Sharpes Eagle   ::   Корнуэлл Бернард

Earth was shovelled into the holes, the grass turves carefully replaced so that to a casual eye there were no visible signs of the burials. They were deliberately left unmarked, the final insult, but when all the soldiers had gone Spanish peasants found the graves and hammered wooden crosses into the turf. It was no measure of respect, just the precaution of sensible men. The dead were Protestants, buried in unhallowed ground, and the crude crosses were there to keep the unquiet spirits firmly underground. The people of Spain had enough problems with the war; the armies of France, Spain, and now Britain crossed and recrossed their land. There was little a peasant could do about that, or about the men who fought the Guerilla, the little war. But the ghosts of heathen Englishmen were another matter. Who needed them to scare the cattle and stalk the fields by night? They hammered the crosses deep and slept easy.



CHAPTER 15

One man in ten was to be flogged. Sixty men from the Battalion, six from each company, the Captain of each company to deliver his six men, stripped to the waist, ready to be tied to the flogging triangles that Simmerson was having made by local carpenters. The Colonel had made his announcement, and then he glared with his small red eyes round the assembled officers. Were there any comments?

Sharpe took a breath. To say anything was useless, to say nothing was cowardly.

“I think it a bad idea, sir.”

“Captain Sharpe thinks it a bad idea.” Simmerson dripped acid with every word. “Captain Sharpe, gentlemen, can tell us how to command men. Why is it a bad idea, Captain Sharpe?”

“To shoot two men in the morning and flog sixty in the afternoon seems to me to be doing the work of the French for them, sir.”

“You do. Well, damn you, Sharpe, and damn your ideas. If the discipline in this Battalion was as strictly enforced by the Captains as I demand, then this punishment would not be necessary. I will have them flogged! And that includes your precious Riflemen, Sharpe! I expect three of them in your six! There’ll be no favouritism.”

There was nothing to be said or done. The Captains told their companies and, like Sharpe, cut straws and drew lots to determine who should be Simmerson’s victims. Three dozen strokes each for sixty men. By two o’clock the victims were scrounging for spirits that might dull their flesh, and their sullen companions began the long afternoon of cleaning and polishing their kit for Simmerson’s inspection. Sharpe left them to their work and went back to the house that served as the Battalion’s headquarters.