“Bad!” Bautista laughed. “Is that all you can say?”
It was all Sharpe had said to the Emperor on Saint Helena, but Napoleon had not needed to hear more. Bonaparte had given Sharpe a look of such quick sympathy that Sharpe had been forced to laugh, and the Emperor had laughed with him. “It was supposed to be bad!” Bonaparte had said indignantly, “But it was evidently not bad enough, eh?” But now, because Sharpe spoke to a man who did not know how the heart shuddered with terror every time a shot punched the air with pressure, flame and death, he could only offer the inadequate explanation. “It was frightening. The guns, I mean.”
“The guns?” Bautista asked with a sudden intensity.
“The French had a lot of artillery,” Sharpe explained lamely, “and it was well handled.”
“It was frightening?” Bautista wanted Sharpe’s earlier assertion confirmed.
“Very.”
“Frightening.” Bautista repeated the word meaningfully, letting it hang in the air as he walked back to his long table. “You hear that?” He shouted the question loudly, rounding on the startled audience. “Frightening! And that is how we will finish this rebellion. Not by marching men into the wilderness, but with guns, with guns, with guns, with guns!” With each repetition of the word he pounded his right fist into his left palm. “Guns! Where are your guns, Ruiz?”
“They’re coming, Your Excellency.” Ruiz said soothingly.
“I’ve told Madrid,” Bautista went on, “time and again to send me guns! We’ll break this rebellion by enticing its forces to attack our strongholds. Here! In Valdivia! We shall let O’Higgins bring his armies and Cochrane his ships into the range of our guns and then we shall destroy them! With guns! With guns! With guns! But if Madrid doesn’t send me guns, how can we win?” He was rehearsing the arguments that would explain the loss of Chile. He would blame it on Madrid for not sending enough guns, yet guns, as any real soldier knew, could not win the war.
Because relying on guns and forts was a recipe for doing nothing. It was generalship by defense. Bautista did not want to risk marching an army into the field and suffering a horrific defeat, so instead he was justifying his inaction by pretending it was a strategy. Let Madrid send enough guns, Bautista claimed, and the enemy would be destroyed when they attacked the Royalist strongholds, yet even the dullest enemy would eventually realize it was both cheaper and more effective to starve a fortress into submission than to drown it in blood. Bautista’s strategy was designed solely to transfer the blame for defeat onto other men’s shoulders, while he became rich enough to challenge those men when he returned to Madrid. No wonder, Sharpe thought, Bias Vivar had hated this man. He was betraying his soldiers as well as his country.
“Why have you come here, Mister Sharpe?” Bautista had suddenly turned on Sharpe again.
Sharpe, noting that he had not been accorded the honorific of his rank, decided not to make an issue of it. “I’m here at the behest of the Countess of Mouromorto to carry her husband’s remains home to Spain.”
“She is evidently an extravagant woman? Why did she not simply ask me to send her husband home?”
Sharpe did not want to explain that Louisa had not heard of her husband’s death or burial when he left, so he just shrugged. “I can’t say, sir.”
“You can’t say. Well, it seems a small enough request. I shall consider my decision, though I must say that so far as most of us are concerned, the sooner General Vivar is out of Chile, the better.” The quip provoked another outburst of laughter which this time Bautista allowed to continue. “You knew General Vivar?” he asked Sharpe when the sycophancy had subsided.
“We fought together in ’09, at Santiago de Compostela.”
Bias Vivar’s fight at Santiago de Compostela had been one of the great events of the Spanish war, a miraculous victory which had proved to many Spaniards that the French were not invincible, and Sharpe’s mention of the battle made many of the officers in the audience look at him with a new interest and respect, but to General Bautista the battle was mere history.