Sharpes Siege   ::   Корнуэлл Бернард

“Fire!”

Harper’s men, the lodgement beneath the archway cleared, knelt with reloaded weapons and poured bullets at point-blank range into defeated men. “Fire, you bastards, fire!” Harper was keening with the joy of battle, lost in it, revelling in it, spitting hatred at men he had never met, men he would drink with on a summer’s day if life had been different, but men who now folded over his bullets and shed bright blood onto a blood-soaked road. “Fire!”

The last shell was thrown far to explode where the roadway narrowed between the glacis’ shoulders and the men at the column’s rear, at last sensing that the front ranks had recoiled in screaming agony, faltered.

“Fire!” Rifles spat at conscripts on the counterguard. Farm-boys, who five weeks before had never seen an army musket, now choked their blood on to sand.

“Cheer! Cheer!” Men whose mouths were dry with gritty powder raised a cheer.

“Keep firing! Drive them back!”

Men’s faces were black with powder. Their nails bled where they had dragged at cartridges, levered stiff frizzens, and torn on flints. Their teeth, showing skull-white in the powder-dark faces, grinned as if in rictus. Breath came short. The whole world now was a few smoky yards, stinking of fire, in which a man rammed and loaded, fired and killed, rammed and loaded and other men screamed and some men crawled bleeding along the ramparts and another man slipped in spilt brains and swore because his musket fell into the courtyard.

The French inched back. The bullets cracked at them, thudded into flesh and still the bullets came. No troops fired muskets faster and no troops had been given such a target.

“Fire!” Sharpe, his rifle re-loaded, pulled the trigger. The smoke of his men’s weapons obscured individuals, but he knew where the enemy was and his bullet twitched the smoke as it flashed through.

Harper, no more enemy visible, shouted for his men to hold their fire. He hauled a pine tree aside, crouched, then beckoned to Taylor. “Ammunition.”

They went to the edge of the ditch, found the men they had killed, and cut their cartridge bags away. They tossed the bags through the archway then went back and re-blocked the arch. There had been no time to run the one remaining cannon into a firing position and Harper, regretting the lost chance, went to check that the quickfuse still led through the cleared venthole to the charge. It was safe and, reassured, he began the laborious process of re-charging the seven-barrelled gun.