turned back. ‘The poor bastards will still need a Forlorn Hope.’
‘And there has to be a bloody fool to lead it, I suppose, and you’re proving a fool! For God’s sake, Richard, why do you want the Hope?’
Sharpe’s anger flared. ‘Because it’s better than this humiliation! I’m a soldier, not a bloody clerk! I fetch bloody forage, count bloody shovels, and take punishment drills. It’s yes, sir, no, sir, can I dig your latrine, sir, and it’s not bloody soldiering!’
Hogan glared at him. ‘It is bloody soldiering! What the hell else do you think soldiering is?’ The two men were facing each other across the mud. ‘Do you think we can win a war without forage? Or without shovels? Or, God help us, without latrines? That is soldiering! Just because you’ve been allowed to swan about like a bloody pirate for years doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take your turn at the real work.’
‘Listen, sir.’ Sharpe was close to shouting. ‘When they tell us to climb those bloody walls, you’ll be glad there are some bloody pirates in the ditch and not just bloody clerks!’
‘And what will you do when there are no more wars to fight?’
‘Start another bloody one.’ Sharpe began to laugh. ‘Sir.’
‘If you survive this one.’ Hogan shook his head, his anger dying as quickly as it had flared. ‘Good God, man! Your woman’s inside. And your child.’
‘I know.’ Sharpe shrugged. ‘But I want the Hope.’
‘You’ll die.’
‘Ask Wellington for me.’
The Irishman frowned. ‘You’re just hurting in your pride, that’s all. In two months, it will be a bad dream, I promise.’
‘Maybe. I still want the Hope.’
‘You’re a stubborn, bloody fool.’
Sharpe laughed again. ‘I know. Colonel Windham says I need humility.’
‘He’s right. It’s a wonder any of us like you at all, but we do.’ He shrugged. ‘I’ll talk to the General for you, but I’m making no promises.’ He gathered the reins into his hand. ‘Would you give me a leg up? If it’s not beneath your dignity.’
Sharpe grinned, heaved the Major on to his horse. ‘You’ll ask him for me?’
‘I said I’d talk to him, didn’t I? It’s not his decision, you know that. It belongs to the General of the attacking Division.’
‘But they listen to Wellington.’
‘Aye, that’s true.’ Hogan pulled on the reins, and then checked himself. ‘You know what tomorrow is?’
‘No.’
‘Tuesday, March the seventeenth.’
‘So?’ Sharpe shrugged.
Hogan laughed. ‘You’re a heathen; an unrepentant, doomed heathen, so you are. St Patrick’s Day. Ireland’s day. Give Sergeant Harper a bottle of rum for being a good Catholic.’
Sharpe grinned. ‘I will.’
Hogan watched the South Essex break up step as they marched over the bridge, followed by Sharpe and his raggletaggle of women, children, servants, and mules. Hogan was saddened. He counted the tall Rifleman as a friend. Perhaps Sharpe was arrogant, but Hogan, along with all the engineering in his head, kept more than a little of Shakespeare. In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man as modest stillness and humility. But this was not peace, this was a horrid campaign and tomorrow, St Patrick’s Day, the army would start digging towards Badajoz. Hogan knew that stillness and humility would not capture the fortress. Time might, but Wellington would not give them time. The General was worried that the French field armies, bigger than the British, might march to the rescue. Badajoz must be taken swiftly, paid for in blood, and the assault would come soon, too soon, perhaps even before Lent was over. Hogan did not relish the prospect. The wall could be closed up with the English dead.
He had promised he would talk to Wellington, and so he would, but not as Sharpe had hoped. Hogan would do a friend’s duty. He would ask the General, if it were possible, that Sharpe’s request should be refused. He would save Sharpe’s life. It was, after all, the very least he could do for a friend.
CHAPTER TWELVE
If a man could have found a new-fangled hot air balloon and flown it over Badajoz, he would have looked down at a city shaped like the quarter segment of a cogged wheel. The castle, ancient stone on rock, was the giant axle boss. The north and east walls were spokes, leaving the axle at right angles to each other, while the south and west walls joined in a long, rough curve that was studded with seven huge cogs.
It was impossible to attack from the north. The city was built on the bank of the River Guadiana, wider at Badajoz than the Thames at Westminister, and the only approach lay across the long, ancient stone bridge. Every yard of the bridge was covered by the guns mounted on the city’s north wall while, across the river, the bridge entrance was guarded by three outlying forts. The largest, San Cristobal, could house more than two regiments. The French were sure that there could be no attack from the north.
The east wall, the other spoke, was more vulnerable. At its northern end was the castle, high and huge, a fortress that had dominated the landscape for centuries, but south of the castle, the city wall was on lower ground and faced towards a hill. The French knew the danger and, just where the castle hill dropped steeply to the lower city, they had dammed the Rivillas stream. Now the vulnerable east wall was protected by a sheet of flood water, as wide as the river to the north, and running far to the south of the city. As Hogan had said to Sharpe; only the navy could attack across the new lake, unless the dam could be blown up and the lake drained.
Which left the huge curve of the south and west walls, a curve nearly a mile long that had no convenient river or stream to offer protection. Instead there were the cogs on the wheel’s rim, the seven vast bastions that jutted out from the city wall, each bastion the size of a small castle. San Vincente was the most northerly, built beside the river at the angle of the north and west walls, and from the San Vincente the bastions ran south and west till they met the flooded Rivillas. San Jose, Santiago, San Juan, San Roque, Santa Maria, and so to the Trinidad. The saints, the mother of Christ, and the Holy Trinity, each with more than a score of guns, to protect a city.
The bastions were not the only protection to the great curve of walls. First came the glacis, the earth slope that deflected the round shot and bounced it high over the defences, and then the huge ditch. The drop from the glacis to the ditch bottom was nowhere less than twenty feet and, once in the ditch, the real problems began. The bastions would flank any attack, pouring in their plunging fire, and there were ravelins in the great dry moat. The ravelins were like great, triangular, fake walls that split an attack and, in darkness, could deceive men into thinking they had reached the real wall. Any man who climbed a ravelin would be swept off by carefully aimed cannon. From the ditch the walls rose fifty feet and on their wide parapets they mounted guns every five yards.
Badajoz was no
