„Bloody well ought to be frightening,” Sharpe responded. „A fight like that? In the rain and dark? Anything can happen. You just go in fast and dirty, Jorge, do the damage and keep on doing it.”
„You have done so much fighting,” Vicente said sadly, as though he pitied Sharpe.
„I’ve been a soldier for a long time,” Sharpe said, „and our army does a lot of fighting. India, Flanders, here, Denmark.”
„Denmark! Why were you fighting in Denmark?”
„God knows,” Sharpe said. „Something about their fleet. We wanted it, they didn’t want us to have it, so we went and took it.” He was gazing down the northern slope at a group of a dozen Frenchmen who had stripped to the waist and now began to shovel at a patch of ferns a hundred yards from the edge of the wood. He took out the replacement telescope Luis had brought him. It was little more than a toy and the outer lens was loose which meant it kept blurring, and it was only half as powerful as his own glass, but he supposed it was better than nothing. He focused the glass, steadied the outer lens with a fingertip and stared at the French work party. „Shit,” he said.
„What?”
„Bastards have got a cannon,” Sharpe said. „Just pray it isn’t a bloody mortar.”
Vicente, looking bewildered, was trying and failing to see a gun. „What happens if it’s a mortar?”
„We all die,” Sharpe said, imagining the pot-like gun lobbing its shells into the sky so that they would drop almost vertically onto his position. „We all die,” he said again, „or else we run away and get captured.”
Vicente made the sign of the cross again. He had not made that gesture at all in the first weeks Sharpe had known him, but the further Vicente traveled from his life as a lawyer the more the old imperatives returned to him. Life, he was beginning to learn, was not controlled by law or reason, but by luck and savagery and blind unfeeling fate. „I can’t see a cannon,” he finally admitted.
Sharpe pointed to the French working party. „Those buggers are making a nice flat patch so they can aim properly,” he explained. „You can’t fire a gun on a slope, not if you want to be accurate.” He took a few steps down the northern path. „Dan!”
„Sir?“
„See where the bastards are going to put a cannon? How far away is it?”
Hagman, ensconced in a crevice of stone, peered down. „Bit under seven hundred paces, sir. Too far.”
„We can try?”
Hagman shrugged. „I can try, but maybe save it for later?”
Sharpe nodded. Better to reveal the rifle’s range to the French when things were more desperate.
Vicente again looked bewildered so Sharpe explained. „A rifle bullet can carry that far, but it would take a genius to be accurate. Dan’s close to genius.” He thought about taking a small party of riflemen halfway down the slope and he knew that at three or four hundred yards they could do a lot of damage to a gun crew, but the gun crew, at that range, would answer them with canister and though the lower slope of the hill was littered with rocks few were of a size to shelter a man from canister. Sharpe would lose soldiers if he went down the hill. He would do it, he decided, if the gun turned out to be a mortar, for mortars never carried canister, but the French were bound to answer his foray with a strong skirmish line of infantry. Stroke and counter-stroke. It felt frustrating. All he could do was pray the gun was not a mortar.
It was not a mortar. An hour after the working party began making a level platform the cannon appeared and Sharpe saw it was a howitzer. That was bad enough, but it gave his men a chance, for a howitzer shell would come at an oblique angle and his men would be safe behind the bigger boulders on the hilltop. Vicente borrowed the small telescope and watched the French gunners unlimber the gun and prepare its ammunition. A caisson, its long coffin-like lid cushioned so that the gun crew could travel on it, was being opened and the powder bags and shells piled by the leveled ground. „It looks like a very small gun,” Vicente said.