Sharpe's Havoc

„Use your rifle butts!” Harper shouted, encouraging the riflemen to force their way through the crowd that blocked the narrow arched gateway leading onto the wharf. A cart loaded with furniture had spilled in the roadway and Sharpe ordered his men to pull it aside to make more space. A spinet, or perhaps it was a harpsichord, was being trampled underfoot, the delicate inlay of its cabinet shattering into scraps. Some of Sharpe’s men were pushing the orphans toward the bridge, using their rifles to hold back the adults. A pile of baskets tumbled and dozens of live eels slithered across the cobbles. French gu

Hagman shouted a warning as three blue-coated soldiers appeared from an alley, and a dozen rifles swung toward the threat, but Sharpe yelled at the men to lower their guns. „They’re Portuguese!” he shouted, recognizing the high-fronted shakoes. „And lower your flints,” he ordered, not wanting one of the rifles to accidentally fire in the press of refugees. A drunk woman reeled from a tavern door and tried to embrace one of the Portuguese soldiers and Sharpe, glancing back because of the soldier’s protest, saw two of his men, Williamson and Tarrant, vanish through the tavern door. It would be bloody Williamson, he thought, and shouted to Harper to keep going, then followed the two men into the tavern. Tarrant turned to defy him, but he was much too slow and Sharpe banged him in the belly with a fist, cracked both men’s heads together, punched Williamson in the throat and slapped Tarrant’s face before dragging both men back to the street. He had not said a word and still did not speak to them as he booted them toward the arch.

And once through the arch the press of refugees was even greater as the crews of some thirty British merchant ships, trapped in the city by an obstinate west wind, tried to escape. The sailors had waited until the last moment, praying that the winds would change, but now they abandoned their craft. The lucky ones used their ships’ tenders to row across the Douro, the unlucky joined the chaotic struggle to get onto the bridge. „This way!” Sharpe led his men along the arched facade of warehouses, struggling along the back of the crowd, hoping to get closer to the bridge. Ca

A pile of empty fish crates gave Sharpe a platform from which he could see the bridge and judge how long before his men could cross safely. He knew there was not much time. More and more Portuguese soldiers were flooding down the steep streets and the French could not be far behind them. He could hear the crackle of musketry like a descant to the big guns’ thunder. He stared over the crowd’s head and saw that Mrs. Savage’s coach had made it to the south bank, but she had not used the bridge, instead crossing the river on a cumbrous wine barge. Other barges still crossed the river, but they were ma

He reckoned the bridge might make an easier escape route. It consisted of a plank roadway laid across eighteen big wine barges that were nrmly anchored against the river’s current and against the big surge of tides from the nearby ocean, but the roadway was now crammed with panicked refugees who became even more frantic as the first French can-nonballs splashed into the river. Sharpe, turning to look up the hill, saw the green coats of French cavalry appearing beneath the great smoke of the French guns while the blue jackets of French infantry showed in the alleyways lower down the hill.

„God save Ireland,” Patrick Harper said, and Sharpe, knowing that the Irish Sergeant only used that prayer when things were desperate, looked back to the river to see what had caused the three words.

He looked and he stared and he knew they were not going to cross the river by the bridge. No one was, not now, because a disaster was happening. „Sweet Jesus,” Sharpe said softly, „sweet Jesus.”

In the middle of the river, halfway across the bridge, the Portuguese engineers had inserted a drawbridge so that wine barges and other small craft could go upriver. The drawbridge spa

„Oh Jesus,” Sharpe said. He could see the first people being swept away. He could hear the shrieks.

„God save Ireland,” Harper said again and made the sign of the cross.

The central hundred feet of the bridge were now under water. Those hundred feet had been swept clear of people, but more were being forced into the gap that suddenly churned white as the drawbridge was sheared away from the rest of the bridge by the river’s pressure. The great span of the bridge reared up black, turned over and was swept seawards, and now there was no bridge across the Douro, but the people on the northern bank still did not know the roadway was cut and so they kept pushing and bullying their way onto the sagging bridge and those in front could not hold them back and instead were inexorably pushed into the broken gap where the white water seethed on the bridge’s shattered ends. The cries of the crowd grew louder, and the sound only increased the panic so that more and more people struggled toward the place where the refugees drowned. Gun smoke, driven by an errant gust of wind, dipped into the gorge and whirled above the bridge’s broken center where desperate people thrashed at the water as they were swept downstream. Gulls screamed and wheeled. Some Portuguese troops were now trying to hold the French in the streets of the city, but it was a hopeless endeavor. They were outnumbered, the enemy had the high ground, and more and more French forces were coming down the hill. The screams of the fugitives on the bridge were like the sound of the doomed on the Day of Judgment, the ca