Sharpe crouched by a fire and wiped the blade free of the sticky blood with a dead Frenchman’s jacket. It was the time for collecting the dead and counting the living. He wanted Gibbons to worry about Berry, to feel fear in the night, and he felt the elation again of the killing stroke. From the town came the bells of midnight, and he thought briefly of the girl lying in the candlelight and he wondered if she thought of him. Harper squatted beside him, his face black with powder smoke, and held out a bottle of spirits.
“Get some sleep, sir. You need it.” Harper grinned briefly. “We have a promise to keep tomorrow.”
Sharpe lifted the bottle towards the Sergeant as if in a toast. “A promise and a half, Sergeant. A promise and a half.”
CHAPTER 20
It was a short, bad night. After the repulse of the French the army rescued the wounded and, in the thin firelight, searched and piled the dead that could be found. Battal-ions that had thought themselves safe in an imaginary second line now posted sentries, and the brief night was broken by frequent rattles of musketry as the nervous picquets imagined fresh enemy columns in the dark. The bugles sounded at two in the morning, the fires were restored to life, and hungry men shivered round the flames and listened to the distant French bugles rousing the enemy. At half past three, when a silvery grey light touched the flanks of the Medellin, Berry’s body was found and carried to the fire, where Simmerson and his officers sipped scalding tea. Gibbons, appalled at the great wound disfiguring his friend’s throat, looked at Sharpe with pale and suspicious eyes. Sharpe looked back and smiled, saw the suspicion, and then Gibbons turned abruptly away and shouted for his servant to clear up the blankets. Simmerson flicked a glance round the officers. “He died a brave death, gentlemen, a brave death.”
They all muttered the right words, more concerned with hunger and what was to come than with the death of a fat Lieutenant, and watched bleakly as the body was stripped of its valuables before being piled with the scores of dead that would be buried before the sun rose high and made them offensive. No-one thought it odd that Berry’s body had been found so far from the other dead. The events of the night had been muddled; there were stories that the Germans below the Medellin had fought a running skirmish with another column and groups of French fugitives had become lost in the darkness and wandered in the British lines, and the shivering officers assumed Berry had met such a group.
By four o’clock the army was in position. Hill’s Brigades were on the Medellin and the Brigade Majors lined the Battalions back from the hill crest so that they would be invisible to the French gunners. The South Essex were on the flank of the hill overlooking the Germans and the Guards who would defend the flat plain between the Medellin and the Pajar. Sharpe stared at the town, half hidden in mist, and wondered what was happening to Josefina. He was impatient for the battle to start, to take his Light Company away from Simmerson and up to the skirmish line that would form in the mist-shrouded Portina valley. He was surprised that Simmerson had said nothing to the Battalion. Instead the Colonel sat on his grey horse and stared moodily at the myriad smoke trails from the French camp that rose and mingled in front of the rising sun. He ignored Sharpe; he always did, as though the Rifleman was a small nuisance that would be brushed from his life when his letter was received in London. Gibbons sat beside Simmerson and it suddenly occurred to Sharpe that the two men were frightened. In front of them the solitary colour drooped from its staff, beaded with morning moisture, a lonely reminder of the Battalion’s disgrace. Simmerson did not know war, and he was staring at the mist along the Portina, wondering what would emerge from the whiteness to challenge his Battal-ion. It was not just Sharpe’s future that depended on this battle. If the Battalion did badly then it would stay a Battalion of Detachments and dwindle away under the onslaught of disease and death until it would simply disappear from the army list; the Battalion that never was. Simmerson would survive. He would sail home to his I country estate, take his seat in Parliament, become an armchair expert on the war, but wherever soldiers met, the names of Simmerson and the South Essex would be scorned. Sharpe grinned to himself; ironically, on this day, Simmerson needed the Riflemen far more than Sharpe needed the Colonel. At last the signal came and the Light Companies went forward, spreading themselves into a thin screen of skirmishers to become the first men to meet the attack. As he walked down the slope towards the mist Sharpe stared at the Cascajal Hill that was topped with French guns, almost wheel to wheel, the barrels pointing at the Medellin. Somewhere behind the guns the French Battalions would be parading into the huge columns that would be thrown at the British line; behind them there would be cavalry waiting to pour through the opening: more than fifty thousand Frenchmen preparing to punish the British for their temerity in sending Wellesley’s small army into their Empire. The Light Company walked into the mist, into the private world where skirmisher would fight Voltigeur, and Sharpe thrust away the thoughts of defeat. It was unthinkable that Wellesley could lose, that the army might be shattered and sent reeling back to the sea, that Sharpe’s problems, Simmerson’s problems, the fate of the South Essex, all. would become drowned in the disastrous flood of defeat. Harper ran up to him and nodded cheerfully as he pulled the muzzle stopper from his rifle.