Not even the dogs had been left alive. A few cats, too difficult to catch, had survived the French, but the dogs, like their owners, had been killed, splayed open with desperate savagery, as if the French thought that death by itself was not enough and a body must be turned inside out if it was not to come magically alive to ambush them again. Only one man lived in the village, one of Sharpe’s men left behind in the attack, and the French, true to the curious honour that prevailed between the armies, had left John Rorden propped on a mattress, with bread and water to hand and a bullet somewhere in his pelvis that would kill him before this new day was done.
Ramon, in slow English, told Sharpe that four dozen people had been left in the village, mostly the old or the very young, but they had all died. Sharpe stared at the wrecked houses, the blood splashed on low, white walls.
‘Why were they caught?’
Ramon shrugged, waved a bandaged hand. ‘They were good.’
‘Good?’
‘Francese.’ He was lost for a word and Sharpe helped.
‘Clever?’
The young man nodded. He had his sister’s nose, the same dark eyes, but there was a friendliness to him that Sharpe had not seen in Teresa. Ramon shook his head hopelessly. ‘They were not all Guerrilleros, yes?’ Each group of words was a question, as if he wanted assurance that his English was adequate. Sharpe kept nodding. ‘They want peace? But now.’ He spoke two quick sentences in Spanish, his tone bitter, and Sharpe knew that those people of the uplands who had tried to stay aloof from the war would be drawn in whether they wanted it or not. Ramon blinked back tears; the dead had been of his village. ‘We went there?’ He pointed north. ‘They were before us, yes? We were…’ He described a circle with his two bandaged hands.
‘Surrounded?’
‘Si.’ He looked down at his right hand, at the fingers that poked from the grey bandage, and Sharpe saw the index finger moving as if it were pulling a trigger. Ramon would fight again.
The bodies were not just in the cellar. Some, perhaps for the amusement of the lancers, had been taken to the hermitage to meet their bitter end, and on the steps of the building Sharpe found Isaiah Tongue, the admirer of Napoleon, throwing up the dry bread that had been his breakfast. The Company waited by the hermitage. The prisoner, tall and proud, stood by Sergeant McGovern, and Sharpe stopped by the Scotsman.
‘Look after him, Sergeant.’
‘Aye, sir. They’ll not touch him.’ The sturdy face was twisted as if in pain. McGovern, like Tongue, had looked inside the hermitage. ‘Savages, sir, that’s what they are. Savages!’
‘I know.’
There was nothing to say that would reach McGovern’s pain, the hurt of a father far from his children who had just seen small, dead bodies. The stench was thick by the hermitage, buzzing with flies, and Sharpe paused by the steps. There was almost a reluctance to go inside, not just because of the bodies, but because of what the hermitage might not contain. The gold. So close, so near to the war’s survival, and instead of a feeling of triumph he felt stained, touched by a horror that brought an anger against his job. He climbed the steps, his face a mask, and wondered what his men would do if they found themselves, as they probably would, in a place where the rules no longer counted. He remembered the uncontrollable savagery that followed a siege, the sheer, exploding rage that he had felt after death had touched him a score of times in one small breach and he knew, as the cold air of the hermitage struck him, that this war in Spain, if it should go on, would not be won until British infantry had been fed into the narrow meat grinder of a small gap in a city wall.
‘Out! Get them out!’ The men, pale-faced, looked shocked at Sharpe’s anger, but he knew no other way to react to the small bodies. ‘Bury them!’
Harper was crying, tears running down his cheeks. So much innocence, so much waste, as if a baby had earned this. Kearsey stood there, with Teresa, and neither cried. The Major flicked at his moustache. ‘Terrible. Awful.’