He sat on the steps. He had not quite gathered that he was free, that he was outside the fortress, that the wide world was spread before him and that he was breathing warm, clean air. He wiped his eyes that were stinging with dust and stared at the view.
The city was spread beneath him along the banks of the River Arlanzon. The spires of the great cathedral dominated the houses, and Sharpe, blinking from the dust and smoke, saw that there were holes torn in the roof of the huge building, holes from which smoke came, and that there was more smoke in the town, buildings burning, and he guessed that the shells had been blasted up and outwards to fall randomly on the city. He knew he must move.
The castle hill fell two hundred steep feet to the houses. He stumbled down, falling twice, sliding one section in a scrabble of soil, loose stone, and pain. When he got up he saw that the bandage on his right hand was soaked through with fresh, bright blood. Blood was sticky on his face too, the wounds reopened. His leg felt as if it had been struck by a musket ball. He limped the last few yards to the shelter of an alleyway. A woman watched him from a window.
There were shouts and screams in the city. He could hear the fires burning. ‘Jesus.’ He spoke aloud. He was feeling dazed, his ears ringing. He could hardly remember leaving the castle. He leaned on the wall.
The woman spat through the window. She would think he was a Frenchman.
He walked down the alley that stank of the night-soil that was indiscriminately thrown from the bedrooms. He knew he was free now, but he knew little else.
He came to the plaza before the magnificent cathedral. He saw civilians running with buckets through the great doors and he glimpsed, as he went forward, the glow of fires deep in the gloom inside. Then he looked right.
A division of French troops had been forming in the plaza before beginning their march north-eastwards. They looked now as if they had been in a battle. Shells had fallen into their ranks and the dead and wounded were scattered on the cobbles. Some screamed, some wandered dazed, others tried to help. Above him the sky was dark with the smoke. Ashes fluttered in the air and fell soft as snow onto the shattered ranks.
He suddenly felt alarm. He had escaped the castle, only to walk like a fool into a city of the enemy. He went back into an alley, leaned on the wall, and tried to make plans, tried to force the ringing from his ears and sense into his head. A horse. For God’s sake, a horse. What was it Hogan had once said to him? For some reason the strangeness of the words had stuck. ‘A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse.’ The Irish Major was always saying odd things like that. Sharpe supposed they were lines of poetry, but had not liked to ask.
He felt sick again. He bent down, his back against the wall, and groaned. He should hide, he decided. He was in no state to steal a horse.
There were footsteps to his right. He looked and saw men in the darkness of the alley. They wore no uniforms. They stared at him suspiciously.
He straightened up. ‘Inglés.’ The word was choked by the dust in his throat.
The man closest to him carried a wooden mallet. He stepped forward, his face twisted with hatred. Sharpe knew they took him for a Frenchman and he shook his head. ‘Inglés!’
He could not draw his sword with his bloody, bandaged right hand. He tried, but the mallet struck him on the head, there was a rush of feet on the cobbles, hisses of anger and curses, and then dozens of boots and fists thumped into him, the mallet swung again, and he was dragged away, beaten half insensible, the blood flowing from his opened wounds.
They kicked him, dragged him deeper into the alley and into a small, foul courtyard. A man produced a long butcher’s blade, Sharpe tried to ward it off, felt the edge sear into his left hand, then the mallet smashed onto his head again and he knew nothing more.
The French left Burgos that day, marching north-east and leaving the city with its great spire of smoke that drifted up as a mark of their retreat.
It began to rain as they left, a steady rain that helped extinguish the fires in the city. It seemed the kind of rain that might last for ever.
The French would have liked to have held Burgos and to have forced Wellington to try once more to take the high fortress on its hill, but Wellington had marched his army to the north, into the hills which common wisdom said were impassable for an army. Wellington’s army was passing the impassable hills, threatening to come south and cut off the French army in Burgos, cutting its supply lines, and so the French went backwards. Back towards the hills about Vitoria where other French armies would join them and they could turn and offer battle.
The British army saw the smoke rising from the city. They were far away. A few British cavalrymen, their horses smeared with mud, rode into the city and confirmed that the French were gone. They stayed long enough to water their horses and buy wine from an inn, then, the city abandoned by their enemy, its castle ruined, and nothing else in Burgos to hold their interest, they rode away. The war had come, taken its toll, and passed on.
The British army left the pyre of smoke over Burgos far behind them. They marched in four great columns. At times two columns would come close, joining for a river crossing before they split again and took their separate paths in the hills. Always the order was speed. Speed to get ahead of the enemy, speed to cut the Road, speed to turn the French right flank, speed to meet the French before the enemy armies joined to outnumber Wellington’s men.
And fighting against speed were the wagon wheels that broke, the horses that went lame, the sick who fell out on the road, the gun-axles that broke, the rain that made the tracks slippery, the flooding of a stream making a ford become a rapid. Yet still they went on, hauling at guns, at wagons, beating the mules on, the infantry driving their weary legs to climb one more hill, cross one more valley and ever into the teeth of wind and rain in the worst summer of memory. They had left their winter quarters with the promise of a fine, though late, summer, but now that they had reached the northern hills the weather had broken into a miserable, cold enemy.
Yet old soldiers had never seen an army march as well. The men marched as though the winds brought the smell of victory and they pushed through difficulties that, in normal times, would have turned men back or caused hours of delay. If a ford was high the cavalry drove their horses in to make a breakwater and passed the infantry down the sheltered side, urging them on, telling them the frogs were waiting for the slaughter, telling them there was one more march and then the victory.
They had been scenting that victory for days. Many had expected to fight at Burgos, but the plume of smoke which marked the French retreat had driven the army on another stage. It was rumoured the French would guard the crossings of the Ebro, the last great river line before the Pyrenees, but the French were nowhere to be seen when, on a cold, chill day, the columns crossed the river unopposed and heard, at last, the orders given for the swing south and east, the swoop down to the enemy.
The columns closed up. A Spanish column stayed to the north, fending off any approach by the French troops on the Biscay shore, but the other columns merged about a single road so they could concentrate swiftly for battle. The infantry, as ever, had the worst of it. The road had to be left for the baggage, the guns, the cavalry, and so the infantry marched on the hills either side, the slopes thick with men and mules, the air noisy with their marching songs.
That they had the energy to sing was astonishing, that they sang so well was more so, that they wanted a fight was obvious. Rumours had gone through the army that the enemy guarded a convoy of gold, that each man would be rich if he did his duty, and perhaps that rumour, more than pride, drove them on. They joked that the froggies were on the run now, that Johnny-Frenchman would not stand till he was past Paris, that this army would march on and on and on till every man jack in it had a Parisian girl on his elbow and a bag of gold in his hand, and the General, who would sometimes just sit on his horse and watch them pass, would feel his soul full of pride and love for these ranks that he led, that marched in such spirits to a battle that would leave some of them