“My congratulations again. Lieutenant?” Sharpe nodded. “And my sincere regrets. Bonne chancel` He mounted and cantered back towards the skyline.
Sharpe took stock of his new company. The survivors from the square had added some seventy men to his small command. Leroy was the senior officer, of course, but his wound forced him to leave the decisions to Sharpe. There were two more Lieutenants, Knowles from the Light Company and a man called John Berry. Berry was overweight with fleshy lips, a young man who petulantly demanded the date of Sharpe’s commission, and, on finding Sharpe was his senior, complained sulkily that his horse had been shot. Sharpe suspected that it was the only reason Berry had stayed with the colours.
The working parties took jackets from the dead, thread-ed the sleeves onto abandoned muskets, and made crude stretchers on which wounded men were carried to the bridge. Half the men worked on the piles round the spot where Sharpe and Harper had clambered across the blood and corpses to rescue the colour; the other half worked among the bodies that formed a fan shape ending at the entrance to the bridge. The French were swiftly finished and started rummaging through the blue-coated bodies of the Spanish. It was not mercy they were showing but a desire to loot the dead and the wounded. The British did the same, there was no stopping them; the spoils of a fight were the one reward of the survivors. The Riflemen, on Sharpe’s orders, collected abandoned muskets, dozens of them, and took ammunition pouches from the dead. If the French should attack then Sharpe planned to arm each man with three or four loaded guns and meet the horsemen with a continuous volley that would destroy the attackers. It would not bring back the lost colour. That had gone for ever or until in some unimaginable future the army might march into Paris and take back the trophy. As he moved among the carnage, directing the work, he doubted if the French really meant to attack again. The losses they would incur would hardly be worth the effort; perhaps instead they were hoping for his surrender. He helped Leroy to the bridge, propped him against the parapet, and cut away the white breeches. There was a bullet wound in the American’s thigh, dark and oozing, but the carbine ball had gone clean through, and, despite Leroy’s evident disgust, Sharpe summoned Harper to put maggots in the wound before binding it with a strip torn from the shirt of a dead man. Forrest was alive, stunned and bleeding, found where the colours had fallen with his sword still gripped in his hand. Sharpe propped him next to Leroy. It would be minutes before Forrest recovered himself, and Sharpe doubted whether the Major, who looked like a vicar, would want to take any more military action that day. He put the colour with the two wounded officers, propped its great yellow flag over the parapet as a symbol of defiance to the French, but what about the British? Twice he had walked gingerly to the edge of the broken roadway and hailed the far bank, but it was as if the men there inhabited a different world, went about their business oblivious of the carnage just a few hundred feet away. For the third time Sharpe walked out onto the bridge through the broken stones.
“Hello!” There could only be thirty minutes of the hour left. He cupped his hands again. “Hello!”
Hogan appeared, waved to him, and came across the other part of the broken bridge. It was reassuring to see the Engineer’s blue coat and cocked hat, but there was something different about the uniform. Sharpe could not place the oddity but it was there. He waved at the gap between them.
“What happened?”
Hogan spread his hands. “Not my doing. Simmerson lit the fuse.”
“For God’s sake, why?”
“Why do you think? He got frightened. Thought the French would swarm all over him. I’m sorry. I tried to stop him but I’m under arrest.” That was it! Hogan wore no sword. The Irishman grinned happily at Sharpe. “So are you, by the way.”