The plans grew more detailed and, as they did, so Sharpe’s fears gathered like dark clouds looming on the skyline. It was easy to win a victory on paper. There were no dogs to bark, no stones to strip a man, no rain to soak powder, and the enemy performed as dozily as Vivar could wish; on paper. “They’ll know we’re coming?” Sharpe asked him.
“They’ll suspect we’re coming,” Vivar allowed. The French could hardly have failed to hear of the gathering in the hills, though they might well dismiss such a threat as negligible. They had, after all, broken the armies of Spain and Britain, so what did they have to fear from a few peasants? Yet the Count of Mouromorto and Colonel de l’Eclin would know exactly what ambition spurred Bias Vivar, and they were both in Santiago. The refugees confirmed it. Marshal Ney’s cavalry had taken the city and then ridden back to Corunna to join Marshal Soult, leaving two thousand French cavalrymen inside the circuit of broken walls.
They had not been left there to stop an ancient banner reaching a shrine, but rather to collect forage from the coastal valleys of Galicia. Having thrown the British out of Spain, Marshal Soult was now planning to march south. His officers, bragging in the taverns of Corunna, spoke openly of their plans, and those words were faithfully retailed to Vivar. The French, once their wounded and frostbitten ranks were mended, would turn south on Portugal. They would conquer that country and expel the British from Lisbon. The coast of Europe would thus be sealed against British trade, and the Emperor’s stranglehold would be complete.
Soult’s route south would lead through Santiago de Com-postela and thus he had ordered that the city become his forward supply base. His army would collect those supplies to fuel its southern attack. French cavalry was aggressively patrolling the countryside in search of the food and fodder which, the refugees told Vivar, was being stockpiled in houses about the cathedral’s plaza. “So you see,” Vivar said to Sharpe on a night later in the week when they met as usual to stare at the city’s map and hone their plan of assault, “you have a proper reason for attacking, Lieutenant.”
“Proper?”
“You can claim that you are not just humouring a mad Spaniard. You are protecting your Lisbon garrison by destroying French supplies. Is that not true?”
But Sharpe was in no mood for such reassurance. He stared at the city’s plan, imagining the French sentries staring into the night. “They’ll know we’re coming.” Sharpe could not rid himself of the fear of the enemy’s preparedness.
“But not where we’ll attack, nor when.”
“I wish de l’Eclin wasn’t there.”
Vivar scorned his fears. “You think Imperial Guards don’t sleep?”
Sharpe ignored the question. “He isn’t there to collect forage. His job is to take the gonfalon, and he knows we’ll bring it to him. Whatever we plan, Major, he’s already thought of. He’s waiting for us! He’s ready for us!”
“You’re frightened of him.” Vivar leaned against the wall of the tower room where the map was kept. Firelight flickered in the courtyard below where a Spaniard sang a slow, sad song.
“I’m frightened of him,” Sharpe confirmed, “because he’s good. Too good.”
“He’s only good in attack. He can’t defend! When you attacked his ambush, and I attacked him in the farmyard, he wasn’t so clever, was he?”
“No,” Sharpe allowed.
“And now he’s trying to defend a city! He’s a chasseur, a hunter like a Cazador, and he’s no good at defence.” Vivar would brook no defeatism. “Of course we’ll win! Thanks to your ideas, we’ll win.”
The praise was calculated to elicit enthusiasm from Sharpe who had suggested an inside-out stratagem for the assault. The attack would not try to take the city house by house, or street by street, but instead it would strike fast and hard for the city’s centre. Then, split into ten parties, one party for each of the roads that broke the circuit of the ancient defences, the attackers would drive the French outwards towards the open country.“‘Let them get away!” Sharpe had argued. “So long as you take the city.”
If they took the city, which Sharpe doubted, they could hope to hold it for no more than thirty-six hours. Soult’s infantry, marching from Corunna and reinforced with the superb French artillery, would soon make mincemeat of the Major’s men. “I only need a day,” Vivar hesitated. “We capture it at dawn, we find the traitors by noon, we destroy the supplies, and that night we unfurl the gonfalon. The next day we leave in glory.”
Sharpe went to the narrow window. Bats, woken from their winter’s sleep by the arrival of soldiers in the fortress, flickered in the red light. The hills were dark. Somewhere on those black slopes Sergeant Harper led a patrol of Riflemen on a long, looping march. The patrol was not just to search for a bivouacking French cavalry patrol, but also to keep the men hard and accustom them to the vagaries of marching at night. All of Vivar’s small force, including the half-trained volunteers, would have to make such a journey and, having seen what chaos a night march could inflict on troops, Sharpe flinched inwardly. He thought, too, of the dreadful odds. There were two thousand French cavalrymen in Santiago de Compostela. Not all would be there when Vivar attacked; some would be bivouacking in the farmlands which they pillaged, but there would still be a mighty preponderance of enemy.
Against whom would march fifty Riflemen, one hundred and fifty Cazadores of whom only a hundred had horses, and close to three hundred half-trained volunteers.
Madness. Sharpe turned on the Spaniard. “Why don’t you wait till the French have marched south?”
“Because to wait wouldn’t make a story which will be told in every Spanish tavern. Because I have a brother who must die. Because, if I wait, I will be thought as spineless as the other officers who’ve fled south. Because I’ve sworn to do it. Because I cannot believe in defeat. No. We go soon, we go very soon.” Vivar was almost speaking to himself, staring down at the charcoal marks which showed the French defences. “Just as soon as our volunteers are ready, we go-‘
Sharpe said nothing. The truth was that he now believed that the attack was madness, but it was a madness he had helped to plan and sworn to support.
Just as the innocent scrabbling of an unfledged owlet in an attic could be turned by a child’s dread into the night-steps of a fearful monster, so Sharpe let his fears feed and grow as the days passed.
He could tell no one of his certainty that the assault would end in disaster. He did not want to earn Vivar’s scorn by such an admission, and there was no one else in whom he could confide. Harper, like the Spanish Major, seemed imbued by a blithe confidence that the attack would work. “Mind you, sir, the Major will have to wait another week.”
The thought of postponement spurted hope into Sharpe. “He’ll have to wait?”
“Those volunteers, sir. They’re not ready, not ready at all.” Harper, who had taken on himself the job of training the volunteers in the art of platoon fire, sounded genuinely concerned.
“Have you told the Major?”
“He’s coming to inspect them in the morning, sir.”
“I’ll be there.“
And in the morning, in a rain which darkened the rocks and dripped from the trees, Sharpe went down to the valley where Lieutenant Davila and Sergeant Harper demonstrated to Bias Vivar the results of a week’s training.
It was a disaster. Vivar had asked merely that the three hundred men be taught the rudiments of musket drill; that, like a half Battalion, they could stand in three ranks and fire the rippling platoon volleys which could gut an attacking force.
But the volunteers could not hold the rigid, tight ranks which concentrated the musket fire into deadly channels. The trouble began as the men in the rear rank instinctively stepped backwards to give themselves adequate space in which to wield their long ramrods, while the centre rank also took a step back to distance itself from the men in front, and thus the whole formation was shaken ragged. Under fire, the instinct would be for that backward movement to continue and, in just a few volleys, the French would have these men running. Nor were they even training with ammunition, for there was not enough powder and shot for that. They merely went through the musket motions. How the front rank would react to the percussion of the rear ranks’ musket shots in their ears, Sharpe dared not think.