Sharpe lunged, knew that the man would counterattack, so immediately stepped back. The blade duly came for him, skewered thin air, and Sharpe’s heavy blade cracked down on to the sword hilt, driving the weapon down, and Sharpe stepped forward, brought his knee up, then used the ugly, iron guard of his sword to punch the officer’s face. “Surrender, you crapaud bastard!”
The officer was on the grass, sword forgotten and hands clutched to his crotch. He was gasping for breath, moaning, and Sharpe decided that constituted a surrender. He kicked the man’s sword into the ditch, pulled the horse towards him, and hauled himself clumsily into the saddle. He wanted the extra height to see what happened on his small, well-chosen battlefield.
The French had run. A Company of them were being organized a quarter mile north, but they posed no immediate problem. A few survivors still clung to the waggons, some died from bayonet thrusts, but most were being taken prisoner. The waggons were otherwise abandoned and Sharpe guessed their drivers, with other fugitives, had fled into the beech woods. “Captain Palmer?”
Palmer seemed astonished to see Sharpe on horseback. “Sir?”
“One squad of men into the beech trees. Flush the damn place clear. Don’t be cautious about it! Scare the bastards!”
“Yes, sir.”
“Captain Frederickson!” Sharpe twisted the horse towards the far side of the road. “Keep that Company busy!” Sharpe pointed to the north. “Take half Minver’s men and press them, William, press them!”
There were picquets to be set on the flanks, the wounded to take into the shelter of the waggons, and the waggons themselves to explore. The two coaches, harness-horses shivering, were brought forward. One was empty, the other contained two women who sat, terrified, with smelling salts uncapped. ”Put a guard on them, Captain Palmer! Unharness the horses.“ Sharpe would leave the women where they were, but the horses, like the oxen, would be scattered into the meadows, Some men would have advised killing the animals to deprive the French of their future use, but Sharpe could not bear to give that order.
The oxen lumbered away, protesting under the prodding of the bayonets. One beast, wounded by a musket bullet in the small battle, was slaughtered and Sharpe watched two
Marines cutting up the steaming, warm flesh that would make a fine supper tonight.
Other Marines swarmed over the waggons, ripping the canvas covers away and slashing the tie-ropes. Barrels and boxes were uncovered and thrown to the road’s verges where the prisoners, shivering and terrified, sat under guard.
It had taken twenty-five minutes of savagery, fire and smoke and bluff and blood, and a French convoy, deep in France and guarded by a half Battalion of troops, was taken. Better still, and even more inexplicable, Sharpe’s headache was entirely gone.
CHAPTER 11
Lieutenant of Marines Fytch, to whom Sharpe had hardly spoken since they had marched inland, brought the civilians to Major Sharpe. The Lieutenant herded them at pistol-point until told by Sharpe to put his damned toy away. Fytch, his martial ardour offended by the Rifleman, gestured at the four stout and worried looking men. “They’re from the town, sir. Buggers want to surrender.”
The four men, all dressed in good woollen clothes, smiled nervously at the mounted officer. They each wore the white cockade which was the symbol of the exiled King Louis XVIII and thus an emblem of anti-Napoleonic sentiment. The sight of the cockade, and the evident willingness of the four men to embrace a British victory, were uncomfortable reminders to Sharpe of Bampfylde’s hopes. Perhaps Bordeaux, like this small town, was ripe for rebellion? He should, Sharpe knew, have interrogated a captured French officer by now, but his determination to obey Elphinstone’s privately given orders, had made him ignore the duty.
“Kindly ask them,” Sharpe said to Fytch who evidently had some French, “if they still wish to surrender when they understand that we will be leaving here this afternoon and may not be back for some months?”
The Mayor’s monarchical enthusiasm evaporated swiftly. He smiled, bowed, fingered the cockade nervously, and backed away. But he still wished to assure the English milord that anything the town could offer his men would be available. They had only to ask for Monsieur Calabord.
“Get rid of him,” Sharpe said. “Politely! And get those damned civilians off the bridge!” Townspeople, hearing the crackle of musketry, had come to view the battle. The one-legged toll-keeper was vainly trying to make them pay for the privilege of their grandstand view.
Frederickson’s rifles snapped from the north as he harried the broken infantry away from the scene of their defeat. Two waggoners and four cavalrymen, hands held high, were being prodded from the beech trees towards the disconsolate prisoners. Marines were piling captured muskets in a pile.
The luckiest Marines were rifling the waggons. Much of the plunder was useless to a looter. There were vats of yellow and black paint that the French mixed to colour their gun-carriages, and which now the Marines spilled on to the road to mingle with the blood and ox-dung. Two of the waggons held nothing but engineer’s supplies. There were coils of three inch white-cable, sap forks, cross-cut saws, bench-hammers, chalk-lines, scrapers, felling-axes, augers, and barrels of Hambro‘ line. There were spare cartouches for the infantry, each bag filled with a wooden block drilled to hold cartridges. Other waggons held drag-chains, crooked-sponges, relievers, bricoles, wad-hooks, sabot-bracers, and hand-spikes. There were garlands for the stacking of round-shot and even band instruments including a Jingling Johnny that a proud Marine paraded about the stripped waggons and shook so that the tiny bells mounted on the wooden frame made a strangely festive sound in the bleak, cold day. Another man banged the clash-pans until Sharpe curtly ordered him to drop the bloody cymbals.
On one waggon there were crates of tinned food. The French had recently invented the process and it was a miracle to Sharpe how such food stayed fresh over weeks or even months. Bayonets prised open lids, and jellied chickens and joints of lamb were hacked into portions so that men’s faces, already blackened by powder smoke, were now smeared with grease. Sharpe accepted a leg of chicken and found it delicious. He ordered two dozen of the tins put aside for Frederickson’s Riflemen.
And in the centre two waggons, strapped down by three inch cable and covered by a double wrapping of tarpaulin, was powder. Barrels of black powder that were destined for the mortars at Bayonne, and coils of quick-match to be cut into shell-fuses. “Lieutenant Minver!”
“Sir?”
“These waggons! Drag them to the bridge. I want the powder packed in the roadway.” It would not be a scientifically controlled explosion, as Hogan so long ago had taught Sharpe to devise, but it might seriously weaken the new stone structure with its proud, carved urns, and the purpose of Sharpe’s incursion was to slow the French supplies. A blown bridge, demanding a detour through an old town, would cause a temper-fraying delay. “And pack all the other waggonloads round it!”
That would take at least two hours. In the meantime captured spades dug graves in the cold soil of the water meadows. A French cavalryman, wearing the odd plaited pigtails at his temples, the cadenettes, was buried first. French prisoners did the work for the twenty-two dead Frenchmen, while the Marines dug graves for their three dead.
“Congratulations, sir,” Palmer said.
“Your men did well, Captain.” Sharpe meant it. He had been impressed by the steadiness of the Marines, and by their swiftness to reload muskets. Those qualities won battles, and battles changed history.