“Yes, sir.” Harper thumbed back the cock of his rifle.

Sharpe looked at Palmer. “On my order we advance. Two files.”

“Yes, sir.”

“No shouting, no cheering.” French and Spanish troops cheered as they advanced, but the silence of a British attack was an eerie and unsettling thing. The Marines, white-faced, crouched low. One crossed himself, while another, his eyes shut, seemed to be praying silently.

The French officer kicked his horse into a trot. The man had a cigar which dribbled smoke, and his broad, open face looked cheerfully at the sodden, misty countryside. He glanced at the farm, bent to pluck his cloak loose of his stirrup leather where it had wrapped itself as he mounted, then saw the red coats and white crossbelts where the Marines were concealed in the hedge-shadow that was still white with frost.

He was so astonished that he kept coming, mouth opening to shout an inquiry, and when he was still some fifteen yards short of the hedgerow, Harper shot him.

The rifle bullet struck a cuirass hidden by the cloak. The ball, squarely hitting the steel, punctured the armour and deflected upwards, through the Frenchman’s throat and into his brain. Blood, bright as dawn, fountained from the man’s open mouth.

“In line!” Sharpe bellowed. “Advance!”

The horse, terrified, reared.

The Frenchman, still incongruously holding his cigar, toppled backwards in the saddle. He was dead, but his knees still gripped the horse’s flanks and, when the beast plunged its forefeet back down, the corpse nodded forward in a grotesque obeisance to the Marines who were scrambling from the ditch to form a double-line across the road.

“Forward!”

The horse turned, eyes showing white, and the dead Frenchman seemed to grin a bloodshot grin at Sharpe before the horse whirled the ghastly face away. The body slumped to the left, fell, but the man’s boot was fast caught in the stirrup and the corpse was dragged, bouncing, behind the bolting horse.

“Hold your fire!” Sharpe cautioned the Marines. He wanted no nervous man to waste a musket shot. He drew his sword. “Double!”

The remaining cavalry had stopped, appalled. The waggons, with their vast weight, still trundled forward. The infantry seemed oblivious of the ambush’s opening shot.

The Marines, their breath misting, ran up the road that was marked with great splashes of blood. Sharpe’s boot crushed the dead cavalry officer’s fallen cigar.

Two cavalrymen hauled carbines from their saddle holsters. “Halt!” Sharpe shouted.

He stood to one side of the road. “Front rank kneel!” That was not entirely necessary, but a kneeling rank always steadied raw troops and Sharpe knew that these Marines, for all their willingness, had small experience in land fighting. “Captain Palmer? Fire low, if you please.”

Palmer, a naval cutlass in his hand, seemed startled at Sharpe’s sudden courtesy in allowing him to give the order to fire. He cleared his throat, measured the distance to the enemy, saw how the handful of cavalry were already climb-ing into saddles and spreading on to the verges, and shouted the order. Tire!“

Fifty musket balls crashed out of fifty muzzles.

“Reload!” a sergeant shouted. Lieutenant Fytch, a heavy brass-hilted pistol in his right hand, jiggled up and down on the balls of his feet with excitement.

Harper had gone right to clear the filthy, yellowish cloud of musket smoke. He saw six horses down, legs kicking on the roadway’s stone. Two men had fallen, while two others crawled towards the beechwood. An ox from the leading waggon was bellowing with pain.

A carbine banged, then another. Far to the convoy’s rear the French infantry were hurrying down the verges, officers shouting. The ox-waggons, brake blocks squealing, were juddering to a clumsy halt.

Harper was looking for officers. He saw one, a cavalryman with drawn sabre, who was bellowing at his men to form line and charge.

It took Harper twenty seconds to reload the Baker Rifle. Another Marine volley hammered forward, this one doing less damage because the redcoats, unsighted by their musket smoke, fired blind. Harper had the rifle at his shoulder, the officer in his sights, and he pulled the trigger.

Black powder flared, flaming debris lashed his cheek, then he unslung the seven-barrelled gun and jumped sideways again. The officer was turning away, hand clasped to a shoulder, but a half dozen cavalrymen were coming forward, sabres drawn and spurs slashing back at thin flanks.

“Ware cavalry, sir!” Harper shouted to Palmer then, hearing the wooden ramrods of the Marines still rattling in barrels, he fired his volley gun.

The impact threw him backwards, but the noise of the seven-barrelled gun, like a small cannon, seemed to stun the tiny battlefield. Two cavalrymen were snatched from their saddles, a horse swivelled to throw its rider, and the cavalry’s small threat was finished. Then, beyond the wounded horses and the scatter of the day’s first dead, the leading two Companies of French infantry appeared in front of the waggons. Their muskets were tipped with bayonets.

Frederickson opened fire.

The volley, stinging from the flank, flayed into the first infantry ranks, and Frederickson was bellowing commands as though he held more men under orders. The French were glancing nervously towards the beechwood as Captain Palmer loosed his third volley.

The mist remnants were thick with smoke now. The stench of blood mingled with powder-stink.

Sharpe had joined Harper. Minver’s men, slower to deploy, were firing from the left.

“Stop loading!” Sharpe shouted at the Marines. “Front rank up! Fix swords!” The headache was forgotten now in the greater urgencies of life and death.

“Bayonets, sir,” Harper muttered. Only Green Jackets, who carried the sword bayonet, used the order to fix swords.

“Bayonets! Bayonets! Captain Palmer! I’ll trouble you to go forward!”

Sharpe could sense this whole battle now, could feel it in his instincts and he knew it was won. There was an exultation, an excitement, a feeling that no other experience on God’s earth could bring. It could bring death, too, and wounds so vile that a man would shudder in his sleep to dream of them, but war also gave this supreme feeling of imposing the will on an enemy and taking success in the face of disaster.

The French outnumbered Sharpe by three or four to one, but the French were dazed, disorganized, and shaken. Sharpe’s men were keyed to the fight, ready for it, and if he struck now, if he behaved as though he had already won, then this half stunned enemy would break.

Sharpe looked at the Marines. “Advance. At the double! Advance!”

The cavalry was gone, destroyed by the seven-barrelled gun and by Frederickson’s sharpshooters. Dead and wounded horses lay in the fields, dropped by rifle-fire, and their surviving riders had fled to the safety of the waggons that offered some small shelter from the bullets. In front of the waggons a rabble of infantry was being shaken into line and Sharpe’s Marines, coming from the smoke with muskets tipped with bayonets, charged them.

If the enemy held, Sharpe knew, then the Marines would be slaughtered.

If the enemy held, then each Marine would be faced with three or four bayonets.

It would only take one enemy officer, one of those blue-coated men on horseback, to survey Sharpe’s feeble charge and the Marines were done for.

“Charge!” Sharpe shouted it as though the volume of his voice alone would breed extra men to face down the enemy line that, uneven though it was, bristled with blades.

„Fire!“ Frederickson, good Frederickson, had understood all. He had formed his Company into ranks, taken them from the trees’ cover and now, at sixty yards range, poured a controlled volley of rifle fire into the infantry’s flank.

That volley, with Sharpe’s stumbling charge, broke the French. Just as scared Frenchmen began to see the paucity of the attacking force, so another enemy appeared and another voice was shouting charge, and then the sight of the bayonets, as it so often did, engendered panic.