"Fire!" Lieutenant Fytch shouted. He pointed his pistol at a French officer not fifty yards away and pulled the trigger. The gun rammed a shock up his arm and blotted his view with smoke.

A Marine's musket hangfired and he threw the gun into the courtyard and picked up the weapon of a dead man. The ammunition left in the pouch of the corpse who had fallen into the burning abatis began to explode.

The Riflemen, knowing that survival depended on the speed of their work, no longer rammed shots home, but tap-loaded their guns by rapping the butts on the rampart then firing the weapon into the gap between the glacis' shoulders. Musket balls and rifle bullets spat into the enemy, but still the column came forward. Sharpe, who had seen it so often before, was again amazed at how much punishment a French column would endure. Three of the Marines, issued with civilian blunderbusses taken from the surrounding villages, poured their fire into the column's head.

The shape of the attack was clear now.

At the front of the column the French general had put raw recruits, musket-fodder; boys whose deaths would not damage the Empire and he had invited the British to slaughter them. Now, pushed by officers and sergeants, the survivors of those conscripts spread along the counter-guard or sheltered in the dry ditch and banged their muskets at the smoke-wreathed wall above them.

Behind were the veterans. Twenty or more men carried ereat fascines of roped branches, great mattresses of timber that sheltered them from bullet strike and which would be thrown into the ditch where the drawbridge should have been. Behind them, moustached faces grim, came the Grenadiers, the assault troops.

Frederickson had lit a candle sheltered in a lantern. He used a spill to take the flame from the candle to the first unexploded mortar shell. He watched the fuse hiss, waited till the fire had burned into the hole bored in the casing, then, with a grunt, heaved it over the edge.

"Fire!" Lieutenant Fytch, his pistol reloaded, wasted the bullet into a fascine.

The shell bounced on the road, disappeared beneath the leading rank, then exploded.

A hole seemed to be punched in the men carrying the great bundles, but as soon as the smoke cleared, the hole filled, and a French sergeant kicked dead men and discarded bundles into the ditch.

"Patrick! The gate!" Sharpe had waited till the last moment, believing that the volume of fire from the walls would hold the column's head back, and now he wondered if he had waited too long. He had meant to attack with his own squad, but he preferred now to control this fight from the ramparts and he knew that any attack headed by Harper would be driven home with a professional savagery.

"Fire!" Frederickson shouted and a score of bullets thudded downward. Some spurted dust from the road, one span a Frenchman clear round, but the rest seemed to be soaked up in the surging, pushing mass that strained to reach the shelter of the archway. That arch was blocked by pine trees, but the barricade had been knocked about by roundshot, and the leading attackers, throwing their fascines down and jumping on to their uncertain footing, could see footholds among the branches.

One man toppled from the makeshift bridge and fell on to the hidden spikes. His screams were cut off as water flowed into his mouth.

Another mortar shell was thrown to explode on the road-way. The air was hissing with bullets, endless with the noise of muskets firing and the rattle of ramrods.

"Now!" Sharpe shouted at Sergeant Rossner.

The sergeant, hiding beneath the ramparts at the southeastern corner of the fort, had a wooden baker's peel which he dug into a barrel of lime. He scooped shovel-load after shovel-load of the white powder over the edge.

"Fire!" Frederickson shouted.

Lieutenant Fytch, aiming his pistol, was shot in the chest and thumped back, astonishment on his face and blood on his crossbelt. "I'm." He could not say what he wanted to say, instead he began to gasp for breath; each exhalation a terrible, pitiful moan.

"Leave him!" Sharpe bellowed at a Marine. This was no time to rescue wounded men. This was a time to fight, or else they would all be wounded. "The whole barrel, sergeant!"

Rossner stooped, lifted the barrel, and tipped it over the rampart. Two bullets struck it, but the powder spumed and fell, was caught by the wind, and Sharpe saw it, like musket smoke, drifting on to the assault troops.

Some of whom, safely over the moat, were dragging with their hands at the branches in the archway.

"Fire!" Harper bellowed the order to his squad and pulled the trigger of his seven-barrelled gun.

Bullets tore through pine and threw men backwards.

"Spike the bastards!" Harper dropped the gun and unslung his rifle. He rammed its bayonet forward, between two branches, and twisted the blade in a Frenchman's arm.

Attackers were coughing, screaming, and clutching at their eyes as the lime drifted among the Grenadiers.

"Fire!" Sharpe yelled and a score of muskets hammered down into the crowd below.

The conscripts on the counterguard fired at the fort, but most fired high. Some balls struck. A Marine corporal, hit in the shoulder, went on loading his musket despite the pain.

"You've got them beat!" Frederickson hurled a third shell that exploded among half-blinded men. "Now kill the bastards, kill them!" Men loaded as fast as cut, grazed hands would work. Bullet after bullet spat down into the French mass that was still pushed forward by the rear ranks.

Sharpe fired his own rifle down into the chaos. "Cheer, you buggers! Let them know they've lost! Cheer!"

Lieutenant Fytch, blood filling his mouth, tried to cheer and died instead.

"Fire!" Frederickson shouted over the cheer.

The area about the gate was flames and smoke and bullets heavy with death. Men screaming, men blinded, men bleeding, men crawling.

"Fire!"

Men stumbled, the pain in their eyes like fire, to fall from the makeshift causeway on to the spikes. Blood drifted on the muddy waters.

"Fire!"

Harper's men, the lodgement beneath the archway cleared, knelt with reloaded weapons and poured bullets at point-blank range into defeated men. "Fire, you bastards, fire!" Harper was keening with the joy of battle, lost in it, revelling in it, spitting hatred at men he had never met, men he would drink with on a summer's day if life had been different, but men who now folded over his bullets and shed bright blood onto a blood-soaked road. "Fire!"

The last shell was thrown far to explode where the roadway narrowed between the glacis' shoulders and the men at the column's rear, at last sensing that the front ranks had recoiled in screaming agony, faltered.

"Fire!" Rifles spat at conscripts on the counterguard. Farm-boys, who five weeks before had never seen an army musket, now choked their blood on to sand.

"Cheer! Cheer!" Men whose mouths were dry with gritty powder raised a cheer.

"Keep firing! Drive them back!"

Men's faces were black with powder. Their nails bled where they had dragged at cartridges, levered stiff frizzens, and torn on flints. Their teeth, showing skull-white in the powder-dark faces, grinned as if in rictus. Breath came short. The whole world now was a few smoky yards, stinking of fire, in which a man rammed and loaded, fired and killed, rammed and loaded and other men screamed and some men crawled bleeding along the ramparts and another man slipped in spilt brains and swore because his musket fell into the courtyard.

The French inched back. The bullets cracked at them, thudded into flesh and still the bullets came. No troops fired muskets faster and no troops had been given such a target.

"Fire!" Sharpe, his rifle re-loaded, pulled the trigger. The smoke of his men's weapons obscured individuals, but he knew where the enemy was and his bullet twitched the smoke as it flashed through.

Harper, no more enemy visible, shouted for his men to hold their fire. He hauled a pine tree aside, crouched, then beckoned to Taylor. "Ammunition."

They went to the edge of the ditch, found the men they had killed, and cut their cartridge bags away. They tossed the bags through the archway then went back and re-blocked the arch. There had been no time to run the one remaining cannon into a firing position and Harper, regretting the lost chance, went to check that the quickfuse still led through the cleared venthole to the charge. It was safe and, reassured, he began the laborious process of re-charging the seven-barrelled gun.

A French officer, galloping his horse across the esplanade to see why the attack had faltered, was seen by two riflemen frorn the south-western bastion. They both fired. Man and horse shuddered, blood spat to sand, then the wounded horse, screaming and tossing, dragged its dead master in a great circle towards the column's rear.

"Fire!" Frederickson shouted and more heavy bullets tore into the smoke and drove the column further back. The drums hesitated, a single rattle sounded defiance, then was silent.

"Hold your fire! Hold it!" Sharpe could see the enemy going, running, and though he wished he could have fired till the last enemy was out of sight, he had ammunition to conserve. "Hold your fire! Hold your fire!" He felt the wild elation of a battle won, of an enemy broken. The space before the fort's gate was foul with dead and wounded men, and smeared with a great, white smudge of lime that was mixed with blood. "Cease firing!"

At which point Calvet's real attack burst on to the north-western corner of the Teste de Buch.

Black clouds were coming from the north. Captain Palmer had watched them, had seen the grey blur of rain beneath them and judged that by this night the Teste de Buch would once again be crouching beneath dirty weather. Biscay, he thought, was living up to its reputation for sudden storms and uneasy calms.