He ran back to Harper, at the centre of the line, and retrieved his rifle. As the column was drummed closer the enemy Voltigeurs were plucking up courage and making short dashes towards the stream in an attempt to force the British skirmish line back. Sharpe could see half a dozen of his men lying dead or badly wounded, one of them in a green jacket, and he pointed at the man and raised his eyebrows to Harper.
,Pendleton, sir. Dead.”
Poor Pendleton, only seventeen, and so many pockets left to pick. The Voltigeurs were firing faster, not bother-ing to aim, just concentrating on saturating their enemy with musket fire, and Sharpe saw another man go down; Jedediah Horrell, whose new boots had given him blisters. It was time to retreat and Sharpe blew his whistle twice and watched as his men squeezed off a last shot before running a few paces back, kneeling, and loading again. He rammed a bullet into his rifle and slid the steel ramrod back into the slit stock. He looked for a target and found him in a man wearing the single stripe of a French Sergeant who was counting off Voltigeurs for the rush that would take them over the stream. Sharpe put the rifle to his shoulder, felt the satisfying click as the flat, ring-neck cock rode back on the mainspring, and pulled the trigger. The Sergeant spun round, hit in the shoulder, and turned to see who had fired. Harper grabbed Sharpe’s arm.
“That was a terrible shot. Now let’s get the hell out of here! They’ll want revenge for that!”
Sharpe grinned and sprinted back with the Sergeant towards the new skirmish line that was seventy paces behind the stream. The air was full of the `boom-boom, boom-boom, boomaboom, boomaboom, boom-boom, Vive L’Empereur’ and the columns were splashing through the stream, the whole plain smothered in French infantry marching beneath countless Eagles towards the thin defensive line that was still being shelled by the guns on the Cascajal. The British guns had a target they could not miss, and Sharpe watched as, time and time again, the solid shot lanced into the columns, crushing men by the dozen, but there were too many men and the files closed, the ranks stepped over the dead, and the columns came on. There was a cheer from the British skirmishers when a spherical case shot, Britain’s secret weapon developed by Colonel Shrapnel, successfully detonated right over one of the columns, and the musket balls, packed in the spherical case, splattered down onto the French and shredded half the ranks, but there were not enough guns to check the attack, and the French took the punishment and kept coming.
Then, for ten minutes, there was no time to watch anything but the Voltigeurs to the front, to do anything but run and fire, run and fire, to try and keep the French skirmishers pinned back against their column. The enemy seemed more numerous, the drumming louder, and the smoke from the muskets and rifles silted the air with an opaque curtain that surrounded Sharpe’s company and the white-coated Voltigeurs with their strange, guttural cries. Sharpe was taking the Light Company back towards the spot where the South Essex should have been, widen-ing the gap between his company and the German skirmishers. His company was down to less than sixty men and, at the moment, they were the only troops between the column and the empty plain at the rear of the British line. He had no chance of stopping the column, but as long as he could slow down the advance then there was a hope that the gap might be filled and the sacrifice of his men justified. Sharpe fought with the rifle until it was so fouled he could hardly push the ramrod into the barrel; the Riflemen had long stopped using the greased patch that surrounded the bullet and gripped the rifling instead; like Sharpe, they were ramming charge and naked ball into their guns as fast as they could to discourage the enemy. Some men were running back, urinating into their guns, and rejoining the battle. It was crude but the fastest method of cleaning the caked powder out of a fouled barrel on the battlefield.