“Halt!” The 92nd stopped dead.
“Present!” It seemed that every man took a slight turn to his right as the muskets came up into their shoulders.
“Fire!” One volley. One blast of foul-stinking smoke.
“Fix bayonets!”
There was an odd silence in which Sharpe could hear the click of the bayonets being locked onto smoking muzzles.
“Forward!” The line moved into their own smoke, showed again beyond the ragged cloud. “Charge!”
The Scotsmen, released, gave a cheer and Sharpe saw defenders scrambling from trenches and fleeing south. The air was suddenly alive with bugles and whistles.
“Don’t let them go to earth!” Wellesley shouted at the 43rd’s commanding officer. There were more troops appearing in the west and a Welsh officer called a warning, but the newcomers were the Germans under General Linsingen. Cavalrymen broke away from Linsingen’s columns to start the pursuit.
“Bloody hell,” Kilmer said, “that was quick.”
“Rifles!” a voice shouted. “Companies in column. On the road!” The greenjackets, like every other man in Wellesley’s army, had been hoping they could go into the town where there was food, liquor and women, but only two companies went with the Highlanders to clear Koge’s streets while the rest were ordered south behind the scavenging cavalry. They marched for an hour, passing corpses left in the fields by the marauding horsemen and listening to the occasional crackle of faraway carbines. Some of the Danish dead were wearing wooden clogs. Scores of prisoners were being escorted northward. At noon the marching column approached a village and found they had at last caught up with the cavalry. The German horsemen had dismounted because a rearguard of the enemy was stubbornly defending a church and graveyard. The horsemen were firing carbines and pistols at too long a range and wasting their bullets against stone walls that were wreathed with smoke from Danish muskets.
“It’ll be a job for us,” Sergeant Filmer said, “just you wait.” And wait they did. The battalion’s senior officers wanted to gauge how many of the enemy were in the small village, and that took time. The riflemen lay in a field, smoking pipes or sleeping. Sharpe walked up and down. Every once in a while a musket would fire from the church or from one of the nearby houses, but the cavalry had pulled back out of range and the balls whistled uselessly overhead. Most incongruous of all was a group of civilian horsemen who were evidently watching the whole confrontation from a safe distance. They looked like the local gentry come to see a battle, though for much of the early afternoon they saw nothing, but then Sir Arthur Wellesley and his staff arrived and there was a flurry of shouts, whistle blasts and sergeants’ curses.
“Told you it would be our job,” Filmer said. He squinted at the church. “Why can’t they just bugger off? Silly bastards have lost, ain’t they?”
The greenjackets spread into a skirmish line then advanced until they were a hundred paces from the makeshift fortress. “Fire!” Dunnet shouted at his company and the rifle bullets cracked on stone. Sharpe watched the church, the closest cottages and graveyard wall and could see no answering musket smoke.
Dunnett must have seen the same. “Two Company! Forward! Forward!” Dunnett shouted and led his men to the churchyard wall, paused a second, then vaulted over. The riflemen followed, conscious that they were being watched by the civilian horsemen and by General Wellesley. Men crouched behind the gravestones, but it seemed the Danes had left. “Got bored waiting for us,” Filmer said.
“Into the street!” Dunnett called. The other companies were wrapping round the village, while the cavalry, mounted again, was following.
Sharpe walked round the side of the church to find himself in a small, neat village. A score of men were at the far end of the street, running away. “Encourage them!” Dunnett shouted and some of his riflemen ran to the center of the street, knelt and fired a farewell volley at the fugitives.
Sergeant Filmer took out his pipe. “Got blisters on my heel,” he said to Sharpe. “It’s Hopkins’s boots, see? They don’t fit.” He pushed tobacco into the clay bowl. “Kept their heads, the lads, didn’t they? Did bloody well, they-” He never finished the sentence but just pitched hard forward onto the dusty road where blood splashed on the broken white clay of his pipe.