Sharpe turned to the Lieutenant. “This is it.’ He wished he was going with him, that he was leading the Hope, but it was not to be. The glory belonged to the Lieutenant who made no reply. Tonight he was a god, tonight he could do no wrong, because tonight he was leading a Forlorn Hope against the biggest citadel the British army had ever attacked. He turned to his men.
They went. Silent. The ladders scraped over the stone lip of the glacis, down into the ditch, and the men scrambled down, slithering on the rungs, falling on to the thrown hay-bags. It had begun.
Sharpe watched the walls. They were dark and silent. Behind him, at the foot of the glacis, he could hear the tramp of feet as the battalions approached and then, ahead, he heard the Lieutenant shout at his men and the first scrambling of boots on the breach. It had started. Hell had come to Badajoz.
CHAPTER 24
In the cathedral that day the prayers had been unceasing, muttered, sometimes hysterical; the words had accompanied the beads as the women of Badajoz feared for the dead who would come to their streets that night. Just as the British army knew the assault was coming, so, too, did the defenders and inhabitants of Badajoz. A host of candles flickered before the saints as if the tiny flames could keep at bay the evil that surrounded the city and came pressing closer as the night gloom filled the cathedral.
Rafael Moreno, merchant, trickled powder into his pistols and hid them, loaded and primed, beneath the lid of his writing desk. He wished his wife were with him, but she had insisted enjoining the nuns in the cathedral, foolish woman, and praying. Prayers would not deflect the soldiers, bullets might, but it was more likely they could be bribed by the cheap red wine he had put in his courtyard. Moreno shrugged. The most valuable possessions were hidden, well hidden, and his niece insisted she had friends among the British. He could hear Teresa upstairs, talking to her child, and doubtless she had the heathen rifle loaded and ready. He liked his niece, of course, but there were times when he thought that his brother Cesar’s family were more than a little too wild. Downright irresponsible even. He poured himself wine. That child upstairs, improving in health, God be praised, but a bastard! And in his house! Moreno sipped the wine. The neighbors did not know, he had seen to that. They thought she was a widow whose husband had died in last year’s battles between the French and the disintegrating Spanish armies. He heard the clock in the cathedral tower begin wheezing as it wound itself up to strike the bell. Ten o’clock in Badajoz. He emptied his glass and called for a servant to refill it.
The bell sounded, and below, in the cathedral, beneath the vaulted ceiling and the gold ledges, below the huge, dark chandelier, and beneath the sad eyes of the Virgin, the women heard the crackle of muskets begin far away. They looked up, over the glow of the candles, at the Mother of God. Be with us now and in the hour of our need.
Sharpe heard the first toll of the hour, and then no more. As it sounded, so the first fireball rose from the battlements, arced its spark-path in the blackness, and then plummeted to the ditch. It was the first of a storm, the tight packed balls flaming and falling as the carcasses were rolled on to the breach, and suddenly the breaches, the ditch, the ravelin, the obstacles, and the tiny figures of the Forlorn Hope were swamped in light, light poured from above, by flames that caught on the obstacles in the ditch, and the Hope began to climb as the fire was bright on their bayonets.
The battalions behind cheered. Silence was done. The front ranks reached the ditch and the ladders scraped over. Men hurled themselves after the hay-bags and scrambled down ladders, a flow of men in desperate haste to cross the ditch and climb the huge ramps of the breaches. They were cheering, urging themselves on, even as the first tongues of quicksilver flame raced down the breaches of the Santa Maria and Trinidad.