Read Online Sharpe's Revenge by Bernard Cornwell - Free Book Online

within range of the French gunners. Nairn ordered his men to march through the marshy fields to the west of the tracks, but still the roundshot slashed into his battalion columns. The British artillery tried to reply, but they were shooting uphill at enemy batteries well dug in behind thick emplacements.
    â€˜Close up, you scum!’ Lieutenant-Colonel Taplow bellowed at his leading company after a cannonball had crashed through a file to leave three men bloody and twitching on the soaking ground. ‘Leave them there!’ he shouted at two men who stooped to help the victims. ‘Leave them, I say, or I’ll have you flogged!’ At the rear of Taplow’s fusiliers a band played, their music made ragged by their stumbling progress over the tussocky soft ground. Drummer boys were ordered to attend to the three men, but two were already dead and the third had not long to live. The battalion surgeon finished the man with a quick knife cut, then, shrugging, wiped his bloody hands on his grey breeches.
    The French artillery pumped smoke from the ridge crest. Sharpe, staring eastwards, could sometimes see the trace of a dark line in the sky and he knew he watched a cannonball at the top of its arcing flight, and he also knew that such a pencil line was only visible in the sky when the ball was coming straight at the observer. At those moments he felt a temptation to spur Sycorax onwards, feigning some urgent duty, but he restrained himself in case any man should think him cowardly. Instead he rode steadily, flinching inwardly, and hid his relief as the balls missed. One roundshot thumped into the mud just ahead of Sycorax, making the mare rear frantically. Somehow Sharpe kept his feet in the stirrups and his arse on the saddle as the gobbets of wet mud fountained about him. The mare was not properly trained to battle, but she was a good steady horse. She had been a gift from Jane, and that thought gave Sharpe a sentimental longing to see his wife. He wondered if her mail had become lost, because no letter had yet arrived, then a cannonball went just over his shako to decapitate a redcoat marching to Sharpe’s left and he forgot his wife in the sudden surge of fear.
    â€˜Close up!’ a Sergeant shouted. ‘Close up!’ It was the litany of battle and the only obituary of the common soldier.
    â€˜You’re used to this, I suppose?’ A Lieutenant, one of Nairn’s junior aides, spurred alongside Sharpe. Ahead of them a man’s entrails were being trodden into the mud, but either the Lieutenant did not notice or did not recognize what he saw.
    â€˜I don’t think you ever get used to it,’ Sharpe said,
    though it was not true. One did get used to it, but that did not help the fear. The Lieutenant, who was new to the war, was clearly terrified, though he was trying hard not to show it. ‘It’s better,’ Sharpe said truthfully, ‘once you can fire back. It’s much less frightening then.’
    â€˜Bless you, sir, I’m not frightened.’
    â€˜I am.’ Sharpe grinned, then looked to his right and saw that Frederickson’s men were so far unscathed. Frederickson had taken his Riflemen closer to the enemy, which had been a shrewd move for the Greenjackets made a small and seemingly negligible target compared to the long and cumbersome column of redcoats. The French were firing over the Riflemen’s heads.
    A cavalry officer galloped past Frederickson’s men towards the head of Beresford’s column. Sharpe recognized the man as one of Wellington’s aides, and assumed from his haste that he carried an urgent message. A clue to the message came when the ridge’s northern end suddenly exploded with cannon fire. Sharpe twisted in his saddle and saw that the French had unmasked a dozen batteries that were hammering their missiles down the hill at the attacking Spaniards.
    The Lieutenant frowned. ‘I thought we were supposed to attack