Sharpes Havoc   ::   Корнуэлл Бернард

Marshal Soult, desperate for fresh troops to attack the seminary, had stripped the city itself of infantry, and the people of Oporto, finding themselves unguarded for the first time since the end of March, swarmed down to the river and dragged their boats out of warehouses, shops and back-yards where the occupiers had kept them under guard. A swarm of those small craft now rowed across the river, past the shattered remnants of the pontoon bridge, to the quays of Vila Nova de Gaia where the Brigade of Guards was waiting. An officer peered anxiously across the Douro to reassure himself that the French were not waiting in ambush on the opposite quay, then shouted at his men to embark. The Guards were rowed back to the city and still more boats appeared and more redcoats crossed. Soult did not know it, but his city was filling with the enemy.

Nor did the men attacking the seminary know it, not till the redcoats appeared at the city’s eastern edge, and by then the second giant column had climbed into the death storm of bullets flicking from the seminary’s walls, roof and windows. The noise rivaled that of Trafalgar, where Sharpe had been dazed by the incessant boom of the great ships’ guns, but this noise was higher pitched as the muskets’ discharges blended into an eerie, hard-edged shriek. The higher slope of the seminary hill was sodden with blood and the surviving Frenchmen were using the bodies of their dead comrades as protection. A few drummers still tried to drive the broken columns on, but then came a shout of alarm from a French sergeant, and the shout spread, and suddenly the smoke was dissipating and the slope emptying as the French saw the Brigade of Guards advancing across the valley.

The French ran. They had fought bravely, going against stone walls with muskets, but now they panicked and all discipline vanished as they ran for the road going east toward Amarante. Other French forces, cavalry and artillery among them, were hurrying from the higher part of the city, escaping the flood of redcoats ferried across the Douro and fleeing the revenge of the townsfolk who hunted up the alleys and streets to find wounded Frenchmen whom they attacked with fish-filleting knives or battered with clubs.

There was screaming and howling in Oporto’s streets, but only a strange silence in the bullet-scarred seminary. Then General Hill cupped his hands. „Follow them!” he shouted. „Follow them! I want a pursuit!”

„Rifles! To me!” Sharpe called. He held his men back from the pursuit. They had already endured enough, he reckoned, and it was time to give them a rest. „Clean your guns,” he ordered them, and so they stayed as the redcoats and riflemen of the 1st Brigade formed ranks outside the seminary and then marched away eastward.

A score of dead men were left on the roof. There were long streaks of blood showing where they had been pulled away from the parapet.