Sharpe's Siege

CHAPTER 16

Two Marines from Sharpe’s squad, judging the intervals between the fall of howitzer shells, darted around the courtyard to retrieve those shells that had not exploded. There were six. The fuses of two had failed to ignite in the howitzer barrels, two had half burned-fuses, while two had simply failed to explode. The four with usable fuses were carried to the bastion above the gatehouse where Lieutenant Fytch licked nervous lips and fingered the hilt of his pistol.

Bread and cold meat had been distributed, but most men found it hard to chew or swallow the food. As the French column came closer and the threat of its drums louder, the bread was abandoned beside the upturned shakoes that served as cartridge holders.

A shell, landing in the flooded ditch, fountained water on to an embrasure. A man laughed nervously. A sparrow, made bold by winter hunger, pecked at one of the discarded lumps of bread then flew off.

Marine Moore, for the twentieth time, lifted the pan lid to check that his musket was primed. For the twentieth time it was.

The French drums sounded clearly inside the fort, punctuated only by the fire of the big guns. Between the rattled passages of drumbeats there was a pause filled by hundreds of voices. „Vive I’Empereur!“

“Funny thing to hear for the first time,” Fytch said.

“I’ve heard it more times than I can remember,” Sharpe said truthfully, “and we beat the buggers every time.” He looked at the column, a great mass of men that advanced implacably over the sandy esplanade. It had been French columns like this, so huge and seemingly so irresistible, that had terrified half the nations of Europe into surrender, but it was also a formation that was designed to contain half-trained troops who could, therefore, be scared and bloodied into defeat. French skirmishers were deploying on the glacis and one of them put a bullet within six inches of Sharpe’s face. A rifle cracked and Sharpe saw the Frenchman slide back behind his mist of musket smoke.

Sharpe had drawn all his Riflemen to the southern or eastern walls. He waited till the enemy was two hundred paces away, then filled his lungs. “Rifles! Fire!”

More than a hundred rifles spat fire.

Perhaps a dozen men in the leading rank of the French column keeled over. Immediately, with a shiver, the column stepped over the bodies. A slow ripple seemed to move down the column as the succeeding ranks negotiated the dead and wounded.

Riflemen concentrated on reloading; working with fast, practised hands, ramming ball and wad and powder down clean barrels, aiming again, firing again, reloading again.

At a hundred paces Sharpe blew two blasts on his whistle. Those Riflemen whose places were on the other ramparts ran back to their stations.

The field guns stopped firing.

It seemed oddly quiet. The drumming and shouting still continued, but the ear-hammering percussion of the twelve-pounders was over. The howitzers, firing still, made a more muffled, coughing sound. A wounded man, under the razor, screamed from the surgery tunnel and a Marine, for no apparent reason, vomited.

“At this range,” Sharpe walked down the line of Marines and kept his voice as matter-of-fact as a drill-sergeant, “aim two feet above the target.” He glanced at the enemy. “Take aim!”

The red-coated men pushed their muskets over th,e embrasures.

“Fire! Reload!”

A Frenchman crawled across the sand of the glacis, trailing blood.

A Marine, hit by a skirmisher’s musket ball, spun backwards, teetered on the edge of the firestep, then fell into the burning branches of the pine abatis.

“Fire!”

A howitzer shell cracked on the firestep beside Sharpe and span into the courtyard where its explosion made a ball of filthy smoke shot through with red flames.

“Fire!” Lieutenant Fytch shouted. He pointed his pistol at a French officer not fifty yards away and pulled the trigger. The gun rammed a shock up his arm and blotted his view with smoke.

A Marine’s musket hangfired and he threw the gun into the courtyard and picked up the weapon of a dead man. The ammunition left in the pouch of the corpse who had fallen into the burning abatis began to explode.

The Riflemen, knowing that survival depended on the speed of their work, no longer rammed shots home, but tap-loaded their guns by rapping the butts on the rampart then firing the weapon into the gap between the glacis’ shoulders. Musket balls and rifle bullets spat into the enemy, but still the column came forward. Sharpe, who had seen it so often before, was again amazed at how much punishment a French column would endure. Three of the Marines, issued with civilian blunderbusses taken from the surrounding villages, poured their fire into the column’s head.

The shape of the attack was clear now.

At the front of the column the French general had put raw recruits, musket-fodder; boys whose deaths would not damage the Empire and he had invited the British to slaughter them. Now, pushed by officers and sergeants, the survivors of those conscripts spread along the counter-guard or sheltered in the dry ditch and banged their muskets at the smoke-wreathed wall above them.

Behind were the veterans. Twenty or more men carried ereat fascines of roped branches, great mattresses of timber that sheltered them from bullet strike and which would be thrown into the ditch where the drawbridge should have been. Behind them, moustached faces grim, came the Grenadiers, the assault troops.

Frederickson had lit a candle sheltered in a lantern. He used a spill to take the flame from the candle to the first unexploded mortar shell. He watched the fuse hiss, waited till the fire had burned into the hole bored in the casing, then, with a grunt, heaved it over the edge.

“Fire!” Lieutenant Fytch, his pistol reloaded, wasted the bullet into a fascine.

The shell bounced on the road, disappeared beneath the leading rank, then exploded.

A hole seemed to be punched in the men carrying the great bundles, but as soon as the smoke cleared, the hole filled, and a French sergeant kicked dead men and discarded bundles into the ditch.

“Patrick! The gate!” Sharpe had waited till the last moment, believing that the volume of fire from the walls would hold the column’s head back, and now he wondered if he had waited too long. He had meant to attack with his own squad, but he preferred now to control this fight from the ramparts and he knew that any attack headed by Harper would be driven home with a professional savagery.

“Fire!” Frederickson shouted and a score of bullets thudded downward. Some spurted dust from the road, one span a Frenchman clear round, but the rest seemed to be soaked up in the surging, pushing mass that strained to reach the shelter of the archway. That arch was blocked by pine trees, but the barricade had been knocked about by roundshot, and the leading attackers, throwing their fascines down and jumping on to their uncertain footing, could see footholds among the branches.

One man toppled from the makeshift bridge and fell on to the hidden spikes. His screams were cut off as water flowed into his mouth.

Another mortar shell was thrown to explode on the road-way. The air was hissing with bullets, endless with the noise of muskets firing and the rattle of ramrods.

“Now!” Sharpe shouted at Sergeant Rossner.

The sergeant, hiding beneath the ramparts at the southeastern corner of the fort, had a wooden baker’s peel which he dug into a barrel of lime. He scooped shovel-load after shovel-load of the white powder over the edge.

“Fire!” Frederickson shouted.

Lieutenant Fytch, aiming his pistol, was shot in the chest and thumped back, astonishment on his face and blood on his crossbelt. “I’m…” He could not say what he wanted to say, instead he began to gasp for breath; each exhalation a terrible, pitiful moan.

“Leave him!” Sharpe bellowed at a Marine. This was no time to rescue wounded men. This was a time to fight, or else they would all be wounded. “The whole barrel, sergeant!”

Rossner stooped, lifted the barrel, and tipped it over the rampart. Two bullets struck it, but the powder spumed and fell, was caught by the wind, and Sharpe saw it, like musket smoke, drifting on to the assault troops.

Some of whom, safely over the moat, were dragging with their hands at the branches in the archway.

“Fire!” Harper bellowed the order to his squad and pulled the trigger of his seven-barrelled gun.

Bullets tore through pine and threw men backwards.

“Spike the bastards!” Harper dropped the gun and unslung his rifle. He rammed its bayonet forward, between two branches, and twisted the blade in a Frenchman’s arm.

Attackers were coughing, screaming, and clutching at their eyes as the lime drifted among the Grenadiers.

“Fire!” Sharpe yelled and a score of muskets hammered down into the crowd below.

The conscripts on the counterguard fired at the fort, but most fired high. Some balls struck. A Marine corporal, hit in the shoulder, went on loading his musket despite the pain.

“You’ve got them beat!” Frederickson hurled a third shell that exploded among half-blinded men. “Now kill the bastards, kill them!” Men loaded as fast as cut, grazed hands would work. Bullet after bullet spat down into the French mass that was still pushed forward by the rear ranks.

Sharpe fired his own rifle down into the chaos. “Cheer, you buggers! Let them know they’ve lost! Cheer!”

Lieutenant Fytch, blood filling his mouth, tried to cheer and died instead.

“Fire!” Frederickson shouted over the cheer.

The area about the gate was flames and smoke and bullets heavy with death. Men screaming, men blinded, men bleeding, men crawling.

“Fire!”

Men stumbled, the pain in their eyes like fire, to fall from the makeshift causeway on to the spikes. Blood drifted on the muddy waters.

“Fire!”

Harper’s men, the lodgement beneath the archway cleared, knelt with reloaded weapons and poured bullets at point-blank range into defeated men. “Fire, you bastards, fire!” Harper was keening with the joy of battle, lost in it, revelling in it, spitting hatred at men he had never met, men he would drink with on a summer’s day if life had been different, but men who now folded over his bullets and shed bright blood onto a blood-soaked road. “Fire!”

The last shell was thrown far to explode where the roadway narrowed between the glacis’ shoulders and the men at the column’s rear, at last sensing that the front ranks had recoiled in screaming agony, faltered.

“Fire!” Rifles spat at conscripts on the counterguard. Farm-boys, who five weeks before had never seen an army musket, now choked their blood on to sand.

“Cheer! Cheer!” Men whose mouths were dry with gritty powder raised a cheer.

“Keep firing! Drive them back!”

Men’s faces were black with powder. Their nails bled where they had dragged at cartridges, levered stiff frizzens, and torn on flints. Their teeth, showing skull-white in the powder-dark faces, grinned as if in rictus. Breath came short. The whole world now was a few smoky yards, stinking of fire, in which a man rammed and loaded, fired and killed, rammed and loaded and other men screamed and some men crawled bleeding along the ramparts and another man slipped in spilt brains and swore because his musket fell into the courtyard.

The French inched back. The bullets cracked at them, thudded into flesh and still the bullets came. No troops fired muskets faster and no troops had been given such a target.

“Fire!” Sharpe, his rifle re-loaded, pulled the trigger. The smoke of his men’s weapons obscured individuals, but he knew where the enemy was and his bullet twitched the smoke as it flashed through.

Harper, no more enemy visible, shouted for his men to hold their fire. He hauled a pine tree aside, crouched, then beckoned to Taylor. “Ammunition.”

They went to the edge of the ditch, found the men they had killed, and cut their cartridge bags away. They tossed the bags through the archway then went back and re-blocked the arch. There had been no time to run the one remaining cannon into a firing position and Harper, regretting the lost chance, went to check that the quickfuse still led through the cleared venthole to the charge. It was safe and, reassured, he began the laborious process of re-charging the seven-barrelled gun.

A French officer, galloping his horse across the esplanade to see why the attack had faltered, was seen by two riflemen frorn the south-western bastion. They both fired. Man and horse shuddered, blood spat to sand, then the wounded horse, screaming and tossing, dragged its dead master in a great circle towards the column’s rear.

“Fire!” Frederickson shouted and more heavy bullets tore into the smoke and drove the column further back. The drums hesitated, a single rattle sounded defiance, then was silent.

“Hold your fire! Hold it!” Sharpe could see the enemy going, running, and though he wished he could have fired till the last enemy was out of sight, he had ammunition to conserve. “Hold your fire! Hold your fire!” He felt the wild elation of a battle won, of an enemy broken. The space before the fort’s gate was foul with dead and wounded men, and smeared with a great, white smudge of lime that was mixed with blood. “Cease firing!”

At which point Calvet’s real attack burst on to the north-western corner of the Teste de Buch.

Black clouds were coming from the north. Captain Palmer had watched them, had seen the grey blur of rain beneath them and judged that by this night the Teste de Buch would once again be crouching beneath dirty weather. Biscay, he thought, was living up to its reputation for sudden storms and uneasy calms.

Then the attack had struck at the fort’s gate.

Men on the northern rampart turned to watch. It seemed to them that a cauldron boiled around the gate, a cauldron that billowed smoke into the sky.

The musketry had fused into a single, sustained crackle. Screams punctuated it. The smell of rotten eggs, powder smoke stench, came over the courtyard. Palmer saw Fytch struck, saw him fall, imagined him dying. Blood, flowing from the lieutenant’s mouth, trickled to the firestep’s edge then, with obscene slowness, ran down the inner wall.

Palmer watched Harper’s group sprint across the courtyard, trampling the useless, burned abatis, and fire like men possessed into the darkness of the arch.

The fort stank of blood and smoke, the soldier’s smell.

Palmer, grateful that the coughing shells no longer fell into the fort, turned back towards the north. Gulls fought above the channel’s beach a quarter mile away. The rain seemed no closer. Beneath the diving, screaming gulls two men in a rowing boat planted fish traps of woven willow.

The noise and carnage at the Teste de Buch might have been a whole world away for all they seemed to care.

The sea was empty. Not one grey sail offered hope.

Palmer was thinking of a wife left in Gravesend, of two children who went hungry three days out of seven, of his hopes for that family when this war ended. An orchard, he thought, far from the sea and never fouled with smoke, would be a fitting place. Somewhere with a small cottage, not too big, but with a room where the children could sleep, another for himself and Betty, and a room where his few books could justify the name of study. A horse, for no gentleman walked where he could ride, and perhaps his father-in-law, who had mightily disapproved of Betty marrying a Marine, might lend some money to make the Marine into a market-gardener.

“Sir?” A Rifleman close to Palmer stared towards the channel.

“What is it?”

“Thought I saw something.”

Palmer stared, saw nothing, and put it down to gulls fighting by the fish-traps.

He was sure, thinking about it, that his eldest child’s feeble health was due to living in a town. Gravesend was filthy with coal-smoke and in winter the sea-fog could lie heavily on a small chest. Two of Palmer’s children had died as infants and were buried in the pauper’s graveyard, for a Marine officer had no money to spare on lavish funerals for the barely baptized. An orchard would be a place to grow up, Palmer thought, an orchard heavy with apples and with espaliered pear-trees growing against a sun-warmed crinkle-crankle wall.

A cheer from the gate made him turn. The men on the ramparts still fired, but the cheer told Palmer that this round was won. God alone knew how, except that the Marines and Riflemen had loaded and fired in practised frenzy and the cheer swelled again and suddenly there was an unnatural silence because all the muskets had gone quiet and there was just the wind sighing over cold stone, the crying of the injured, and a sudden, startled shout from Palmer’s right. He ran.

Three hundred Frenchmen had left the village before dawn and groped their way in the darkness. They had marched in a great circle, east and north and west, to come, an hour after first light, to the channel’s edge north of the fortress.

One hundred of the men were new conscripts, brought along to fire their muskets when ordered.

The other two hundred were among the best in Calvet’s force. They were led by a Captain Briquet whose warlike name, meaning sabre, gave the force an odd confidence. They were guided to their assault by Henri Lassan who saw, in this attack, his chance of redemption.

Briquet, though a junior officer compared to many in Calvet’s force, had a reputation. He was brave, thorough, and a firebrand.

His task was to approach the fort once the larger battle began. Under the cover of its noise, and trusting to the distraction offered by its existence, he planned to come close beneath the fort’s vulnerable north-western corner. Lassan had promised the approach could be made unseen because the sand-dunes offered hiding, and Lassan had been proved right.

Once in place, hidden close to the fortress, a Forlorn Hope would charge across the masonry bridge of the dam, put ladders to the closest embrasures, and climb. The Hope, who expected death, would be led by Briquet who expected to be a major when the sun went down.

The conscripts, under experienced sergeants, would flay the walls left and right of the assault with musket fire.

The Forlorn Hope, gaining the ramparts, would hold a small section while the other veterans, with more ladders, flooded on to the sand strip between the fort and the channel to place more ladders. Briquet, knowing that the ramparts facing the channel would have the fewest defenders, aimed to take that wall. The stone ramp, that Lassan had drawn on his careful plan, would then lead into the heart of the Teste de Buch.

Two hundred men, Briquet said, could capture this fort. It would take, if the first lodgement was successful, no more than twenty minutes.

Yet for that lodgement to work the British sentries must be drawn to look the other way, and in that cause men must die at the main gate. General Calvet had ordered it thus, but Captain Briquet’s fear, for he was a man who thirsted for glory, was that the larger attack would pierce the fortress before his Forlorn Hope could rush the stone dam. The colonel leading the main attack, Briquet knew, was desperate to succeed and there was not a man marching with the drummers who did not believe that the British would be swept ignominiously aside once the fascines were in place and the moustaches stormed over the ditch.

Briquet’s force, with stealth and care, crept southwards between the dunes and the water. Two men, ostensibly planting fish-traps from a tiny boat, gave warning when faces appeared at the fort’s north-western corner, but their warnings were few.

Briquet listened to the turmoil at the gate. Not once did he raise his head to look at the fort, not once did he risk discovery. That could wait for the last moment, the dash over the dam.

“This is as close as we can get unseen,” Lassan said.

The firing at the main gate was dying and Briquet knew this was the moment or there would be no moment at all. „Veneer“

His feet scrambled for footing in the sand, a sergeant shoved him upwards, and suddenly the fort loomed above him and Briquet had an impression that no men guarded the ramparts, but he dared not search for the enemy because there was a task to do. He saw the stone dam, exactly as Lassan had described it, and he leaped the small wooden fence that straggled to the sea, then his bootnails were loud on the stone that was lightly covered with sand.

A musket banged somewhere, then another, but Briquet took no notice. He jumped the rusted cogs of the sluice-gear and steadied himself with a hand on the fortress wall. “One!” He pointed right, “Two!” Left.

The ladders, carried with such care down the channel’s edge, were dragged forward. There were four men to each ladder, two planted the rails in the sand and the others swung the ladders up and over so that the timbers crashed on to the stonework. Briquet shouldered a sergeant aside with a snarl and climbed the first ladder as if the dogs of hell were at his heels.

A man appeared above him, startled, but a musket shot from below dissolved the man’s face in blood and Briquet, spattered by the gore, spat as his head cleared the embrasure’s lip.

He reached up, grasped the top of a merlon, and heaved himself over. He tripped on an empty gun slide, recovered, and already the sergeant was beside him.

Briquet drew his sword, the steel whispering at the scabbard’s throat. “Follow me!”

Men poured up the ladders. More men, cheering, followed with new ladders and Briquet, leading his charge along the western walls, knew that the fort was his.

He had achieved surprise, he had gained the wall, and he would be a major by sundown.

Captain Palmer saved the north wall. The pine-lashed walkway was still in place, circumventing the citadel, and he seized the timbers, grunted, then shoved the heavy pine-trunks into the courtyard beneath. Now the only access was through the citadel that was blocked by a barrel of lime.

“Fire!” Palmer, crammed into the tiny sentry-chamber with five Marines, fired over the barrel at the blue uniforms who had appeared with such suddenness on the gun-platform.

“William! Stay!” Sharpe needed a man above the gate. If the French, sensing that the defenders were being stripped away by the new threat, attacked again, then it would need a man like Frederickson to hold them.

“Marines! Marines!” He shouted the word like a battle-cry.

Sharpe was running towards the western wall. “Marines!” The Marines, trained for the bloody business of boarding enemy ships, were the troops he needed now. The Rifles could defend the gate, but the Marines could show their worth in the close-quarter work. “Marines!”

Sharpe threw down his rifle and tugged the Heavy Cavalry sword from its ungainly scabbard. How in Christ’s name had the French sneaked into the fort? A musket ball snicked the wall beside him, fired by a Frenchman on the west wall. Sharpe could see red uniforms bunched at the far citadel, showing that the north wall held. Sharpe’s job, and the task of the Marines who ran behind him, was to throw the enemy off the western bastions.

The walkway across the corner of the ramparts was gone, burned by the fire, so Sharpe must lead his men through the zig-zag of the citadel. The enemy would know it, their muskets would be waiting for men coming from that narrow doorway, but it was no use dwelling on fear. Sharpe saw a French officer, sword drawn, leading his men in a rush down the western rampart and Sharpe knew it would be a race to see who reached the citadel first and he ran harder, ammunition pouch bouncing, then slammed through the door to check his speed by thumping on the inner wall.

Frederickson, left with the Riflemen, sent a volley at the French who had climbed the ladders. At this range, across the angle of the fort, the rifle fire was deadly.

Marines crushed into the citadel and Sharpe, trusting they would follow him, jumped through the doorway. “Come on!”

He emerged into winter sunlight to see a space of five empty, stone-flagged yards beyond which, screaming and threatening, the front rank of the French charged at him.

The enemy had the impetus here. They were running, and Sharpe had just emerged from the obstacle of the citadel. This was the second of pure, naked fear prompted by the sight of steel, then Sharpe snarled his challenge and hissed his blade in a glittering arc to check the French rush.

“Bayonets!” Sharpe shouted at the two men who had followed him on to the ramparts. Other Marines pushed behind, but it was up to Sharpe to clear a space for them. “Now kill them!” He jumped forward to anticipate the French attack. The French officer, a short man with a fierce face, lunged with his sword. The man was flanked by moustached giants with bayonets.

The Heavy Cavalry sword, a butcher’s blade, swept one musket aside. The French officer’s sword skewered past Sharpe’s swerve and a Marine, instinctively seizing the blade, screamed as Briquet withdrew and cut the Marine’s fingers to the joints.

Sharpe hit the soldier nearest him with the guard of the sword, then sawed the blade downwards on to the officer. Briquet, sensing the flash of steel, ducked, but a Marine’s bayonet thumped on his ribs and the Heavy Cavalry sword took him in the side of the neck to end his hopes of glory.

A boot kicked at Sharpe’s groin and struck his upper thigh. His sword was tangled in the officer’s fall, but he ripped it clear and drove it forward with both hands so that the point was in his assailant’s throat.

A bayonet tried to reach Sharpe from the second French rank.

There were men grunting and kicking and slashing around him. He could smell their sweat, their breath, and he needed space. A musket fired, the noise huge, but it was impossible to tell which side had fired the shot.

The French, by sheer weight of numbers, were pressing the tiny handful of British backwards. Sharpe had a half yard of space behind him, stepped back, and screamed the war cry as he swung the great sword in a fearsome downwards swing. A man ducked, Sharpe twisted his wrist to lunge the sword, stamped forward, and a Frenchman moaned as the big blade gouged at his belly.

“Marines! Marines!” One Marine was down, coughing and bleeding, but two others forced their way over his body and thrust into the fight with bayonets. Two more came behind them. This was gutter fighting, something learned in a hard childhood and never taught by drill sergeants. Here men clawed and kicked and smelt the breath of the men they killed.

A Marine tripped over Captain Briquet’s body and a French bayonet lunged into his back. Immediately another Marine, screaming like a banshee, drove his blade into the Frenchman’s face. The bodies were like a barricade now, but the Marines kicked them down to the smouldering embers of the burned offices, and carried their wet blades forward.

Sharpe was using the sword to press men back. He watched the enemy’s eyes and, though he did not know it, he smiled. He lunged, parried, stamped forward, lunged, and every action was now a reflex. Nineteen years of battle had come to this moment.

A musket exploded close to Sharpe and the bullet thumped at his chest like a prize-fighter’s blow. A French lieutenant, blood on his face and jacket, twisted into the enemy’s front rank and hissed his slim flexible blade towards Sharpe’s face. Sharpe knocked the blade aside and rammed his own heavier sword at the officer’s eyes. “On! On!”

They were holding. A dozen Marines were on the rampart now and the French, the impetus of their first charge checked, were wary of the bayonets. Some of the French, seeing their way blocked, turned to flood into the semicircular bastion where the thirty-six pounders had stood. Others ran down the stone ramp into the courtyard.

Frederickson had brought a dozen Riflemen halfway down the southern rampart and he drilled them as if they were on the training ground at Shorncliffe. Aim, load, fire, aim, load, fire, and every volley flailed into the French who still swarmed up the ladders on to the battlements.

The French on the rampart, hearing a cheer as their comrades spilt down the ramp, gave ground before Sharpe. If the courtyard was taken then there would be no need to fight this savage Rifleman whose face was black with powder. His eyes glittered against darkened skin and his teeth were bared.

Sharpe sensed that the fight on the rampart was dying as men, on both sides, let their fear of cold steel bring them caution. He dared not let it die. He shouted his Marines to charge again, trampled over the French lieutenant’s body, and stabbed a French sergeant, wrenched the blade free of the clinging flesh, and his Marines drove into the newly made gap with blades jabbing at the enemy in quick, professional lunges.

Shots sounded in the courtyard. There was a scream, then the bellow of a vast gun that told Sharpe Harper was in action.

Another volley came from Frederickson.

The rampart’s stones were slick with blood. A Marine slipped and a tall Frenchman, carrying an engineer’s axe, killed the fallen man with a single blow. The axeman gave the enemy new spirit and drove deep into Sharpe’s men.

Sharpe knew the fort was lost if the axeman lived. He lunged at the man and his sword rammed itself between the man’s ribs, grated, then a French hand gripped Sharpe’s blade, blood showed at his fingers, but the man held on, tugged, and another man clawed at Sharpe’s face. A bayonet stabbed his thigh, Sharpe fell backwards, sword lost in the melee, and a Frenchman’s breath was in his face and fingers were at his throat. Sharpe was on his back now, driven there by two Frenchmen. He brought up his knee and clawed his fingers at the man who tried to choke him. The man screamed as Sharpe’s fingers closed in his left eye.

There was no skill left, no order, just a bitter mass of men who ripped at each other with blades, kicked and clawed and stabbed again. A Marine sergeant, shouting an incomprehensible challenge, bayoneted one of Sharpe’s assailants and kicked the other in the face. The axeman, choking on blood in his lungs, fell sideways and two Marines grunted as they forced bayonets into his trunk. Somewhere a man sobbed, and another screamed.

Sharpe twisted up and, his sword lost, picked up the wide-bladed axe. The Marine sergeant did not hear Sharpe’s thanks, but just drove on with his bloodied bayonet.

A Frenchman tripped on a gunslide, an opening appeared and Sharpe hacked down with the axe blade, then screamed the challenge to drive the enemy a full two paces back.

An explosion hammered in the courtyard, a sound that echoed like a drumbeat of hell in the echoing walls of the Teste de Buch. Smoke billowed.

Harper had turned the cannon, then fired it with its charge of stone-shards, nails, and lead scraps into the French who came down the stone ramp. The cannon’s recoil had thrown it back five yards. “Now kill them!” Harper charged.

Minver’s Riflemen, on the north wall, fired down at the French who were left in the courtyard. Some of the Riflemen, wanting loot from the dead, jumped down to risk broken ankles. The long sword bayonets, brass-handled, hunted forward.

Sharpe swung the axe underhand, screaming the chal—lenge and the blade buried itself in a body, wrenched free in a gush of blood and he went forward again.

He saw a movement to his left, ducked, and a man jumping from a ladder tripped on Sharpe’s back and sprawled into the Marines. One hit him a hammer blow of a musket butt, killing him as clean as a rabbit chopped on the neck.

Sharpe turned, protected by the embrasure, and saw the French firing from the dunes. Another man neared the ladder’s head and Sharpe swung the axe into his face, heard the scream, then took an upright of the ladder, pushed it away and sideways, and heard the shouts as the ladder tumbled.

“Behind you!” The voice warned him, Sharpe ducked, and a bayonet slid over his back. He drove the axe handle into the Frenchman’s belly then stepped back, reversed the weapon, and brought the head down in a vicious swing to bury it into the man’s ribs. The axe stuck there.

A French musket, tipped with a bayonet, lay at his feet. It felt unnatural, but it served. He jabbed it forward as he had learned so many years ago. Forward, twist, back, right foot forward, lunge, twist, back.

If he shouted orders he did not know it. If he screamed with rage, he did not know it. He just fought to clear a wall of enemy.

There was the strange sensation that he had noticed before in battle, the odd slowing of the world as though the men around him were puppets under palsied fingers. He alone seemed to be moving fast.

A Frenchman, eyes wide with terror, lunged, and it seemed a simple matter to knock the man’s musket aside and drive the bayonet into the man’s belly, to twist, to draw it free then, stamp the foot forward again. Another Frenchman, to the left, fumbled with his musket’s lock and Sharpe, not knowing if his captured musket was loaded, pulled the trigger and felt not the slightest surprise as it fired to rip a bloody hole in the man’s throat.

That made a gap. A French sergeant, wise in war, saw Sharpe and lunged, but Sharpe was faster and his bayonet caught the man’s arm, ripped down to bone, and a Marine, at Sharpe’s shoulder, drove his blade into the sergeant’s groin.

The fort could be lost for all Sharpe knew. He only understood that these bloodslick stones must be fought for and that the Marines were fighting like men possessed, overbearing the enemy with a ferocity and confidence that put terror into the French who had to fight them. And terror was the first and chief weapon of war. It was terror that brought this murderous rage beneath the dragon-slayer’s banner that was wind-lifted above the fight.

A scream, prolonged, rising to a shout that would have chilled the horsemen of the devil, sounded beyond the enemy.

Sharpe knew that sound. “Patrick!”

Harper, the courtyard cleansed of the enemy, climbed the ramp that twitched with the wounded thrown down by the cannon. He led a charge of bayonets to the ramparts and the French, assailed on three sides, began to give.

Frenchmen, come to the ladders’ tops with fear, saw that their fear was justified. They forced their way back down, shouting to the men who waited behind that the enemy was imminent. One ladder, its rungs green, broke to tumble six men on to the sand.

Riflemen, sent by Frederickson on to the western rampart, cleared the water bastion and, leaning in its cannon embrasures, enfiladed the ladders. Captain Palmer led more Marines from the north.

“Charge!” Sharpe yelled it unnecessarily, for the victory was clear. The Marines had fought half the length of a rampart and now they carried their blades the rest of the way and the French, who had seen the redcoats snatch victory from defeat, took to the ladders or jumped into the ditch.

Harper had a lunge of his bayonet-tipped rifle deflected into an enemy’s thigh so kept the rifle swinging so that the brass-bound butt smashed the man’s jaw. He kicked him aside, ripped the blade into another man, and saw the rampart was empty of opponents. Marines were kneeling in embrasures to fire at the French conscripts. Captain Palmer, sword red with blood, was standing by the flagstaff that had somehow stood with its trophy of table-linen and uniform sleeves still flying.

“God save Ireland.” Harper, his huge chest heaving for breath, sat on a gunslide. His face, spattered with blood, looked up at Sharpe. “Jesus God.”

“Close.” Sharpe, breathing like a blown horse, glanced back to the gate, but no trouble threatened there. He looked at the strange musket in his hand and tossed it down. “God.” The French were fleeing north through the dunes. “Hold your fire! Hold your fire!”

A Rifleman threaded the dead bodies, stepping in blood, to bring Sharpe his sword.

“Thank you.” Sharpe took it. He wanted to smile, but his face seemed frozen in the grimace of fighting.

The fort had held. Blood trickled thick in the rampart’s gutters.

Briquet’s men, defeated, ran.

The larger attack, beaten to bloody ruin at the gate, was a shambles in retreat. If that attack had lasted five minutes longer, just five minutes, then the fort would have fallen. Sharpe knew that. He shuddered to think of it, then stared at the bloody, edge-nicked blade of his sword. “Jesus.”

Then the howitzer shells began to fall again.