Sharpe's Havoc Read Online Free PDF

it did not make him feel any better. “Williamson and Tarrant are on a charge,” he told

Harper.
    “Again?”
    “Again,” Sharpe said, and wondered at the idiocy of the two men who would rather have

snatched a drink than escape from the city, even if that drink had meant imprisonment in

France. “Now come on!” He followed the civilian fugitives who, arriving at the place where

the river’s wharf was blocked by the ancient city wall, had turned up an alleyway. The old

wall had been built when men fought in armor and shot at each other with crossbows, and the

lichen-covered stones would not have stood two minutes against a modern cannon and as if to

mark that redundancy the city had knocked great holes in the old ramparts. Sharpe led his men

through one such gap, crossed the remnants of a ditch and then hurried into the wider streets

of the new town beyond the walls.
    “Crapauds!” Hagman warned Sharpe. “Sir! Up the hill!” Sharpe looked to his left and saw a

troop of French cavalry riding to cut off the fugitives. They were dragoons, fifty or more

of them in their green coats and all carrying straight swords and short carbines. They wore

brass helmets that, in wartime, were covered by cloth so the polished metal would not

reflect the sunlight. “Keep running!” Sharpe shouted. The dragoons had not spotted the

riflemen or, if they had, were not seeking a confrontation, but instead spurred on to where

the road skirted a great hill that was topped with a huge white flat-roofed building. A school,

perhaps, or a hospital. The main road ran north of the hill, but another went to the south,

between the hill and the river, and the dragoons were on the bigger road so Sharpe kept to

his right, hoping to escape by the smaller track on the Douro’s bank, but the dragoons at

last saw him and drove their horses across the shoulder of the hill to block the lesser road

where it bordered the river. Sharpe looked back and saw French infantry following the

cavalry. Damn them. Then he saw that still more French troops were pursuing him from the

broken city wall. He could probably outrun the infantry, but the dragoons were already

ahead of him and the first of them were dismounting and making a barricade across the road.

The folk fleeing the city were being headed off and some were climbing to the big white

building while others, in despair, were going back to their houses. The cannon were

fighting their own battle above the river, the French guns trying to match the bombardment

from the big Portuguese battery which had started dozens of fires in the fallen city as the

round shot smashed ovens, hearths and forges. The dark smoke of the burning buildings mingled

with the gray-white smoke of the guns and beneath that smoke, in the valley of drowning

children, Richard Sharpe was trapped.
    Liutenant Colonel James Christopher was neither a lieutenant nor a colonel, though he had

once served as a captain in the Lincolnshire Fencibles and still held that commission. He

had been christened James Augustus Meredith Christopher and throughout his schooldays had

been known as Jam. His father had been a doctor in the small town of Saxilby, a profession

and a place that James Christopher liked to ignore, preferring to remember that his mother

was second cousin to the Earl of Rochford, and it was Rochford’s influence that had taken

Christopher from Cambridge University to the Foreign Office where his command of

languages, his natural suavity and his quick intelligence had ensured a swift rise. He had

been given early responsibilities, introduced to great men and entrusted with

confidences. He was reckoned to be a good prospect, a sound young man whose judgment was

usually reliable, which meant, as often as not, that he merely agreed with his

superiors, but the reputation had led to his present appointment which was a position as

lonely as it was secret. James