"Back, lads, back!" The Captain grasped the danger immediately. His men turned and ran up the street. Some were helping their comrades, a few ran hard to find safety, but most stayed together to join the larger number of British troops who were forming in the small cobbled space at the village's centre. Williams had held three reserve companies in the safer houses at the upper end of the village and those men had now come down to stem the rising French tide.
The French burst out of the alley just as the company went past its mouth. A redcoat went down to a bayonet, then the Captain slashed his sword in a wild cut that sliced open the face of the Frenchman. A big French sergeant swung his musket stock at the Captain, but Sharpe lunged into the man's face with his sword and though the blow was off balance and feeble, it served to check the man while the Captain got away. The Frenchman rammed his bayonet at Sharpe, had it parried away, then Sharpe skewered the sword low and hard, twisting the blade to stop it being gripped by the man's flesh. He ripped it clear of the Frenchman's belly and went back up the hill, one pace, two, watching for more attacks, then a hand pulled him into the re-formed British ranks in the open space. "Fire!" someone shouted, and Sharpe's ears rang with the deafening bellow of serried muskets exploding all around his head.
"I want that alley cleared!" Colonel Williams's voice called. "Go on, Wentworth! Take your men down. Don't let them stand!"
A group of redcoats charged. There were French muskets firing from the windows of the houses and some of the men burst through the doors to drive the French out. More enemy came up the main street. They came in small groups, stopping to fire, then running up into the square where the battle was ragged and desperate. One small group of redcoats was overrun by a rush of Frenchmen who came out of a side alley and there were screams as the enemy's bayonets rose and fell. A boy somehow escaped the massacre and scrambled over the cobbles. "Where's your musket, Sanders?" a sergeant shouted.
The boy swore, turned to look for his fallen weapon and was shot in the open mouth. The French, exhilarated by their victory over the small group, charged over the boy's body to attack the larger mass of men who were trying to hold the mouth of the recaptured alley. They were met by bayonets. The clash of steel on steel and of steel on wood was louder than the muskets, for few men now had time to load a musket and so they used their blades or the stocks of their guns instead of bullets. The two sides stood poised just feet from each other and every now and then a brave group of men would summon the courage to make a charge into the enemy ranks. Then the voices would rise to hoarse shouts and the clash of steel would begin again. One such assault was led by a tall, bareheaded French officer who drove two redcoats aside with whip-quick slashes of his sword, then lunged at a British officer who was fumbling with his pistol. The red-coated officer stepped back and so exposed Sharpe. The tall Frenchman feinted left and managed to draw Sharpe's sword away in the parry, then reversed his stroke and was already gritting his teeth for the killing lunge, but Sharpe was not fighting by the rules of some Parisian fencing master and so he kicked the man in the crotch, then hammered the heavy iron hilt of the sword down onto his head. He kicked the man out of the ranks, and back-cut his heavy sword at a French soldier who was trying to drag a musket and bayonet out of a redcoat's hand. The blade's edge, unsharpened, served as a cudgel rather than a sword, but the Frenchman reeled away with his head in his hands.
"Forward!" a voice shouted and the makeshift British line advanced down the street. The enemy retreated from Williams's reserve who now threatened to take back the whole lower part of the village, but then a vagary of wind swirled away a patch of dust and gunsmoke and Sharpe saw a whole new wave of French attackers swarming over the gardens and walls on the stream's eastern bank.
"Sharpe!" Colonel Williams called. "Are you spoken for?"
Sharpe elbowed back through the tight ranks of redcoats. "Sir?"
"I'd be damned grateful if you were to find Spencer on the ridge and tell him we could use a few reinforcements."
"At once, sir."
"Lost a couple of my aides, you see," Williams began to explain, but Sharpe had already left on the errand. "Good man!" Williams called after him, then turned back to the fight that had degenerated into a series of bloody and desperate brawls in the murderous confines of the alleys and back gardens. It was a fight Williams feared losing for the French had committed their own reserves and a new mass of blue-coated infantry was now pouring into the village.
Sharpe ran past wounded men dragging themselves uphill. The village was clouded with dust and smoke and he took one wrong turning and found himself in a blind alley of stone walls. He backtracked, found the right street again," and emerged on the slope above the village where a crowd of wounded men waited for help.
They were too weak to climb the slope and some called out as Sharpe ran past.
He ignored them. Instead he climbed up the goat path beside the graveyard. A group of worried officers were standing beside the church and Sharpe shouted at them to see if any knew where General Spencer was. "I've got a message!" he called.
"What is it?" a man called back. "I'm his aide!"
"Williams wants reinforcements. Too many Frogs!"
The staff officer turned and ran towards the brigade that was waiting beyond the crest while Sharpe paused to catch his breath. His sword was in his hand and its blade was sticky with blood. He cleaned the steel on the edge of his jacket, then jumped in alarm as a bullet smacked hard into the stone wall beside him. He turned and saw a puff of musket smoke showing between some broken beams at the upper edge of the village and he realized the French had taken those houses and were now trying to cut off the defenders still inside Fuentes de Onoro. The greenjackets in the graveyard opened fire, their rifles cutting down any enemy foolish enough to show himself at a window or door for too long.
Sharpe sheathed his cleaned sword then went over the wall and crouched behind a slab of granite on which a rough cross had been chiselled. He loaded the rifle, then aimed it at the broken roof where he had seen the musket smoke. The flint had skewed in the doghead and he released the screw, adjusted the leather patch that gripped the flint, then tightened it down. He thumbed the cock back. He was bitterly thirsty, the usual fate of any man who had been biting into salty gunpowder cartridges. The air was foul with the stench of smoke.
A musket appeared between the beams and, a second later, a man's head showed. Sharpe fired first, but the rifle's smoke hid the bullet's mark. Harper slid down the graveyard's slope to land beside Sharpe. "Jesus," the Irishman said, "Jesus."
"Bad in there." Sharpe nodded down to the village. He primed the rifle, then upended the weapon to charge the muzzle. He had left his ramrod conveniently propped against the grave.
"More of the buggers coming over the stream," Harper said. He bit a bullet and was forced to silence until he could spit it into the rifle. "That poor lieutenant. Died."
"It was a chest wound," Sharpe said, ramming the ball and charge hard down the barrel. "Not many survive chest wounds."
"I stayed with the poor bugger," Harper said. "His mother's a widow, he told me. She sold the family plate to buy his uniform and sword, then said he'd be as great a soldier as any there was."
"He was good," Sharpe said. "He kept his nerve." He cocked the rifle.
"I told him that. Gave him a prayer. Poor wee bugger. First battle, too." Harper pulled the trigger. "Got you, you bastard," he said and immediately fished a new cartridge from his pouch while he pulled the hammer to half cock. More British defenders were emerging from between the houses, forced out of the village by the sheer weight of French numbers. "They should send some more men down there," Harper said.