Sharpe's Skirmish Read Online Free PDF Page A

backwater of the war?
    Or was his instinct, that had served him so well through over fifteen years of fighting, telling him to be careful? "Keep your men here, love,"
    he said to Teresa, "because I think you're going to have frogs to kill."
    He turned and ran towards the firestep that looked down onto the bridge.
    "Sergeant Harper!"
    Harper emerged from the shrine built on the far side of the roadway and blinked up at Sharpe who, standing on the fort parapet, was silhouetted against the sky. "Sir?"
    "My compliments to Major Tubbs, Sergeant, and I want his ox-cart on the bridge. As a barricade, got it? And I want you and twenty riflemen up at that damn farm," he pointed southwards, "and I want it all done now!"
    Teresa put a hand on his green sleeve. "You really think the French are coming here, Richard?"
    "I don't think it, I know it! I know it! I don't know how I know it, but I do. The buggers have slipped round the side gate and are coming in through the back door."
    Major Tubbs, sweating in the day's heat, came lumbering up the stone stairway from the courtyard. "You can't block the bridge, Captain Sharpe!"
    Tubbs protested. "You can't! It's a public thoroughfare."
    "If I had the powder, Major, I'd blow the bloody bridge up."
    Tubbs looked into Sharpe's grim face, then gazed southwards. "But the French aren't coming! Look!"
    The southern landscape was wonderfully peaceful. Poppies fluttered in the breeze that rippled the crops and flickered the pale leaves of the olive groves. There was no smoke rising from burning villages to smear the sky, and no plume of dust kicked up by thousands of boots and hooves. There was just a peaceful summer landscape, basking in Castilian heat. God was in his heaven and all was well in the world. "But they're coming," Sharpe said obstinately.
    "Then why don't we warn Salamanca?" Tubbs asked.
    It was a good question, a damn good question, but Sharpe did not want to articulate his answer. He knew he should warn Salamanca, but he was scared of raising a false alarm. It was only his instinct that contradicted the peaceful appearance of the landscape, and what if he was wrong? Suppose that the garrison at Salamanca marched out half a battalion of redcoats and a battery of field guns, and with them a supply convoy and a squadron of dragoons, and all of it proved a waste? What would they say? That Captain Sharpe, up from the ranks, was an alarmist. He couldn't be trusted. He might be useful enough in a tight corner when there were frogs to be killed, but he was skittery as a virgin in a barrack's town when left to himself. "We don't warn Salamanca," he told Tubbs firmly, "because we can deal with the bastards ourselves."
    "You can?" Tubbs asked dubiously.
    "Have you ever fought a battle, Major?" Sharpe whipped angrily at Tubbs.
    "My dear fellow, I wasn't doubting you!" Tubbs held up both hands as though to ward Sharpe off. "My own nerves giving tongue, nothing more.
    Tremulous, they are. I ain't a soldier like you. Of course you're right!"
    Sharpe hoped to God he was, but he knew he was not. He knew he should summon reinforcements, but he would still stay and fight alone because he was too proud to lose face by looking nervous. "We'll beat the bastards,"
    he said, "if they come."
    "I'm sure they won't," Tubbs said.
    And Sharpe prayed that Tubbs was right.
    Three hundred French infantrymen were sacrificed in the defiles of the road that led up to Avila, and from all across the Sierra de Gredos partisans flooded to the fight, hurrying over the hills for this chance to slaughter the hated enemy. The three hundred men seemed to have marched too far ahead of the rest of their column, and they were doomed, for the other Frenchmen did not hurry to their assistance, but made camp in the plain. And there were too many Frenchmen camped on that southern plain, so the partisans concentrated on the doomed three hundred infantrymen who had ventured too far into the hills.
    And when night fell, and when the sound