The bullets, flickering out of the smoke cloud and clanging on the black-muzzled barrels of the French guns, were the first warning the battery had of their danger. ‘Spikes!’

The gunners desperately slewed the guns round, the men heaving on the handspikes as yet more bullets came from the north. ‘Canister!’ the officer shouted, and then a bullet span him round, he clapped a hand to his shoulder, and suddenly his men were running because the Riflemen were charging up the slope. ‘Load it!’

It was too late. The Riflemen, their weapons tipped with the long sword-bayonets, were in the battery. The blades stabbed at the few Frenchmen who tried to swing rammers at the British Riflemen. Some gunners crawled under the barrels of their guns, waiting for a prudent moment to surrender.

Behind the Rifles, spreading in the wheat with their Colours overhead, came the lines of red-jacketed men.

‘Back! Back!’ A French gunner Colonel, seeing his northern battery taken, shouted for the limbers and horses. Men hurled ready ammunition into chests, picked up trails, the trace chains were linked on, the horses were whipped, and the French guns went thundering and rocking and bouncing back towards the second line.

‘Ready!’ Now the French infantry, who had thought the guns had done their task, had to come forward to blunt the British attack. ‘Present! Fire!’ Over the fields that had been flayed with canister came the sound of musketry, the clash of infantry.

The Marquess of Wellington opened his watch case. He had his lodgement on the plain, he had driven the first French line into confusion, but now, he knew, there would be a pause.

Prisoners were being herded back, the wounded were being carried to the surgeons. In the smoke of the battlefield Colonels and Generals were looking for landmarks, seeking out units on their flanks, waiting for orders. The attack had worked, but now the attack had to be re-aligned. The men who had suffered under the French guns must be relieved, new Battalions marched onto the plain to link up with the northern attacks.

Wellington crossed the river. He spurred forward to take ommand of the next attack, the one that would drive the French army due east, towards Vitoria, and he wondered what was happening to the small finger of his plan’s hand. That finger was the Fifth Division. It marched to a village called Gamarra Mayor, and if it could take that village, cross the river, and cut the Great Road, then it would turn French defeat into a rout. There, Wellington knew, the battle would be hardest, and to that place, as the sun rose to its zenith, Sharpe rode.

CHAPTER 23

Lieutenant Colonel Leroy fiddled with his watch. ‘God damn them!’

No one spoke.

To their right, three miles away, the other columns had struck over the river. The battle there was a roiling cloud of musket and cannon smoke.

The Fifth Division waited.

Three Battalions, the South Essex one of them, would head the attack on Gamarra Mayor. Ahead of Leroy’s men was a gentle slope that led down to the village, beyond which was a stone bridge that crossed the river. Beyond the river was the Great Road. If the Division could cut the road, then the French army was cut off from France.

He snapped open the lid of his watch again. ‘What’s keeping the bloody man?’ Leroy wanted the General of Division to order the attack quickly.

The French were in Gamarra Mayor. This was the only river crossing they had garrisoned, and they had loopholed the houses, barricaded the alleys, and Leroy knew this would be grim work. Three years before, on the Portuguese frontier, he had fought at Fuentes d’Onoro and he remembered the horrors of fighting in small, tight streets.

‘Christ on his cross!’ Across the river, where the lane from the bridge rose to the Great Road, he could see French guns unlimbering. The attack would now be harder. The guns were just high enough to fire over the village and, even if the British took Gamarra Mayor, the guns would make the bridge murderous with canister.

‘Sir?’ Ensign Bascable gestured to the right. A staff officer had ridden to the centre Battalion of the attack.

‘About god-damned time.’ Leroy rode forward, his face, scarred dreadfully at Badajoz, looking grimmer than ever. ‘Mr d’Alembord?’

‘Sir?’

‘Skirmish line out!’

‘Sir!’

Then the Colonel of the centre Battalion waved his hat, the band of that Battalion struck into a jauntier tune, and the Light Companies were going forward. Leroy looked at his watch. It was one o’clock. He closed the watch’s lid, thrust it into a pocket, and shouted the orders that would march the South Essex’s line towards the enemy. Leroy was taking them into battle for the first time.

The Colours had been unsheathed. The silk looked crumpled after its long confinement in the leather tubes, but the Ensigns shook the flags out so that the tassels danced and the great emblems spread out above their heads. On — the right was the King’s Colour, a huge Union Flag that was embroidered with the badge of the South Essex at its centre. The badge showed a chained eagle, commemorating Sharpe and Harper’s capture of the French standard at Talavera.

On the left was the Regimental Colour, a yellow flag that listed the South Essex’s battle honours about the badge at its centre and with the Union flag sewn into its upper corner. Both flags were holed, both scorched, both had been in battle before, arid it was to the flags, more than to King or country, that a man gave his love and allegiance. Around the two Ensigns who carried the standards were the Sergeants, halberd-blades shining in the sun. If the French wanted to take the flags they would have to get past the men with the long, savage, axe-headed spears.

The Battalion marched with bayonets fixed and muskets loaded. They trampled the wheat flat.

Ahead of them, spread out like beaters, was the Light Company. Sergeant Patrick Harper shouted at them to spread out more. He had waited all morning for an officer to come with black hair and a scar on his left cheek, but there had been no sign of Sharpe. Yet Harper refused to give up hope. He stubbornly insisted that Sharpe was alive, that he would come today, that Sharpe would never let the South Essex fight without being present. If Sharpe had to> come out of the grave, he would come.

Captain d’Alembord listened to the thunder of guns to his right. British guns were on the plain now, firing from the Arinez Hill at the second French line. D’Alembord, who was at his first great battle, thought the sound was more terrible than any he had ever heard. He knew that soon the six French guns across the river would open fire. It seemed to Peter d’Alembord, as he marched ever closer to the silent, barricaded village, that each of the French guns was pointing directly at him. He glanced at Harper, taking comfort from the apparent stolidity of the huge Irishman.

Then the guns disappeared in smoke.

Lieutenant Colonel Leroy saw a pencil line go up and down in the sky and knew that a roundshot was coming towards him. He kept his horse going straight, held his breath, and watched with relief as the ball thumped into the grass ahead of the Battalion, bounced overhead and rolled behind them.

The shots came over the village and plunged onto the meadow that the British Battalions crossed. The first volley did no damage, except for the ball that had bounced over Leroy’s head. It bounced again, once more, and rolled towards the South Essex’s bandsmen who waited at the rear for the wounded. A drummer boy, seeing the ball roll slow as a cricket ball that might not make the boundary, ran to check it with his foot.

‘Stop!’ A Sergeant shouted at the boy, but he was too late. The drummer put his foot in the ball’s path, it seemed to roll so innocuously, so slowly, and, as the boy grinned, it took his foot off in blood and pain.