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

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      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. СКАЧАТЬ