Sharpe's Fury

Sharpe, taken aback by the offhand greeting, had looked surprised. “I do, sir?”

“Don’t be modest with me, man,” Moon had said, stabbing a finger at the South Essex badge, which showed a chained eagle. Sharpe and his sergeant, Patrick Harper, had captured that eagle from the French at Talavera, and such a feat, as Moon had said, gave a man a reputation. “I don’t want any damn heroics, Sharpe,” the brigadier went on.

“No, sir.”

“Good plain soldiering wins wars,” Moon had said. “Doing mundane things well is what counts.” That was undoubtedly true, but it was odd coming from Sir Barnaby Moon whose reputation was anything but mundane. He was young, only just a year over thirty, and he had been in Portugal for little more than a year, yet he had already made a name for himself. He had led his battalion at Bussaco where, on the ridge where the French had climbed and died, he had rescued two of his skirmishers by galloping through his men’s ranks and killing the skirmishers’ captors with his sword. “No damned frog will take my fusiliers!” he had a

“I’ll try hard not to, sir,” Sharpe had said, for which he had received a foul look, and ever since Moon had virtually ignored Sharpe. Jack Bullen, who was Sharpe’s lieutenant, reckoned that the brigadier was jealous.

“Don’t be daft, Jack,” Sharpe had said when this was proposed.

“In any drama, sir,” Bullen had persevered, “there is only room for one hero. The stage is too small for two.”

“You’re an expert on drama, Jack?”

“I am an expert on everything except for the things you know about,” Bullen had said, making Sharpe laugh. The truth, Sharpe reckoned, was that Moon simply shared most officers’ mistrust of men who had been promoted from the ranks. Sharpe had joined the army as a private, he had served as a sergeant, and now he was a captain, and that irritated some men who saw Sharpe’s rise as an affront to the established order, which, Sharpe decided, was fine by him. He would create the diversion, let the other five companies do the fighting, then go back to Lisbon and so back to the battalion. In a month or two, as spring arrived in Portugal, they would march north from the Lines of Torres Vedras and pursue Marshal Masséna’s forces into Spain. There would be plenty enough fighting in the spring, even enough for upstarts.

“There’s the light, sir,” Harper said. He was lying flat beside Sharpe and staring into the valley.

“You’re sure?”

“There it is again, sir. See it?”

The brigadier had a shielded lantern and, by raising one of its screens, could flash a dim light that would be hidden from the French. It glowed again, made faint by the dawn, and Sharpe called to his men. “Now, lads.”

All they had to do was show themselves, not in ranks and files, but scattered across the hilltop so that they looked like partisans. The object was to make the French peer northward and so ignore the attack creeping from the west.

“That’s all we do?” Harper asked. “We just piss around up here?”

“More or less,” Sharpe said. “Stand up, lads! Let the Crapauds see you!” The light company was on the skyline, plainly visible, and there was just enough light to see that the French in Fort Joseph had registered their presence. Undoubtedly the garrison’s officers would be training their telescopes on the hill, but Sharpe’s men were in greatcoats so their uniforms, with their distinctive crossbelts, were not visible, and he had told them to take off their shakos so they did not look like soldiers.

“Can we give them a shot or two?” Harper asked.

“Don’t want to get them excited,” Sharpe said. “We just want them to watch us.”

“But we can shoot when they wake up?”

“When they see the others, yes. We’ll give them a greenjacket breakfast, eh?”

Sharpe’s company was unique in that while most of its men wore the red coats of the British infantry, others were uniformed in the green jackets of the rifle battalions. It was all because of a mistake. Sharpe and his riflemen had been cut off from the retreat to Coru

“There they go,” Harper said.

The five light companies were advancing up the hill. Their red uniforms looked black in the half-light. Some carried short ladders. They had a nasty job, Sharpe thought. The fort had a dry ditch and from the bottom of the ditch to the top of the parapet was at least ten feet and the top of the parapet was protected by sharpened stakes. The redcoats had to cross the ditch, place the ladders between the stakes, climb into the musket fire of the defenders, and, worse, face ca

Sharpe was not watching. He had suddenly been seized by the superstition that if he watched the attack, then it would fail. Instead he stared down at the river, counting the bridge’s pontoons that were dark shadows in the mist that writhed just above the water. He decided he would count them and not look at Fort Joseph until the first shot was fired. Thirty-one, he reckoned, which meant there was one pontoon every ten feet, for the river was just over a hundred yards wide. The pontoons were big, clumsy, square-ended barges across which a timber roadway had been laid. The winter had been wet all across southern Spain and Portugal; the Guadiana was ru

“They’re dozy bastards,” Harper said in wonderment, presumably speaking of Fort Joseph’s defenders, but still Sharpe would not look. He was staring at Fort Josephine across the river where he could see men clustered about a ca