“Are you sure, now?”
“It was a flesh wound, nothing else.”
“But painful, eh?”
D’Alembord almost screamed with agony as Harper heaved him up into Sharpe’s saddle. “You should know,” he managed to reply with admirable self-restraint.
“Funnily enough,” the Irishman said, “I’ve never had a bad wound. Mr Sharpe, now, he’s different, he’s always getting bits chopped out of him, but I must be lucky.”
“Don’t tempt fate,” d’Alembord said fervently.
“Considering what fate’s done to Ireland, Major, what the hell more can it do to me?” Harper laughed. “Back to duty, eh?”
“Back to duty.” D’Alembord knew he could have ridden away from the battlefield, and no one would have blamed him, but in his time he had seen more than one officer lose an arm and still go back to the battle line after the surgeon had chopped and sawed the stump into shape. So d’Alembord would go back, because he was an officer and that was his duty. He hid his terror, tried to smile, and rode to the ridge.
Major Vine was shot through his left eye by a skirmisher. He gave a last bad-tempered grunt, fell from his saddle, and lay stone-dead beside Lieutenant-Colonel Ford’s horse. The Colonel whimpered, then stared down at the fallen Major whose face now appeared to have one vast red Cyclopean eye. “Major Vine?” Ford asked nervously.
The dead man did not move.
Ford tried to remember Vine’s Christian name. “Edwin?” He tried, or perhaps it was Edward? “Edward?” But Edwin Vine lay quite still. A fly settled next to the fresh pool of blood that had been his left eye.
“Major Vine!” Ford snapped as though a direct order would resurrect the dead.
“He’s a gonner, sir,” a sergeant from the colour party offered helpfully, then, seeing his Colonel’s incomprehension, made a more formal report. “The Major’s dead, sir.”
Ford smiled a polite response and stifled an urge to scream. He did not know it, but a quarter of the men who had marched with him to battle were now either dead or injured. RSM Mclnerney had been disembowelled by a roundshot that had killed two other men and torn the arm off another. Daniel Hagman was bleeding to death with a bullet in his lungs. His breath bubbled with blood as he tried to speak. Sharpe knelt beside him and held his hand. “I’m sorry, Dan.” Sharpe had known Hagman the longest of all the men in the light company. The old poacher was a good soldier, shrewd, humorous and loyal. ,I’ll get you to the surgeons, Dan.”
“Bugger them surgeons, Mr Sharpe,” Hagman said, then said nothing more. Sharpe shouted at two of the bandsmen to carry him back to the surgeons, but Hagman was dead. Sergeant Huckfield lost the small finger of his left hand to a musket ball. He stared in outrage at the wound, then, refusing to leave the battalion, sliced once with his knife then asked Captain Jefferson to wrap a strip of cloth round the bleeding stump. Private Clayton was shaking with fear, but somehow managed to stand steady and look straight into the eyes of the French skirmishers who still roamed the ridge crest with apparent impunity. Next to him Charlie Weller was trying to remember childhood’s prayers, but, though childhood was not very far in his past, the prayers would not come. “Oh, God,” he said instead.
“God’s no bloody help,” Clayton said, then ducked as a skirmisher’s bullet almost knocked the crown off his shako.
“Stand still there!” Sergeant Huckfield shouted.
Clayton pulled his shako straight and muttered a few curses at the Sergeant. “We should be bloody attacking,” he said after he had exhausted his opinion of Huckfield’s mother.
“In time we will.” Charlie Weller still had a robust faith in victory.
Another musket bullet went within inches of Clayton’s head. He shivered helplessly. “If I’m a dead `un, Charlie, you’ll look after Sally, won’t you?” Clayton’s wife, Sally, was by far the prettiest wife in the battalion. “She likes you, she does,” Clayton explained his apparent generosity.
“You’re going to be all right.” Charlie Weller, despite the hiss and crash of bullet and shell, felt a frisson of excitement at the thought of Sally.