Sharpe’s Battle: The Battle of Fuentes de Oñoro, May 1811

CHAPTER TWO

The view from the castle in Ciudad Rodrigo looked across the River Agueda towards the hills where the British forces gathered, yet this night was so dark and wet that nothing was visible except the flicker of two torches burning deep inside an arched tunnel that burrowed through the city’s enormous ramparts. The rain flickered silver-red past the flame light to make the cobbles slick. Every few moments a sentry would appear at the entrance of the tunnel and the fiery light would glint off the shining spike of his fixed bayonet, but otherwise there was no sign of life. The tricolour of France flew above the gate, but there was no light to show it flapping dispiritedly in the rain which was being gusted around the castle walls and sometimes even being driven into the deep embrasured window where a man leaned to watch the arch. The flickering torchlight was reflected in the thick pebbled lenses of his wire-bound spectacles.

‘Maybe he’s not coming,’ the woman said from the fireplace.

‘If Loup says he will be here,’ the man answered without turning round, ‘then he will be here.’ The man had a remarkably deep voice that belied his appearance for he was slim, almost fragile-looking, with a thin scholarly face, myopic eyes and cheeks pocked with the scars of childhood smallpox. He wore a plain dark-blue uniform with no badges of rank, but Pierre Ducos needed no gaudy chains or stars, no tassels or epaulettes or aiguillettes to signify his authority. Major Ducos was Napoleon’s man in Spain and everyone who mattered, from King Joseph downwards, knew it.

‘Loup,’ the woman said. ‘It means “wolf”, yes?’

This time Ducos did turn round. ‘Your countrymen call him El Lobo,’ he said, ‘and he frightens them.’

‘Superstitious people frighten easily,’ the woman said scornfully. She was tall and thin, and had a face that was memorable rather than beautiful. A hard, clever and singular face, once seen never forgotten, with a full mouth, deep-set eyes and a scornful expression. She was maybe thirty years old, but it was hard to tell for her skin had been so darkened by the sun that it looked like a peasant woman’s. Other well-born women took care to keep their skins as pale as chalk and soft as curds, but this woman did not care for fashionable looks nor for fashionable clothes. Her passion was hunting and when she followed her hounds she rode astride like a man and so she dressed like a man: in breeches, boots and spurs. This night she was uniformed as a French hussar with skin-tight sky-blue breeches that had an intricate pattern of Hungarian lace down the front of the thighs, a plum-coloured dolman with blue cuffs and plaited white-silk cordings and a scarlet pelisse edged with black fur. It was rumoured that Doña Juanita de Elia possessed a uniform from the regiment of every man she had ever slept with and that her wardrobe needed to be as large as most people’s parlours. To Major Ducos’s eyes the Doña Juanita de Elia was nothing but a flamboyant whore and a soldier’s plaything, and in Ducos’s murky world flamboyance was a lethal liability, but in Juanita’s own eyes she was an adventuress and an afrancesada, and any Spaniard willing to side with France in this war was useful to Pierre Ducos. And, he grudgingly allowed, this war-loving adventuress was willing to run great risks for France and so Ducos was willing to treat her with a respect he would not usually accord to women. ‘Tell me about El Lobo,’ the Doña Juanita demanded.

‘He’s a brigadier of dragoons,’ Ducos said, ‘who began his army career as a groom in the royal army. He’s brave, he’s demanding, he’s successful and, above all, he is ruthless.’ On the whole Ducos had little time for soldiers whom he considered to be romantic fools much given to posturing and gestures, but he approved of Loup. Loup was single-minded, fierce and utterly without illusions, qualities that Ducos himself possessed, and Ducos liked to think that, had he ever been a proper soldier, he would have been like Loup. It was true that Loup, like Juanita de Elia, affected a certain flamboyance, but Ducos forgave the Brigadier his wolf-fur pretensions because, quite simply, he was the best soldier Ducos had discovered in Spain and the Major was determined that Loup should be properly rewarded. ‘Loup will one day be a marshal of France,’ Ducos said, ‘and the sooner the better.’

‘But not if Marshal Masséna can help it?’ Juanita asked.

Ducos grunted. He collected gossip more assiduously than any man, but he disliked confirming it, yet Marshal Masséna’s dislike of Loup was so well known in the army that Ducos had no need to dissemble about it. ‘Soldiers are like stags, madame,’ Ducos said. ‘They fight to prove they are the best in their tribe and they dislike their fiercest rivals far more than the beasts that offer them no competition. So I would suggest to you, madame, that the Marshal’s dislike of Brigadier Loup is confirmation of Loup’s genuine abilities.’ It was also, Ducos thought, a typical piece of wasteful posturing. No wonder the war in Spain was taking so long and proving so troublesome when a marshal of France wasted petulance on the best brigadier in the army.

He turned back to the window as the sound of hooves echoed in the fortress’s entrance tunnel. Ducos listened as the challenge was given, then he heard the squeal of the gate hinges opening and a second later he saw a group of grey horsemen appear in the flamelit archway.

The Doña Juanita de Elia had come to stand beside Ducos. She was so close that he could smell the perfume on her gaudy uniform. ‘Which one is he?’ she asked.

‘The one in front,’ Ducos replied.

‘He rides well,’ Juanita de Elia said with grudging respect.

‘A natural horseman,’ Ducos said. ‘Not fancy. He doesn’t make his horse dance, he makes it fight.’ He moved away from the woman. He disliked perfume as much as he disliked opinionated whores.

The two waited in silent awkwardness. Juanita de Elia had long sensed that her weapons did not work on Ducos. She believed he disliked women, but the truth was that Pierre Ducos was oblivious of them. Once in a while he would use a soldier’s brothel, but only after a surgeon had provided him with the name of a clean girl. Most of the time he went without such distractions, preferring a monkish dedication to the Emperor’s cause. Now he sat at his table and leafed through papers as he tried to ignore the woman’s presence. Somewhere in the town a church clock struck nine, then a sergeant’s voice echoed from an inner courtyard as a squad of men was marched towards the ramparts. The rain fell relentlessly. Then, at last, boots and spurs sounded loud on the stairway leading to Ducos’s big chamber and the Doña Juanita looked up expectantly.

Brigadier Loup did not bother to knock on Ducos’s door. He burst in, already fuming with anger. ‘I lost two men! God damn it! Two good men! Lost to riflemen, Ducos, to British riflemen. Executed! They were put against a wall and shot like vermin!’ He had crossed to Ducos’s table and helped himself from the decanter of brandy. ‘I want a price put on the head of their captain, Ducos. I want the man’s balls in my men’s stewpot.’ He stopped suddenly, checked by the exotic sight of the uniformed woman standing beside the fire. For a second Loup had thought the figure in cavalry uniform was an especially effeminate young man, one of the dandified Parisians who spent more money on their tailor than on their horse and weapons, but then he realized that the dandy was a woman and that the cascading black plume was her hair and not a helmet’s embellishment. ‘Is she yours, Ducos?’ Loup asked nastily.

‘Monsieur,’ Ducos said very formally, ‘allow me to name the Doña Juanita de Elia. Madame? This is Brigadier General Guy Loup.’

Brigadier Loup stared at the woman by the fire and what he saw, he liked, and the Doña Juanita de Elia returned the Dragoon General’s stare and what she saw, she also liked. She saw a compact, one-eyed man with a brutal, weather-beaten face who wore his grey hair and beard short, and his grey, fur-trimmed uniform like an executioner’s costume. The fur glinted with rainwater that had brought out the smell of the pelts, a smell that mingled with the heady aromas of saddles, tobacco, sweat, gun oil, powder and horses. ‘Brigadier,’ she said politely.

‘Madame,’ Loup acknowledged her, then shamelessly looked up and down her skin-tight uniform, ‘or should it be Colonel?’

‘Brigadier at least,’ Juanita answered, ‘if not Maréchal.’

‘Two men?’ Ducos interrupted the flirtation. ‘How did you lose two men?’

Loup told the story of his day. He paced up and down the room as he spoke, biting into an apple he took from Ducos’s desk. He told how he had taken a small group of men into the hills to find the fugitives from the village of Fuentes de Oñoro, and how, having taken his revenge on the Spaniards, he had been surprised by the arrival of the greenjackets. ‘They were led by a captain called Sharpe,’ he said.

‘Sharpe,’ Ducos repeated, then leafed through an immense ledger in which he recorded every scrap of information about the Emperor’s enemies. It was Ducos’s job to know about those enemies and to recommend how they could be destroyed, and his intelligence was as copious as his power. ‘Sharpe,’ he said again as he found the entry he sought. ‘A rifleman, you say? I suspect he may be the same man who captured an eagle at Talavera. Was he with greenjackets only? Or did he have redcoats with him?’

‘He had redcoats.’

‘Then it is the same man. For a reason we have never discovered he serves in a red-jacketed battalion.’ Ducos was adding to his notes in the book that contained similar entries on over five hundred enemy officers. Some of the entries were scored through with a single black line denoting that the men were dead and Ducos sometimes imagined a glorious day when all these enemy heroes, British, Portuguese and Spanish alike, would be black-lined by a rampaging French army. ‘Captain Sharpe,’ Ducos now said, ‘is reckoned a famous man in Wellington’s forces. He came up from the ranks, Brigadier, a rare feat in Britain.’

‘I don’t care if he came up from the jakes, Ducos, I want his scalp and I want his balls.’

Ducos disapproved of such private rivalries, fearing that they interfered with more important duties. He closed the ledger. ‘Would it not be better,’ he suggested coldly, ‘if you allowed me to issue a formal complaint about the execution? Wellington will hardly approve.’

‘No,’ Loup said. ‘I don’t need lawyers taking revenge for me.’ Loup’s anger was not caused by the death of his two men, for death was a risk all soldiers learned to abide, but rather by the manner of their death. Soldiers should die in battle or in bed, not against a wall like common criminals. Loup was also piqued that another soldier had got the better of him. ‘But if I can’t kill him in the next few weeks, Ducos, you can write your damned letter.’ The permission was grudging. ‘Soldiers are harder to kill than civilians,’ Loup went on, ‘and we’ve been fighting civilians too long. Now my brigade will have to learn how to destroy uniformed enemies as well.’

‘I thought most French soldiers would rather fight other regulars than fight guerrilleros,’ the Doña Juanita said.

Loup nodded. ‘Most do, but not me, madame. I have specialized in fighting the guerrilla.’

‘Tell me how,’ she asked.

Loup glanced at Ducos as if seeking permission, and Ducos nodded. Ducos was annoyed by the attraction he sensed between these two. It was an attraction as elemental as the lust of a tomcat, a lust so palpable that Ducos almost wrinkled his nose at the stench of it. Leave these two alone for half a minute, he thought, and their uniforms would make a single heap on the floor. It was not their lust that offended him, but rather the fact that it distracted them from their proper business. ‘Go on,’ he told Loup.

Loup shrugged as though there was no real secret involved. ‘I’ve got the best-trained troops in the army. Better than the Imperial Guard. They fight well, they kill well and they’re rewarded well. I keep them separate. They’re not billeted with other troops, they don’t mix with other troops, and that way no one knows where they are or what they’re doing. If you send six hundred men marching from here to Madrid then I guarantee you that every guerrillero between here and Seville will know about it before they leave. But not with my men. We don’t tell anyone what we’re doing or where we’re going, we just go there and do it. And we have our own places to live. I emptied a village of its inhabitants and made it my depot, but we don’t just stay there. We travel where we will, sleep where we will, and if guerrilleros attack us they die, and not just them, but their mothers, their children, their priests and their grandchildren die with them. We horrify them, madame, just as they try to horrify us, and by now my wolf pack is more horrifying than the partisans.’

‘Good,’ Juanita said simply.

‘Brigadier Loup’s patrol area is remarkably free of partisans,’ Ducos said in generous tribute.

‘But not entirely free,’ Loup added grimly. ‘El Castrador survives, but I’ll use his own knife on him yet. Maybe the arrival of the British will encourage him to show his face again.’

‘Which is why we are here,’ Ducos said, taking command of the room. ‘Our job is to make certain that the British do not stay here, but are sent packing.’ And then, in his deep and almost hypnotic voice, he described the military situation as he comprehended it. Brigadier General Loup, who had spent the last year fighting to keep the passes through the frontier hills free of partisans and who had thus been spared the disasters that had afflicted Marshal Masséna’s army in Portugal, listened raptly as Ducos told the real story and not the patriotic lies that were peddled in the columns of the Moniteur. ‘Wellington is clever,’ Ducos admitted. ‘He’s not brilliant, but he is clever and we under-estimated him.’ The existence of the Lines of Torres Vedras had been unknown to the French until they marched within cannon shot of the defences and there they had waited, ever hungrier, ever colder, through a long winter. Now the army was back on the Spanish frontier and waiting for Wellington’s assault.

It was an assault that would be hard and bloody because of the two massive fortresses that barred the only passable roads through the frontier mountains. Ciudad Rodrigo was the northern fastness and Badajoz the southern. Badajoz had been in Spanish hands till a month before and Masséna’s engineers had despaired of ever reducing its massive walls, but Ducos had arranged a huge bribe and the Spanish commander had yielded the keys to the fortress. Now both keys of Spain, Badajoz and Ciudad Rodrigo, were firmly in the Emperor’s grip.

But there was a third border fortress which also lay in French hands. Almeida was inside Portugal and, though it was not so important as Ciudad Rodrigo or Badajoz, and though its massive castle had been destroyed with the neighbouring cathedral in an earth-shattering explosion of gunpowder just the previous year, the town’s thick star-shaped walls and its strong French garrison still presented a formidable obstacle. Any British force laying siege to Ciudad Rodrigo would have to use thousands of men to guard against the threat of Almeida’s garrison sallying out to raid the supply roads and Ducos reckoned that Wellington would never abide that menace in his army’s rear. ‘Wellington’s first priority will be to capture Almeida,’ Ducos said, ‘and Marshal Masséna will do his best to relieve the fortress from the British siege. In other words, Brigadier’ – Ducos was speaking more to Loup than to the Doña Juanita – ‘there will be a battle fought close to Almeida. Not much is certain in war, but I think we can be certain of that.’

Loup stared at the map, then nodded agreement. ‘Unless Marshal Masséna withdraws the garrison?’ he said in a tone of contempt suggesting that Masséna, his enemy, was capable of any foolishness.

‘He won’t,’ Ducos said with the certainty of a man who had the power to dictate strategy to marshals of France. ‘And the reason he will not is here,’ Ducos said, and he tapped the map as he spoke. ‘Look,’ he said, and Loup bent obediently over the map. The fortress of Almeida was depicted like a star to imitate its jagged, star-shaped fortifications. Around it were the hatch marks of hills, but behind it, between Almeida and the rest of Portugal, ran a deep river. The Coa. ‘It runs in a gorge, Brigadier,’ Ducos said, ‘and is crossed by a single bridge at Castello Bom.’

‘I know it well.’

‘So if we defeat General Wellington on this side of the river,’ Ducos said, ‘then the fugitives of his army will be forced to retreat across a single bridge scarce three metres wide. That is why we shall leave the garrison in Almeida, because its presence will force Lord Wellington to fight on this bank of the Coa and when he does fight we shall destroy him. And once the British are gone, Brigadier, we shall employ your tactics of horror to end all resistance in Portugal and Spain.’

Loup straightened up. He was impressed by Ducos’s analysis, but also dubious of it. He needed a few seconds to phrase his objection and made the time by lighting a long, dark cigar. He blew smoke out, then decided there was no politic way to voice his doubt, so he just stated it baldly. ‘I’ve not fought the British in battle, Major, but I hear they’re stubborn bastards in defence.’ Loup tapped the map. ‘I know that country well. It’s full of hill ranges and river valleys. Give Wellington a hill and you could die of old age before you could shift the bugger loose. That’s what I hear, anyway.’ Loup finished with a shrug, as if to deprecate his own opinion.

Ducos smiled. ‘Supposing, Brigadier, that Wellington’s army is rotted from the inside?’

Loup considered the question, then nodded. ‘He’ll break,’ he confirmed simply.

‘Good! Because that is precisely why I wanted you to meet the Doña Juanita,’ Ducos said, and the lady smiled at the dragoon. ‘The Doña Juanita will be crossing the lines,’ Ducos continued, ‘and living among our enemies. From time to time, Brigadier, she will come to you for certain supplies that I shall provide. I want you to make the provision of those supplies to Doña Juanita your most important duty.’

‘Supplies?’ Loup asked. ‘You mean guns? Ammunition?’

Doña Juanita answered for Ducos. ‘Nothing, Brigadier, that cannot be carried in the panniers of a packhorse.’

Loup looked at Ducos. ‘You think it’s easy to ride from one army to another? Hell, Ducos, the British have a cavalry screen and there are partisans and our own picquets and God knows how many other British sentries. It isn’t like riding in the Bois de Boulogne.’

Ducos looked unconcerned. ‘The Doña Juanita will make her own arrangements and I have faith in those. What you must do, Brigadier, is acquaint the lady with your lair. She must know where to find you, and how. You can arrange that?’

Loup nodded, then looked at the woman. ‘You can ride with me tomorrow?’

‘All day, Brigadier.’

‘Then we ride tomorrow,’ Loup said, ‘and maybe the next day too?’

‘Maybe, General, maybe,’ the woman answered.

Ducos again interrupted their flirtation. It was late, his supper was waiting and he still had several hours of paperwork to be completed. ‘Your men,’ he said to Loup, ‘are now the army’s picquet line. So I want you to be alert for the arrival of a new unit in the British army.’

Loup, suspecting he was being taught how to suck eggs, frowned. ‘We’re always alert to such things, Major. We’re soldiers, remember?’

‘Especially alert, Brigadier.’ Ducos was unruffled by Loup’s scorn. ‘A Spanish unit, the Real Compañía Irlandesa, is expected to join the British soon and I want to know when they arrive and where they are positioned. It is important, Brigadier.’

Loup glanced at Juanita, suspecting that the Real Compañía Irlandesa was somehow connected with her mission, but her face gave nothing away. Never mind, Loup thought, the woman would tell him everything before the next two nights were done. He looked back to Ducos. ‘If a dog farts in the British lines, Major, you’ll know about it.’

‘Good!’ Ducos said, ending the conversation. ‘I won’t keep you, Brigadier. I’m sure you have plans for the evening.’

Loup, thus dismissed, picked up his helmet with its plume of wet grey hair. ‘Doña,’ he said as he reached the staircase door, ‘isn’t that the title of a married woman?’

‘My husband, General, is buried in South America.’ Juanita shrugged. ‘The yellow fever, alas.’

‘And my wife, madame,’ Loup said, ‘is buried in her kitchen in Besançon. Alas.’ He held a hand towards the door, offering to escort her down the winding stairs, but Ducos held the Spanish woman back.

‘You’re ready to go?’ Ducos asked Juanita when Loup was gone out of earshot.

‘So soon?’ Juanita answered.

Ducos shrugged. ‘I suspect the Real Compañía Irlandesa will have reached the British lines by now. Certainly by the month’s end.’

Juanita nodded. ‘I’m ready.’ She paused. ‘And the British, Ducos, will surely suspect the Real Compañía Irlandesa’s motives?’

‘Of course they will. They would be fools not to. And I want them to be suspicious. Our task, madame, is to unsettle our enemy, so let them be wary of the Real Compañía Irlandesa and perhaps they will overlook the real threat?’ Ducos took off his spectacles and polished their lenses on the skirts of his plain jacket. ‘And Lord Kiely? You’re sure of his affections?’

‘He is a drunken fool, Major,’ Juanita answered. ‘He will do whatever I tell him.’

‘Don’t make him jealous,’ Ducos warned.

Juanita smiled. ‘You may lecture me on many things, Ducos, but when it comes to men and their moods, believe me, I know all there is to know. Do not worry about my Lord Kiely. He will be kept very sweet and very obedient. Is that all?’

Ducos looped his spectacles back into place. ‘That is all. May I wish you a good night’s rest, madame?’

‘I’m sure it will be a splendid night, Ducos.’ The Doña Juanita smiled and walked from the room. Ducos listened as her spurs jangled down the steps, then heard her laugh as she encountered Loup who had been waiting at the foot of the steps. Ducos closed the door on the sound of their laughter and walked slowly back to the window. In the night the rain beat on, but in Ducos’s busy mind there was nothing but the vision of glory. This did not just depend on Juanita and Loup doing their duty, but rather on the clever scheme of a man whom even Ducos acknowledged as his equal, a man whose passion to defeat the British equalled Ducos’s passion to see France triumphant, and a man who was already behind the British lines where he would sow the mischief that would first rot the British army, then lead it into a trap beside a narrow ravine. Ducos’s thin body seemed to quiver as the vision unfolded in his imagination. He saw an insolent British army eroded from within, then trapped and beaten. He saw France triumphant. He saw a river gorge crammed to its rocky brim with bloody carcasses. He saw his Emperor ruling over all Europe and then, who could tell, over the whole known world. Alexander had done it, why not Bonaparte?