‘He killed him!’
‘You do nothing! You bloody endure, that’s all. It gets better, lad.’
‘I’ll kill him!’ Weller, with all the passion of his seventeen years, could not hold back the tears caused by Buttons’ death.
‘After Patrick’s torn his head off, maybe,’ Sharpe grinned. He liked Weller. The boy was one of those rare recruits who had joined the army, not out of desperation, but because he wanted to serve his country. Weller, given time, would rise in the army, but Sharpe knew that first the seventeen year old must survive this place.
A place where, to his astonishment, he discovered that there were more than seven hundred men in training. Some were close to finishing, almost ready to take their place in the ranks that must fight the French, others, like his own squad, still learned the basic grammar of the trade. Yet there were more than enough men here to save the First Battalion in Pasajes and to form the core of a properly constituted Second as well.
He discovered too where the camp was. On a rainy, drizzling day he was ordered to the kitchens where he unloaded a cart of half rotted cabbages. A Mess-corporal, leaning in the doorway and staring at the low cloud to the south, grumbled what a godawful bloody place it was.
‘What place?’ Sharpe asked.
The corporal lit a pipe and, when it was drawing to his satisfaction, spat into the mud. ‘End of the bleeding world, Called Foulness.”
‘Foulness?’
‘Bloody foul too, yes?’ The corporal laughed. ‘Christ knows why they sent us here. Chelmsford was all right, but the buggers want us here.’
The corporal was happy to talk. Foulness, he said, was an island, joined by the wooden bridge to the mainland, and on the island there was a single, small, poor village and this army camp. To the south, the corporal said, was the Thames Estuary. At low tide it was a great desert of mud. To the east was the North Sea and to the north and west were the tangling tidal creeks and rivers of the Essex coast.
‘It’s like a prison,’ Sharpe said.
The corporal laughed. ‘You won’t be here long. Six weeks and they ship you out! You should feel sorry for me. Stuck out here!’
Sharpe had guessed already that the corporal, like the two senior Companies in the camp that, alone on Foulness, were dressed in red jackets, was one of the men who were here to guard the recruits against escape. It truly was like a prison, with water as its walls and troops as its jailers. Sharpe chopped a cabbage in half. ‘Where do they ship us to?’
‘Wherever the buggers want you. You know that, you’re an old soldier.’
And being an old soldier was to Sharpe’s advantage, for it kept him out of trouble and spared him the punishments that racked the less experienced men. No sergeant wanted to punish Sharpe or Harper, for the simple reason that both men gave the appearance of being able to take any punishment that was handed to them. Instead it was Marriott, always Marriott, who, with his tuppence worth of education, was unable to rid himself of the idea that he was superior to the illiterate men who were his fellow recruits. He argued stubbornly, wept when he was punished, and even at night, in the stillness of the tent lines, when the soft tread of the patrolling sergeants and officers listening for mutiny could be heard outside, Marriott cried.
Harper’s view was simple. ‘It’s his own bloody fault.’
‘He thinks he’s too clever to be sensible.’ Sharpe was the only man to whom Marriott would listen, but even Sharpe could not drive into the ex-clerk’s head that the only route to survival lay in acceptance and submission.
‘I’m going to get out. I’ll run!’ Marriott had told him. He had only been in the army a week.
‘Don’t be a fool.’ There was a snap in Sharpe’s voice that made Marriott’s head jerk up, the snap of an officer. ‘You’re not running away!’
‘They can’t do this to people!’
That night, before the bugle called the lights-out, Sharpe told Harper that Marriott wanted to run. Harper shrugged. ‘What about us?’