Sharpe’s Christmas

Sharpe’s Christmas

The two soldiers crouched at the edge of the field. One of them, a dark-haired man with a scarred face and hard eyes, eased back the cock of his rifle, aimed the weapon, but then, after a few seconds, lowered the gun. “Too far away,” he said softly.

The second man was even 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, each of half-inch bore and fired by a single flintlock. It was a murderous weapon, with a kick like an angry mule, but the man looked strong enough to use it. “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 suggested.

“Where can they run to?” the second man asked. His accent was of Ulster. “It’s a field, so it is. They can’t run away!”

“So we just walk up and shoot him?”

“Unless you want to strangle the sod, sir. Shooting’s quicker.”

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 spunk as three blind mice.”

“They look dangerous to me,” Sharpe said. “They’ve got horns.”

“But they’re missing their other equipment, sir,” Harper said. “They can’t sing the low notes, if you follow me.” He pointed to one of the bullocks. “He’s got some rare fine fat on him, sir. He’ll roast just lovely.”

The chosen bullock, unaware of its fate, watched the two men. “I can’t just shoot it!” Sharpe protested.

“You bayoneted all those goats in Portugal, sir,” Harper pointed out, remembering a time when they had been stripping the countryside bare in front of a French advance, “so what’s different?”

“I hate goats.”

“But this is Christmas dinner, sir,” Harper encouraged his commanding officer. “Proper roast beef, sir, plum pudding and wine. We’ve got the plums and we’ve got the wine, so all we need is the beef and the suet.”

“Where do you get suet?”

“Off the bullock, of course,” Harper said with all the scorn of a country-raised man talking to someone from the city. “It’s white and tasty, sir, and 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 that watched Sharpe with an expression of gentle fatalism. Sharpe cocked the rifle and the bullock blinked at the strange noise. Sharpe began to raise the weapon, then lowered it again. “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 still gazed at him. “You do it,” Sharpe said to Harper, lowering the gun.

“With this?” Harper held up the volley gun. “I’ll blow its bloody head off!”

“We don’t want its head, do we?” Sharpe said. “Just its rumps and suet. So go on, do it.”

“It’s not very accurate, sir, not a volley gun. It’s grand for killing Frogs, so it is, but not for slaughtering cattle. And I like the brains, I do. My ma used to fry them in a bit of butter and it tasted lovely. I don’t want to spatter brains across half of Spain. Best use your rifle.”

“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 bloody cow.”

“It’s a 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 between the beast’s sad eyes. “I shot a tiger once,” he said.

“Did you now, sir?” Harper said, without showing much interest. “So just imagine that beast is a tiger and shoot it.”

Sharpe gazed into the beast’s eyes. He had put wounded horses out of their misery and had shot enough hares, rabbits and foxes 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 and eager voice bailed him from the field’s far side. “Mister Sharpe, sir! Mister Sharpe!”

Sharpe lowered the rifle’s cock, then turned to see Ensign Charles Nicholls running 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, Mister Nicholls,” Sharpe said.

“Yes, sir, I will, sir,” Ensign Nicholls said, not slowing his pace at all. “It’s Colonel Hogan, sir,” he said as he reached Sharpe, “he wants you, sir. He says it’s the Frogs, sir, and 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 will.”

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, sir,” 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 more admired or feared. It had been 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, and Nicholls hardly dared believe he was in their batallion. “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 that they did not hang down over his hands. “I was worried,” Nicholls had explained to Sharpe when he arrived at the batallion 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 the 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, and so 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 pummelled his nose with a giant red handkerchief, then blew scraps of snuff from the map he had spread on the farmhouse table of his billet. “It could be rumour, Richard, nothing but rumour. Did you murder your bullock now?”

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

“I 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 damned Frogs are going to use the east road or the west, so Wellington insists we 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 ever will be, but that’s where you’re going for Christmas.”

Because maybe the French were going there. Wellington’s victory at Vitoria had thrown their armies out of Spain, but a handful of French forts still remained south of the frontier and Hogan’s agents had learned that the garrison at Ochagavia was about to attempt an escape back 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 now setting his snares on the only two routes that the escaping French 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 that the French would choose, but there was a second road, a tight, hard, steep road, and that had to be blocked as well and 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’re over a thousand 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 comfortingly, “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 Richard Sharpe had not joined the army to kill Frogs. He had joined because he was hungry and on the run from the constables, and because 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 in India where, 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 now, 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 batallion 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 were of a mind to go soldiering in a cold Spanish winter. Sharpe ignored their displeasure. Men did not join the army to be comfortable.

They marched on the hour. Four hundred and twenty-two 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 French escaping. Not that Sharpe believed he would fight this Christmas. Even Hogan was not certain that the Ochagavia garrison would march, and if they did they would probably choose the eastern 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 did the same.

Colonel Jean Gudin watched as the tricolour 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 stuck into a map of Spain, and the pin represented the garrison of Ochagavia and no one had been willing to surrender the pinprick until now, when some bureaucrat had suddenly remembered the fort’s existence and realised that it held a thousand 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 batallion, Colonel Caillou. Behind the 75th, clustered about two horse-drawn wagons, was a crowd of women and children.

“Those damned women aren’t coming with us,” Caillou said. He was mounted on a black charger that he curbed beside Gudin’s horse. “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 mostly the wives and girlfriends of Gudin’s garrison, and between them the ninety women had almost as many children, some of them no more than babes in arms. “They’re Spaniards!” he snapped.

“Not all of them,” Gudin said, “some are French.”

“But French or Spanish,” Caillou insisted, “they will slow us down. 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 stubbornly, “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.” Jean Gudin knew that maybe all of them, soldiers, women and children alike, might die because of that decision, but he could not abandon these Spanish women who had found themselves French husbands and given birth to half-French babies. If they were left here then 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, Colonel,” Gudin said stiffly. He outranked Caillou, but only by virtue of having been a Colonel longer than the fiery infantryman.

“I go too far?” Caillou spat in derision. “But at least I care more for France than for a pack of snivelling women. If you lose my Eagle, Gudin,” he pointed to the tricolor flag beneath its statuette of the eagle, “I will have you shot.” It was a small thing, an Eagle, hardly bigger than a man’s spread hand, but the gilded bronze birds were granted personally by Napoleon, and each held in its clawed grip the whole honour of France. To lose an Eagle was the greatest disaster a regiment could imagine, for the Emperor’s Eagle was France. “Lose it,” Caillou said savagely, “and I’ll personally command the firing squad that kills you.”

Gudin did not bother to reply, but just kicked 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, thirteen years before, when he had been a military adviser to the Tippoo Sultan, ruler of Mysore, and Gudin had held such high hopes that, with French help and advice, the Tippoo could defeat the British in southern India, but instead the British had won. The Tippoo’s capital, Seringapatam, had fallen, and Gudin had been a prisoner for a year until he was exchanged for a British officer held prisoner by the French. He had returned to France then and thought that his career would revive, but instead it had been one long failure. 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 where France was losing a war. And if he could escape successfully? That would be a victory, especially if he could take Caillou’s precious Eagle safe across the Pyrenees, but he doubted that even an Eagle was worth the life of so many women and children. And that, he knew all too well, was his handicap. The Emperor would sacrifice a hundred thousand women and children to preserve the glory of France, but Gudin could not do it. He reached the fort’s gate and nodded to the Sergeant of the guard. “You can open up,” he said, “and once we’ve left, Sergeant, light the fuses.”