Sharpe's Devil

The infantry was good enough. Its first two volleys were followed by another within just fifteen seconds. Two more marines fell backward. A dozen men had collapsed on the steps; some were dead, some wounded. A drummer was screaming in pain, his hand fluttering on the drumskin to make a grotesque dying music. Cochrane's gamble, which had depended on reaching the top of the stairs before the Spanish defenders barred the archway, had failed.

"Fire!" Miller shouted, and his men hammered a feeble volley at the musket smoke, but the volley was almost immediately answered by another cracking smack of musket fire. The balls sliced and lashed past Sharpe's ears. A Corporal was vomiting blood and slipping back down the slope. Miller fired a useless pistol at the defenders, then screamed defiance, but the Spaniards had the best of this fight. Not only were there more of them, but they had the advantage of the high ground. They were well trained, too. The company was rotating its ranks. As soon as the front rank had poured its musketry down into the rebel attack, it stepped back to be replaced by the second rank which, its guns reloaded and ready, added its fire before the third rank stepped forward. They were firing like British infantry used to fire. They had established a murderous rhythm of volleys that would keep firing till the attackers were reduced to twitching, bloody carcasses on the steps. It was volley fire like this that had defeated Napoleon at Waterloo and which now was throwing back Cochrane at Puerto Crucero.

"Down!" Cochrane shouted. "Get down!" The man had the devil's own luck, for despite being in the front rank, he was unscathed, but his assault was in horrid confusion.

Sharpe had a pistol that he fired at one of the arched windows that lay high to his right. He saw a chip of stone fly off the window ledge. Harper dropped beside Sharpe. "Christ save Ireland," Harper panted, "but this is desperate!" He leveled his borrowed musket and fired up into the smoke. "I told the wife I'd be doing nothing dangerous. Not a thing, I told her, except the sea voyage, and that never worries her because she's a great believer in Saint Brendan's protection, so she is." All this was spoken while Harper was reloading the musket with a skill that betrayed his years of soldiering. 'Jesus, but the money that woman wastes on candles! Christ, I could have lit my way to the shithole of hell and back with all the bloody candles she's given to the holy saints, but I wished she'd lit a bloody candle to keep me safe in a fight." He aimed up the steps in the general direction of the smoke cloud and pulled the trigger. "God help us." He began reloading. "I mean there's no way out of here, is there? The bloody boat will be hard aground in a minute or two."

Sharpe saw a man leaning out of a window to fire at the attackers cowering on the steps. He aimed the reloaded pistol and fired, and saw a spurt of blood vivid in the gray morning as the man toppled down the crag's face. "Got one," he said happily.

"Good for you." Harper raised himself and fired over the prone bodies of the marines higher up the steps. A volley smacked down, blasting a chip of stone from the stair beside Sharpe.

"This can't last!" Sharpe shouted at Harper. He needed to shout for the musketfire was almost continuous now, suggesting that the Spaniards had concentrated even more muskets at the top of the steps. For the defenders this was like shooting rats in a barrel. They would be gri

"Jesus, but he needs a bloody trick now," Harper said, then raised the musket blindly over the parapet of the dead bodies to pull its trigger. "God save Ireland, but we're dead men unless he can get us out of here."

Miller shouted at his musicians to play louder, as though their feeble and ragged music could somehow turn back the surging tide of disaster. Some of Miller's experienced marines, realizing how hopeless was their plight, began to edge backward. There had been a chance of capturing the fortress, even a good chance, but only if the surprise attack had reached the head of the staircase before the defenders had rallied. But the attackers had failed by yards, and now the Spaniards were grinding Cochrane's men into blood and bones. More attackers began slipping down the steps. They were looking for possible escape routes around the harbor's edge.

"Stay there!" Cochrane shouted. "It's all right, lads! Stay where you are! Wait for it! I promise everything will be well! Heads down now! Heads down! Keep your—" Cochrane's voice was swamped as the whole world suddenly exploded in noise and stone fragments.

"Christ!" Harper screeched as the citadel's foundations seemed to shudder with the impact of gunfire.

The O'Higgins, now that the citadel's main thirty-six-pound battery had been silenced, had sailed out from the unwitting protection offered by the American ship and had anchored with her starboard broadside facing the fortress. She had just fired that full broadside at the defenders bunched at the top of the broad flight of stairs. The volley of ca

"Heads down!" Cochrane called again, and once again the broadside thundered from the Chilean warship. Stone shards, struck from the battlements, sang viciously over Sharpe's head. This, he remembered from the tales of survivors, was precisely how Wellington had captured San Sebastian. That great fortress, the last French bastion in Spain, had resisted every British attack until, at the very last moment of the very last assault, when the helpless attackers were dying in the great breach as the French garrison poured a murderous fire into the redcoated ranks, Wellington had ordered his siege guns to fire just above the attackers' heads. The unexpected ca

"Heads down!" Cochrane called again. He had clearly anticipated that the defenders might block the head of the stairs, and had thus arranged with the O'Higgins for this drastic solution that had caught the Spaniards bunched at the stairhead. "One more broadside, lads, then we'll fillet the bastards!"

The third broadside slammed into the citadel above Sharpe. The defenders' musket fire, which a moment before had been so overwhelming, had now vanished, blown into whimpering carnage by the shocking violence of the naval gu