The other aides arrived, faces gleaming from their razors. Sharpe had still not shaved, and he had a sudden irrational conviction that he would survive the day if he did not shave, then another equally strong impulse said that he would only live if he did shave, and he felt the reptilian squirm of fear in his belly. He stared up at the long, long ridge that, just like the British bivouacs, was topped by a shifting layer of smoke. The smoke was thick enough to suggest the large numbers of Frenchmen who would be defending the high ground this day. Sharpe thought of Jane and suddenly longed for the Dorset house with its implicit promise of a nursery. He was about to ask whether any mail had arrived when a light flashed from the ridge top and Sharpe knew it was the sun reflecting from a telescope as an enemy officer gazed down at the British lines. The fear stirred in Sharpe. He was tempted to take some of Nairn’s rum, but resisted.
The waiting abraded the fear. The first Spanish, Portuguese and British brigades had marched long before dawn, their long lines uncoiling from the encampment in a sluggishly macabre motion, but Nairn’s brigade would be one of the last to leave the lines. They could only wait, pretending confidence, as the minutes wore on. Nairn inspected his battalions and tossed gruff encouragement to the soldiers. Some of the Highlanders sang psalms, but their tunes were so dirge-like that Sharpe went out of earshot. He had decided that his survival lay in not shaving.
It took another half hour before the orders came from Division and Nairn at last could order his men forward. Taplow’s battalion led, and the Highlanders marched at the rear. The brigade followed the other battalions who were already marching to the ridge’s southern slopes. Sharpe, mounted on his mare Sycorax, could see the
Spanish Divisions that waited at the ridge’s northern end. Today those Spaniards had the place of honour, for they would comprise the major attack up the ridge’s spine. They had asked for the honour. As they attacked, so the British and Portuguese, under Marshal Beresford, would assault the ridge’s southern end to split the French defences. Other British troops were ringed about the city to make threatening feints designed to stop Marshal Soult concentrating his army on the ridge.
The French, secure on their heights, could see all that Wellington planned. There could be no deception this day, no sleight of arms to blind the enemy and cheat him. This would be work, hard work, work for the bayonet and the bullet, work for the infantry.
The southward march was not easy for the ground was soft. Nairn’s brigade, among the last in Beresford’s long column, found the tracks churned into a morass. At first that clinging mud was their only problem, but as their route angled ever closer to the ridge the brigade came within range of the French gunners. Nairn ordered his men to march through the marshy fields to the west of the tracks, but still the roundshot slashed into his battalion columns. The British artillery tried to reply, but they were shooting uphill at enemy batteries well dug in behind thick emplacements.
“Close up, you scum!” Lieutenant-Colonel Taplow bellowed at his leading company after a cannonball had crashed through a file to leave three men bloody and twitching on the soaking ground. “Leave them there!” he shouted at two men who stooped to help the victims. “Leave them, I say, or I’ll have you flogged!” At the rear of Taplow’s fusiliers a band played, their music made ragged by their stumbling progress over the tussocky soft ground. Drummer boys were ordered to attend to the three men, but two were already dead and the third had not long to live. The battalion surgeon finished the man with a quick knife cut, then, shrugging, wiped his bloody hands on his grey breeches.
The French artillery pumped smoke from the ridge crest. Sharpe, staring eastwards, could sometimes see the trace of a dark line in the sky and he knew he watched a cannonball at the top of its arcing flight, and he also knew that such a pencil line was only visible in the sky when the ball was coming straight at the observer. At those moments he felt a temptation to spur Sycorax onwards, feigning some urgent duty, but he restrained himself in case any man should think him cowardly. Instead he rode steadily, flinching inwardly, and hid his relief as the balls missed. One roundshot thumped into the mud just ahead of Sycorax, making the mare rear frantically. Somehow Sharpe kept his feet in the stirrups and his arse on the saddle as the gobbets of wet mud fountained about him. The mare was not properly trained to battle, but she was a good steady horse. She had been a gift from Jane, and that thought gave Sharpe a sentimental longing to see his wife. He wondered if her mail had become lost, because no letter had yet arrived, then a cannon-ball went just over his shako to decapitate a redcoat marching to Sharpe’s left and he forgot his wife in the sudden surge of fear.
“Close up!” a Sergeant shouted. “Close up!” It was the litany of battle and the only obituary of the common soldier.
“You’re used to this, I suppose?” A Lieutenant, one of Nairn’s junior aides, spurred alongside Sharpe. Ahead of them a man’s entrails were being trodden into the mud, but either the Lieutenant did not notice or did not recognize what he saw.
“I don’t think you ever get used to it,” Sharpe said, though it was not true. One did get used to it, but that did not help the fear. The Lieutenant, who was new to the war, was clearly terrified, though he was trying hard not to show it. “It’s better,” Sharpe said truthfully, “once you can fire back. It’s much less frightening then.”
“Bless you, sir, I’m not frightened.”
“I am.” Sharpe grinned, then looked to his right and saw that Frederickson’s men were so far unscathed. Frederickson had taken his Riflemen closer to the enemy, which had been a shrewd move for the Greenjackets made a small and seemingly negligible target compared to the long and cumbersome column of redcoats. The French were firing over the Riflemen’s heads.
A cavalry officer galloped past Frederickson’s men towards the head of Beresford’s column. Sharpe recognized the man as one of Wellington’s aides, and assumed from his haste that he carried an urgent message. A clue to the message came when the ridge’s northern end suddenly exploded with cannon fire. Sharpe twisted in his saddle and saw that the French had unmasked a dozen batteries that were hammering their missiles down the hill at the attacking Spaniards.
The Lieutenant frowned. “I thought we were supposed to attack at the same time as the Dagoes, sir?”
“We were.”
God only knew what had gone wrong, but gone wrong it had. The Spaniards, instead of waiting until Beresford’s diversionary attack was in position to the south, had precipitately charged up the ridge’s northern slopes. Their bright uniforms and gaudy colours made a brave show, but it was a gallant display being eviscerated by the concentrated fire of the deadly twelve-pounders.
“Halt! Halt!” Divisional officers were galloping back down Beresford’s column. “Face right! Face right!”
Battalion officers and sergeants took up the cry and the great column halted and clumsily turned to face the bleak, steep slope at the ridge’s centre.
Nairn, who had been riding at the head of his brigade, spurred back. “Column of half companies!” he ordered. It seemed that Marshal Beresford must be contemplating an immediate assault on the ridge. Certainly, if Beresford was to divert attention from the Spanish attack then he could not wait till he reached the gentler slopes at the ridge’s southern end, but would be forced to launch his eleven thousand men on a desperate uphill scramble against the French entrenchments.
The French batteries, seeing the British and Portuguese battalions shake into their attack columns, kept firing. “Lie down!” Nairn shouted. “Lie down!”