Sharpe's Rifles Read Online Free PDF Page A

into his chest.

Still the horsemen came. Their horses stank with saddlesores because they had been ridden too

hard, but they had been trained to this work. A Rifleman’s cheek Was flensed from his face and

his mouth bubbled with blood and saliva. The French grunted as they hacked. This was a

cavalryman’s paradise; broken infantry and firm ground.
    The new Lieutenant still shouted as he climbed. “Rifles! To me! To me! To me!” The chasseur

must have heard him, for he turned his big black horse and spurred towards the Englishman.
    The Lieutenant saw him coming, slung his empty rifle, and drew his sabre. “Come on, you

bastard!”
    The chasseur held his own sabre in his right hand and, to make his killing cut easy, directed

his horse to the left of the Rifleman. The Lieutenant waited to swing his curved blade at the

horse’s mouth. The cut would stop its charge dead, making it rear and twist away. He had seen off

more horsemen than he could remember with such a stroke. The skill lay in the timing, and the

Lieutenant hoped that the horse’s panicked evasion would shake the rider loose. He wanted that

clever chasseur dead.
    A touch of the Frenchman’s spurs seemed to make the horse lunge forward for the killing stroke

and the Lieutenant swung his sabre and saw he had been fooled. The horse checked and swerved in a

manoeuvre which spoke of hours of patient training. The sabre hissed in empty space. The chasseur

was not right-handed but left, and he had changed hands as his horse broke to the right. His

blade glittered as it swept down, aimed at the Rifleman’s neck.
    The Lieutenant had been fooled. He had swung early and into nothing, and he was off balance.

The chasseur, knowing this Englishman was dead, was planning his next kill even before his sabre

stroke went home. He had killed more men than he could remember with this simple trick. Now he

would add a Rifle officer to all the Austrians, Prussians, Russians, and Spaniards who had not

been skilful enough.
    But the chasseur’s sabre did not cut home. With a speed that was astonishing, the Rifleman

managed to recover his blade into the parry. The sabres met with a clash that jarred both men’s

arms. The Lieutenant’s four-guinea blade shattered, but not before it had taken the force from

the Frenchman’s slashing cut.
    The momentum of the chasseur’s horse took him past the Englishman. The Frenchman turned back,

astonished by the parry, and saw him turning to run uphill. For a second he was tempted to

follow, but there were other, easier, targets down the hill. He spurred away.
    The Lieutenant threw away his broken sabre and scrambled towards the low cloud. “Rifles!

Rifles!” Men heard and closed on him. They scrambled uphill together and made a large enough

group to deter the enemy. The Dragoons went for individuals, the men most easily killed, and they

took pleasure in thus avenging all the horsemen who had been put down by rifle bullets, all the

Frenchmen who had jerked and bled their lives away on the long pursuit, and all the jeers that

the Riflemen had sent through the biting air in the last bitter weeks.
    Captain Murray joined the new Lieutenant. “Outfoxed us, by God!” He sounded

surprised.
    The small group of Riflemen reached safety short of the clouds, up where the litter of rocks

made the ground too uneven for the Dragoons to follow. There Murray stopped his men and stared,

appalled, at the carnage beneath.
    The Dragoons rode among the dead and the defeated. Riflemen with slashed faces reeled among

them, others lay motionless until grasping hands turned the dead bodies and began ripping at

pouches and pockets. The Quartermaster watched as Major Dunnett was pulled to his feet and his

uniform searched for plunder. Dunnett was lucky. He was alive and a prisoner. One Rifleman ran

downhill, still trying to escape, and the man in the black coat and white boots rode after him

and,