‘Left turn!’ a corporal shouted. ‘Let’s have you bastards! Move!’
Their clothes had been taken, labelled in sacks, they had been given their fatigues, and now they were issued with what the army called their Necessaries: gaiters, spare shoes, stockings, shirts, mittens, shoe-brush, foraging cap, and knapsack. Then, loaded down with the kit, they were taken, one by one, into a clerk’s hut and peremptorily told to sign a piece of paper that was thrust at each man.
Sharpe made his cross. Giles Marriott, inevitably, complained.
Harper, standing outside, heard the whining voice and groaned. ‘Stupid bastard!’
‘I protest!’ Marriott was shouting at the clerk. ‘It’s not fair!’
Nor was it. They had each been promised a bounty of twenty-three pounds, seventeen shillings and sixpence. Sergeant Havercamp had dazzled the recruits with his cascade of gold in Sleaford, and the guinea they had each received at their attestation had compounded the promise, but now-came the reality.
The paper they signed confirmed that there was no bounty, or rather, that each recruit was deemed to have already spent it.
The army had charged them for their Necessaries. It had charged them for the food they had eaten on their journey, and for the ale and rum they had drunk in Sergeant Havercamp’s generous company. It charged them for the laundry they had not had washed, for the army hospitals at Chelsea and Kilmainham that most had never heard of and, by one deduction after another, it was proved to them that, far from the army owing them the balance of their bounty, the recruits all owed money which would be deducted from their pay.
Of course it was not fair, but the army would have no recruits unless it made the extravagant promise, and no money to fight the war if it kept it. Nevertheless, Sharpe had never known so much to be stripped from the bounty. Someone, he reflected as Marriott’s shrill protest continued, was making a fine profit from each recruit.
‘Filth!’ The voice came from behind them, startling them, making them turn to see a small, immaculately uniformed Sergeant pacing towards them with a face of such concentrated fury and hatred that the recruits instinctively shrank back, letting the small, dark-faced man stride into the clerk’s hut.
There was a shriek from inside, followed by a yelp of protest, then Marriott came backwards from the door, tripped, fell, and the Sergeant followed, slashed him about the head with his cane and kicked him in the shins with his gleaming boots.
‘Up, filth! Up!’
Marriott, shaking, stood. He was a head taller than the Sergeant who, once Marriott was standing, punched him in the belly. ‘You’ve got a complaint, filth?’
‘They promised us . . .’
The sergeant punched him again, harder. ‘You’ve got a complaint, filth?’
‘No, Sergeant.’
‘I can’t hear you, filth!’
‘No, Sergeant!’ There were tears on Marriott’s cheeks.
The Sergeant snapped his head round to look at the other recruits, then past them to where Lieutenant Colonel Girdwood approached with his retinue. ‘Filth!’ He shouted at them all. ‘Fall in!’
Lieutenant Colonel Bartholomew Girdwood was a man soured by life, a man mistreated by life, a man that few understood. He was a soldier, he regarded himself as a great soldier, but he had never, not once, been allowed to go into battle. The closest he had come to war had been in Ireland, but he despised fighting against peasants; and even when the peasants had decimated his troops and run him ragged round the damp countryside, he had still despised them. Those he caught, he hanged, those he did not catch, he ignored. He dreamed only of fighting the French, and could not understand an army that had not allowed him to go to Spain.
‘Filth!’ The Sergeant screamed the word. ‘Shun!’ The recruits shuffled to attention. Lieutenant Colonel Girdwood, with his eye for military punctilio, noticed the two men who did it properly, whose thumbs were against the seams of their ragged trousers and whose heads and shoulders were back and whose feet were angled at a precise thirty degrees. Two old soldiers, two men easy to train, and two men who, because they knew all the tricks, he must watch like a hawk. He watched them now, seeing the scarred face of the older man and the hugeness of the younger, and he made the strange, snarling noise in his throat that was supposed to be a warning to them. He glared at the scarred man. ‘What regiment were you?’