It was not much of a force. Two riflemen, two women and a wounded Portuguese cazador. But Sharpe reckoned it should be enough to break a French dream.
So he slung his rifle, hitched the sword belt higher, and led them downstairs.
Most of the French infantry in Coimbra were from the 8th Corps, a newly raised unit of young men fresh from the depots of France, and they were half trained, ill disciplined, resentful of an Emperor who had marched them to a war they mostly did not understand and, above all, hungry. Hundreds broke ranks to explore the university, but, finding little that they wanted, they took out their frustration by smashing, mangling and shattering whatever could be broken. Coimbra was renowned for its work on optics, but microscopes were of small use to soldiers and so they hammered the beautiful instruments with muskets, then wrenched apart the fine sextants. A handful of telescopes were saved, for such things were valued, but the larger instruments, too long to carry, were destroyed, while an unparalleled set of finely ground lenses, cushioned by velvet in a cabinet of wide, shallow drawers, was systematically broken. One room was filled with chronometers, all being tested, and they were reduced to bent springs, cogwheels and shattered cases. A fine assembly of fossils was pounded to shards and a collection of minerals, a lifetime's work carefully catalogued into quartzes and spars and ores, was scattered from a window. Fine porcelain was shattered, pictures torn from their frames and if most of the library was spared that was only because there were too many volumes to be destroyed. Some men nevertheless tried, pulling rare books from the shelves and tearing them apart, but they soon got bored and contented themselves with smashing some fine Roman vases that stood on gilded pediments. There was no sense in it, except the anger that the soldiers felt. They hated the Portuguese and so they took their revenge on what their enemy valued.
Coimbra's Old Cathedral had been built by two Frenchmen in the twelfth century and now other Frenchmen whooped with delight because so many women had taken shelter close to its altars. A handful of men tried to protect their wives and daughters, but the muskets fired, the men died and the screaming began. Other soldiers shot at the gilded high altar, aiming at the carved saints guarding the sad-faced Virgin. A six-year-old child tried to pull a soldier off his mother and had his throat cut, and when a woman would not stop screaming a sergeant cut her throat as well. In the New Cathedral, up the hill, voltigeurs took it in turns to piss into the baptismal font and, when it was full, they christened the girls they had captured in the building, giving them all the same name, Putain, which meant whore. A sergeant then auctioned the weeping girls, whose hair dripped with urine.
In the church of Santa Cruz, which was older than the Old Cathedral, the troops found the tombs of Portugal's first two kings. The beautifully sculpted sepulchers were wrenched apart, the coffins shattered and the bones of Alfonso the Conqueror, who had liberated Lisbon from the Muslims in the twelfth century, were hauled from their winding cloth and thrown across the floor. His son, Sancho I, had been buried in a white linen shift edged with cloth of gold, and an artilleryman ripped the shroud away and draped it about his shoulders before dancing on the remnants of the corpse. There was a gold cross studded with jewels in Sancho's tomb and three soldiers fought over it. One died, and the other two hacked the cross apart and shared it. There were more women in Santa Cruz and they suffered as the other women were suffering, while their men were taken into the Cloisters of Silence and shot.
Mostly the soldiers wanted food. They broke into houses, kicked open cellars and searched for anything they could eat. There was plenty, for the city had never been properly stripped of foodstuffs, but there were too many soldiers, and anger grew when some men ate and others stayed hungry, and the anger turned into fury when it was fuelled by the lavish supplies of wine discovered in the taverns. A rumor spread that there was a great stock of food in a warehouse in the lower town, and hundreds of men converged on it, only to find the hoard guarded by dragoons. Some stayed, hoping the dragoons would go away, while others went to find women or plunder.
A few men tried to prevent the destruction. An officer attempted to pull two artillerymen off a woman and was kicked to the ground, then stabbed with a sword. A pious sergeant, offended at what went on in the Old Cathedral, was shot. Most officers, knowing it was hopeless to try and stop the orgy of destruction, barricaded themselves in houses and waited for the madness to subside, while others simply joined in.
Marshal Massena, escorted by hussars and accompanied by his aides and by his mistress, who was fetchingly dressed in a sky-blue hussar's uniform, found a billet in the Archbishop's palace. Two infantry colonels came to the palace and complained of the troops' behavior, but they got small sympathy from the Marshal. "They deserve a little respite," he said. "It's been a hard march, a hard march. And they're like horses. They go better if you ease the curb rein from time to time. So let them play, gentlemen, let them play." He made certain Henriette was comfortable in the Archbishop's bedroom. She disliked the crucifixes hanging on the walls so Massena jettisoned them through the window, then asked what she would like to eat. "Grapes and wine," she said, and Massena ordered one of his servants to ransack the palace kitchens and find both. "And if there are none, sir?" the servant asked. "Of course there are grapes and wine!" Massena snapped. "Good Christ Almighty, can nothing be done without questions in this army? Find the damned grapes, find the damned wine, and take them to mademoiselle!" He went back to the palace's dining room where maps had been spread on the Archbishop's table. They were poor maps, inspired more by imagination than by topography, but one of Massena's aides thought better ones might exist in the university, and he was right, though by the time he found them they had been reduced to ashes.
The army's Generals assembled in the dining room where Massena planned the next stage of the campaign. He had been rebuffed at Bussaco, but that defeat had not prevented him turning the enemy's left flank and thus chasing the British and Portuguese out of central Portugal. Massena's army was now on the Mondego and the enemy was retreating towards Lisbon, but that still left the Marshal with other enemies. Hunger assailed his troops, as did the Portuguese irregulars who closed behind his forces like wolves following a flock of sheep. General Junot suggested it was time for a pause. "The British are taking to their ships," he said, "so let them go. Then send a corps to retake the roads back to Almeida."
Almeida was the Portuguese frontier fortress where the invasion had begun, and it lay over a hundred miles eastwards at the end of the monstrously difficult roads across which the French army had struggled. "To what end?" Massena asked.
"So supplies can get through," Junot declared, "supplies and reinforcements."
"What reinforcements?" The question was sarcastic.
"Drouet's corps?" Junot suggested.
"They won't move," Massena said sourly, "they won't be permitted to move." The Emperor had ordered that Massena was to be given 130,000 men for the invasion, but less than half that number had assembled on the frontier and when Massena had pleaded for more men, the Emperor had sent a message that his present forces were adequate, that the enemy was risible and the task of invading Portugal easy. Yet the Emperor was not here. The Emperor did not command an army of half-starved men whose shoes were falling apart, an army whose supply lines were non-existent because the damned Portuguese peasants controlled the roads winding through the hills to Almeida. Marshal Massena did not want to return to those hills. Get to Lisbon, he thought, get to Lisbon. "The roads from here to Lisbon," he asked, "are better than those we've traveled?"