Harper was tempted to tell Sharpe not to be so foolish, but decided it might be one step too many over the subtle boundaries of rank and friendship. He sighed. ‘No, sir. Just that they’re keen to help. They’re fond of her, sir, so they are.’ And of you, he might have added.
Sharpe shook his head ungratefully. Teresa and Antonia were his problem, not the Company’s, and he did not want a horde of grinning men to witness his emotion at first seeing his child. ‘Tell them no.’
Harper shrugged. ‘They may try and help anyway.’
‘They’ll have a problem finding her in the city.’
The Sergeant grinned. ‘It won’t be difficult. We’ll be trying the house with two orange trees, just behind the Cathedral.’
‘Go to hell, Sergeant.’
‘Follow you anywhere, sir.’
A few hours later the army seemed in hell, or a watery version of hell. The skies opened. Thunder cracked like the rumbling of field guns over wooden boards in the storm clouds. Lightning slashed, piercing and blue, to an earth soaked by great, slanting volleys of rain. Human noise was drowned by the seething water, a constant, crashing downpour in a darkness splintered by jagged, thundering light. Eighteen hundred men were on the hilltop, digging the first parallel; a trench six hundred yards long that would protect the besiegers and from which they would excavate the first gun batteries. The workers were soaked to the skin, shivering, made weary by the sheer weight of water, and sometimes peering through the deluge at the dark citadel starkly revealed in the lightning strikes.
The wind billowed the rain in huge, scything loops; suspended it, and then smashed it down even harder. It plucked greatcoats into fantastic, bat like shapes and drove the water in unstoppable rivulets that filled up the trench, seeped over the men’s boots, and sank their spirits down into the cold, sodden earth that yielded each spadeful with such reluctance.
All night they dug, and all night it rained, and in the cold morning it still rained and the French gunners came out of their warm shelters to see the scar of fresh earth curving over the shallow hill. The gunners opened fire, smashing solid shot across the wide ditch, over the glacis, over the floodwaters, and into the wet earth of the trench parapet. The work stopped. The first parallel was too shallow to give shelter and all day the rain weakened the trench and the guns hammered it. The excavation filled with sopping mud that would all have to be scooped out in the night.
They dug all night. It still rained, a rain like the rain before Noah’s flood. Uniforms doubled their weight with water, boots were sucked off in the glutinous slime, and shoulders were chafed raw and bleeding with the effort of sinking the trench. On this night the French gunners kept up a harassing and sporadic fire that turned some parts of the mud scarlet until the unending rain diluted the blood, but slowly, infinitely slowly, the spades hacked deeper and the parapet went higher.
The creeping dawn showed a trench deep enough to be worked by daylight. The exhausted battalions filed back through the zigzag trench that led to safety at the rear of the hill, and new battalions took their place. The South Essex, their packs and weapons discarded, went down the crooked way to the mud, the gunfire, and the spades.
Sharpe was left behind. Two dozen men were with him, the baggage guard, and they made crude shelters out of the piled packs and crouched, muskets between their knees, and stared at a wet, grey, dripping landscape. Sharpe could hear the French guns, muffled by rain and distance, and he hated the thought of not seeing what he could hear. He left an old Sergeant in charge of the guard and walked the trench to the hillside.
Badajoz was a dark rock in a sea of water and mud. The walls were fringed with cannon smoke that was lanced through by the leaping flames of each shot. The French gunners were concentrating their fire to Sharpe’s left where the first two British batteries were being dug. A whole battalion was working on the gun-pits. The round shot smacked into the parapets, destroyed the earth-filled wicker gabions, and sometimes smashed a bloody path through the men. The French even tried their howitzers whose short, squat barrels spat shells high into the air, so that the tiny smoke trail of the burning fuse disappeared into the low clouds before dropping on to the wet hillside. Most of the shells simply fell and lay silent, their fuses extinguished by mud or rain, but a few exploded in black smoke and jagged iron fragments. They did no damage; the range was too great, and after a time the French stopped the shell-fire and saved the howitzers for the digging of the second parallel, lower down the hill and much closer to the walls.