Sharpe 18 - Sharpe's Siege (8 page)

It was not much of a road, merely a rutted cart track that wound between brush and pine and edged past great swamps where long-legged wading birds flapped slowly into the winter air as the Riflemen passed. The Green Jackets marched fast, as they were trained to march, and always, a quarter mile ahead, the picquets signalled back towards Sharpe that the road was clear.

It seemed strange to be this deep in France. This was the land of Bonaparte, the enemy land, and between Sharpe and Bordeaux, indeed between Sharpe and Paris, there were no friendly troops. A single squadron of enemy cavalry could cut this march into butcher's offal, yet the Green Jackets marched undisturbed and unseen.

“If we go at this pace,” Frederickson said, “we'll overtake the Marines.”

“It had occurred to me,” Sharpe said mildly.

The eye-patched man stared at Sharpe. “You're not thinking of taking the.”

“No,” Sharpe interrupted. “If Bampfylde wants to take the fort, he can. But if the map's right we have to go close to Arcachon, so we might take a look at the fort before we turn eastwards.”

Patrick Harper carried the picquets' packs and coats as punishment, but the extra weight made no difference to his marching pace. His tooth bothered him; the pain of that was foul and throbbing, but he had no other cares in the world. He had followed Sharpe because it was unthinkable to stay behind when Sharpe went off on his own. Harper had seen that happen before and the Major had nearly killed himself in Burgos Castle as a result. Besides, Jane Sharpe, giving him the oil of cloves, had suggested he stowed away, Isabella had insisted he stay with the Major, and Captain Frederickson had turned his blind eye to Harper's presence. Harper felt he was in his proper place; with Sharpe and with a column of Riflemen marching to battle.

Their green jackets and dark trousers melded with the cloud-darkened pines. The 60th had been raised for just such terrain, the American wilderness, and Sharpe, turning sometimes to watch the men, could see how well chosen the uniform was. At a hundred paces an unmoving man could be invisible. For a moment Sharpe felt the sudden pride of a Rifleman. The Rifles, he believed as an article of his soldier's faith, were simply, indisputably, the finest troops in all the world.

They fought like demons and were made more deadly because they were trained, unlike other infantry, to fight independently. These men, in danger, would not look to an officer or sergeant for instruction, but would know, thanks to their training, just what to do. They were mostly squat and ugly men, toothless and pinched-faced, villainous and foul-mouthed, but on a battlefield they were kings, and victory was their common coin.

They could fight and they could march. God, but they could march! In `09, trying to reach the carnage of Talavera, the Light Division had marched forty-two hilly miles in twenty-six hours and had arrived in good order, weapons primed, and ready to fight. These men marched thus now. They did it unthinkingly, not knowing that the pace they unconsciously assumed was the fastest marching pace of all the world's armies. They were Riflemen, the finest of the best, and they were going north to war.

While to their west, on the less happy trails that edged the tumbled dunes, the Marines faltered.

It was not their fault. For months now, on a diet of worm-infested biscuit, rotting meat, foul water and rum, they had been immured in the forecastles of the great ships that weathered the Biscay storms. They were not hardened to marching, and the sand they crossed gave treacherous footing and chafed their boots on softened skin. Their muskets, all of the heavy Sea Service pattern, seemed to grow heavier by the mile. Their chest straps, whitened and taut, constricted labouring lungs. It was a cold day, but sweat stung their eyes while the muscles at the backs of their legs burned like fire. Some of the men were burdened by ropes and grapnel hooks that they would use to scale the fort's wall instead of the long ladders that Bampfylde had deemed unnecessary for the Marines.

“We shall call a halt.” Captain Bampfylde did not do it for the men's benefit, but his own. If they laboured, he suffered. His handmade boots had rubbed his right heel raw and raised blisters on his toes. The leather band of his bicorne hat was like a ring of steel and his white breeches were cutting into his crotch like a sawhorse.

The captain was regretting his intrepidity. He had been eager to lead these men into battle, and that could not be done from the deck of the Vengeance any more than it could be done from the quarterdeck of the Scylla. That frigate, under Captain Grant, would nose into the Arcachon channel to draw the fire of what few defenders might infest the fort's bastions. Once those defenders were occupied with the frigate, and while their gaze was fastened seawards, the Marines would assault the empty landward ramparts. It was that assault which would capture the imagination of the British public when it was printed in the Naval Gazette, not the old story of a ship bombarding a battery.

Captain of Marines Palmer saluted Bampfylde. “We're behind time, sir.”

“God damn it, Palmer, if I require your contribution then I shall ask for it!”

“Sir!” Palmer was unmoved by Bampfylde's anger. Neil Palmer was ten years older than Bampfylde and too experienced to be worried by the petulance of yet another ambitious young captain who resented the fame gained by Nelson's band of brothers. “I'll put picquets out, sir?”

“Do it!” Bampfylde subsided against the trunk of a tree. He wanted to haul offhis precious boots and dabble his sore feet in the shallows of the sea, but he dared not betray such weakness in front of his men.

“Water, sir?” Lieutenant Ford offered a canteen.

“After you, Ford.” Bampfylde knew such behaviour was proper, and he was a man eager to be seen to behave heroically in all things.

He consoled himself that his discomfort was a small price to pay for the renown that he would win this day. The Marines might come late to the fortress, but the fortress would fall just the same, and the blisters on his feet would be forgotten in the blaze of glory. He opened his watch, saw they had already rested ten minutes, but decided a few more minutes could not hurt. He stretched out tired legs, tipped his hat forward, and polished the news of victory that he would write this night.

While a hundred yards away, standing on a sudden rise of sandy soil that made a bare ridge through the thin pines, Captain Palmer stared at the countryside through a heavy, ancient telescope. Far to the north, beyond the fading ridges of sand and conifers, a rainstorm misted the land like a vast curtain. The rain lifted for a brief instant and Palmer thought he saw the malevolent, dark shape of the fort hull-down on the horizon, but, as the rain closed again on his view, he could not be certain of what he had seen.

He swung the glass inland. Two miles away, suddenly visible where the trees gave way to a stretch of marshy, glistening ground, he saw the tiny shapes of green jacketed Riflemen marching forward. Palmer was envious. He wished he was with them and not tied to Bampfylde's apron strings, but then a bark of command from the dunes made him collapse his glass and turn back towards his men.

“We'll attack,” Bampfylde told Ford and Palmer, “at dusk.”

“Yes, sir.” Both men knew that the Scylla had been ordered into the channel two hours before sundown, but there was no hope of meeting that rendezvous. They must just march, on blistering, aching feet, and be consoled that the night would bring them victory, supplies from the ships, and blessed rest in the shelter of a captured stronghold.

In the Teste de Buch Commandant Henri Lassan told his beads, yet somehow could not shift from his thoughts a line from an essay by Montaigne that he had read the night before. It had said something about a whole man's life being nothing more than an effort to build a house of death, and he feared, without letting that fear affect his behaviour, that the Teste de Buch might be his house of death this day. He told himself that such fears were entirely natural in a man facing battle for the first time.

He knelt in the tiny whitewashed chapel that, in the early heady years of the Revolution, had been turned first into a Temple of Reason and then into a storeroom. The small red light of the Eternal Presence, that Lassan himself had caused to be placed in this shrine when he restored it as a chapel, took his thoughts back to prayer. If he should die today in this miserable, damp fort on the edge of France then that light was a sure promise of salvation. Beneath it a simple wooden crucifix stood on an altar that bore a frontal of plain white. It was an Easter frontal, used only because the fort had no other to put on the table beneath, yet somehow the Easter promise of resurrection was comforting to Commandant Henri Lassan as he rose from his knees.

He went into the courtyard. Rain had puddled the cobbles and streaked the inner walls dark. The fort seemed strangely empty. Lassan had sent the families of the garrison to the village so that no woman or child should be struck by enemy fire. The tricolour, that had not flown these past days, was wrapped on to the halyard ready to be hoisted when the first cannon slammed back on its carriage.

“Sir!” Lieutenant Gerard called from the western rampart.

Lassan walked up the stone ramp that made it easy for heated shot to be carried from the furnace to the guns. Not that he had enough men left to tend the fire, but cold shot should be sufficient for any vessel that tried to brave the narrow, shoal-ridden waters of the channel.

“There, sir.” The lieutenant pointed seawards where, westering from the horizon, came a British frigate. The warship's new topsails were as white as the bone in her teeth that was flashing bright as the wind drove the boat towards the channel entrance.

“That's the frigate that pursued the Thuella, isn't it?” Lassan asked.

“Yes, sir,” Gerard said. ,Scylla."

Beyond the frigate were other ships. One, Lassan could see, was a ship of the line; one of the great vessels that had put a noose around the Emperor's conquests. Lassan would rather be pouring his shot into that great belly than into the frigate's slender and fragile beauty, but the Commandant would take what targets he could in this day's fight for God and the Emperor. “Wait till she passes the outer mark.”

“Sir.”

The Scylla moved closer, the giltwork of her figurehead gleaming, and Lassan knew the frigate had come to make him look one way while the Marines came from his rear, but he had an American warrior hidden in the woods and Lassan must put his trust in that unexpected ally. He knew that no Marine could pass Killick without shots being fired, and even if the Americans were pushed back then the noise of their battle would give Lassan a chance to man the ramparts by the fortress gate. For the moment that rampart was only garrisoned by three sick men.

If the Scylla's attack was timed properly, Lassan thought, then the Marines must be close. Lassan looked south, but could see nothing untoward beyond the village, then he turned back seawards in time to watch the frigate's flying-jib shiver as it turned towards the channel. At the same time the Scylla's great battle-ensign unfurled from an upper yard.

Lassan's men crouched by their guns. Their portfires seeped grey smoke into the air and Lassan knew how dry their mouths were and how fragile their bellies felt. On the frigate's forepeak he could see men clustered around the chasing guns. The officers on the quarterdeck, Lassan knew, would have donned their best uniforms in honour of their enemy while, deep in the frigate's bowels, the surgeon would be waiting by his razor-sharp scalpels.

The fortress waited. A corporal stood by the flagpole ready, at the first bellow of the guns, to hoist the standard of France. A gull, wide wings still, rode the soft wind above the channel.

Lassan imagined the red coats of Marines in the Americans' gunsights, then forgot what happened to his south because the frigate's graceful profile was changing and the white wave at her bows was cutting into the fretted, churning tiderace of the channel.

The frigate seemed to shudder as she met the full force of the Arcachon ebb, then the bellying sails plunged her onwards and the long, reaching spar of the Scylla's bowsprit bisected the tarred elm pole that marked the inner shoal and Lieutenant Gerard's voice, harsh and proud, shouted the order to fire.

The French gunners touched portfires to vents, and the battle of Arcachon had begun.

CHAPTER 6

The bellow of the guns rolled like thunder over the rain-sodden land. Instinctively, without any orders, the Riflemen knelt as if to shelter from artillery.

Sharpe ran. His metal scabbard flapped at his side, his rifle slipped from his shoulder to dangle at his elbow, and his pack thumped on to the small of his back.

Sergeant Rossner, leading the small picquet that spied the route ahead, was crouching by a straggle of furze that lined the roadside at the crest of a gentle rise. He gave a Germanic grunt as Sharpe dropped beside him then a jerk of his half-shaven chin to indicate the source of the thunder.

Not that Sharpe needed any such indication. Darkly streaked smoke billowed from the landscape a mile and a half ahead and to Sharpe's left. Directly ahead of him, and reaching across the whole view, lay the silvered waters of the Arcachon basin, made visible suddenly by this rise in the road, but Sharpe stared only at the fortress, seemingly half-buried in the encroaching sand, and at the white-sailed frigate that coughed her own billow of whiter smoke to meld with the fort's darker gusts. “Marines, eh?” The German sergeant showed his disgust by spitting on to the road.

Sharpe took out his telescope as Frederickson crouched beside him. From this landward side the Teste de Buch fort looked hardly formidable. It was built low within its protective glacis of packed earth and sand off which, as Sharpe watched, the small shot of the frigate bounced like cricket balls.

The smoke from the fort's guns drifted northwards, leaving the channel clear for the gunners' aim. Four guns only were working, but they were served with a quick skill that betrayed the presence of real gunners. God damn Bampfylde's fisherman, Sharpe thought, for the Teste de Buch was lethal still. It was doing the Scylla damage, while the frigate could make small impression on its massive walls.

Sharpe trained the telescope left. He paused as he saw a throng of people, drably dressed, then realized, from the heavy skirts worn by most of the crowd, that he watched the villagers who, in turn, watched the uneven battle from the crest of the dunes beside the channel. Sharpe looked further south, seeking the bright coats of the Marines, then checked the glass again.

He saw another small crowd of people, but these were not watching the frigate's struggle, but instead seemed to be crowded at the edge of a group of dark pines. Some, a few, had strolled further north to watch the battle in the channel, but they had chosen a poor vantage point to witness a sight that must be rare in their harsh lives.

“Why?” he spoke aloud.

“Sir?” Frederickson asked.

Sharpe was wondering why villagers, witnessing a contest that would be told to their grandchildren as a great happening in the village's history, chose such a strange place to watch the event. Most of the villagers had gone to the dunes, seeking the best view, yet a sizeable few were huddled there at the wood's edge. He stared at them, making out a shape beneath the tree shadows. “William? That wood, where the people are, tell me what you see?”

Frederickson took the precious glass and trained it. He stared for twenty seconds, then shook his head. “It looks like a bloody limber!”

“Doesn't it?” Sharpe took the glass back and, his guess reinforced by Frederickson's puzzled confirmation, saw more clearly the box shape slung between the high wheels. He had seen those objects before; the small carts that carried the ready ammunition to French guns. “Bloody Bampfylde,” he said as he stared at the shape beneath the trees, “has been wrong about everything. The fort is defended, they're not bloody militia, and I'll wager you a year's pay they've got a damned ambush waiting for the web-foots.” Sharpe swept the telescope right again to look at the fort. He could just see the gunners working on the water-bastion. Above them, sluggish in the falling breeze, the tricolour was bright, while closer, on the ramparts above the fort's gate, he could see no one.

He lowered the glass a fraction. It was hard to tell from this low vantage-point, but the approach to the fort seemed to go through a humped landscape of wind-drifted dunes. One thing was certain; which was that all French eyes were glued seawards. “I think we ought to have a snap at it.”

Frederickson grinned. “No ladders?” He mentioned it not to discourage Sharpe, but to encourage a solution.

Sharpe raised the glass. “They've kept the drawbridge down.” Where the approach road crossed the inner ditch a solid wooden bridge was suspended by chains. It led to a closed gate. The fact of the drawbridge being down reinforced Sharpe's suspicion that another French force was hidden in the woods. If that force was pushed backwards by the Marines then their horses would drag the field guns over the bridge and into the fort's safety.

Sharpe closed the telescope and slid the brass shutters over its lenses. What he planned was risky, even foolhardy, but the Marines marched into ambush and the fort would never again be so unprepared for a surprise attack. Once the hidden field guns opened fire then the garrison would know the enemy was at their rear and men would hurry to the land defences and slide their muskets over the wall.

The road ahead dropped to a stone mill that stood beside a small stream. Beyond that were pale, poor meadows where broken byres served a handful of thin cattle. Beyond that again were the masts of the coastal shipping huddled where another village, betrayed by smoke from its chimneys, lay at the basin's edge. The Riflemen must cross the stream, slip through the scant cover of the meadows, then work their way into the sandy waste about the fort. Sharpe smiled. “To be truthful I don't know how we get over the bloody wall.”

“Knock on the front door?” Frederickson suggested.

Sharpe pushed his telescope into the tin box that protected it from harm, then into his pocket. “Send two good men south to warn Bampfylde. Then we go down the slope in small groups. Open order. Rendezvous at the first cattle shed.” He had a growing suspicion that this was a task best left to a small group, a very small group. Sharpe turned. “Sergeant Harper!”

The huge Irishman, grinning with anticipation, loped up the road. “Sir?”

“You wanted to be killed, so come with me.”

“Yes, sir.”

Sharpe and Harper were going to war.

The guns of the Teste de Buch fired shot weighing thirty-six pounds, each shot propelled by ten pounds and two ounces of black powder. The iron balls, striking the Scylla, splintered oak like matchwood, threw cannon barrels off carriages, and made carnage among the gun crews.

They were deadly weapons that graced Lassan's semicircular water-bastion. Each was mounted on a traverse and slide. The traverse was hinged at the embrasure in the fort's wall, and wheeled at its rear so that the crew could swivel the whole gun to face anywhere within its designated arc of fire. The traversing wheels, iron bound, had ground deep, semi-circular grooves into the stone. For this battle the guns were slewed right to fire south-west and Lassan's men had hammered iron pegs into holes drilled in the curving grooves so that the traverses, under the guns' recoil, did not swing out of true.

The recoil was soaked up by the slide. A field gun, or a gun aboard a ship, was mounted on wheels and the hammer of the shot's explosion in the breech would drive the weapon fiercely backwards. After each shot the crew must man-handle the gun forward again, aim it again, and all the time the crews were swabbing out and reloading, but not with these guns. Lassan's great weapons also had wheels, but the wheels fitted over wooden ramps that sloped up towards the rear of the traverse. The recoil slammed the guns backwards and gravity ran them down into place again. And again, and again, and another thirty-six pound ball of iron shivered the Scylla as Lassan's monsters belched flame and smoke across the waters of the channel.

The smoke of the guns drifted northwards, but, in that strange phenomenon that all gunners knew and none could ever explain, the very firing of the guns seemed to still the wind. The smoke thickened before the embrasures, making a filthy-smelling fog that obliterated the target from the gunners' view.

The blinding fog did not matter. Henri Lassan had thought long about the science of gunnery and had ordered white lines painted on the granite bastions. A similar pattern of lines was painted on the barracks' roof from where, unobstructed by the smoke, a sergeant watched the target and shouted out the alignment. “Three!” he bellowed, and `three!" the gun captains shouted, and four handspikes wrenched the eye-pins from the drilled holes and four other handspikes levered the traverses about until the iron wheel was flush with the white-line marked with the numeral three, then the pins were dropped into new holes and the guns, despite the fog of war, hammered their shot with deadly accuracy.

,Two!"

The shout told Lassan that the target was moving and he guessed, correctly, that the frigate was bearing away. He walked southwards, away from his gunsmoke, to see the two-decked Vengeance raise her gunports. That battleship was beyond Cap Ferrat and far beyond range. He watched. The great slab-side, chequered black and white, disappeared in one great clap of smoke, but, as Lassan had suspected, the broadside fell uselessly into the sea. “Keep firing!”

“One!” the sergeant shouted from the roof and the crews levered at the vast guns as the boys ran up the stone ramp with more charges. A ball from the frigate rumbled overhead, another struck the stone of the embrasure nearest Lassan with a crack that made his heart pulse warm fear through his chest, but most of the frigate's shots were uselessly striking the sea wall or glancing off the southern glacis.

“She's gone!” the sergeant shouted.

“Cease fire!” Lassan shouted, and the thunder ended suddenly. The smoke cleared with painful slowness to show that the frigate, sorely wounded, had gone south beyond the arc of the big guns. Lassan contemplated manning some of the twenty-four pounders on his southern ramparts, then saw the shot-torn foresails fill with air again and knew that the British captain, under orders to keep the fort's gunners busy, was heading back into the channel. The sight of those torn sails and flying severed cables made Lassan think that some of his shots had been going high.

“Lower the barrels, Lieutenant!” Lassan wanted to pump his shots into that fragile hull.

The Scylla's guns were run out, ready to fire when the frigate wore, but the bow-chasers, long-nines, barked defiance. The balls cracked on the bastion's stone, doing no damage, then the sergeant on the barrack roof again had the enemy in his line of aim. “One!” the sergeant shouted.

“Fire!” Gerard bellowed. The great barrels jerked back and up, the wheels rumbled as they rolled back down the slide, and the smoke, that stank like rotten eggs, pumped again into the cold air. Lassan's garrison might have been stripped to the bone, he might not even have crews for every gun, but he would do his duty and he would show the British that an under-manned fort could still hurt them and still, by the grace of the good God and in the service of the French Emperor, win battles.

The handcart was made of splintered, fragile wood that was held to uncertain unity by bent, rusted nails and with lashings of thin, frayed, black twine. Some of the wheel-spokes were broken.

Sharpe pulled the handcart out of the cattle byre and listened to the ghastly screech of the wooden axle that ran through two ungreased wooden blocks. He supposed that the cart was used to take hay from these meadows into the village, or perhaps bedding straw to the fort, but it had been abandoned through the frost months to lie in this byre where the spiders had made thick webs on its spokes and handles. “It could work.” Sharpe tested the small bed of the cart and it seemed solid enough. “Except we don't speak French.”

“Sweet William does, sir,” Harper said, then, seeing Sharpe's face, corrected himself. “Captain Frederickson croaks Frog, sir.”

A group of armed men, approaching a fort, invited hostility, but two men, pushing a wounded comrade on a handcart, posed no threat.

“Jesus.” Frederickson's voice was awed when, arriving at the cattle byre, he heard Sharpe's plan. “We're supposed to walk up and ask for a bloody sawbones?”

“You suggested knocking on the front door,” Sharpe said. “So why not?”

The Riflemen still drifted down the gentle slope. They came in scattered groups, spread out in the chain formation they would use in battle, and no alarm had been raised at the sight. Sharpe doubted whether any Frenchman had even seen the dark shapes flit down the slope. Once on the lower ground, over the tiny stream and hidden by the ditches that were edged by straggling blackthorn hedges, the Riflemen were invisible. The fort still thundered its huge noise.

“What we need,” Sharpe said, “is blood.” He was reckoning that the fort would not refuse entry to a mortally wounded man, but mortal wounds were usually foul with blood and, in search of it, both officers looked instinctively to Patrick Harper.

Who stared back with a slow and horrified understanding. “No! Holy Mother, no!”

“It has to come out, Patrick.” Sharpe spoke in a voice of sweet reason.

“You're not a surgeon, sir. Besides!” Harper's swollen face suddenly looked cheerful. “There's no pincers, remember?”

Sweet William unbuckled his pouch. “The barber-surgeons of London, my dear Sergeant, will pay six shillings and six pence for a ten-ounce bag of sound teeth taken from corpses. You'd be surprised how many fashionable London ladies wear false teeth taken from dead Frogs.” Frederickson flourished a vile-looking pair of pincers. “They're also useful for a spot of looting.”

“God save Ireland.” Harper stared at the pincers.

Captain Frederickson smiled. “You'll be doing it for England, Sergeant Harper, for your beloved King.”

“Christ, no, sir!”

“Strip to the waist,” Sharpe ordered

“Strip?” Harper had backed into the corner of the filthy byre.

“We need to have your chest soaked in blood,” Sharpe said as though this was the most normal procedure in the world. “As soon as the tooth's pulled, Patrick, let the blood drip on to your skin. It won't take long.”