Sharpe's Fortress Read Online Free PDF Page B

business."
    “Waste of time being an ensign,” Sharpe said.
    “Nonsense! An ensign is merely a colonel in the making,” Venables said.
    “Our duty, Richard, is to be decorative and stay alive long enough to be promoted. But

    no one expects us to be useful! Good God! A junior officer being useful? That'll be the

    day.” Venables gave a hoot of laughter. He was a bumptious, vain youth, but one of the few

    officers in the 74th who offered Sharpe companionship.
    “Did you hear a new draft has come to Madras?” he asked.
    “Urquhart told me.”
    “Fresh men. New officers. You won't be junior any more.”
    Sharpe shook his head.
    “Depends on the date the new men were commissioned, doesn't it?”
    "Suppose it does. Quite right. And they must have sailed from Britain long before you got

    the jump up, eh? So you'll still be the mess baby.
    Bad luck, old fellow."
    Old fellow? Quite right, Sharpe thought. He was old. Probably ten years older than

    Venables, though Sharpe was not exactly sure for no one had ever bothered to note down his

    birth date. Ensigns were youths and Sharpe was a man.
    “Whoah!” Venables shouted in delight and Sharpe looked up to see that a round shot had

    struck the edge of an irrigation canal and bounced vertically upwards in a shower of

    soil. Tig-ears says he once saw two cannonballs collide in mid-air," Venables said.
    “Well, he didn't actually see it, of course, but he heard it. He says they suddenly

    appeared in the sky. Bang! Then flopped down.”
    “They'd have shattered and broken up,” Sharpe said.
    “Not according to Pig-ears,” Venables insisted.
    “He says they flattened each other.” A shell exploded ahead of the company, whistling

    scraps of iron casing overhead. No one was hurt and the files stepped round the smoking

    fragments. Venables stooped and plucked up a scrap, juggling it because of the heat.
    “Like to have keepsakes,” he explained, slipping the piece of iron into a pouch.
    “I'll send it home for my sisters. Why don't our guns stop and fire?”
    “Still too far away,” Sharpe said. The advancing line still had half a mile to go and,

    while the six-pounders could fire at that distance, the gunners must have decided to get

    really close so that their shots could not miss. Get close, that was what Colonel

    McCandless had always told Sharpe. It was the secret of battle. Get close before you

    start slaughtering.
    A round shot struck a file in seven company. It was on its first graze, still

    travelling at blistering speed, and the two men of the file were whipped backwards in a

    spray of mingling blood.
    “Jesus,” Venables said in awe.
    “Jesus!” The corpses were mixed together, a jumble of splintered bones, tangled

    entrails and broken weapons. A corporal, one of the file closers stooped to extricate the

    men's pouches and haversacks from the scattered offal.
    “Two more names in the church porch,” Venables remarked.
    “Who were they, Corporal?”
    “The McFadden brothers, sir.” The Corporal had to shout to be heard over the roar of

    the Mahratta guns.
    “Poor bastards,” Venables said.
    “Still, there are six more. A fecund lady, Rosie McFadden.”
    Sharpe wondered what fecund meant, then decided he could guess.
    Venables, for all his air of carelessness, was looking slightly pale as though the

    sight of the churned corpses had sickened him. This was his first battle, for he had been

    sick with the Malabar Itch during Assaye, but the Ensign was forever explaining that he

    could not be upset by the sight of blood because, from his earliest days, he had assisted

    his father who was an Edinburgh surgeon, but now he suddenly turned aside, bent over and

    vomited. Sharpe kept stolidly walking.
    Some of the men turned at the sound of Venables's retching.
    “Eyes front!” Sharpe snarled.
    Sergeant Colquhoun gave Sharpe a resentful look. The Sergeant believed that any order

    that did not come from himself or from Captain