He watched the French gunners. They were unhur-ried, there was no need for haste, and they glanced constantly at the British force, which marched convenient-ly towards their gun. It was pointing directly at Sharpe. He could see the dirty green-painted carriage, the dulled brass barrel, and the blackened muzzle. He had watched the efficient gun crew lever the three-quarters of a ton until the four and a half feet of barrel pointed straight down the road. Now a blue-coated gunner was putting the serge bag with its one and a half pounds of black powder in the cannon. A second man rammed it down, and Sharpe saw a third man lean over the touch-hole and thrust down with a spike so that the serge bag was pierced and the powder could be set off by the fuse. Another gunner was walking forward with the metal canister. It was only seconds now before the gun would be ready to fire. He lifted his rifle into the air and pulled the trigger.
“Now!”
His one hundred and seventy men began to run, a shambling lung-bursting run in their broken shoes. Each soldier carried three loaded muskets, two slung on their shoulders, one carried in their hands. They kept roughly aligned; if the cavalry moved they could close ranks in seconds, form the impenetrable wall of bayonets. The French gunners heard the rifle shot, paused to watch their enemy break into their cumbrous run, and grinned at the futility of the men who thought they could charge a field gun. Then everything changed.
In the twenty minutes after the visit of the Chasseur Captain the British had continued to collect their wound-ed. Sharpe was certain the French had noticed nothing odd about the stream of men who went to and from the bodies that lay thickly around the spot where he and Harper had saved the Regimental Colour. In those twenty minutes Sharpe had hidden thirty men among the dead, ten Riflemen who lay crumpled in borrowed red jackets, and twenty men of the South Essex. Each Rifleman carried two rifles, one borrowed from a comrade, and every redcoat lay with three loaded muskets. The French had ignored them. They unlimbered the gun and lined it on target and had taken no notice of the scattered bodies that lay thickly just a hundred paces to their right. The time for looting would be later; first the gunners would destroy the presumptuous English who were half running, half walk-ing, towards them.
Harper sweated in his borrowed jacket. It was much too small for him and he had ripped the seams in both armpits, but even so he could feel the sweat trickling down to the small of his back. The red jackets were essential. The French had become accustomed to the sight of the dead men and would have been certain to notice if suddenly ten bodies in green uniforms had appeared among the corpses. Harper’s biggest fear had been that the French might wander over to loot the bodies, but they had been ignored. He watched Sharpe march towards them, still two hundred and fifty yards away, and heard Lieutenant Knowles sigh with relief as Sharpe lifted his rifle in the air. Knowles was nominally in charge of the thirty men but Harper was satisfied the inexperienced Lieutenant would do nothing without first talking to him, and he suspected Sharpe had told Knowles, in no uncertain way, to leave the decisions to Harper.
The sound of the shot came flatly up the field. With relief Harper stretched his muscles and knelt upwards. “Take your time, lads, make the shots tell.”
To hurry would destroy their purpose. The Riflemen aimed deliberately, let the cramp ease in their arms; the first shots would be the most important. Hagman was first, Harper had expected that, and he watched approvingly as the Cheshire poacher grunted over his back sight and pulled the trigger. The gunner who was on the point of inserting the fuse spun away from the barrel and fell. In the next two seconds another eight bullets slaughtered three more of the French gun crew; the four survivors scrambled desperately for the scanty cover provided by the trail and the spokes of the gun’s wheels. The gun could not be fired now. The canister was still not loaded, Harper could see it lying beside a dead gunner who had fallen by the brass muzzle, and any man who dared to try to thrust the projectile into the barrel would be sure to be cut down by the deadly rifles. The French had stopped using rifles on the battlefield; they had abandoned them because they were too slow to load, but these gunners were learning that even the slow rifle had its advantages over the speedy musket, which could never hope to be accurate at a hundred paces.