Sharpe went right, looking for the Fourth Division and the South Essex, but the ditch was a massive sink of death, of weird shadows cast by the fires, and he could make out no faces in the packed crowd that was filling the space between the ravelin and glacis. Men sheltered behind parapets made from the dead, others clumsily reloaded muskets and fired them uselessly at the towering stone that crushed them with fire. He ran for a minute, right on the edge of the glacis, stumbling on the uneven paving and hearing the canister above him, in front of him, yet he was untouched. Small groups of men were on the glacis lip, Light Companies mostly, who rammed and fired, rammed and fired, hoping that their bullets might ricochet from an embrasure and kill a Frenchman. The canister flung them backwards, ragged down the slope, and beyond the bodies, in the darkness, more men waited for the orders that would send them running to the light, to the ditch, to the hundreds of dead. Sharpe had never seen so many dead.
He was still fifty yards from the Trinidad, but he could see that its breach was no better than the Santa Maria. The foot of the breach was smeared with bodies, its approaches bare of the living, though small groups of men dashed from the shadows of the ravelin and screamed defiance as they clawed at the stones and were blasted away. Bugles sounded to the right, the shouts of officers and Sergeants, and there was the South Essex! He saw them flowing up the glacis in close column and his Company, Rymer’s Company, lined the ditch and fired their ineffectual muskets at the wall’s height while the other men scrambled at the ladders, flung themselves on hay-bags, frantic in their haste. Men bunched at the ditch’s edge, the guns hammered from the wall, their hot breath hard on the glacis, and Sharpe saw the Battalion shudder like a wounded thing, reform, smash itself under new impacts. But they were over, scrambling in the ditch and he saw Windham, his cocked hat gone, scything his sword towards the breach, and new guns fired until the sound of the city was like a weight of solid thunder.
They died in dozens, but still they went towards the breach, and more men came from the ditch, from other Regiments, and they tried, and pushed, and fought, and scrambled up the stone till it seemed they had to win for there was not enough shot in the world to kill so many men. The gunners rammed and fired, loaded and fired, and the powder kegs banged down the slope, and the shells were thrown, fuses lit, so the dark explosions splintered the men, and they died and it was done. The dead choked the living, the breach had won. A few men, very few, still lived and struggled upwards, shredding their hands on the nailed boards laid down the upper slope, and Sharpe saw Leroy, sword in hand, cigar inevitably between his teeth, look up into the night, so slow, and then he fell, tumbling, fell, screaming into the ditch. A last man reached the sword blades, the very top, he clawed at them, blood on his hands, and then he shook, quivered, filled with a dozen bullets and the highest man, dead on the Trinidad, slid down, blood on stone, till he was caught.
The survivors were behind the ravelin, digging into the dead, and the French mocked them. ‘Come to Badajoz, English.’
Sharpe had not been with them. He knelt, fired once at the wall, and watched the death of the Battalion; Collett, Jack Collett, neck severed by a round shot, even Sterritt, poor, worried Sterritt, a hero now, killed in the ditch at Badajoz.
‘Sir?’ A voice curiously calm in the torment of sound. ‘Sir?’
He looked up. Daniel Hagman, strange in red coat, stood over him. He stood up. ‘Daniel?’
‘You’d better come, sir.’
He went towards the Light Company, close to him now and still on the glacis, and he saw in the ditch where men had drowned in the deep water. The black humps of their bodies broke up the ripples in red and dark patterns. The guns were quieter now, saving their anger for the fools who would come from behind the ravelin. The breaches were empty of all but the dead. The huge fires roared, greedy for the lumber that was tossed from the walls, and an army was dying between their flames.