The sudden outburst of musketry had alerted the sailors and they had cut the lines to the boarding grapnels they were using as anchors and then shoved the lighters away from the bank, but the ponderous boats moved painfully slowly. The one farthest from Sharpe made better progress, but the nearer one seemed to be half-grounded. More French muskets banged, coughing out smoke in which Sharpe saw the glint of bayonets. The outnumbered marines scrambled aboard the nearest lighter as the French reached the bank. A marine fired and a blue-coated Frenchman was hurled back and two others closed on the lighter and rammed their bayonets at sailors who were trying to pole the lighter off the bank with their oars. The attackers grabbed the oars. The French prisoners who had been under the guard were free now and, though unarmed, were also trying to board the lighter. A pistol fired, its report crisper than a musket. Then a dozen heavier crashes sounded and Sharpe guessed the sailors had been issued with the heavy pistols used by boarding parties. They had been issued with cutlasses too, though doubtless none had expected to use them, but now the sailors were hacking at men scrambling over the lighter’s gunwale.
Sharpe was twenty yards away, crouching at the creek’s edge. He told himself that this was not his fight, that his responsibility was back in the city whose lights shimmered across the wide bay. But he had six smoke balls aboard that threatened lighter and he wanted them, and besides, if the French took even one lighter then it would make Sir Thomas’s withdrawal almost impossible. “We’re going to have to drive the buggers away from the boat,” Sharpe said.
“There must be fifty of the bastards, sir. More.”
“Plenty of our lads still fighting,” Sharpe said. “We’ll just scare the buggers. Maybe they’ll run.” He stood, slung the unloaded rifle on his back, and drew his sword.
“God save Ireland,” Harper said.
Army regulations decreed that Sharpe, as a skirmishing officer, should be armed with a cavalry saber, but he had never liked the weapon. The saber’s curve made it good for slashing, but in truth most officers wore the blades as mere decoration. He much preferred the heavy cavalry trooper’s sword that was one of the longest manufactured. The blade was straight, almost a yard of Birmingham steel. The cavalry complained constantly of the weapon. It did not keep an edge, it was too heavy in the blade, and the asymmetrical point made it ineffective. Sharpe had ground down the back blade to make the point symmetrical and he liked the weapon’s weight that made the sword into an effective club. He and Harper splashed into the creek’s shallows and came at the French from their left. The blue-coated men were not expecting an attack and may even have thought the two dark-uniformed men were French, for none turned to oppose them. These men were the French laggards, those unwilling to plunge into the creek and fight against the marines and sailors, and none wanted a fight. Some were reloading their muskets, but most just watched the struggle for the lighter as Sharpe and Harper hit them. Sharpe lunged the sword at a throat and the man fell away, his ramrod clattering in his musket’s barrel. Sharpe struck again. Harper was thrusting the sword bayonet and bellowing in Gaelic. A French bayonet glinted to Sharpe’s right and he swung the sword hard, thumping its blunt edge against a man’s skull, and suddenly there was no immediate enemy in front, just a stretch of water and a knot of Frenchmen trying to board the lighter’s bows that was being defended by marines with cutlasses and bayonets. Sharpe waded into the creek and thrust the sword at a man’s spine, and knew he had taken too big a chance because the men assailing the lighter turned on him ferociously. A bayonet slashed into his jacket and became entangled there. He cut sideways just as Harper arrived beside him.
Harper was screaming incoherently now. He drove his rifle butt into a man’s face, but more Frenchmen were coming and Sharpe dragged Harper back from their blades. Four men were attacking them and these were not the laggards. These were men who wanted to kill and he could see their bared teeth and their long blades. He swept the sword in a massive haymaking blow that deflected two bayonet thrusts, then stepped back again. Harper was beside him, and the Frenchmen pressed hard, thinking they had easy victims. At least, Sharpe thought, the enemy had no loaded muskets. Just then a gun went off and the muzzle flash blinded him and thick smoke engulfed him. But the bullet went God knows where, and Sharpe instinctively twitched from it and fell sideways into the creek. The French must have thought he was dead because they ignored him and lunged at Harper who thrust his sword bayonet hard into a man’s eyes just as the Irish struck.
Major Gough had brought his company back to the creek and the first Sharpe knew of their coming was a volley that drowned the marsh in noise. After that came the screams of the attacking redcoats. They came with bayonets and fury. “Faugh a ballagh!” they shouted, and the French obeyed. The attack on the lighter shredded under the assault of the 87th. A Frenchman stooped to Sharpe, thinking him dead and presumably wanting his sword, and Sharpe punched the man in the face, then came out of the water, sword swinging, and he slashed it across the man’s face. The Frenchman ran. Sharpe could see Ensign Keogh cutting his straight sword at a much bigger enemy who flailed at the thin officer with his musket. Then the big Sergeant Masterson drove his bayonet into the man’s ribs. The Frenchman went down under Masterson’s weight. Keogh sliced his sword at the fallen man and wanted more. He was screaming a high-pitched scream and he saw the two dark figures in the creek’s shallows and turned to attack, shouting at his men to follow.
“Faugh a ballagh!” Harper roared.
“It’s you!” Keogh stopped at the water’s edge. He grinned suddenly. “That was a proper fight.”
“It was bloody desperate,” Harper muttered.
Major Gough was shouting at his men to form line and face south. Sergeants pulled redcoats away from the enemy corpses they were plundering. The surviving marines were clubbing the few remaining Frenchmen off the lighter, but Captain Collins, a cutlass in his hand, was dead. “He should have moved the bloody boats, sir,” a marine sergeant said as he greeted Sharpe. The sergeant spat a dark stream of tobacco juice onto a French corpse. “You’re soaked through, sir,” he added. “Did you fall in?”
“I fell in,” Sharpe said, and the first explosion split the darkness.
The explosion came from one of the five fire rafts. A spire of flame, brilliantly white, shot into the sky, then red light followed, flashing outward in a ring that flattened the marsh grass. The night was flooded with fire. Later it was decided that an errant spark from a fire in one of the captured French camps had somehow ignited a quickfuse. The charges had already been laid and the engineers were stringing the last of the fuses when one saw the bright fizz of a burning quick match. He shouted a warning, then jumped off the raft just as the first powder keg exploded. All across the rafts now the fuses sparked and smoked like wriggling snakes of fire.
The white spire twisted and dimmed. The rumble of the explosion faded across the marshland as a bugle sounded, ordering the British troops back to the lighters. The bugle was still calling when the next charges exploded, one after the other, their fire pounding toward the clouds and their noise punching across the marshes where the reeds and grasses bent again to the warm and unexpected winds. Smoke began to boil from the rafts where the French-laid incendiaries caught the fire and their flames illuminated the French troops who had retreated from the lighters. “Fire!” Major Gough roared, and his company of the 87th loosed a volley, and still the charges exploded and the rafts burned. The cannons at the rafts’ perimeters began to fire, the balls and grapeshot whistling across the creek and marsh.