The standard-bearer jumped out of the ranks to carry the precious Eagle down the Battalion to safety, but there was a crack, the man fell, and Sharpe heard Hagman’s customary `got him’. Then there was a new sound, more volleys, and the Dutch Battalion shook like a wounded animal as the South Essex arrived on their flank and began to pour in their volleys. Sharpe was faced by a crazed officer who swung at him with a sword, missed, and screamed in panic as Sharpe lunged with the point. A man in white ran out of the ranks to pick up the fallen Eagle but Sharpe was through the line as well and he kicked the man in the ribs, bent, and plucked the staff from the ground. There was a formless scream from the enemy, men lunged at him with bayonets and he felt a blow on the thigh, but Harper was there with the axe and so was Denny with his ridiculously slim sword.
Denny! Sharpe pushed the boy down, swung the sword to protect him, but a bayonet was in the Ensign’s chest and even as Sharpe smashed the sword down on the man’s head he felt Denny shudder and collapse. Sharpe screamed, swung the gilded copper Eagle at the enemy, watched the gold scar the air and force them back, screamed again, and jumped the bodies with his bloodied sword reaching for more. The Dutchmen fell back, appalled; the Eagle was coming at them and they retreated in the face of the two huge Riflemen who snarled at them, swung at them, who bled from a dozen cuts yet still came on. They were unkillable! And now there were volleys coming from the right, from the front, and the Dutchmen, who had fought so well for their French masters, had had enough. They ran, as the other French Battalions were running, and in the smoke of the Portina valley the scratch Battalions like the 48th, and the men of the Legion and the Guards who had reformed and come forward to fight again, marched forward on ground made slippery with blood and thrust with their bayonets and forced the massive French columns backwards. The enemy went, away from the dripping steel, backwards, in a scene that was like the most lurid imaginings of hell. Sharpe had never seen so many bodies, so much blood spilt on a field; even at Assaye which he had thought unrivalled in horror there had not been this much blood.
From the Medellin, through the smoke, Sir Henry watched the whole French army go backwards, blasted once more by British muskets, shattered and bleeding, a quarter of their number gone; defeated, broken by the line, by the musket that could be fired five times a minute on a good day, and by men who were not frightened by drums. And in his head Sir Henry composed a letter that would explain how his withdrawing the South Essex from the line was the key move that brought victory. Had not he always said that the British would win?
CHAPTER 24
It was still not over, but very nearly so. As the British troops in the centre of the field sank in exhausted lines by the edge of the discoloured Portina stream, they heard flurries of firing and the shrill tones of cavalry trumpets from the ground north of the Medellin. But nothing much happened; the 23rd Light Dragoons made a suicidal charge, the British six-pounders ground twelve French Battalion squares into horror, and then the French gave up. Silence fell on the field. The French were done, defeated, and the British had the victory and the field.
And with it the dead and wounded. There were more than thirteen thousand casualties but no-one knew that yet. They did not know that the French would not attack again, that King Joseph Bonaparte and the two French Marshals would ride away eastward through the night, so the exhausted and blackened victors stayed in the field. The wounded cried for water, for their mothers, for a bullet, for anything other than the pain and helplessness in the heat. And the horror was not done with them. The sun had burned relentlessly for days, the grass on the Medellin and in the valley was tinder dry, and from somewhere a flame began that rippled and spread and flared through the grass and burned wounded and dead alike. The smell of roasting flesh spread and hung like the lingering palls of smoke. The victors tried to move the wounded but it was too much, too soon, and the flames spread and the rescuers cursed and dropped beside the fouled Portina stream and slaked their thirst in its bloodied water.