Sharpe 3-Book Collection 7: Sharpe's Revenge, Sharpe's Waterloo, Sharpe's Devil Read Online Free PDF

course the Peer knew about it,’ Major-General Nairn was speaking of the duel, ‘but between you and me I don’t think he was unhappy about it. The Navy’s been rather irritating him lately.’
    ‘I expected to be arrested,’ Sharpe said.
    ‘If you’d have killed the bugger, you would have been. Even Wellington can’t absolutely ignore a deceased Naval Captain, but it was clever of you just to crease the man’s bum.’ Nairn gave a joyful bark of laughter at the thought of Bampfylde’s wound.
    ‘I was trying to kill him,’ Sharpe confessed.
    ‘It was much cleverer of you to give him a sore arse. And let me say how very good it is to see you, my dear Sharpe. I trust Jane is well?’
    ‘Indeed, sir.’
    Sharpe’s tone caused Nairn to give the Rifleman an amused look. ‘Do I detect that you are in marital bad odour, Sharpe?’
    ‘I stink, sir.’
    It had taken Sharpe three days to catch up with the advancing army, and another half-day to find Nairn, whose brigade was on the left flank of the advance. Sharpe had eventually discovered the Scotsman on a hilltop above a ford which the British had captured that morning and through which a whole Division now marched. The French were only visible as a few retreating squadrons of cavalry far to the east, though a battery of enemy artillery occasionally fired from a copse of trees about a mile beyond the river.
    ‘You brought Frederickson?’ Nairn now asked.
    ‘His men are at the foot of the hill.’
    ‘Creased his bum!’ Nairn laughed again. ‘Can I assume from your marital odour that Jane is not with you?’
    ‘She sailed for home two days ago, sir.’
    ‘Best place for a woman. I never really did approve of officers carrying wives around like so much baggage. No offence, of course, Jane’s a lovely girl, but she’s still baggage to an army. Hello! Christ!’ These last words were a greeting for a French cannonball that had thumped across the river and bounced uphill to force Nairn into a frantic evasion that almost spilled him from his saddle. The Scotsman calmed his horse, then gestured over the river. ‘You can see what’s happening, Sharpe. The bloody French try to stop us at every river, and we just outflank the buggers and keep moving.’ At the foot of the slope Nairn’s brigade patiently waited their turn to cross the ford. The brigade was composed of one Highland battalion and two English county battalions.
    ‘What exactly do you want me to do?’ Sharpe asked Nairn.
    ‘Damned if I know. Enjoy yourself. I am!’ And indeed the Scotsman, who had endured years of dreary staff work for Wellington, revelled in his new command. Nairn’s only regret was that so far there had been no battle in which he could demonstrate how foolish Wellington had been in not giving him a brigade much earlier. ‘God damn it, Richard, there’s not much of the war left. I want one crack at the garlic-reekers.’
    Sharpe might have been ordered to enjoy himself, but he soon discovered that being chief of staff to a brigade entailed enormously long days and seemingly endless problems. He worked wherever Nairn’s headquarters happened to be; sometimes in a sequestrated farmhouse, but more usually in a group of tents pitched wherever the brigade happened to bivouac. Sometimes Sharpe would hear the thump of guns to the east and he would know that a French rearguard was in action, but Sharpe had neither the time, nor the responsibility, to join the fighting. He only knew that every river crossed and every mile of country captured meant more work for the harried staff officers who had to marry men to food, weapons to ammunition, and Divisional Headquarters’ orders to a baser reality.
    It was a salutary job. Sharpe had always expressed a combat soldier’s scorn for most staff officers, believing that such arrogant creatures were overpaid and under-worked, but as Sharpe discovered the problems of organizing a brigade, so he learned that it was his job, rather than