Sharpe’s Battle: The Battle of Fuentes de Oñoro, May 1811

Sharpe jumped down the last few feet. He fell as he landed, picked himself up and ran past a dunghill heaped against a house wall. A single horse was tethered to a steel picket pin driven into the ground beside one of the small houses where a French soldier suddenly appeared in the doorway. The man was wearing a shirt and a grey coat, but nothing below the waist. He raised his musket as Sharpe ran into view, but then saw the riflemen behind Sharpe and so dropped the musket and raised his hands in surrender.

Sharpe had drawn his sword as he ran to the house door. Once there he shouldered the surrendering man aside and burst into the hovel that was a bare stone chamber, beamed with wood and roofed with stone and turf. It was dark inside the cottage, but not so dark that Sharpe could not see a naked girl scrambling over the earth floor into a corner. There was blood on her legs. A second Frenchman, this one with cavalry overalls round his ankles, tried to stand and reach for his scabbarded sword, but Sharpe kicked him in the balls. He kicked him so hard that the man screamed and then could not draw breath to scream again and so toppled onto the bloody floor where he whimpered and lay with his knees drawn tight up to his chest. There were two other men on the beaten earth floor, but when Sharpe turned on them with his drawn sword he saw they were both civilians and both dead. Their throats had been cut.

Musketry sounded ragged in the valley. Sharpe went back to the door where the bare-legged French infantryman was crouching with his hands held behind his head. ‘Pat!’ Sharpe called.

Harper was organizing the riflemen. ‘We’ve got the buggers tamed, sir,’ the Sergeant said reassuringly, anticipating Sharpe’s question. The riflemen were crouching beside the cottages where they fired, reloaded and fired again. Their Baker rifle muzzles gouted thick spurts of white smoke that smelt of rotted eggs. The French returned the fire, their musket balls smacking on the stone houses as Sharpe ducked back into the hovel. He picked up the two Frenchmen’s weapons and tossed them out of the door. ‘Perkins!’ he shouted.

Rifleman Perkins ran to the door. He was the youngest of Sharpe’s men, or was presumed to be the youngest for though Perkins knew neither the day nor the year of his birth, he did not yet need to shave. ‘Sir?’

‘If either of these bastards move, shoot them.’

Perkins might be young, but the look on his thin face scared the unhurt Frenchman who reached out a placating hand as though begging the young rifleman not to shoot. ‘I’ll look after the bastards, sir,’ Perkins said, then slotted his brass-handled sword bayonet onto his rifle’s muzzle.

Sharpe saw the girl’s clothing which had been tossed under a crudely sawn table. He picked up the greasy garments and handed them to her. She was pale, terrified and crying, a young thing, scarcely out of childhood. ‘Bastards,’ Sharpe said to the two prisoners, then ran out into the damp light. A musket ball hissed over his head as he ducked down into cover beside Harper.

‘Bastards are good, sir,’ the Irishman said ruefully.

‘I thought you had them tamed?’

‘They’ve got different ideas on the matter,’ Harper said, then broke cover, aimed, fired and ducked back. ‘Bastards are good,’ he said again as he started to reload.

And the French were good. Sharpe had expected the small group of Frenchmen to hurry away from the rifle fire, but instead they had deployed into a skirmish line and so turned the easy target of a marching column into a scattered series of difficult targets. Meanwhile the half-dozen dragoons accompanying the infantry had dismounted and begun to fight on foot while one man galloped their horses out of rifle range, and now the assorted dragoon carbines and infantry muskets were threatening to overwhelm Sharpe’s riflemen. The Baker rifles were far more accurate than the Frenchmen’s muskets and carbines, and they could kill at four times the distance, but they were desperately slow to load. The bullets, each one wrapped in a leather patch that was designed to grip the barrel’s rifling, had to be forced down the tight grooves and lands of the barrel, whereas a musket ball could be rammed fast down a smoothbore’s unrifled gullet. Sharpe’s men were already abandoning the leather patches in order to load faster, but without the leather the rifling could not impart spin to the ball and so the rifle was robbed of its one great advantage: its lethal accuracy. Hagman and his three companions were still firing down from the ridge, but their numbers were too few to make much difference and all that was saving Sharpe’s riflemen from decimation was the protection of the village’s stone walls.

Sharpe took the small whistle from its pouch on his crossbelt. He blew it twice, then unslung his own rifle, edged round the corner of the house and aimed at a puff of smoke down the valley. He fired. The rifle kicked back hard just as a French musket ball cracked into the wall beside his head. A fleck of stone slashed across his scarred cheek, drawing blood and missing his eyeball by half an inch. ‘Bastards are bloody good.’ Sharpe echoed Harper’s tribute grudgingly, then a crashing musket volley announced that Harry Price had lined his redcoats on the hill top and was firing down at the French.

Price’s first volley was enough to decide the fight. Sharpe heard a French voice shouting orders and a second later the enemy skirmish line began to shred and disappear. Harry Price only had time for one more volley before the grey-coated enemy had retreated out of range. ‘Green! Horrell! McDonald! Cresacre! Smith! Sergeant Latimer!’ Sharpe called to his riflemen. ‘Fifty paces down the valley, make a picquet line there, but get the hell back here if the bastards come back for more. Move! Rest of you stay where you are.’

‘Jesus, sir, you should see in here.’ Harper had pushed open the nearest house door with the muzzle of his seven-barrel gun. The weapon, originally designed to be fired from the fighting tops of Britain’s naval ships, was a cluster of seven half-inch barrels fired by a single flint. It was like a miniature cannon and only the biggest, strongest men could fire the gun without permanently damaging their shoulders. Harper was one of the strongest men Sharpe had ever known, but also one of the most sentimental and now the big Irishman looked close to tears. ‘Oh, sweet suffering Christ,’ Harper said as he crossed himself, ‘the living bastards.’

Sharpe had already smelt the blood, now he looked past the Sergeant and felt the disgust make a lump in his throat. ‘Oh, my God,’ he said softly.

For the small house was drenched in blood, its walls spattered and its floor soaked with it, while on the floor were sprawled the limp bodies of children. Sharpe tried to count the little bodies, but could not always tell where one blood-boltered corpse began and another ended. The children had evidently been stripped naked and then had their throats cut. A small dog had been killed too, and its blood-matted, curly-haired corpse had been tossed onto the children whose skins appeared unnaturally white against the vivid streaks of black-looking blood.

‘Oh, sweet Jesus,’ Sharpe said as he backed out of the reeking shadows to draw a breath of fresh air. He had seen more than his share of horror. He had been born to a poorhouse whore in a London gutter and he had followed Britain’s drum from Flanders to Madras and through the Indian wars and now from the beaches of Portugal to the frontiers of Spain, but never, not even in the Sultan Tippoo’s torture chambers in Seringapatam, had he seen children tossed into a dead pile like so many slaughtered animals.

‘There’s more here, sir,’ Corporal Jackson called. Jackson had just vomited in the doorway of a hovel in which the bodies of two old people lay in a bloody mess. They had been tortured in ways that were only too evident.

Sharpe thought of Teresa who was fighting these same scum who gutted and tormented their victims, then, unable to bear the unbidden images that seared his thoughts, he cupped his hands and shouted up the hill, ‘Harris! Down here!’

Rifleman Harris was the company’s educated man. He had once been a schoolmaster, even a respectable schoolmaster, but boredom had driven him to drink and drink had been his ruin, or at least the cause of his joining the army where he still loved to demonstrate his erudition. ‘Sir?’ Harris said as he arrived in the settlement.

‘You speak French?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘There’s two Frogs in that house. Find out what unit they’re from, and what the bastards did here. And Harris!’

‘Sir?’ The lugubrious, red-haired Harris turned back.

‘You don’t have to be gentle with the bastards.’

Even Harris, who was accustomed to Sharpe, seemed shocked by his Captain’s tone. ‘No, sir.’

Sharpe walked back across the settlement’s tiny plaza. His men had searched the two cottages on the stream’s far side, but found no bodies there. The massacre had evidently been confined to the three houses on the nearer bank where Sergeant Harper was standing with a bleak, hurt look on his face. Patrick Harper was an Ulsterman from Donegal and had been driven into the ranks of Britain’s army by hunger and poverty. He was a huge man, four inches taller than Sharpe who was himself six feet tall. In battle Harper was an awesome figure, yet in truth he was a kind, humorous and easy-going man whose benevolence disguised his life’s central contradiction which was that he had no love for the king for whom he fought and little for the country whose flag he defended, yet there were few better soldiers in all King George’s army, and none who was more loyal to his friends. And it was for those friends that Harper fought, and the closest of his friends, despite their disparity in rank, was Sharpe himself. ‘They’re just wee kiddies,’ Harper now said. ‘Who’d do such a thing?’

‘Them.’ Sharpe jerked his head down the small valley to where the stream joined the wider waterway. The grey Frenchmen had stopped there; too far to be threatened by the rifles, but still close enough to watch what happened in the settlement where they had pillaged and murdered.

‘Some of those wee ones had been raped,’ Harper said.

‘I saw,’ Sharpe said bleakly.

‘How could they do it?’

‘There isn’t an answer, Pat. God knows.’ Sharpe felt sick, just like Harper felt sick, but inquiring into the roots of sin would not gain revenge for the dead children, nor would it save the raped girl’s sanity, nor bury the blood-soaked dead. Nor would it find a way back to the British lines for one small light company that Sharpe now realized was dangerously exposed on the edge of the French outpost line. ‘Ask a goddamn chaplain for an answer, if you can ever find one closer than the Lisbon brothels,’ Sharpe said savagely, then turned to look at the charnel houses. ‘How the hell are we going to bury this lot?’

‘We can’t, sir. We’ll just tumble the house walls down on top of them,’ Harper said. He gazed down the valley. ‘I could murder those bastards. What are we going to do with the two we’ve got?’

‘Kill them,’ Sharpe said curtly. ‘We’ll get an answer or two now,’ he said as he saw Harris duck out of the cottage. Harris was carrying one of the steel-grey dragoon helmets which Sharpe now saw were not cloth-covered, but were indeed fashioned out of metal and plumed with a long hank of grey horsehair.

Harris ran his right hand through the plume as he walked towards Sharpe. ‘I found out who they are, sir,’ he said as he drew nearer. ‘They belong to the Brigade Loup, the Wolf Brigade. It’s named after their commanding officer, sir. Fellow called Loup, Brigadier General Guy Loup. Loup means wolf in French, sir. They reckon they’re an elite unit. Their job was to hold the road open through the mountains this past winter and they did it by beating the hell out of the natives. If any of Loup’s men get killed then he kills fifty civilians as revenge. That’s what they were doing here, sir. A couple of his men were ambushed and killed, and this is the price.’ Harris gestured at the houses of the dead. ‘And Loup’s not far away, sir,’ he added in warning. ‘Unless these fellows are lying, which I doubt. He left a detachment here and took a squadron to hunt down some fugitives in the next valley.’

Sharpe looked at the cavalryman’s horse which was still tethered in the settlement’s centre and thought of the infantryman he had captured. ‘This Brigade Loup,’ he asked, ‘is it cavalry or infantry?’

‘The brigade has both, sir,’ Harris said. ‘It’s a special brigade, sir, formed to fight the partisans, and Loup’s got two battalions of infantry and one regiment of dragoons.’

‘And they all wear grey?’

‘Like wolves, sir,’ Harris said helpfully.

‘We all know what to do with wolves,’ Sharpe said, then turned as Sergeant Latimer shouted a warning. Latimer was commanding the tiny picquet line that stood between Sharpe and the French, but it was no new attack that had caused Latimer to shout his warning, but rather the approach of four French horsemen. One of them carried the tricolour guidon, though the swallow-tailed flag was now half obscured by a dirty white shirt that had been impaled on the guidon’s lance head. ‘Bastards want to talk to us,’ Sharpe said.

‘I’ll talk to them,’ Harper said viciously and pulled back the cock of his seven-barrelled gun.

‘No!’ Sharpe said. ‘And go round the company and tell everyone to hold their fire, and that’s an order.’

‘Aye, sir.’ Harper lowered the flint, then, with a baleful glance towards the approaching Frenchmen, went to warn the greenjackets to hold their tempers and keep their fingers off their triggers.

Sharpe, his rifle slung on his shoulder and his sword at his side, strolled towards the four Frenchmen. Two of the horsemen were officers, while the flanking pair were standard-bearers, and the ratio of flags to men seemed impertinently high, almost as if the two approaching officers considered themselves greater than other mortals. The tricolour guidon would have been standard enough, but the second banner was extraordinary. It was a French eagle with gilded wings outspread perched atop a pole that had a crosspiece nailed just beneath the eagle’s plinth. Most eagles carried a silk tricolour from the staff, but this eagle carried six wolf tails attached to the cross-piece. The standard was somehow barbaric, suggesting the far-off days when pagan armies of horse soldiers had thundered out of the Steppes to rape and ruin Christendom.

And if the wolf-tail standard made Sharpe’s blood run chill, then it was nothing compared to the man who now spurred his horse ahead of his companions. Only the man’s boots were not grey. His coat was grey, his horse was a grey, his helmet was lavishly plumed in grey and his grey pelisse was edged with grey wolf fur. Bands of wolf pelt encircled his boot tops, his saddle-cloth was a grey skin, his sword’s long straight scabbard and his carbine’s saddle holster were both sheathed in wolfskin while his horse’s nose band was a strip of grey fur. Even the man’s beard was grey. It was a short beard, neatly trimmed, but the rest of the face was wild and merciless and scarred fit for nightmare. One bloodshot eye and one blind milky eye stared from that weather-beaten, battle-hardened face as the man curbed his horse beside Sharpe.

‘My name is Loup,’ he said, ‘Brigadier General Guy Loup of His Imperial Majesty’s army.’ His tone was strangely mild, his intonation courteous and his English touched with a light Scottish accent.

‘Sharpe,’ the rifleman said. ‘Captain Sharpe. British army.’

The three remaining Frenchmen had reined in a dozen yards away. They watched as their Brigadier swung his leg out of the stirrup and dropped lightly down to the path. He was not as tall as Sharpe, but he was still a big man and he was well muscled and agile. Sharpe guessed the French Brigadier was about forty years old, six years older than Sharpe himself. Loup now took two cigars from his fur-edged sabretache and offered one to Sharpe.

‘I don’t take gifts from murderers,’ Sharpe said.

Loup laughed at Sharpe’s indignation. ‘More fool you, Captain. Is that what you say? More fool you? I was a prisoner, you see, in Scotland. In Edinburgh. A very cold city, but with beautiful women, very beautiful. Some of them taught me English and I taught them how to lie to their drab Calvinist husbands. We paroled officers lived just off Candlemaker Row. Do you know the place? No? You should visit Edinburgh, Captain. Despite the Calvinists and the cooking it is a fine city, very learned and hospitable. When the peace of Amiens was signed I almost stayed there.’ Loup paused to strike flint on steel, then to blow the charred linen tinder in his tinderbox into a flame with which he lit his cigar. ‘I almost stayed, but you know how it is. She was married to another man and I am a lover of France, so here I am and there she is and doubtless she dreams about me a lot more than I dream about her.’ He sighed. ‘But this weather reminded me of her. We would so often lie in bed and watch the rain and mist fly past the windows of Candlemaker Row. It is cold today, eh?’

‘You’re dressed for it, General,’ Sharpe said. ‘Got as much fur as a Christmas whore, you have.’

Loup smiled. It was not a pleasant smile. He was missing two teeth, and those that remained were stained yellow. He had spoken pleasantly enough to Sharpe, even charmingly, but it was the smooth charm of a cat about to kill. He drew on his cigar, making the tip glow red, while his single bloodshot eye looked hard at Sharpe from beneath the helmet’s grey visor.

Loup saw a tall man with a well-used rifle on one shoulder and a battered ugly-bladed sword at his hip. Sharpe’s uniform was torn, stained and patched. The jacket’s black cord hung in tatters between a few silver buttons that hung by threads, while beneath the jacket Sharpe wore a set of leather-reinforced French cavalry overalls. The remains of an officer’s red sash encircled Sharpe’s waist, while around his neck was a loosely knotted black choker. It was the uniform of a man who had long discarded the peacetime trappings of soldiering in exchange for the utilitarian comforts of a fighting man. A hard man, too, Loup guessed, not just from the evidence of the scar on Sharpe’s cheek, but from the rifleman’s demeanour which was awkward and raw-edged as though Sharpe would have preferred to be fighting than talking. Loup shrugged, abandoned his pleasantries and got down to business. ‘I came to fetch my two men,’ he said.

‘Forget them, General,’ Sharpe replied. He was determined not to dignify this Frenchman by calling him ‘sir’ or ‘monsieur’.

Loup raised his eyebrows. ‘They’re dead?’

‘They will be.’

Loup waved a persistent fly away. The steel-plated straps of his helmet hung loose beside his face, resembling the cadenettes of braided hair that French hussars liked to wear hanging from their temples. He drew on his cigar again, then smiled. ‘Might I remind you, Captain, of the rules of war?’

Sharpe offered Loup a word that he doubted the Frenchman had heard much in Edinburgh’s learned society. ‘I don’t take lessons from murderers,’ Sharpe went on, ‘not in the rules of war. What your men did in that village wasn’t war. It was a massacre.’

‘Of course it was war,’ Loup said equably, ‘and I don’t need lectures from you, Captain.’

‘You might not need a lecture, General, but you damn well need a lesson.’

Loup laughed. He turned and walked to the stream’s edge where he stretched his arms, yawned hugely, then stooped to scoop some water to his mouth. He turned back to Sharpe. ‘Let me tell you what my job is, Captain, and you will put yourself in my boots. That way, perhaps, you will lose your tedious English moral certainties. My job, Captain, is to police the roads through these mountains and so make the passes safe for the supply wagons of ammunition and food with which we plan to beat you British back to the sea. My enemy is not a soldier dressed in uniform with a colour and a code of honour, but is instead a rabble of civilians who resent my presence. Good! Let them resent me, that is their privilege, but if they attack me, Captain, then I will defend myself and I do it so ferociously, so ruthlessly, so comprehensively, that they will think a thousand times before they attack my men again. You know what the major weapon of the guerrilla is? It is horror, Captain, sheer horror, so I make certain I am more horrible than my enemy, and my enemy in this area is horrible indeed. You have heard of El Castrador?’

‘The Castrator?’ Sharpe guessed the translation.

‘Indeed. Because of what he does to French soldiers, only he does it while they are alive and then he lets them bleed to death. El Castrador, I am sorry to say, still lives, but I do assure you that none of my men has been castrated in three months, and do you know why? Because El Castrador’s men fear me more than they fear him. I have defeated him, Captain, I have made the mountains secure. In all of Spain, Captain, these are the only hills where Frenchmen can ride safely, and why? Because I have used the guerrilleros’ weapon against them. I castrate them, just as they would castrate me, only I use a blunter knife.’ Brigadier Loup offered Sharpe a grim smile. ‘Now tell me, Captain, if you were in my boots, and if your men were being castrated and blinded and disembowelled and skinned alive and left to die, would you not do as I do?’

‘To children?’ Sharpe jerked his thumb at the village.

Loup’s one eye widened in surprise, as though he found Sharpe’s objection odd in a soldier. ‘Would you spare a rat because it’s young? Vermin are vermin, Captain, whatever their age.’

‘I thought you said the mountains were safe,’ Sharpe said, ‘so why kill?’

‘Because last week two of my men were ambushed and killed in a village not far from here. The families of the murderers came here to take refuge, thinking I would not find them. I did find them, and now I assure you, Captain, that no more of my men will be ambushed in Fuentes de Oñoro.’

‘They will if I find them there.’

Loup shook his head sadly. ‘You are so quick with your threats, Captain. But fight me and I think you will learn caution. But for now? Give me my men and we shall ride away.’

Sharpe paused, thinking, then finally shrugged and turned. ‘Sergeant Harper!’

‘Sir?’

‘Bring the two Frogs out!’

Harper hesitated as though he wanted to know what Sharpe intended before he obeyed the order, but then he turned reluctantly towards the houses. A moment later he appeared with the two French captives, both of whom were still naked below the waist and one of whom was still half doubled over in pain. ‘Is he wounded?’ Loup asked.

‘I kicked him in the balls,’ Sharpe said. ‘He was raping a girl.’

Loup seemed amused by the answer. ‘You’re squeamish about rape, Captain Sharpe?’

‘Funny in a man, isn’t it? Yes, I am.’

‘We have some officers like that,’ Loup said, ‘but a few months in Spain soon cures their delicacy. The women here fight like the men, and if a woman imagines that her skirts will protect her then she is wrong. And rape is part of the horror, but it also serves a secondary purpose. Release soldiers to rape and they don’t care that they’re hungry or that their pay is a year in arrears. Rape is a weapon like any other, Captain.’

‘I’ll remember that, General, when I march into France,’ Sharpe said, then he turned back towards the houses. ‘Stop there, Sergeant!’ The two prisoners had been escorted as far as the village entrance. ‘And Sergeant!’

‘Sir?’

‘Fetch their trousers. Get them dressed properly.’

Loup, pleased with the way his mission was going, smiled at Sharpe. ‘You’re being sensible, good. I would hate to have to fight you in the same way that I fight the Spanish.’

Sharpe looked at Loup’s pagan uniform. It was a costume, he thought, to scare a child, the costume of a wolfman walking out of nightmare, but the wolfman’s sword was no longer than Sharpe’s and his carbine a good deal less accurate than Sharpe’s rifle. ‘I don’t suppose you could fight us, General,’ Sharpe said, ‘we’re a real army, you see, not a pack of unarmed women and children.’