Sharpe’s Havoc by Bernard Cornwell

They turned east toward the bridge just as it began to rain again. All morning the dark showers had slanted about them, but now one opened directly above them, and then a crash of thunder bellowed across the sky. Ahead, far off to the south, there was a patch of sunshine lightening the pale hills, but above Sharpe the sky grew darker and the rain heavier and he knew the rifles would have difficulty firing in such a teeming downpour. He said nothing. They were all cold and dispirited, the French were escaping and Christopher might already be over the Misarella and on his way into Spain.

To their left the grass-grown road twisted up into the last Portuguese hills and they could see dragoons and infantry slogging up the road’s tortuous bends, but those men were a half-mile away and the rocky bluff was just ahead. Javali was already on its summit and he warned the remnants of the ordenanga who waited among the ferns and boulders that the uniformed men who approached were friends. The Portuguese, whose muskets were useless in the heavy rain, had been reduced to throwing rocks that bounded down the bluff’s eastern face and were nothing but a minor nuisance to the stream of French who crossed the thin lifeline across the Misarella.

Sharpe shrugged off the ordenanqa who wanted to welcome him and threw himself down on the bluff’s lip. Rain thrashed the rocks, poured down the cliff’s face and drummed on his shako. A crash of thunder sounded overhead to be echoed by another from the southwest, and Sharpe recognized the second peal as the sound of guns. It was cannon fire, and the noise meant that Sir Arthur Wellesley’s army must have caught up with the French and that his artillery had opened fire, but that fight was miles away, back beyond the Ponte Nova, and here, at the final obstacle, the French were escaping.

Hogan, panting from the exertion of climbing the bluff, dronned beside Sharpe. They were so close to the bridge they could see the mustaches on the faces of the French infantry, see the striped brown-and-black pattern of a woman’s long skirt. She walked beside her man, carrying his musket and his child, and had a dog tied to her belt by a length of string. Behind them an officer led a limping horse. „Is that cannon I’m hearing?” Hogan asked.

„Yes, sir.“

„Must be the three-pounders,” Hogan guessed. „We could do with a couple of those toys here.”

But they had none. Only Sharpe, Vicente and their men. And an army that was escaping.

Back at the Ponte Nova the gunners had manhandled their two toy cannon to the crest of a knoll that overlooked the French rearguard. It was not raining here. An occasional flurry whipped down from the mountains, but the muskets could still fire and the Brigade of Guards loaded their weapons, fixed bayonets and then formed to advance in column of companies.

And the guns, the despised three-pounders, opened on the French and the small balls, scarcely bigger than an orange each, whipped through the tight ranks and bounced on rock to kill more Frenchmen, and the band of Coldstream Guards struck up „Rule Britannia” and the great colors were unfurled to the damp air, and the three-pound balls struck again, each shot leaving a long spray of blood in the air as though a giant unseen knife were slashing through the French ranks. The two light companies of the Guards and a company of the green-jacketed 60th, the Royal American Rifles, were advancing among a jumble of rocks and low stone walls on the French left flank and the muskets and Baker rifles began taking their toll of French officers and sergeants. French skirmishers, men from the renowned 4th Leger, a regiment chosen by Soult to guard his rear because the 4th was famous for its steadiness, ran forward to drive the British skirmishers back, but the rifles were too much for them. They had never faced such long-range accurate fire before and the voltigeurs backed away.

„Take them forward, Campbell, take them forward!” Sir Arthur Wellesley called to the brigade’s commander and so the first battalion of the Coldstreamers and the first battalion of the 3rd Foot Guards marched toward the bridge. Their bearskins made them seem huge, the band’s drummers thumped for all they were worth, the rifles snapped and the two three-pounders crashed back onto their trails to cut two more bloody furrows through the long lines of Frenchmen.

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