Sharpe watched the men coming into the convent; the blinded, the lamed, the bleeding, French and British. He tried to blot the screaming from his ears, but it was impossible, the sound penetrated the senses like the acrid smoke that hung in the city’s streets this night. An officer of the 95th Rifles came down the main stairway, crying, and saw Sharpe. ‘He’s bad.’ He did not know who he was talking to, except that he saw in Sharpe another Rifleman. ‘Crauford?’
‘There’s a bullet in his spine. They can’t get it out. The bastard was standing in the middle of the breach, right in the bloody middle, and telling us to move our arses. They shot him!’
The Rifle officer went out into the cold night. Crauford never asked his men to do anything he would not do himself, and he would be there, cursing and spitting, leading his men on, and now he would die. The army would not be the same.
Things were changing.
A clock struck ten o’clock and Sharpe thought it had been just three hours since they slipped over the snow towards the breach. Just three hours! The door through which Lawford had been carried was opened and a soldier dragged out a corpse. It was not the Colonel. The body, pulled by the heels, left a jellied slime of bloodied mud on the tiles. The door was left open and Sharpe crossed to it, leaned on the post, and stared into the candle-bright charnel house. He remembered the soldier’s prayer, morning and evening, that God keep him from the surgeon’s knife. Lawford was on the table strapped tight, his uniform cut away. An orderly leaned on his chest, obscuring the face, while a surgeon, his apron stiff with blood the colour of burnt ochre, grunted as he pushed in the knife. Sharpe saw Lawford’s feet, still encased in the boots with the swan-neck spurs, jerk in the leather straps. The surgeon was sweating. The candles guttered in the draught and he turned a blood-spattered face. ‘Shut the bloody door!’
Sharpe closed it, cutting off the view of severed limbs, the waiting bodies. He wanted a drink. Things were changing. Lawford under the knife, Crauford dying upstairs, the New Year mocking them. He stood in the hallway, in dark shadow, and remembered the gas lighting he had seen in London’s Pall Mall just two months ago. A wonder of the world, he had been told, but he did not think so. Gas lighting, steam power, and stupid men in offices with dirty spectacles and neat files, the new denizens of England that would tie up the world in pipes, conduits, paper, and above all order. Neatness above all. England did not want to know about the war. A hero was a week-long wonder, so long as he was not untidily scarred like the beggars in the streets of London. There were men with only half a face, covered in suppurating sores, rodent ulcers, men with empty eye sockets, torn mouths, ragged stumps who had cried out for a penny for an old soldier. He had watched them being moved on so they did not sully the pristine, hissing light in Pall Mall. Sharpe had fought beside some of them, watched them drop on a battlefield, but their country did not care. There were the military hospitals, of course, at Chelsea and Kilmainham, but it was the soldiers who paid for those, not the country. The country wanted the soldiers out of the way. Sharpe wanted a drink.
The door of the surgeon’s room banged open and Sharpe turned to see Lawford being carried on a canvas stretcher to the wide staircase. He hurried to the orderlies. ‘How is he?’ ‘If the rot doesn’t get him, sir… ” The man left the sentence unfinished. His nose was dripping, but he could not wipe it because both hands were on the stretcher. He sniffed. ‘Friend of yours, sir?’ ‘Yes. ‘
‘Nothing you can do tonight, sir. Come back tomorrow. We’ll look after him. ‘ He jerked his head upwards. ‘Lieutenant Colonels and above are on the second floor, sir. Bleeding luxury. Not like those in the cellar. ‘ Sharpe could imagine it, had seen it often enough, the dank cellars where the wounded were crammed on verminous pallets, one part of the ‘ward’ always left as a death room where the hopeless could simply rot. He let them go, and turned away.