Sharpe's Enemy Read Online Free PDF Page B

artillerymen.
    Harper, his indignation at the massacre temporarily forgotten, was laughing.
    ‘Run, you idiots!’
    Horses bolted, men panicked, and the sound grew louder, a thunderbolt from the December sky, and Gilliland’s shrill voice was shrieking confusion at his men. The artillerymen dived to the earth, hands over their heads, and the noise grew and suddenly crashed into nothing as the solid six-pound shot of the twelve pound rocket buried itself in the soil. The stick quivered above it. For a second the rocket propellant still flamed hungrily at the cylinder’s base, then it died and there were only flickering blue flames licking at the stick.
    Harper wiped his eyes. ‘God save Ireland!’
    ‘The others?’ Sharpe was looking upfield.
    Sergeant Huckfield shook his head. ‘All over the place, sir. Nearest to the target area was probably thirty yards.’ He licked the pencil and made a note in the book he was carrying, then shrugged. ‘About average, sir.’
    Which was, sadly for Gilliland, true. The rockets seemed to have a mind of their own once they were in motion. As Lieutenant Harry Price had said, they were superb for frightening horses so long as no one cared which horses were frightened, French or British.
    Sharpe walked Captain Gilliland up the valley among the smoking remains of his missiles. The air was bitter with powder smoke. The notebook said it all, the rockets were a failure.
    Gilliland, a small, young man, his face thin but lit with a fanatical passion for his weapon, pleaded with Sharpe. Sharpe had heard all the arguments before. He half listened, the other part of his mind sympathetic to Gilliland’s desperate eagerness to be part of the 1813 campaign. This year was ending sourly. After the great victories of Ciudad Rodrigo, Badajoz and Salamanca the campaign had ground to a halt before the French fortress of Burgos. The autumn had seen a British retreat back to Portugal, back to the foodstocks that would keep an army alive through the winter, and the retreat had been hard. Some fool had sent the army’s supplies by a different road so that the troops slogged westward, through pouring rain, hungry and angry. Discipline had broken down. Men had been hung by the roadside for looting. Sharpe had stripped two drunks stark naked and left them to the mercies of the pursuing French. No man in the South Essex became drunk after that and it was one of the few Battalions that had marched back into Portugal in good order. Next year they would avenge that retreat and for the first time the armies of the Peninsula would march under one General. Wellington was head now of the British, the Portuguese and the Spanish armies, and Gilliland, pleading with Sharpe, wanted to be part of the victories that unity seemed to promise. Sharpe cut the speech short. ‘But they don’t hit anything, Captain. You can’t make them accurate.’
    Gilliland nodded, shrugged, shook his head, flapped his hands in impotence, then turned again to Sharpe. ‘Sir? You once said a frightened enemy is already half beaten, yes?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Think of what these will do to an enemy! They’re terrifying!’
    ‘As your men just found out.’
    Gilliland shook his head in exasperation. ‘There’s always a rogue rocket or two, sir. But think of it! An enemy that’s never seen them? Suddenly the flames, the noise! Think, sir!’
    Sharpe thought. He was required to test these rockets, test them thoroughly, and he had done that in four hard days work. They had started the rockets at their full range of two thousand yards and quickly brought the range down, down to just three hundred yards and still the missiles were hopelessly inaccurate. And yet! Sharpe smiled to himself. What was the effect on a man who had never been exposed to them? He looked at the sky. Midday. He had hoped for an easy afternoon before going to see the performance of Hamlet that the officers of the Light Division were staging in a barn outside the town, but