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swept away. He could hear the

shrieks.
    “God save Ireland,” Harper said again and made the sign of the cross.
    The central hundred feet of the bridge were now under water. Those hundred feet had been

swept clear of people, but more were being forced into the gap that suddenly churned white

as the drawbridge was sheared away from the rest of the bridge by the river’s pressure. The

great span of the bridge reared up black, turned over and was swept seawards, and now there was

no bridge across the Douro, but the people on the northern bank still did not know the roadway

was cut and so they kept pushing and bullying their way onto the sagging bridge and those in

front could not hold them back and instead were inexorably pushed into the broken gap where

the white water seethed on the bridge’s shattered ends. The cries of the crowd grew louder,

and the sound only increased the panic so that more and more people struggled toward the

place where the refugees drowned. Gun smoke, driven by an errant gust of wind, dipped into the

gorge and whirled above the bridge’s broken center where desperate people thrashed at the

water as they were swept downstream. Gulls screamed and wheeled. Some Portuguese troops were

now trying to hold the French in the streets of the city, but it was a hopeless endeavor.

They were outnumbered, the enemy had the high ground, and more and more French forces were

coming down the hill. The screams of the fugitives on the bridge were like the sound of the

doomed on the Day of Judgment, the cannonballs were booming overhead, the streets of the

city were ringing with musket shots, hooves were echoing from house walls and flames were

crackling in buildings broken apart by cannon fire.
    “Those wee children,” Harper said, “God help them.” The orphans, in their dun uniforms,

were being pushed into the river. “There’s got to be a bloody boat!”
    But the men manning the barges had rowed themselves to the south bank and abandoned their

craft and so there were no boats to rescue the drowning, just horror in a cold gray river and

a line of small heads being swept downstream in the fretting waves and there was nothing

Sharpe could do. He could not reach the bridge and though he shouted at folk to abandon the

crossing they did not understand English. Musket balls were necking the river now and some

were striking the fugitives on the broken bridge.
    “What the hell can we do?” Harper asked.
    “Nothing,” Sharpe said harshly, “except get out of here.” He turned his back on the dying

crowd and led his men eastward down the river wharf. Scores of other people were doing the

same thing, gambling that the French would not yet have captured the city’s inland suburbs.

The sound of musketry was constant in the streets and the Portuguese guns across the river

were now firing at the French in the lower streets so that the hammering of the big guns was

punctuated by the noise of breaking masonry and splintering rafters.
    Sharpe paused where the wharf ended to make sure all his men were there and he looked back at

the bridge to see that so many folk had been forced off its end that the bodies were now jammed

in the gap and the water was piling up behind them and foaming white across their heads. He

saw a blue-coated Portuguese soldier step on those heads to reach the barge on which the

drawbridge had been mounted. Others followed him, skipping over the drowning and the dead.

Sharpe was far enough away that he could no longer hear the screams.
    “What happened?” Dodd, usually the quietest of Sharpe’s men, asked.
    “God was looking the other way,” Sharpe said and looked at Harper. “All here?”
    “All present, sir,” Harper said. The big Ulsterman looked as if he had been weeping.

“Those poor wee children,” he said resentfully.
    “There was nothing we could do,” Sharpe said curtly, and that was true, though the truth of