Sharpe’s Regiment: The Invasion of France, June to November 1813

CHAPTER ONE

Sharpe, arriving in Chelmsford, could not remember the way to the South Essex’s depot. He had only visited the barracks once, a brief visit in ’09, and he was forced to ask directions from a vicar who was watering his horse at a public trough. The vicar looked askance at Sharpe’s unkempt uniform, then thought of a happy explanation for the soldier’s vagabond appearance. ‘You’re back from Spain?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Well done! Well done! First class!’ The vicar pointed eastwards, directing the soldiers out into the open country. ‘And God bless you!’

The four men walked eastwards. Sharpe and Harper earned odd glances, just as they had in London, for they looked as if they had come straight from a Spanish battlefield and still expected, even in this county town’s quiet streets, to meet a French patrol. Captain d’Alembord was dressed more elegantly than Sharpe or Harper, yet even his uniform, like Lieutenant Price’s, showed the ravages of battle. ‘It ought to work wonders with the ladies.’ D’Alembord fingered a rent in his scarlet jacket, made by a French bayonet at Vitoria.

‘Speaking of which,’ Lieutenant Harry Price had drawn his sword as they left the town behind and now slashed with the blade at the cow-parsley that grew thick in the lane, ‘are you going to give us some leave, sir?’

‘You don’t want leave, Harry. You’ll only get into trouble.’

‘All those girls in London!’ Price said wistfully. ‘Most of them haven’t met a hero like me! Back from the wars and what are you smiling at, Sergeant?’

Harper grinned broadly. ‘Just having a grand day, sir.’

Sharpe laughed. He was beginning to think that this journey was entirely unnecessary. He was convinced now that Lord Fenner’s letter was a mistake, and that there were, indeed, replacements waiting in Chelmsford. In London Sharpe had visited the Horse Guards, reporting his presence to the authorities, and the clerk in the dusty, impatient office had confirmed that the Second Battalion was indeed at Chelmsford. The man could offer no explanation as to why it was now called a Holding Battalion, suggesting wearily to Sharpe that it was, perhaps, merely an administrative convenience, but he could confirm that it was drawing rations and pay for seven hundred men.

Seven hundred! That figure gave Sharpe hope. He was certain now that the First Battalion was saved, that within weeks, even days, he would lead the replacements south to Pasajes. He walked towards the barracks with high hopes, his optimism made yet more buoyant by the splendour of this summer countryside.

It seemed like a dream. Sharpe knew that England was as heavy with beggars and slums and horror as any city in Spain, yet after the plains of Leon or the mountains of Galicia, this landscape seemed like a foretaste of heaven.

They walked through an England heavy with food and soft with foliage, a country of ponds and rivers and streams and lakes. A country of pink-cheeked women and fat men, of children who were not wary of soldiers or strangers. It was unnatural to see chickens pecking the road-verges undisturbed, their necks not wrung by soldiers; to see cows and sheep that were in no danger from the Commissary officers, to see barns unguarded, and cottage doors and windows not broken apart for firewood, nor marked with the chalk hieroglyphs of the billeting sergeants. Sharpe still found himself judging every hill, every wood, every turn in the road as a place to fight. That hedgerow, with its sunken lane behind, would be a deathtrap to cavalry, while an open meadow, bright with buttercups and rising towards a fat farm on a gentle hill, would be a place to avoid like the plague if French cuirassiers were in the area. England seemed to Sharpe to be a plump country, lavish and soft. Yet if he found it strange it was nothing to the reaction of Harper’s wife.

Harper had asked that Isabella should come with them. She was pregnant, and the big Irishman did not want her following the army into strange, hostile France. He had a cousin who lived in Southwark, and there Isabella had been deposited until the war should end. ‘A man doesn’t need his wife on his coat-tails,’ Harper had declared with all the authority of a man married less than a month.

‘You didn’t mind her there before you were married,’ Sharpe had said.

‘That’s different!’ Harper said indignantly. ‘The army’s no place for a married woman, nor is it.’

‘Will she be happy in England?’ Sharpe asked.

‘Of course she’ll be happy!’ Harper was astonished at the question. Happiness to him was being alive and fed, and the thought that Isabella might be fearful of life in a strange country did not seem to have occurred to him.

And, to Isabella, England seemed most strange. On the journey from Portsmouth to London she had shyly whispered questions to her husband. Where were the olive trees? Were there no oranges? No vines? No Catholic churches? She could not believe how full and plentiful were the rivers, how carelessly the villagers spilt water, how green, thick and tangled was the vegetation, how fat were the cows.

And even three days later, walking out of Chelmsford, it still seemed unreal to Sharpe that a country could be so plump. They passed ripening orchards, grain fields bright with poppies, and pigs running free that could have fed an army corps for a week. The sun shone, the land was warmed and fragrant, and Sharpe felt the careless joy of a man who knew that a task he had thought difficult or even impossible was suddenly proving so simple.

His optimism was dashed at the barracks. It was dashed as suddenly as if Napoleon’s Imperial Guard had appeared in Chelmsford’s marketplace. He had come here in hope, expecting to find seven hundred men, and the depot seemed deserted.

There was not even a guard on the gate. The wind stirred the dust, weeds grew between the paving stones, and a door creaked back and forth on ungreased hinges. ‘Guard!’ Sharpe’s voice bellowed angrily and was met by silence.

The four soldiers walked into the archway’s shadow. The depot was not entirely abandoned for, on the far side of the wide parade ground, a file of cavalrymen walked their horses. Sharpe pushed open the creaking door and looked into an empty guardroom. For a few seconds he wondered if the Battalion had been shipped to Spain, if somewhere on the wind-fretted ocean he had crossed their path on this useless mission, but surely the Horse Guards would have known if the Battalion had moved?

‘Someone’s home,’ d’Alembord said. He nodded towards the Union flag that stirred weakly from a flagpole in front of an elegant, brick-built building which, Sharpe remembered, housed the officers’ Mess and the regiment’s offices. Beside the flagpole, its shafts empty, stood an open carriage.

Harper pulled his shako over his forehead. ‘What in hell’s name are cavalry doing here?’

‘Christ knows.’ Sharpe’s voice was grim. ‘Dally?’

‘Sir?’ D’Alembord was brushing the dust from his boots.

‘Take the Sergeant Major. Go round this place and roust the bastards out.’

‘If there’s anyone to roust out,’ d’Alembord said gloomily.

‘Harry! With me.’

Sharpe and Price walked towards the headquarters building. Sharpe’s face, Price saw, boded ill for whoever had left the guardroom empty and the depot unguarded.

Sharpe climbed the steps of the elegant house and, as at the main gate, there was no sentry at the door. He led Price into a long, cool hallway that was hung with pictures of red-coated men in battle array. From somewhere in the house came the tinkle of music and the sound of laughter.

Sharpe opened a white-painted door to find an empty office. A fly buzzed at the unwashed window above the dead bodies of other flies. The papers on the desk were thick with dust. A small, black-cased clock on the mantel had stopped with both its hands hanging down to the six.

Sharpe pushed open a second door on the far side of the hall. He stared into an elegantly appointed dining room, empty as the office, with a great, varnished table on which stood silver statuettes. A half-empty decanter of wine held a slowly drowning wasp. Sharpe closed the door.

The hallway was carpeted, its furniture heavy and expensive, and its paintings new. Above a curving staircase was a huge chandelier, its gilded brackets thick with wax. Sharpe put his shako on a table and frowned as the laughter swelled. He heard a girl’s voice distinct above the trilling of the spinet. Lieutenant Price grinned at the sound. ‘Sounds like a brothel, sir.’

‘It does, too.’ Sharpe’s voice hid the anger that was thick in him, an anger at an unguarded barracks where women’s laughter mingled with tinkling music.

He went to the last door in the hallway, the one that he remembered opened into the Mess and from which came the laughter. He pushed the door slowly open, stood in the dark shadows of the hallway, and watched.

Three officers, all wearing the yellow facings and chained-eagle badge of the South Essex, were in the room. Two girls were with them, one sitting at the spinet, the other blindfolded in the centre of the room.

They were playing blind-man’s bluff.

The officers laughed, they dodged the lunges of the blind-folded girl. One of them stood guard so that she should not stumble into a low table that carried a tea of thin sandwiches, small pastries, and delicate porcelain cups. That officer, a Captain, was the first to see Sharpe.

The Captain made a mistake. It was a common enough error. In Spain men often mistook Sharpe for a private soldier for the Rifleman wore no badges of rank on his shoulders, and his red, whip-tasselled officer’s sash had long been lost. He wore an officer’s weapon, a sword, but in the hall’s shadow the Captain did not see it. He only saw the rifle on Sharpe’s shoulder and he assumed, naturally enough, that only a private would carry a long-arm. Harry Price, whose uniform was more conventional, was hidden behind Sharpe.

The Captain frowned. He was a young man with a sharp-featured, thin-lipped face beneath carefully waved blond hair. The smile he had worn for the game was suddenly replaced by irritation. ‘Who the devil are you?’ His voice was confident, the voice of the young master in his little domain, and it stopped the blindfolded girl in her tracks.

The other two officers were Lieutenants. One of them frowned at Sharpe. ‘Go away! Wrong place! Go!’

The other Lieutenant giggled. ‘About-turn! Quick march! One-two, one-two!’ He thought he had made a fine joke and laughed again. The girl at the spinet laughed with him.

‘Who are you? Well? Speak up, man!’ The Captain’s voice snapped petulantly at Sharpe, then suddenly died away as the Rifleman stepped out of the shadows.

The realisation that they might have made a mistake came to all three young officers at the same moment. They were suddenly silent and scared as they saw a tall man, black haired, with a face darkened by a foreign sun and scarred by a foreign blade, a strong face that was given a mocking look by the scarred left cheek. That mocking expression vanished when Sharpe smiled, but he was not smiling as he stalked into the Mess. He might have worn no badges of rank, but there was something about his face, about the sword at his side and about the battered hilt of the rifle slung on his shoulder that spoke of something far beyond their understanding. The girl in the room’s centre took off her blindfold and gasped at Sharpe’s sudden, startling appearance.

The room was well lit by tall southern windows. The carpet was thick. Sharpe came slowly forward and the Captain put his feet together as if at attention and stared at the faded jacket and tried to convince himself that the dark stains on the green cloth were not blood.

Harry Price, seeing that one of the two girls was pretty, leaned nonchalantly against the door jamb with what he considered a suitably heroic expression. Sharpe stopped. ‘Whose carriage is outside?’

No one spoke, but one of the girls made a hesitant gesture towards her companion. Sharpe turned. ‘Harry?’

‘Sir?’

‘You will arrange for the coach outside to be harnessed.’ He looked at the two girls. ‘Ladies. What is about to happen here is not for your ears or eyes. You will oblige me by going to your carriage with Lieutenant Price.’

Price, delighted with the orders, bowed to the girls, while one of the two Lieutenants, the young man who had laughed at his own jest and who looked hardly more than seventeen, frowned. ‘I say, sir …’

‘Quiet!’ It was a voice that sent orders across the chaos of battlefields and the snap of it made the girls squeal and stunned the three officers into shocked silence. Sharpe looked again at the girls. ‘Ladies? You will please leave.’

They fled, snatching scarves and reticules, abandoning music sheets, uneaten cakes, cups of tea, and a bowl of chocolate confections. Sharpe closed the door behind them.

He turned. He took the rifle from his shoulder and slammed it onto a varnished, delicate table. The sound made the three officers shiver. Sharpe looked at the Captain beside the spinet. ‘Who are you?’

‘Carline, sir.’

‘Who’s officer of the day?’

Carline swallowed nervously. ‘I am, sir.’

Sharpe looked at the Lieutenant who had told him to go away. ‘You?’

The Lieutenant forced his voice to sound unafraid. ‘Merrill, sir.’

‘And you?’

‘Pierce, sir.’

‘What Battalion are you?’ He looked back to Carline.

Carline, scarcely older than the two Lieutenants, tried to match the dignity of his higher rank with an unruffled face, but his voice came out as a frightened squeak. ‘South Essex, sir.’ He cleared his throat. ‘First Battalion.’

‘Who’s the senior officer in the depot?’

‘I am, sir,’ Carline said. He could not, Sharpe thought, have been more than twenty-two or three.

‘Where’s Lieutenant Colonel Girdwood?’

There was silence. A fly battered uselessly against a window. Sharpe repeated the question.

Captain Carline licked his lips. ‘Don’t know, sir.’

Sharpe walked to a massive sideboard that was heavy with decanters and ornaments. In the very centre of the display was a silver replica of a French Eagle which he picked up. On its base was a plaque. ‘This Memento of the French Eagle, Captured at Talavera by the South Essex under the Command of Colonel Sir Henry Simmerson, was Proudly Presented by Him to the Officers of the Regiment in Memory of the Gallant Feat.’ Sharpe grimaced. Sir Henry Simmerson had been relieved of the command before Sharpe and Harper had captured the Eagle. He turned to the three officers, the Eagle held in his hands as though it were a weapon. ‘My name is Major Richard Sharpe.’

Sharpe would have needed a soul of stone not to enjoy their reaction. They had been frightened of him from the moment he had walked from the hall shadows, but their fear was almost palpable now. A man they had thought a thousand miles away had come to this plump, soft, lavish place, and each of the three men felt a terrible, quivering fear. Pierce, who had laughed as he ordered Sharpe to about-turn, visibly shook. Sharpe let the fear settle into them before speaking in a low voice. ‘You’ve heard of me?’

‘Yes, sir,’ Carline answered.

These officers, Sharpe knew, were the rump of the First Battalion, the men who kept its home records and who were supposed to despatch replacements to Spain. Except there were no recruits, there were no replacements, because the depot was dead and empty, and its officers were entertaining young ladies. Sharpe looked at the two Lieutenants, seeing fleshy, spoilt faces above rich uniforms that, well cut though they were, could not hide the spreading waists and fat thighs. Merrill and Pierce, in turn, stared back at the tall, battle-hardened Rifleman as though he was a visitor from some strange, undiscovered island of savages.

Sharpe put the Eagle back on the sideboard. ‘Why was there no guard detail on the gate?’

‘Don’t know, sir.’ Carline, Sharpe saw, was wearing glossy dancing shoes buttoned over silk stockings.

‘What in Christ’s name do you mean? You’re officer of the day, aren’t you?’ The sudden loudness of Sharpe’s voice startled them.

‘Should have been, sir.’ Carline said it helplessly.

Sharpe looked through the window as the file of horsemen, dressed in fatigues, trotted past. ‘Who the hell are they?’

‘Militia, sir. They use the stables here.’

The three young men, standing rigidly at attention, watched Sharpe as he moved about the room, examining ornaments, picking up a newspaper, once pressing a key of the spinet and letting the plucked note die into ominous silence before he again spoke softly. ‘How many men of the First Battalion are here, Carline?’

‘Forty-eight, sir.’

‘Detail them!’

Carline did. There was himself, three Lieutenants, four sergeants, and the rest were all storekeepers or clerks. Sharpe’s face showed nothing, yet he was seething with frustration and anger within. Forty-eight men to revive a wounded First Battalion, and no sign of the Second Battalion!

He stopped by the window and looked at each man in turn. ‘You god-damn bloody astonish me! No guard mounted, but you’ve got time to play blind-man’s buff and have a little teaparty. What do you do when you exert yourselves, arrange flowers?’ All three kept a judicious, embarrassed silence, avoiding his eyes as he looked at them again in turn. ‘Starting at six this evening, and thereafter on the hour, every hour, day and night till I’m bored with you, you will report in full regimentals to Sergeant Major Harper, who, you will be glad to hear, has returned from Spain with me. You!’ Sharpe pointed at Merrill, whose face showed utter horror at the thought of parading in front of an inferior, ‘and you!’ The finger moved to Pierce. ‘You will find Captain d’Alembord outside. You will request him to parade the men and tell him I am making an inspection in ten minutes, and once I have done that I shall inspect the barracks. Move!’

They moved like hares out of a coursing trap, running out of the room, leaving Carline alone with Sharpe.

Sharpe ate a sandwich. He let the silence stretch. The walls of this comfortable room were bright with hunting pictures, red-coated horsemen in full cry across grass. Sharpe’s sudden question made Carline jump. ‘Where’s Lieutenant Colonel Girdwood?’

‘Don’t know, sir.’ Captain Carline now sounded plaintive, like a small boy hauled up in front of a fearsome headmaster.

Sharpe stared with distaste at the thin, petulant man. ‘Colonel Girdwood does command the Second Battalion?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘So where the hell is he? And where in Christ’s name is the Second Battalion?’

‘I don’t know, sir.’

Sharpe stepped close to him, close enough to smell the tea on Carline’s breath and the pomade in his carefully waved hair. ‘Captain.’ Sharpe, taller than Carline, looked down into the pale eyes and made his voice conversational. ‘You’ve heard men speak, presumably, of Regimental Sergeant Major MacLaird?’

Carline gave the smallest nod. ‘I’ve heard the name, sir.’

‘Less than one month ago, Carline, I saw his guts in blood. His belly was slit open. It was not a pretty sight, Captain. It would have spoilt your tea. But I’ll show it to you, Captain Carline. I’ll rip your bloody guts out with my own hands unless you answer me some god-damned questions! I’ll pull your spine out of your throat! You hear me?’

Carline looked as if he might faint. ‘Sir?’

‘Where is the Second Battalion?’

‘I don’t know, sir.’ He said it pleadingly, with naked fear in his eyes, and Sharpe believed him.

‘Then what the hell do you know, Captain Carline?’

Slowly, haltingly, Carline told his story. The Second Battalion, he said, had been stood down six months before, converted into a Holding Battalion. All recruiting had been stopped. Then, abruptly, the Second Battalion had marched away.

‘Just like that?’ Sharpe snarled the question. ‘They simply vanished?’

‘Yes, sir.’ Carline said it plaintively.

‘No explanations?’

Carline shrugged. ‘Colonel Girdwood said they were going to other units, sir.’ He paused. ‘He said the war’s coming to an end, sir, and the army was being pruned. We were to send our last draft out to the First Battalion and then just keep the depot tidy.’ He shrugged again, a gesture of helplessness.

‘The French are pruning the bloody army, Carline, and we need recruits! Are you recruiting for the First Battalion?’