‘Give him fire!’ Harper’s voice rang clear. There were redcoats in the ravine, running and kneeling, aiming upwards, and Sharpe saw the new Ensign dancing in excitement, his sword drawn. Then the muskets fired and the balls scoured the ramparts and Sharpe had a glimpse of his Riflemen coming forward again, their guns reloaded.
He would burn himself; there was no choice. The carcass flamed and he bent down, picked it up by its base, feeling the heat. A rock thrown from the fort, smashed into the straw and it flared on his face, burning, burning, and he turned with it, scorched by the terrible heat and in the corner of his eye, as he turned, he saw a yellow flame, huge and foreshortened, stab from the ravine towards him. Bullets plucked at him, hit him, and he knew he had been shot, but did not believe it, and hurled the carcass at the white fuse.
He tried to run. Pain lanced his leg, his side, and he stumbled. He had thrown the carcass too far. He was falling. He remembered the flaming mass landing too close to the powder, and he remembered the yellow flame that seemed to come from the ravine side. Nothing made sense and then night turned to day.
Flame and light, noise and heat, the deafening, rolling blast thundered up and out so that the men in the British trenches, digging the new batteries, saw the face of the San Pedro bastion lit with flame. The whole face of Badajoz, from castle to the Trinidad, was seared with the light and the dam’s fort was outlined black against the sheet of red that slammed up and belched smoke and fragments into the night. The blast was just a fragment of the explosion that had destroyed Almeida, but few men had seen that and lived, while this one was witnessed by thousands who watched the dark night split by fire, and felt the hot wind buffet the sky.
Sharpe was thrown forward, snatched and hurled into the stream, bruised and deafened by the blast, blinded by the flame-sheet. The stream saved his life and he regretted it, knowing that in a second he would be crushed by the water, flattened by the falling tons of earth, rock and lake. He had not meant to throw the carcass as far as he did, but he had been scorched by flame, hit by bullets, and it hurt, it hurt. He would not see his child. He thought death came slowly and he tried to move as if he could out crawl the weight of falling water.
Heat slammed back and forth in the ravine. Burning fragments hissed in the water. No muskets fired from the rampart. The blast had pushed the French away from the parapet, dazed by the noise that echoed off the vast city walk, thundered over the plain, and died in the night.
Harper pulled Sharpe upright. ‘Come on, sir.’
Sharpe could not hear. ‘What?’ He was dazed, senseless.
‘Come on!’ Harper pulled him downstream, away from the fort, away from the dam that sail stood. ‘Are you hit?’
Sharpe moved automatically, stumbling on rocks, going away. He tried to turn, to look at the dam. ‘It’s still there.’
‘Yes. It held. Come on!’
Sharpe shook himself free. ‘It held.’
‘I know! Come on!’
The dam still stood! Burning fragments lit the huge wall, scorched and gouged by the explosion, but intact. ‘It held!’
Harper pulled at Sharpe. ‘Come on! For God’s sake, move!’
A body was at Sharpe’s feet and he looked down. The new Ensign. What was his name? He could not remember, and the boy was dead, and for nothing!
Harper pulled him downstream into the cover of the trees, dragging Matthews’ body in his other hand. Sharpe staggered, the pain shooting up his leg, and he felt tears in his eyes. It was failure, miserable and complete, and the boy was dead who should not have died, and all because Sharpe had tried to prove he was more than a messenger boy or baggage minder. Sharpe felt as if there was some malevolent fate that had decided to destroy him, his pride, his life, all his hopes; and, in mockery, to make the failure more complete, the fates had shown him something worth living for. Teresa would have heard the explosion, would even now be rocking his child into a restless sleep, but Sharpe, stumbling through the night, felt that he would never see the child. Never. Badajoz would kill him, as it had killed the boy, as it was killing all he had worked and fought for in nineteen years of soldiering.