Sharpe's Christmas

PART ONE

THE TWO riflemen crouched at the edge of the field. One, a dark-haired man with a scarred face and hard eyes, eased back the cock of his rifle, aimed, but then, after a few seconds, lowered it. "Too far away, " he whispered.

The second was taller than the first and, like his companion, wore the faded green jacket of the 95th Rifles, but instead of a Baker rifle, he carried a curious volley gun of seven barrels. "No good trying with this, " he whispered, hefting the huge gun, "only works at close range."

"If we get too close they'll run, " the first man said.

"Where can they run to? It's a field, for God's sake."

"So we just walk up and shoot him?"

"Unless you want to strangle the sod."

Major Richard Sharpe lowered his rifle's flint. "Come on, then, " he said, and the two men stood and walked gingerly towards the three bullocks. "You think they'll charge us, Pat?" Sharpe asked.

"They're gelded, sir! " Sergeant Major Patrick Harper offered. "Got about as much spark as three blind mice."

"They look dangerous to me, " Sharpe said. "They've got horns."

"But they're missing their other equipment, sir. They can't sing the low notes, if you follow me, " Harper said, then pointed to one of the bullocks.

"He's got some fat on him, sir. He'll roast just fine." The chosen bullock, unaware of its fate, watched the two men.

"I can't just shoot it! " Sharpe protested.

"It's Christmas dinner, sir, " Harper encouraged his commanding officer.

"Proper roast beef, plum pudding and wine. We've got the plums and we've got the wine, sir, so all we need is the beef and the suet."

"Where do you get suet?"

"Off the bullock, of course. It's sort of stacked around the kidneys, so it is, but you'd best shoot the poor beast first. It's kinder."

Sharpe walked closer to the animal. It had large, brown, sad eyes. "I can't do it, Pat."

"One shot, sir. Imagine it's a Frenchman."

Sharpe lifted the rifle, cocked it and aimed straight between the bullock's eyes. The animal gazed at him ruefully. "You do it, " Sharpe said to Harper, lowering the gun.

"With this?" Harper held up the volley gun. "I'll blow its head off!»

"We don't want its head, do we?" Sharpe said. "Just its rumps and suet. Go on, do it."

"Not very accurate, sir, not a volley gun. Good for killing Frogs, it is. But not for slaughtering cattle."

"So have the rifle, " Sharpe said, offering the weapon.

Harper gazed at the rifle for a second, but did not take it. "The thing is, sir, " the huge Irishman said, "that I drank a drop too much last night. My hands are shaky, see? Best that you do it, sir."

Sharpe hesitated. The Light Company had set their hearts on a proper Christmas dinner: bloody roast beef, gravy thick enough to choke a rat and a brandy-soaked pudding clogged with plums and suet. "It's daft, isn't it?" he said. "I wouldn't think twice if it was a Frog. It's only a cow."

"Bullock, sir."

"What's the difference?"

"You can't milk this one, sir."

«Right,» Sharpe said, and aimed the rifle again. "Just hold still, " he ordered the bullock, then crept a half-pace closer so that the gun's blackened muzzle was only a few inches from the coarse black hair. "I shot a tiger once, " he said.

"Go on, sir, kill it."

Sharpe gazed into the beast's eyes. He had put wounded horses out of their misery and shot enough rabbits in his time, but somehow he could not squeeze the trigger. And then he was saved from having to shoot at all because a small, high eager voice hailed him from the field's far side.

"Mr. Sharpe, sir! Mr. Sharpe!»

Sharpe lowered the rifle's cock, then turned to see Ensign Charles Nicholls rustling over the grass.

Nicholls had only just arrived in Spain and went everywhere at a tumultuous pace, as if he feared the war might get away from him.

"Slow down, Mr. Nicholls, " Sharpe said.

"It's Colonel Hogan, sir, " Ensign Nicholls panted, "he wants you, sir. He says it's the Frogs, sir. He says we've got to stop some Frogs, sir, and it's urgent."

Sharpe slung the rifle on his shoulder. "We'll do this later, sergeant major, " he said.

"Yes, sir, of course we shall."

The bullock watched the men go, then lowered its head to the grass. "Were you going to shoot it, sir?" Nicholls asked excitedly.

"What do you think I was going to do?" Sharpe asked the boy. "Strangle it?"

"I couldn't shoot one, " Nicholls admitted. "I'd feel too sorry for it." He gazed at Sharpe and Harper in admiration, and no wonder, for there were no two men in Wellington's army who were more admired or feared. It was Sharpe and Harper who had taken the French Eagle at Talavera, who had stormed through the breach of blood at Badajoz and cut the great road at the rout of Vitoria.

Nicholls hardly dared believe he was in their battalion. "You think we're going to fight, sir?" he asked eagerly.

"I hope not, " Sharpe said.

"No, sir?" Nicholls sounded disappointed.

"It's Christmas in three days, " Sharpe said. "Would you want to die at Christmas?"

"I don't suppose I would, sir, " Nicholls admitted.

The ensign was seventeen, but looked fourteen. He wore a second-hand uniform coat on which his mother had sewn loops of tarnished gold lace, then turned up the yellow-tipped sleeves so they did not fall down over his hands.

"I was worried, " Nicholls had explained to Sharpe when he arrived at the battalion just a week before, "that I would miss the war. Awful bad luck to miss a war."

"Sounds like good luck to me."

"No, sir! A fellow must do his duty, " Nicholls had said earnestly; and the ensign did try very hard to do his duty and was never discouraged when veterans of the regiment laughed at his eagerness.

He was, Sharpe thought, like a puppy. Wet nose, tail up and raring to bare his milk teeth at the enemy.

But not at Christmas, Sharpe thought, not at Christmas. He hoped Hogan was wrong and that the Frogs were not moving, for Christmas was no time to be killing.

"You probably won't have to fight, " Colonel Hogan said, then sneezed violently. He pummeled his nose with a giant red handkerchief, then blew scraps of snuff from the map. "It could be a rumour, Richard, nothing but rumour. Did you shoot your bullock?"

"Never got round to it, sir. And how did you know we were going to shoot one, anyway?"

"It am the peer's chief of intelligence, " Hogan said grandly, "and I know everything, or almost everything. What I don't know, Richard, is whether these Frogs are going to use the east road or the west, so I have to cover both, or rather the Spaniards will block the east road and you and your merry men will guard the west. Here."

He stabbed a finger down and Sharpe peered at the map to see a tiny mark close to the French frontier, and next to it, in Hogan's extravagant handwriting, the name Irati. "You'll like Irati, " Colonel Hogan said. "It's a nothing place, Richard. Hovels and misery, that's all it is and all it'll ever be, but that's where you're going." Because maybe the French were going there. Wellington's victory at Vitoria had thrown Napoleon's armies out of Spain, but a handful of French forts still remained south of the frontier and Hogan's spies had learned one of those garrisons was about to attempt an escape into France. The garrison planned to march at Christmas, in the hope that their enemies would be too bloated with beef and wine to fight, but Hogan had got wind of their plans and was setting his snares on the only two routes that the escaping garrison could use.

One, the eastern road, was by far the easier, for it entered France through a low pass, and Hogan guessed it was that route the French would choose. But there was a second, a tight, hard, steep road, and that had to be blocked as well, so the Prince of Wales's Own Volunteers, Sharpe's regiment, would climb into the hills and spend their Christmas at a place of hovels and misery called Irati.

"There's more than 1, 000 men in the fort at Ochagavia, " Hogan told Sharpe, "and we don't want Boney to get those men back, Richard. You have to stop them."

"If they use the western road, sir."

"Which they probably won't, " Hogan said confidently, "but if they do, Richard, stop them. Kill me some Frogs for Christmas. That's why you joined the Army, isn't it? To kill Frogs. So go and do it. I want you out of here in an hour."

In truth, Sharpe had not joined the Army to kill Frogs. He had joined because he was hungry and on the run from the constables. And once a man had taken the shilling and pulled on the King's coat, he was reckoned safe from the law. And so Private Richard Sharpe had joined the 33rd, fought with them in Flanders and India. And at Assaye, a bloody battlefield between two rivers where a small British army had trounced a vast Indian horde, he had become an officer.

That was almost ten years ago and he had spent a good many of those years fighting the French in Portugal and Spain. Only now he fought in a dark green coat, for he was a Rifleman, though by an accident of war, he now found himself commanding a battalion of redcoats. They had once been called the South Essex, but now they were the Prince of Wales's Own Volunteers, though on this dank, grey morning they were anything but willing. They were comfortable in their Spanish billets, they liked the local girls, and none was of a mind to go soldiering in a cold Spanish winter.

Sharpe ignored their displeasure. Men did not join the Army to be comfortable, but to fight. They marched on the hour, 422 men swinging east out of the town and down into the valley.

It had begun to rain heavily, filling the small ditches that edged the fields and flooding the furrows left in the road by the big guns. No one else in the Army was moving, just Sharpe's regiment that was going to plug a gap in the high mountains to stop the Frogs escaping.

Not that Sharpe believed he would fight this Christmas. Even Hogan was not certain the French would march, and if they did, they would probably choose the other road, the main road, so all Sharpe expected was a long march and a cold Christmas.

But King George wanted him to be at Irati, so to Irati he would go. And God help the Frogs if they went as well.

Colonel Jean Gudin watched as the tricolor was lowered. The fort at Ochagavia, that he had commanded for four years, was being abandoned and it hurt. It was another failure, and his life had been nothing but failure.

Even the fort at Ochagavia was a failure for, as far as Gudin could see, it guarded nothing. True, it dominated a road in the mountains, but the road had never been used to bring supplies from France and so it had never been haunted by the dreaded partisans who harried all the other French garrisons in Spain.

Time and again, Gudin had pointed this out to his superiors, but somewhere in Paris there was a pin representing the garrison of Ochagavia stuck into a map of Spain and no one had been willing to surrender the pinprick until now, when some bureaucrat had suddenly remembered the fort's existence and realised it held 1, 000 good men who were needed to defend the homeland.

Those men now made ready for their escape. Three hundred were Gudin's garrison and the others were fugitives who had taken refuge in Ochagavia after the disaster at Vitoria. Some of those refugees were Dragoons, but most were infantrymen from the 75th Regiment who paraded in the fort's courtyard beneath their Eagle and under the eye of their irascible chef de battalion, Colonel Caillou. Behind the 75th, clustered around two horse-drawn wagons, was a crowd of women and children.

"The women, " Caillou rode his horse to Gudin's side. "I thought we agreed to abandon the women."

"I didn't agree, " Gudin said curtly.

Caillou snorted, then glared at the shivering women. They were the wives and girlfriends of Ochagavia's garrison and, between them, had almost as many children, some no more than babes in arms. "They're Spaniards! " he snapped.

"Not all of them, " Gudin said. "Some are French."

"But French or Spanish, they will slow us down, " Caillou insisted. "The essence of success, Gudin, is to march fast. Audacity! Speed! There lies safety. We cannot take women and children."

"If they stay, " Gudin said, "they will be killed."

'That's war, Gudin, that's war! " Caillou declared. "In war, the weak die."

"We are soldiers of France, " Gudin said stiffly, "and we do not leave women and children to die. They march with us."

Gudin knew that all of them, soldiers, women and children alike, might die because of that decision, but he could abandon these Spanish women who had found themselves French husbands and given birth to half-French babies. If they were left, the partisans would find them, they would be called traitors, they would be tortured and they would die. No, Gudin thought, he could not just leave them.

"And Maria is pregnant, " he added, nodding towards an ammunition cart on which a woman lay swathed in grey army blankets.

"I don't care if she's the Virgin Mary! " Caillou exploded. "We cannot afford to take women and children! " Caillou saw that his words were having no effect on the grey-haired Colonel Gudin, and the older man's stubbornness inflamed Caillou. "My God, Gudin, no wonder they call you a failure!»

"You go too far, " Gudin said. He outranked Caillou, but only by virtue of having been a colonel longer than the infantryman.

"I go too far?" Caillou spat in derision. "But at least I care more for France than for a pack of sniveling women. If you lose my Eagle, Gudin, " he pointed to the tricolor beneath its statuette of the Eagle, "I'll see you face a firing squad."

Gudin did not bother to reply, but just walked his horse towards the gate. He felt an immense sadness. Caillou was right, he thought, he was a failure.

It had all begun in India, 13 years before, when Seringapatam had fallen, and since then, nothing had gone right. He had not received one promotion in all those years, but had gone from one misfortune to the next until now he was the commander of a useless fort in a bleak landscape. And if he could escape? That would be a victory, especially if he could take Caillou's precious Eagle safe across the Pyrenees, but was even an Eagle worth the life of so many women and children?

He smiled down at his Sergeant. "You can open the gate. And once we've left, sergeant, light the fuses."

"The women, sir?" the sergeant asked anxiously. "They are coming?"

"They're coming, Pierre."

The Dragoons left first. It was dusk. Gudin planned to march all night in the hope that by dawn he would have left any partisans far behind. Until then, he had hardly been worried by the fearsome Spanish guerilleros, but those savage men had few French enemies left in Spain and were closing on the remaining enemy fortresses like vultures scenting death.

Gudin had spread a rumor that he intended to march his garrison to join the beleaguered French troops in Pamplona, and he hoped that might keep the partisans away from the road that led northwards, but he doubted the rumor would work.

His best hope lay in marching at night, and God help any of his men or women who could not keep up, for they would face a terrible, slow death. Some would be burned alive, some flayed, some, but no, it did not bear thinking about.

It was not war as Gudin understood it, it was butchery, and what galled Gudin most was that the guerilleros were only doing to the French what the French had done to the Spaniards.

The infantry marched through the gate behind their Eagle. The women followed.

Gudin stayed to watch the sergeant light the fuses, then he spurred away from his doomed fort. He paused a half-mile up the road and turned to watch as the fire in the fuses reached the charges set in the fort's magazines.

The night blossomed red and a moment later the sound of the explosions punched through the damp darkness. Flames and smoke boiled above the fort's remains as the heavy guns were tumbled from their emplacements. Another failure, Gudin thought, watching the great fire rage.

"If my Eagle is lost, " Colonel Caillou said, "I shall blame you, Gudin."

"So pray that the British have no blocked the road, " Gudin answered. The fort was a dark mass of stone in which streaks of fire glowed bloody red.

"It's partisans I worry about, not the British, " Caillou sneered. "If the British are on the road, then General Picard will come from behind and they will be squeezed to death."

For that was the plan. General Picard was marching south from St. Jean Pied-de-Port. He would climb the French side of the Pyrenees to make sure the frontier pass was open for Gudin's men, and all Gudin needed to do was survive the forty kilometres of tortuous winter road that twisted up from Ochagavia to the pass where General Picard waited.

At a place of misery in the mountains, at a place called Irati.

SHARPE said, "It's not such a bad place." And it was true that in the fading evening light Irati was picturesque. It was a village of small stone houses, little more than huts, that lay in a sheltered valley at the junction of two high streams and clustered about a big tavern, the Casa Alta, that provided shelter for folks traveling the high pass. "Can't see why anyone would want to live here, though, " he added.

"They're mostly shepherds, " said Captain Peter d'Alembord.

"Shepherds! That's fitting for Christmas, " Sharpe said. "I seem to remember something about shepherds. Shepherds and wise men, isn't that right?"

"Quite right, sir, " d'Alembord said. He could never quite get used to the idea that Sharpe had received no education at all other than being taught to read while he was a prisoner in India.

"A fellow used to read the Christmas story to us in the foundling home,»

Sharpe remembered. "A big, fat parson, he was, with funny whiskers. Looked a bit like that sergeant who caught a bellyful of cannister at Salamanca. We had to sit and listen, and if we yawned, the bugger used to jump off the platform and clout us round the face with the Holy Book. One minute it was all peace on earth, the next you were flying across the floor with a thick ear."

"But at least you learned your Bible stories."

"Not there, I didn't. I learned those in India. I worked with a Scottish colonel who was a Bible-thumper." Sharpe smiled at the memory.

He was walking north, climbing the road that led from Irati towards the nearby French frontier. He had already found a place south of the village where the battalion could stop the escaping garrison and he wanted to be certain that no Frogs were lurking at his rear.

"You liked India?" d'Alembord asked.

"It was a bit hot, " Sharpe said, "and the food was funny, but yes, I liked it.

In India I served under the best colonel I ever had."

"Wellesley?" d'Alembord asked.

"Not Nosey, no, " Sharpe laughed. "He was good, Nosey, but just as cold then as he is now. No, this man was a Frog. Long story, Dally, and I don't want to bore you, but I served with the enemy for a bit in India. On purpose, it was, all official. Colonel Gudin, he was called." Sharpe smiled, remembering. "He was very good to me, Colonel Gudin. He even wanted me to go back to France with him, and I can't say I wasn't tempted."

D'Alembord smiled. He wished Sharpe would tell the story of Colonel Gudin, but he knew it was hopeless trying to get reminiscences out of Major Sharpe. He had seen other men try to learn how Sharpe had taken the French Eagle at Salamanca, but Sharpe would just shrug and say anyone could have done it. It was just luck, really, he happened to be there and the thing was looking for a new owner.

Like hell, d'Alembord thought. Sharpe was quite simply the best soldier he had ever known or would know.

Sharpe stopped at the head of the pass and pulled a telescope from a pocked of his green jacket. The telescope's outer barrel had an ivory cover and an inscribed gold plate that read in French, "To Joseph, King of Spain and the Indies, from his brother, Napoleon, Emperor of France." Sharpe trained the expensive glass northwards to search the misted slopes across the border. He saw rocks, stunted trees and the glint of a cold stream tumbling from a high place, and beyond a fading succession of mountain peaks.

A chill, damp, hard land, he thought, and no place to send soldiers at Christmas time. "Not a Frog to be seen, " Sharpe said happily, and was about to lower the glass when he saw something move in a cleft of rock on a distant slope. The road ran through the cleft and he held his breath as he stared at the narrow gap.

"What is it?" d'Alembord asked.

Sharpe did not answer. He just gazed at the split in the grey stone from which an army was suddenly appearing. At least it looked like an army. Rank after rank of infantry trudging northwards in dun grey coats. And they were coming from France. He handed the telescope to d'Alembord. "Tell me what you see, Dally."

D'Alembord aimed the glass, then swore quietly. "A whole brigade, sir." "Coming from the wrong direction, too, " Sharpe said. Without the telescope he could not see the distant enemy, but he could guess what they were about. The garrison would be escaping on this road and the French brigade had been sent to make sure the frontier was open for them.

"They'll not make it this far tonight, " Sharpe said. The sun had already sunk beneath the western peaks and the night shadows were stretching fast.

"But they'll be here tomorrow, " d'Alembord said nervously.

"Aye, tomorrow. Christmas Eve, " Sharpe said.

"An awful lot of them, " d'Alembord said.

«Barrels,» Sharpe answered.

"Barrels, sir?" d'Alembord gazed at Sharpe as though the major had gone mad.

"That tavern in Irati, Dally, has to be full of barrels. I want them here tonight, all of them."

Because tomorrow there would be an enemy behind and an enemy in front, and a road to hold and a battle to win. At Christmas time.