"I'm just making sure we know where to deliver ammunition, sir."
Williams offered Sharpe an owlish gaze of surprise. "Got you fetching and carrying, have they? Seems a waste of time for a man of your talents, Sharpe. And I don't think you'll find much custom here. My boys are all well supplied. Eighty rounds a man, two thousand men, and as many cartridges again stacked up in the church. Sweet Jesus!" This last imprecation was caused by a round-shot that must have gone within two feet of the Colonel's head, forcing him to duck hard down. It crashed into a house, there was a tumble of falling stone and then, quite suddenly, silence.
Sharpe tensed. The silence, after the crash of the guns and the splintering thunder of the roundshots' destructive impacts, was unnerving. Maybe, he thought, it was just a strange pause, like the sudden coincidental silence that could descend on a room of lively talkers during that moment when an angel was said to be passing over the room, and maybe an angel had flickered across the gunsmoke and all the French cannon had found themselves momentarily unloaded. Sharpe almost found himself praying for the guns to start again, but the silence stretched and stretched, threatening to be replaced by something much worse than a cannonade. Somewhere in the village a man coughed and a musket lock clicked. A horse whinnied up on the ridge where the pipes played. Rubble fell in a house where a wounded man whimpered. Out in the street a spent French cannon ball rolled gently downhill, then lodged against a fallen beam.
"I suspect we'll have company soon, gentlemen," Williams said. He climbed down from the bench and brushed white dust from his faded green jacket. "Very soon. Can't see a thing from here. Gunsmoke, you see. Worse than fog." He was talking to fill the ominous silence. "Down to the stream, I think. Not that we can hold them there, not enough loopholes, but once they're in the village they'll find life a bit difficult. At least I hope so." He nodded agreeably to Sharpe, then ducked out of the door. His staff ran after him.
"We're not staying here, are we, sir?" Harper asked.
"Might as well see what's happening," Sharpe said. "Got nothing better to do. Are you loaded?"
"Just the rifle."
"I'd have the volley gun ready," Sharpe said. "Just in case." He began loading his own rifle just as the British guns on the ridge opened fire. Their smoke jetted sixty feet out from the crest and their noise punched at the wounded village as the shots screamed overhead towards the advancing French battalions.
Sharpe stood on the bench to see the dark columns of infantry emerging from the French gunsmoke. The first British case shot exploded above and ahead of the columns, each explosion staining the air with a smear of grey-white smoke riven with fire. Solid shots seared into the massed ranks, but none of the missiles seemed to make an ounce of difference. The columns kept coming: twelve thousand men under their eagles being drummed across the flat land towards the hammering artillery and the waiting muskets and the primed rifles beyond the stream. Sharpe looked left and right, but saw no other enemies apart from a handful of green-coated dragoons patrolling the southern fields. "They're coming straight in," he said, "no messing. One attack, Pat, hard at the village. No buggering round the edge yet. Looks like they think they can come straight through here. There'll be more brigades behind, and they'll throw them in one after the other till they get the church. After that it's downhill all the way to the Atlantic, so if we don't stop them here we'll not stop them anywhere."
"Well, as you say, sir, we've got nothing better to do." Harper finished loading his seven-barrelled gun, then picked up a small rag doll that had been discarded under the garden bench. The doll had a red torso on which a mother had stitched a white crossbelt to imitate a British infantryman's uniform. Harper propped the doll in a niche in the wall. "You keep guard now," he said to the rag bundle.
Sharpe half drew his sword and tested the edge. "Didn't get it sharpened," he said. Before a battle he liked to have the big blade professionally honed by a cavalry armourer, but there had been no time. He hoped it was not an omen.
"You'll just have to bludgeon the bastards to death then," Harper said, then crossed himself before reaching into his pocket to make sure his rabbit's foot was in its proper place. He looked back to the rag doll and was suddenly overwhelmed by a certainty that his own fate hung on the doll surviving in the wall's niche. "You take care now," he told the doll, then gave fate a nudge by jamming a scrap of stone across the niche's face to try and imprison the small rag toy.
A crackling sound like the tearing of calico announced that the British skirmishers had opened fire. The French voltigeurs had been advancing a hundred paces in front of their columns, but now were stopped by the fire of the riflemen concealed among the gardens and hovels on the stream's far bank. For a few minutes the skirmish fire stuttered loud, then the outnumbering voltigeurs threatened to surround the British skirmishers and the whistles of the officers and sergeants sounded shrilly to call the greenjackets back through the gardens. Two riflemen were limping, a third was being carried by two of his comrades, but most splashed unscathed through the stream and up into the labyrinthine maze of cottages and alleys.
The French voltigeurs crouched behind the garden walls on the stream's far bank and began trading fire with the village's defenders. The stream became fogged with a lacy veil of powder smoke that drifted south in the day's small wind. Sharpe and Harper, still waiting in the inn, could hear the French drummers sounding the pas de charge, the rhythm that had driven Napoleon's veterans over half Europe to fell their enemies like ninepins. The drums suddenly paused and both Sharpe and Harper instinctively mouthed the words along with twelve thousand Frenchmen, "Vive l'Empereur." Both men laughed as the drums started again.
The guns on the ridge had abandoned the case shot and were smashing roundshot down into the columns and now that the enemy's main formations were almost at the village's eastern gardens Sharpe could see the damage being done by the iron balls as they slashed through file and rank to fling men aside like bloody rags before bouncing in sprays of misted blood to smash into yet more ranks of men. Again and again the missiles lanced through the massed files, yet again and again, doggedly, unstoppably, the French closed up their ranks and kept on coming. The drummers beat on, the eagles flashed in the sun as brightly as the bayonets on the muskets of the leading ranks.
The drums paused again. "Vive l'Empereur!" the mass of Frenchmen called, but this time they drew out the last syllable into a long cheer that sustained them as they were released to the attack. The columns could not march in close order through the maze of walled gardens on the village's eastern bank and so the attacking infantry was let off the leash and ordered to charge pell-mell through the vegetable plots and small orchards, across the stream and up into the fire of Colonel Williams's defenders.
"God save us," Harper said in awe as the French attack engulfed the far bank like a dark wave. The enemy were cheering as they ran and as they overwhelmed the small walls and trampled down the spring crops and splashed into the shallow stream.
"Fire!" a voice shouted and the muskets and rifles cracked from the loopholed houses. A Frenchman went down, his blood thick in the water. Another fell on the clapper bridge and was unceremoniously pushed into the ford by the men crowding behind. Sharpe and Harper both fired from the inn garden, their bullets spinning over the lower roofs to plough into the mass of attackers who were now shielded from the artillery on the ridge by the village itself.
The first French attackers burst against the village's eastern walls. Bayonets clashed against bayonets. Sharpe saw a Frenchman appear on a top of a wall, then jump down into a hidden yard. More Frenchmen followed him across the wall. "Sword on, Pat," Sharpe said and drew his own sword as Harper clicked the sword bayonet onto his rifle. They ducked through the garden door and ran down the main street to find their progress blocked by a double rank of redcoats who were waiting with charged muskets and fixed bayonets. Twenty yards further down the street there were more redcoats who were firing over a makeshift barricade of window shutters, doors, tree branches and a pair of commandeered handcarts. The barricade was shaking from the assault of the French on the far side and every few seconds a musket would be thrust through the entanglement and blast fire, smoke and bullet at the defenders.