Sharpe’s Company: The Siege of Badajoz, January to April 1812
Captain Richard Sharpe has to lead the attack on the terrible fortress.It is a hard winter. For Richard Sharpe it is the worst he can remember. He has lost command to a man who could buy the promotion Sharpe covets. His oldest enemy, the ruthless and indestructible Hakeswill, joins the regiment and he is a man with a mission to ruin Sharpe.But Sharpe is determined to change his luck. The only way – a desperate choice – is to volunteer the Forlorn Hope, to lead the attack on the impregnable fortress town of Badajoz, a road to almost certain death or, just possibly, to heroic glory.Soldier, hero, rogue – Sharpe is the man you always want on your side. Born in poverty, he joined the army to escape jail and climbed the ranks by sheer brutal courage. He knows no other family than the regiment of the 95th Rifles whose green jacket he proudly wears.
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SHARPEâS
COMPANY
Richard Sharpe and the Siege of Badajoz,
January to April 1812
BERNARD CORNWELL
Copyright
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by Collins 1982
Previously published in paperback by Fontana 1983
Reprinted eleven times
Copyright © Rifleman Productions Ltd 1982
Bernard Cornwell asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is a work of fiction.
The incidents and some of the characters portrayed in it, while based on real historical events and figures, are the work of the authorâs imagination.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Source ISBN: 9780007276233
Ebook Edition © March 2012 ISBN: 9780007334551 Version: 2018-12-05
Sharpeâs Company is for the Harper family, Charlie and Marie, Patrick, Donna and Terry, with affection and gratitude
âBrilliant! Sharpe is a great creationâ
Daily Mirror
âNow thou art come unto a feast of deathâ
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
HENRY VI, PART I, ACT 4, SCENE 5.
Table of Contents
Part Two: FebruaryâMarch 1812
Part Three: St Patrickâs Day, March 17th to Easter Sunday, March 29th 1812
Part Four: Saturday, April 4th to Monday, April 6th 1812
The SHARPE Series (in chronological order)
CHAPTER ONE
A pale horse seen a mile away at sunrise means the night is over. Sentries can relax, battalions stand down, because the moment for a surprise dawn attack has passed.
But not on this day. A grey horse would hardly have been visible at a hundred paces, let alone a mile, and the dawn was shredded with dirty cannon smoke that melded with the snow-clouds. Only one living thing moved in the grey space between the British and French lines; a small, dark bird that hopped busily in the snow. Captain Richard Sharpe, huddled in his greatcoat, watched the bird and willed it to fly away. Move, you bastard! Fly! He hated the superstition in himself. He had spotted the tiny bird and, quite suddenly and unbidden, the thought had come to him that unless the bird took wing within thirty seconds, then the day would end in disaster.
He counted. Nineteen, twenty, and still the damned bird hopped in the snow. He could not tell what kind of bird it was. Sergeant Harper would know, of course, the huge Irish sergeant knew all the birds, but knowing what kind of bird it was would not help. Move! Twenty-four, twenty-five, and in desperation he bundled a crude snowball and skittered it down the slope so that the small bird, startled, sprang up into the skeins of smoke with a couple of seconds to spare. A man must sometimes make his own luck.
God! But it was cold! It was all right for the French. They were behind the vast defences of Ciudad Rodrigo, sheltered in the townâs houses and warmed by wide hearths, but the British and Portuguese troops were in the open. They slept by vast fires that died in the night and yesterday, at dawn, four Portuguese sentries had been discovered frozen, their greatcoats iced to the ground, dead by the river. Someone had tipped them in, breaking the Aguedaâs thin ice, because no one wanted to dig graves. The army had taken its fill of digging; for twelve days they had done nothing else; batteries, parallels, saps and trenches, and they never wanted to dig again. They wanted to fight. They wanted to carry their long bayonets up the glacis of Ciudad Rodrigo, to go into the breach, to kill the French, and take those fires and houses for themselves. They wanted to be warm.
Sharpe, Captain of the South Essexâs Light Company, lay in the snow and stared through his telescope at the largest breach. He could not see much. Even from the hillside, five hundred yards from the town, the snow-covered slope of the glacis hid all but the top few feet of Ciudad Rodrigoâs main wall. He could see that the British guns had done damage and knew that the stones and rubble must have cascaded into the hidden ditch to make a crude ramp, perhaps a hundred feet wide, up which the attackers must climb to get into the heart of the fortress town. He wished he could see beyond the breach to the alleyways at the foot of the shot-scarred church tower that was so close to the walls. The French would be busy there, building new defences, siting fresh cannon, so that when the attack burst over the rubbled mound of the breach it would be met with precisely planned horror, flame and grapeshot, death in the night.
