Sharpe waited for the first gun, heard it, and started running. To Badajoz.
CHAPTER 27
The heights of the wall disappeared in smoke, the flames lancing through, and he jumped, the sword high, and the men in the ditch screamed at them. ‘Down! Down!’
He had not counted on this. The ditch was crammed with the living, the dying, and the dead, and the living clawed at him. ‘Get down! They’ll kill us.’
He had sprawled down on bodies, but he scrambled up and heard his men thumping around him. There were small fortresses in the ditch, piled corpses, that soaked the grapeshot and sheltered men who themselves crouched on other corpses.
The bullets flickered into the ravelin’s shadow, and the wounded pulled at him, and Sharpe swung the sword ahead of him, clearing a path. He screamed at them, ‘Out the way!’ The dead could not move, and he was wading in bodies, slipping on blood, and to his right, by the Trinidad, the gunners were shredding the last attack.
Hands clutched at Sharpe, tried to pull him down, and out of the darkness a bayonet was thrown at him. Behind him Harper was shouting, in his own tongue, rousing the Irish. A man reared up in front of Sharpe, clawed at him, and Sharpe hammered down with the sword hilt. Ahead was the ravelin’s sloping face with the light bright above it and the guns were waiting. Sharpe felt the temptation to sink into the rank stench in the ditch and let the night hide him. He swung the sword again, using the flat, and a man fell, and Sharpe’s feet were on the slope and he climbed, not wanting to, fearing the oblivion, his body cringing from the death that ravaged the ravelin’s top. He stopped.
There was a new sound in the ditch, a sound so mad that he had turned, the sword bright in his hand, and he looked unbelievingly behind him. The survivors of the South Essex, their yellow facings smeared with blood, were struggling towards him. They had seen their Light Company carve a path to the ravelin, and now they wanted to join the madness, but it was their voices that had stopped Sharpe.
‘Sharpe! Sharpe! Sharpe!’ They chanted it senselessly, a war cry, and men who did not know what it meant picked up the sound, and the ditch stirred, and the shout bellied into the night. ‘Sharpe! Sharpe! Sharpe!’
‘What are they saying, March?’
‘It sounds like “sharp”, my Lord.’
The General laughed because moments before he had wished for one thousand Sharpes, and now, perhaps, that rogue was giving him the city. His aides-de-camp, hearing the grim tone of the laughter, did not understand and did not like to ask.
The gunners, high on the wall, heard the chant and did not understand. They were massacring the newest attack on the Trinidad, hurling it back as they had hurled the others back, but then they saw the ravelin’s top dark with men, and the men were shouting, and the whole ditch was moving that they had thought filled with corpses, and the corpses had come to life and were coming to them, for their revenge, and the dead were shouting. ‘Sharpe! Sharpe! Sharpe!’
The madness was on Sharpe, the glory of it, the song of battle shrieking in his ears, so he did not hear the gunfire, or feel the blast of the shot, or know that, behind him, crossing the diamond, the men were falling, and the guns were tangling the air with death. He jumped. He had crossed the ravelin, running, the heat of the fire close on his right side, and the drop was huge. The new ditch was strangely empty, and he jumped, seeing a stone leap from a musket strike. The jump winded him, pitched him forward, but he was up and running.
‘Sharpe! Sharpe! Sharpe!’
I will die here, he thought, in this empty ditch with the strange white bundles that stirred in the small breeze. He remembered the wool-padding that had protected the two breaches and wondered at a mind that could notice such irrelevant things at the point of a death.
‘Sharpe! Sharpe! Sharpe!’