Sharpe's Battle

Yet still the columns came. Drummer boys beat them on and the eagles showed bright above as they marched past the dead of the previous attacks. It seemed to some of the French that they walked towards the very gate of hell, towards a smoke-wreathed maw spitting flame and stinking from three days of death. To north and south the meadows lay in spring freshness, but on the banks of Fuentes de Onoro's stream there was nothing but blasted trees, burned houses, fallen walls, dead, dying and screaming men, and on the plateau's crest above the village there was just smoke and more smoke as the ca

The battle had been shrunken to this one place, to these last few feet of the slope above Fuentes de Onoro. It was midday and the sun was fierce and the shadows short as the ten new battalions broke their ranks to run through the gardens and down the eastern bank of the stream. They splashed through the water and ran up into streets choked with bloody bodies and groaning, slow-moving wounded men. The fresh attackers cheered as they ran, encouraging themselves and the waiting French infantry to one last, supreme effort. They filled the streets, then they burst in huge streams from the alley and laneway entrances at the top of the village, and there were so many attackers that the last of the newly arrived columns were still crossing the stream as the leading companies swarmed over the graveyard wall and up into the volley fire. Men fell to the allied volleys, but more men came behind to clamber over the dead and the dying and to struggle across the graves. Other men ran up the road alongside the cemetery. One whole battalion swerved to the right to fire up at the riflemen on the rocky knoll and their musket fire overwhelmed and drove the greenjackets back from the boulders. A Frenchman climbed to the knoll's summit where he waved his hat before pitching down with a rifle bullet in his lungs. More Frenchmen clambered up the slabs from where they could look down on the great victorious surge of their comrades who were fighting up the last few bloody inches of the slope. The attackers passed the Frenchmen left dead from the previous attacks, they climbed at last onto grass untouched by blood, and then they reached the ragged place where the wadding of the allied muskets had scorched and burned the turf, and still they climbed, and still their officers and sergeants shouted them on, and still the drummer boys beat their attack rhythm to drive this vast wave up and across the plateau's lip. Massйna's infantrymen were doing all that the Marshal had wanted them to do. They were climbing into the horror of the rolling volleys and climbing over their own dead, so many dead that the survivors seemed dipped in blood, and the British and Portuguese and Germans were being forced back step by step as still more men came from the village to press up behind and replace the men who fell to the awful volley fire.

A cheer arose as the leading Frenchmen gained the ridge's summit. A whole company of voltigeurs had run to the church to use its wall and rock foundations as a shelter from the musketry and now those men clambered up the last few feet and bayoneted some redcoats defending the church door, then burst inside to find the flagged floor filled with wounded men. Doctors sawed at shattered arms and bleeding legs as the French voltigeurs ran to the windows and opened fire. One of the voltigeurs was hit by a rifle bullet and left a sliding trail of blood on the whitewashed wall as he sagged to the floor. The other voltigeurs ducked as they reloaded, but when they took aim across the window ledges they could see deep across the plateau into the heart of Wellington's position. Close by they could see the wagons of the ammunition park and one of the voltigeurs laughed as he made an English officer scamper for safety with a shot that drove a long splinter out of a wagon's side. The doctors shouted a protest as the noise and smoke of the musketry filled the church, but the voltigeur commander told them to shut the hell up and keep on working. On the road outside the church a surge of French attackers reinforced the heroes who had captured the ridge's crest and who now threatened to break the enemy army in two before they scattered it to the merciless blades of the frustrated cavalry.

Massйna saw his blue coats gain the far skyline and he felt a great burden drop from his soul. Sometimes, he thought, the hardest part of being a general lay in the necessity of disguising worry. All day he had pretended a confidence he had not altogether felt, for the wretched Major Ducos had been right when he said that Wellington loved nothing better than defending a hill, and Massйna had watched Fuentes de Onoro's hill and worried that his brave men would never spill over its lip to the rich harvest of victory beyond. Now they were over, the battle was won, and Massйna had no further need to hide his anxiety. He laughed aloud, smiled on his entourage and accepted a flask of brandy with which to toast his victory. And victory was sweet, so sweet. "Send Loup forward," Massйna now commanded. "Tell him to clear the road through the village. We can't deliver supplies through streets choked with dead. Tell him the battle's won so he can take his whore with him if he can't bear to untie her apron strings from round his neck." He laughed again for life was suddenly so very very good.

There were two battalions standing ready near the church; one famous and the other infamous. The famous battalion was the 74th, Highlanders all, and known for their hard steadiness in battle. The Scotsmen were eager to take revenge for the losses suffered by their sister regiment in Fuentes de Onoro's bloody streets and to help them was the 88th, the infamous battalion, reckoned to be as near ungovernable as any regiment in the army, though no one had ever complained about their ability in battle. The 88th was a hard brawling regiment, its men as proud of their fighting record as of their homeland, and that homeland was the wild, bleak and beautiful west of Ireland. The 88th were the Co

The French hold on the ridge's crest was tightening as more men reached the road's summit. There was no time to deploy the Scots or Irish into line, only to throw them forward in column of sections at the very centre of the enemy's line. "Bayonets, boys!" an officer shouted, then the two battalions were ru

And so they struck home. Most infantry would have checked their charge a few paces short of an enemy line to pour in a volley of musketry in the hope that the enemy would retreat rather than accept the challenge and horror of hand-to-hand fighting, but the Highlanders and the men of Co