Sharpe’s Rifles. Bernard Cornwell

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СКАЧАТЬ on a battlefield, he had been made into an officer. The other officers were wary of the new Lieutenant’s past, fearing that his competence in battle would show up their own inexperience. They need not have worried, for the Colonel had kept the new Lieutenant from the battle-line by making him into the Battalion’s Quartermaster; an appointment based on the principle that any man who had served in the ranks and as a Sergeant would know every trick of the Quartermaster’s criminal trade.

      Abandoning both the drunks and the remaining ammunition to the French, the Quartermaster emerged from the tavern yard. It began to rain; a sleet-cold rain that spat from the east onto the three hundred Riflemen who waited in the village street. These Riflemen were the army’s rearguard; a rearguard dressed in rags like a mockery of soldiers, or like some monstrous army of beggars. Men and officers alike were draped and bundled in whatever scraps of cloth they had begged or stolen on the march, the soles of their boots held in place by knotted twine. Their unshaven faces were wrapped with filthy scarves against the bitter wind. Their eyes were red-rimmed and vacant, their cheeks were sunken, and their eyebrows whitened by frost. Some men had lost their shakos and wore peasant hats with floppy brims. They looked a beaten, ragtag unit, but they were still Riflemen and every Baker rifle had an oiled lock and, gripped in its doghead, a sharp-edged flint.

      Major Dunnett, who commanded this half Battalion, marched them westwards. They had been marching since Christmas Eve, and now it was a week into January. Always west away from the victorious French whose overwhelming numbers were swamping Spain, and every day of the march was a torture of cold and hunger and pain. In some Battalions all discipline had disappeared and the paths of such units were littered with the bodies of men who had given up hope. Some of the dead were women; the wives who had been permitted to travel with the army to Spain. Others were children. The survivors were now so hardened to horror that they could trudge past the frozen body of a child and feel nothing.

      Yet if the army had been broken on the rack of ice-storms and a frozen wind that cut like a chasseur’s sabre, there were still some men who marched in good formation and who, when ordered, turned to keep the French pursuit at bay. Those were the hard men, the good men; the Guards and the Light Infantry, the elite of Sir John Moore’s army that had marched into the centre of Spain to cut off Napoleon’s supply roads. They had marched expecting victory, but the Emperor had turned on them with a savage speed and overwhelming numbers, so now this small British army retreated towards the ships that would take them home.

      Dunnett’s three hundred Riflemen seemed alone in a frozen wilderness. Somewhere ahead of them was the bulk of the retreating army, and somewhere behind were the pursuing French, but the Riflemen’s world was the pack of the man in front, the sleet, their tiredness, and the pain of bellies cramped by hunger.

      An hour from the village they reached a stream crossed by a stone bridge. British cavalry waited there with news that some artillery was floundering on a slope two miles ahead. The cavalry’s commander suggested that Dunnett’s Rifles wait by the bridge. ‘Give us time to help the gunners to the ridge, then we’ll come back for you.’

      ‘How long?’ Dunnett asked testily.

      ‘An hour? No longer.’

      The Riflemen waited. They had done this a score of times in the last two weeks, and doubtless they would do it a score of times again. They were the sting in the army’s tail. If they were lucky this day no Frenchman would bother them, but the probability was that, sometime in the next hour, the enemy vanguard would appear. That vanguard would be cavalry on tired horses. The French would make a token attack, the Riflemen would fire a couple of volleys; then, because neither side had an advantage, the French would let the greenjackets trudge on. It was soldiering; boring, cold, dispiriting, and one or two Riflemen and one or two Frenchmen would die because of it.

      The Riflemen formed in companies to bar the road west of the bridge. They shivered and stared east. Sergeants paced behind their ranks. The officers, all of whom had lost their horses to the cold, stood in front of their companies. No one spoke. Perhaps some of the men dreamed of the Navy’s ships that were supposed to be waiting for them at the end of this long road, but more likely their thoughts were of nothing but cold and hunger.

      The Lieutenant who had been made into the Battalion’s Quartermaster wandered aimlessly onto the stone bridge and stared into the stinging sleet. He was now the closest man to the enemy, twenty paces ahead of the greenjacketed line, and that piqued Major Warren Dunnett who saw an unspoken arrogance in the Lieutenant’s chosen position. ‘Bugger him.’ Dunnett crossed to Captain Murray’s side.

      ‘He’s harmless.’ Murray spoke with his customary mildness.

      ‘He’s a jumped-up bloody nothing.’

      Murray smiled. ‘He’s a damned efficient Quartermaster, Warren. When did your men last have so much ammunition?’

      ‘His job is to arrange my bed for tonight, not loiter here in the hope of proving how well he can fight. Look at him!’ Dunnett, like a man with an itching sore that he could not stop scratching, stared at the Quartermaster. ‘He thinks he’s still in the ranks, doesn’t he? Once a peasant, always one, that’s what I say. Why’s he carrying a rifle?’

      ‘I really couldn’t say.’

      The rifle was the Quartermaster’s eccentricity, and an unfitting one, for a Quartermaster needed lists and ink and quills and tally-sticks, not a weapon. He needed to be able to forage for food or ferret out shelters in apparently overcrowded billets. He needed a nose to smell out rotten beef, scales to weigh ration flour, and stubbornness to resist the depredations of other Quartermasters. He did not need weapons, yet the new Lieutenant always carried a rifle as well as his regulation sabre. The two weapons seemed to be a statement of intent; that he wanted to fight rather than be a Quartermaster, yet to most of the greenjackets the weapons were a rather pathetic pretension carried by a man who, whatever his past, was now nothing more than an ageing Lieutenant.

      Dunnett stamped his cold feet on the road. ‘I’ll send the flank companies back first, Johnny. You can cover.’

      ‘Yes, sir. Do we wait for our horse?’

      ‘Bugger the cavalry.’ Dunnett offered the infantryman’s automatic scorn of the mounted arm. ‘I’m waiting five more minutes. It can’t take this long to clear some bloody guns off the road. Do you see anything, Quartermaster?’ The question was asked mockingly.

      ‘No, sir.’ The Lieutenant took off his shako and pushed a hand through hair that was long, black, and made greasy by days of campaigning. His greatcoat hung open and he wore neither scarf nor gloves. Either he could not afford them, or else he was boasting that he was too tough to need such comforts. That arrogance made Dunnett wish that the new Lieutenant, so eager for a fight, would be cut down by the enemy horsemen.

      Except there were no enemy horsemen in sight. Perhaps the rain and the wind and the God-damned bloody cold had driven the French to shelter in the last village. Or perhaps the drunken women had proved too irresistible a lure. Whichever it was, there were no Frenchmen in sight, just sleet and low clouds driven to turmoil by a freshening wind.

      Major Dunnett swore nervously. The four companies seemed alone in a wilderness of rain and frost, four companies of forgotten soldiers in a lost war, and Dunnett made up his mind that he could wait no longer. ‘We’re going.’

      Whistles blew. The two flank companies turned and, like the walking dead, shambled up the road. The two centre companies stayed at the bridge under Captain Murray’s command. In five minutes or so, when the flank companies had stopped to provide cover, it would be Murray’s turn to withdraw.

      The Riflemen liked Captain John СКАЧАТЬ