British infantry into ragged ruin, and now it dawned on them that there was no gun, no easy victory. Harper raised his first rifle, snapped the backsight into the upright position, and guessed the horsemen were three hundred yards away. It was a long shot for a rifle, but not impossible, and the French had conveniently bunched their senior officers in a small group forward of their first line. As he pulled the trigger he heard other rifles fire; he saw the group pull apart, a horse went down, two officers fell dead or wounded. The French were temporarily leaderless. The initiative, as Sharpe had planned, had gone totally to the British. Harper stood up.
“Hagman’s group! Keep firing. You others! Follow me!”
He ran towards the gun, curving wide so that Hagman had an uninterrupted field of fire, and the men followed him. The plan had been for the Riflemen to destroy the gunners and let Sharpe’s company capture the gun, but Harper could see his Lieutenant still had a long way to go and neither he nor Sharpe had expected the gun to be placed so conveniently close to the ambush party. Knowles felt astonished at the rush for the gun, but the huge Irishman was so infectious that he found himself urging the redcoats on as they dodged the bodies and ran for the gun that loomed larger and larger. The surviving artillerymen took one look at the seeming dead who had come to life, and fled. As Harper sprinted the final few yards he was aware of Hagman’s spaced shots ceasing and then he was there, his hands actually on the brass muzzle, the men surrounding him.
“Sir?”
“Sergeant?” Knowles was panting.
“Two ranks between the gun and the cavalry?” Harper made it sound like a request, but Knowles nodded as if it had been an order. The young Lieutenant was frantically nervous. He had seen his new Battalion destroyed by cavalry, watched the King’s Colour dragged from the field, and fought off the sabres with the sword his father had bought him for fifteen guineas at Kerrigan’s in Birmingham. He had watched Sharpe and Sergeant Harper recover the Regimental Colour and had been astonished by their action. Now he wanted to prove to the Riflemen that his men could fight just as effectively, and he lined up his small force and stared at the cavalry, which was at last moving. It seemed as if a hundred horsemen were advancing towards the gun; the rest were slanting off towards Sharpe, and Knowles remembered the sabres, the smell of fear, and gripped his sword tightly. He was determined not to let Sharpe down. He thought of Sharpe’s last words to him, the hands that gripped his shoulders and eyes that bored into him. “Wait!” Sharpe had said. “Wait until they’re forty paces away, then fire the volley. Wait, wait, wait!” Knowles found it incredible that he was the same rank as Sharpe; he felt sure he would never have the easy manner of command that seemed so natural to the tall Rifleman. Knowles was awed by the French, they were the conquerors of Europe, yet Sharpe saw them as men to be outwitted and outfought, and Knowles desperately wanted the same confidence. Instead he felt nervous. He wanted to fire his first volley now, to stop the French horses while they were a hundred paces away, but he controlled the fear and watched the horsemen walk forward, watched as a hundred sabres rasped from their scabbards and caught the afternoon sun in ranks of curved light. Harper came and stood beside him.
“We’ve got a treat for the bastards, sir.”
He sounded so cheerful! Knowles swallowed, kept his sword low. Wait, he told himself, and was surprised to hear that he had spoken out loud and that his voice had sounded calm. He looked at his men. They were trusting him!
“Well done, sir. May I?” Harper had spoken softly. Knowles nodded, not sure what was happening.
“Platoon!” Harper was in front of the tiny line of men. He pointed to the ten men on the right. “Sideways, four paces. March!” Then on the left the same order.
“Platoon! Backwards. March!”
Knowles stepped back with them, watching as the French eased their horses into a trot, and then understood. While he had been standing watching the French, the Riflemen had moved the gun! Instead of pointing down the track it was now aimed at the French cavalry; somehow they had loaded it, and the canister which should have swept the British off the road like a housewife scattering roaches with a broom was now threatening the cavalry instead. Harper stood at the back of the gun, well clear of the wheel. The gunners had done most of the loading, the Riflemen had thrust the canister into the barrel and found the slow match that burned red at the end of the pole. The fuse was in the touch-hole. It was a reed filled with fine powder, and when Harper touched it the fire would flash down the tube and ignite the powder charge in its serge bag.
“Hold your fire!” Harper shouted clearly; he did not want the inexperienced men of the South Essex to fire when the gun went off. “Hold your fire!”
The cavalry were seventy yards away, just urging their horses into the canter, ten riders in the first rank. Harper guessed that fifty men were aimed at the tiny party round the gun, and there were fifty more in reserve. He touched the fuse onto the reed. There was a fizzing, a puff of smoke from the touch-hole, and then the enormous explosion. Grey-white smoke belched from the muzzle; the gun, on its five-foot wheels, lurched back its fifteen hundredweight that dug the trail into the soil and bounced the wheels off the ground. The thin metal canister split apart as it left the muzzle, and Harper watched through the smoke as the musket balls and scrap iron snatched the cavalry off the field.
The first three ranks were destroyed; the other two were dazed, unable to advance over the bloody corpses and the wounded who staggered upright, bleeding and shocked. Harper heard Knowles shouting.
“Hold your fire! Hold your fire!”
Good lad, thought the Irishman. The cavalry had split either side of the carnage; some of the reserve was galloping forward, but the horsemen seemed dazed by the sudden blow. They came on towards the gun but stayed clear of its line of fire, and Knowles watched the two wings of horsemen as they drew nearer. He waited, waited until they put spurs to their horses and tried to gallop the last few paces, and slashed his sword down.
„Fire!“
The muskets coughed out flame and smoke. The leading horses dropped, making a barrier to those behind.
“Change muskets!” Knowles felt the stirrings of confidence, the realisation that he could do it!
“Fire!”
A second volley destroyed the horsemen trying to close on the two sides of the gun. More horses fell, more men were pitched from their saddles in a flurry of arms, legs, sabres and scabbards. The horsemen behind went on, lapped round the back of the gun, and the rifles started their sharper reports and more horses were shot. Knowles was startled to see no more horsemen in front of the cannon; he turned his men round, changed to the third musket, and blasted a third volley over the heads of the kneeling Riflemen.
“Thank you, sir!”
Harper grinned at the Lieutenant. The cavalry had gone, shattered by the canister, bloodied by the close volleys, prevented from closing with the infantry because of the barriers of dead and wounded horses. Harper watched as Knowles started his men reloading their muskets. He turned back to the gun. There was so much to remember! Sponge out, stop the vent; he summoned the Riflemen to reload their captured cannon.
Sharpe had seen the four-pounder fire, watched the horsemen cut down in a bloody swathe, then he had turned to the Chasseurs attacking his own formation. As the cavalry had come closer he had halted the three ranks, turned them to face the French except for the rear rank that about-turned to deal with the horsemen who would envelop the small formation. The horsemen were in savage mood. An easy victory had been snatched away from them, the gun had been captured, but there was still the insolent colour waving from the small group of infantry. They spurred towards Sharpe, their discipline ragged, their mood simply one of revenge and a determination to crush this tiny force like a boot heel stamping on a scorpion. Sharpe watched them come. Forrest glanced nervously at him and cleared his throat, but Sharpe shook his head.
“Wait, Major, always wait.”
He and Forrest stood beneath the defiant colour. It taunted the French. They spurred towards it, the trumpet rang out its curdling charge, the Chasseurs screamed revenge, raised their sabres, and died.
Sharpe had let them come to forty yards, and the volley destroyed the first line that opposed the British. The second rank of French horsemen clapped spurs to their mounts. They were confident. Had the British not fired their volley? They jumped over the writhing remains of the first rank and to their horror saw that the red-coated ranks were not busy reloading but were calmly aiming their muskets again. Some pulled desperately at their reins, but it was too late. The volley from Sharpe’s second set of muskets piled thehorses beside the bodies of thefirst line.
“Change muskets!”
The rear rank fired, once and twice. Sharpe whirled, but the experienced sergeants had done well. His men were ringed with horses, dead and dying, stunned and wounded Chasseurs struggled from the mess and ran into the wide expanse of the field. The French had lost all cohesion, all chance of a further attack.
“Left turn! Forward!”
He ran on. He could see Harper and Knowles. The young Lieutenant looked calm, and Sharpe could see the ring of French dead that showed he had learnt to hold his fire. The cannon fired again, shrouding the group in smoke, and Sharpe glanced back to see more horsemen fall where they were reforming ranks off to his right. A few horsemen still galloped round them; once Sharpe stopped and fired a volley of twenty muskets to drive off a group of six Chasseurs who came galloping up on the flank. Then his men reached the gun. Sharpe grabbed Harper, pounded him on the back, grinned up at the huge Irishman, and turned to congratulate Knowles. They had done it! Captured the gun, driven off the cavalry, inflicted terrible damage on men and horses, and without a single scratch to themselves.
And that was it. With the gun in his hands Sharpe knew the French dare not attack again. He watched them circle well clear of its range as the British formed a square. Forrest was beaming, looking for all the world like a Bishop who had conducted a particularly pleasing confirmation service. “We did it, Sharpe! We did it!” Sharpe looked up at the colour over the small square. A little honour had been regained, not enough, but a little. A French gun had been captured, the Chasseurs had been mauled, some of the South Essex had learned to fight. But that was not all. Lashed to the trail of the captured gun, festooned on the limber, were ropes. Long, tough, French ropes that could span a broken bridge instead of haul the gun up steep slopes. Ropes, timber from the gun’s carriage; all he needed to start taking the wounded back across the river.
At the bridge Lennox watched as a Chasseur officer walked his horse towards the British square. Negotiating again; but it would be too late for him. He felt cold and numb, the pain had passed, and he knew that there was not long. He gripped the sword; some atavistic memory told him it was his pass into a better heaven, perhaps where his wife waited. He felt content, lazy but content. He had watched Sharpe walk suicidally forward, wondered what he was doing, then heard the distinctive crack of the rifles, seen the figures running on the gun, and watched as the French cavalry broke themselves on the massed volleys of the infantry. Now it was over. The French would pick up their wounded and go, and Sharpe would come back to the bridge. And he would keep the promise, Lennox knew that now; a man who could plan the capture of that gun would have the daring to do what Lennox wanted. That way there could be no shame in this day’s work. The image of the colour, far up the smoke-veiled field, dimmed in the Scotsman’s eyes. The sun was hot but it was damned cold all the same. He gripped the sword and closed his eyes.