Sharpes Devil   ::   Корнуэлл Бернард

"Very."

"Frightening." Bautista repeated the word meaningfully, letting it hang in the air as he walked back to his long table. "You hear that?" He shouted the question loudly, rounding on the startled audience. "Frightening! And that is how we will finish this rebellion. Not by marching men into the wilderness, but with guns, with guns, with guns, with guns!" With each repetition of the word he pounded his right fist into his left palm. "Guns! Where are your guns, Ruiz?"

"They're coming, Your Excellency." Ruiz said soothingly.

"I've told Madrid," Bautista went on, "time and again to send me guns! We'll break this rebellion by enticing its forces to attack our strongholds. Here! In Valdivia! We shall let O'Higgins bring his armies and Cochrane his ships into the range of our guns and then we shall destroy them! With guns! With guns! With guns! But if Madrid doesn't send me guns, how can we win?" He was rehearsing the arguments that would explain the loss of Chile. He would blame it on Madrid for not sending enough guns, yet guns, as any real soldier knew, could not win the war.

Because relying on guns and forts was a recipe for doing nothing. It was generalship by defense. Bautista did not want to risk marching an army into the field and suffering a horrific defeat, so instead he was justifying his inaction by pretending it was a strategy. Let Madrid send enough guns, Bautista claimed, and the enemy would be destroyed when they attacked the Royalist strongholds, yet even the dullest enemy would eventually realize it was both cheaper and more effective to starve a fortress into submission than to drown it in blood. Bautista's strategy was designed solely to transfer the blame for defeat onto other men's shoulders, while he became rich enough to challenge those men when he returned to Madrid. No wonder, Sharpe thought, Bias Vivar had hated this man. He was betraying his soldiers as well as his country.

"Why have you come here, Mister Sharpe?" Bautista had suddenly turned on Sharpe again.

Sharpe, noting that he had not been accorded the honorific of his rank, decided not to make an issue of it. "I'm here at the behest of the Countess of Mouromorto to carry her husband's remains home to Spain."

"She is evidently an extravagant woman? Why did she not simply ask me to send her husband home?"

Sharpe did not want to explain that Louisa had not heard of her husband's death or burial when he left, so he just shrugged. "I can't say, sir."

"You can't say. Well, it seems a small enough request.