„Rifles only!” Sharpe called. „Fire when you’re ready. Don’t waste the patch! Hagman? Go for that big man with the saber.”
„I see him, sir,” Hagman said and shifted his rifle to aim at the officer who was striding ahead, setting an example, asking to be rifle meat.
„Look for the ladders,” Sharpe reminded the others, then walked to the parapet, put his left foot on the coping and the rifle to his shoulder. He aimed at a man with a ladder, sighting on the man’s head in the expectation that the bullet would fall to take him in the lower belly or groin. The wind was in Sharpe’s face so would not drift the shot. He fired and was immediately blinded by the smoke. Hagman fired next, then there was the crackle of the other rifles. The muskets kept silent. Sharpe went to his left to see past the smoke and saw that the saber-carrying officer had vanished, as had any other man struck by a bullet. They had been swallowed by the advancing column that stepped over and past the victims, then Sharpe saw a ladder reappear as it was snatched up by a man in the fourth or fifth rank. He felt in his cartridge box for another round and began to reload.
He did not look at the rifle as he reloaded. He just did what he had been trained to do, what he could do in his sleep, and just as he primed the rifle so the first musket balls were shot from the garden wall, then the muskets opened fire from the windows and roof, and the seminary was again wreathed in smoke and noise. The cannon shots rumbled above, so close that Sharpe almost ducked once, and the case shot banged above the slope. Bullets and musket balls ripped into the French files. Close to a thousand men were in the seminary now and they were protected by stone walls and given a wide open target. Sharpe fired another shot down the hill, then walked up and down behind his men, watching. Slattery needed a new flint and Sharpe gave him one, then Tarrant’s mainspring broke and Sharpe replaced the weapon with Williamson’s old rifle which Harper had been carrying ever since they left Vila Real de Zedes. The enemy’s drums sounded nearer and Sharpe reloaded his own rifle as the first French musket bullets rattled against the seminary’s stones. „They’re firing blind,” Sharpe told his men, „firing blind! Don’t waste your shots. Look for targets.” That was difficult because of the smoke hanging over the slope, but vagaries of wind sometimes stirred the fog to reveal blue uniforms and the French were close enough for Sharpe to see faces. He aimed at a man with an enormous mustache, fired and lost sight of the man as the smoke blossomed from his rifle’s muzzle.
The noise of the fight was awesome. Muskets crackling incessantly, the drumbeats thumping, the case shots banging overhead, and beneath all that violence was the sound of men crying in distress. A redcoat slumped down near Harper, blood puddling by his head until a sergeant dragged the man away from the parapet, leaving a smear of bright red on the roofs lead. Far off-it had to be on the river’s southern bank-a band was playing „The Drum Major” and Sharpe tapped his rifle’s butt in time to the tune. A French ramrod came whirling through the air to clatter against the seminary wall, evidently fired by a conscript who had panicked and pulled his trigger before he cleared his barrel. Sharpe remembered how, in Flanders, at his very first battle as a red-coated private, a man’s musket had misfired, but he had gone on reloading, pulling the trigger, reloading, and when they drilled out his musket after the battle they found sixteen useless charges crammed down the barrel. What was the man’s name? He had been from Norfolk, despite being in a Yorkshire regiment, and he had called everyone „bor.” Sharpe could not remember the name and it annoyed him. A musket ball whipped past his face, another hit the parapet and shattered a tile. Down in the garden Vicente’s men and the redcoats were not aiming their muskets, but just pushing the muzzles into the loopholes, pulling the triggers, and getting out of the way so the next man could use the embrasure. There were some green-jackets in the garden now and Sharpe guessed a company of the 60th, the Royal American Rifles, must be attached to Hill’s brigade and was now joining the fight. They would do better, he thought, to climb to the roof than try to fire their Bakers through the loopholes. The single tree on the northern slope was thrashing as though in a gale and there was scarcely one leaf left on its splintered branches. Smoke drifted through the winter-bare twigs that twitched continually from the bullet strikes.