The gunners desperately slewed the guns round, the men heaving on the handspikes as yet more bullets came from the north. `Canister!’ the officer shouted, and then a bullet span him round, he clapped a hand to his shoulder, and suddenly his men were running because the Riflemen were charging up the slope. `Load it!’
It was too late. The Riflemen, their weapons tipped with the long sword-bayonets, were in the battery. The blades stabbed at the few Frenchmen who tried to swing rammers at the British Riflemen. Some gunners crawled under the barrels of their guns, waiting for a prudent moment to surrender.
Behind the Rifles, spreading in the wheat with their Colours overhead, came the lines of red-jacketed men.
`Back! Back!’ A French gunner Colonel, seeing his northern battery taken, shouted for the limbers and horses. Men hurled ready ammunition into chests, picked up trails, the trace chains were linked on, the horses were whipped, and the French guns went thundering and rocking and bouncing back towards the second line.
`Ready!’ Now the French infantry, who had thought the guns had done their task, had to come forward to blunt the British attack. `Present! Fire!’ Over the fields that had been flayed with canister came the sound of musketry, the clash of infantry.
The Marquess of Wellington opened his watch case. He had his lodgement on the plain, he had driven the first French line into confusion, but now, he knew, there would be a pause.
Prisoners were being herded back, the wounded were being carried to the surgeons. In the smoke of the battlefield Colonels and Generals were looking for landmarks, seeking out units on their flanks, waiting for orders. The attack had worked, but now the attack had to be re-aligned. The men who had suffered under the French guns must be relieved, new Battalions marched onto the plain to link up with the northern attacks.
Wellington crossed the river. He spurred forward to take ommand of the next attack, the one that would drive the French army due east, towards Vitoria, and he wondered what was happening to the small finger of his plan’s hand. That finger was the Fifth Division. It marched to a village called Gamarra Mayor, and if it could take that village, cross the river, and cut the Great Road, then it would turn French defeat into a rout. There, Wellington knew, the battle would be hardest, and to that place, as the sun rose to its zenith, Sharpe rode.
CHAPTER 23
Lieutenant Colonel Leroy fiddled with his watch. `God damn them!’
No one spoke.
To their right, three miles away, the other columns had struck over the river. The battle there was a roiling cloud of musket and cannon smoke.
The Fifth Division waited.
Three Battalions, the South Essex one of them, would head the attack on Gamarra Mayor. Ahead of Leroy’s men was a gentle slope that led down to the village, beyond which was a stone bridge that crossed the river. Beyond the river was the Great Road. If the Division could cut the road, then the French army was cut off from France.
He snapped open the lid of his watch again. `What’s keeping the bloody man?’ Leroy wanted the General of Division to order the attack quickly.
The French were in Gamarra Mayor. This was the only river crossing they had garrisoned, and they had loopholed the houses, barricaded the alleys, and Leroy knew this would be grim work. Three years before, on the Portuguese frontier, he had fought at Fuentes d’Onoro and he remembered the horrors of fighting in small, tight streets.
`Christ on his cross!’ Across the river, where the lane from the bridge rose to the Great Road, he could see French guns unlimbering. The attack would now be harder. The guns were just high enough to fire over the village and, even if the British took Gamarra Mayor, the guns would make the bridge murderous with canister.
`Sir?’ Ensign Bascable gestured to the right. A staff officer had ridden to the centre Battalion of the attack.
`About god-damned time.’ Leroy rode forward, his face, scarred dreadfully at Badajoz, looking grimmer than ever. `Mr d’Alembord?’