Just in time for Christmas.
Colonel Caillou watched the two red-coated horsemen approach under their flag of truce and felt an immense rage surge inside him. Gudin would surrender, he knew it, and when that happened Caillou would lose the Eagle that the Emperor himself had presented to the 75th.
He would not let it happen, and so, in a blind fury, he drove back his spurs and galloped after Gudin.
Gudin heard him coming, turned and waved him back, but Caillou ignored him.
Instead he drew his pistol. "Go back! " he shouted in English to the approaching officers. "Go back!»
D'Alembord reined in his horse. "Do you command her, monsieur?" he asked Caillou in French.
"Go back! " Caillou shouted angrily. "We do not accept your flag. You hear me?
We do not accept it. Go! " He leveled the pistol at the younger officer who held the offending flag of truce, a white handkerchief tied to a musket's ramrod. «Go!» Caillou shouted, then spurred his horse away from Gudin who had moved to intervene.
"It's all right, Charlie, " d'Alembord said. "He won't shoot. It's a flag of truce." He looked back to Caillou. "Monsieur? I insist upon knowing if you command here."
"Just go! " Caillou shouted, but at that moment Nicholls's horse stumbled a pace forward and Caillou, overwhelmed with rage for the anticipated shame of surrender, pulled the pistol's trigger.
The white flag toppled slowly. Nicholls stared at Caillou with a look of astonishment on his young face, then he turned in puzzlement to gaze at d'Alembord. D'Alembord reached out a hand, but Nicholls was already falling.
The bullet had broken through one of the gold laces his mother had sewn onto his jacket and then it had pierced his young heart.
Caillou seemed suddenly shocked, as if he had only just realized the enormity of his crime. He opened his mouth to speak, but no words came. Instead, a second pistol sounded and Caillou, just like Nicholls, toppled dead from his horse.
Colonel Gudin put his pistol back in its holster. "I command here, " he told d'Alembord in English. "To my shame, sir. I command here. You have come to offer terms?"
"I have come to fetch your surrender, sir, " d'Alembord said, and saw from Gudin's face that he would get it. The battle was over.
SHARPE heard of Nicholls's death while he was still watching the French take their dead from the northern slope. He swore when he heard the news, and then he stalked back to the village with pure bloody murder in his head.
A ground of unarmed French soldiers stood nervously outside the tavern, and he pushed his angry way through them and then kicked open the door. "What bastard Frenchman dared killed my officer?" he shouted, storming into the room with one hand on the hilt of his heavy cavalry sword.
A tall, grey-haired French officer stood to face him. "The man who killed your officer is dead, monsieur, " the Frenchman said. "I shot him."
Sharpe stopped and stared. His hand fell from the sword and his mouth dropped open. For a second he seemed unable to speak, but then he found his voice.
"Colonel Gudin?" he asked in amazement.
Gudin smiled. "Oui, Caporal Sharpe."
"I'm a major now, sir, " Sharpe said, and he stepped forward with his hand outstretched, but Gudin ignored the hand and instead clasped Sharpe in both arms and kissed him on both cheeks. D'Alembord watched, smiling.
"I knew it was you, " Gudin said, his hands still on Sharpe's shoulders. "I'm proud of you, Sharpe. So very proud." There were tears in the colonel's eyes.
"And for your officer who died, I am sorry. There was nothing I could do."
The door from the kitchens opened and Daniel Hagman poked his head through.
"Need more towels, Captain, " he said to d'Alembord.
"What the hell are you doing, Dan?" Sharpe asked.
"Delivering a baby, sir, " Hagman said, as if that was the most natural thing in the world for a Rifleman to be doing on Christmas Eve. "Isn't the first baby I've done, sir. The Frog doctor was going to cut her open, and that would have killed her, but I'll see her right. It's no different from slipping a lamb into the world. Thank you, sir." He took the proffered rags from d'Alembord and ducked back into the candlelit kitchen.
Sharpe sat. D'Alembord and Gudin had started on the wine, so he poured himself a mug and took a long drink. "So what am I going to do with you?" he asked his old colonel.
Gudin spread his hands. "I could choose to fight you, I suppose, but if I do, I lose. So I fear I am your prisoner again." The colonel looked at d'Alembord.
"He took me prisoner in India, and he was only a corporal then."
"That was a long time ago, sir, a long time ago." Sharpe poured more wine and pushed the wineskin towards the colonel. "And how have you been since, sir?"
"Not well, Sharpe, not well, " Gudin confessed. "You see I am still a colonel, just as I was then. It seemed that after Seringapatam I could do nothing right."
"I'm sure that's not true, sir. You were the best officer I ever had."
Gudin smiled at the compliment. "But I have had no luck, Sharpe, no victories."
"So tell me about it, sir. It's the night before Christmas, a good night for a story. So tell me."
So Gudin did.
GENERAL Maximillien Picard sulked. He sat by a miserable fire in the deep, cold valley listening to the moans of his wounded and knew that he had been well beaten.
He had scented defeat from the moment he had seen the demonstration volley the British had flaunted from their high ridge, but Picard had always thought he was a lucky man and he had hoped that his good luck would serve to drive his column up the hill and through the thin British line. But the column had been shattered and his conscripts, instead of tasting victory, were now more fearful than ever.
He drank from a brandy flask. It was three o'clock on Christmas morning, but he could not sleep. The skies had cleared, so that the Christmas stars were bright, but General Picard felt nothing but gloom. "Gudin's doomed, " he said to his chief of staff Major Santon. "If we couldn't break those bastards, what hope does he have?"
"None, sir, " Santon said.
"I don't mind losing Gudin, " Picard said, "but why must we lose Caillou? Now there's a soldier for you. And if we lose Caillou, Santon, you know what else we lose?"
"The Eagle, sir."
"The Eagle, " Picard said, and flinched. "We will have lost one of the Emperor's Eagles." His eyes filled with tears. "I do not mind defeat, Santon, he said untruthfully, "but I cannot bear the loss of an Eagle. It will be taken to London and flaunted in front of that fat prince. And Eagle of France, gone to captivity."
Santon said nothing, for there was nothing to say. To a soldier of France there was no shame like losing an Eagle. The birds might be nothing more than little bronze statuettes poised on a staff from which the tricolour flew, but they had all been touched by the Emperor and they were all sacred to France.
And in the dark hills above them, an Eagle was in desperate danger.
"I can bear anything, " Picard said, "except that."
Then, from above them, all hell broke loose.
To the defeated French brigade in the deep valley it sounded like a battle to end the world. True, there was no artillery firing, but the experienced soldiers claimed they had never heard musketry like it. The volleys were unending, and the crash of those musket blasts was magnified and multiplied by the valley's echoing walls. They could hear faint screams and shouts, and sometimes a bugle call but, above it all, and never ending, the hammer sound of muskets. There was volley after volley, so many that after a while the sound became continuous; a deep grinding sound like the creak of a hinge on the gate of hell.