Sharpe's Rifles Read Free

vacant, their cheeks were sunken, and their eyebrows whitened by frost. Some men

had lost their shakos and wore peasant hats with floppy brims. They looked a beaten, ragtag unit,

but they were still Riflemen and every Baker rifle had an oiled lock and, gripped in its doghead,

a sharp-edged flint.
    Major Dunnett, who commanded this half Battalion, marched them westwards. They had been

marching since Christmas Eve, and now it was a week into January. Always west away from the

victorious French whose overwhelming numbers were swamping Spain, and every day of the march was

a torture of cold and hunger and pain. In some Battalions all discipline had disappeared and the

paths of such units were littered with the bodies of men who had given up hope. Some of the dead

were women; the wives who had been permitted to travel with the army to Spain. Others were

children. The survivors were now so hardened to horror that they could trudge past the frozen

body of a child and feel nothing.
    Yet if the army had been broken on the rack of ice-storms and a frozen wind that cut like a

chasseur’s sabre, there were still some men who marched in good formation and who, when ordered,

turned to keep the French pursuit at bay. Those were the hard men, the good men; the Guards and

the Light Infantry, the elite of Sir John Moore’s army that had marched into the centre of Spain

to cut off Napoleon’s supply roads. They had marched expecting victory, but the Emperor had

turned on them with a savage speed and overwhelming numbers, so now this small British army

retreated towards the ships that would take them home.
    Dunnett’s three hundred Riflemen seemed alone in a frozen wilderness. Somewhere ahead of them

was the bulk of the retreating army, and somewhere behind were the pursuing French, but the

Riflemen’s world was the pack of the man in front, the sleet, their tiredness, and the pain of

bellies cramped by hunger.
    An hour from the village they reached a stream crossed by a stone bridge. British cavalry

waited there with news that some artillery was floundering on a slope two miles ahead. The

cavalry’s commander suggested that Dunnett’s Rifles wait by the bridge. “Give us time to help the

gunners to the ridge, then we’ll come back for you.”
    “How long?” Dunnett asked testily.
    “An hour? No longer.”
    The Riflemen waited. They had done this a score of times in the last two weeks, and doubtless

they would do it a score of times again. They were the sting in the army’s tail. If they were

lucky this day no Frenchman would bother them, but the probability was that, sometime in the next

hour, the enemy vanguard would appear. That vanguard would be cavalry on tired horses. The French

would make a token attack, the Riflemen would fire a couple of volleys; then, because neither

side had an advantage, the French would let the greenjackets trudge on. It was soldiering;

boring, cold, dispiriting, and one or two Riflemen and one or two Frenchmen would die because of

it.
    The Riflemen formed in companies to bar the road west of the bridge. They shivered and stared

east. Sergeants paced behind their ranks. The officers, all of whom had lost their horses to the

cold, stood in front of their companies. No one spoke. Perhaps some of the men dreamed of the

Navy’s ships that were supposed to be waiting for them at the end of this long road, but more

likely their thoughts were of nothing but cold and hunger.
    The Lieutenant who had been made into the Battalion’s Quartermaster wandered aimlessly onto

the stone bridge and stared into the stinging sleet. He was now the closest man to the enemy,

twenty paces ahead of the greenjacketed line, and that piqued Major Warren Dunnett who saw an

Unspoken arrogance in the Lieutenant’s chosen position. “Bugger him.” Dunnett crossed to Captain

Murray’s side.
    “He’s harmless.” Murray spoke with his customary