Flames appeared in the smoke-shrouded rubble, livid serpents that flickered in the stone, forked lightning that ran quicksilver down the scoured stones to touch the mines that had been hidden in the breach. The explosions tore the lower slope apart, flinging men and masonry into the air, blowing the first attack into failure. The meat-grinder of the breach had begun to turn.
The growl was still audible. The men from Connaught and Nottinghamshire were going back to the breach, over their mangled dead, past the blackened, smoking pits where the mines had been dug, and the French screamed insults at them; called them boy-lovers and weaklings, and followed the insults with more burning carcasses and lumps of timber or stone that avalanched on the slope and hurled men back into the blood-soaked base of the breach. The vast guns in their hidden, flanking casements were being reloaded, ready for their next targets, and they came, clawing their way up the blood-slick ramp till the thunder crashed again, the flames slapped at the breach, and the myriad scraps of grapeshot blasted the stones clear.
The assault had been bloodily repulsed, but there was no thought except to go forward. The foot of the ramp was crowded with the men of the two battalions who climbed again in the mindless, seething bravery of siege warfare.
Lawford clutched Sharpe’s arm, leaned close to his ear. ‘Those bloody guns!’
‘I know!’ They fired again, a fraction early, and it was plain that no man could climb past their fire. They were dug into the very heart of the town’s thick, low wall and no British siege gun could have hoped to reach them; not unless Wellington had fired at each hidden casement for a week until the whole wall collapsed like the breach itself. In front of each gun, revealed by the burning carcasses, was a trench that defended the gunners from their enemy on the breach, and as long as the two guns were firing, across and slightly ahead of each other, there could be no victory.
The troops were climbing again, slower now, wary of the guns and trying to avoid the burning grenades that the French were tossing on to the slope. The red explosions punctured the scattered attackers. Sharpe turned to Harper. ‘Are you loaded?’
The huge Sergeant nodded, grinned, and held up the seven-barreled gun.
Sharpe grinned back. ‘Shall we join in?’
Lawford shouted at them. ‘What are you doing?’
Sharpe pointed at the nearest side of the breach. ‘Going after the gun. Do you mind?’
Lawford shrugged. ‘Be careful!’
There was no time to think, just to jump into the ditch and pray that their ankles would not twist or break. Sharpe fell awkwardly, slipping on the snow, but a huge hand grabbed his greatcoat, hauled him upright, and the two men ran across the floor of the ditch. The jump had been twenty feet and it seemed as if they had fallen into the bottom of a giant cauldron, an alchemist’s vessel of fire, and the flames poured in from above. Carcasses rolled down, musket and cannon flame spat from above, and the fire spilt on to the living and dead flesh in the ditch and was reflected red on the underside of the low clouds that rolled southwards to Badajoz. There was only one way to live in the cauldron, and that was to go upwards, and the column was climbing again as Sharpe and Harper skirted the mass of men, and then the guns spoke, and the attack was flung back by the flame-borne grape-shot.
Sharpe had been counting the gaps between the shots and knew that the French gunners were taking about a minute to reload each giant gun. He counted the seconds in his head as the two men struggled past the mass of Irishmen to the left of the breach. They fought their way through the crush, going for the very edge of the slope, and the surge of men carried them forward so that, for an instant, Sharpe thought they would be carried on to the rubble slope itself. Then the guns fired again and the men ahead recoiled, something wet slapped Sharpe’s face, and the attack was broken into small groups. He had a minute. ‘Patrick!’