Sharpe's Rifles (2 page)

The Lieutenant did not reply. Six months ago, when he had joined this Battalion, no officer
would have spoken thus in front of the men, but the retreat had jaded tempers and brought hidden
antagonisms to the surface. Men who would normally have treated each other with wary respect or
even a forced cordiality, now snapped like rabid dogs. And Major Warren Dunnett hated the
Quartermaster. It was a livid, irrational and consuming hatred, and the Quartermaster’s annoying
response was to ignore it. That, and his air of competence, could provoke Major Dunnett into a
livid anger. “Who in Christ’s holy name does he think he is?” he exploded to Captain Murray
outside the tavern. “Does he think the whole bloody army will wait for him?”

“He’s just doing his job, isn’t he?” John Murray was a mild and fair man.

“He’s not doing his job. He’s gaping at some whore’s tits.” Dunnett spat. “I didn’t bloody
want him in this Battalion, and I still don’t bloody want him in the Battalion. The Colonel only
took him as a favour to Willie Lawford. What the hell is this bloody army coming to? He’s a
jumped-up sergeant, Johnny! He isn’t even a real officer! And in the Rifles, too!”

Murray suspected that Dunnett was jealous of the Quartermaster. It was a rare thing for a man
to join Britain’s army as a private soldier and to rise into the officers’ mess. The
Quartermaster had done that. He had carried a musket in the red-coated ranks, become a Sergeant,
then, as a reward for an act of suicidal bravery on a battlefield, he had been made into an
officer. The other officers were wary of the new Lieutenant’s past, fearing that his competence
in battle would show up their own inexperience. They need not have worried, for the Colonel had
kept the new Lieutenant from the battle-line by making him into the Battalion’s Quartermaster; an
appointment based on the principle that any man who had served in the ranks and as a Sergeant
would know every trick of the Quartermaster’s criminal trade.

Abandoning both the drunks and the remaining ammunition to the French, the Quartermaster
emerged from the tavern yard. It began to rain; a sleet-cold rain that spat from the east onto
the three hundred Riflemen who waited in the village street. These Riflemen were the army’s
rearguard; a rearguard dressed in rags like a mockery of soldiers, or like some monstrous army of
beggars. Men and officers alike were draped and bundled in whatever scraps of cloth they had
begged or stolen on the march, the soles of their boots held in place by knotted twine. Their
unshaven faces were wrapped with filthy scarves against the bitter wind. Their eyes were
red-rimmed and vacant, their cheeks were sunken, and their eyebrows whitened by frost. Some men
had lost their shakos and wore peasant hats with floppy brims. They looked a beaten, ragtag unit,
but they were still Riflemen and every Baker rifle had an oiled lock and, gripped in its doghead,
a sharp-edged flint.

Major Dunnett, who commanded this half Battalion, marched them westwards. They had been
marching since Christmas Eve, and now it was a week into January. Always west away from the
victorious French whose overwhelming numbers were swamping Spain, and every day of the march was
a torture of cold and hunger and pain. In some Battalions all discipline had disappeared and the
paths of such units were littered with the bodies of men who had given up hope. Some of the dead
were women; the wives who had been permitted to travel with the army to Spain. Others were
children. The survivors were now so hardened to horror that they could trudge past the frozen
body of a child and feel nothing.

Yet if the army had been broken on the rack of ice-storms and a frozen wind that cut like a
chasseur’s sabre, there were still some men who marched in good formation and who, when ordered,
turned to keep the French pursuit at bay. Those were the hard men, the good men; the Guards and
the Light Infantry, the elite of Sir John Moore’s army that had marched into the centre of Spain
to cut off Napoleon’s supply roads. They had marched expecting victory, but the Emperor had
turned on them with a savage speed and overwhelming numbers, so now this small British army
retreated towards the ships that would take them home.

Dunnett’s three hundred Riflemen seemed alone in a frozen wilderness. Somewhere ahead of them
was the bulk of the retreating army, and somewhere behind were the pursuing French, but the
Riflemen’s world was the pack of the man in front, the sleet, their tiredness, and the pain of
bellies cramped by hunger.

An hour from the village they reached a stream crossed by a stone bridge. British cavalry
waited there with news that some artillery was floundering on a slope two miles ahead. The
cavalry’s commander suggested that Dunnett’s Rifles wait by the bridge. “Give us time to help the
gunners to the ridge, then we’ll come back for you.”

“How long?” Dunnett asked testily.

“An hour? No longer.”

The Riflemen waited. They had done this a score of times in the last two weeks, and doubtless
they would do it a score of times again. They were the sting in the army’s tail. If they were
lucky this day no Frenchman would bother them, but the probability was that, sometime in the next
hour, the enemy vanguard would appear. That vanguard would be cavalry on tired horses. The French
would make a token attack, the Riflemen would fire a couple of volleys; then, because neither
side had an advantage, the French would let the greenjackets trudge on. It was soldiering;
boring, cold, dispiriting, and one or two Riflemen and one or two Frenchmen would die because of
it.

The Riflemen formed in companies to bar the road west of the bridge. They shivered and stared
east. Sergeants paced behind their ranks. The officers, all of whom had lost their horses to the
cold, stood in front of their companies. No one spoke. Perhaps some of the men dreamed of the
Navy’s ships that were supposed to be waiting for them at the end of this long road, but more
likely their thoughts were of nothing but cold and hunger.

The Lieutenant who had been made into the Battalion’s Quartermaster wandered aimlessly onto
the stone bridge and stared into the stinging sleet. He was now the closest man to the enemy,
twenty paces ahead of the greenjacketed line, and that piqued Major Warren Dunnett who saw an
Unspoken arrogance in the Lieutenant’s chosen position. “Bugger him.” Dunnett crossed to Captain
Murray’s side.

“He’s harmless.” Murray spoke with his customary mildness.

“He’s a jumped-up bloody nothing.”

Murray smiled. “He’s a damned efficient Quartermaster, Warren. When did your men last have so
much ammunition?”

“His job is to arrange my bed for tonight, not loiter here in the hope of proving how well he
can fight. Look at him!” Dunnett, like a man with an itching sore that he could not stop
scratching, stared at the Quartermaster. “He thinks he’s still in the ranks, doesn’t he? Once a
peasant, always one, that’s what I say. Why’s he carrying a rifle?”

“I really couldn’t say.”

The rifle was the Quartermaster’s eccentricity, and an unfitting one, for a Quartermaster
needed lists and ink and quills and tally-sticks, not a weapon. He needed to be able to forage
for food or ferret out shelters in apparently overcrowded billets. He needed a nose to smell out
rotten beef, scales to weigh ration flour, and stubbornness to resist the depredations of other
Quartermasters. He did not need weapons, yet the new Lieutenant always carried a rifle as well as
his regulation sabre. The two weapons seemed to be a statement of intent; that he wanted to fight
rather than be a Quartermaster, yet to most of the greenjackets the weapons were a rather
pathetic pretension carried by a man who, whatever his past, was now nothing more than an ageing
Lieutenant.

Dunnett stamped his cold feet on the road. “I’ll send the flank companies back first, Johnny.
You can cover.”

“Yes, sir. Do we wait for our horse?”

“Bugger the cavalry.” Dunnett offered the infantryman’s automatic scorn of the mounted arm.
“I’m waiting five more minutes. It can’t take this long to clear some bloody guns off the road.
Do you see anything, Quartermaster?” The question was asked mockingly.

“No, sir.” The Lieutenant took off his shako and pushed a hand through hair that was long,
black, and made greasy by days of campaigning. His greatcoat hung open and he wore neither scarf
nor gloves. Either he could not afford them, or else he was boasting that he was too tough to
need such comforts. That arrogance made Dunnett wish that the new Lieutenant, so eager for a
fight, would be cut down by the enemy horsemen.

Except there were no enemy horsemen in sight. Perhaps the rain and the wind and the God-damned
bloody cold had driven the French to shelter in the last village. Or perhaps the drunken women
had proved too irresistible a lure. Whichever it was, there were no Frenchmen in sight, just
sleet and low clouds driven to turmoil by a freshening wind.

Maj’r Dunnett swore nervously. The four companies seemed alone in a wilderness of rain and
frost, four companies of forgotten soldiers in a lost war, and Dunnett made up his mind that he
could wait no longer. “We’re going.”

Whistles blew. The two flank companies turned and, like the walking dead, shambled up the
road. The two centre companies stayed at the bridge under Captain Murray’s. command. In five
minutes or so, when the flank companies had stopped to provide cover, it would be Murray’s turn
to withdraw.

The Riflemen liked Captain John Murray. He was a proper gentleman, they said, and it was a fly
bastard who could fool him; but if you were straight with him, then the Captain would treat you
fair. Murray had a thin and humorous face, quick to smile and swift with a jest. It was because
of officers like him that these Riflemen could still shoulder arms and march with an echo of the
elan they had learned on the parade ground at Shorncliffe.

“Sir!” It was the Quartermaster who still stood on the bridge and drew Murray’s attention to
the east where a figure moved in the sleet. “One of ours,” he called after a moment.

The single figure, staggering and weaving, was a redcoat. He had no musket, no shako, nor
boots. His naked feet left bloodstains on the road’s flint bed.

“That’ll learn him,” Captain Murray said. “You see, lads, the perils of drink?”

It was not much of a joke, merely the imitation of a preacher who had once lectured the
Battalion against the evils of liquor, but it made the Riflemen smile. Their lips might be
cracked and bloody with the cold, but a smile was still better than despair.

The redcoat, one of the drunks abandoned in the last village, seemed to flap a feeble hand
towards the rearguard. Some instinct had awoken and driven him onto the road and kept him
travelling westwards towards safety. He stumbled past the flensed and frozen carcass of a horse,
then tried to run.

“Ware cavalry!” the new Lieutenant shouted.

“Rifles!” Captain Murray called, “present!”

Rags were snatched from rifle locks. Men’s hands, though numb with the cold, moved
quickly.

Because, in the white mist of sleet and ice, there were other shapes. Horsemen.

The shapes were grotesque apparitions in the grey rain. Dark shapes. Scabbards, cloaks, plumes
and carbine holsters made the ragged outlines of French cavalry. Dragoons.

“Steady, lads, steady!” Captain Murray’s voice was calm. The new Lieutenant had gone to the
company’s left flank where his mule was hobbled.

The redcoat twisted off the road, jumped a frozen ditch, then screamed like a pig in a
slaughteryard. A Dragoon had caught the man, and the long straight sword sliced down to open his
face from brow to chin. Blood speckled the frosted earth. Another horseman, riding from the other
flank, hissed his steel blade to cut into the fugitive’s scalp. The drunken redcoat fell to his
knees, crying, and the Dragoons rode over him and spurred towards the two companies which barred
the road. The small stream would be no obstacle to their charge.

‘Serrez! Serrez!“ The French word of command came clear to the Riflemen. It meant ’close up!”
The Dragoons bunched, booted knee to booted knee, and the new Lieutenant had time to see the odd
pigtails which framed their faces before Captain Murray shouted the order to fire.

Perhaps eighty of the rifles fired. The rest were too damp, but eighty bullets, at less than a
hundred yards, shattered the single squadron into a maelstrom of floundering horses, falling men,
and panic. The scream of a dying horse flayed the cold day.

“Reload!”

Sergeant Williams was on the right flank of Murray’s company. He seized one of the damp rifles
which had not fired, scooped the wet sludge from its pan, and loaded it with dry powder from his
horn. “Pick your targets! Fire as you will!”

The new Lieutenant peered through the dirty grey smoke to find an enemy officer. He saw a
horseman shouting at the broken cavalry. He aimed, and the rifle bruised his shoulder as he
fired. He thought he saw the Frenchman fall, but could not be sure. A riderless horse galloped
away from the road with blood dripping from its saddle-cloth.

More rifles fired. Their flames spat two feet clear of the muzzles. The French had scattered,
using the sleet as a screen to blur the Riflemen’s aim. Their first charge, designed only to
discover what quality of rearguard faced them, had failed, and now they were content to harass
the greenjackets from a distance.

The two companies that had retreated westwards under Dunnett had formed now. A whistle blew,
telling Murray that he could safely fall back. The French beyond the bridge opened a ragged and
inaccurate fire with their short-barrelled carbines. They fired from the saddle, making it even
less likely that their bullets would find a mark.

“Retire!” Murray shouted.

A few rifles spat a last time, then the men turned and scrambled up the road. They forgot
their hunger and desperate tiredness; fear gave them speed, and they ran towards the two formed
companies who could hold another French charge at bay. For the next few minutes it would be a cat
and mouse game between tired cavalry and cold Riflemen, until either the French abandoned the
effort, or British cavalry arrived to drive the enemy away.