Sharpe’s Christmas. Bernard Cornwell

by an accident of war he now found himself commanding a batallion of redcoats. They had once been called the South Essex, but now they were the Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers, though on this dank, grey morning they were anything but willing. They were comfortable in their Spanish billets, they liked the local girls and none were of a mind to go soldiering in a cold Spanish winter. Sharpe ignored their displeasure. Men did not join the army to be comfortable.

      They marched on the hour. Four hundred and twenty-two men swinging east out of the town and down into the valley. It had begun to rain heavily, filling the small ditches that edged the fields and flooding the furrows left in the road by the big guns. No one else in the army was moving, just Sharpe’s regiment that was going to plug a gap in the high mountains to stop the French escaping. Not that Sharpe believed he would fight this Christmas. Even Hogan was not certain that the Ochagavia garrison would march, and if they did they would probably choose the eastern road, the main road, so all Sharpe expected was a long march and a cold Christmas. But King George wanted him to be at Irati, so to Irati he would go. And God help the Frogs if they did the same.

      Colonel Jean Gudin watched as the tricolour was lowered. The Fort at Ochagavia, that he had commanded for four years, was being abandoned and it hurt. It was another failure, and his life had been nothing but failure.

      Even the Fort at Ochagavia was a failure for, as far as Gudin could see, it guarded nothing. True, it dominated a road in the mountains, but the road had never been used to bring supplies from France and so it had never been haunted by the dreaded partisans who harried all the other French garrisons in Spain. Time and again Gudin had pointed this out to his superiors, but somewhere in Paris there was a pin stuck into a map of Spain, and the pin represented the garrison of Ochagavia and no one had been willing to surrender the pinprick until now, when some bureaucrat had suddenly remembered the fort’s existence and realised that it held a thousand good men who were needed to defend the homeland.

      Those men now made ready for their escape. Three hundred were Gudin’s garrison and the others were fugitives who had taken refuge in Ochagavia after the disaster at Vitoria. Some of those refugees were dragoons, but most were infantrymen from the 75^th regiment who paraded in the fort’s courtyard beneath their Eagle and under the eye of their irascible chef de batallion, Colonel Caillou. Behind the 75^th, clustered about two horse-drawn wagons, was a crowd of women and children.

      “Those damned women aren’t coming with us,” Caillou said. He was mounted on a black charger that he curbed beside Gudin’s horse. “I thought we agreed to abandon the women.”

      “I didn’t agree,” Gudin said curtly.

      Caillou snorted, then glared at the shivering women. They were mostly the wives and girlfriends of Gudin’s garrison, and between them the ninety women had almost as many children, some of them no more than babes in arms. “They’re Spaniards!” he snapped.

      “Not all of them,” Gudin said, “some are French.”

      “But French or Spanish,” Caillou insisted, “they will slow us down. The essence of success, Gudin, is to march fast. Audacity! Speed! There lies safety. We cannot take women and children.”

      “If they stay,” Gudin said stubbornly, “they will be killed.”

      “That’s war, Gudin, that’s war!” Caillou declared. “In war the weak die.”

      “We are soldiers of France,” Gudin said stiffly, “and we do not leave women and children to die. They march with us.” Jean Gudin knew that maybe all of them, soldiers, women and children alike, might die because of that decision, but he could not abandon these Spanish women who had found themselves French husbands and given birth to half-French babies. If they were left here then the partisans would find them, they would be called traitors, they would be tortured, and they would die. No, Gudin thought, he could not just leave them. “And Maria is pregnant,” he added, nodding towards an ammunition cart on which a woman lay swathed in grey army blankets.

      “I don’t care if she’s the Virgin Mary!” Caillou exploded. “We cannot afford to take women and children!” Caillou saw that his words were having no effect on the grey-haired Colonel Gudin, and the older man’s stubbornness inflamed Caillou. “My God, Gudin, no wonder they call you a failure!”

      “You go too far, Colonel,” Gudin said stiffly. He outranked Caillou, but only by virtue of having been a Colonel longer than the fiery infantryman.

      “I go too far?” Caillou spat in derision. “But at least I care more for France than for a pack of snivelling women. If you lose my Eagle, Gudin,” he pointed to the tricolor flag beneath its statuette of the eagle, “I will have you shot.” It was a small thing, an Eagle, hardly bigger than a man’s spread hand, but the gilded bronze birds were granted personally by Napoleon, and each held in its clawed grip the whole honour of France. To lose an Eagle was the greatest disaster a regiment could imagine, for the Emperor’s Eagle was France. “Lose it,” Caillou said savagely, “and I’ll personally command the firing squad that kills you.”

      Gudin did not bother to reply, but just kicked his horse towards the gate. He felt an immense sadness. Caillou was right, he thought, he was a failure. It had all begun in India, thirteen years before, when he had been a military adviser to the Tippoo Sultan, ruler of Mysore, and Gudin had held such high hopes that, with French help and advice, the Tippoo could defeat the British in southern India, but instead the British had won. The Tippoo’s capital, Seringapatam, had fallen, and Gudin had been a prisoner for a year until he was exchanged for a British officer held prisoner by the French. He had returned to France then and thought that his career would revive, but instead it had been one long failure. He had not received one promotion in all those years, but had gone from one misfortune to the next until now he was the commander of a useless fort in a bleak landscape where France was losing a war. And if he could escape successfully? That would be a victory, especially if he could take Caillou’s precious Eagle safe across the Pyrenees, but he doubted that even an Eagle was worth the life of so many women and children. And that, he knew all too well, was his handicap. The Emperor would sacrifice a hundred thousand women and children to preserve the glory of France, but Gudin could not do it. He reached the fort’s gate and nodded to the Sergeant of the guard. “You can open up,” he said, “and once we’ve left, Sergeant, light the fuses.”