Sharpe 3-Book Collection 5: Sharpe's Company, Sharpe's Sword, Sharpe's Enemy by Bernard Cornwell Read Free Book Online Page A

burning and men shouted for help from its upper windows. On the pavement outside women screamed, pointing at their trapped men, but the women were scooped up by redcoats and carried shrieking into an alley. Nearby a shop was being looted. Loaves and hams were slung from the door, to be caught on outstretched bayonets, and Sharpe could see the flicker of flame deep inside the building.
    Some troops had kept their discipline and followed their officers in futile attempts to stop the riot. One horseman rode at a group of drunks, and flailing down with a scabbarded sword, split the group apart, and rode out with a young girl, screaming, clinging to his saddle. The horseman took the girl to a growing huddle of women, sheltered by sober troops, and turned his horse back into the melee. Shrieks and screams, laughter and tears, the sound of victory.
    Watching it all, in silent awe, the survivors of the French garrison had gathered in the centre of the plaza to surrender. They were mostly still armed, but submitted patiently to the British troops who systematically worked their way down the loser’s ranks and pillaged them. Some women clung to their French husbands or lovers, and those women were left alone. No one was taking revenge on the French. The fight had been short and there was little ill will. Sharpe had heard a suggestion, floating as a rumour before the assault, that all surviving Frenchmen were to be massacred, not as revenge, but as a warning to the garrison at Badajoz what to expect if they chose to resist in their larger fortress. It was no more than a rumour. These French, silent in the midst of rampage, would be marched into Portugal, over the winter roads to Oporto, and then back by ships to the foetid prison hulks or even the brand new prison, built for prisoners of war, in the bleakness of Dartmoor.
    ‘Good God.’ Major Forrest’s eyes widened as he stared at the rioting troops. ‘They’re animals! Just animals!’
    Sharpe said nothing. There were few rewards for a soldier. The pay would make no man rich, and the battlefields that yielded booty were few and far between. A siege was the hardest fighting and soldiers had always regarded victory in a breach as reason for losing all discipline and taking their reward from the conquered fortress. And if the fortress was a city, so much the more loot, and if the inhabitants of the city were your allies, then that was bad luck; they were in the wrong place, at the wrong time. Life had always been like that, and always would, because this was ancient custom, soldiers’ custom. In truth Ciudad Rodrigo was not suffering much. There were, to Sharpe’s eyes, plenty of sober, disciplined troops who had not joined the riot and who would, by morning, have swept up the drunks, disposed of the corpses, and the city’s ordeal would soon end in alcoholic exhaustion. He looked round, trying to identify a hospital.
    ‘Sir! Sir!’ Sharpe turned. It was Robert Knowles, who had been his Lieutenant till the previous year, but was now a Captain himself. The ‘sir’ was pure habit. ‘How are you?’ Knowles smiled in delight. He wore the uniform of his new Regiment. Sharpe gestured at Lawford’s body and the young Captain’s face fell. ‘How?’
    ‘A mine.’
    ‘Christ! Will he live?’
    ‘God knows. We need a hospital.’
    ‘This way.’ Knowles had entered the town through the smaller breach, attacked by the Light Division, and he led the party north, through the crowds, and into a narrow street. ‘I passed it on the way here. A convent. Crauford’s there.’
    ‘Wounded?’ Sharpe had thought Black Bob Crauford to be indestructible. The General of the Light Division was the toughest man in the army.
    Knowles nodded. ‘Shot. It’s bad. They don’t think he’ll live. There.’ He pointed to a big, stone building which was topped by a cross and fronted by an arched cloister lit by bracketed torches. Wounded men were lying outside, tended by friends, while screams