Sharpes Siege   ::   Корнуэлл Бернард

Within the fort a dozen unwounded French prisoners were herded down to the liquor store to join Captain Mayeron, Twenty dead Frenchmen were inside the ramparts. One of them, lying in the embers of the burned buildings, suddenly flipped in the air as the ammunition in his pouch exploded. There was a smell of roast meat to mingle with the stench of blood and powder. Men who saw the sudden jerk and flip of the body laughed because, they said, it was just like a frog. It was better to laugh than to weep.

“I’m sorry, sir,” Palmer said again.

Sharpe shook his head. “We got rid of them.”

“I should have been watching.” Palmer was determined to expose his blame.

“Yes, you should.” Sharpe had used a bucket of well-water to clean his sword. Marines and Riflemen pissed into weapons, blocked the muzzles, and sloshed the urine around to scour the powder deposits from the barrels.

No one spoke much. Most men, their weapons cleaned, just sat by the embrasures and stared into empty air. Buckets of drinking water were carried to the walls while smoke drifted from the smouldering fires in the courtyard. The fort was a place of ruin, blood, smoke, ash, and exhaustion, as if the defenders had suffered a defeat instead of winning a victory.

“If they’d got on to the northern wall,” Sharpe said to Palmer, “we’d be‘ surrendering our swords by now. You did well to stop them.” Sharpe rammed his sword home. He could not remember a fight so bitter or so close, not even at Badajoz. There the horror had been the cannons on the walls, not the infantrymen behind them. “And your Marines,” Sharpe said, “fought magnificently,”

“Thank you, sir.” Palmer nodded at Sharpe’s chest. “That must have hurt.”

Sharpe looked down. The small bolstered whistle, mounted on his leather crossbelt, was dented flat in its centre. He remembered the bang of the French musket and knew that had the ball been aimed a fraction either way it would have pierced his heart. The fight was a blur now, but later the individual moments would come to his half-waking dreams as nightmares. The memory of the moment when the French had driven him to the ground, the memory of the bullet thumping his chest, the sheer fear of that first glimpse of blue-uniformed men on his walls; those were the incidents that made a man shudder with delayed terror. Sharpe never recalled the moments of triumph after a battle, only those moments of near defeat.

Harper, a scrap of dirty paper in one hand, climbed the stone ramp. “Seventeen dead, sir. Including Lieutenant Fytch.