Sharpes Siege   ::   Корнуэлл Бернард

He did this so his men would see him, not because hethought it safe. A roundshot glanced off the cordon of the parapet, and Sharpe knew the twelve-pounders, barrels heated, were firing higher. The mortars, he noticed, were both less frequent and less accurate and he guessed the wooden beds had shifted in the sandy soil. He reached fifty in his count, decided he was deliberately hurrying the numbers, so made himself start again from forty.

“Sir! Mr Sharpe!” It was Moore. The boy was pointing south-east, inland, and Sharpe, staring at that direction, saw the mass of men who had been drawn up behind the village and who now, drums beating and colours held high, emerged into plain view. The mortars, Sharpe realized with surprise, had stopped firing. He looked towards the field guns and those weapons, all eight of them, were silent. Their gunsmoke drifted over the meadows. He noticed that there was a touch of spring in the air and something beautiful in the way the sun glittered on the water.

Sharpe turned. “Captain Frederickson! To your places! All of you!” He blew his whistle, watched as men debouched at a run from the stone tunnels, then turned back to see what his enemy might do.

The assault was coming.

General Calvet, a flitch of fat bacon in one hand and a watch in the other, grinned. “You think they’ll have manned the ramparts by now, Favier?”

“I’m sure, sir.”

“Give the signal, then. I’ll go back to lunch.”

Favier nodded to the trumpeter, who made the call, and the infantry immediately sat down.

The gunners, who had been hammering quoins into the shaken howitzer beds, leaped back as the portfires were lit and as the barrels thudded down again.

“Lie down!” Sharpe was furious. He had fallen for a trick like a raw officer fresh out of school and he had brought his men into the open, just as the French had wanted him to do, and now the shells were wobbling at the top of their arc, spiralling smoke, then were plunging towards the fort. “Lie down!”

The field guns fired, the shells exploded, and the nightmare of fire and banging and skull-splitting shrieks and flame and whistling fragments began again.

A solid shot, striking an embrasure, drove stone scraps into a man’s eyes. A shell, landing on the western wall between two Marines, took the belly of one and left the other unscathed but screaming.

“They did that neatly,” Frederickson said.

“And I fell for it,” Sharpe said with bitter self-digust.

Frederickson peered through an embrasure. The.French infantry lay by the millstream as though on a holiday.