Sharpe turned and stared south. He could not see Irati, for the village was well over a mile away and his picquet a half-mire further away still, and he suddenly worried that he would not hear Captain Smith’s warning shots. But it was too late to change the arrangements. So stop worrying, he told himself. No point in fretting about what you cannot change.
“Enemy, sir,” Harper said softly, and Sharpe wheeled around to gaze down the road.
The French had come. Not many yet, just a half company of grenadiers, the elite of the enemy infantry, because they wore high bearskin hats with a yellow grenade badge, though none, he saw through his telescope, flaunted the high red plume on their hats. French grenadiers were very protective of that plume and on campaign they liked to keep it in a leather tube attached to their bayonet sling.
“Thirty,” he counted the men as they appeared, “forty, forty-five. All grenadiers, Pat.”
“Sending their best up front, are they?”
“Got them worried, we have,” Sharpe said. The grenadiers had stopped at the sight of the barrels. Some of them gazed up the steep slope beyond, but the Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers were well hidden, and Sharpe and Harper were concealed behind the frontier cairn.
An officer came to the front of the grenadiers, stared at the barrels for a minute, then shrugged and walked forward. “It’s his lucky day,” Sharpe said.
The grenadiers hung back as their officer approached the strange obstacle. He was cautious, as any man would be on the Spanish frontier, but the barrels looked innocent enough.
He stooped to the nearest, sniffed at the bung, then drew his sword and worked the tip of its blade into the cork plug. He levered the tight bung free and then stooped to sniff again. “He’s found the wine,” Sharpe said.
“Let’s hope they stop and drink it, sir.”
The grenadiers, assured that only barrels of cheap Spanish tinto barred their path, surged forward. More soldiers were appearing over the lower crest and they too rushed to join the unexpected booty. Men tipped the first three barrels over and stabbed at their lids with drawn bayonets, while a group of grenadiers ran to take possession of the second line of barrels.
“For what they are about to receive,” Sharpe said.
Two of the second line of barrels contained nothing but stones. But the third, the middle barrel, was half-filled with gunpowder from Sharpe’s spare ammunition. It was mixed with small, sharp stones and, above it, balanced on a stave that Rifleman Hagman had carefully nailed into place, was a coiled strip of burning slow-match.
None of the grenadiers noticed the small holes that had been drilled into the barrel to feed oxygen to the fuse, they just smelt wine and so kicked over the barrel.
For a second Sharpe thought the trap had failed, then suddenly the narrow valley vanished in a cloud of grey-white powder smoke pierced with livid flame.
The smoke churned in the small combe, hiding the carnage made by the explosion. Then, as the damp wind began to carry the powder smoke northwards, the sound rolled up the slope. It was like a clap of thunder magnified by the echo that beat back from the valley’s far side. Once the echo had gone there was just a strange silence in the hills.
“Poor bastards,” Harper said, for the smoke was clearing and he could see the bodies scattered on the road. Some were still, some crawled blindly, some just twitched. Then the rifles opened fire. Sharpe’s riflemen did not miss their mark at that close range. They fired from behind the rocks high on either side of the small valley. First, they picked off the surviving officers, then the sergeants. By the time each greenjacket had fired two rounds, the French had vanished from the small valley. They had fled back over its lip, leaving behind a dozen dead and a score of wounded men. The battle for Irati had begun.
IN ONE way, Colonel Jean Gudin had been untypically lucky, for not one partisan had troubled his column on its dark road north, but in every other way his usual ill fortune had prevailed.