A woman who was suckling a baby looked up at the Rifleman who had shouted the question. `Second.’
`Where’s the Fifth?’
`Christ knows.’
Which answer, Sharpe reflected, he deserved. He spurred Carbine forward. `Lieutenant! Lieutenant!’
A Lieutenant of infantry turned. He saw a tall, suntanned man on a horse. The man wore a tattered uniform of the 95th Rifles. At his hip was a sword, which seemed to suggest that the unshaven man was an officer. `Sir?’ The Lieutenant sounded tentative.
`Where’s Wellington?’
`I think he’s over the river.’
`Fifth Division?’
`On the left, sir. I think.’
`Are you the right?’
`I think so, sir.’ The Lieutenant sounded dubious.
Sharpe turned his horse. The defile was jammed with men and he could hear the sound of guns that told him this road led only to the battlefield.
He did not care about Wellington. Now was not the time to find the General and speak of the treaty that La Marquesa had betrayed to him in Burgos. He had written down everything that she had told him, and he would make sure that the letter reached Hogan: But now Sharpe had caught up with the army on a day of battle, he was a soldier, and vindicating his name could wait until the fighting was done. He looked at Angel, mounted onan ugly horse that they had stolen in Pancorvo. `Come on!’
He led the boy back to the village where a bridge crossed to the western bank. He would find the South Essex, he would come back from the dead, and he would fight.
CHAPTER 21
The French guns fired all morning. Their sound rattled the windows in the city. It was like a thunder that had no ending.
The smoke grew like a cloud. The women who sat on the tiers of seats above the city wall grumbled because their view was obscured. They could not see the enemy. They could only see the great cloud that grew and spread and drifted southwards with the breeze. Some of them strolled on the ramparts, flirting with the officers of the town guard. Others, their parasols raised against the sun, dozed on the benches.
The gunners fired, aimed and fired again. They dragged the guns forward after each shot, levered the trails round with handspikes, and pushed the ammunition into the hot muzzles that steamed from the sponging out. Men were sent to the small streams of the plain for buckets of water to soak the sponges. The roads from the city were loud with the galloping limbers that brought new ammunition to feed the guns that hammered at the killing ground.
The French infantry sat on the ridges, slicing sausage and bread, drinking the raw, red wine that filled their canteens. The guns were doing their work. Good luck to the guns.
The guns bucked, their wheels jarring from the ground with each shot. As each gun thudded down the gunner ran forward to put his leather-covered thumb over the smoking touch-hole. With the touch-hole covered if was safe to ram the wet sponge down the barrel and kill the last red sparks before the next powder charge was pushed home. Without the touch-hole blocked the rush of air forced by the plunging sponge could flare pockets of unexploded powder that had been known to erupt with enough force to blast the sponge back and impale its handle through the body of a gunner.
The guns had names embossed on the barrels beneath the proudly wreathed `N’s. Egalite fired next to Liberte, while Fortune and Defi were being sponged out.
The gunners sweated and heaved and grinned; listened to their officers call the aim and they knew they were filling the western plain with death. They could not see their enemy, the smoke hid all to the west, but each shot lanced a spear of flame into the smoke that would twitch with the canister’s passing and then the gunners would reload, would haul the gun back into a true aim, then stand back as the chief gunner rammed his spike through the touch-hole into the canvas bag of powder, as the second man pushed the quill of fine powder into the hole made by the spike. The quill carried the fire down tp the powder from the linstock held by the chief gunner.