The standard-bearer jumped out of the ranks to carry the precious Eagle down the Battalion to safety, but there was a crack, the man fell, and Sharpe heard Hagman’s customary ‘got him’. Then there was a new sound, more volleys, and the Dutch Battalion shook like a wounded animal as the South Essex arrived on their flank and began to pour in their volleys. Sharpe was faced by a crazed officer who swung at him with a sword, missed, and screamed in panic as Sharpe lunged with the point. A man in white ran out of the ranks to pick up the fallen Eagle but Sharpe was through the line as well and he kicked the man in the ribs, bent, and plucked the staff from the ground. There was a formless scream from the enemy, men lunged at him with bayonets and he felt a blow on the thigh, but Harper was there with the axe and so was Denny with his ridiculously slim sword.
Denny! Sharpe pushed the boy down, swung the sword to protect him, but a bayonet was in the Ensign’s chest and even as Sharpe smashed the sword down on the man’s head he felt Denny shudder and collapse. Sharpe screamed, swung the gilded copper Eagle at the enemy, watched the gold scar the air and force them back, screamed again, and jumped the bodies with his bloodied sword reaching for more. The Dutchmen fell back, appalled; the Eagle was coming at them and they retreated in the face of the two huge Riflemen who snarled at them, swung at them, who bled from a dozen cuts yet still came on. They were unkillable! And now there were volleys coming from the right, from the front, and the Dutchmen, who had fought so well for their French masters, had had enough. They ran, as the other French Battalions were running, and in the smoke of the Portina valley the scratch Battalions like the 48th, and the men of the Legion and the Guards who had reformed and come forward to fight again, marched forward on ground made slippery with blood and thrust with their bayonets and forced the massive French columns backwards. The enemy went, away from the dripping steel, backwards, in a scene that was like the most lurid imaginings of hell. Sharpe had never seen so many bodies, so much blood spilt on a field; even at Assaye which he had thought unrivalled in horror there had not been this much blood.
From the Medellin, through the smoke, Sir Henry watched the whole French army go backwards, blasted once more by British muskets, shattered and bleeding, a quarter of their number gone; defeated, broken by the line, by the musket that could be fired five times a minute on a good day, and by men who were not frightened by drums. And in his head Sir Henry composed a letter that would explain how his withdrawing the South Essex from the line was the key move that brought victory. Had not he always said that the British would win?
CHAPTER 24
It was still not over, but very nearly so. As the British troops in the centre of the field sank in exhausted lines by the edge of the discoloured Portina stream, they heard flurries of firing and the shrill tones of cavalry trumpets from the ground north of the Medellin. But nothing much happened; the 23rd Light Dragoons made a suicidal charge, the British six-pounders ground twelve French Battalion squares into horror, and then the French gave up. Silence fell on the field. The French were done, defeated, and the British had the victory and the field.
And with it the dead and wounded. There were more than thirteen thousand casualties but no-one knew that yet. They did not know that the French would not attack again, that King Joseph Bonaparte and the two French Marshals would ride away eastward through the night, so the exhausted and blackened victors stayed in the field. The wounded cried for water, for their mothers, for a bullet, for anything other than the pain and helplessness in the heat. And the horror was not done with them. The sun had burned relentlessly for days, the grass on the Medellin and in the valley was tinder dry, and from somewhere a flame began that rippled and spread and flared through the grass and burned wounded and dead alike. The smell of roasting flesh spread and hung like the lingering palls of smoke. The victors tried to move the wounded but it was too much, too soon, and the flames spread and the rescuers cursed and dropped beside the fouled Portina stream and slaked their thirst in its bloodied water.
Vultures circled the northern hills. The sun dropped red and slanted shadows on the burning field, on the men who struggled to escape the flames, and on the blackened troops who stirred themselves to loot the dead and move the wounded. Sharpe and Harper wandered their own course, two men in the curtains of smoke and burning grass, both bleeding but with their faces creased in private mirth. Sharpe held the Eagle. It was not much to look at: a light blue pole eight feet long and on its top the gilded bird with wings outspread and in its left raised claw a thunderbolt it was about to launch at the enemies of France. There was no flag attached; like so many other French Battalions the previous owners had left their colour at the depot and just carried Napoleon’s gift to the war. It was less then two hands’ breadth across, and the same in height, but it was an Eagle and it was theirs.
The Light Company had watched them go. Only Sharpe, Harper and Denny had gone through the ranks of the enemy Battalion, and when the French attack crumbled the rest of the Light Company had been pushed to one side by the panicked rush of the survivors fleeing from the clockwork volleys. Lieutenant Knowles, a bullet in his shoulder, watched as the men went on firing at the retreating French and then led them back to meet the Battalion. He knew Sharpe and Harper were somewhere in the smoke and they would turn up, with or without the Eagle.
Lieutenant Colonel the Honourable William Lawford sat his horse and stared at the bodies on the field. He had led the South Essex down the slope and watched as they fired their muskets, slowly but calmly, into the white-jacketed enemy. He had seen the fight for the Eagle, but the spreading smoke of the Battalion’s volleys had blotted out the scene and the survivors of the Light Company told him little more. A Lieutenant brought in forty-three bleeding and stained men, grinning like monkeys, who talked of the Eagle but where was it? He wanted to see Sharpe, wanted to see his friend’s face when he discovered that his companion of the Seringapatam jail was now his Colonel, but the field was shrouded in flames and smoke, so he gave up looking and started the Battalion on the grisly task of stripping the dead and piling the naked bodies like cordwood for the fire. There were too many to bury.
Sir Henry Simmerson was done. Wellesley had sworn, briefly and fluently, and sent Lawford to take over the Battalion. Lawford hoped to keep it, it was time he commanded a Battalion, and there was much to be done with it. Major Forrest rode up to him and saluted.
“Major?”
“Except for the Light Company, sir, we’ve lost very few.”
“How many?” Lawford watched as Forrest fetched a piece of paper from his pouch.
“A dozen dead, sir, perhaps twice as many wounded.”
Lawford nodded. “We got off lightly, Major. And the Light Company?”
“Lieutenant Knowles brought in forty-three, sir, and most of them are wounded. Sergeant Read stayed with the baggage with two others, that’s forty-six. There were five men too sick to fight who are in the town.” Forrest paused. “That’s fifty-one, sir, out of a complement of eighty-nine.”
Lawford said nothing. He leaned forward on his saddle and peered into the shifting smoke. Forrest cleared his throat nervously. “You don’t think, sir… „He tailed the question away.