Free Sharpe's Revenge by Bernard Cornwell Page A

Greenjackets had the more accurate, longer-ranged rifle that was slow to reload. The mixture of weapons could be lethal; the rifles killed with precision and were protected by the muskets. The men were scattered now, making a screen to repel the attack of any French skirmishers.
    Yet so far no enemy had threatened the cumbersome advance. Even the ridge’s centre batteries had ceased their speculative firing. Sharpe could see nothing but the empty skyline and a wisp of high cloud. The thin turf on the slope was dryer than the bottom-ground. A hare raced across the advance’s front, then slewed and scampered downhill. A hawk hovered for a few seconds above Taplow’s colours, then slid disdainfully westwards. From beyond the crest came the sound of a French band playing a quick march; the only evidence that a real enemy waited for Beresford’s thin lines.
    The slope steepened and Sharpe’s breath shortened. The enemy’s invisibility seemed ominous. Marshal Soult had been given three hours to observe the preparations for this attack; three hours in which he could prepare a devil’s reception for the three lines that struggled up the ridge. Somewhere ahead of the attack, beyond the empty skyline, the enemy waited with charged barrels and drawn blades. The old game was about to be played once more; the Goddamns against the Crapauds. The game of Crecy and Agincourt, Ramillies and Blenheim. The air was very clear; so clear that when Sharpe turned he could see a woman driving two cows to pasture a half mile beyond the western river. The sight of the woman made Sharpe think of Jane. He knew that he could have accompanied Jane home without any shame, and that even now he could be sitting in England, but instead he was on a French hillside and on the brink of battle’s horror.
    He turned back to the cast just in time to see a redcoat among Frederickson’s flank skirmishers bend double, clutch his belly, and start gasping for breath. At first Sharpe thought the man was winded, then he saw the puff of dirty white smoke higher on the slope. The redcoat toppled backwards, blood drenching his grey breeches. More French skirmishers fired from positions that had been concealed in a tumble of rocks. The enemy would soon be on the flank of the advance unless they were shifted.
    â€˜We’re going to clear those scum out of there!’ Frederickson had seen the danger just as soon as Sharpe. He had a company of redcoats offer rapid fire to keep the enemy subdued while Sergeant Harper led a squad with fixed sword-bayonets in a flanking charge. The Frenchmen did not stay to contest the rocks, but retreated nimbly up towards the empty skyline. One of the retreating Frenchmen was hit in the back by a rifle bullet, and Marcos Hernandez, one of Frederickson’s Spanish Riflemen, grinned with pleasure at his own deadly marksmanship.
    â€˜Cease fire!’ Frederickson called. ‘Well done, lads. Now don’t bunch up! You’re not in love with each other, so spread out!’ Sweet William had taken off his eye-patch and removed his false teeth so that he looked like some monstrous being from the grave. He seemed much happier now that the first shots had been fired. Hernandez reloaded, then scored a line on the butt of his rifle to mark another hated Frenchman killed.
    The surviving French skirmishers ran over the skyline from where, though the source of the noise stayed hidden, came the sudden sound of massed French drums. The instruments rattled the sky. Sharpe had first heard that malicious sound when he was sixteen and he had heard it on unnumbered battlefields since. He knew what it portended. He was listening to the pas de charge, the heartbeat of an Empire and the sound that drove French infantry to the attack.
    â€˜D’you see guns, Sergeant?’ Frederickson shouted to Harper who was some yards further up the slope.
    â€˜Not a one, sir!’
    Then the skyline, as though sown by