The wall began to slide, not piece by piece as the bastions had given, but in one solid, spectacular chunk. Hogan jumped for the joy of it. ‘It’s going!’
Then the view was lost. Dust boiled up like smoke from an explosion, the sound rolled across the water, and the gun crews cheered themselves hoarse. The dust drifted slowly away and there, where once there had been a seemingly solid wall, was now a third, huge breach; as wide as the others, but fresh, undefended, and the orders were given. Tonight, gentlemen, tonight at dusk. Into the breaches and the gates of Spain would belong to Britain.
All afternoon, as clouds came from the east, the guns fired so that the French could not work in the breaches. The gunners worked willingly. Their job was done and this was the last day of effort, the twenty-second day of the siege, and tomorrow there would be no more heaving and sweating and no more enemy counter-battery fire. Badajoz would be theirs. The Engineers counted ladders and hay-bags, stacked the huge axes that the leading troops would take into the attack, and thought of the comfortable beds that waited in the city. Badajoz was theirs.
The orders, just twenty-seven paragraphs, were issued at last and the men listened in silence as their officers told them the news. Bayonets were polished again, muskets checked, and they listened to the flat notes of the cathedral clock. First darkness and Badajoz was theirs.
Captain Robert Knowles, now part of the Third Division, stared up at the huge castle with its colony of kestrels. The Third Division, carrying the longest ladders, was to cross the stream and climb the castle rock. No one expected the attack to work, it was merely a diversion to keep troops pinned in the castle, but Knowles’s men grinned at him and swore they would climb the wall. ‘We’ll show them, sir!’ And they would try, he knew, and so would he, and he thought how splendid it would be if he could reach Teresa first, in the house with two orange trees, and hand her and the child safely to Sharpe. He looked again at the vast castle, on its high, steep rock, and he vowed he would fight as Sharpe fought. The devil with a fake attack! They would attack for real.
The Fifth Division, brought back across the river, would mount another escalade with ladders; this time against the north-east bastion, the San Vincente, which towered above the slow river. Like the castle attack, it was intended to pin down enemy troops, to stop reinforcements going to the south-east corner, for it was there, at the three breaches, that Wellington knew he must win his victory.
The breaches. The Fourth and Light Divisions would make the real attack; the assault on the three breaches and the men, waiting as the clouds spread over the sky, imagined the boiling of troops in the ditch, the fighting that was to come, but they would win. Badajoz would be taken. The guns fired on.
Sharpe found a cavalry armourer who put the huge sword against a treadled wheel and the sparks flowed from the edge. He had checked his rifle and loaded the seven-barreled gun. Even though his own orders forbade him to go into the ditch he wanted to be ready. He was a guide, the only man who had already walked to the lip of the glacis, and his task was to lead the Forlorn Hope of the Light Division to the brink of the ditch opposite the Santa Maria bastion. There they would leave him and go on to attack the bastion and the new breach while, off to the right, the South Essex and the Fourth Division marched on the Trinidad. Once Sharpe had taken the Forlorn Hope to the ditch, he was to return and guide other battalions up the slope, but he hoped, against hope, that he could find a way into the fight and over the wall to his child.
The bell tolled six, then the quarter, and on the half, the men lined up out of sight of the city. They carried no packs, just weapons and ammunition, and their Colonels inspected them, not to check on uniforms, but to grin at them and encourage them, because tonight the common man, the despised soldier, would write a page in history and that page had better be a British victory. Tension stretched as the sun sank, imagination making fears real, and the officers passed the rum rations down the ranks and listened to the old jokes. There was a sudden warmth in the army, a feeling of difficulties that would be shared, and the officers who came from the big houses felt close to their men. Imagination did not spare the rich, nor would the defenders, and tonight the rich and poor in the ditch would need each other. The wives made their farewells and hoped for a live husband on the morrow, and the children were silent, awed by the expectancy, while in the doctors’ tents the instrument cases were opened and the scalpels honed. The guns fired on.