‘Take him to the surgeon, Corporal,’ Lawford said, then watched as the great mass of Frenchmen, thousands of them now visible at the swirling margins of the fog, turned towards his ranks. ‘Make ready!’
Close to six hundred men cocked their muskets. The voltigeurs knew what was coming and fired at the battalion. Bullets twitched the heavy yellow silk of the regimental colour. Two more men were hit in front of Sharpe and one was screaming in pain. ‘Close up! Close up!’ a corporal shouted.
‘Stop your bleeding noise, boy!’ Sergeant Willetts of five company growled.
The column was two hundred paces away, still ragged, but in sight of the crest now. The voltigeurs were closer, just a hundred paces away, kneeling and firing, standing to reload and then firing again. Slingsby had let his riflemen go a few paces forward of the line and those men were hurting the voltigeurs, taking out their officers and sergeants, but a score of rifles could not blunt this attack. That would be a job for the redcoats. ‘When you fire,’ Lawford called, ‘aim low! Don’t waste His Majesty’s lead! You will aim low!’ He rode along the right of his line, repeating the message. ‘Aim low! Remember your training! Aim low!’
The column was coalescing, the ranks shuffling together as if for protection. A nine-pounder round shot seared through it, sending up a long fast spray of blood. The drummers were beating frantically. Sharpe glanced left and saw the Connaught Rangers were closing on the South Essex, coming to add their volleys, then a voltigeur’s bullet slapped off the top of his horse’s left ear and twitched at the sleeve of his jacket. He could see the faces of the men in the column’s front rank, see their moustaches, see their mouths opening to cheer their Emperor. A canister from a nine-pounder tore into them, twitching files red and ragged, but they closed up, stepped over the dead and dying, and came on with their long bayonets gleaming. The Eagles were bright in the new sunlight. Still more cannons opened fire, blasting the column with canisters loaded over round shot, and the French, sensing that there was no artillery off to their left, slanted that way, climbing now towards the Portuguese battalion on the right of the South Essex. ‘Offering themselves to us,’ Lawford said. He had ridden back to the battalion’s centre and now watched as the French turned away to reveal their right flank to his muskets. ‘I think we should join the dance, Sharpe, don’t you? Battalion!’ He took a deep breath. ‘Battalion will advance!’
Lawford marched the South Essex forward, only twenty yards, but the movement scared the voltigeurs who thought they might be the target of a regimental volley and so they hurried away to join the column that now marched slantwise across the front of the South Essex. ‘Present!’ Lawford shouted, and nearly six hundred muskets went into men’s shoulders.
‘Fire!’
The massive volley pumped out a long cloud of gun smoke that smelt like rotting eggs, and then the musket stocks thumped onto the ground and men took new cartridges and began to reload. ‘Platoon fire now!’ Lawford called to his officers, and he took off his hat again and wiped sweat from his forehead. It was still cold, the wind blowing chill from the far-off Atlantic, yet Lawford was hot. Sharpe heard the splintering crack of the Portuguese volley, then the South Essex began their own rolling fire, shooting half company by half company from the centre of the line, the bullets never ending, the men going through the well-practised motions of loading and firing, loading and firing. The enemy was invisible now, hidden from the battalion by its own gun smoke. Sharpe rode along the right of the line, deliberately not going left so no one could accuse him of interfering with Slingsby. ‘Aim low!’ he called to the men. ‘Aim low!’ A few bullets were coming back out of the smoke, but they were nearly all high. Inexperienced men usually shot high and the French, who were being flayed by the Portuguese and by the South Essex, were trying to fire uphill into a cloud of smoke and they were taking a terrible punishment from muskets and cannons. Some of the enemy must be panicking because Sharpe saw two ramrods go wheeling overhead, evidence that the men were too scared to remember their musket drill. He stopped by the grenadier company and watched the Portuguese and he reckoned they were firing as efficiently as any redcoat battalion. Their half-company volleys were steady as clockwork, the smoke rolling out from the battalion’s centre, and he knew the bullets must be striking hard into the disintegrating column’s face.
More muskets flared as the 88th, the feared Connaught Rangers, wheeled forward of the line to blast at the wounded French column, but somehow the French held on. Their outer ranks and files were being killed and injured, but the mass of men inside the column still lived and more were climbing the hill to replace the dead, and the whole mass, in no good order, but crowding together, tried to advance into the terrible volleys. More red-and brown-jacketed troops were moving towards the fight, adding their musketry, but still the French pushed against the storm. The column was dividing again, torn by the slashing round shots and ripped by canister, so now it seemed as though disorganized groups of men were struggling uphill past piles of dead. Sharpe could hear the officers and sergeants shouting them on, could hear the rattle of the frantic drums, which was now challenged by a British band that was playing ‘Men of Harlech’. ‘Not very appropriate!’ Major Forrest had joined Sharpe and had to shout to make himself heard over the dense sound of musketry. ‘We’re hardly in a hollow.’
‘You’re wounded,’ Sharpe said.
‘A scratch.’ Forrest glanced at his right sleeve, which was torn and bloodstained. ‘How are the Portuguese?’
‘Good!’
‘The Colonel was wondering where you were,’ Forrest said.
‘Did he think I’d gone back to the light company?’ Sharpe asked sourly.
‘Now, now, Sharpe,’ Forrest chided him.
Sharpe clumsily turned his horse and kicked it back to Lawford. ‘The buggers aren’t moving!’ the Colonel greeted him indignantly. Lawford was leaning forward in his saddle, trying to see through the smoke and, between the half-company volleys, when the foul-smelling cloud thinned a little, he could just make out the huge groups of stubborn Frenchmen clinging to the hillside beneath the crest. ‘Will bayonets shift them?’ he asked Sharpe. ‘By God, I’ve a mind to try steel. What do you think?’
‘Two more volleys?’ Sharpe suggested. It was chaos down the slope. The French column, broken again, was now clumps of men who fired uphill into the smoke, while more men, perhaps another column altogether or else stragglers from the first, were continually joining the groups. French artillery was adding to the din. They must have brought their howitzers to the foot of the slope and the shells, shot blind into the fog, were screaming overhead to crash onto the rear area where women, campfires, tents and tethered horses were the only casualties. A group of French voltigeurs had taken the rocky spur where Sharpe had placed his picquet in the night. ‘We should move those fellows away,’ Sharpe said, pointing to them.
‘They’re not harming us,’ Lawford shouted above the din, ‘but we can’t let those wretches stay here!’ He pointed to the smoke-wreathed Frenchmen. ‘That’s our land!’ He took a breath. ‘Fix bayonets! Fix bayonets!’
Colonel Wallace, commander of the 88th, must have had the same thought, for Sharpe was aware that the Irishmen had stopped firing, and they would only do that to fix the seventeen-inch blades on their muskets. Clicks sounded all along the South Essex line as the two ranks slotted their bayonets onto blackened muzzles. The French, with extraordinary bravery, used the lull in the musket fire to try and advance again. Men clambered over dead and dying bodies, officers shouted them forward, the drummers redoubled their efforts and suddenly the Eagles were moving again. The leading Frenchmen were among the bodies of the dead voltigeurs now and must have been convinced that one more hard push would break through