“I can give wine to the lads?” Harper suggested bleakly.

“Do that.” Sharpe walked around the ramparts. French dead, stripped of their equipment, were being heaved on to the sand by the channel. If any of his men had shown the energy Sharpe would have ordered shallow graves dug, but even their own dead lay unburied. Two Marines, their faces still masked with powder, wearily hauled an abandoned French ladder through an embrasure and carried it down to the gate where it would be added to the new barricade.

Sharpe threaded the south-west citadel, wondering how he had ever come through it at the full charge. The French gunners, advised that the wounded had been cleared from the fort’s apron, opened fire again. The jets of flame stabbed from the watermill and the twelve-pound shots crashed into the wall to fray the defenders’ already shredded nerves. Sharpe found Frederickson. “Thank you, William.”

“For doing my duty?” Sweat had trickled through the powder on Frederickson’s face to make odd brown rivulets on his sun-baked skin.

“I’m leaving you in command,” Sharpe said, “while I go to see the wounded.”

“I’d have that attended to.” Frederickson gestured at Sharpe’s left thigh where the blood started by a French bayonet had crusted on to the overalls.

“It doesn’t hurt.” Sharpe raised his voice so that every man about the gate could hear him. “Well done!” Two Marines, carrying a body, grinned at him. The body, Sharpe saw, was young Moore, the boy from Devon, who had been shot in the forehead and who must have died instantly.

Sharpe felt a thickening in his throat and the prick of tears at his eyes, but he swore instead. Moore was luckier than the wounded who, in the foul stone gallery, waited for the surgeon’s butchery. Sharpe went to give small, bleak comfort to men who were beyond consolation and whose future was nothing but pain and poverty.

The shells still fell, the blood stank, and Sharpe’s men waited for the next assault.

The remnants of Captain Briquet’s force returned to the village. Their faces were bleak, exhausted and bloodied. A wounded man, using his musket as a crutch, collapsed on the sand. A drummer boy, who had survived the attack on the main gate and who was not yet twelve years old, wept because his father, a sergeant, had died with Captain Briquet on the fort’s western wall. The survivors of Briquet’s force told stories of blades and blood, of faces screaming hatred, of a Rifleman swinging an axe, of a cannon blasting men into bloody scraps on the ramp, of soldiers gouging and cutting and dying.

Surgeons used sea-water to wash lime from the eyes of defeated men. No man had been blinded; for reflex had made attackers close their stinging eyes and stumble away from the white cloud, but the use of the quicklime infuriated General Calvet. “They’re savages! Savages! Worse than the Russians!”

The senior French officers were gathered in the hovel that was Calvet’s command post. They stared at the map, avoiding each other’s eyes, and were glad when Calvet, seeking a target for his anger, chose Pierre Ducos.

„Tell me,“ Calvet said to Ducos, ”exactly why men died today?“

“They died,” Ducos was quite unmoved by the general’s fury, “for a victory that France needs.”

“Victory over what?” Calvet asked scathingly. “A huddle of goddamn refugees who use quicklime?” He stared belligerently at Ducos. “We agree their plans for a landing are foiled, so why don’t I let this Sharpe moulder behind his walls?” No one in the room thought it odd that a general should seek permission from a major, not when the major was Pierre Ducos with his odd power over the Emperor’s affections.

“Because,” Ducos said, “if Sharpe escapes, he will take evidence with him that would betray the Comte de Maquerre.”

“Then warn de Maquerre!” Calvet snapped. “Why should men die here for lack of a letter?” Ducos did not reply, implying that Calvet trespassed on forbidden territory. The general banged a big, splayed hand on the map in a gesture of irritated frustration. “We should be down south, thumping Wellington, not pissing about with a bloody major! I’ll leave a Battalion here to pen the bugger in, then we can go south where we’re needed.“

Pierre Ducos smiled thinly. The general spoke good military sense, but Pierre Ducos wanted Richard Sharpe in his power, and thus Ducos now played his final, winning card. “Can you suggest, General, the manner in which I explain to the Emperor how a British major, with less than two hundred men, defeated the great Calvet?”

Those icy words stung. For a moment it seemed as if Ducos had said too much, but then Calvet gave a shrug of surrender. “I hope you’re right, Ducos. I hope the goddamns aren’t pouring men ashore at the Adour while we’re pissing about.” He growled with impotent menace, then slapped a hand on the map. “So if it must be done,” Calvet said, “then how do we prise this bastard out from his walls? I need a breach!”

“You can have one, sir.” To everyone’s surprise it was Commandant Lassan, returned safely from the failed northern attack, who spoke, and who now told Calvet that he had written no less, than twelve times in the last eight years to the Minister of Marine, responsible for the coastal forts, complaining that the Teste de Buch’s main gateway was in danger of collapse. The stones had shifted so much that the gate pintles were a full inch out of true, and cracks had appeared in the guardroom walls. The Ministry, after the fashion of government departments, had done nothing. “The whole gateway can be collapsed,” Lassan said.

General Calvet believed him. He ordered the twelve-pounders to concentrate their fire on the archway; artillery fire to make an avalanche of stone that would spill into the ditch and provide a slope up which attackers could scramble. “That’s where our main attack goes in the morning.” Calvet took a lump of charcoal and scrawled a thick arrow on the fortress plan. The arrow pointed at the gateway. “I shall lead that attack,” Calvet growled, “while you,” he gestured at an infantry colonel, “will make a demonstration here.” He scored another arrow that aimed itself at the northern wall. “That’ll split their defenders.” Calvet stared at his broad arrow and imagined the archway tumbling its stones into the ditch to make a bridge; he saw his men flooding over that barricade and taking their bayonets to this so-called ‘elite’ of Riflemen and Marines. “We’ll parade the prisoners through Bordeaux to show what happens to scum who think they can defy France.”

“I insist,” Ducos said, “that Major Sharpe is handed over to my department.”

“You can have the bastard.” Calvet looked back at the map and, with a sudden gesture, extended the larger arrow straight into the courtyard. “Tell the men that the enemy is low on ammunition. Tell them we killed half the bastards today, tell them there’s women and wine inside. Tell them there’s a medal each for the first ten men inside.” Calvet looked at his scribbled arrow and remembered the sheer volume of fire that the goddamns had poured into his column. He remembered men screaming, clawing at their eyes, and he remembered the trails of blood across the fort’s esplanade.

His men would remember just as clearly, and defeated men would be nervous about a renewed attack. Calvet needed something else, some new factor to change the second assault, and, with sudden energy, he scribbled marks in the sand-dunes by the channel. “If we put two twelves there,” he asked the artillery colonel, “they can rake the breach till the last minute?”

The artillery colonel was already doubtful of his guns’ ability to bring down an archway in just a few hours. Even huge siege guns, twice the size of his twelve-pounders, could take weeks to shatter a well-built rampart, and now Calvet wanted to take two of the guns away from the breaching battery. “And even if I moved two guns, sir, how do we protect the crews from the Riflemen?” Calvet wanted the two guns placed within two hundred yards of the ramparts.