Sharpe’s Company. Bernard Cornwell

      There was a scream from inside the town, shots as men blew open the doors of houses, and over it all the sound of triumphant voices. After the fight, the reward.

      Harper reached the body first, plucked the cloak to one side, and bent over the bloodied chest. ‘He’s alive, sir.’

      It seemed to Sharpe like a parody of life. The explosion had sheared Lawford’s left arm almost clean from his body, crushed the ribs and flicked them open so they protruded through the remnants of skin and flesh. The blood was flowing beneath the once immaculate uniform. Harper began tearing the cloak into strips, his mouth a tight line of anger and sorrow. Sharpe looked towards the breach where men still clambered towards the houses. ‘Bandsmen!’

      The bands had played during the assault. He remembered hearing the music and now, idiotically, he could suddenly identify the tune he had heard. ‘The Downfall of Paris’. By now the bandsmen should be doing their other job, of caring for the wounded, but he could see none. ‘Bandsmen!’

      Miraculously Lieutenant Price appeared, pale and unsteady, and with him a small group of the Light Company. ‘Sir?’

      ‘A stretcher. Fast! And send someone back to battalion.’

      Price saluted. He had forgotten the drawn sword in his hand so that the blade, a curved sabre, nearly sliced into Private Peters. ‘Sir.’ The small group ran back.

      Lawford was unconscious. Harper was binding the chest, his huge fingers astonishingly gentle with the tattered flesh. He looked up at Sharpe. ‘Take the arm off, sir.’

      ‘What?’

      ‘Better now than later, sir.’ The Sergeant pointed at the Colonel’s left arm, held by a single, glistening shred of tissue. ‘He might live, sir, so he might, but the arm will have to go.’

      A splintered piece of bone protruded from the stump. The arm was bent unnaturally upwards, pointing towards the city, and Harper was binding the brief stump to stop the weakly pulsing blood. Sharpe picked his way to Lawford’s head, treading carefully for the ground was slick, though whether with blood or ice it was impossible to see. The only light came from the burning timber. He put the point of his sword down into the bloodied mess and Harper moved the blade till it was in the right place. ‘Leave the skin, sir. It’ll flap over.’

      It was no different from butchering a pig or a bullock, but it felt different. He could hear crashes from the city, punctuating the screams. ‘Is that right?’ He could feel Harper manipulating the blade.

      ‘Now, sir. Straight down.’

      Sharpe pushed down, with both hands, almost as if he was driving a stake into mud. Human flesh is resilient, proof against all but the hottest stroke, and Sharpe felt the gorge rise in his throat as the sword met resistance and he heaved down so that Lawford tipped in the scarlet slush and the Colonel’s lips grimaced. Then it was done, the arm free, and Sharpe stooped to the dead fingers and pulled off a gold ring. He would give it to Forrest to be sent home with the Colonel or, God forbid, to be sent to his relatives.

      Lieutenant Price was back. ‘They’re coming, sir.’

      ‘Who?’

      ‘The Major, sir.’

      ‘A stretcher?’

      Price nodded, looking sick. ‘Will he live, sir?’

      ‘How the hell do I know?’ It was not fair to vent his anger on Price. ‘What was he doing here anyway?’

      Price shrugged miserably. ‘He said he was going to find you, sir.’

      Sharpe stared down at the handsome Colonel and swore. Lawford had no business in the breach. The same, perhaps, could have been said of Sharpe and Harper, but the tall Rifleman saw a difference. Lawford had a future, hopes, a family to protect, ambitions that were within his grasp, and soldiering was not where those ambitions finally lay. They might all be thrown away for one mad moment in a breach, a moment to prove something. Sharpe and Harper had no such future, no such hopes, only the knowledge that they were soldiers, as good as their last battle, useful as long as they could fight. They were both, Sharpe thought, adventurers, gambling with their lives. He looked at the Colonel. It was such a waste.

      Sharpe listened to the great noise coming from the city, a noise of rampage and victory. Once, perhaps, he thought, an adventurer had a future, back when the world was free and a sword was the passport to any hope. Not now. Everything was changing with a suddenness and pace that was bewildering. Three years before, when the army had defeated the French at Vimiero, it had been a small army, almost an intimate army, and the General could inspect all his troops in a single morning and have time to recognize them, remember them. Sharpe had known most officers in the line by face, if not by name, and was welcome at their evening fires. Not now. Now there were generals of this and generals of that, of division and brigade, and provost-marshals and senior chaplains, and the army was far too large to see on a single morning or even march on a single road. Wellington, perforce, had become remote. There were bureaucrats with the army, defenders of files, and soon, Sharpe knew, a man would be less important than the pieces of paper like that folded, forgotten gazette in Whitehall.

      ‘Sharpe!’ Major Forrest was shouting at him, waving, hurrying over the rubble. He was leading a small group of men, some of whom carried a door, Lawford’s stretcher. ‘What happened?’

      Sharpe gestured at the ruin about them. ‘A mine, sir. He was caught by it.’

      Forrest shook his head. ‘Oh God! What do we do?’ The question was not surprising from the Major. He was a kind man, a good man, but not a decisive man.

      Captain Leroy, the loyalist American, leaned down to light his thin, black cigar from the flickering flames of the timber baulk. ‘Must be a hospital in town.’

      Forrest nodded. ‘Into town.’ He stared in horror at the Colonel. ‘My God! He’s lost his arm!’

      ‘Yes, sir.’

      ‘Will he live?’

      Sharpe shrugged. ‘God knows, sir.’

      It was suddenly freezing cold, the wind reaching over the breach to chill the men who rolled the Colonel, still mercifully unconscious, on to the makeshift stretcher. Sharpe wiped the sword blade on a scrap of Lawford’s cloak, sheathed it, and pulled the collar of his greatcoat high up his neck.

      It was not the entry into Ciudad Rodrigo that he had imagined. It was one thing to fight through a breach, overcome the last obstacle, and feel the elation of victory, but to follow Lawford in a slow, almost funeral march was destroying the triumph. Inevitably, too, though Sharpe hated himself for thinking of it, there were other questions that hung on this moment.

      There would be a new Colonel of the South Essex, a stranger. The Battalion would be changed, maybe for the better, but probably not for the betterment of Sharpe. Lawford, whose own future was seeping into the crude bandages, had learned to trust Sharpe years before; at Seringapatam, Assaye, and Gawilghur, but Sharpe could expect no favours from a new man. Lawford’s replacement would bring his own debts to be repaid, his own ideas, and the old ties of loyalty, friendship, and even gratitude that had held the Battalion together would be untied. Sharpe thought of the gazette. If it was refused, and the thought persisted that it might, then Lawford would have ignored the refusal. He would have kept Sharpe as Captain of the Light Company, come what may, but no longer. The new man would make his own dispositions and Sharpe felt the chill of uncertainty.

      They pushed deeper into the town, through crowds of men intent on recompense for the night’s effort. A group of the 88th had hacked open a wine-shop, splintering the door with bayonets, and now had set up their own business selling the stolen wine. Some officers tried to restore order, but they were outnumbered and ignored. Bolts of cloth cascaded from an upper window, draping the narrow street in a grotesque parody of a holiday as soldiers destroyed what they did not want to loot. A Spaniard lay beside a door, blood trickling in a dozen spreading streams