JК
Sharpes Battle :: Корнуэлл Бернард
Страница: 52 из 244The Frenchman's greatest fear was that the unit would be positioned so far behind the fighting front that it would be useless for his purposes, but that was a risk Ducos was forced to run. Ever since French intelligence had intercepted Lord Kiely's letter requesting King Ferdinand's permission to take the Real Companпa Irlandesa to war on the allied side, Ducos had known that the success of his scheme depended as much on the allies' unwitting cooperation as on his own cleverness. Yet Ducos's cleverness would achieve nothing if the Irishmen failed to arrive, and so he waited with mounting impatience.
Little news came from behind the British lines. There had been a time when Loup's men could ride with impunity on either side of the frontier, but now the British and Portuguese armies were firmly clamped along the border and Loup had to depend for his intelligence on the unreliable and minuscule handful of civilians willing to sell information to the hated French, on interrogations of deserters and on educated guesses formed from the observations of his own men as they peered through spyglasses across the mountainous border.
And it was one of those scouts who first brought Loup news of the Real Companпa Irlandesa . A troop of grey dragoons had gone to one of the lonely hill tops which offered a long view into Portugal, and from where, with luck, a patrol might see some evidence of a British concentration of forces that could signal a new advance. The lookout post dominated a wide, barren valley where a stream glittered before the land rose to the rocky ridge on which the long-abandoned fort of San Isidro stood. The fort was of little military value for the road it guarded had long fallen into disuse and a century of neglect had eroded its ramparts and ditches into mockeries of their former strength so that now the San Isidro was home to ravens, foxes, bats, wandering shepherds, lawless men, and the occasional patrol of Loup's grey dragoons who might spend a night in one of the cavernous barracks rooms to stay out of the rain.
Yet now there were men in the fort, and the patrol leader brought Loup news of them. The new garrison was not a full battalion, he said, just a couple of hundred men. The fort itself, as Loup well knew, would need at least a thousand men to man its crumbling walls, so a mere two hundred hardly constituted a garrison, yet strangely the newcomers had brought their wives and children with them. The dragoons' troop leader, a Captain Braudel, thought the men were British. "They're wearing red coats," he said, "but not the usual stovepipe hats." He meant shakoes. "They've got bicornes."
"Infantry, you say?"
"Yes, sir.
Little news came from behind the British lines. There had been a time when Loup's men could ride with impunity on either side of the frontier, but now the British and Portuguese armies were firmly clamped along the border and Loup had to depend for his intelligence on the unreliable and minuscule handful of civilians willing to sell information to the hated French, on interrogations of deserters and on educated guesses formed from the observations of his own men as they peered through spyglasses across the mountainous border.
And it was one of those scouts who first brought Loup news of the Real Companпa Irlandesa . A troop of grey dragoons had gone to one of the lonely hill tops which offered a long view into Portugal, and from where, with luck, a patrol might see some evidence of a British concentration of forces that could signal a new advance. The lookout post dominated a wide, barren valley where a stream glittered before the land rose to the rocky ridge on which the long-abandoned fort of San Isidro stood. The fort was of little military value for the road it guarded had long fallen into disuse and a century of neglect had eroded its ramparts and ditches into mockeries of their former strength so that now the San Isidro was home to ravens, foxes, bats, wandering shepherds, lawless men, and the occasional patrol of Loup's grey dragoons who might spend a night in one of the cavernous barracks rooms to stay out of the rain.
Yet now there were men in the fort, and the patrol leader brought Loup news of them. The new garrison was not a full battalion, he said, just a couple of hundred men. The fort itself, as Loup well knew, would need at least a thousand men to man its crumbling walls, so a mere two hundred hardly constituted a garrison, yet strangely the newcomers had brought their wives and children with them. The dragoons' troop leader, a Captain Braudel, thought the men were British. "They're wearing red coats," he said, "but not the usual stovepipe hats." He meant shakoes. "They've got bicornes."
"Infantry, you say?"
"Yes, sir.