It was not just the guns. The defenders hurled anything that would kill from the ramparts. Stone lumps, the size of a man’s head, crashed down into the ditch; gun-shells, their fuses cut to a quarter inch and lit by hand, fizzed down and sent red hot fragments scything on the ditch’s floor, and even kegs of powder, fused and lit, were rolled down the breach slope. Sharpe watched one barrel, bouncing and tumbling, its fuse spinning madly red, finally leap into the ditch and explode in the face of a dozen Riflemen who were running for the Santa Maria breach. Only three lived, blinded and screaming, and one of them wandered, insensate with pain, into the burning timbers that blocked the path to the new breach. Sharpe fancied he could hear the man’s dying screams bubble with the flames, but there were so many dying, and so much noise, that he could not be certain.
The noise of the living in the ditch was a growl and, suddenly, it rose to a sound of fury and Sharpe looked right to see a wave of men, Riflemen and red-jackets, charging forward. He groaned. They had stormed their way up the ravelin’s sloping face, desperate for victory, and the burgeoning attack spread out on the diamond’s top flat surface and ran with leveled bayonets towards the new breach. The French were waiting. Guns that had not fired were touched with flame, the grapeshot ripped in from three sides and the attack died in a dancing horror as men were struck as by contrary iron winds. A few lived, ran on, and found that the ravelin led to another sheer drop, into another ditch before the breach and, as they hesitated, the French infantry dropped them with musket fire and there was nothing but bodies left on the ravelin’s top, bodies that had fallen and left unrecognizable dark smears on the stone.
The guns were winning the night. The ditch was blocked by fire. Men could not go right or left because of the flaming timbers that jammed the main ditch on either side of the two bastions, just as the approaches to the third breach were blocked. The four fires, fed with fresh timber from the walls, defined where the British could go, a space that was terrible with gunfire. Yet still more men went over the edge, hurrying down the ladders as if there was some safety in the milling, scrambling horde that bulged at the edges as fresh groups charged towards a breach. The ditch was filling with men, hundreds and hundreds of men, shouting men, holding their bayonets above the crush, and the grapeshot would lick down and clear a space of the living and the space would be filled again as men trampled the dying. The guns would belch again, and again, and the metal scraps turned the ditch into a charnel house. Still they went forward, incoherently brave, trying to reach an enemy they could not see or touch, and they died as they cursed and struggled forward.
They went in small groups and Sharpe, crouched on the glacis, watched as an officer or Sergeant led them forward. Mostly they died in the ditch, but some, at last, reached the breach and clambered upwards. A dozen men would go and, in seconds, there would be six, and three would reach the stone and begin to climb while the men on the glacis lip, next to Sharpe, knelt up and fired their muskets at the walls as if they could clear the path for the scrambling men. Sharpe wondered if the French were playing with them. Sometimes no gun would fire on the small, desperate groups, even though guns swept the approach to the breach, and he would watch them struggle, higher and higher until, casually almost, the enemy would pluck them off the stone, tumble them dead, and a new high-tide mark of blood was marked on the breach. Once a man even reached the Chesaux de Frise, he swept at the sabre blades with a musket, bellowing defiance, and then he was hit by an unseen French infantryman and he fell, twisting like a rag doll, down the slope and the French jeered him and poured fire down.