Free Sharpe's Revenge by Bernard Cornwell Page B

dragon’s teeth, sprouted men.

    â€˜Christ in his Scottish heaven.’ Major-General Nairn, surrounded by his junior aides, sounded disgusted with the enemy. ‘You’d have thought the woollen-headed bastards would have learned by now.’ He sheathed his sword and glowered dour disapproval at the two enemy columns.
    â€˜Learned, sir?’ the young aide, whose first battle this was, asked nervously.
    â€˜You are about to see the God-damned Frogs damned even further.’ Nairn took a watch from his fob pocket and snapped open the lid. ‘Good God! If they’re going to offer battle, then they might as well do it properly!’
    The aide did not understand, but every veteran in the British attack knew what was about to happen and felt relieved because of it. They had climbed in fear of waiting artillery that would have gouged bloody ruin in the three attacking lines. Even more they had feared the conjunction of artillery and cavalry, for the cavalry would have forced the attacking infantry into protective squares that would have made choice targets for the French gunners. Instead they were faced with the oldest French tactic; a counter-attack by columns of massed infantry.
    Two such columns were advancing over the skyline. The two columns were immense formations of crammed soldiers, rank after rank of infantrymen assembled into human battering rams that were aimed at the seemingly fragile British lines. These were the same columns that the Emperor Napoleon had led across a continent to smash his enemies’ armies into broken and panicked mobs, but no such column had ever broken an army led by Wellington.
    â€˜Halt!’ All along the British and Portuguese lines the order was shouted. Sergeants dressed the battalions while the skirmishers readied themselves to beat off the French light troops who, advancing in front of the columns, were supposed to unsettle the British line with random musketry.
    The French light troops offered no threat to Beresford; instead it was the momentum of the two great columns that was supposed to drive his men into chaos. Yet, like Wellington, Beresford had faced too many columns to be worried now. His first line would deal with their threat, while his second and third lines would merely be spectators. That first line stood to attention, muskets grounded, and gazed up the long sloping sward over which the two giant formations marched. The French columns looked irresistible, their weight alone seeming sufficient to drive them through the thin skeins of waiting men. Above the Frenchmen’s heads waved their flags and eagles. In the centre of the formations the drummer boys kept up the pas de charge, pausing only to let the marching men shout ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ between each flurry of drumbeats. The veterans among the waiting British and Portuguese battalions, who had seen it all before, seemed unmoved.
    The skirmishers fell slowly back before the weight of enemy light troops, but they had done their job which was to keep the French skirmish fire off the waiting line. French officers, swords drawn, marched confidently ahead of the columns. Major-General Nairn gazed at the closest column through a telescope, then slammed the tubes shut. ‘Not many moustaches there!’ The old moustached veterans, the backbone of France, were in their graves, and Nairn had seen how young these counter-attacking Frenchmen were. Perhaps that was why Soult had launched them in column, for raw green troops took courage from the sheer closeness of their comrades in the tightly packed mass of men. It was a formation suited to a conscripted, citizen army, but those citizen conscripts were now closing on the professional killers of Britain and Portugal.
    When the columns were eighty paces from Beresford’s forward line, the British and Portuguese officers stirred themselves to give a single laconic order. ‘Present!’
    Four thousand heavy muskets came up in