The voltigeur walked onto the bridge and leaned over for the pipe that he used to light his cigar. Then he returned the pipe with a short length of garlic sausage. The two men smoked companionably, enjoying the spring sunshine. Other voltigeurs stretched and stood, just as the greenjackets relaxed in their positions. Some men took off their boots and dangled their feet in the stream.
In Fuentes de Onoro itself the British were struggling to remove the dead and the wounded from the crammed alleys. Men wrapped cloth strips about their mouths to drag the blood-black and heat-swollen bodies from the piles that marked where the fighting had been fiercest. Other men fetched water from the stream to relieve the thirst of the wounded. By mid-morning the truce across the stream was official and a company of unarmed French infantry arrived to carry their own casualties back across the bridge that had been patched with a plank taken from the watermill on the British bank. French ambulances waited at the ford to carry their men to the surgeons. The vehicles had been specially constructed for carrying wounded men and had springs as lavish as any city grandee's coach. The British army preferred to use farm carts that jolted the wounded foully.
A French major sat drinking wine and playing chess with a greenjacket captain in the inn's garden. Outside the inn a work party loaded an ox-drawn wagon with the dead who would be carried up to the ridge and buried in a common grave. The chessplayers frowned when a burst of raucous laughter sounded loud and the British Captain, annoyed that the laughter was not fading away, went to the gate and snapped at a sergeant for an explanation. "It was Mallory, sir," the Sergeant said, pointing to a shamefaced British rifleman who was the butt of French and British amusement. "Bugger fell asleep, sir, and the Frogs was loading him up with the dead 'uns."
The French Major took one of the Englishman's castles and remarked that he had once almost buried a living man. "We were already throwing earth in his grave when he sneezed. That was in Italy. He's a sergeant now."
The rifle Captain might have been losing the game of chess, but he was determined not to be outdone in stories. "I've met two men who survived hangings in England," he remarked. "They were pulled off the scaffold too soon and their bodies sold to the surgeons. The doctors pay five guineas a corpse, I'm told, so they can demonstrate their damned techniques to their apprentices. I'm told the corpses revive far more often than you'd think. There's always an unseemly scramble round the gallows as the man's family tries to cut the body down before the doctors get their wretched hands on it, and there doesn't seem anyone in authority to make sure the villain's properly dead before he's unstrung." He moved a bishop. "I suppose the authorities are being bribed."
"The guillotine makes no such mistakes," the Major said as he advanced a pawn. "Death by science. Very quick and certain. I do believe that is checkmate."
"Damn me," the Englishman said, "so it is."
The French Major stowed away his chess set. His pawns were musket balls, half limewashed and half left plain, the court pieces were carved from wood and the board was a square of painted canvas that he wrapped carefully about the chessmen. "It seems our lives have been spared this day," he said, glancing up at the sun that was already past the meridian. "Maybe we shall fight tomorrow instead?"
Up on the ridge the British watched as French troops marched south. It was clear that Massena would now be trying to turn the British right flank and so Wellington ordered the Seventh Division to deploy southwards and thus reinforce a strong force of Spanish partisans who were blocking the roads the French needed to advance artillery as part of their flanking manoeuvre. Wellington's army was now in two parts; the largest on the plateau behind Fuentes de Onoro was blocking the approach to Almeida while the smaller part was two and a half miles south astride the road along which the British would need to retreat if they were defeated. Massena put a telescope to his one eye to watch as the small British division moved south. He kept expecting the division to stop before it left the protective artillery range of the plateau, but the troops kept marching and marching. "He's made a bollocks of it," he told an aide as the Seventh Division finally marched way beyond the range of the strong British artillery. Massena collapsed the telescope. "Monsieur Wellington has made a bollocks of it," he said.
Andrй Massena had begun his military career as a private in the ranks of Louis XVI's army and now he was a marshal of France, the Duke of Rivoli and the Prince of Essling. Men called him "Your Majesty", yet once he had been a half-starved wharf rat in the small town of Nice. He had also once possessed two eyes, but the Emperor had shot one of the eyeballs away in a hunting accident. Napoleon would never acknowledge the responsibility, but nor would Marshal Massйna ever dream of blaming his beloved Emperor for the eye's loss, for he owed both his royal status and his high military rank to Napoleon who had recognized the wharf rat's skills as a soldier. Those skills had made Andrй Massйna famous inside the Empire and feared outside. He had trampled through Italy winning victory after victory, he had smashed the Russians on the borders of Switzerland and rammed bloody defeat down Austrian throats before Marengo. Marshal Andrй Massйna, Duke of Rivoli and Prince of Essling, was not a pretty soldier, but by God he knew how to fight, which was why, at fifty-two years old, he had been sent to retrieve the disasters besetting the Emperor's armies in Spain and Portugal.
Now the wharf rat turned prince watched in disbelief as the gap between the two parts of the British army opened still wider. For a few seconds he even toyed with the idea that perhaps the four or five thousand red-coated infantrymen marching southwards were the Irish regiments that Major Ducos had promised would mutiny before the battle, but Massйna had never put much hope in Ducos's stratagem and the fact that these nine battalions were flying their flags as they marched suggested that they were hardly in revolt. Instead, miraculously, it seemed that the British were offering them up as a sacrifice by isolating them out in the southern plain where they would be far from any help. Massйna watched as the enemy regiments finally stopped just short of a village far to the south. According to his map the village was called Nave de Haver and it lay nearly five miles from Fuentes de Onoro. "Is Wellington tricking us?" Massйna asked an aide.
The aide was just as incredulous as his master. "Perhaps he believes he can beat us without keeping to the rules?" he suggested.
"Then in the morning we will teach him about the rules of war. I expected better of this Englishman! Tomorrow night, Jean, we shall have his whores as our own. Does Wellington have whores?"
"I don't know, Your Majesty."
"Then find out. And make sure I get the pick of the bunch before some filthy grenadier gives her the clap, you hear me?"
"Yes, Your Majesty," the aide said. His master's passion for women was as tiresome as his appetite for victory was inspiring, and tomorrow, it seemed, both hungers would be satisfied.
By mid-afternoon it was plain that the French were not coming that day. The picquets were doubled, and every battalion kept at least three companies under arms, but the other companies were released to more usual duties. Cattle were herded onto the plateau and slaughtered for the evening meal, bread was fetched from Vilar Formoso and the rum ration distributed.
Captain Donaju sought and received Tarrant's permission to take a score of men to attend Lord Kiely's burial which was taking place four miles behind Fuentes de Onoro. Hogan also insisted that Sharpe attend and Harper wanted to come as well. Sharpe felt awkward in Hogan's company, especially as the Irishman seemed blithely unaware of Sharpe's bitterness over the court of inquiry. "I invited Runciman," Hogan told Sharpe as they walked along the dusty road west from Vilar Formoso, "but he didn't really want to come. Poor fellow."