LITMIR.BIZ

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all were criminals. Some had been gulled by the Recruiting Sergeants, offered an escape from village tedium and narrow horizons. Some had failed in love and joined the army in despair, swearing they would rather die in battle than see their sweetheart married to another man. Many were drunkards who were terrified of a lonely shivering death in a winter ditch and joined an army that offered them clothes, boots, and a third of a pint of rum each day. Some, a few, a very few, joined for patriotism. Some, like Harper, joined because there was nothing but hunger at home and the army offered food and an escape. They were, almost to a man, the failings and leavings of society and to them all the army was one big Forlorn Hope.

      Yet they were the best infantry in the world. They had not always been and, without the right leaders, would not be so again. Harper instinctively knew that this army that faced Badajoz was a superb instrument, better than anything the great Napoleon could muster, and Harper knew why. Because there were just enough officers like Sharpe who trusted the failures. It started at the top, of course, with Wellington himself, and went right through the ranks to the junior officers and Sergeants, and the trick of it was very simple. Take a man who has failed at everything, give him a final chance, show him trust, lead him to one success, and there is a sudden confidence that will lead to the next success. Soon they will believe they are unbeatable, and become unbeatable, but the trick was still to have officers like Sharpe who kept on offering trust. Of course the Light Company missed him! He had expected great things of them and trusted them to win. Perhaps the new man would one day learn the trick, but until he did, if ever, the men would miss Sharpe. Hell, thought Harper, they even like him. And the fool did not realize it. Harper shook his head to himself and offered the bottle to Sharpe. ‘Here’s to Ireland, sir, and death to Hakeswill.’

      ‘I’ll drink to that. How is the bastard?’

      ‘I’ll kill him one day.’

      Sharpe gave a humourless laugh. ‘You won’t. I will.’

      ‘How the hell is he still alive?’

      Sharpe shrugged. ‘He says he can’t be killed.’ It was cold on the hill and Sharpe hunched his shoulders beneath the greatcoat. ‘And he never turns his back. Watch yours.’

      ‘I’m growing eyes in my bum with that bastard around.’

      ‘What does Captain Rymer think of him?’

      Harper paused, took the bottle from Sharpe, drank, and passed it back. ‘God knows. I think he’s scared of him, but so are most.’ He shrugged. ‘The Captain’s not a bad fellow, but he’s not exactly confident.’ The Sergeant was feeling awkward. He did not like to sound critical of one officer in front of another. ‘He’s young.’

      ‘None of us are old. How’s that new Ensign?’

      ‘Matthews? He’s fine, sir. Sticks to Lieutenant Price like a kid brother.’

      ‘And Mr Price?’

      Harper laughed. ‘He keeps us cheerful, sir. Drunk as a cross-eyed stoat, but he’ll survive.’

      It began raining, small, spitting drops that stung their faces. Behind them, on the Seville road, the bugles called the battalions to the evening lines. Sharpe turned up his collar. ‘We’d better be getting back.’ He stared at the small, blue-uniformed figures on the city parapets, three-quarters of a mile away. ‘Those sods will be warm tonight.’ He suddenly thought of Teresa and Antonia inside the walls and looked at the big, square, battlemented Cathedral tower. It was odd to think they were so close to her. The rain became heavier and he turned away, back towards the sprawling, makeshift British camp.

      ‘Sir?’

      ‘Yes?’

      The Sergeant seemed embarrassed. ‘Major Hogan stopped by the other day.’

      ‘So?’

      ‘He was telling us about Miss Teresa, sir.’

      Sharpe frowned. ‘What about her?’

      ‘Only, sir, that she’d asked you to look out for her. In the city. In case the lads go a bit wild.’

      ‘So?’

      ‘Well, the men are keen to help, so they are.’

      ‘You mean they don’t think I can manage?’

      Harper was tempted to tell Sharpe not to be so foolish, but decided it might be one step too many over the subtle boundaries of rank and friendship. He sighed. ‘No, sir. Just that they’re keen to help. They’re fond of her, sir, so they are.’ And of you, he might have added.

      Sharpe shook his head ungratefully. Teresa and Antonia were his problem, not the Company’s, and he did not want a horde of grinning men to witness his emotion at first seeing his child. ‘Tell them no.’

      Harper shrugged. ‘They may try and help anyway.’

      ‘They’ll have a problem finding her in the city.’

      The Sergeant grinned. ‘It won’t be difficult. We’ll be trying the house with two orange trees, just behind the Cathedral.’

      ‘Go to hell, Sergeant.’

      ‘Follow you anywhere, sir.’

      A few hours later the army seemed in hell, or a watery version of hell. The skies opened. Thunder cracked like the rumbling of field guns over wooden boards in the storm clouds. Lightning slashed, piercing and blue, to and earth soaked by great, slanting volleys of rain. Human noise was drowned by the seething water, a constant, crashing downpour in a darkness splintered by jagged, thundering light. Eighteen hundred men were on the hilltop, digging the first parallel; a trench six hundred yards long that would protect the besiegers and from which they would excavate the first gun batteries. The workers were soaked to the skin, shivering, made weary by the sheer weight of water, and sometimes peering through the deluge at the dark citadel starkly revealed in the lightning strikes.

      The wind billowed the rain in huge, scything loops; suspended it, and then smashed it down even harder. It plucked greatcoats into fantastic, batlike shapes and drove the water in unstoppable rivulets that filled up the trench, seeped over the men’s boots, and sank their spirits down into the cold, sodden earth that yielded each spadeful with such reluctance.

      All night they dug, and all night it rained, and in the cold morning it still rained and the French gunners came out of their warm shelters to see the scar of fresh earth curving over the shallow hill. The gunners opened fire, smashing solid shot across the wide ditch, over the glacis, over the floodwaters, and into the wet earth of the trench parapet. The work stopped. The first parallel was too shallow to give shelter and all day the rain weakened the trench and the guns hammered it. The excavation filled with sopping mud that would all have to be scooped out in the night.

      They dug all night. It still rained, a rain like the rain before Noah’s flood. Uniforms doubled their weight with water, boots were sucked off in the glutinous slime, and shoulders were chafed raw and bleeding with the effort of sinking the trench. On this night the French gunners kept up a harassing and sporadic fire that turned some parts of the mud scarlet until the unending rain diluted the blood, but slowly, infinitely slowly, the spades hacked deeper and the parapet went higher.

      The creeping dawn showed a trench deep enough to be worked by daylight. The exhausted battalions filed back through the zigzag trench that led to safety at the rear of the hill, and new battalions took their place. The South Essex, their packs and weapons discarded, went down the crooked way to the mud, the gunfire, and the spades.

      Sharpe was left behind. Two dozen men were with him, the baggage guard, and they made crude shelters out of the piled packs and crouched, muskets between their knees, and stared at a wet, grey, dripping landscape. Sharpe could hear the French guns, muffled by rain and distance, and he hated the thought of not seeing what he could hear. He left an old Sergeant in charge of the guard and walked the trench to the hillside.

      Badajoz was a dark rock in a sea of water and mud. The walls were fringed with cannon smoke that was lanced through by the leaping flames

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