Sharpe's Battle Part 46

They slept close to the ammunition wagons. Sharpe woke once as a small shower hissed in the embers of the fire, then slept again until an hour before dawn.

He awoke to see a small mist clinging to the plateau and blurring the grey shapes of soldiers tending their fires. Sharpe shared a pot of hot shaving water with Major Tarrant, then pulled on his jacket and weapons and walked westwards in search of a cavalry regiment. He found an encampment of hussars from the King's German Legion and exchanged a half-pint of issue rum for an edge on his sword. The German armourer bent over his wheel as the sparks flew and when he was done the edge of Sharpe's heavy cavalry sword was glinting in the dawn's small light. Sharpe slid the blade carefully into its scabbard and walked slowly back towards the gaunt silhouetted shapes of the wagon park.

The sun rose through a cloud of French cooking smoke. The enemy on the stream's eastern bank greeted the new day with a fusillade of musketry that rattled among Fuentes de Onoro's houses, but died away as no shots were returned. On the British ridge the gunners cut new fuses and piled their ready magazines with case shot, but no French infantry advanced from the distant trees to be the beneficiaries of their work. A large force of French cavalry rode southwards across the marshy plain where they were shadowed by hors.e.m.e.n from the King's German Legion, but as the sun rose higher and the last pockets of mist evaporated from the lowland fields it dawned on the waiting British that Ma.s.sena was not planning any immediate attack.

Two hours after dawn a French voltigeur picquet on the stream's eastern bank called out a tentative greeting to the British sentry he knew was hidden behind a broken wall on the west bank. He could not see the British soldier, but he could see the blue haze of his pipe smoke. "G.o.ddam!" he called, using the French nickname for all British troops. "G.o.ddam!"

"c.r.a.paud?"

A pair of empty hands appeared above the French-held wall. No one fired and, a moment later, an anxious moustached face appeared. The Frenchman produced an unlit cigar and mimed that he would like a light.

The greenjacket picquet emerged from hiding just as warily, but when no enemy fired at him he walked out onto the clapper bridge that had lost one of its stone slabs in the previous day's fighting. He held his clay pipe out over the gap. "Come on, Frenchie."

The voltigeur walked onto the bridge and leaned over for the pipe that he used to light his cigar. Then he returned the pipe with a short length of garlic sausage. The two men smoked companionably, enjoying the spring suns.h.i.+ne. Other voltigeurs stretched and stood, just as the greenjackets relaxed in their positions. Some men took off their boots and dangled their feet in the stream.

In Fuentes de Onoro itself the British were struggling to remove the dead and the wounded from the crammed alleys. Men wrapped cloth strips about their mouths to drag the blood-black and heat-swollen bodies from the piles that marked where the fighting had been fiercest. Other men fetched water from the stream to relieve the thirst of the wounded. By mid-morning the truce across the stream was official and a company of unarmed French infantry arrived to carry their own casualties back across the bridge that had been patched with a plank taken from the watermill on the British bank. French ambulances waited at the ford to carry their men to the surgeons. The vehicles had been specially constructed for carrying wounded men and had springs as lavish as any city grandee's coach. The British army preferred to use farm carts that jolted the wounded foully.

A French major sat drinking wine and playing chess with a greenjacket captain in the inn's garden. Outside the inn a work party loaded an ox-drawn wagon with the dead who would be carried up to the ridge and buried in a common grave. The chessplayers frowned when a burst of raucous laughter sounded loud and the British Captain, annoyed that the laughter was not fading away, went to the gate and snapped at a sergeant for an explanation. "It was Mallory, sir," the Sergeant said, pointing to a shamefaced British rifleman who was the b.u.t.t of French and British amus.e.m.e.nt. "b.u.g.g.e.r fell asleep, sir, and the Frogs was loading him up with the dead 'uns."

The French Major took one of the Englishman's castles and remarked that he had once almost buried a living man. "We were already throwing earth in his grave when he sneezed. That was in Italy. He's a sergeant now."

The rifle Captain might have been losing the game of chess, but he was determined not to be outdone in stories. "I've met two men who survived hangings in England," he remarked. "They were pulled off the scaffold too soon and their bodies sold to the surgeons. The doctors pay five guineas a corpse,

I'm told, so they can demonstrate their d.a.m.ned techniques to their apprentices. I'm told the corpses revive far more often than you'd think.

There's always an unseemly scramble round the gallows as the man's family tries to cut the body down before the doctors get their wretched hands on it, and there doesn't seem anyone in authority to make sure the villain's properly dead before he's unstrung." He moved a bishop. "I suppose the authorities are being bribed."

"The guillotine makes no such mistakes," the Major said as he advanced a p.a.w.n.

"Death by science. Very quick and certain. I do believe that is checkmate."

"d.a.m.n me," the Englishman said, "so it is."

The French Major stowed away his chess set. His p.a.w.ns were musket b.a.l.l.s, half limewashed and half left plain, the court pieces were carved from wood and the board was a square of painted canvas that he wrapped carefully about the chessmen. "It seems our lives have been spared this day," he said, glancing up at the sun that was already past the meridian. "Maybe we shall fight tomorrow instead?"

Up on the ridge the British watched as French troops marched south. It was clear that Ma.s.sena would now be trying to turn the British right flank and so

Wellington ordered the Seventh Division to deploy southwards and thus reinforce a strong force of Spanish partisans who were blocking the roads the

French needed to advance artillery as part of their flanking manoeuvre.

Wellington's army was now in two parts; the largest on the plateau behind

Fuentes de Onoro was blocking the approach to Almeida while the smaller part was two and a half miles south astride the road along which the British would need to retreat if they were defeated. Ma.s.sena put a telescope to his one eye to watch as the small British division moved south. He kept expecting the division to stop before it left the protective artillery range of the plateau, but the troops kept marching and marching. "He's made a b.o.l.l.o.c.ks of it," he told an aide as the Seventh Division finally marched way beyond the range of the strong British artillery. Ma.s.sena collapsed the telescope. "Monsieur

Wellington has made a b.o.l.l.o.c.ks of it," he said.

Andre Ma.s.sena had begun his military career as a private in the ranks of Louis

XVI's army and now he was a marshal of France, the Duke of Rivoli and the

Prince of Essling. Men called him "Your Majesty", yet once he had been a half- starved wharf rat in the small town of Nice. He had also once possessed two eyes, but the Emperor had shot one of the eyeb.a.l.l.s away in a hunting accident.

Napoleon would never acknowledge the responsibility, but nor would Marshal

Ma.s.sena ever dream of blaming his beloved Emperor for the eye's loss, for he owed both his royal status and his high military rank to Napoleon who had recognized the wharf rat's skills as a soldier. Those skills had made Andre

Ma.s.sena famous inside the Empire and feared outside. He had trampled through

Italy winning victory after victory, he had smashed the Russians on the borders of Switzerland and rammed b.l.o.o.d.y defeat down Austrian throats before

Marengo. Marshal Andre Ma.s.sena, Duke of Rivoli and Prince of Essling, was not a pretty soldier, but by G.o.d he knew how to fight, which was why, at fifty-two years old, he had been sent to retrieve the disasters besetting the Emperor's armies in Spain and Portugal.

Now the wharf rat turned prince watched in disbelief as the gap between the two parts of the British army opened still wider. For a few seconds he even toyed with the idea that perhaps the four or five thousand red-coated infantrymen marching southwards were the Irish regiments that Major Ducos had promised would mutiny before the battle, but Ma.s.sena had never put much hope in Ducos's stratagem and the fact that these nine battalions were flying their flags as they marched suggested that they were hardly in revolt. Instead, miraculously, it seemed that the British were offering them up as a sacrifice by isolating them out in the southern plain where they would be far from any help. Ma.s.sena watched as the enemy regiments finally stopped just short of a village far to the south. According to his map the village was called Nave de

Haver and it lay nearly five miles from Fuentes de Onoro. "Is Wellington tricking us?" Ma.s.sena asked an aide.

The aide was just as incredulous as his master. "Perhaps he believes he can beat us without keeping to the rules?" he suggested.

"Then in the morning we will teach him about the rules of war. I expected better of this Englishman! Tomorrow night, Jean, we shall have his wh.o.r.es as our own. Does Wellington have wh.o.r.es?"

"I don't know, Your Majesty."

"Then find out. And make sure I get the pick of the bunch before some filthy grenadier gives her the clap, you hear me?"

"Yes, Your Majesty," the aide said. His master's pa.s.sion for women was as tiresome as his appet.i.te for victory was inspiring, and tomorrow, it seemed, both hungers would be satisfied.

By mid-afternoon it was plain that the French were not coming that day. The picquets were doubled, and every battalion kept at least three companies under arms, but the other companies were released to more usual duties. Cattle were herded onto the plateau and slaughtered for the evening meal, bread was fetched from Vilar Formoso and the rum ration distributed.

Captain Donaju sought and received Tarrant's permission to take a score of men to attend Lord Kiely's burial which was taking place four miles behind Fuentes de Onoro. Hogan also insisted that Sharpe attend and Harper wanted to come as well. Sharpe felt awkward in Hogan's company, especially as the Irishman seemed blithely unaware of Sharpe's bitterness over the court of inquiry. "I invited Runciman," Hogan told Sharpe as they walked along the dusty road west from Vilar Formoso, "but he didn't really want to come. Poor fellow."

"In a bad way, is he?" Sharpe asked.

"Heartbroken," Hogan said callously. "Keeps claiming that nothing was his fault. He doesn't seem to grasp that isn't the point."

"It isn't, is it? The point is that you'd prefer to keep b.l.o.o.d.y Valverde happy."

Hogan shook his head. "I'd prefer to bury Valverde, and preferably alive, but what I really want is for Wellington to be Generalisimo."

"And you'll sacrifice me for that?"

"Of course! Every soldier knows you must lose some valuable men if you want to win a great prize. Besides, what does it matter if you do lose your commission? You'll just go off and join Teresa and become a famous partisan:

El Fusilero!" Hogan smiled cheerfully, then turned to Harper. "Sergeant? Would you do me a great service and give me a moment's privacy with Captain Sharpe?"

Harper obligingly walked on ahead where he tried to overhear the conversation between the two officers, but Hogan kept his voice low and Sharpe's exclamations of surprise offered Harper no clue. Nor did he have any chance to question Sharpe before the three British officers turned a corner to see Lord

Kiely's servants and Captain Donaju's twenty men standing awkwardly beside a grave that had been recently dug in an orchard next to a graveyard. Father