Sharpes Battle   ::   Корнуэлл Бернард

Their leading soldiers were just feet beneath the ridge's summit that was crowned with redcoats and Portuguese blasting volleys that foun-tained soil among the graves and rattled sharply against the village walls. The surviving Highlanders had retreated to the ridge with the Warwickshire men who had lived through the mauling fight in the streets and now they had been joined by Portuguese ca з adores, redcoats from the English shires, skirmishers from the valleys of Wales and by Hanoverians loyal to King George III; all mingled as they stood shoulder to shoulder to hold the heights and drown Fuentes de Onoro in smoke and lead. And in the village the streets were crowded with French infantry who were waiting for the order to make the last victorious assault up and out of the smoking houses, across the broken graveyard wall, over the humped graves and broken stones of the cemetery and then across the ridge's crest and into the enemy's vulnerable rear. To the left of their charge would be the white-walled, bullet-scarred church on its ledge of rock, while to the right would be the tumbled grey boulders of the stony summit where the British riflemen lurked, and in between those two landmarks the road climbed the grassy, blood-slicked chute up which the blue-coated infantry needed to attack to bring France a victory .

Massйna now tried to make the victory certain by sending forward ten fresh battalions of infantry. Wellington, he knew, could defend the slope above the village only by bringing in men who were guarding other parts of the ridge. If Massйna could weaken another section of the ridge it would open an alternative path to the plateau, but to do that he must first turn the saddle of grassland above the village into a place of death. The French reinforcements crossed the plain in two great columns and their appearance provoked the fire of every British cannon on the ridge. Case shot slashed across the stream to burst in livid smoke, roundshot crashed through the ranks while shells lobbed from the short-barrelled howitzers fizzed to leave smoky trails arcing in the sky before cracking open in the columns' hearts.

Yet still the columns came. Drummer boys beat them on and the eagles showed bright above as they marched past the dead of the previous attacks. It seemed to some of the French that they walked towards the very gate of hell, towards a smoke-wreathed maw spitting flame and stinking from three days of death.