Sharpe’s Company. Bernard Cornwell

A soldier of the 45th reeled past Sharpe and waved a bottle in the Rifleman’s face. The man was hopelessly drunk. ‘The store! We opened the store.’ He fell down.

      The French spirit store had been broken apart. Shouts came from the building’s interior, thumps as the casks were stove in, and musket shots as crazed men fought for the contents. A house nearby was in flames and a soldier, his red jacket decorated with the 45th’s green facings, staggered in agony, his back burning, and he tried to douse the flames by pouring a bottle over his shoulder. The spirit flared, scorched his hand, and the man fell, writhing, to die on the stones. Across the plaza a second house was burning and men shouted for help from its upper windows. On the pavement outside women screamed, pointing at their trapped men, but the women were scooped up by redcoats and carried shrieking into an alley. Nearby a shop was being looted. Loaves and hams were slung from the door, to be caught on outstretched bayonets, and Sharpe could see the flicker of flame deep inside the building.

      Some troops had kept their discipline and followed their officers in futile attempts to stop the riot. One horseman rode at a group of drunks, and flailing down with a scabbarded sword, split the group apart, and rode out with a young girl, screaming, clinging to his saddle. The horseman took the girl to a growing huddle of women, sheltered by sober troops, and turned his horse back into the melee. Shrieks and screams, laughter and tears, the sound of victory.

      Watching it all, in silent awe, the survivors of the French garrison had gathered in the centre of the plaza to surrender. They were mostly still armed, but submitted patiently to the British troops who systematically worked their way down the losers’ ranks and pillaged them. Some women clung to their French husbands or lovers, and those women were left alone. No one was taking revenge on the French. The fight had been short and there was little ill will. Sharpe had heard a suggestion, floating as a rumour before the assault, that all surviving Frenchmen were to be massacred, not as revenge, but as a warning to the garrison at Badajoz what to expect if they chose to resist in their larger fortress. It was no more than a rumour. These French, silent in the midst of rampage, would be marched into Portugal, over the winter roads to Oporto, and then back by ships to the foetid prison hulks or even the brand new prison, built for prisoners of war, in the bleakness of Dartmoor.

      ‘Good God.’ Major Forrest’s eyes widened as he stared at the rioting troops. ‘They’re animals! Just animals!’

      Sharpe said nothing. There were few rewards for a soldier. The pay would make no man rich, and the battlefields that yielded booty were few and far between. A siege was the hardest fighting and soldiers had always regarded victory in a breach as reason for losing all discipline and taking their reward from the conquered fortress. And if the fortress was a city, so much the more loot, and if the inhabitants of the city were your allies, then that was bad luck; they were in the wrong place, at the wrong time. Life had always been like that, and always would, because this was ancient custom, soldiers’ custom. In truth Ciudad Rodrigo was not suffering much. There were, to Sharpe’s eyes, plenty of sober, disciplined troops who had not joined the riot and who would, by morning, have swept up the drunks, disposed of the corpses, and the city’s ordeal would soon end in alcoholic exhaustion. He looked round, trying to identify a hospital.

      ‘Sir! Sir!’ Sharpe turned. It was Robert Knowles, who had been his Lieutenant till the previous year, but was now a Captain himself. The ‘sir’ was pure habit. ‘How are you?’ Knowles smiled in delight. He wore the uniform of his new Regiment. Sharpe gestured at Lawford’s body and the young Captain’s face fell. ‘How?’

      ‘A mine.’

      ‘Christ! Will he live?’

      ‘God knows. We need a hospital.’

      ‘This way.’ Knowles had entered the town through the smaller breach, attacked by the Light Division, and he led the party north, through the crowds, and into a narrow street. ‘I passed it on the way here. A convent. Crauford’s there.’

      ‘Wounded?’ Sharpe had thought Black Bob Crauford to be indestructible. The General of the Light Division was the toughest man in the army.

      Knowles nodded. ‘Shot. It’s bad. They don’t think he’ll live. There.’ He pointed to a big, stone building which was topped by a cross and fronted by an arched cloister lit by bracketed torches. Wounded men were lying outside, tended by friends, while screams came from the upper windows behind which the surgeons were already at work with their serrated blades.

      ‘Inside!’ Sharpe pushed through the men in the doorway, ignored a nun who tried to stop him, and forced a path for the Colonel’s stretcher. The tiled floor was gleaming with fresh blood that looked black in the candlelight. A second nun pushed Sharpe aside and looked down at Lawford. Her eyes saw the gold lace, the torn elegance of the blood-stained uniform, and she rapped orders at her sisters. The Colonel was carried through an arched doorway to whatever horrors the surgeons would inflict.

      The small group of men looked at each other, saying nothing, but on each face there were deep lines of tiredness and sorrow. The South Essex, that had achieved so much under Lawford’s leadership, was about to change. Soldiers might belong to an army, wear the uniform of a Regiment, but they lived inside a battalion and the commander of the Battalion made or broke their happiness. Their thoughts were all the same.

      ‘What now?’ Forrest was weary.

      ‘You get some sleep, sir.’ Leroy spoke brutally.

      ‘Parade in the morning, sir?’ Sharpe suddenly realized that Forrest was in command until the new man was appointed. ‘The Brigade Major will have orders.’

      Forrest nodded. He waved a hand towards the doorway where Lawford had disappeared. ‘I must report this.’

      Knowles put a hand on Forrest’s elbow. ‘I know where the Headquarters will be, sir. I’ll take you.’

      ‘Yes.’ Forrest hesitated. He saw a severed hand lying on the checkered tiles and he nearly gagged. Sharpe kicked the hand out of sight beneath a dark wooden chest. ‘Go on, sir.’

      Forrest, Leroy, and Knowles left. Sharpe turned to Lieutenant Price and Sergeant Harper. ‘Find the Company. Make sure they have billets.’

      ‘Yes, sir.’ Price seemed shocked. Sharpe tapped him on the chest.

      ‘Stay sober.’

      The Lieutenant nodded, then pleaded. ‘Half sober?’

      ‘Sober.’

      ‘Come on, sir.’ Harper led Price away. There was no doubt about which man was in command.

      Sharpe watched the men coming into the convent; the blinded, the lamed, the bleeding, French and British. He tried to blot the screaming from his ears, but it was impossible, the sound penetrated the senses like the acrid smoke that hung in the city’s streets this night. An officer of the 95th Rifles came down the main stairway, crying, and saw Sharpe. ‘He’s bad.’ He did not know who he was talking to, except that he saw in Sharpe another Rifleman.

      ‘Crauford?’

      ‘There’s a bullet in his spine. They can’t get it out. The bastard was standing in the middle of the breach, right in the bloody middle, and telling us to move our arses. They shot him!’

      The Rifle officer went out into the cold night. Crauford never asked his men to do anything he would not do himself, and he would be there, cursing and spitting, leading his men on, and now he would die. The army would not be the same. Things were changing.

      A clock struck ten o’clock and Sharpe thought it had been just three hours since they slipped over the snow towards the breach. Just three hours! The door through which Lawford had been carried was opened and a soldier dragged out a corpse. It was not the Colonel. The body, pulled by the heels, left a jellied slime of bloodied mud on the tiles. The door was left open and Sharpe crossed to it, leaned on the post, and stared into the candle-bright charnel house. He remembered the soldier’s prayer, morning and evening, that God keep him from the surgeon’s knife. Lawford was on the table strapped tight, his uniform cut away. An orderly leaned on his chest, obscuring the face,