A scream, prolonged, rising to a shout that would have chilled the horsemen of the devil, sounded beyond the enemy.

Sharpe knew that sound. “Patrick!”

Harper, the courtyard cleansed of the enemy, climbed the ramp that twitched with the wounded thrown down by the cannon. He led a charge of bayonets to the ramparts and the French, assailed on three sides, began to give.

Frenchmen, come to the ladders’ tops with fear, saw that their fear was justified. They forced their way back down, shouting to the men who waited behind that the enemy was imminent. One ladder, its rungs green, broke to tumble six men on to the sand.

Riflemen, sent by Frederickson on to the western rampart, cleared the water bastion and, leaning in its cannon embrasures, enfiladed the ladders. Captain Palmer led more Marines from the north.

“Charge!” Sharpe yelled it unnecessarily, for the victory was clear. The Marines had fought half the length of a rampart and now they carried their blades the rest of the way and the French, who had seen the redcoats snatch victory from defeat, took to the ladders or jumped into the ditch.

Harper had a lunge of his bayonet-tipped rifle deflected into an enemy’s thigh so kept the rifle swinging so that the brass-bound butt smashed the man’s jaw. He kicked him aside, ripped the blade into another man, and saw the rampart was empty of opponents. Marines were kneeling in embrasures to fire at the French conscripts. Captain Palmer, sword red with blood, was standing by the flagstaff that had somehow stood with its trophy of table-linen and uniform sleeves still flying.

“God save Ireland.” Harper, his huge chest heaving for breath, sat on a gunslide. His face, spattered with blood, looked up at Sharpe. “Jesus God.”

“Close.” Sharpe, breathing like a blown horse, glanced back to the gate, but no trouble threatened there. He looked at the strange musket in his hand and tossed it down. “God.” The French were fleeing north through the dunes. “Hold your fire! Hold your fire!”

A Rifleman threaded the dead bodies, stepping in blood, to bring Sharpe his sword.

“Thank you.” Sharpe took it. He wanted to smile, but his face seemed frozen in the grimace of fighting.

The fort had held. Blood trickled thick in the rampart’s gutters.

Briquet’s men, defeated, ran.

The larger attack, beaten to bloody ruin at the gate, was a shambles in retreat. If that attack had lasted five minutes longer, just five minutes, then the fort would have fallen. Sharpe knew that. He shuddered to think of it, then stared at the bloody, edge-nicked blade of his sword. “Jesus.”

Then the howitzer shells began to fall again.

CHAPTER 17

A man wept and could not be consoled. His right leg was gone at the thigh, taken by a howitzer shell. He wanted his mother, but he would die instead. The other wounded men, shivering in the foul tunnel that led to the makeshift surgery, wished he would stop his blathering. A Marine corporal, his shoulder mangled by a bayonet, read St John’s gospel aloud and men wished that he too would be silent.

The Marines who had volunteered as surgeons wore clothes that were soaked in blood. They cut, tied and sawed, helped by lightly wounded men who held the badly wounded down while legs or arms were crudely butchered off and arteries tied and raw flesh cauterized with fire because they did not know if all the blood vessels were safely blocked.

The French wounded, under the angry rain of howitzer shells, were carried to the gate, across the crude bridge of fascines, and left on the roadway among their dead colleagues. Ten Marines, protected by ten Riflemen, moved among the carnage beyond the gate and collected enemy ammunition. The French artillery colonel, seeing his own wounded countrymen brought outside the fort, wanted to cease fire, but Calvet snarled at the gunners to continue. The twelve-pounders, loaded with heavy canister, tried to flick the ammunition collectors away, but the Marines dodged among the bodies and hurled the enemy pouches back to the archway. Only when they had retreated did General Calvet order his guns to cease their fire so that Frenchmen, armed with white flags, could go forward and rescue the injured.

Within the fort a dozen unwounded French prisoners were herded down to the liquor store to join Captain Mayeron, Twenty dead Frenchmen were inside the ramparts. One of them, lying in the embers of the burned buildings, suddenly flipped in the air as the ammunition in his pouch exploded. There was a smell of roast meat to mingle with the stench of blood and powder. Men who saw the sudden jerk and flip of the body laughed because, they said, it was just like a frog. It was better to laugh than to weep.

“I’m sorry, sir,” Palmer said again.

Sharpe shook his head. “We got rid of them.”

“I should have been watching.” Palmer was determined to expose his blame.

“Yes, you should.” Sharpe had used a bucket of well-water to clean his sword. Marines and Riflemen pissed into weapons, blocked the muzzles, and sloshed the urine around to scour the powder deposits from the barrels.

No one spoke much. Most men, their weapons cleaned, just sat by the embrasures and stared into empty air. Buckets of drinking water were carried to the walls while smoke drifted from the smouldering fires in the courtyard. The fort was a place of ruin, blood, smoke, ash, and exhaustion, as if the defenders had suffered a defeat instead of winning a victory.

“If they’d got on to the northern wall,” Sharpe said to Palmer, “we’d be‘ surrendering our swords by now. You did well to stop them.” Sharpe rammed his sword home. He could not remember a fight so bitter or so close, not even at Badajoz. There the horror had been the cannons on the walls, not the infantrymen behind them. “And your Marines,” Sharpe said, “fought magnificently,”

“Thank you, sir.” Palmer nodded at Sharpe’s chest. “That must have hurt.”

Sharpe looked down. The small bolstered whistle, mounted on his leather crossbelt, was dented flat in its centre. He remembered the bang of the French musket and knew that had the ball been aimed a fraction either way it would have pierced his heart. The fight was a blur now, but later the individual moments would come to his half-waking dreams as nightmares. The memory of the moment when the French had driven him to the ground, the memory of the bullet thumping his chest, the sheer fear of that first glimpse of blue-uniformed men on his walls; those were the incidents that made a man shudder with delayed terror. Sharpe never recalled the moments of triumph after a battle, only those moments of near defeat.

Harper, a scrap of dirty paper in one hand, climbed the stone ramp. “Seventeen dead, sir. Including Lieutenant Fytch.”

Sharpe grimaced. “I thought he’d live.”

“Difficult with a bullet in your bellows.”

“Yes.” Poor Fytch, who was so very proud, Sharpe remembered, of his pistol. “Wounded?”

“At least thirty are bad, sir.” Harper’s voice was bleak.

A howitzer shell landed in the courtyard, bounced, and exploded. The shells seemed like small things after the fight. If the French had any sense, Sharpe thought, they would assault now. They should have men clawing and screaming at the walls, but perhaps the French were as shaken as he was.

Rifleman Taylor came up from the courtyard and spat tobacco juice over the ramparts. He jerked a thumb towards Harper’s cannon. “It’s buggered.”

“Buggered?” Sharpe asked.

“Snapped a capsquare.” The field-gun’s left trunnion had leaped out of its socket and broken the metal strap that should have held it in place. Doubtless Bampfylde’s fire had weakened the capsquare and now the twelve-pounder was as good as useless. Sharpe looked at Harper. “See what you can do, Patrick.”