Sharpe’s Battle: The Battle of Fuentes de Oñoro, May 1811

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‘Bugger republicanism,’ Sharpe said savagely. ‘But you were the one who told me the Real Compañía Irlandesa can’t be trusted. But I tell you, sir, that if there’s any mischief there, it isn’t coming from the ranks. Those soldiers weren’t trusted with French mischief. They don’t have enough power. Those men are what soldiers always are: victims of their officers, and if you want to find where the French have sown their mischief, sir, then you look among those damned, overpaid, overdressed, overfed bloody officers,’ and Sharpe threw a scornful glance towards the Real Compañía Irlandesa’s officers who seemed unsure whether or not they were supposed to follow their men northwards. ‘That’s where your rotten apples are, sir,’ Sharpe went on, ‘not in the ranks. I’d as happily fight alongside those guardsmen as alongside any other soldier in the world, but I wouldn’t trust my life to that rabble of perfumed fools.’

Hogan made a calming gesture with his hand, as if he feared Sharpe’s voice might reach the worried officers. ‘You make your point, Richard.’

‘My point, sir, is that you told me to make them miserable. So that’s what I’m doing.’

‘I just wasn’t sure I wanted you to start a revolution in the process, Richard,’ Hogan said, ‘and certainly not in front of Valverde. You have to be nice to Valverde. One day, with any luck, you can kill him for me, but until that happy day arrives you have to butter the bastard up. If we’re ever going to get proper command of the Spanish armies, Richard, then bastards like Don Luis Valverde have to be well buttered, so please don’t preach revolution in front of him. He’s just a simple-minded aristocrat who isn’t capable of thinking much beyond his next meal or his last mistress, but if we’re going to beat the French we need his support. And he expects us to treat the Real Compañía Irlandesa well, so when he’s nearby, Richard, be diplomatic, will you?’ Hogan turned as the group of Real Compañía Irlandesa’s officers led by Lord Kiely and General Valverde came close. Riding between the two aristocrats was a tall, plump, white-haired priest mounted on a bony roan mare.

‘This is Father Sarsfield’ – Kiely introduced the priest to Hogan, conspicuously ignoring Sharpe – ‘who is our chaplain. Father Sarsfield and Captain Donaju will travel with the company tonight, the rest of the company’s officers will attend General Valverde’s reception.’

‘Where you’ll meet Colonel Runciman,’ Hogan promised. ‘I think you’ll find him much to your Lordship’s taste.’

‘You mean he knows how to treat royal troops?’ General Valverde asked, looking pointedly at Sharpe as he spoke.

‘I know how to treat royal guards, sir,’ Sharpe intervened. ‘This isn’t the first royal bodyguard I’ve met.’

Kiely and Valverde both stared down at Sharpe with looks little short of loathing, but Kiely could not resist the bait of Sharpe’s comment. ‘You refer, I suppose, to the Hanoverian’s lackeys?’ he said in his half-drunken voice.

‘No, my Lord,’ Sharpe said. ‘This was in India. They were royal guards protecting a fat little royal bugger called the Sultan Tippoo.’

‘And you trained them too, no doubt?’ Valverde inquired.

‘I killed them,’ Sharpe said, ‘and the fat little bugger too.’ His words wiped the supercilious look off both men’s thin faces, while Sharpe himself was suddenly overwhelmed with a memory of the Tippoo’s water-tunnel filled with the shouting bodyguard armed with jewelled muskets and broad-bladed sabres. Sharpe had been thigh-deep in scummy water, fighting in the shadows, digging out the bodyguard one by one to reach that fat, glittering-eyed, buttery-skinned bastard who had tortured some of Sharpe’s companions to death. He remembered the echoing shouts, the musket flashes reflecting from the broken water and the glint of the gems draped over the Tippoo’s silk clothes. He remembered the Tippoo’s death too, one of the few killings that had ever lodged in Sharpe’s memory as a thing of comfort. ‘He was a right royal bastard,’ Sharpe said feelingly, ‘but he died like a man.’

‘Captain Sharpe,’ Hogan put in hastily, ‘has something of a reputation in our army. Indeed, you may have heard of him yourself, my Lord? It was Captain Sharpe who took the Talavera eagle.’

‘With Sergeant Harper,’ Sharpe put in, and Kiely’s officers stared at Sharpe with a new curiosity. Any soldier who had taken an enemy standard was a man of renown and the faces of most of the guards’ officers showed that respect, but it was the chaplain, Father Sarsfield, who reacted most fulsomely.

‘My God and don’t I remember it!’ he said enthusiastically. ‘And didn’t it just excite all the Spanish patriots in Madrid?’ He climbed clumsily down from his horse and held a plump hand out to Sharpe. ‘It’s an honour, Captain, an honour! Even though you are a heathen Protestant!’ This last was said with a broad and friendly grin. ‘Are you a heathen, Sharpe?’ the priest asked more earnestly.

‘I’m nothing, Father.’

‘We’re all something in God’s eyes, my son, and loved for it. You and I shall talk, Sharpe. I shall tell you of God and you shall tell me how to strip the damned French of their eagles.’ The chaplain turned a smiling face on Hogan. ‘By God, Major, but you do us proud by giving us a man like Sharpe!’ The priest’s approval of the rifleman had made the other officers of the Real Compañía Irlandesa relax, though Kiely’s face was still dark with distaste.

‘Have you finished, Father?’ Kiely asked sarcastically.

‘I shall be on my way with Captain Sharpe, my Lord, and we shall see you in the morning?’

Kiely nodded, then turned his horse away. His other officers followed, leaving Sharpe, the priest and Captain Donaju to follow the straggling column formed by the Real Compañía Irlandesa’s baggage, wives and servants.

By nightfall the Real Compañía Irlandesa was safe inside the remote San Isidro Fort that Wellington had chosen to be their new barracks. The fort was old, outdated and had long been abandoned by the Portuguese so that the tired, newly arrived men first had to clean out the filthy stone barracks rooms that were to be their new home. The fort’s towering gatehouse was reserved for the officers, and Father Sarsfield and Donaju made themselves comfortable there while Sharpe and his riflemen took possession of one of the magazines for their own lodgings. Sarsfield had brought a royal banner of Spain in his baggage that was proudly hoisted on the old fort’s ramparts next to the union flag of Britain. ‘I’m sixty years old,’ the chaplain told Sharpe as he stood beneath Britain’s flag, ‘and I never thought the day would come when I’d serve under that banner.’

Sharpe looked up at the British flag. ‘Does it worry you, Father?’

‘Napoleon worries me more, my son. Defeat Napoleon, then we can start on the lesser enemies like yourself!’ The comment was made in a friendly tone. ‘What also worries me, my son,’ Father Sarsfield went on, ‘is that I’ve eight bottles of decent red wine and a handful of good cigars and only Captain Donaju to share them with. Will you do me the honour of joining us for supper now? And tell me, do you play an instrument, perhaps? No? Sad. I used to have a violin, but it was lost somewhere, but Sergeant Connors is a rare man on the flute and the men in his section sing most beautifully. They sing of home, Captain.’

‘Of Madrid?’ Sharpe asked mischievously.

Sarsfield smiled. ‘Of Ireland, Captain, of our home across the water where few of us have ever set foot and most of us never shall. Come, let’s have supper.’ Father Sarsfield put a companionable arm across Sharpe’s shoulder and steered him towards the gatehouse. A cold wind blew over the bare mountains as night fell and the first cooking fires curled their blue smoke into the sky. Wolves howled in the hills. There were wolves throughout Spain and Portugal and in winter they would sometimes come right up to the picquet line in the hope of snatching a meal from an unwary soldier, but this night the wolves reminded Sharpe of the grey-uniformed Frenchmen in Loup’s brigade. Sharpe supped with the chaplain and afterwards, under a star-shining sky, he toured the ramparts with Harper. Beneath them the Real Compañía Irlandesa grumbled about their accommodations and about the fate that had stranded them on this inhospitable border between Spain and Portugal, but Sharpe, who had orders to make them miserable, wondered if instead he could make them into real soldiers who would follow him over the hills and far into Spain to where a wolf needed to be hunted, trapped and slaughtered.

Pierre Ducos waited nervously for news of the Real Compañía Irlandesa’s arrival in Wellington’s army. The Frenchman’s greatest fear was that the unit would be positioned so far behind the fighting front that it would be useless for his purposes, but that was a risk Ducos was forced to run. Ever since French intelligence had intercepted Lord Kiely’s letter requesting King Ferdinand’s permission to take the Real Compañía Irlandesa to war on the allied side, Ducos had known that the success of his scheme depended as much on the allies’ unwitting cooperation as on his own cleverness. Yet Ducos’s cleverness would achieve nothing if the Irishmen failed to arrive, and so he waited with mounting impatience.

Little news came from behind the British lines. There had been a time when Loup’s men could ride with impunity on either side of the frontier, but now the British and Portuguese armies were firmly clamped along the border and Loup had to depend for his intelligence on the unreliable and minuscule handful of civilians willing to sell information to the hated French, on interrogations of deserters and on educated guesses formed from the observations of his own men as they peered through spyglasses across the mountainous border.

And it was one of those scouts who first brought Loup news of the Real Compañía Irlandesa. A troop of grey dragoons had gone to one of the lonely hill tops which offered a long view into Portugal, and from where, with luck, a patrol might see some evidence of a British concentration of forces that could signal a new advance. The lookout post dominated a wide, barren valley where a stream glittered before the land rose to the rocky ridge on which the long-abandoned fort of San Isidro stood. The fort was of little military value for the road it guarded had long fallen into disuse and a century of neglect had eroded its ramparts and ditches into mockeries of their former strength so that now the San Isidro was home to ravens, foxes, bats, wandering shepherds, lawless men, and the occasional patrol of Loup’s grey dragoons who might spend a night in one of the cavernous barracks rooms to stay out of the rain.

Yet now there were men in the fort, and the patrol leader brought Loup news of them. The new garrison was not a full battalion, he said, just a couple of hundred men. The fort itself, as Loup well knew, would need at least a thousand men to man its crumbling walls, so a mere two hundred hardly constituted a garrison, yet strangely the newcomers had brought their wives and children with them. The dragoons’ troop leader, a Captain Braudel, thought the men were British. ‘They’re wearing red coats,’ he said, ‘but not the usual stovepipe hats.’ He meant shakoes. ‘They’ve got bicornes.’

‘Infantry, you say?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘No cavalry? Any artillery?’

‘Didn’t see any.’

Loup picked at his teeth with a sliver of wood. ‘So what were they doing?’

‘Doing drill,’ Braudel said. Loup grunted. He was not much interested in a group of strange soldiers taking up residence in San Isidro. The fort did not threaten him and if the newcomers were content to sit tight and make themselves comfortable then Loup would not stir them into wakefulness. Then Captain Braudel stirred Loup himself into wakefulness. ‘But some of them were unblocking a well,’ the Captain said, ‘only they weren’t redcoats. They were wearing green.’

Loup stared at him. ‘Dark green?’

‘Yes, sir.’

Riflemen. Damned riflemen. And Loup remembered the insolent face of the man who had insulted him, the man who had once insulted all France by taking an eagle touched by the Emperor himself. Maybe Sharpe was in the San Isidro Fort? Ducos had denigrated Loup’s thirst for vengeance, calling it unworthy of a great soldier, but Loup believed that a soldier made his reputation by picking his fights and winning them famously. Sharpe had defied Loup, the first man to openly defy him in many a long month, and Sharpe was a champion among France’s enemies, so Loup’s vengeance was not just personal, but would send ripples throughout the armies that waited to fight the battle that would decide whether Britain lunged into Spain or was sent reeling back into Portugal.

So that afternoon Loup himself visited the hill top, taking his finest spyglass which he trained on the old fort with its weed-grown walls and half-filled dry moat. Two flags hung limply in the windless air. One flag was British, but Loup could not tell what the second was. Beyond the flags the red-coated soldiers were doing musket drill, but Loup did not watch them long, instead he inched the telescope southwards until, at last, he saw two men in green coats strolling along the deserted ramparts. He could not see their faces at this distance, but he could tell that one of the men was wearing a long straight sword and Loup knew that British light infantry officers wore curved sabres. ‘Sharpe,’ he said aloud as he collapsed the telescope.

A scuffle behind made him turn round. Four of his wolf-grey men were guarding a pair of prisoners. One captive was in a gaudily trimmed red coat while the other was presumably the man’s wife or lover. ‘Found them hiding in the rocks down there,’ said the Sergeant who was holding one of the soldier’s arms.

‘He says he’s a deserter, sir,’ Captain Braudel added, ‘and that’s his wife.’ Braudel spat a stream of tobacco juice onto a rock.

Loup scrambled down from the ridge. The soldier’s uniform, he now saw, was not British. The waistcoat and sash, the half boots and the plumed bicorne were all too fancy for British taste, indeed they were so fancy that for a second Loup wondered if the captive was an officer, then he realized that Braudel would never have treated a captured officer with such disdain. Braudel clearly liked the woman who now raised shy eyes to stare at Loup. She was dark-haired, attractive and probably, Loup guessed, about fifteen or sixteen. Loup had heard that the Spanish and Portuguese peasants sold such daughters as wives to allied soldiers for a hundred francs apiece, the cost of a good meal in Paris. The French army, on the other hand, just took their girls for nothing. ‘What’s your name?’ Loup asked the deserter in Spanish.

‘Grogan, sir. Sean Grogan.’

‘Your unit, Grogan?’

‘Real Compañía Irlandesa, señor.’ Guardsman Grogan was plainly willing to cooperate with his captors and so Loup signalled the Sergeant to release him.

Loup questioned Grogan for ten minutes, hearing how the Real Compañía Irlandesa had travelled by sea from Valencia, and how the men had been happy enough with the idea of joining the rest of the Spanish army at Cadiz, but how they resented being forced to serve with the British. Many of the men, the fugitive claimed, had fled from British servitude, and they had not enlisted with the King of Spain just to return to King George’s tyranny.

Loup cut short the protests. ‘When did you run?’ he asked.

‘Last night, sir. Half a dozen of us did. And a good many ran the night before.’

‘There is an Englishman in the fort, a rifle officer. You know him?’

Grogan frowned, as though he found the question odd, but then he nodded. ‘Captain Sharpe, sir. He’s supposed to be training us.’

‘To do what?’

‘To fight, sir,’ Grogan said nervously. He found this one-eyed, calm-spoken Frenchman very disconcerting. ‘But we know how to fight already,’ he added defiantly.

‘I’m sure you do,’ Loup said sympathetically. He poked at his teeth for a second, then spat the makeshift toothpick away. ‘So you ran away, soldier, because you didn’t want to serve King George, is that it?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘But you’d certainly fight for His Majesty the Emperor?’

Grogan hesitated. ‘I would, sir,’ he finally said, but without any conviction.

‘Is that why you deserted?’ Loup asked. ‘To fight for the Emperor? Or were you hoping to get back to your comfortable barracks in the Escorial?’

Grogan shrugged. ‘We were going to her family’s house in Madrid, sir.’ He jerked his head towards his wife. ‘Her father’s a cobbler, and I’m not such a bad hand with a needle and thread myself. I thought I’d learn the trade.’

‘It’s always good to have a trade, soldier,’ Loup said with a smile. He took a pistol from his belt and toyed with it for a moment before he pulled back the heavy cock. ‘My trade is killing,’ he added in the same pleasant voice and then, without showing a trace of emotion, he lifted the gun, aimed it at Grogan’s forehead and pulled the trigger.

The woman screamed as her husband’s blood splashed across her face. Grogan was thrown violently back, blood spraying and misting the air, then his body thumped and slid backwards down the hill. ‘He didn’t really want to fight for us at all,’ Loup said. ‘He’d have been just another useless mouth to feed.’

‘And the woman, sir?’ Braudel asked. She was bending over her dead husband and screaming at the French.

‘She’s yours, Paul,’ Loup said. ‘But only after you have delivered a message to Madame Juanita de Elia. Give madame my undying compliments, tell her that her toy Irish soldiers have arrived and are conveniently close to us, and that tomorrow morning we shall mount a little drama for their amusement. Tell her also that she would do well to spend the night with us.’

Braudel smirked. ‘She’ll be pleased, sir.’

‘Which is more than your woman will be,’ Loup said, glancing at the howling Spanish girl. ‘Tell this widow, Paul, that if she does not shut up I will tear her tongue out and feed it to the Doña Juanita’s hounds. Now come on.’ He led his men down the hill to where the horses had been picketed. Tonight the Doña Juanita de Elia would come to the wolf’s stronghold, and tomorrow she would ride to the enemy like a plague rat sent to destroy them from within.

And somewhere, some time before victory was final, Sharpe would feel France’s vengeance for two dead men. For Loup was a soldier, and he did not forget, did not forgive and never lost.

CHAPTER THREE

Eleven men deserted during the Real Compañía Irlandesa’s first night in the San Isidro Fort and eight men, including four picquets set to stop such desertions, ran on the second night. The guardsmen were providing their own sentries and Colonel Runciman suggested Sharpe’s riflemen took over the duty. Sharpe argued against such a change. His riflemen were supposed to be training the Real Compañía Irlandesa and they could not work all day and stand guard all night. ‘I’m sure you’re right, General,’ Sharpe said tactfully, ‘but unless headquarters sends us more men we can’t work round the clock.’

Colonel Runciman, Sharpe had discovered, was malleable so long as he was addressed as ‘General’. He only wanted to be left alone to sleep, to eat and to grumble about the amount of work expected from him. ‘Even a general is only human,’ he liked to inform Sharpe, then he would inquire how he was supposed to discharge the onerous duties of liaising with the Real Compañía Irlandesa while he was also expected to be responsible for the Royal Wagon Train. In truth the Colonel’s deputy still ran the wagon train with the same efficiency he had always displayed, but until a new Wagon Master General was formally appointed Colonel Runciman’s signature and seal were necessary on a handful of administrative documents.

‘You could surrender the seals of office to your deputy, General?’ Sharpe suggested.

‘Never! Never let it be said that a Runciman evaded his duty, Sharpe. Never!’ The Colonel glanced anxiously out of his quarters to see how his cook was proceeding with a hare shot by Daniel Hagman. Runciman’s lethargy meant that the Colonel was quite content to let Sharpe deal with the Real Compañía Irlandesa, but even for a man of Runciman’s idle nonchalance, nineteen deserters in two nights was cause to worry. ‘Damn it, man’ – he leaned back after inspecting the cook’s progress – ‘it reflects on our efficiency, don’t you see? We must do something, Sharpe! In another fortnight we won’t have a soul left!’

Which, Sharpe reflected silently, was exactly what Hogan wanted. The Real Compañía Irlandesa was supposed to self-destruct, yet Richard Sharpe had been put in command of their training and there was a stubborn streak in Sharpe’s soul that would not let him permit a unit for which he was responsible to slide into ruin. Damn it, he would make the guards into soldiers whether Hogan wanted him to or not.

Sharpe doubted he would get much help from Lord Kiely. Each morning his Lordship woke in a foul ill-temper that lasted until his steady intake of alcohol gave him a burst of high spirits that would usually stretch into the evening, but then be replaced by a morose sullenness aggravated by his losses at cards. Then he would sleep till late in the morning and so begin the cycle again. ‘How in hell,’ Sharpe asked Kiely’s second-in-command, Captain Donaju, ‘did he get command of the guard?’

‘Birth,’ Donaju said. He was a pale, thin man with a worried face who looked more like an impoverished student than a soldier, but of all the officers in the Real Compañía Irlandesa he seemed the most promising. ‘You can’t have a royal guard commanded by a commoner, Sharpe,’ Donaju said with a touch of sarcasm, ‘but when Kiely’s sober he can be quite impressive.’ The last sentence contained no sarcasm at all.

‘Impressive?’ Sharpe asked dubiously.

‘He’s a good swordsman,’ Donaju replied. ‘He detests the French, and in his heart he would like to be a good man.’

‘Kiely detests the French?’ Sharpe asked without bothering to disguise his scepticism.

‘The French, Sharpe, are destroying Kiely’s privileged world,’ Donaju explained. ‘He’s from the ancien régime, so of course he hates them. He has no money, but under the ancien régime that didn’t matter because birth and title were enough to get a man a royal appointment and exemption from taxes. But the French preach equality and advancement on merit, and that threatens Kiely’s world so he escapes the threat by drinking, whoring and gambling. The flesh is very weak, Sharpe, and it’s especially feeble if you’re bored, under-employed and also suspect that you’re a relic of a bygone world.’ Donaju shrugged, as though ashamed of having offered Sharpe such a long and high-minded sermon. The Captain was a modest man, but efficient, and it was on Donaju’s slender shoulders that the day-to-day running of the guard had devolved. He now told Sharpe how he would attempt to stem the desertions by doubling the sentries and using only men he believed were reliable as picquets, but at the same time he blamed the British for his men’s predicament. ‘Why did they put us in this godforsaken place?’ Donaju asked. ‘It’s almost as if your General wants our men to run.’

That was a shrewd thrust and Sharpe had no real answer. Instead he mumbled something about the fort being a strategic outpost and needing a garrison, but he was unconvincing and Donaju’s only response was to politely ignore the fiction.

For the San Isidro Fort was indeed a godforsaken place. It might have had strategic value once, but now the main road between Spain and Portugal ran leagues to the south and so the once huge fastness had been abandoned to decay. Weeds grew thick in the dry moat that had been eroded by rainfall so that the once formidable obstacle had become little more than a shallow ditch. Frost had crumbled the walls, toppling their stones into the ditch to make countless bridges to what was left of the glacis. A white owl roosted in the remains of the chapel’s bell tower while the once-tended graves of the garrison’s officers had become nothing but shallow declivities in a stony meadow. The only serviceable parts of San Isidro were the old barracks buildings that had been kept in a state of crude repair thanks to the infrequent visits of Portuguese regiments which had been stationed there in times of political crisis. During those crises the men would block the holes in the barracks walls to protect themselves from the cold winds, while the officers took up quarters in the twin-towered gatehouse that had somehow survived the years of neglect. There were even gates that Runciman solemnly ordered closed and barred each night, though employing such a precaution against desertion was like stopping up one earth of a mighty rabbit warren.

Yet, for all its decay, the fort still held a mouldering grandeur. The impressive twin-towered gateway was embellished with royal escutcheons and approached by a four-arched causeway that spanned the only section of the dry moat still capable of checking an assault. The chapel ruins were laced with delicate carved stonework while the gun platforms were still hugely massive. Most impressive of all was the fort’s location for its ramparts offered sky-born views deep across shadowy peaks to horizons unimaginable distances away. The eastern walls looked deep into Spain and it was on those eastern battlements, beneath the flags of Spain and Britain, that Lord Kiely discovered Sharpe on the third morning of the guard’s stay in the fort. It seemed that even Kiely had become worried about the rate of desertion. ‘We didn’t come here to be destroyed by desertion,’ Kiely snapped at Sharpe. The wind quivered the waxed tips of his moustaches.

Sharpe fought back the comment that Kiely was responsible for his men, not Sharpe, and instead asked his Lordship just why he had come to join the British forces.

And, to Sharpe’s surprise, the young Lord Kiely took the question seriously. ‘I want to fight, Sharpe. That’s why I wrote to His Majesty.’

‘So you’re in the right place, my Lord,’ Sharpe said sourly. ‘The Crapauds are just the other side of that valley.’ He gestured towards the deep, bare glen that separated the San Isidro from the nearest hills. Sharpe suspected that French scouts must be active on the valley’s far side and would already have seen the movement in the old fort.

‘We’re not in the right place, Sharpe,’ Kiely said. ‘I asked King Ferdinand to order us to Cadiz, to be in our own army and among our own kind, but he sent us to Wellington instead. We don’t want to be here, but we have royal orders and we obey those orders.’

‘Then give your men a royal order not to desert,’ Sharpe said glibly.

‘They’re bored! They’re worried! They feel betrayed!’ Kiely shuddered, not with emotion, but because he had just risen from his bed and was still trying to shake off his morning hangover. ‘They didn’t come here to be trained, Sharpe,’ he snarled, ‘but to fight! They’re proud men, a bodyguard, not a pack of raw recruits. Their job is to fight for the King, to show Europe that Ferdinand still has teeth.’

Sharpe pointed east. ‘See that track, my Lord? The one that climbs to that saddle in the hills? March your men up there, keep them marching for half a day and I’ll guarantee you a fight. The French will love it. It’ll be easier for them than fighting choirboys. Half your men don’t even have working muskets! And the other half can’t use them. You tell me they’re trained? I’ve seen militia companies better trained in Britain! And all those plump militia bastards do is parade in the market place once a week and then beat a retreat to the nearest bloody tavern. Your men aren’t trained, my Lord, whatever you might think, but you give them to me for a month and I’ll have them sharper than a bloody razor.’

‘They’re merely out of practice,’ Kiely said loftily. His immense pride would not let him concede that Sharpe was right and that his vaunted palace guards were a shambles. He turned and gazed at his men who were being drilled on the weed-thick flagstones of the fort’s plaza. Beyond the company, hard by the gatehouse towers, grooms were bringing saddled horses ready for the officers’ midday exercises in horsemanship, while just inside the gate, on a stretch of smooth flagstones, Father Sarsfield was teaching the catechism to some of the company’s children. The learning process evidently involved a deal of laughter; indeed, Sharpe had noticed, wherever the chaplain went, good humour followed. ‘If they were just given an opportunity,’ Kiely said of his men, ‘they’d fight.’

‘I’m sure they would,’ Sharpe said, ‘and they’d lose. What do you want of them? Suicide?’

‘If necessary,’ Kiely said seriously. He had been staring east into enemy-held country, but now looked Sharpe in the eye. ‘If necessary,’ he said again, ‘yes.’

Sharpe gazed at the dissolute, ravaged young face. ‘You’re mad, my Lord.’

Kiely did not take offence at the accusation. ‘Would you call Roland’s defence of Roncesvalles the suicide of a madman? Did Leonidas’s Spartans do nothing but throw away their lives in a fit of imbecility? What about your own Sir Richard Grenville? Was he just mad? Sometimes, Sharpe, a great name and undying fame can only come from a grand gesture.’ He pointed at the far hills. ‘There are three hundred thousand Frenchmen over there, and how many British here? Thirty thousand? The war is lost, Sharpe, it is lost. A great Christian kingdom is going down to mediocrity, and all because of a Corsican upstart. All the glory and the valour and the splendour of a royal world are about to become commonplace and tawdry. All the nasty, mean things – republicanism, democracy, equality – are crawling into the light and claiming that they can replace a lineage of great kings. We are seeing the end of history, Sharpe, and the beginnings of chaos, but maybe, just maybe, King Ferdinand’s household guard can bring the curtain down with one last act of shining glory.’ For a few seconds the drunken Kiely had betrayed his younger, nobler self. ‘That’s why we’re here, Sharpe, to make a story that will still be told when men have forgotten the very name of Bonaparte.’

‘Christ,’ Sharpe said, ‘no wonder your boys are deserting. Jesus! I would too. If I take a man into battle, my Lord, I like to offer him a better than evens chance that he’ll march away with his skin intact. If I wanted to kill the buggers I’d just strangle them in their sleep. It’s kinder.’ He turned and watched the Real Compañía Irlandesa. The men were taking it in turns to use the forty or so serviceable muskets and, with a handful of exceptions, they were virtually useless. A good soldier could shoot a smoothbore musket every twenty seconds, but these men were lucky to get a shot away every forty seconds. The guards had spent too long wearing powdered wigs and standing outside gilded doors, and not long enough learning the simple habits of priming, ramming, firing and loading. ‘But I’ll train them,’ Sharpe said when the echo of another straggling volley had faded across the fort, ‘and I’ll stop the buggers deserting.’ He knew he was undermining Hogan’s stratagem, but Sharpe liked the rank and file of the Real Compañía Irlandesa. They were soldiers like any others, not so well trained maybe, and with more confused loyalties than most, but the majority of the men were willing enough. There was no mischief there, and it cut against Sharpe’s grain to betray good men. He wanted to train them. He wanted to make the company into a unit of which any army could be proud.