Major Sharpe thanked him. He offered him tea.
Two hours later, when General Preston arrived with his five Battalions, puzzled because he had heard no musketry ahead of him, he found fifteen hundred French prisoners, three captured guns, and four wagons of supplies. The French muskets were piled on the roadway. The plunder they had brought from their garrisoned village was in the packs of Sharpe’s men. Not one of the South Essex, nor one of Frederickson’s Riflemen, was even wounded. The French had lost seven men, with another twenty-one wounded.
`Congratulations, Sharpe!’
`Thank you, sir.’
Officer after officer offered him congratulations. He shook them off. He explained that the French really had no choice, they could not have broken his position without guns, yet still the congratulations came until, shy with embarrassment, he walked back to the bridge.
He crossed the seething water and found the South Essex’s Quartermaster, a plump officer named Collip who had accompanied the half battalion on its night-time march.
Sharpe backed Collip into a cleft of the rocks. Sharpe’s face was grim as death. `You’re a lucky man, Mr Collip.’
`Yes, sir.’ Collip looked terrified. He had joined the South Essex only two months before.
`Tell me why you’re a lucky man, Mr Collip?’
Collip swallowed nervously. `There’ll be no punishment, sir?’
`There never would have been any punishment, Mr Collip.’
`No, sir?’
`Because it was my fault. I believed you when you said you could take the baggage off my hands. I was wrong. What are you?’
`Very sorry, sir.’
In the night Sharpe and his Captains had gone ahead with Frederickson’s Riflemen. He had gone ahead to show them the path they must take, and he had left Collip, with the Lieutenants, to bring the men on. He had gone back and discovered Collip at the edge of a deep ravine that had been crossed with harsh difficulty. Sharpe had led the Riflemen over, climbing down one steep bank, wading an ice-cold stream that was waist deep with the water of this wet spring, then scrambling up the far bank with dripping, freezing clothes.
When he returned for the five companies he had found failure waiting for him.
Mr Collip, Quartermaster, had decided to make the crossing easier for the redcoats. He had made a rope out of musket slings, a great loop that could be endlessly pulled over the chasm, and on the rope he had slung across the ravine all the mens’ weapons, packs, canteens, and haversacks. On the last pass the knotted slings had come undone and all the South Essex’s musket ammunition had gone down into the stream.
When the French approached the bridge only Sharpe’s Riflemen had ammunition. The French could have taken the bridge with one volley of musketry because Sharpe had nothing with which to oppose them.
`Never, Mr Collip, ever, separate a man from his weapons and ammunition. Do you promise me that?’
Collip nodded eagerly. `Yes, sir.’
`I think you owe me a bottle of something, Mr Collip.’
`Yes, sir. Of course, sir.’
`Good day, Mr Collip.’
Sharpe walked away. He smiled suddenly, perhaps because the clouds in the west had parted and there was a sudden shaft of red sunlight that glanced down to the scene of his victory. He looked for Patrick Harper, stood with his old Riflemen, and drank tea with them. `A good day’s work, lads.’
Harper laughed. `Did you tell the bastards we didn’t have any ammunition?’
`Always leave a man his pride, Patrick.’ Sharpe laughed. He had not laughed often since Christmas.
But now, with this first fight of the new campaign, he had survived the winter, had made his first victory of the spring, and he looked forward at last to a summer untrammelled by the griefs and tangles of the past. He was a soldier, he was marching to war, and the future looked bright.
CHAPTER 2
On a day of sunshine, when the martins were busy making their nests in the old masonry of Burgos Castle, Major Pierre Ducos stared down from the ramparts.
He was hatless. The small west wind lifted his black hair as he stared into the castle’s courtyard. He fidgeted with the earpieces of his spectacles, wincing as the curved wire chafed his sore skin.