The horses were left with the servants in the valley. Sharpe, no longer pretending to consult Girdwood, gave the orders. The Battalion would advance in two columns. The Grenadier Company would lead the right hand column, the Light Company the left, while RSM Harper and his detail would go in the centre, ahead of Sharpe and the Colour party. ‘I don’t want any god-damned foolishness. We’re not on a parade ground. You can’t keep the ranks dressed up there, so just keep going! Listen for orders, but if you can’t hear any then you won’t do anything wrong if you just attack to the front. Attack! All the time!’ He looked round the faces, staring especially at the new men like Captain Smith and Captain Carline. ‘And don’t let your men settle into safe holes, understand? They like to do that, so keep them moving! Roust them out, take them forward.’ He described what he had seen through his telescope; the nightmare landscape of trenches and walls, of blank culverts where men could be trapped with French sharp-shooters above them, a jumbled, rocky landscape designed for defence. ‘It has to be fast work! If they drive us into the ground, we’re done for! So tell your men to fire on sight, not to wait for orders, and warn them there’ll be sticking work.’ Captain Smith looked worried at the thought of bayonets. ‘We go in fast. Tell them the French are more scared than we are.’
‘They must be bloody terrified then,’ Lieutenant Price said, and raised a smile from the officers.
‘They are,’ Sharpe said, ‘because they know they’re fighting us.’ And oddly, even the new men who had never fought, and who had been given a new lease on their shabby careers, suddenly knew that they could win. They followed a soldier, and they went to a fight.
It took more than two hours to climb the hill and catch up with the first attacking Battalions. Charlie Weller, pushed into the back file of the Light Company, saw his first enemy dead; a man crumpled on the rocks, his blood congealed by the cold. Another dead Frenchman’s beard was frosted white.
He saw British dead, one with an arm seemingly torn from the socket, another blown apart by a cannon ball with his guts blue on the rocks. More terrible than the dead were the wounded. Charlie passed groups of Frenchmen, one sobbing because his eyes were gone, another gasping out his life in terrible, huge, clouding breaths. His belly had been laid open by a sword. A British private gave him wine to sip, but the man could not take it.
A British sergeant whose left thigh was torn open to the bone and whose blood, despite the leather belt twisted into his groin, pulsed onto the ground, grinned at Weller. ‘Go on, lad! Give ’em hell.’ Weller thought he was more likely to vomit. He stumbled on, following the pack of men in front, wondering if he would remember to clear the ramrod from his musket before he fired. Ahead, seemingly closer all the while, was the sound of the guns.
Lieutenant Colonel Girdwood walked beside Sharpe. Without the pitch in his moustache he seemed punier. His small, black eyes darted about the unfamiliar scenery. He too saw the dead, but he had seen men torn by bullets before. Yet never in Ireland had he seen men struck by artillery fire. Somehow the gobbets of flesh, like the work of a demented, drunken butcher, seemed unreal. He shied away once as a dog ran across his front.
The sun was fitful between clouds. The smoke of the French mountain guns was like a thin skein above the Battalion, bringing its filthy smell of powder smoke. Somewhere a man screamed, the scream rising and falling in a dreadful cadence. It was silenced suddenly and Girdwood shuddered.
The Lieutenant Colonel could not make sense of what he saw. He could not tell where the enemy positions were, or how far the leading Battalions had reached in their attack. He could see, at the ridge’s northern end, the steep pinnacle of rock, wreathed in smoke, but dead ground lay before the pinnacle and Girdwood was confused. Once, through a shifting mist of smoke, he saw red uniforms running forward, a loose knot of men not in any proper order, and he wondered if he heard a cheer, but was not sure. He watched Sergeant John Lynch, plodding ahead of him, and thought that if Lynch showed no fear, then nor need he.