Sharpe’s Rifles: The French Invasion of Galicia, January 1809. Bernard Cornwell

bloody crapaud bastards!’

      Fifty Riflemen, survivors from all four companies, had been saved from the rout. Sergeant Williams was with them, as was Rifleman Harper. Some of the men were bleeding. A Sergeant was trying to staunch a terrible slash in his shoulder. A youngster was white-lipped and shaking. Murray and the new Lieutenant were the only officers to have escaped the massacre.

      ‘We’ll work our way east,’ Murray said calmly. ‘Maybe we can reach the army after dark.’

      A morose swearword sounded from the big Irishman and the two officers glanced down the valley to see the British cavalry at last appear in the drizzle. The chasseur saw them at the same time, and the French trumpet called the Dragoons into order. The British, seeing the enemy’s preparedness, and finding no sign of infantry, withdrew.

      The Riflemen on the cloud’s edge jeered at their retreating cavalry. Murray whipped round. ‘Silence!’

      But the jeer had drawn the attention of the dismounted Dragoons on the slope below, and they believed the mocking sound had been aimed at them. Some of them seized carbines, others took up fallen rifles, and they fired a ragged volley at the small group of survivors.

      The bullets hissed and whiplashed past the greenjackets. The ragged volley missed, except for one fatal bullet that ricocheted from a rock into Captain Murray’s side. The force of the bullet spun him round and threw him face down onto the hillside. His left hand scrabbled at the thin turf while his right groped in the blood at his waist.

      ‘Go on! Leave me!’ His voice was scarcely more than a whisper.

      Rifleman Harper jumped down the slope and plucked Murray into his huge arms. The Captain sighed a terrible moan of pain as he was lifted. Below him the French were scrambling uphill, eager to complete their victory by taking these last Riflemen prisoner.

      ‘Follow me!’ The Lieutenant led the small group into the clouds. The French fired again, and the bullets flickered past, but the Riflemen were lost in the whiteness now. For the moment, at least, they were safe.

      The Lieutenant found a hollow among the rocks that offered some shelter from the cold. The wounded were laid there while picquets were set to guard its perimeter. Murray had gone as white as cartridge paper. ‘I didn’t think they could beat us, Dick.’

      ‘I don’t understand where they came from.’ The Lieutenant’s scarred face, Murray thought, made him look like an executioner. ‘They didn’t get past us. They couldn’t!’

      ‘They must have done.’ Murray sighed, then gestured to Rifleman Harper who, with a gentleness that seemed odd in a man so big, first unstrapped the Captain’s sword belt, then unpeeled his clothes from the wound. It was clear that Harper knew his business, and so the Lieutenant went to peer down the fogged hillside for a sight of the enemy. He could neither see nor hear anything. The Dragoons evidently thought the band of survivors too small to worry about. The fifty Riflemen had become the flotsam of war, mere splinters hacked from a sinking endeavour, and if the French had known that the fugitives were led by a Quartermaster, they might have been even more contemptuous.

      But the Quartermaster had first fought the French fifteen years before, and he had been fighting ever since. The stranded Riflemen might call him the new Lieutenant, and they might invest the word ‘new’ with all the scorn of old soldiers, but that was because they did not know their man. They thought of him as nothing more than a jumped-up Sergeant, and they were wrong. He was a soldier, and his name was Richard Sharpe.

      CHAPTER TWO

      In the night, Lieutenant Sharpe took a patrol westwards along the high crest. He had hoped to determine whether the French held the place where the road crossed the ridge, but in the freezing darkness and among the jumble of rocks, he lost his bearings and grudgingly went back to the hollow where the Riflemen sheltered.

      The cloud lifted before dawn, letting the first wan light reveal the main body of the French pursuit in the valley which lay to the south. The enemy cavalry was already gone to the west, and Sharpe stared down at Marshal Soult’s infantry which marched in dogged pursuit of Sir John Moore’s army.

      ‘We’re bloody cut off.’ Sergeant Williams offered his pessimistic assessment to Sharpe who, instead of replying, went to squat beside the wounded men. Captain Murray slept fitfully, shivering beneath a half-dozen greatcoats. The Sergeant who had been slashed across the neck and shoulders had died in the night. Sharpe covered the man’s face with a shako.

      ‘He’s a jumped-up bit of nothing.’ Williams stared malevolently at Lieutenant Sharpe’s back. ‘He ain’t an officer, Harps. Not a real one.’

      Rifleman Harper was sharpening his sword-bayonet, doing the job with the obsessive concentration of a man who knows his life depends on his weapons.

      ‘Not a proper officer,’ Williams went on. ‘Not a gentleman. Just a jumped-up Sergeant, isn’t he?’

      ‘That’s all.’ Harper looked at the Lieutenant, seeing the scars on the officer’s face and the hard line of his jaw.

      ‘If he thinks he’s giving me orders, he’s a bugger. He ain’t no better than I am, is he?’

      Harper’s reply was a grunt, and not the agreement which would have given the Sergeant the encouragement he wanted. Williams waited for Harper’s support, but the Irishman merely squinted along the edge of his bayonet, then carefully sheathed the long blade.

      Williams spat. ‘Put a bloody sash and sword on them and they think they’re God Almighty. He’s not a real Rifle, just a bloody Quartermaster, Harps!’

      ‘Nothing else,’ Harper agreed.

      ‘Bloody jumped-up storekeeper, ain’t he?’

      Sharpe turned quickly and Williams, even though it was impossible, felt that he had been overheard. The Lieutenant’s eyes were hard as flint. ‘Sergeant Williams!’

      ‘Sir.’ Williams, despite his assertion of disobedience, stepped dutifully towards Lieutenant Sharpe.

      ‘Shelter.’ Sharpe pointed down into the northern valley where, far beneath them and slowly being revealed by a shredding mist, a stone farmstead could be seen. ‘Get the wounded down there.’

      Williams hissed a dubious breath between yellowed teeth. ‘I dunno as how they should be moved, sir. The Captain’s …’

      ‘I said get the wounded down there, Sergeant.’ Sharpe had stepped away, but now turned back. ‘I didn’t ask for a debate on the God-damned matter. Move.’

      It took the best part of the morning, but they succeeded in carrying the wounded down to the derelict farm. The dryest building was a stone barn, built on rock pillars that were meant to keep vermin at bay, and with a roof surmounted by crosses so that, from a distance, it looked like a small crude church. The ruined house and byres yielded damp and fungus-ridden timbers that, split and shredded with cartridge powder, were coaxed into a fire that slowly warmed the wounded men. Rifleman Hagman, a toothless, middle-aged Cheshireman, went to hunt for food, while the Lieutenant put picquets on the goat tracks that led east and west.

      ‘Captain Murray’s in a poorly way, sir.’ Sergeant Williams cornered Sharpe when the Lieutenant returned to the barn. ‘He needs a surgeon, sir.’

      ‘Hardly possible, is it?’

      ‘Unless we … that is …’ The Sergeant, a squat, red-faced man, could not say what was in his mind.

      ‘Unless we surrender to the French?’ Sharpe asked acidly.

      Williams looked into the Lieutenant’s eyes. They were curious eyes, almost reptilian in their present coldness. The Sergeant found a truculence to brace his argument. ‘At least the crapauds have got surgeons, sir.’

      ‘In one