He stood at the midpoint of the rampart and stared south.

He felt all the old symptoms of fear. His heart thumped in his ribcage, his belly seemed to be sinking, his throat was dry, he felt a muscle trembling in his thigh that he could not still, and sweat, though it was a cold day, pricked at his skin. He told himself he should not move from the spot until he had counted to twenty, then decided that a brave man would count to sixty.

He did this so his men would see him, not because he thought it safe. A roundshot glanced off the cordon of the parapet, and Sharpe knew the twelve-pounders, barrels heated, were firing higher. The mortars, he noticed, were both less frequent and less accurate and he guessed the wooden beds had shifted in the sandy soil. He reached fifty in his count, decided he was deliberately hurrying the numbers, so made himself start again from forty.

“Sir! Mr Sharpe!” It was Moore. The boy was pointing south-east, inland, and Sharpe, staring at that direction, saw the mass of men who had been drawn up behind the village and who now, drums beating and colours held high, emerged into plain view. The mortars, Sharpe realized with surprise, had stopped firing. He looked towards the field guns and those weapons, all eight of them, were silent. Their gunsmoke drifted over the meadows. He noticed that there was a touch of spring in the air and something beautiful in the way the sun glittered on the water.

Sharpe turned. “Captain Frederickson! To your places! All of you!” He blew his whistle, watched as men debouched at a run from the stone tunnels, then turned back to see what his enemy might do.

The assault was coming.

General Calvet, a flitch of fat bacon in one hand and a watch in the other, grinned. “You think they’ll have manned the ramparts by now, Favier?”

“I’m sure, sir.”

“Give the signal, then. I’ll go back to lunch.”

Favier nodded to the trumpeter, who made the call, and the infantry immediately sat down.

The gunners, who had been hammering quoins into the shaken howitzer beds, leaped back as the portfires were lit and as the barrels thudded down again.

“Lie down!” Sharpe was furious. He had fallen for a trick like a raw officer fresh out of school and he had brought his men into the open, just as the French had wanted him to do, and now the shells were wobbling at the top of their arc, spiralling smoke, then were plunging towards the fort. “Lie down!”

The field guns fired, the shells exploded, and the nightmare of fire and banging and skull-splitting shrieks and flame and whistling fragments began again.

A solid shot, striking an embrasure, drove stone scraps into a man’s eyes. A shell, landing on the western wall between two Marines, took the belly of one and left the other unscathed but screaming.

“They did that neatly,” Frederickson said.

“And I fell for it,” Sharpe said with bitter self-digust.

Frederickson peered through an embrasure. The.French infantry lay by the millstream as though on a holiday. “They’ll attack the gate when they do come.”

“I imagine so.”

“Confident bastards, letting us know.” Both officers ducked as a roundshot shivered dust and dry mortar from the stones above them. The great masonry block had been shifted a full inch by the blow.

Sharpe stared at the far rampart. “Lieutenant Minver!”

“Sir?”

“Get some bread and cold meat sent round!”

Minver, somewhat aghast at being ordered to brave the courtyard where most of the shells exploded, nodded. Sharpe would leave his men exposed for he had no way of telling just when the attack of massed infantry would start forward. They would come from the south-east and the howitzers could keep firing until the French were actually at the ramparts. The field guns, firing very close to the line of advance, would have to cease fire long before the attack struck home.

Sharpe wanted them to come. He wanted to hear the Old Trousers, the drummers’ pas de charge, he wanted to hear the screams of attacking men, the banging of muskets, for that would be preferable to this helpless waiting. He suddenly wanted to echo young Moore and swear uselessly at the gunners who sweated and fired and swabbed and fired again.

Harper, waiting on the western wall with Sharpe’s picked squad, went to the screaming Marine and slapped him into silence. “And shovel that mess over the side, lad.” He gestured at the spilt guts of the dead man. “You don’t want flies here, do you?”

“Flies in winter?”

“Don’t be cheeky, lad. Do it.”

One of the Marines with Harper seemed untroubled by the shelling. He drew a stone along the fore-edge of a cutlass, doing it again and again in search of the perfect cutting blade. Another, leaning against the abandoned timber slide of one of Lassan’s guns, read a small book with evident fascination. From time to time he looked up, saw that his services were not yet required, and went back to the book. Captain Palmer, staring north and east from his allotted station, thought he saw movement in the dunes but when he examined the place with his spyglass he saw only sand and grass.

For a half hour more the bombardment continued. Screaming shells blasted apart in black ruin, flames roared from the rafters that collapsed in a shower of sparks into the ruins of the offices, and iron shards spat dirty death into the corners of the garrison. Men shivered. They stared at stone an inch before their face, they cursed the French, their officers, their luck, the whole rotten world that had brought them to this eye of a manmade hell, until at last, at long, long last, the trumpets sounded thin through the thunder’s noise and the far cheer betrayed that a mass of men moved towards the attack and the men in the fort, men in red and green and men with drawn and dirtied faces, prepared themselves to fight.

CHAPTER 16

Two Marines from Sharpe’s squad, judging the intervals between the fall of howitzer shells, darted around the courtyard to retrieve those shells that had not exploded. There were six. The fuses of two had failed to ignite in the howitzer barrels, two had half burned-fuses, while two had simply failed to explode. The four with usable fuses were carried to the bastion above the gatehouse where Lieutenant Fytch licked nervous lips and fingered the hilt of his pistol.

Bread and cold meat had been distributed, but most men found it hard to chew or swallow the food. As the French column came closer and the threat of its drums louder, the bread was abandoned beside the upturned shakoes that served as cartridge holders.

A shell, landing in the flooded ditch, fountained water on to an embrasure. A man laughed nervously. A sparrow, made bold by winter hunger, pecked at one of the discarded lumps of bread then flew off.

Marine Moore, for the twentieth time, lifted the pan lid to check that his musket was primed. For the twentieth time it was.

The French drums sounded clearly inside the fort, punctuated only by the fire of the big guns. Between the rattled passages of drumbeats there was a pause filled by hundreds of voices. „Vive I’Empereur!“

“Funny thing to hear for the first time,” Fytch said.

“I’ve heard it more times than I can remember,” Sharpe said truthfully, “and we beat the buggers every time.” He looked at the column, a great mass of men that advanced implacably over the sandy esplanade. It had been French columns like this, so huge and seemingly so irresistible, that had terrified half the nations of Europe into surrender, but it was also a formation that was designed to contain half-trained troops who could, therefore, be scared and bloodied into defeat. French skirmishers were deploying on the glacis and one of them put a bullet within six inches of Sharpe’s face. A rifle cracked and Sharpe saw the Frenchman slide back behind his mist of musket smoke.