Harper looked suspicious. “So if we see him across, sir, we can go back to the town?”
“You’re missing the tavern?” Sharpe asked. His men had been bivouacking at the beach’s end for two days now: two days of constant grumbling at the Spanish rations that Galiana had arranged and two days of missing the comforts of San Fernando. Sharpe sympathized, but was secretly pleased that they were uncomfortable. Idle soldiers got into mischief and drunken soldiers into trouble. It was better to have them grumbling. “So once we’ve got him safe across,” Sharpe said, “you can go back with the lads. I’ll write you orders. And you can have a bottle of that vino tinto waiting for me.”
Harper, given what he wanted, looked troubled. “Waiting for you?” he asked flatly.
“I won’t be long. It should all be over by nightfall. So go on, tell the lads they can go back as soon as we’ve got Captain Galiana over the bridge.”
Harper did not move. “So what will you be doing, sir?”
“Officially,” Sharpe said, ignoring the question, “we’re all ordered to stay here till Brigadier bloody Moon tells us otherwise, but I don’t think he’ll mind if you go back. He won’t know, will he?”
“But why will you be staying, sir?” Harper insisted.
Sharpe touched the edge of the bandage showing under his shako. The pain in his head had gone and he suspected it was safe to take the bandage off, but his skull still felt tender so he had left it on and religiously soaked it with vinegar each day. “The 8th of the line, Pat,” he said, “that’s why.”
Harper looked down the shoreline to where the French stood silent. “They’re there?”
“I don’t know where the buggers are. What I do know is that they were sent north and they couldn’t get north because we blew up their damned bridge, so the odds are they came back here. And if they are here, Pat, then I want to say hello to Colonel Vandal. With this.” He hefted the rifle.
“So you’re—”
“So I’m just going to wander along the beach,” Sharpe interrupted.
“I’m going to look for him. If I see him I’ll have a shot at him, that’s all. Nothing more, Pat, nothing more. I mean it’s not our fight, is it?”
“No, sir, it isn’t.”
“So that’s all I’m doing, and if I can’t find the bugger, then I’ll come back. Just have that bottle of wine ready for me.” Sharpe clapped Harper on the shoulder, then walked to where Captain Galiana was sitting on a horse. “What’s happening, Captain?”
Galiana had a small telescope and was staring southward. “I don’t understand it,” he said.
“Understand what?”
“There are Spanish troops there. Beyond the French.”
“General Lapeña’s men?”
“Why are they here?” Galiana asked. “They should be marching on Chiclana!”
Sharpe gazed over the river and down the long beach. The French stood in three ranks, their officers on horseback, their eagles glinting in the early sun. Then, quite suddenly, those eagles, instead of being outlined against the sky, were wreathed in smoke. Sharpe saw the musket smoke blossom thick and silent until, a few seconds later, the sound crackled past him.
Then, after that first massive volley, the world went silent except for the call of the gulls and the seethe of the waves. “Why are they here?” Galiana asked again, and then the muskets fired a second time, more of them now, and the morning was filled with the sound of battle.
A HUNDRED or so paces upstream of the pontoon bridge a small tidal creek branched south from the Rio Sancti Petri. The creek was called the Almanza and it was a place of reeds, grass, water, and marsh where herons hunted. The creek headed inland, thus dictating that an army coming north along the coast would find itself on a narrowing strip of land and beach that ended at the Rio Sancti Petri. The Almanza Creek was a mile long at low tide and twice that distance at high, and its presence made the narrowing funnel of sand into a trap if another army could get behind the first and drive it north toward the river. The trap would become even more lethal if another force could ford the creek and so block any retreat across the pontoon bridge.
The Almanza Creek was not much of a barrier, except at its mouth it could be waded almost anywhere along its length and, at nine o’clock the morning of March 5, 1811, the tide had only just begun to flood and so the French infantry could cross it easily. They splashed through the marshes, slid down the muddy bank, and waded the creek’s sandy bed before climbing to the dunes and beach beyond. Yet, though the creek was no obstacle to men or to horses, it was impassable to artillery. The cannons weighed too much. A French twelve-pounder, the most common gun in the emperor’s arsenal, weighed a ton and a half, and to get a cannon, its limber, its caisson and crew across the marsh would require engineers. When Marshall Victor ordered General Villatte’s division to ford the Almanza there was no time to summon engineers, let alone for those engineers to build a makeshift road across the creek, so the force Villatte led to block the retreat of Lapeña’s army was infantry alone.
Marshal Victor was no fool. He had made his reputation at Marengo and at Friedland, and since coming to Spain he had beaten two Spanish armies at Espinosa and at Medellin. It was true he had taken a bloody nose from Lord Wellington at Talavera, but le beau soleil, the beautiful sun as his men called him, regarded that reverse as a whim of fickle fortune. “A soldier who has never been defeated,” he liked to say, “has learned nothing.”
“And what did you learn from Lord Wellington?” General Ruffin, a giant of a man who led one of Victor’s divisions, had asked.
“Never to lose again, François!” Victor had said, then laughed. Claude Victor was a friendly soul, outgoing and genial. His soldiers loved him. He had been a soldier in the ranks himself once. True, he had been an artilleryman, which was hardly the same as an infantryman, but he knew the ranks, he loved them, and he expected them to fight hard just as he led them hard. He was, all French soldiers said, a brave and a good man. Le beau soleil. And he was no fool. He knew that Villatte’s infantry, unsupported by close artillery, could not stand against the approaching Spaniards, but they could delay Lapeña. They could hold Lapeña’s forces on the narrowing beach while Victor’s other two divisions, those of Leval and Ruffin, worked around their rear, and then the trap would be sprung. The allied army would be driven into the narrowing funnel that ended at the Rio Sancti Petri and, though Villatte’s men would doubtless have to give way in front of the increasing pressure, the other two divisions would come from behind like avenging angels. Only a few Spaniards and Britons could hope to cross the pontoon bridge; the rest would be herded and slaughtered until, inevitably, the survivors surrendered. And it would be simple! The allied army, apparently oblivious of the fate that waited for it, was still in line of march, stretching for three miles along the straggling coast road. The marshal had watched their progress from Tarifa with growing astonishment; he had watched them haver and change course and stop and start and change direction again, and he came to understand that he was opposing enemy generals who did not know their business. It would all be so easy.
Now Villatte was across the creek and in place. He was the anvil. And the two sledgehammers, Leval and Ruffin, were ready to attack. Marshal Victor, from the summit of a hill on the inland heath, gave a last survey of his chosen battlefield and liked what he saw. On his right, closest to Cádiz, was the Almanza Creek, which he could cross with infantry but not with artillery, so he would let Villatte fight his battle there with musketry alone. In the center, south of the creek, was a stretch of heathland ending in a thick pinewood that hid his view of the sea. The enemy column, his scouts reported, was mostly strung along the track that ran inside that wood, so Marshal Victor would send General Leval’s division to attack the pinewood and break through to the beach beyond. Such an attack would be threatened on its left flank by a hill that also hid the sea. It was not much of a hill—Victor guessed it rose no more than two hundred feet above the surrounding heath—but it was steep enough and it was crowned by a ruined chapel and a stand of wind-bent trees. The hill, astonishingly, was empty of troops, though Victor did not believe his enemies would be so foolish as to leave it unguarded. Occupied or not, the hill must be taken and the pinewood captured. Then Victor’s two divisions could turn north up the shore and drive the remnants of the allied army to destruction in the narrowing space between the sea and the creek. “It will be a rabbit hunt!” Victor promised his aides. “A rabbit hunt! So hurry! Hurry! I want my bunnies in the pot by lunchtime!”