Sharpe's Havoc

„Those wee children,” Harper said, „God help them.” The orphans, in their dun uniforms, were being pushed into the river. „There’s got to be a bloody boat!”

But the men ma

„What the hell can we do?” Harper asked.

„Nothing,” Sharpe said harshly, „except get out of here.” He turned his back on the dying crowd and led his men eastward down the river wharf. Scores of other people were doing the same thing, gambling that the French would not yet have captured the city’s inland suburbs. The sound of musketry was constant in the streets and the Portuguese guns across the river were now firing at the French in the lower streets so that the hammering of the big guns was punctuated by the noise of breaking masonry and splintering rafters.

Sharpe paused where the wharf ended to make sure all his men were there and he looked back at the bridge to see that so many folk had been forced off its end that the bodies were now jammed in the gap and the water was piling up behind them and foaming white across their heads. He saw a blue-coated Portuguese soldier step on those heads to reach the barge on which the drawbridge had been mounted. Others followed him, skipping over the drowning and the dead. Sharpe was far enough away that he could no longer hear the screams.

„What happened?” Dodd, usually the quietest of Sharpe’s men, asked.

„God was looking the other way,” Sharpe said and looked at Harper. „All here?”

„All present, sir,” Harper said. The big Ulsterman looked as if he had been weeping. „Those poor wee children,” he said resentfully.

„There was nothing we could do,” Sharpe said curtly, and that was true, though the truth of it did not make him feel any better. „Williamson and Tarrant are on a charge,” he told Harper.

„Again?”

„Again,” Sharpe said, and wondered at the idiocy of the two men who would rather have snatched a drink than escape from the city, even if that drink had meant imprisonment in France. „Now come on!” He followed the civilian fugitives who, arriving at the place where the river’s wharf was blocked by the ancient city wall, had turned up an alleyway. The old wall had been built when men fought in armor and shot at each other with crossbows, and the lichen-covered stones would not have stood two minutes against a modern ca

„Crapauds!” Hagman warned Sharpe. „Sir! Up the hill!” Sharpe looked to his left and saw a troop of French cavalry riding to cut off the fugitives. They were dragoons, fifty or more of them in their green coats and all carrying straight swords and short carbines. They wore brass helmets that, in wartime, were covered by cloth so the polished metal would not reflect the sunlight. „Keep ru

Liutenant Colonel James Christopher was neither a lieutenant nor a colonel, though he had once served as a captain in the Lincolnshire Fencibles and still held that commission. He had been christened James Augustus Meredith Christopher and throughout his schooldays had been known as Jam. His father had been a doctor in the small town of Saxilby, a profession and a place that James Christopher liked to ignore, preferring to remember that his mother was second cousin to the Earl of Rochford, and it was Rochford’s influence that had taken Christopher from Cambridge University to the Foreign Office where his command of languages, his natural suavity and his quick intelligence had ensured a swift rise. He had been given early responsibilities, introduced to great men and entrusted with confidences. He was reckoned to be a good prospect, a sound young man whose judgment was usually reliable, which meant, as often as not, that he merely agreed with his superiors, but the reputation had led to his present appointment which was a position as lonely as it was secret. James Christopher’s task was to advise the government whether it would be prudent to keep British troops in Portugal.

The decision, of course, would not rest with James Christopher. He might be a coming man in the Foreign Office, but the decision to stay or withdraw would be taken by the Prime Minister, though what mattered was the quality of advice being given to the Prime Minister. The soldiers, of course, would want to stay because war brought promotion, and the Foreign Secretary wanted the troops to remain because he detested the French, but other men in Whitehall took a more sanguine view and had sent James Christopher to take Portugal’s temperature. The Whigs, enemies of the administration, feared another debacle like that which had led to Coru

None of which occupied his thoughts as he rode out of Oporto less than a ca