Sharpes Eagle   ::   Корнуэлл Бернард

“Hold your fire!” Harper shouted clearly; he did not want the inexperienced men of the South Essex to fire when the gun went off. “Hold your fire!”

The cavalry were seventy yards away, just urging their horses into the canter, ten riders in the first rank. Harper guessed that fifty men were aimed at the tiny party round the gun, and there were fifty more in reserve. He touched the fuse onto the reed. There was a fizzing, a puff of smoke from the touch-hole, and then the enormous explosion. Grey-white smoke belched from the muzzle; the gun, on its five-foot wheels, lurched back its fifteen hundredweight that dug the trail into the soil and bounced the wheels off the ground. The thin metal canister split apart as it left the muzzle, and Harper watched through the smoke as the musket balls and scrap iron snatched the cavalry off the field. The first three ranks were destroyed; the other two were dazed, unable to advance over the bloody corpses and the wounded who staggered upright, bleeding and shocked. Harper heard Knowles shouting.

“Hold your fire! Hold your fire!”

Good lad, thought the Irishman. The cavalry had split either side of the carnage; some of the reserve was galloping forward, but the horsemen seemed dazed by the sudden blow. They came on towards the gun but stayed clear of its line of fire, and Knowles watched the two wings of horsemen as they drew nearer. He waited, waited until they put spurs to their horses and tried to gallop the last few paces, and slashed his sword down.

„Fire!“

The muskets coughed out flame and smoke. The leading horses dropped, making a barrier to those behind.

“Change muskets!” Knowles felt the stirrings of confidence, the realisation that he could do it!

“Fire!”

A second volley destroyed the horsemen trying to close on the two sides of the gun. More horses fell, more men were pitched from their saddles in a flurry of arms, legs, sabres and scabbards. The horsemen behind went on, lapped round the back of the gun, and the rifles started their sharper reports and more horses were shot. Knowles was startled to see no more horsemen in front of the cannon; he turned his men round, changed to the third musket, and blasted a third volley over the heads of the kneeling Riflemen.

“Thank you, sir!”

Harper grinned at the Lieutenant. The cavalry had gone, shattered by the canister, bloodied by the close volleys, prevented from closing with the infantry because of the barriers of dead and wounded horses. Harper watched as Knowles started his men reloading their muskets. He turned back to the gun.