Sharpe's Christmas s-17 Read online

  "Quite right, sir, " d'Alembord said. He could never quite get used to the idea that Sharpe had received no education at all other than being taught to read while he was a prisoner in India.

  "A fellow used to read the Christmas story to us in the foundling home,»

  Sharpe remembered. "A big, fat parson, he was, with funny whiskers. Looked a bit like that sergeant who caught a bellyful of cannister at Salamanca. We had to sit and listen, and if we yawned, the bugger used to jump off the platform and clout us round the face with the Holy Book. One minute it was all peace on earth, the next you were flying across the floor with a thick ear."

  "But at least you learned your Bible stories."

  "Not there, I didn't. I learned those in India. I worked with a Scottish colonel who was a Bible-thumper." Sharpe smiled at the memory.

  He was walking north, climbing the road that led from Irati towards the nearby French frontier. He had already found a place south of the village where the battalion could stop the escaping garrison and he wanted to be certain that no Frogs were lurking at his rear.

  "You liked India?" d'Alembord asked.

  "It was a bit hot, " Sharpe said, "and the food was funny, but yes, I liked it.

  In India I served under the best colonel I ever had."

  "Wellesley?" d'Alembord asked.

  "Not Nosey, no, " Sharpe laughed. "He was good, Nosey, but just as cold then as he is now. No, this man was a Frog. Long story, Dally, and I don't want to bore you, but I served with the enemy for a bit in India. On purpose, it was, all official. Colonel Gudin, he was called." Sharpe smiled, remembering. "He was very good to me, Colonel Gudin. He even wanted me to go back to France with him, and I can't say I wasn't tempted."

  D'Alembord smiled. He wished Sharpe would tell the story of Colonel Gudin, but he knew it was hopeless trying to get reminiscences out of Major Sharpe. He had seen other men try to learn how Sharpe had taken the French Eagle at Salamanca, but Sharpe would just shrug and say anyone could have done it. It was just luck, really, he happened to be there and the thing was looking for a new owner.

  Like hell, d'Alembord thought. Sharpe was quite simply the best soldier he had ever known or would know.

  Sharpe stopped at the head of the pass and pulled a telescope from a pocked of his green jacket. The telescope's outer barrel had an ivory cover and an inscribed gold plate that read in French, "To Joseph, King of Spain and the Indies, from his brother, Napoleon, Emperor of France." Sharpe trained the expensive glass northwards to search the misted slopes across the border. He saw rocks, stunted trees and the glint of a cold stream tumbling from a high place, and beyond a fading succession of mountain peaks.

  A chill, damp, hard land, he thought, and no place to send soldiers at Christmas time. "Not a Frog to be seen, " Sharpe said happily, and was about to lower the glass when he saw something move in a cleft of rock on a distant slope. The road ran through the cleft and he held his breath as he stared at the narrow gap.

  "What is it?" d'Alembord asked.

  Sharpe did not answer. He just gazed at the split in the grey stone from which an army was suddenly appearing. At least it looked like an army. Rank after rank of infantry trudging northwards in dun grey coats. And they were coming from France. He handed the telescope to d'Alembord. "Tell me what you see, Dally."

  D'Alembord aimed the glass, then swore quietly. "A whole brigade, sir." "Coming from the wrong direction, too, " Sharpe said. Without the telescope he could not see the distant enemy, but he could guess what they were about. The garrison would be escaping on this road and the French brigade had been sent to make sure the frontier was open for them.

  "They'll not make it this far tonight, " Sharpe said. The sun had already sunk beneath the western peaks and the night shadows were stretching fast.

  "But they'll be here tomorrow, " d'Alembord said nervously.

  "Aye, tomorrow. Christmas Eve, " Sharpe said.

  "An awful lot of them, " d'Alembord said.

  «Barrels,» Sharpe answered.

  "Barrels, sir?" d'Alembord gazed at Sharpe as though the major had gone mad.

  "That tavern in Irati, Dally, has to be full of barrels. I want them here tonight, all of them."

  Because tomorrow there would be an enemy behind and an enemy in front, and a road to hold and a battle to win. At Christmas time.

  PART TWO

  GENERAL Maximillien Picard was an unhappy man. His brigade was late. He had expected to be at Irati by midday, but his men had marched like a herd of lame goats. By nightfall, they still had one steep-sided valley to cross and a precipitous hill to climb, and so he punished them by making them bivouac in the valley.

  He knew they would hate him for that, but let them. Most were conscripts who needed to be toughened, and a night among the cold rocks would help scour the mother's milk from their gullets.

  The only fuel for fires was a few stunted trees in the hollows where the winter's first snow had drifted, but most of the conscripts had no idea how to light a fire from damp, tough wood, and so they suffered. Their only food was rings of hard bread they carried on strings about their necks, but at least the stream offered plenty of clean, cold water.

  "Another fortnight and it'll be frozen, " said Picard.

  "As bad as Russia, " consented Major Santon, his chief of staff.

  "Nothing was as bad as Russia, " Picard said, though in truth he had rather enjoyed the Russian campaign. He was among the few men who had done well, but he was accustomed to success. Not like Colonel Gudin, whose garrison he now marched to rescue. "Gudin's a useless piece of gristle, " Picard said.

  "I never met him."

  'Let's hope you meet him tomorrow, but knowing Gudin he'll mess things up."

  Picard leaned to his fire and lit a pipe. "I knew him way back. He promised well then, but ever since India." Picard shrugged. "He's unlucky, that's what Gudin is, unlucky, and you knew what the Emperor says about luck, it's the only thing a soldier needs."

  "Luck can turn, " Santon observed.

  "Not for Gudin, " Picard said. "The man's doomed. If the 75th hadn't taken refuge with him, we'd have left him to rot in Spain."

  Santon looked up the dark northern slope. "Let's hope the British aren't waiting for him up there."

  Picard sneered. "Let them. What will they send? One battalion? You think we can't blast our way through a battalion? We'll put our grenadiers up front and let them shoot some rosbifs for breakfast. Then, we'll occupy Irati. What's there?"

  «Nothing,» Santon said. "A few shepherds."

  "So it's mutton and shepherd girls for Christmas, " Picard said. "A last taste of Spain, eh?"

  The general smiled in anticipation. Irati might be a miserable hovel on the frontier, but it was an enemy hovel and that meant plunder. And Picard rather hoped there would be rosbifs guarding the small village, for he reckoned his conscripts needed a fight. Most were city boys too young to shave and they needed a taste of blood before Wellington's army spilled across the Pyrenees into the fields of France. Give a young soldier the taste of victory, Picard reckoned, and it gave him a hunger for more.

  That was the trouble with Colonel Gudin. He had become used to defeat, but Picard was a winner. He was a short man, like the Emperor, and just as ruthless; a soldier of France who had led a brigade through the slaughter-snows of Russia and left a trail of Cossacks to mark his passing.

  In the morning, if any rosbifs dared oppose him, he would show them how a veteran of the Russian campaign made war. He would give them a Christmas to remember, a Christmas of blood in a high, hard place, for he was General Maximillien Picard, and he did not lose.

  "DOESN'T seem right somehow, " Sharpe said, "fighting at Christmas."

  "Tomorrow's Christmas, sir, " Harper said, as if that made today's fight more acceptable.

  "If we do fight today, keep an eye on young Nicholls. I don't want to lose another ensign, " Sharpe said.

  "He's a nice, wee lad, " Harper said, "and I'll keep an eye on him, so I
will."

  Ensign Nicholls was standing at the centre of Sharpe's line beneath the regiment's twin colours. The Prince of Wales's Own Volunteers were 50 paces back from the frontier that was marked only by a cairn of stones, just far enough back so that any Frenchman coming from the south could not see them beyond the crest. Behind them, on the Spanish side of the frontier, the pass ran gently down towards the village, while in front of the battalion the slope fell away steeply. The road zig-zagged up that slope and the enemy brigade would have a foul time climbing into Sharpe's muskets.

  "It'll be like shooting rats in a pit, " Harper said happily, and so it would, but the enemy brigade could still be a nuisance. Its very presence meant Sharpe had to keep his battalion on the frontier, leaving only a picquet to guard the road south of the village.

  Captain Smith commanded that picquet and he would give Sharpe warning if the escaping French garrison came into sight. But what would Sharpe do then? If he marched his men south the French brigade would climb the slope and take him in the rear, while if he stayed on this high crest the garrison troops would appear in the valley behind him. He just had to hope that the garrison did not come today.

  There was still no sign of the French who had camped in the deep valley beyond the frontier. They would be bitterly cold by now, cold and scared and damp and unhappy, while Sharpe's men were as comfortable as they could be in this miserable place. Except for the sentries, they had spent the night inside Irati's fire-warmed houses where they had made a decent breakfast from twice-baked bread and sour salt beef.

  Sharpe stamped his feet and blew on his cold hands. When would the French come? He was not really in any hurry, for the longer they delayed, the more hope he had of keeping them out of the village all day, but he had a soldier's impatience to get the grim business done. Grim, at least, for the French, for Sharpe had set them a trap on the road.

  The road twisted down from the frontier into a small hanging combe that overlooked the deeper valley where the French had spent their uncomfortable night. In that smaller valley which the dawn now touched with a grey, damp light, there were twenty-one big wine barrels. The barrels were arranged in several groups of three and each group blocked the narrow track up which the French must come.

  Above the barrels, hidden among the rocks, were fifteen riflemen. The French hated riflemen. They did not use the rifle, reckoning that it took too long to load, but Sharpe had learned to love the weapon. It might be slow in battle, but it could kill at give times the range of a smoothbore musket and he had more than once seen a handful of riflemen turn a battle's fate.

  Sharpe turned and stared south. He could not see Irati, for the village was well over a mile away and his picquet a half-mire further away still, and he suddenly worried that he would not hear Captain Smith's warning shots. But it was too late to change the arrangements. So stop worrying, he told himself. No point in fretting about what you cannot change.

  "Enemy, sir, " Harper said softly, and Sharpe wheeled around to gaze down the road.

  The French had come. Not many yet, just a half company of grenadiers, the elite of the enemy infantry, because they wore high bearskin hats with a yellow grenade badge, though none, he saw through his telescope, flaunted the high red plume on their hats. French grenadiers were very protective of that plume and on campaign they liked to keep it in a leather tube attached to their bayonet sling.

  «Thirty,» he counted the men as they appeared, "forty, forty-five. All grenadiers, Pat."

  "Sending their best up front, are they?"

  "Got them worried, we have, " Sharpe said. The grenadiers had stopped at the sight of the barrels. Some of them gazed up the steep slope beyond, but the Prince of Wales's Own Volunteers were well hidden, and Sharpe and Harper were concealed behind the frontier cairn.

  An officer came to the front of the grenadiers, stared at the barrels for a minute, then shrugged and walked forward. "It's his lucky day, " Sharpe said.

  The grenadiers hung back as their officer approached the strange obstacle. He was cautious, as any man would be on the Spanish frontier, but the barrels looked innocent enough.

  He stooped to the nearest, sniffed at the bung, then drew his sword and worked the tip of its blade into the cork plug. He levered the tight bung free and then stooped to sniff again. "He's found the wine, " Sharpe said.

  "Let's hope they stop and drink it, sir."

  The grenadiers, assured that only barrels of cheap Spanish tinto barred their path, surged forward. More soldiers were appearing over the lower crest and they too rushed to join the unexpected booty. Men tipped the first three barrels over and stabbed at their lids with drawn bayonets, while a group of grenadiers ran to take possession of the second line of barrels.

  "For what they are about to receive, " Sharpe said.

  Two of the second line of barrels contained nothing but stones. But the third, the middle barrel, was half-filled with gunpowder from Sharpe's spare ammunition. It was mixed with small, sharp stones and, above it, balanced on a stave that Rifleman Hagman had carefully nailed into place, was a coiled strip of burning slow-match.

  None of the grenadiers noticed the small holes that had been drilled into the barrel to feed oxygen to the fuse, they just smelt wine and so kicked over the barrel.

  For a second Sharpe thought the trap had failed, then suddenly the narrow valley vanished in a cloud of grey-white powder smoke pierced with livid flame.

  The smoke churned in the small combe, hiding the carnage made by the explosion. Then, as the damp wind began to carry the powder smoke northwards, the sound rolled up the slope. It was like a clap of thunder magnified by the echo that beat back from the valley's far side. Once the echo had gone there was just a strange silence in the hills.

  "Poor bastards, " Harper said, for the smoke was clearing and he could see the bodies scattered on the road. Some were still, some crawled blindly, some just twitched. Then the rifles opened fire. Sharpe's riflemen did not miss their mark at that close range. They fired from behind the rocks high on either side of the small valley. First, they picked off the surviving officers, then the sergeants. By the time each greenjacket had fired two rounds, the French had vanished from the small valley. They had fled back over its lip, leaving behind a dozen dead and a score of wounded men. The battle for Irati had begun.

  IN ONE way, Colonel Jean Gudin had been untypically lucky, for not one partisan had troubled his column on its dark road north, but in every other way his usual ill fortune had prevailed.

  First, one of the dragoon horses had stumbled on a frozen rut in the road and broken its leg. By itself, it was no great accident, and the poor beast was put out of its misery swiftly enough, but in the dark the commotion caused a long delay. The carcass was finally hauled from the road and the column had trudged on, only to have the dragoon vanguard take a wrong turning a few kilometres further on.

  That, at least, was not Gudin's fault, any more than an injured horse was his fault, but it was typical of his luck. It was almost dawn by the time the column had turned itself about and found the right track winding up towards the high pass. By then, Gudin had surrendered his horse to one of his lieutenants who had a fever and could hardly walk.

  Colonel Caillou was fuming at the delay. He had never, he claimed, in all his service as a soldier, seen such ineptitude. A halfwit could do better than Colonel Gudin. "We are supposed to be at the pass by midday, " he insisted. "We shall be lucky to be there by nightfall."

  Gudin ignored the colonel's ranting. There was nothing to be done, except press on and be thankful that the guerilleros were all asleep in their beds.

  In three days' time, Gudin reflected, he could be back at a depot in France.

  He would be safe. And so long as no British troops waited at the frontier he should save Caillou's Eagle and so spare himself the firing squad.

  It was just after dawn that the next accident occurred. The column was dragging two wagons, one carrying the heavily pregnant Maria and the second loaded
with what small baggage the garrison had managed to rescue from the fort. The axle of that second wagon broke and suddenly the horses were dragging stumps of splintering wood across the rutted road. Gudin sighed.

  There was nothing for it but to abandon the wagon with all its precious possessions; small things, but the property of men who owned little.

  He did let his men rifle through the baggage to retrieve what they could carry, and all the while Caillou cursed him and said it was time-wasting.

  Gudin knew that was true and so, before all the packs could be hauled off, he ordered the wagon to be shoved off the road. With it went his books, not many, but all of them dear to Gudin. They included his diaries from India, the careful record of those long, hot years when he had thought he could drive the British out of Mysore. But the redcoats had won and nothing had been the same since.

  Gudin often thought of India. He missed it; the smells, the heat, the colour, the mystery. He missed the gaudy panoply of Indian armies marching, he missed the sun and the savagery of the monsoon. In India, he thought, I had a future, but after it, none.

  And sometimes, when he was feeling sorry for himself, he blamed it all on one young man whom he had liked, an Englishman called Sharpe. It had been Sharpe who had caused that first great defeat, though Gudin had never blamed him, for he had recognised that Private Richard Sharpe had been a natural soldier. How the Emperor would love Sharpe. So much luck.

  Now there was another Sharpe, an officer in Spain whose named haunted the French, and Gudin sometimes wondered if it was the same man, though that seemed unlikely for few British officers came from the ranks and, besides, this Spanish Sharpe was a Rifleman and Gudin's Sharpe had been a redcoat. Yet still Gudin hoped it was the same man for he had liked young Richard Sharpe, though in truth he suspected that he was long dead. Not many Europeans had survived India. The fever got them if the enemy did not.

  Gudin walked on, his diaries left behind, musing on India and trying to ignore Colonel Caillou's insults. The pregnant girl was crying and the garrison surgeon, a fastidious Parisian who had hated serving in the Pyrenees, claimed she would die if he did not cut her open.