He straightened up. `Ingles’ The word was choked by the dust in his throat.
The man closest to him carried a wooden mallet. He stepped forward, his face twisted with hatred. Sharpe knew they took him for a Frenchman and he shook his head.
He could not draw his sword with his bloody, bandaged right hand. He tried, but the mallet struck him on the head, there was a rush of feet on the cobbles, hisses of anger and curses, and then dozens of boots and fists thumped into him, the mallet swung again, and he was dragged away, beaten half insensible, the blood flowing from his opened wounds.
They kicked him, dragged him deeper into the alley and into a small, foul courtyard. A man produced a long butcher’s blade, Sharpe. tried to ward it off, felt the edge sear into his left hand, then the mallet smashed onto his head again and he knew nothing more.
The French left Burgos that day, marching north east and leaving the city with its great spire of smoke that drifted up as a mark of their retreat.
It began to rain as they left, a steady rain that helped extinguish the fires in the city. It seemed the kind of rain that might last for ever.
The French would have liked to have held Burgos and to have forced Wellington to try once more to take the high fortress on its hill, but Wellington had marched his army to the north, into the hills which common wisdom said were impassable for an army. Wellington’s army was passing the impassable hills, threatening to come south and cut off the French army in Burgos, cutting its supply lines, and so the French went backwards. Back towards the hills about Vitoria where other French armies would join them and they could turn and offer battle.
The British army saw the smoke rising from the city. They were far away. A few British cavalrymen, their horses smeared with mud. rode into the city and confirmed that the French were gone. They stayed long enough to water their horses and buy wine from an inn, then, the city abandoned by their enemy, its castle ruined, and nothing else in Burgos to hold their interest, they rode away. The war had come, taken its toll, and passed on.
CHAPTER 18
The British army left the pyre of smoke over Burgos far behind them. They marched in four great columns. At times two columns would come close, joining for a river crossing before they split again and took their separate paths in the hills. Always the order was speed. Speed to get ahead of the enemy, speed to cut the Road, speed to turn the French right flank, speed to meet the French before the enemy armies joined to outnumber Wellington’s men.
And fighting against speed were the wagon wheels that broke, the horses that went lame, the sick who fell out on the road, the gun-axles that broke, the rain that made the tracks slippery, the flooding of a stream making a ford become a rapid. Yet still they went on, hauling at guns, at wagons, beating the mules on, the infantry driving their weary legs to climb one more hill, cross one more valley and ever into the teeth of wind and rain in the worst summer of memory. They had left their winter quarters with the promise of a fine, though late, summer, but now that they had reached the northern hills the weather had broken into a miserable, cold enemy.
Yet old soldiers had never seen an army march as well. The men marched as though the winds brought the smell of victory and they pushed through difficulties that, in normal times, would have turned men back, or caused hours of delay. If a ford was high the cavalry drove their horses in to make a breakwater and passed the infantry down the sheltered side, urging them on, telling them the frogs were waiting for the slaughter, telling them there was one more march and then the victory.
They had been scenting that victory for days. Many had expected to fight at Burgos, but the plume of smoke which marked the French retreat had driven the army on another stage. It was rumoured the French would guard the crossings of the Ebro, the last great river line before the Pyrenees, but the French were nowhere to be seen when, on a cold, chill day, the columns crossed the river unopposed and heard, at last, the orders given for the swing south and east, the swoop down to the enemy.