The linstocks were lit. In each of the great guns, more than a hundred of them, the priming tubes had pierced the powder bags and waited for the fire.

King Joseph rode alongside his Marshal. Joseph was terrified of his younger brother’s displeasure, and the terror showed on his face. If he lost this battle he would be a king no more, and to win it he had to see Wellington beaten. Joseph had witnessed the British army fight at Talavera and he had seen how their infantry had snatched victory from certain defeat.

But Marshal Jourdan had seen more. He had fought as a private in the French army that went to help the American Revolutionaries. He had seen the British defeated, and he knew he would see it again. He beamed at the King, the Emperor’s brother. ‘You have a victory, sir. You have a victory!’

‘You’re sure?’

‘Look!’ He waved his hand at the empty north, then to the troops that spread out before his guns. ‘You have a victory!’

It was the last moment that men could look at the field and see what happened, the last moment before the smoke of the guns hid the struggle. Jourdan drew his sabre, the steel bright as the sun, and swept it down.

The guns began.

The defile where the Great Road entered Vitoria’s plain was crowded. Troops waited to be ordered forward. Wounded, from the Heights of Puebla, had been brought to the road. Surgeons, their aprons already gleaming red, tried to work their saws and blades as men crowded the narrow verges waiting to go towards the gunfire that had suddenly started.

Men joked fabout the sound of the French guns. They joked because they feared them.

Young drummer boys, their voices unbroken, watched the veterans and tried to take comfort from their calmness. Young officers, sitting on expensive horses, wondered whether glory was worth this nervousness. Staff officers, their horses’ flanks already white with sweat, galloped along the columns looking for Generals and Colonels. The Colours, untouched in the defile by any wind, hung heavy on staffs. The first Battalions were already on the plain. The first wounded were already dragging themselves back towards the surgeons.

Men broke from the ranks to go down to the river and fill their canteens with water. Some had prudently saved their ration of wine or rum. It was better, they said, to go into battle with alcohol inside.

An Irish regiment, their red coats faded and patched to show their long service in Spain, knelt to a chaplain of a Spanish regiment who blessed them, made the sign of the cross above them, while their women prayed anxiously behind. Their Colonel, a Scottish Presbyterian, sat in his saddle and read the twenty-third psalm.

Some Highland troops were climbing the Puebla Heights, going to take over from the Spaniards. The sound of the pipes, wild as madness, came to the defile mixed with the roar of the French guns.

Men asked each other what was happening, and no one knew. They waited, feeling the warmth coming into the day, and they listened to the battle sound and prayed that they would live to hear the sound of victory. They prayed to be spared the surgeons.

At the rear of the column, where the women and children waited for the day’s lottery of widowhood to be drawn, and where the local villagers stared wide-eyed at the strange, huge tribe that was packed into their valley, two horsemen reined in. One of the two men, a tall, dark-haired, scarred man shouted at a group of soldiers’ women who sat at the river’s edge. ‘Which Division is this?’

A woman who was suckling a baby looked up at the Rifleman who had shouted the question. ‘Second.’

‘Where’s the Fifth?’

‘Christ knows.’

Which answer, Sharpe reflected, he deserved. He spurred Carbine forward. ‘Lieutenant! Lieutenant!’

A Lieutenant of infantry turned. He saw a tall, suntanned man on a horse. The man wore a tattered uniform of the 95th Rifles. At his hip was a sword, which seemed to suggest that the unshaven man was an officer. ‘Sir?’ The Lieutenant sounded tentative.

‘Where’s Wellington?’

‘I think he’s over the river.’

‘Fifth Division?’

‘On the left, sir. I think.’

‘Are you the right?’

‘I think so, sir.’ The Lieutenant sounded dubious.

Sharpe turned his horse. The defile was jammed with men and he could hear the sound of guns that told him this road led only to the battlefield.

He did not care about Wellington. Now was not the time to find the General and speak of the treaty that La Marquesa had betrayed to him in Burgos. He had written down everything that she had told him, and he would make sure that the letter reached Hogan: But now Sharpe had caught up with the army on a day of battle, he was a soldier, and vindicating his name could wait until the fighting was done. He looked at Angel, mounted on^an ugly horse that they had stolen in Pancorvo. ‘Come on!’

He led the boy back to the village where a bridge crossed to the western bank. He would find the South Essex, he would come back from the dead, and he would fight.

CHAPTER 21

The French guns fired all morning. Their sound rattled the windows in the city. It was like a thunder that had no ending.

The smoke grew like a cloud. The women who sat on the tiers of seats above the city wall grumbled because their view was obscured. They could not see the enemy. They could only see the great cloud that grew and spread and drifted southwards with the breeze. Some of them strolled on the ramparts, flirting with the officers of the town guard. Others, their parasols raised against the sun, dozed on the benches.

The gunners fired, aimed and fired again. They dragged the guns forward after each shot, levered the trails round with handspikes, and pushed the ammunition into the hot muzzles that steamed from the sponging out. Men were sent to the small streams of the plain for buckets of water to soak the sponges. The roads from the city were loud with the galloping limbers that brought new ammunition to feed the guns that hammered at the killing ground.

The French infantry sat on the ridges, slicing sausage and bread, drinking the raw, red wine that filled their canteens. The guns were doing their work. Good luck to the guns.

The guns bucked, their wheels jarring from the ground with each shot. As each gun thudded down the gunner ran forward to put his leather-covered thumb over the smoking touch-hole. With the touch-hole covered if was safe to ram the wet sponge down the barrel and kill the last red sparks before the next powder charge was pushed home. Without the touch-hole blocked the rush of air forced by the plunging sponge could flare pockets of unexploded powder that had been known to erupt with enough force to blast the sponge back and impale its handle through the body of a gunner.

The guns had names embossed on the barrels beneath the proudly wreathed ‘N’s. Egalite fired next to Liberte, while Fortune and Defi were being sponged out.

The gunners sweated and heaved and grinned; listened to their officers call the aim and they knew they were filling the western plain with death. They could not see their enemy, the smoke hid all to the west, but each shot lanced a spear of flame into the smoke that would twitch with the canister’s passing and then the gunners would reload, would haul the gun back into a true aim, then stand back as the chief gunner rammed his spike through the touch-hole into the canvas bag of powder, as the second man pushed the quill of fine powder into the hole made by the spike. The quill carried the fire down tp the powder from the linstock held by the chief gunner.

All gunners were deaf, they said. They were the kings of the battlefield and they never heard the applause.

Sometimes, rarely, a battery would pause. The smoke would clear slowly from its front and the officers would peer at their target. The British had been stopped.