Sharpe's Escape by Bernard Cornwell Read Free Book Online Page A

then climbing the low hill to stare up at the British and Portuguese. The gunfire continued. It was not the staccato fire of battle, but desultory shots as the gunners experimented with powder loads and fuse lengths. Too much powder and a shot would scream over the spur to explode somewhere above the stream, while if the fuse was cut too long the shell would land, bounce and come to rest with the fuse still smoking, giving the French time to skip out of the way before the shell exploded. Each detonation was a puff of dirty smoke, surprisingly small, but Sharpe could not see the deadly scraps of broken shell casing hiss away from each blast.
    No more French horses or men were struck. They were well spread out and the shells obstinately fell in the gaps between the small groups of men who looked as carefree as folk out for a walk in a park. They stared up at the ridge, trying to determine where the defenses lay thickest, though it was surely obvious that the places where the two roads reached the summit would be the places to defend. Another score of cavalrymen, some in green coats and some in sky blue, splashed through the stream and spurred up the lower hill. The sun glinted on brass helmets, polished scabbards, stirrups and curb chains. It was, Sharpe thought, as though the French were playing cat and mouse with the sporadic shell fire. He saw a shell burst close by a group of infantrymen, but when the smoke cleared they were all standing and it seemed to him, though they were very far away, that they were laughing. They were confident, he thought, sure they were the best troops in the world, and their survival of the gunfire was a taunt to the defenders on the ridge's top.
    The taunting was evidently too much, for a battalion of brown-jacketed Portuguese light troops appeared on the crest and, scattered in a double skirmish chain, advanced down the ridge's slope towards the spur. They went steadily downhill in two loose lines, one fifty paces behind the other, both spread out, giving a demonstration of how skirmishers went to war. Most troops fought shoulder to shoulder, but skirmishers like Sharpe went ahead of the line and, in the killing ground between the armies, tried to pick off the enemy skirmishers and then kill the officers behind so that when the two armies clashed, dense line against massive column, the enemy was already leaderless. Skirmishers rarely closed ranks. They fought close to the enemy where a bunch of men would make an easy target for enemy gunners, and so the light troops fought in loose formation, in pairs, one man shooting and then reloading as his comrade protected him.
    The French watched the Portuguese come. They showed no alarm, nor did they advance any skirmishers of their own. The shells went on arcing down the slope, their detonations echoing dully from the eastern hills. The vast mass of the French were making their bivouacs, ignoring the small drama on the ridge, but a dozen cavalrymen, seeing easy meat in the scattered Portuguese skirmishers, kicked their horses up the hill.
    By rights the cavalrymen should have decimated the skirmishers. Men in a loose formation were no match for swift cavalry and the French, half of them dragoons and the other half hussars, had drawn their long swords or curved sabers and were anticipating some practice cuts on helpless men. The Portuguese were armed with muskets and rifles, but once the guns were fired there would be no time to reload before the surviving horsemen reached them, and an empty gun was no defense against a dragoon's long blade. The cavalry were curving around to assault the flank of the line, a dozen horsemen approaching four Portuguese on foot, but the ridge was too steep for the horses, which began to labor. The advantage of the cavalry was speed, but the ridge stole their speed so that the horses were struggling and a rifle cracked, the smoke jetting above the grass, and a horse stumbled, twisted away and collapsed. Another two rifles