And behind them, behind the spiked gun, were the piled skulls, the stuff of ghosts, and the soldiers shivered and watched the British sentries on the ramparts who were outlined by the fires in the Castle courtyard, and then another gust of wind would snatch the white ghost-like snow into waving plumes that went westward to settle again in the pass.
Sledge-hammers sounded above them, the crashes muffled by the intervening stones. The gunners would have their embrasures in the southern wall.
One of the Frenchmen smoked a short pipe, his back comfortable against the skulls, though the others had seen him lean there and had sketched the sign of the cross on their greatcoats.
‘Steam.’ One of them said.
`What?’
‘I’ve been thinking about it. Steam, that’s what they were. Steam.’
They had been talking of the strange weapon that had torn into the column. One of the men spat into the darkness. ‘Steam.’ He was scornful.
‘Have you ever seen a steam engine?’ Asked the first man.
‘No.’
‘I saw one in Rouen. Bloody great noise! Just like this morning! Fire, smoke, noise. Has to be steam!’
A new conscript who had hardly spoken all night plucked up courage to say something. ‘My father says the future is with steam.’
The first man looked at him, dubious of this unmoustached support. He decided it was welcome. ‘There you are then! I tell you! I saw one in a mill. A bloody great room with bloody great beams going up and down, and smoke everywhere! Like hell it was, like hell!’ He shook his head, intimating that he had seen things that they had not seen, horrors of which they could have no comprehension, though in truth his glimpse had been brief at best, and incomprehensible as well. ‘Your father’s right, son. Steam! It’ll be everywhere.’
Another man laughed. ‘You’ll have a steam musket, Jean.’
‘And why not?’ The first man had been carried away by his vision of the future. ‘Steam infantry. I tell you! It’ll happen! You saw what happened this morning.’
‘I could do with a steam whore right now.’
There was a crash outside, a cheer, and a section of the wall fell into the snow. The man with the pipe blew smoke that was snatched into the pass. ‘They should block this hole up.’
‘They should march us back to bloody Salamanca.’
There were footsteps in the cellar behind and Jean peered between the skulls. ‘Officer.’
They swore quietly, pulled their uniforms straight, and adopted poses that suggested an unceasing watch on the snow outside. The Lieutenant stopped at the gun. ‘Anything?’
‘No, sir. All quiet. Reckon they’re tucked up in bed.’
The officer fingered the filed nail in the touch-hole. ‘It’ll soon be over, lads.’
‘That’s what they told them, sir.’ The man with the pipe jerked its stem at the skulls of the nuns.
The Lieutenant looked at the skulls. ‘Bit eerie, aren’t they?’
‘We don’t mind, sir.
‘Well, it’ll soon be over. We’ve got four howitzers upstairs. There’ll be four other guns as well. They’re just putting them into place. Another hour and we’ll open fire.’
‘Then what, sir?’Jean asked.
‘Then nothing!’ He grinned at them. ‘We guard the guns and watch the attack.’
‘Really!’
‘Truly.’
The soldiers grinned. Someone else would be doing the fighting and the dying. The Lieutenant peered through the great hole and watched the snow smoke off the crest of the pass. ‘It’ll soon be over.’
The hour passed slowly. Overhead the gunners prepared, the tools of their trade, their rippers and wormheads, rammers and swabbers, buckets and portfires, spikes and fuses. The howitzers, obscenely squat guns, pointed into the air and the gunners fussed about them. The range was short and the officers were debating how much powder to put into each barrel and the gunners waited with their long-handled scoops to feed the skyward muzzles that would lob the six inch shells over the valley. The hornbeam had long been taken away as fuel for the fires that burned in the lower courtyard.
To the east there was the faintest lightening of a strip of sky over the horizon, a false dawn that was seen by few except the Riflemen on the watchtower hill, and for the four sentries alone again in the room of skulls and bones the night was as dark as ever. It seemed to them that the dawn would never come, that they were trapped eternally in this cold place, this dark place, where the skulls of the dead reached to the ceiling, and they shivered, watched the night above the snow, and hoped for dawn. One of them looked suddenly alarmed. ‘What was that?’