Sharpe's Rifles Read Free Page B

lads, the perils of drink?”
    It was not much of a joke, merely the imitation of a preacher who had once lectured the

Battalion against the evils of liquor, but it made the Riflemen smile. Their lips might be

cracked and bloody with the cold, but a smile was still better than despair.
    The redcoat, one of the drunks abandoned in the last village, seemed to flap a feeble hand

towards the rearguard. Some instinct had awoken and driven him onto the road and kept him

travelling westwards towards safety. He stumbled past the flensed and frozen carcass of a horse,

then tried to run.
    “Ware cavalry!” the new Lieutenant shouted.
    “Rifles!” Captain Murray called, “present!”
    Rags were snatched from rifle locks. Men’s hands, though numb with the cold, moved

quickly.
    Because, in the white mist of sleet and ice, there were other shapes. Horsemen.
    The shapes were grotesque apparitions in the grey rain. Dark shapes. Scabbards, cloaks, plumes

and carbine holsters made the ragged outlines of French cavalry. Dragoons.
    “Steady, lads, steady!” Captain Murray’s voice was calm. The new Lieutenant had gone to the

company’s left flank where his mule was hobbled.
    The redcoat twisted off the road, jumped a frozen ditch, then screamed like a pig in a

slaughteryard. A Dragoon had caught the man, and the long straight sword sliced down to open his

face from brow to chin. Blood speckled the frosted earth. Another horseman, riding from the other

flank, hissed his steel blade to cut into the fugitive’s scalp. The drunken redcoat fell to his

knees, crying, and the Dragoons rode over him and spurred towards the two companies which barred

the road. The small stream would be no obstacle to their charge.
    ‘Serrez! Serrez!“ The French word of command came clear to the Riflemen. It meant ’close up!”

The Dragoons bunched, booted knee to booted knee, and the new Lieutenant had time to see the odd

pigtails which framed their faces before Captain Murray shouted the order to fire.
    Perhaps eighty of the rifles fired. The rest were too damp, but eighty bullets, at less than a

hundred yards, shattered the single squadron into a maelstrom of floundering horses, falling men,

and panic. The scream of a dying horse flayed the cold day.
    “Reload!”
    Sergeant Williams was on the right flank of Murray’s company. He seized one of the damp rifles

which had not fired, scooped the wet sludge from its pan, and loaded it with dry powder from his

horn. “Pick your targets! Fire as you will!”
    The new Lieutenant peered through the dirty grey smoke to find an enemy officer. He saw a

horseman shouting at the broken cavalry. He aimed, and the rifle bruised his shoulder as he

fired. He thought he saw the Frenchman fall, but could not be sure. A riderless horse galloped

away from the road with blood dripping from its saddle-cloth.
    More rifles fired. Their flames spat two feet clear of the muzzles. The French had scattered,

using the sleet as a screen to blur the Riflemen’s aim. Their first charge, designed only to

discover what quality of rearguard faced them, had failed, and now they were content to harass

the greenjackets from a distance.
    The two companies that had retreated westwards under Dunnett had formed now. A whistle blew,

telling Murray that he could safely fall back. The French beyond the bridge opened a ragged and

inaccurate fire with their short-barrelled carbines. They fired from the saddle, making it even

less likely that their bullets would find a mark.
    “Retire!” Murray shouted.
    A few rifles spat a last time, then the men turned and scrambled up the road. They forgot

their hunger and desperate tiredness; fear gave them speed, and they ran towards the two formed

companies who could hold another French charge at bay. For the next few minutes it would be a cat

and mouse game between tired cavalry and cold Riflemen, until either the French abandoned the

effort,