Sharpes Escape   ::   Корнуэлл Бернард

Instead, feebly, they returned the fire, but the men in the column's front rank were dying every second, and then more Portuguese cannons cameto the right flank of the 74th. The guns slewed around, their horses were taken back out of musket range, and the gunners rammed canister over round shot. The new guns crashed back and the leading left corner of the column began to resemble the devil's butcher's shop. It was a sodden tangle of broken bodies, blood and screaming men. And still the guns recoiled, jetting a spew of smoke with every discharge, their barrels depressed to fire down into the crowded mass of Frenchmen. Every round shot had to be wedged in the barrel with a circle of rope to stop the ball trickling down the barrel, and the rope loops burned in the air like crazed fireballs as they spun in mad whorls. More allied troops were coming to the fight, marching along the newly made road from the southern end of the long ridge. That southern end was quiet, apparently under no threat from the French, and the arriving men formed south of the guns and added their own musket fire.

The column shuddered under the onslaught of the merciless guns and then began to edge northwards. The French officers could see there was an empty space on the ridge beyond the Portuguese brigade and they shouted at their men to go right. A voltigeur officer sent a company ahead to occupy the skyline as, behind them, the cumbersome mass edged its way towards the opening, leaving a right-angled line of bodies, the remnants of their left flank and front lines, thick on the rocky slope.

Lieutenant Colonel Lawford saw the column approaching and, more urgently, the voltigeurs running to claim the open ground. "Mister Slingsby!" Lawford called. "You will deploy the light company! Send those miscreants back where they belong. Battalion! Battalion will move to the right!" Lawford was marching the South Essex into the open space, going to seal it off, and Slingsby had the job of throwing back the enemy skirmishers. Sharpe, back on Slingsby's horse which had been rescued by Major Forrest, rode behind the color party and counted the Eagles in the shuffling column. He could see fifteen. The noise of splintering dominated the air, the sound of muskets like dry thorns burning, and the incessant crackling was echoing from the distant side of the valley. The powder smoke drifted above the fog which had crept back up the slope almost to the ridge's top. Every now and then the great white vaporous mass twitched as a French round shot or shell punched through. The hillside was dotted with bodies, all blue-coated. A man crawled downhill, trailing a broken leg. A dog ran to and fro, barking, trying to rouse its dead master.