The Germans died hard. They defended each casement, each stairway, but they stood no chance. The castle had been denuded of troops, only a thin battalion left, but that battalion fought grimly. Each minute that they saved on the battlements was another minute for the central reserves to reach the casde, so they fought on, despising the odds, and screamed as they fell from the parapets, chopped down by the redcoats, and fought till the wall was lost.
Knowles felt the joy of it. They had won the unbelievable victory. They had climbed a rock hill and a casde and they had won! He pounded his men on their backs, hugged them, laughed with them, forgave them all their crimes, because they had done it. It did not matter that the vast casde buildings would still have to be cleared, the dark, treacherous courtyards, because no one now could take this battlement from them. The British had won the city’s highest point and from here they could fight downhill, into the streets, down to the main breach, and Knowles knew he would reach Teresa first and he would see, some time in the night, the gratitude on Sharpe’s face. He had done it. They had done it. And for the first time that night, it was British cheers dial startled the air in Badajoz.
The cheers could not be heard at the breaches. The casde was a long journey away, at least a mile’s ride by the time a horseman had circled the floodwaters, and it would be minutes yet before the messenger would be dispatched. Picton waited. He had heard the bell strike eleven as he saw his first, magnificent men cross the parapet, and he waited, listening to the sounds of battle, to know if they had won or were being chopped to pieces in the castle yards. He heard the cheers, stood up in his stirrups and roared his own, then turned to an aide-de-camp. ‘Ride, man, ride!’ He turned to another staff officer and clapped the man mightily on the back. ‘We’ve proved him wrong! Damn his eyes! We did it!’
He chuckled, anticipating Wellington’s reaction when the news arrived at midnight.
Anger would take a man through a breach, sheer passion, but a small idea helped. It was not much of an idea, hopeless even, deserving the name Forlorn, but it was all Sharpe had, and so he stared at the ravelin that stretched so invitingly towards the third, unsullied breach. There was no point in trying to outrace the grapeshot across its flat, diamond surface. Any man who tried was flicked hopelessly away, contemptuous meat to the gunners’ fire. Yet the third breach was the newest, and the French had been given small time to entrap it, and Sharpe could see, through the sifting smoke, that the Chevaux de Prise on the new breach’s summit was too short. There was a gap at the right hand side, a gap three men could pass abreast, and the only problem was reaching the gap. There was no approach in the ditch. The fires still seethed, white hot and violent, and the only path was across the ravelin. They must climb the ravelin, brave the top, and jump into the ditch, and it must be done at the ravelin’s edge, close to the flames, where the diamond shape narrowed and the fatal journey was short.
He had no right to take the Company on the journey. This was a Forlorn Hope, born of despair and nurtured by pride, and it belonged to the volunteer, to the foolish. He knew he did not have to go himself, but he wanted no dead man’s shoes. He had waited, letting the violence of the last attack spend itself in the ditch, and there was now a kind of truce before the breaches. As long as the British stayed quiet, harmless behind the ravelin, the gunners let them be. Only when men came into the firelight, towards the breaches, did the muzzles spout flame and the grapeshot crease the ditch floor. Back in the darkness, down the glacis, Sharpe could hear orders being called. Another attack was coming, the last reserves of the Division being fed into the ditch, and that was the moment, the hopeless moment, when the feeble idea, based only on the narrowing width of the ravelin, must be tried. He turned to his men and drew the sword, the blade a great streak in the night, and the steel hissed as he swung it to the point at the firelight.