“Talion! By the front!’ Harper’s voice was huge. ‘Quick march!’
The four Companies, followed by the coach, went under the archway and turned west towards Chelmsford. Sharpe skirted the town, going north, and it was not until the tallest spire of Chelmsford had disappeared that he allowed himself a small measure of hope. He still kept them marching at a cracking pace, taking them down narrow, thick-grown lanes, losing them in a scented, soft country of orchards, hedges, and gentle hills. He marched them until the sun, huge and glorious, almost touched the western horizon. Then, where a meadow lay by a great covert of oak and beech, he stopped the exhausted column and called the officers to him. ‘This, gentlemen, is where we sleep.’
Captain Carline, whose elegant breeches had been chafed thin by the ride, gaped at him. ‘Sleep, sir? But we haven’t got tents!’
‘Good.’
They slept.
For two days he marched them westward. They slept rough, as they would in Spain, and Sharpe spared the men the parades and drills which had plagued them at Foulness. Not that he made it easy, but he tried, so far as it was possible in this plump, easy country, to give them a taste of what a campaign march was like.
At night they set picquets. To two of his Captains, Smith and Carline, a picquet was a smart group of men who stood to attention at the boundary of a camp and had no purpose other than to salute officers.
On the first night that Smith set the picquets, Regimental Sergeant Major Harper, hidden in a thicket of blackberries, put a bullet into a tree trunk beside the Captain. Smith jumped a foot in the air. ‘Sir! Sir!’
Sharpe beckoned Smith to one side. ‘If that was the French and not the RSM, you’d be dead. Hide the buggers.’
‘Hide them?’
‘If you were French, Captain, how would you approach this place?’
Smith frowned, then pointed to where the lane disappeared over the hill by a stand of elms. ‘There, sir?’
‘So guard it. And tell them I’ll come looking for them.’
That night and the subsequent nights, about the officers’ fire, Sharpe talked of battles. He did not do it boastfully, but because none of these men, except for d’Alembord and Price, knew what it was to face the French. He told them how to smell unseen cavalry, how to clean a musket on a battlefield, how to face a charging horse, how to make a billet out of nothing, and sometimes Sharpe would wander about the other camp-fires and tell the same stories to the men. Harper did it too, working his Irish magic so that, within two days, he could swear at them foully and they still grinned and tried to impress him with their endurance.
‘They’re good lads, sir,’ Harper said.
They were, too, and they were beginning to want to go to Spain, but Sharpe sometimes feared in the night that their hopes would be dashed by his temerity. His idea, that might mean no proof would be needed, was a desperate gamble. He tried not to contemplate failure, and marched his hidden Battalion onwards.
The men were not spared all drills. Where they could, on common land or on the patches of heath that they discovered as they went further west, Sharpe would suddenly bellow at them to form square, or line, or a column of half Companies, and he had Lieutenant Mattingley at his side to time the manoeuvre. They got better each day, even began to enjoy the experience, and they were blessed with little rain, warm sun, and some back pay from the Battalion chest that was still kept in the hired coach. The money dwindled fast. It was used to pay millers for flour, farmers for beer, and innkeepers for ration ale.
On the third day Sharpe stopped the march. The men were harder than they had ever been, as dirty and ragged as any soldiers in Spain, and happier than he had dared hope. He made it a day of exercises, two Companies against two, games in which men tried to surprise picquets or conceal themselves in woodland; stalking games that would not be of great use to any of them unless they joined the Light Company, but which were a rest from the hard slog of marching. That evening, to the concern of the sergeants and officers, he let them go to the tavern in a nearby village, promising to flog any man who made trouble or who could not walk back to the bivouac.