CHAPTER 11

The boots of the Coldstream Guards rang on the flagstones, echoing hollowly in the darkness, fading down the steep street to be replaced by the leading companies of the 3rd Guards. They were followed by the first Battalion of the 61st, the second of the 83rd, and then by four full Battalions of the crack King’s German Legion. Sharpe, standing in a church porch, watched the Germans march past.

“They’re good troops, sir.”

Forrest, shivering despite a greatcoat, peered into the darkness. “What are they?”

“King’s German Legion.”

Forrest thrust his hands deeper into his pockets. “I’ve not seen them before.”

“You wouldn’t have, sir.” The Germans were a foreign corps of the army, and the law said they were allowed no nearer the British mainland than the Isle of Wight. Overhead the church clock struck three times. Three o’clock on the morning of Monday, 17th July, 1809, and the British army was leaving Plasencia. A company of the 60th went past, another German unit, with the incongruous title of the Royal American Rifles. Forrest saw Sharpe staring ruefully at the marching Riflemen with their green jackets and black belts.

“Homesick, Sharpe?”

Sharpe grinned in the darkness. “I’d rather it was the other Rifle Regiment, sir.” He yearned for the sanity of the 95th rather than the worsening suspicion and moroseness that was infecting Simmerson’s Battalion.

Forrest shook his head. “I’m sorry, Sharpe.”

“Don’t be, sir. I’m a Captain at last.”

Forrest ignored the statement. “He showed me the letter, you know.” Sharpe knew. Forrest kept apologising and had mentioned the letter twice already. Dereliction of duty, gross disobedience, even the word ‘treason’ had found its place into Simmerson’s scathing account of Sharpe’s actions at Valdelacasa; but none of that was surprising. What had disturbed Sharpe was Simmerson’s final request: that Sharpe be posted, as a Lieutenant, to a Battalion in the West Indies. No one ever purchased a commission in one of those Battalions, even though promotion was quicker there than anywhere else in the army, and Sharpe had even known men resign rather than go to the sun-drenched islands with their lazy garrison duty.

“It may not happen, Sharpe.” Forrest’s tone betrayed that he thought Sharpe’s fate was sealed.

“No, sir.” Not if I can help it, thought Sharpe, and he imagined an Eagle in his hands. Only an Eagle could save him from the islands where fever reduced a man’s life expectancy to less than a year, from the dreadful, sweating disease that made Simmerson’s request into a virtual death warrant unless Sharpe resigned his hard-won commission.

Almost every unit marched before them. Five Regiments of Dragoons and the Hussars of the King’s German Legion, over three thousand cavalry in all, followed by an army of mules carrying fodder for the precious horses. The cumbersome artillery with their guns, limbers, and portable forges added even more mules, more supplies, but mostly it was infantry who disturbed the quiet streets. Twenty-five Battalions of unglamorous infantry, with stained uniforms and worn boots, the men who had to stand and face the world’s best artillerymen and cavalry; and with them marched even more mules mixed up with the Battalions’ women and children.

The Battalion finally took the road across the river well after sunrise, and if the previous days had been hot, it now seemed as if nature was intent on baking the landscape into one solid expanse of terracotta. The army crept across the vast, arid plain and stirred up a fine dust that hung in the air and lined the mouths and throats of the parched infantry. There was no trace of wind, just the dust, the heat and glare, the sweat that stung the eyes, and the endless sound of boots hitting the white road. In one village there was a pool that had been trampled into foul sticky mud by the cavalry, but even that was welcomed by the men, who had long before emptied their canteens and now skimmed the sour water from the surface of the glutinous mud.

There was not much else to be grateful for. The rest of the army shunned the new Battalion of Detachments as if the men were harbouring a repulsive disease. The loss of the colour had stained the reputation of the whole army, and when the Battalion bivouacked on the first night they were turned away from a capacious farm by a Colonel of Dragoons who wanted nothing to do with a Regiment which had failed so shamefully. The Battalion’s morale was not helped by a shortage of food. The herd of cattle which had left Portugal had long been slaughtered and eaten, the supplies promised by the Spanish had not appeared, and the men were hungry, sullen, and cowed by Simmerson’s brutality. He had found his own reasons for the loss of the colour, the behaviour of Sharpe and the actions of his own men, and if he could not punish the first it was well within his practised power to punish the second. Only the Light Company retained some vestiges of pride. The men were proud of their new Captain. Throughout the Battalion Sharpe was now believed to be a magic man, a lucky one, a man whom enemy swords and bullets could not touch. The Light Company believed, in the way of soldiers, that Sharpe would bring them luck in battle, would keep them alive, and pointed to the action at the bridge as proof. Sharpe’s Riflemen agreed, they had always known their officer was lucky, and they revelled in his new promotion. Sharpe had been embarrassed by their pleasure, blushed when they offered him drinks from hoarded bottles of Spanish brandy, and covered his confusion by pretending to have duties elsewhere. On the first night of the march from Plasencia he lay in a field, wrapped in his greatcoat, and thought of the boy who had fearfully joined the army sixteen years before. What would that terrified sixteen-year-old, running from justice, have thought if he knew he would one day be a Captain?

On the second night the Battalion was more fortunate. They bivouacked near another nameless village, and the woods were filled with soldiers hacking at branches to build the fires on which they could boil the tea-leaves they carried loose in their pockets. Provosts guarded the olive groves; nothing made the army so unpopular as the French habit of cutting down a village’s olive trees and denying them harvests for years to come, and Wellesley had issued strict orders that the olives were not to be touched. The officers of the South Essex—the Battalion still thought of itself as that—were billeted in the village inn. It was a large building, evidently a way station between Plasencia and Talavera, and behind it was a courtyard with big cypress trees beneath which were tables and benches. The three-sided yard opened onto a stream, and on the far bank the men of the Battalion made fires and beds in a grove of cork trees. There had been pigs in the grove, and as Sharpe stripped off his uniform to search the seams for lice he could smell pork cooking on the myriad small fires that showed through the foliage. Such looting was punishable by instant hanging, but nothing could stop it. The officers, the provosts, everyone was short of food, and the surreptitious offer of some stolen pork would ensure that the provosts would take no action.

The courtyard gradually filled with officers from the dozen Battalions bivouacked in the village. The heat of the day mellowed into a warm, clear evening, and the stars came out like the camp fires of a limitless army seen far away. From the main room of the inn came the sound of music and cheering as the officers egged on the Spanish dancers to twitch their skirts higher.

Sharpe pushed his way through the crowded room and glimpsed Simmerson and his cronies sitting playing cards at a corner table. Gibbons was there, he was now permanently attached to Simmerson’s staff, and the unpleasant Lieutenant Berry. For a second Sharpe thought about the girl. He had seen her once or twice since the return from the bridge and felt a surge of jealousy. He pushed the thought away; the officers of the Battalion were split enough as it was. There were Simmerson’s supporters, who toadied to the Colonel and assured him that the loss of the colour had been no fault of his, and there were those who had publicly supported Sharpe. It was an uncomfortable situation but there was nothing to be done about it. He passed out of the room into the courtyard and found Forrest, Leroy, and a group of Subalterns sitting beneath one of the cypress trees. Forrest made room for him on the bench.