Sharpe's Havoc by Bernard Cornwell Read Free Book Online

he saw the dragoons twisting away from the barricade. Was he dead? Dreaming?

Concussed and imagining things? But then he heard the roar of triumph from his men and he

knew he was not dreaming. The enemy really had turned away and Sharpe was going to live and

his men would not have to march as prisoners to France.
    He heard the firing then, the stuttering chatter of muskets and realized that the

dragoons had been attacked from their rear. There was powder smoke hanging thick between the

houses that edged the road, and more coming from an orchard halfway up the hill on which the

great white flat-topped block of a building stood, and then Sharpe was at the barricade and he

leaped up onto the first skiff, his foot half sticking in some new tar that had been smeared on

its lower hull. The dragoons were facing away from him, shooting up at the windows, but then

a green-coated man turned and saw Sharpe and shouted a warning. An officer came from the

door of the house beside the river and Sharpe, jumping down from the boat, skewered the man’s

shoulder with his big sword, then shoved him hard against the limewashed wall as the dragoon

who had shouted the warning fired at him. The ball plucked at Sharpe’s heavy pack, then Sharpe

kneed the officer in the groin and turned on the man who had fired at him. That man was going

backward mouthing “non, non,” and Sharpe slammed the sword against his head, drawing blood but

doing more damage with the blade’s sheer weight so that the dazed dragoon fell and was

trampled by riflemen swarming over the low barricade. They were screaming slaughter, deaf

to Harper’s shout to give the dragoons a volley.
    Maybe three rifles fired, but the rest of the men kept charging to take their sword

bayonets to an enemy that could not stand against an attack from front and back. The dragoons

had been ambushed by troops coming from a building some fifty yards down the road, troops who

had been hidden in the building and in the garden behind, and the French were now being

attacked from both sides. The small space between the houses was veiled in powder smoke, loud

with screams and the echo of shots, stinking of blood, and Sharpe’s men were fighting with a

ferocity that both astonished and appalled the French. They were dragoons, schooled to

fight with big swords from horseback, and they were not ready for this bloody brawl on foot with

riflemen hardened by years of tavern fights and barrack-room conflicts. The men in

rifle-green jackets were murderous in close combat and the surviving dragoons fled back

to a grassy space on the river bank where their horses were picketed and Sharpe roared at his

men to keep going eastward. “Let them go!” he shouted. “Drop ‘em! Drop ‘em!” The last four

words were those used in the rat pit, the instruction shouted to a terrier trying to kill a

rat that was already dead. “Drop ‘em! Keep going!” There was French infantry close behind,

there were more cavalrymen in Oporto and Sharpe’s priority now was to get as far away from

the city as he possibly could. “Sergeant!”
    “I hear you, sir!” Harper shouted and he waded down the alley and hauled Rifleman Tongue

away from a Frenchman. “Come on, Isaiah! Move your bloody bones!”
    “I’m killing the bastard, Sergeant, I’m killing the bastard!”
    “The bastard’s already dead! Now move!” A brace of carbine bullets rattled in the

alleyway. A woman screamed incessantly in one of the nearby houses. A fleeing dragoon

stumbled over a pile of woven wicker fish traps and sprawled in the house’s backyard where

another Frenchman was lying among a pile of drying washing that he had pulled from a line

as he died. The white sheets were red with his blood. Gataker aimed at a dragoon officer who

had managed to mount his horse, but Harper pulled him away. “Keep running! Keep running!”
    Then there was a swarm of blue uniforms to