Sharpe's Siege

CHAPTER 7

They stopped ignominiously on the sand-gritted planks of the drawbridge.

The gates did not open, they could go no further, and Sharpe and Frederickson, chests heaving and breath misting into great plumes from the effort of pushing the obstinate cart with Harper’s weight, could only stare up at a puzzled face which appeared on the ramparts.

Frederickson shouted to the sentry in French, an answer was made, and Harper, fearing a sudden musket blast from above, groaned horribly on the cart. The blood on his huge chest was drying to a cracked crust.

“He wants to know,” Frederickson spoke to Sharpe with astonishment in his voice, “whether we’re the Americans.”

“Yes!” Sharpe shouted. “Yes, yes!”

„Attendee!“ The guard’s head disappeared.

Sharpe turned to look through the notch made where the approach road cut through the glacis. He stared at the place where the villagers stood by the trees and where he had dimly discerned the shape of a gun’s limber among the pines. “The Americans are manning those guns?” He too sounded astonished.

Frederickson shrugged. “Must be.”

Sharpe turned back, his boots making a hollow sound on the thick planks of the drawbridge. To right and left the flooded inner ditch stretched. The ditch water, fed by a rivulet from the millstream, seemed shallow enough, but it would still be a cloying obstacle to men trying to assault the gaunt, rough-faced wall of the fort’s enceinte.

The fortress guns bellowed to Sharpe’s left, jetting smoke and flame towards the frigate that was now beyond Cap Ferrat. The battle had become a long-range duel as Grant teased the fort and, doubtless, cursed the land force for their late arrival.

“What’s the crapaud bastard doing?” Harper growled softly.

“Gone to fetch the officer of the guard?” Sharpe guessed. Harper shivered. The light was dying in the west, a cold evening promised frost in the night, and the huge Irishman was stripped to the waist. “Not long now,” Sharpe said, the words spoken more in nervousness than for comfort.

Suddenly a bolt clanged, scraped, then a bar thudded to the ground from its brackets.

“Christ!” Frederickson’s voice betrayed relief that their ruse, so quickly devised and then made possible by Harper’s pain, was working.

“Wait for my word.” Sharpe said it softly as he saw Harper’s muscles, beneath their crazed and shivering quilt of dried blood, suddenly tense.

The hinges of the gate squealed like a tormented soul. Lieutenant Minver, two hundred yards away, would see the huge door leafing open and should already be moving. “Now,” Sharpe said.

The French guard was eager to help the wounded man. The guard himself was injured, his leg setting in plaster, and he gestured at the cast as if to explain the slowness with which he tugged the huge, iron-studded gate open.

Harper, rolling from the cart, did not see the thick plaster on the man’s leg, nor did he see the welcoming, reassuring smile; he only saw a man in an enemy jacket, a man who barred a door that must be opened, and Harper came up from the roadway with a sword-bayonet in his right hand and the Frenchman gave a horrid, pathetic sigh as the twenty-three inch blade, held like a long dagger, ripped into his belly. Sharpe saw the blood spilling like water on the cobbles of the archway as he pushed his full weight on to the half-opened gate.

Harper twisted the bayonet free and left the guard bleeding and twitching on the drawbridge. He kicked the man’s musket into the ditch, then fetched his rifle and seven-barrelled gun from the cart. Frederickson, sword in hand, dragged the empty handcart into the tunnel that pierced the ramparts. No one had seen them, no one raised the alarm; they had taken the garrison utterly by surprise.

Sharpe bolted both doors open. His rifle was slung, his sword naked, and at any second he expected a shout of alarm or a musket shot, but the three Riflemen were undetected. They smiled at each other, made nervous by success, then their ears were punched by the shattering pulse of air as the fortress guns fired towards the Scylla. Harper hefted his seven-barrelled gun. “I’ll teach those bastards how to fire guns.”

“Sergeant!” Sharpe called, but Harper was already running, gun cocked, towards the courtyard.

A shout sounded from the sand-dunes and, at the same instant, two muskets coughed above Sharpe. He realized there must be other guards on the gate’s roof, men who could see Minver’s assault approaching, and Sharpe looked for a route that would take him to the ramparts. A low, arched doorway lay to his right and he ducked through it.

He found himself in a guardroom. A wooden musket rack, varnished and polished, held eight muskets upright. A table was littered with playing cards before a black-leaded potbellied stove that silted smoke from an ill-fitting chimney pipe. Stairs climbed through an arch on the far side of the room and, exchanging his sword for the rifle, Sharpe took the steps at a rush.

He could hear, above him, the rattle of ramrods in barrels. The stairs turned a right angle, the sky was grey overhead, then a moustached face, just ten feet away, turned towards the sound of feet on the stairs and Sharpe pulled the rifle’s trigger and saw the man twitch backwards. More blood.

A movement to his left as he cleared the stairs made Sharpe twist round. A second man was desperately pulling a ramrod free of his musket’s long barrel, then, seeing that he could not free his weapon of the encumbrance, the Frenchman just raised the gun to his shoulder.

Sharpe fell and rolled to his right.

The musket banged and flamed and the ramrod, which could have impaled Sharpe like a skewer, cartwheeled across the inner courtyard to clang against the stone ramp.

„Non! Non!“ The man was backing away now as Sharpe, unscathed, rose from the stones with his sword in his right hand.

„Non!“ The guard dropped his musket, raised his hands, and Sharpe accepted the man’s surrender by the simple expedient of tipping him over the ramparts into the flooded ditch twenty feet below. Minver’s Riflemen, pouches, scabbards, canteens and horns flapping as they ran, were on the road now; the fastest men already close to the glacis.

Sharpe turned towards the sound of the fortress guns. He could see an empty wall on which vast, cold guns stood mute. At the wall’s end was a small stone citadel, little more than a covered shelter for sentries, and beyond that was the semi-circular bastion that jutted into the waters of the Arcachon channel and from which the heavy guns fired. The French artillerymen, stunned, deafened and half blinded by their own firing, had still not seen the small slaughter at the gate. They swabbed and charged their vast weapons, intent only on the frigate that dared to defy them.

Then a voice screamed defiance at them. Some turned. The others, losing the rhythm of their tasks, twisted to see what had interrupted the work.

Patrick Harper had shouted at them in a voice that would have silenced hell itself, a voice that had called Battalions to order across the vast spaces of windy parade grounds, and the gunners stared with astonishment into the courtyard below where a blood-boltered giant seemed to hold a small cannon in his hands.

“Bastards!” Harper screamed the word, then pulled the seven-barrelled gun’s trigger. The half-inch balls flayed up and out, fanning to strike the left hand gun crew. Two men fell, then Harper dropped the massive gun and unslung his rifle.

“Patrick!” Sharpe had seen a Frenchman on the barrack roof who knelt, carbine in hand, to aim downwards. “Cover!”

Harper rolled right, looked up, and ran.

A French officer, commanding the big gun battery, stared at the blood-streaked giant, then to Sharpe, and the Rifleman saw the look of sheer surprise on the thin, pale face. Frederickson, sword in hand, was crossing the yard, careless of the carbine above him, and shouting to the gunners to surrender.

The French officer suddenly jerked, as though waking to find a nightmare real, and shouted at his men to forsake their cannons and snatch their carbines from racks beside the embrasures. Sharpe had forgotten how French gunners carried long-arms and he bellowed at Frederickson to take cover, then saw the flicker of movement as the Frenchman on the roof changed aim.

Sharpe twisted away, knowing the shot was aimed at himself. He had a glimpse of the foreshortened stab of flame with its aureole of smoke, then the carbine ball slashed across his forehead. One half inch closer and he would have been dead, killed by fragments of skull driven into his brain, but instead he staggered, stunned, and his vision was suddenly sheeted with scarlet as he twisted, fell, and heard the sword clang as it bounced on the rampart’s stones. His head felt as if a red-hot poker had been slashed across his face. He was blind.

A pitiless stab of pain lanced in his head, making him moan. The blindness was making him panic, and his dizziness would not let him stand. He slumped against the wall and tasted thick, salty blood on his tongue. He scrabbled vainly for his fallen sword.

A French shout of command made him turn his face left, but he could see nothing. Carbines fired. A ball fluttered overhead, another slapped the wall beside him, then a Baker rifle’s quick crack, that Sharpe had heard a million times before, sounded to his right and he could hear the scrape of boots on stone as the riflemen came into the courtyard. Another crack, a scream, and another Baker rifle had found a victim, then Frederickson was shouting orders.

A volley splintered the dusk, sparking pricks of flame from rifle muzzles, then half the Green Jackets went forward, their comrades covering them, and the long sword-bayonets were carried up the stone ramp and Sharpe heard them cheer and knew that the fort was taken. He was blind.

Slowly, fearfully, Sharpe raised a hand to his throbbing head and gouged at his right eye. He scraped blood away and saw a shimmer of light. His eyes were thick with blood, sealed by it, and he spat on a filthy hand and scraped at the gore to clear his right eye and dimly saw Frederickson’s men scouring the water-bastion with their bayonets. He felt a pang of relief, clear as spring water, that he could see. He could see the enemy leaping from the embrasures, abandoning fort and guns, and he saw a shot from the Scylla, that had been firing vainly for ninety minutes, take the head from a Rifleman on the western ramparts. The body, streaming blood like a squirting wine-bag, tumbled down on to the courtyard’s cobbles.

“Get the flag down!” Sharpe bellowed it. He was on his hands and knees, blood soaking his shirt and threatening to close his right eye again. “The flag!”

Lieutenant Minver, understanding, cut the halyard with his sword so that the tricolour fluttered down. That would stop the Scylla’s guns.

“Close the gate!” Sharpe shouted again, and the effort lanced such quick agony through his skull that he sobbed. He shook his head, trying to clear the pain, but it pulsed like a needle of fire behind his eyes.

A massive volley sounded to the south and Sharpe, his head hurting with every move, twisted round to see the blossom of smoke from the grove of trees. “Captain Frederickson! Captain Frederickson!”

Frederickson took the stairs to the upper rampart three at a time. “Jesus!” He stooped beside Sharpe and tried to wipe the blood away from his face, but Sharpe, still on his hands and knees, twisted away. “Minver’s Company to the ramparts. Take yours and clear those damned American guns.” He saw Frederickson hesitate. “Go!”

Frederickson went and Sharpe, the pain suddenly dreadful, realized that the Scylla had ceased fire and that the field guns had ended their fusillade. He leaned against the wall, closed his good eye, and let the pain come. He had captured a fort.

Cornelius Killick could have happily taken Nicolas Leblanc and wrung his damned French neck.

It was Leblanc’s factory, at St Denis near Paris, that manufactured the potassium nitrate that was mixed with charcoal and sulphur to make gunpowder.

It was not that Cornelius Killick had ever heard of Nicolas Leblanc, but the American knew powder, and he knew, the instant that his guns fired, that French powder was fit only for July the Fourth fire-crackers. The potassium nitrate, saltpetre, was at fault, but that again Killick could not know, but he did know when a gun coughed instead of banged. He had charged the guns as he would his own guns, and as if he was using American powder, but he should have elevated the guns to compensate for the poor quality of the charges.

He had elevated the barrels slightly, knowing that the first shots, fired through cold metal, would go low, but he could never have guessed how low. The first blast of grapeshot, instead of taking the red-coated Marines in a storm of metallic death, spattered into the sand. Some of the balls bounced upwards, but Killick did not see a single body struck by grape.

Killick swore, for his troubles multiplied. The bastards must have known he was there. He had seen the first red jackets ten minutes before and waited for them to march unsuspecting into the clearing, but instead they had lined the trees at the far side and Killick, tired of the delay, had fired his opening volley at that tree line. And he had wasted it. He swore again.

His men were sponging out, ramming, and levering the guns back into their positions. A British musket fired and Killick heard the ball flicker through the pines above. Then more flames stabbed from the shrubs at the clearing’s far side and the musket balls thudded into the sandy bank or thumped on trees or rained pine needles down on to the gunners.

Killick ran left. If the Marines were to attack him they would come this way, flitting through the trees, and the dusk would make their scarlet coats hard to see. He shouted at the left hand gun to slew round and cover the approach, then stared into the gathering darkness. He could see nothing.

Cornelius Killick was nervous. His men were nervous. This was not warfare as he knew it. Killick’s war was out where the wind gave the advantage to the better man and where the dead went to the cleansing sea. It was not in this damned vale of shadows where the enemy could skulk and hide and creep and murder.

A twig cracked, he twisted, but it was only Marie from the village who stared with huge, worried eyes at him. “Go back,” Killick barked.

“The fort,” Marie said.

“What about it?” Killick was searching the southern shadows, watching for the flicker that might betray an enemy movement.

“The flag’s gone,” Marie said.

“Shot away,” Killick said, then ignored the girl’s news because British muskets sparked and the far tree-line was puffed with clouds of powder smoke. “Go back, Marie! Back!”

Some of the Thuella’s crew fired back, using the French muskets that were sold so widely in America. If only the bastards would show themselves, Killick thought, then his six guns could tear the guts out of them. “Liam! Liam!” he shouted.

“Sir?”

“Do you see anything?” Killick ran through dead pine-needles towards his main battery.

“Only their bloody smoke. Bastards won’t show themselves!”

A soldier, Killick thought, would know what to do at this point. Perhaps he should throw men into the trees, cutlasses and muskets ready, but what good would that do? They would simply become meat for the Marines’ muskets. Perhaps, he thought, another volley would stir the bastards up. “Liam? Aim high and fire!”

“Sir!”

The brass elevating screws were turned and the portfires touched vent tubes and the fire slipped down to the coarse powder that hammered more grapeshot to slice into the undergrowth across the clearing. A bird squawked and flapped heavily away from the shredded trees, but that was the only visible result of the volley.

Smoke drifted over the clearing. Good sense told Cornelius Killick that this was the moment to run like hell. He had lost his greatest weapon, surprise, and he risked losing much more, but he was not a man to admit failure. Instead he imagined victory. Perhaps, he thought, the bastards had gone. No muskets fired across the clearing now, no redcoats moved, nothing showed. Perhaps, astonished and shredded by the volleys of grape, the yellow-bellied bastards had turned and run. Killick licked dry lips, tested the surprising thought, and decided it must be the truth. “We’ve beaten the bastards, lads!”

“Not these bastards, you haven’t.”

Killick turned with the speed of a snake, then froze. Standing behind him was a one-eyed man whose face would have terrified an imp of Satan. Captain William Frederickson, in grim jest, always removed his eye-patch and false teeth before a fight and the lack of those cosmetics, added to the horror that was his eye-socket, gave him the face of a man come from a stinking and rotting grave. The Rifle officer’s voice, Killick noticed in stunned astonishment, was oddly polite while, behind him and moving with fast confidence, green-jacketed men whose guns were tipped with long, brass-handled bayonets slipped between the trees.

Killick put a hand to his pistol’s hilt and the one-eyed man shook his head. “It would distress me to kill you. I have a certain sympathy for your Republic.”

Killick gave his opinion of Frederickson’s sympathy in one short and efficacious word.

“It is the fortune of war,” Frederickson said. “Sergeant Rossner! I want prisoners, not dead ‘uns!”

“Sir!” The Riflemen, taking the Americans from the rear, and coming so unexpectedly with weapons ready, gave the Thuella’s crew no chance to fight. Docherty drew his sword, but Taylor’s bayonet touched the Irishman’s throat and the feral eyes of the Rifleman told the lieutenant just what would happen if he raised the blade. Docherty let it fall. Some of Thuella’s crew, unable to retreat into the clearing that was covered by the Marines’ muskets, dropped their weapons and ran to shelter with the startled villagers.

“Who the hell are you?” Killick asked.

“Captain Frederickson, Royal American Rifles. You’re supposed to offer me your sword.”

Killick succinctly gave his view of that suggestion, and Frederickson smiled. “I can always take it from you. Do you command here?”

“What if I do?”

Killick’s truculence only made Frederickson more patient. “If you want to fight my lads, then I assure you they’ll welcome the chance. They’ve been fighting for six years, and about the only consolation our Army offers to them is the plunder from dead enemies.”

“Shit,” said Killick. There was no fight to be had, for the Riflemen were already herding his gun crews back. One of the green-jacketed bastards, the one who had taken Liam Docherty prisoner, was folding the Stars and Stripes into a bundle. Some of his men, Killick saw, were edging away with the villagers, but they had abandoned their weapons so as not to be taken for combatants. Cornelius Killick felt the impotence of a sailor doomed to fight out of water. He could have wept in anger and impotence and for the shame of seeing his flag taken. Instead, clinging to a shred of dignity, he plucked his sword from his scabbard and offered it, hilt first, to Frederickson. “If you’d fought me at sea…” Killick began.

“… I would be your prisoner,” Frederickson politely finished the sentence. “And if you give me your word that you will not attempt to escape, then you may keep your sword.”

Killick dutifully slid the blade back into its scabbard. “You have my word.”

Frederickson took a silver whistle from the loop on his crossbelt and blew six blasts on it. “Just to let our web-footed friends know that we’ve done their job.” He opened his pouch and took out an eye-patch and false teeth. “You’ll forgive my vanity?” Frederickson asked as he tied the eye-patch in place. “Shall we go back now?”

“Back?”

“To the fort, of course. As my prisoner I can assure you that your treatment will be that of a gentleman.”

Killick stared at the Rifleman whose face, even with patch and teeth restored, was hardly reassuring. Cornelius Killick expected a British officer to be a supercilious poltroon, all airs and graces and high-spoken delicacies, and he was somewhat shaken to be faced with a man who looked as hard-bitten as this Rifleman. “You give me your word we’ll be treated properly?”

Frederickson frowned, as though the question were indelicate. “You have my word as an officer.” He smiled suddenly. “I can’t speak for the food tonight, but doubtless there’ll be wine in abundance. This is, after all, the Medoc, and the harvest was good this year or so I believe. Sergeant!” He in gave a shrug of apology to Killick for thus turning away. “Leave the guns to the web-foots! Back to the fort!”

“Sir!”

Cornelius Killick, who had hoped to be as successful on land as he was at sea, had met a Rifleman, and all he could do was light a cigar and console himself that, for a sailor, there was no disgrace in being bested ashore. But it irked all the same, God, how it irked!

And the Arcachon Basin, in which the Thuella was stranded, had fallen.

Henri Lassan, seeing his men cornered in their bastion and recognizing the import of the feared Green Jackets and their long, glittering bayonets, had known there was no future in fighting. “Over! Over!” He pointed over the bastion and down to the strip of wind-drifted sand that edged the fort’s western ramparts. Here, on the fort’s seaward facing flank, there was no flooded ditch for the tidewater was better than any moat, and his gunners leaped from the embrasures to tumble heavily on the sand. Lassan, as he jumped, felt a sudden, keen pang for the loss of his books, then the wind was driven from him by the jar of his landing. Two of his men twisted their ankles, but they were safely helped into the dune’s cover from where, the wounded men assisted by their comrades, Lassan led his men north. Two rifle bullets followed them, but a bark of command ordered the ceasefire.

The fortress had fallen, not to Marines, but to Green Jackets, and Lassan wondered how they had come so silently, and how they had pierced the defences without his knowledge, but that was useless speculation today, when he had failed in his task.

He had lost the Teste de Buch, but he could yet frustrate his enemy. He supposed they had come for the chasse-marees and Lassan, stumbling in the cloying sand, would go to Le Moulleau and there burn the boats.

Falling night brought cold rain to pit the sand with tiny dark craters. The track wound through dunes, past discarded fish traps and the black ribs of rotted boats. The fishing village lay two miles north and Lassan could see the dense tangle of masts and yards where the chasse-marees had been moored by his orders. The owners of the boats mostly lived aboard, waiting and grumbling until they could be released back to their trade.

Vestiges of cannon smoke sifted north with Henri Lassan. The tide, he saw, was turning. Tiny waves rolled over the beds where mussels and oysters thrived. No more would the women bring him the flat baskets of shellfish and stop to gossip about the prices in the Arcachon town market or to whisper, with pretended shock, of the bedtime exploits of the American captain. Lassan wondered what had happened to Killick, but that speculation was as useless as wondering how the Teste de Buch had fallen. Commandant Henri Lassan, sword at his waist and pistol in his belt, had a task to do, and he went north in the gathering darkness to perform it.

And at Le Moulleau the chasse-maree crews mutinied. They gathered outside the white-painted Customs House, disused these many years because of the Royal Navy blockade, but still manned by two uniformed men who opened their heavy door to listen to the commotion outside. Behind the crews were the wooden pilings that edged the sheds where the shellfish were broken open and where the murmur swelled into an angry protest. The ships were their livelihoods. Without the ships they would starve, their children would starve, and their women would starve.

Lassan’s men, embarrassed by their predicament, stared at the ground. Torches flared in brackets on the Customs House facade, casting a red light on angry faces. Rain spat from the south. Lassan, a reasonable and kind man, raised his hands. “My friends!” He explained why the boats were needed, how the English would use the craft to make a bridge or to land their Army north of the Adour. “What of your children then? What of your wives, eh? Tell me that?”

There was silence, except for the running of the tide and the hiss as rain hit the torches. The faces were suspicious. Lassan knew that the French forces were disliked by the French peasantry, for the Emperor had decreed that French troops could take what rations they wanted and not pay for them. Lassan himself had refused to obey that decree, but the disobedience had been funded from his own pocket. Some of these men knew that, knew that Lassan had always been a decent officer, but still he threatened them with hunger.

“The English,” a voice shouted from the anonymity of the crowd, “are offering twenty francs a day. Twenty!”

The murmur started again, grew, and Lassan knew he would have to use force to keep these men from interfering with his duty. He had tried reason, but reason was a feeble weapon against the cupidity of peasants, so now he must be savage in his duty. “Lieutenant Gerard!”

“Sir?”

“You will fire the boats! Start at the southern moorings!”

A jeer went up and Lassan instinctively reached for his pistol, but his sergeant touched his arm. “Sir.” The sergeant’s voice was sad.

A creak sounded, then another. There was the squeak of an oar in its thole, then there were splashes and Lassan could see, in the darkness, the white marks of blades touching water. He still watched and, in the glistening darkness where the torchlight touched the water into ripples, he saw the ghostly shapes of white-painted boats.

On the flowing tide the British had rowed up channel and Lassan, listening to the ridicule of his countrymen, saw the blue-jacketed sailors, cutlasses in their hands, swarming from their longboats on to the ckasse-marees. The French crews, welcoming English gold, applauded.

Lassan turned away. “We go east, Lieutenant.”

“Sir.”

Henri Lassan, with his little band of gunners, stumbled away from the village. He would follow the Arcachon’s southern shore, then head inland to Bordeaux to report to his superiors that he had failed, that Arcachon was lost, and that the British had taken their boats.

And thus the battle of Arcachon, that had begun with such high hopes for its defenders, ended in a rain-cold night of bleak defeat.