“If they use the western road, sir.”
“Which they probably won’t,” Hogan said confidently, “but if they do, Richard, stop them. Kill me some Frogs for Christmas. That’s why you joined the Army, isn’t it? To kill Frogs. So go and do it. I want you out of here in an hour.”
In truth, Sharpe had not joined the Army to kill Frogs. He had joined because he was hungry and on the run from the constables. And once a man had taken the shilling and pulled on the King’s coat, he was reckoned safe from the law. And so Private Richard Sharpe had joined the 33rd, fought with them in Flanders and India. And at Assaye, a bloody battlefield between two rivers where a small British army had trounced a vast Indian horde, he had become an officer.
That was almost ten years ago and he had spent a good many of those years fighting the French in Portugal and Spain. Only now he fought in a dark green coat, for he was a Rifleman, though by an accident of war, he now found himself commanding a battalion of redcoats. They had once been called the South Essex, but now they were the Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers, though on this dank, grey morning they were anything but willing. They were comfortable in their Spanish billets, they liked the local girls, and none was of a mind to go soldiering in a cold Spanish winter.
Sharpe ignored their displeasure. Men did not join the Army to be comfortable, but to fight. They marched on the hour, 422 men swinging east out of the town and down into the valley.
It had begun to rain heavily, filling the small ditches that edged the fields and flooding the furrows left in the road by the big guns. No one else in the Army was moving, just Sharpe’s regiment that was going to plug a gap in the high mountains to stop the Frogs escaping.
Not that Sharpe believed he would fight this Christmas. Even Hogan was not certain the French would march, and if they did, they would probably choose the other road, the main road, so all Sharpe expected was a long march and a cold Christmas.
But King George wanted him to be at Irati, so to Irati he would go. And God help the Frogs if they went as well.
COLONEL Jean Gudin watched as the tricolor was lowered. The fort at Ochagavia, that he had commanded for four years, was being abandoned and it hurt. It was another failure, and his life had been nothing but failure.
Even the fort at Ochagavia was a failure for, as far as Gudin could see, it guarded nothing. True, it dominated a road in the mountains, but the road had never been used to bring supplies from France and so it had never been haunted by the dreaded partisans who harried all the other French garrisons in Spain.
Time and again, Gudin had pointed this out to his superiors, but somewhere in Paris there was a pin representing the garrison of Ochagavia stuck into a map of Spain and no one had been willing to surrender the pinprick until now, when some bureaucrat had suddenly remembered the fort’s existence and realised it held 1,000 good men who were needed to defend the homeland.
Those men now made ready for their escape. Three hundred were Gudin’s garrison and the others were fugitives who had taken refuge in Ochagavia after the disaster at Vitoria. Some of those refugees were Dragoons, but most were infantrymen from the 75th Regiment who paraded in the fort’s courtyard beneath their Eagle and under the eye of their irascible chef de battalion, Colonel Caillou. Behind the 75th, clustered around two horse-drawn wagons, was a crowd of women and children.
“The women,” Caillou rode his horse to Gudin’s side. “I thought we agreed to abandon the women.”
“I didn’t agree,” Gudin said curtly.
Caillou snorted, then glared at the shivering women. They were the wives and girlfriends of Ochagavia’s garrison and, between them, had almost as many children, some no more than babes in arms. “They’re Spaniards!” he snapped.