The Battalion finally took the road across the river well after sunrise, and if the previous days had been hot, it now seemed as if nature was intent on baking the landscape into one solid expanse of terracotta. The army crept across the vast, arid plain and stirred up a fine dust that hung in the air and lined the mouths and throats of the parched infantry. There was no trace of wind, just the dust, the heat and glare, the sweat that stung the eyes, and the endless sound of boots hitting the white road. In one village there was a pool that had been trampled into foul sticky mud by the cavalry, but even that was welcomed by the men, who had long before emptied their canteens and now skimmed the sour water from the surface of the glutinous mud.
There was not much else to be grateful for. The rest of the army shunned the new Battalion of Detachments as if the men were harbouring a repulsive disease. The loss of the colour had stained the reputation of the whole army, and when the Battalion bivouacked on the first night they were turned away from a capacious farm by a Colonel of Dragoons who wanted nothing to do with a Regiment which had failed so shamefully. The Battalion’s morale was not helped by a shortage of food. The herd of cattle which had left Portugal had long been slaughtered and eaten, the supplies promised by the Spanish had not appeared, and the men were hungry, sullen, and cowed by Simmerson’s brutality. He had found his own reasons for the loss of the colour, the behaviour of Sharpe and the actions of his own men, and if he could not punish the first it was well within his practised power to punish the second. Only the Light Company retained some vestiges of pride. The men were proud of their new Captain. Throughout the Battalion Sharpe was now believed to be a magic man, a lucky one, a man whom enemy swords and bullets could not touch. The Light Company believed, in the way of soldiers, that Sharpe would bring them luck in battle, would keep them alive, and pointed to the action at the bridge as proof. Sharpe’s Riflemen agreed, they had always known their officer was lucky, and they revelled in his new promotion. Sharpe had been embarrassed by their pleasure, blushed when they offered him drinks from hoarded bottles of Spanish brandy, and covered his confusion by pretending to have duties elsewhere. On the first night of the march from Plasencia he lay in a field, wrapped in his greatcoat, and thought of the boy who had fearfully joined the army sixteen years before. What would that terrified sixteen-year-old, running from justice, have thought if he knew he would one day be a Captain?
On the second night the Battalion was more fortunate. They bivouacked near another nameless village, and the woods were filled with soldiers hacking at branches to build the fires on which they could boil the tea-leaves they carried loose in their pockets. Provosts guarded the olive groves; nothing made the army so unpopular as the French habit of cutting down a village’s olive trees and denying them harvests for years to come, and Wellesley had issued strict orders that the olives were not to be touched. The officers of the South Essex-the Battalion still thought of itself as that-were billeted in the village inn. It was a large building, evidently a way station between Plasencia and Talavera, and behind it was a courtyard with big cypress trees beneath which were tables and benches. The three-sided yard opened onto a stream, and on the far bank the men of the Battalion made fires and beds in a grove of cork trees. There had been pigs in the grove, and as Sharpe stripped off his uniform to search the seams for lice he could smell pork cooking on the myriad small fires that showed through the foliage. Such looting was punishable by instant hanging, but nothing could stop it. The officers, the provosts, everyone was short of food, and the surreptitious offer of some stolen pork would ensure that the provosts would take no action.