Bernard Cornwell – 1812 10 Sharpe’s Enemy

Sharpe waited. He was alone with Nairn, but he had seen much coming and going as he entered the Headquarters. The rumour, whatever its truth, had stirred Frenada into activity. Sharpe was part of it, or else Nairn would not have sent for him, but the Rifleman was content to wait until he was told. The moment had evidently come, for Nairn waved Sharpe into a chair by the small fireplace and took the chair opposite. ‘I have a problem, Major Sharpe. In brief it is this. I have a nasty mess on my doorstep, a mess I must clear up, but I don’t have the troops to do it.’ He held up a hand tostop an interruption. ‘Oh yes, I know. I have a whole bloody army, but that’s under Beresford’s control.’ Beresford was in nominal command of the Army while Wellington politicked in the south. ‘Beresford’s up north, with his Portuguese, and I don’t have time to write a `please, sir’ note to him. If I ask for help from one of the Divisions then every General inside ten miles is going to want a finger in this pie. I’m in charge of this Headquarters. My job is to pass the papers and make sure the cooks don’t piss in the soup. However, I do have you, and I do have the so-called garrison battalion of Frenada, and if you’re willing then we might put the lid on this peculiarly nasty pot of snakes.’

‘Willing, sir?’

‘You will be a volunteer, Sharpe. That’s an order.’ He grinned. ‘Tell me what you know of Pot-au-Feu. Marshal Pot-au-Feu.’

Sharpe shook his head. ‘Nothing.’

‘An army of deserters?’

That did ring faint bells. Sharpe remembered a night on the retreat from Burgos, a night when the wind flung rain at the roofless barn where four hundred wet, miserable and hungry soldiers had sheltered. There had been talk there of a haven for soldiers, an army of deserters who were defying the French and the English, but Sharpe had dismissed the stories. They were like other rumours that went through the army. He frowned. ‘Is that true?’

Nairn nodded. ‘Yes.’ He told the story that he had gleaned that morning from Hogan’s papers, from the priest of Adrados, and from a Partisan who had brought the priest to Frenada. It was a story so incredible that Sharpe, at times, stopped Nairn simply to ask for confirmation. Some of the wildest rumours, it seemed, turned out to be fact.

For a year now, perhaps a few months longer, there had been an organized band of deserters, calling themselves an army, living in the mountains of southern Galicia. Their leader was a Frenchman whose real name was unknown, an ex-Sergeant who now styled himself as Marshal Pot-au-Feu. Nairn grinned. ‘Stockpot, I suppose that translates. There’s a story that he was once a cook.’ Under Pot-au-Feu the `army’ had prospered. They lived in territory that was unimportant to the French Marshals or to Wellington, they subsisted by terrorizing the countryside, taking what they wanted, and their numbers grew as deserters from every army in the Peninsula heard of their existence. French, British, Portuguese and Spanish, all were in Pot-au-Feu’s ranks.

‘How many, sir?’

Nairn shrugged. ‘We don’t know. Numbers vary between four hundred and two thousand. I’d guess six or seven hundred.’

Sharpe raised his eyebrows. That could be a formidable force. ‘Why have they come south, sir?’

‘That’s a question.’ Nairn blew his nose into the huge wrinkled handkerchief. ‘It seems that the Frogs are being pretty lively in Galicia. I don’t know, bloody rumour again, but there’s a whisper that they might try a winter attack on Braganza then on to Oporto. I don’t believe it for a second, but there’s a school of thought which maintains that Napoleon is in need of some victory, any victory, after the Russian catastrophe. If they capture the north of Portugal then they can trumpet that as some kind of achievement.’ Nairn shrugged. ‘I can’t think why, but we’re told to take the possibility seriously and certainly there’s a lot of Frog cavalry lumbering about in Galicia and our belief is that they drove our friend Pot-au-Feu towards us. And he promptly sends his British deserters to attack a village called Adrados where they murder a small Spanish garrison and go on to make themselves free with all the ladies. Now half of bloody Spain thinks that the Protestant English are reverting to the Wars of Religion. That, Sharpe, is the story in its rancid little nutshell.’

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