Sergeant Coignet tried to reach the tall rifle officer, but he tripped on a dead body and the rifle officer kicked him in the face, then kicked him again, and Coignet tried to roll over, spitting out teeth, to stab his sabre up into the bastard’s groin, but Sharpe stabbed down first. The sword blade scraped on ribs, then broke through to splash blood onto Sharpe’s boots. Then Pailleterie was carving space for himself by slashing his sabre from side to side, and Sharpe stepped back from Coignet’s body and wrenched the sword free, and then leaped back because Pailleterie had lunged, but a sabre is a poor lunging weapon and Sharpe smacked it aside with his sword and ran at the hussar captain, just ran at him, and gripped him in a bear hug and thrust him against the parapet and then pushed.
Pailleterie shouted as he fell into the river, then another voice shouted, much louder. “The hell out the way! Out the way!” And Sergeant Harper had arrived with his seven-barrelled gun, the vicious cluster of barrels held at his hip and the redcoats twisted aside as the big Irishman came straight up the bridge’s centre. “Bastards!” He shouted at the hussars, then pulled the trigger and it was as if a cannon had been fired. Blood misted over the Tormes, and Harper was charging into the bloody space he had made, swinging the stubby seven-barrelled gun like a club. He was chanting in Irish, lost in a saga of old when heroes had counted their enemy dead in the scores.
And the hussars, their beloved captain gone, gave ground. “Keep after them!” Sharpe snarled, “don’t let them breathe! Kill them!” And men stepped over bodies, slipped in blood and carried the bayonets forward and Sharpe broke a sabre clean in two with a cut of the sword and then stabbed the blade into a pigtailed face, and then the French really did break.
Break and run. Back the way they had come.
“Hold it there!” Sharpe called. “Stop! Stop!”
The bridge was his. The French were running. A dripping Pailleterie was clambering up the southern bank, but the fight had been drenched out of him and his men were running.
“Form ranks!” Sharpe shouted. Form ranks, count the dead, bind up the wounded, and then he looked south and his mouth dropped open. “Bloody hell,” he said.
“God save Ireland,” Patrick Harper spoke beside him.
Because every bloody cavalryman in France was on the road. All the Emperor’s horses and all the Emperor’s men. With lances, swords and sabres. In blue coats, green coats, white coats and brown coats. With plumes and braid and lace and pelisses and sabretaches and glitter.
Polished blades catching the sun like a field of steel.
And all coming straight at the South Essex Light Company.
“God save Ireland,” Harper said again.
“Back!” Sharpe said, “back!” Back to the northern side of the bridge. Not that retreating would do him much good, but it might give him time to think.
To think about what? Death?
Just what the hell could he do?
General Herault did not have all his men, for some of the horses had simply collapsed during the long night march, but he had close to twelve hundred cavalrymen and he had come down from the Sierra de Gredos to see the fort at San Miguel de Tormes belching smoke like a furnace, and to see his beloved elite company of hussars thrust off the bridge by a ragtag collection of redcoats and greenjackets.
But there was only a handful of British infantry, and one glance at the northern bank showed Herault that there were no more British troops at hand. No artillery, no cavalry, no more infantry, just the one small band of men who even as he watched scuttled back over the bridge’s hump to form a double rank at the far end of the roadway. The riflemen were scattering along the bank, plainly intending to rake the flank of any cavalry charge with their horribly accurate marksmanship.
So that was what stood between him and victory. Two ranks and a handful of grasshoppers. That was what the French called the riflemen, grasshoppers.