Sharpe 17 sharpes regi.., p.12
Sharpe 17 - Sharpe's Regiment, page 12
It had not been his fault! He had been ambushed! By God, it was not his fault! If His Majesty’s troops could not march in decent close order down an Irish highway, where could they march? They had been traitorous peasants, the men who shot from behind hedges and who had tumbled his men in blood on the sunken road while Captain Girdwood, screaming in anger, had ordered his redcoats to form line and fix bayonets, but by the time he had imposed decent order on his Company, the Irish bastards had gone. Gone! Run away! In other words, as he had told the Court, he had defeated them! ‘I was left master of the field,’ he had said, and was it not true?
The Court had thought not. They had passed him over for promotion, dismissed him from the garrison, reprimanded him, and recommended that Captain Bartholomew Girdwood be no longer employed in the service of His Majesty’s army.
He had taken his reprimand to Sir Henry Simmerson, Member of Parliament, Commissioner of the Excise, a man known to be a scourge of the lax discipline that was creeping into the army. And from that fortuitous meeting, in which their two minds were of such sweet accord, had come promotion and this opportunity. Sir Henry, with his friend, Lord Fenner, had purchased a Majority for Girdwood, then promoted him to Lieutenant Colonel, and presented him with a Battalion and with a chance to become wealthy. There was more to come. The war, Girdwood was assured by both Sir Henry and Lord Fenner, was ending, and he could look forward, thanks to their generosity and patronage, to a peacetime career of eminence and comfort. He would be married to Sir Henry’s niece; he would become rich, powerful, and, until then, he would continue to do the job that he believed he did better than any man alive; the job of turning undisciplined, lax civilians into soldiers. He shivered as he remembered the shock of seeing a dog, then smiled at his rescuer, Sergeant Lynch. ‘Carry on, Sergeant, and well done!’
* * *
One man in this camp hated the Irish more than the Colonel, and that was Sergeant John Lynch. He had been christened Sean, but, just as he tried to lose the accent of his native Kerry, so he had lost his native name.
He modelled himself on Girdwood, seeing in the Lieutenant Colonel the quality of rigid discipline that had made Britain’s army victorious over the Irish rebels. Sergeant John Lynch wanted to be with the winners, and not just with them, but of them. Instead of being an Irish peasant forced to show unwilling respect to the English, he wished to be a man to whom that respect was shown. He had turned against his country with all the passion of a convert, exactly as he had abandoned his parents’ faith to become an Anglican. There could have been no man better suited to attract Patrick Harper’s hatred, or, indeed, the hatred of every man in the squad, for Sergeant John Lynch was a most harsh trainer of troops. Yet, as Sharpe grudgingly allowed, an effective one.
The training was done the old-fashioned way, by brutal discipline, punishment, and unrelenting hard work. Girdwood believed that what made a man stand in the musket line and fight outnumbering enemies was not pride, nor loyalty, nor patriotism, but fear of the alternative. He made soldiers, and, it was apparent, he made money too.
Indeed, within three days, it seemed to Sharpe that perhaps money was the reason for the camp’s secrecy. It was not just the way that Lieutenant Colonel Girdwood’s men had stolen the bounty from each recruit, but the way that, day after day, the debts piled up. At every inspection Sergeant Lynch would find a fault with a man’s Necessaries; a torn knapsack strap, a holed sock, and each fault would be noted and the cost of the item deducted against future pay. Sharpe guessed that no man at the camp received pay, that all of it was channelled into the hands of Girdwood. Such raids on men’s pay were quite normal in the army; half of every man’s wages was deducted for food alone; yet Sharpe had never seen it done on such a scale or with such enthusiastic rapacity.
Only the training was pursued with more enthusiasm, and Sharpe had not seen any camp in which recruits were worked so hard. They drilled from morning till sundown. The grammar of soldiering was hammered into them until the clumsiest recruit, after one week, could perform all the manoeuvres of Company drill. Only Tom, the half-wit, was considered untrainable and he was given to the Sergeants’ Mess as a cleaner.
The object of their life, from the cold mornings when they were roused before dawn until the sun was set and the bugle called the lights-out, was to avoid punishment. Even after the bugle there was still danger, for it was a maxim with Lieutenant Colonel Girdwood that mutinies were plotted at night. He made the Sergeants and officers patrol the tent lines, listening for voices, and it was rumoured that Girdwood himself had been seen, on hands and knees, threading his body between the tent guy ropes to put an ear close to the canvas.
The punishments were as varied as the crimes that occasioned them. A whole squad or tent could fetch a normal fatigue duty; digging latrines, clearing one of the many drainage channels that ran to the mudflats, or mending, with stiff twine and a leatherworker’s needle, the stiff canvas of the tents. Sergeant Lynch favoured a swift beating, and sometimes used a knapsack filled with bricks as his instrument of punishment, either worn for extra drill, or else held at arm’s length while he stood behind ready to cut with his cane at the first quiver of fatigue in the outstretched arms.
There were beatings and floggings and, savage though they were, they could all be avoided by the simple expedient of obedience and anonymity. Most of the recruits learned fast. Even when it rained, and it seemed impossible to keep the mud from their uniforms, or from the tarpaulins that formed the groundsheets of their tents, they learned to scrape and wash the mud entirely away, and even though the cleaning water, that was blessedly abundant in the low, marshy land, soaked their thin straw palliasses, it was better to sleep shivering and damp than to incur the wrath of Lieutenant Colonel Girdwood’s inspection.
Yet Giles Marriott, who had joined the army in a mood of self destruction because his girl had jilted him for a richer man, earned punishment after punishment. Morning after morning, at the dawn inspection, Sergeant Lynch would find a speck of mud on Marriott’s pipeclay and the Sergeant’s voice would snap at the terrified man. ‘Strip!’
Marriott would strip. He would stand shivering.
‘Run!’
He would run the tent lines, stumbling in the mud, jeered on his way by sergeants and corporals who would slash at his bare buttocks with their canes or steel-tipped pacing sticks. ‘Faster! Faster!’ He would come back to Sergeant Lynch with tears in his eyes and his pale flesh scarred by the welts of the blows.
Just keep your bloody mouth shut,‘ Harper told him.
‘We’re not animals. We’re men.’
‘No you’re not. You’re a bloody soldier now. Never look the bugger in the eyes, never argue, and never complain.’
Marriott listened, but did not hear. The other recruits did both, for in only a few hours Sharpe had become their unofficial leader and guide within the army. On their very first day Sharpe had calmed Charlie Weller down, gripping the boy’s shoulders till it hurt. ‘You do nothing, Charlie!’
‘He killed him!’
‘You do nothing! You bloody endure, that’s all. It gets better, lad.’
‘I’ll kill him!’ Weller, with all the passion of his seventeen years, could not hold back the tears caused by Buttons’ death.
‘After Patrick’s torn his head off, maybe,’ Sharpe grinned. He liked Weller. The boy was one of those rare recruits who had joined the army, not out of desperation, but because he wanted to serve his country. Weller, given time, would rise in the army, but Sharpe knew that first the seventeen year old must survive this place.
A place where, to his astonishment, he discovered that there were more than seven hundred men in training. Some were close to finishing, almost ready to take their place in the ranks that must fight the French, others, like his own squad, still learned the basic grammar of the trade. Yet there were more than enough men here to save the First Battalion in Pasajes and to form the core of a properly constituted Second as well.
He discovered too where the camp was. On a rainy, drizzling day he was ordered to the kitchens where he unloaded a cart of half rotted cabbages. A Mess-corporal, leaning in the doorway and staring at the low cloud to the south, grumbled what a god-awful bloody place it was.
‘What place?’ Sharpe asked.
The corporal lit a pipe and, when it was drawing to his satisfaction, spat into the mud. ‘End of the bleeding world. Called Foulness.’
‘Foulness?’
‘Bloody foul too, yes?’ The corporal laughed. ‘Christ knows why they sent us here. Chelmsford was all right, but the buggers want us here.’
The corporal was happy to talk. Foulness, he said, was an island, joined by the wooden bridge to the mainland, and on the island there was a single, small, poor village and this army camp. To the south, the corporal said, was the Thames Estuary. At low tide it was a great desert of mud. To the east was the North Sea and to the north and west were the tangling tidal creeks and rivers of the Essex coast.
‘It’s like a prison,’ Sharpe said.
The corporal laughed. ‘You won’t be here long. Six weeks and they ship you out! You should feel sorry for me. Stuck out here!’
Sharpe had guessed already that the corporal, like the two senior Companies in the camp that, alone on Foulness, were dressed in red jackets, was one of the men who were here to guard the recruits against escape. It truly was like a prison, with water as its walls and troops as its jailers. Sharpe chopped a cabbage in half. ‘Where do they ship us to?’
‘Wherever the buggers want you. You know that, you’re an old soldier.’
And being an old soldier was to Sharpe’s advantage, for it kept him out of trouble and spared him the punishments that racked the less experienced men. No sergeant wanted to punish Sharpe or Harper, for the simple reason that both men gave the appearance of being able to take any punishment that was handed to them. Instead it was Marriott, always Marriott, who, with his tuppence worth of education, was unable to rid himself of the idea that he was superior to the illiterate men who were his fellow recruits. He argued stubbornly, wept when he was punished, and even at night, in the stillness of the tent lines, when the soft tread of the patrolling sergeants and officers listening for mutiny could be heard outside, Marriott cried.
Harper’s view was simple. ‘It’s his own bloody fault.’
‘He thinks he’s too clever to be sensible.’ Sharpe was the only man to whom Marriott would listen, but even Sharpe could not drive into the ex-clerk’s head that the only route to survival lay in acceptance and submission.
‘I’m going to get out. I’ll run!’ Marriott had told him. He had only been in the army a week.
‘Don’t be a fool.’ There was a snap in Sharpe’s voice that made Marriott’s head jerk up, the snap of an officer. ‘You’re not running away!’
‘They can’t do this to people!’
That night, before the bugle called the lights-out, Sharpe told Harper that Marriott wanted to run. Harper shrugged. ‘What about us?’
‘Us?’
‘Bugger Marriott, it’s time we got the hell out of here.’
‘We don’t even know what they’re doing here.’ Sharpe knew that the camp did not exist solely to steal the men’s pay. If that was its sole purpose, why were they trained so hard?
‘Still time we got out.’ Harper said it stubbornly.
‘Give it another week, Patrick. Just one more week.’
The huge Irishman nodded. ‘But promise me one thing?’
‘What?’
The big, flat face grinned slowly. ‘I’d like to come here as RSM for just one day. Just one day. And one hour with that bastard Lynch.’
Sharpe laughed. Above his head, beautiful and crisp against the darkening sky, a skein of geese glided towards the eastern mudflats. ‘It’s a promise, Sergeant.’
A promise he would keep. But first he would discover just why this hidden Battalion of the South Essex trained so hard and were punished so savagely in the lost, wet, secret marshland camp called Foulness.
CHAPTER 8
‘Say it, filth!’
Patrick Harper, staring stolidly over Sergeant Lynch’s shako, bawled out the words that he was required to say at every single parade. ‘God save the King!’
‘Again, filth!’
‘God save the King!’
Sergeant Lynch, in the eight days since he had taken over this squad, had not found fault with Harper once; with Marriott a thousand times, but with the big Irishman, not once. Sergeant Lynch had decided that the big man was broken. He had assured as much to Lieutenant Colonel Girdwood. ‘He’s just a big, stupid boar, sir. No trouble at all.’ Indeed, Sergeant Lynch was glad to have Privates O‘Keefe and Vaughn in his squad, for the presence of two trained men hastened the training of the other recruits.
‘Again, filth!’
‘God save the King!’
It was a beautiful morning. The sun was drying the mudflats and a small breeze brought the smell of salt to the parade ground. Sergeant Lynch, whose moustached face seemed unhappy this splendid day, stepped back from Harper to face his three ranks. ‘Filth! Stocks off!’
It was an extraordinary relief to unhook the thick, stiff, leather collars that they were then ordered to hand down the ranks to the men in the right file who, in turn, handed them to a corporal. Sergeant Lynch stared at them with his habitual expression of dislike. ‘Filth. You have work to do! Ditching work! If just one of you bastards gives me trouble, just one! I’ll damage you! I’ll damage you!’ It was evident he disapproved of the fatigue duty, preferring the close order drill in which every mistake was obvious and easily punished. ‘Left turn! Quick march!’
Each of the squad was issued with either a rake, a billhook, or a shovel. Sharpe assumed that they were to attack another of the island’s drainage channels, but, instead, Sergeant Lynch ordered them onto the embanked road which led off the island.
The Sergeant, like his two corporals, was armed with a musket. If this was a prison, then now the squad was under armed guard I as they left Foulness. Sharpe noted again the strength of the picquet that stood sentry duty at the wooden bridge. More than a dozen men watched the squad pass, while the presence of a tethered horse beside the wooden guard hut suggested to Sharpe that an officer was on duty there as well.
Sergeant Lynch took them back along the road they had come when they had first arrived at Foulness, then north on the track which led to the big brick house with its eagle weathervane, and Sharpe prayed that they were not being marched to Sir Henry Simmerson’s home. They splashed through the ford, climbed to the track on the bank, then, before reaching Sir Henry’s house, they turned right onto a narrow path that led, ever more narrowly, into the reeds of the sea-marsh.
It seemed to Sharpe that they must be skirting Sir Henry’s estate. They worked their way east, then north, and Sharpe was glad to see a creek between themselves and the house of the one man who might recognise him in this corner of Essex. Nevertheless his worry increased as, pace by pace, Sergeant Lynch led them closer and closer to the big, splendid house.
It looked peaceful on this bright summer’s day. The morning sun caught the gleaming white paint of the window and door frames that faced east. Before the east facade was a terrace that sloped down to a wide, close cut lawn that ended with a brick retaining wall. The top of the wall was level with the lawn, while at its base was the muddy channel of the creek.
The channel was silted and choked, the mud banked and overgrown with plants. Sergeant Lynch, stopping by a belt of sea rushes, ordered the men to halt. ‘Listen, filth!’ His voice was softer than usual, perhaps because he did not want to offend the ears of the English gentry beyond the silted creek. ‘You are going to clear out this bloody channel! Start there!’ He gestured with his pacing stick to the end of the garden wall, ‘and you will work it down to that marker!’ He pointed behind him and Sharpe saw, some two hundred yards away, a wooden pole that leaned in the marsh. ‘You will work in silence! Corporal Mason!’
‘Sergeant!’
‘Take the odd-numbered men and start at the marker!’
‘Sir!’
Sharpe and Harper, because they paraded beside each other, had consecutive numbers, so that Harper, who as the tallest man in the squad was number one, was taken with the corporal to the far marker. Sharpe, as number two, went with the second corporal through the rushes and down into the channel beside Sir Henry’s wall. Sergeant Lynch, impeccable in his regimentals, decided to stay on the dry bank.
It was hard, messy work. The mud was overgrown with rice grass that had to be tugged up, its spreading, linked roots hard to drag out of the slime, then the men with shovels, working behind, deepened the channel so that the slimy water, stinking of old vegetation, gurgled and seeped about their shins. Sharpe was sweating quickly, though oddly he found the work enjoyable, perhaps because it was so mindless and because there was a strange pleasure working in the sucking, thick cool mud.
It was clear that Sir Henry Simmerson had requested the channel cleared, not just so that his east lawn should be edged with water as if by a moat, but because, halfway down the brick, moss-grown wall, there was an archway that led into a boathouse. A barred gate, rusted and padlocked, faced the creek, while behind the bars Sharpe could see three old punts that would need this channel excavated if they were ever again to float. Beyond the punts Sharpe could see a stone stairway that must lead up to the garden.
‘You! You, filth!’ Sergeant Lynch was pointing at Sharpe. ‘Vaughn!’
‘Sergeant?’
‘Wait there, filth!’
It seemed to Sharpe that he had been singled out for punishment, though for what he could not think, but instead he saw, through the bars of the water gate, a man descend into the boathouse. He felt a second’s panic, fearing that it was Sir Henry himself, but instead it was a servant who, stooping along a brick walk built at one side of the tunnel that formed the arched dock, came and unlocked the padlock. The key took a deal of turning, so stiff was the lock, but finally it was undone and the gate creaked open.
