The bastards were always darting about in the grass, sniping away, then moving on. Sauterelles.
Herault paused. No need to go bald-headed at the bridge. Even a handful of redcoats could do damage in the confined space of a bridge’s roadway, and two dead horses dropped between the parapets would make a horribly effective barricade. No, these rosbifs and sauterelles must be thinned out, and then he would release a company of Polish lancers at them.
Infantry hated lancers. Herault loved them.
He summoned his green-jacketed dragoons first. Dragoons were supposed to be mounted infantry, and they all carried longarms as well as swords, and Herault had three hundred of them. “Dismount your men,” he ordered the dragoon colonel, “and make a skirmish line. Get them close to the river and smother those bastards with fire.” He reckoned the dragoons could silence the riflemen, though the redcoats could probably find shelter by crouching under the bridge parapets. Which is where he wanted them.
“You want me to charge the bridge on foot?” The dragoon Colonel asked.
“I shall charge the bridge,” Herault said. The dragoons would make the redcoats cower and Herault would burst across the bridge with the dreaded Polish horsemen.
The dragoons dismounted, leaving their horses with the hussars. Herault trotted his horse to where the Poles, in their dark blue uniforms, fronted with yellow and their square-sided, black leather, yellow topped tsapka hats waited. He chose a company that wore the single white epaulettes to show they were an elite unit, and he borrowed a lance from a trooper in another company. It was an ash pole, fourteen feet long, with a narrow steel blade projecting another eighteen inches. Herault had seen a lancer at the full gallop take the top off a hard-boiled egg, and the eggcup had not even shivered as the lance blade struck and cut. “In a few moments,”
he told the Poles, pausing to let his words be translated, “we shall cross the bridge. Kill them all.” He would lead them, because that was the tradition in the French army. Had not General Bonaparte made his name on the bridge at Arcole? So Herault would now add a bridge to his own legend.
The dragoons had opened a galling fire over the Tormes and Herault, twisting in his saddle, saw the sauterelles running back from their fire.
He pushed his right hand through the wrist loop that was fastened at the lance’s midpoint.
It was time to swat the enemy aside.
Time to win.
Bloody hell, Sharpe thought, but what to do? If his men stood up they exposed themselves to the galling fire of the three hundred dragoons, and if they stayed crouching they could not see over the bridge’s hump. They could fire one volley when the French came, but by then the big horses would be within forty feet and, though the volley might kill the leading cavalrymen, the dead and dying horses would slide forward on the roadway to smash their weight into the redcoats. Sharpe had seen the first French square break at Garcia Hernandez because the French held their fire an instant too long and the dead weight of the slaughtered horses had broken through the square’s face like a battering ram. He stood, attracting a whistling volley of dragoon fire, but he endured it long enough to see a squadron of lancers trotting towards the road. “Bloody lancers,” he said.
He hated lancers.
He needed to barricade the bridge, but the wagon was in the river and any timbers that might have been useful from the fort were now inside an inferno. The smoke and embers whirled around Sharpe. The upper floors had collapsed, spewing sparks high into the cloudless sky. The heat of the burning fort was like a furnace to Sharpe’s right.
Mister MacKeon had equipped himself with a musket and cartridge pouch. He was crouching beside the wayside shrine and now beckoned Sharpe. Sharpe crossed to him and the Scotsman jerked a thumb through the iron-grille gate that protected the Virgin. “Your answer’s there, Mister Sharpe,” he said.
Prayer? Sharpe wondered, then he looked past the chipped plaster saint and saw that the back of the chapel was piled with the bottles of wine that Harper had been ordered to smash. “Wine?”