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

Loup stiffened. ‘You will find, Captain Sharpe, that the Brigade Loup can fight any man, anywhere, anyhow. I do not lose, Captain, not to anyone.’

‘So if you never lose, General, how were you taken prisoner?’ Sharpe sneered. ‘Fast asleep, were you?’

‘I was a passenger on my way to Egypt, Captain, when our ship was captured by the Royal Navy. That hardly counts as my defeat.’ Loup watched as his two men pulled on their trousers. ‘Where is Trooper Godin’s horse?’

‘Trooper Godin won’t need a horse where he’s going,’ Sharpe said.

‘He can walk? I suppose he can. Very well, I yield you the horse,’ Loup said magniloquently.

‘He’s going to hell, General,’ Sharpe said. ‘I’m dressing them because they’re still soldiers, and even your lousy soldiers deserve to die with their trousers on.’ He turned back to the settlement. ‘Sergeant! Put them against the wall! I want a firing squad, four men for each prisoner. Load up!’

‘Captain!’ Loup snapped and his hand went to his sword’s hilt.

‘You don’t frighten me, Loup. Not you nor your fancy dress,’ Sharpe said. ‘You draw that sword and we’ll be mopping up your blood with your flag of truce. I’ve got marksmen up on that ridge who can whip the good eye out of your face at two hundred yards, and one of those marksmen is looking at you right now.’

Loup looked up the hill. He could see Price’s redcoats there, and one greenjacket, but he plainly could not tell just how many men were in Sharpe’s party. He looked back to Sharpe. ‘You’re a captain, just a captain. Which means you have what? One company? Maybe two? The British won’t entrust more than two companies to a mere captain, but within half a mile I have the rest of my brigade. If you kill my men you’ll be hunted down like dogs, and you will die like dogs. I will exempt you from the rules of war, Captain, just as you propose exempting my men, and I will make sure you die in the manner of my Spanish enemies. With a very blunt knife, Captain.’

Sharpe ignored the threat, turning towards the village instead. ‘Firing party ready, Sergeant?’

‘They’re ready, sir. And eager, sir!’

Sharpe looked back to the Frenchman. ‘Your brigade is miles away, General. If it was any closer you wouldn’t be here talking to me, but leading the attack. Now, if you’ll forgive me, I’ve got some justice to execute.’

‘No!’ Loup said sharply enough to turn Sharpe back. ‘I have made a bargain with my men. You understand that, Captain? You are a leader, I am a leader, and I have promised my men never to abandon them. Don’t make me break my promise.’

‘I don’t give a bugger about your promise,’ Sharpe said.

Loup had expected that kind of answer and so shrugged. ‘Then maybe you will give a bugger about this, Captain Sharpe. I know who you are, and if you do not return my men I will place a price on your head. I will give every man in Portugal and Spain a reason to hunt you down. Kill those two and you sign your own death warrant.’

Sharpe smiled. ‘You’re a bad loser, General.’

‘And you’re not?’

Sharpe walked away. ‘I’ve never lost,’ he called back across his shoulder, ‘so I wouldn’t know.’

‘Your death warrant, Sharpe!’ Loup called.

Sharpe lifted two fingers. He had heard that the English bowmen at Agincourt, threatened by the French with the loss of their bowstring fingers at the battle’s end, had first won the battle and then invented the taunting gesture to show the overweening bastards just who were the better soldiers. Now Sharpe used it again.

Then went to kill the wolfman’s men.

Major Michael Hogan discovered Wellington inspecting a bridge over the River Turones where a force of three French battalions had tried to hold off the advancing British. The resulting battle had been swift and brutal, and now a trail of French and British dead told the skirmish’s tale. An initial tide line of bodies marked where the sides had clashed, a dreadful smear of bloodied turf showed where two British cannon had enfiladed the enemy, then a further scatter of corpses betrayed the French retreat across the bridge which their engineers had not had time to destroy. ‘Fletcher thinks the bridge is Roman work, Hogan,’ Wellington greeted the Irish Major.

‘I sometimes wonder, my Lord, whether anyone has built a bridge in Portugal or Spain since the Romans.’ Hogan, swathed in a cloak because of the day’s damp chill, nodded amicably to his Lordship’s three aides, then handed the General a sealed letter. The seal, which showed the royal Spanish coat of arms, had been lifted. ‘I took the precaution of reading the letter, my Lord,’ Hogan explained.

‘Trouble?’ Wellington asked.

‘I wouldn’t have bothered you otherwise, my Lord,’ Hogan answered gloomily.

Wellington frowned as he read the letter. The General was a handsome man, forty-two years old, but as fit as any in his army. And, Hogan thought, wiser than most. The British army, Hogan knew, had an uncanny knack of finding the least qualified man and promoting him to high command, but somehow the system had gone wrong and Sir Arthur Wellesley, now the Viscount Wellington, had been given command of His Majesty’s army in Portugal, thus providing that army with the best possible leadership. At least Hogan thought so, but Michael Hogan allowed that he could be prejudiced in this matter. Wellington, after all, had promoted Hogan’s career, making the shrewd Irishman the head of his intelligence department and the result had been a relationship as close as it was fruitful.

The General read the letter again, this time glancing at a translation Hogan had thoughtfully provided. Hogan meanwhile looked about the battlefield where fatigue parties were clearing up the remnants of the skirmish. To the east of the bridge, where the road came delicately down the mountainside in a series of sweeping curves, a dozen work parties were searching the bushes for bodies and abandoned supplies. The French dead were being stripped naked and stacked like cordwood next to a long, shallow grave that a group of diggers was trying to extend. Other men were piling French muskets or else hurling canteens, cartridge boxes, boots and blankets into a cart. Some of the plunder was even more exotic, for the retreating French had weighed themselves down with the loot of a thousand Portuguese villages and Wellington’s men were now recovering church vestments, candlesticks and silver plate. ‘Astonishing what a soldier will carry on a retreat,’ the General remarked to Hogan. ‘We found one dead man with a milking stool. A common milking stool! What was he thinking of? Taking it back to France?’ He held the letter out to Hogan. ‘Damn,’ he said mildly, then, more strongly, ‘God damn!’ He waved his aides away, leaving him alone with Hogan. ‘The more I learn about His Most Catholic Majesty King Ferdinand VII, Hogan, the more I become convinced that he should have been drowned at birth.’

Hogan smiled. ‘The recognized method, my Lord, is smothering.’

‘Is it indeed?’

‘It is indeed, my Lord, and no one’s ever the wiser. The mother simply explains how she rolled over in her sleep and trapped the blessed little creature beneath her body and thus, the holy church explains, another precious angel is born.’

‘In my family,’ the General said, ‘unwanted children get posted into the army.’

‘It has much the same effect, my Lord, except in the matter of angels.’

Wellington gave a brief laugh, then gestured with the letter. ‘So how did this reach us?’

‘The usual way, my Lord. Smuggled out of Valençay by Ferdinand’s servants and brought south to the Pyrenees where it was given to partisans for forwarding to us.’

‘With a copy to London, eh? Any chance of intercepting the London copy?’

‘Alas, sir, gone these two weeks. Probably there already.’

‘Hell, damn and hell again. Damn!’ Wellington stared gloomily at the bridge where a sling cart was salvaging the fallen barrel of a dismounted French cannon. ‘So what to do, eh, Hogan? What to do?’

The problem was simple enough. The letter, copied to the Prince Regent in London, had come from the exiled King Ferdinand of Spain who was now a prisoner of Napoleon in the French château at Valençay. The letter was pleased to announce that His Most Catholic Majesty, in a spirit of cooperation with his cousin of England and in his great desire to drive the French invader from the sacred soil of his kingdom, had directed the Real Compañía Irlandesa of His Most Catholic Majesty’s household guard to attach itself to His Britannic Majesty’s forces under the command of the Viscount Wellington. Which gesture, though it sounded generous, was not to the Viscount Wellington’s taste. He did not need a stray company of royal palace guards. A battalion of trained infantry with full fighting equipment might have been of some service, but a company of ceremonial troops was about as much use to the Viscount Wellington as a choir of psalm-singing eunuchs.

‘And they’ve already arrived,’ Hogan said mildly.

‘They’ve what?’ Wellington’s question could be heard a hundred yards away where a dog, thinking it was being reproved, slunk away from some fly-blackened guts that trailed from the eviscerated body of a French artillery officer. ‘Where are they?’ Wellington asked fiercely.

‘Somewhere on the Tagus, my Lord, being barged towards us.’

‘How the hell did they get here?’

‘According to my correspondent, my Lord, by ship. Our ships.’ Hogan put a pinch of snuff on his left hand, then sniffed the powder up each nostril. He paused for a second, his eyes suddenly streaming, then sneezed. His horse’s ears flicked back at the noise. ‘The commander of the Real Compañía Irlandesa claims he marched his men to Spain’s east coast, my Lord,’ Hogan went on, ‘then took ship to Menorca where our Royal Navy collected them.’

Wellington snorted his derision. ‘And the French just let that happen? King Joseph just watched half the royal guard march away?’ Joseph was Bonaparte’s brother and had been elevated to the throne of Spain, though it was taking three hundred thousand French bayonets to keep him there.

‘A fifth of the royal guard, my Lord,’ Hogan gently corrected the General. ‘And yes, that’s exactly what Lord Kiely says. Kiely, of course, being their comandante.’

‘Kiely?’

‘Irish peer, my Lord.’

‘Damn it, Hogan, I know the Irish peerage. Kiely. Earl of Kiely. An exile, right? And his mother, I remember, gave money to Tone back in the nineties.’ Wolfe Tone had been an Irish patriot who had tried to raise money and men in Europe and America to lead a rebellion against the British in his native Ireland. The rebellion had flared into open war in 1798 when Tone had invaded Donegal with a small French army that had been roundly defeated and Tone himself had committed suicide in his Dublin prison rather than hang from a British rope. ‘I don’t suppose Kiely’s any better than his mother,’ Wellington said grimly, ‘and she’s a witch who should have been smothered at birth. Is his Lordship to be trusted, Hogan?’

‘So far as I hear, my Lord, he’s a drunk and a wastrel,’ Hogan said. ‘He was given command of the Real Compañía Irlandesa because he’s the only Irish aristocrat in Madrid and because his mother had influence over the King. She’s dead now, God rest her soul.’ He watched a soldier try to fork up the spilt French officer’s intestines with his bayonet. The guts kept slipping off the blade and finally a sergeant yelled at the man to either pick the offal up with his bare hands or else leave it for the crows.

‘What has this Irish guard been doing since Ferdinand left Madrid?’ Wellington asked.

‘Living on sufferance, my Lord. Guarding the Escorial, polishing their boots, staying out of trouble, breeding, whoring, drinking and saluting the French.’

‘But not fighting the French.’

‘Indeed not.’ Hogan paused. ‘It’s all too convenient, my Lord,’ he went on. ‘The Real Compañía Irlandesa is permitted to leave Madrid, permitted to take ship, and permitted to come to us, and meanwhile a letter is smuggled out of France saying the company is a gift to you from His imprisoned Majesty. I smell Frog paws all over it, my Lord.’

‘So we tell these damn guards to go away?’

‘I doubt we can. In London the Prince Regent will doubtless be flattered by the gesture and the Foreign Office, you may depend, will consider any slight offered to the Real Compañía Irlandesa to be an insult to our Spanish allies, which means, my Lord, that we are stuck with the bastards.’

‘Are they good for anything?’

‘I’m sure they’ll be decorative,’ Hogan allowed dubiously.

‘And decoration costs money,’ Wellington said. ‘I suppose the King of Spain did not think to send his guard’s pay chest?’

‘No, my Lord.’

‘Which means I’m paying them?’ Wellington inquired dangerously, and, when Hogan’s only answer was a seraphic smile, the General swore. ‘God damn their eyes! I’m supposed to pay the bastards? While they stab me in the back? Is that what they’re here for, Hogan?’

‘I wouldn’t know, my Lord. But I suspect as much.’

A gust of laughter sounded from a fatigue party that had just discovered some intimate drawings concealed in a dead Frenchman’s coat tails. Wellington winced at the noise and edged his horse further away from the raucous group. Some crows fought over a pile of offal that had once been a French skirmisher. The General stared at the unpleasant sight, then grimaced. ‘So what do you know about this Irish guard, Hogan?’

‘They’re mostly Spanish these days, my Lord, though even the Spanish-born guards have to be descended from Irish exiles. Most of the guardsmen are recruited from the three Irish regiments in Spanish service, but a handful, I imagine, will be deserters from our own army. I’d suspect that most of them are patriotic to Spain and are probably willing to fight against the French, but undoubtedly a handful of them will be afrancesados, though in that regard I’d suspect the officers before the men.’ An afrancesado was a Spaniard who supported the French and almost all such traitors came from the educated classes. Hogan slapped a horsefly that had settled on his horse’s neck. ‘It’s all right, Jeremiah, just a hungry fly,’ he explained to his startled horse, then turned back to Wellington. ‘I don’t know why they’ve been sent here, my Lord, but I am sure of two things. First, it will be a diplomatic impossibility to get rid of them, and second we have to assume that it’s the French who want them here. King Ferdinand, I’ve no doubt, was gulled into writing the letter. I hear he’s not very clever, my Lord.’

‘But you are, Hogan. It’s why I put up with you. So what do we do? Put them to latrine digging?’

Hogan shook his head. ‘If you employ the King of Spain’s household guard on menial tasks, my Lord, it will be construed as an insult to our Spanish allies as well as to His Catholic Majesty.’

‘Damn His Catholic Majesty,’ Wellington growled, then stared balefully towards the trench-like grave where the French dead were now being unceremoniously laid in a long, white, naked row. ‘And the junta?’ he asked. ‘What of the junta?’

The junta in Cadiz was the regency council that ruled unoccupied Spain in their King’s absence. Of its patriotism there could be no doubt, but the same could not be said of its efficiency. The junta was notorious for its internal squabbles and touchy pride, and few matters had touched that pride more directly than the discreet request that Arthur Wellesley, Viscount Wellington, be made Generalisimo of all Spain’s armies. Wellington was already the General Marshal of Portugal’s army and commander of the British forces in Portugal, and no man of sense denied he was the best general on the allied side, not least because he was the only one who consistently won battles, and no one denied that it made sense for all the armies opposing the French in Spain and Portugal to be under a unified command, but nevertheless, despite the acknowledged sense of the proposal, the junta was reluctant to grant Wellington any such powers. Spain’s armies, they protested, must be led by a Spaniard, and if no Spaniard had yet proved capable of winning a campaign against the French, then that was no matter; better a defeated Spaniard than a victorious foreigner.

‘The junta, my Lord,’ Hogan answered carefully, ‘will think this is the thin end of a very broad wedge. They’ll think this is a British plot to take over the Spanish armies piecemeal, and they’ll watch like hawks, my Lord, to see how you treat the Real Compañía Irlandesa.’

‘The hawk,’ Wellington said with a sour twist, ‘being Don Luis.’

‘Precisely, my Lord,’ Hogan said. General Don Luis Valverde was the junta’s official observer with the British and Portuguese armies and the man whose recommendation was needed if the Spanish were ever to appoint Wellington as their Generalisimo. It was an approval that was highly unlikely, for General Valverde was a man in whom all the junta’s great pride and none of its small sense was concentrated.

‘God damn it,’ Wellington said, thinking of Valverde. ‘Well, Hogan? You’re paid to advise me, so earn your damned pay.’

Hogan paused to collect his thoughts. ‘I fear we have to welcome Lord Kiely and his men,’ he said after a few seconds, ‘even while we distrust them, and so it seems to me, my Lord, that we must do our best to make them uncomfortable. So uncomfortable that they either go back to Madrid or else march down to Cadiz.’

‘We drive them out?’ Wellington said. ‘How?’

‘Partly, my Lord, by bivouacking them so close to the French that those guardsmen who wish to desert will find it easy. At the same time, my Lord, we say that we have put them in a place of danger as a compliment to their fighting reputation, despite which, my Lord, I think we must assume that the Real Compañía Irlandesa, while undoubtedly skilled at guarding palace gates, will prove less skilled at the more mundane task of fighting the French. We should therefore insist that they submit to a period of strict training under the supervision of someone who can be trusted to make their life a living misery.’

Wellington gave a grim smile. ‘Make these ceremonial soldiers stoop, eh? Make them chew on humble pie till it chokes them?’

‘Exactly, my Lord. I have no doubt that they expect to be treated with respect and even privilege, so we must disappoint them. We’ll have to give them a liaison officer, someone senior enough to smooth Lord Kiely’s feathers and allay General Valverde’s suspicions, but why not give them a drillmaster too? A tyrant, but someone shrewd enough to smoke out their secrets.’

Wellington smiled, then turned his horse back towards his aides. He knew exactly who Hogan had in mind. ‘I doubt our Lord Kiely will much like Mister Sharpe,’ the General said.

‘I cannot think they’ll take to each other, my Lord, no.’

‘Where is Sharpe?’

‘He should be on his way to Vilar Formoso today, my Lord. He’s an unhappy recruit to the Town Major’s staff.’

‘So he’ll be glad to be cumbered with Kiely instead then, won’t he? And who do we appoint as liaison officer?’

‘Any emollient fool will do for that post, my Lord.’

‘Very well, Hogan, I’ll find the fool and you arrange the rest.’ The General touched his heels to his horse’s flank. His aides, seeing the General ready to move, gathered their reins, then Wellington paused. ‘What does a man want with a common milking stool, Hogan?’

‘It keeps his arse dry during wet nights of sentry duty, my Lord.’

‘Clever thought, Hogan. Can’t think why I didn’t come up with the idea myself. Well done.’ Wellington wheeled his horse and spurred west away from the battle’s litter.

Hogan watched the General go, then grimaced. The French, he was sure, had wished trouble on him and now, with God’s good help, he would wish some evil back on them. He would welcome the Real Compañía Irlandesa with honeyed words and extravagant promises, then give the bastards Richard Sharpe.

The girl clung to Rifleman Perkins. She was hurt inside, she was bleeding and limping, but she had insisted on coming out of the hovel to watch the two Frenchmen die. Indeed she taunted the two men, spitting and screaming at them, then laughed as one of the two captives dropped to his knees and lifted his bound hands towards Sharpe. ‘He says he wasn’t raping the girl, sir,’ Harris translated.

‘So why were the bastard’s trousers round his ankles?’ Sharpe asked, then looked at his eight-man firing squad. Usually it was hard to find men willing to serve on firing squads, but there had been no difficulty this time. ‘Present!’ Sharpe called.

‘Non, Monsieur, je vous prie! Monsieur!’ the kneeling Frenchman called. Tears ran down his face.

Eight riflemen lined their sights on the two Frenchmen. The other captive spat his derision and kept his head high. He was a handsome man, though his face was bruised from Harris’s ministrations. The first man, realizing that his begging was to go unanswered, dropped his head and sobbed uncontrollably. ‘Maman,’ he called pathetically, ‘Maman!’ Brigadier General Loup, back in his fur-edged saddle, watched the executions from fifty yards away.

Sharpe knew he had no legal right to shoot prisoners. He knew he might even be endangering his career by this act, but then he thought of the small, blood-blackened bodies of the raped and murdered children. ‘Fire!’ he called.

The eight rifles snapped. Smoke gusted to form an acrid, filthy-smelling cloud that obscured the skeins of blood splashing high on the hovel’s stone wall as the two bodies were thrown hard back, then recoiled forward to flop onto the ground. One of the men twitched for a few seconds, then went still.

‘You’re a dead man, Sharpe!’ Loup shouted.

Sharpe raised his two fingers to the Brigadier, but did not bother to turn round. ‘The bloody Frogs can bury those two,’ he said of the executed prisoners, ‘but we’ll collapse the houses on the Spanish dead. They are Spanish, aren’t they?’ he asked Harris.

Harris nodded. ‘We’re just inside Spain, sir. Maybe a mile or two. That’s what the girl says.’

Sharpe looked at the girl. She was no older than Perkins, maybe sixteen, and had dank, dirty, long black hair, but clean her up, he thought, and she would be a pretty enough thing, and immediately Sharpe felt guilty for the thought. The girl was in pain. She had watched her family slaughtered, then had been used by God knows how many men. Now, with her rag-like clothes held tight about her thin body, she was staring intently at the two dead soldiers. She spat at them, then buried her head in Perkins’s shoulder. ‘She’ll have to come with us, Perkins,’ Sharpe said. ‘If she stays here she’ll be slaughtered by those bastards.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘So look after her, lad. Do you know her name?’

‘Miranda, sir.’

‘Look after Miranda then,’ Sharpe said, then he crossed to where Harper was organizing the men who would demolish the houses on top of the dead bodies. The smell of blood was as thick as the mass of flies buzzing inside the charnel houses. ‘The bastards will chase us,’ Sharpe said, nodding towards the lurking French.

‘They will too, sir,’ the Sergeant agreed.

‘So we’ll keep to the hill tops,’ Sharpe said. Cavalry could not get to the tops of steep hills, at least not in good order, and certainly not before their leaders had been picked off by Sharpe’s best marksmen.

Harper glanced at the two dead Frenchmen. ‘Were you supposed to do that, sir?’

‘You mean, am I allowed to execute prisoners of war under the King’s Regulations? No, of course I’m not. So don’t tell anyone.’

‘Not a word, sir. Never saw a thing, sir, and I’ll make sure the lads say the same.’

‘And one day,’ Sharpe said as he stared at the distant figure of Brigadier General Loup, ‘I’ll put him against a wall and shoot him.’

‘Amen,’ Harper said, ‘amen.’ He turned and looked at the French horse that was still picketed in the settlement. ‘What do we do with the beast?’

‘We can’t take it with us,’ Sharpe said. The hills were too steep, and he planned to keep to the rocky heights where dragoon horses could not follow. ‘But I’ll be damned before I give a serviceable cavalry horse back to the enemy.’ He cocked his rifle. ‘I hate to do it.’