Sharpe, who was amused that Harper had chosen such an elegant regiment for his supposed past, sensed that Lieutenant Colonel Girdwood's hostility had been increased by the big man's answer. Girdwood made the odd, snarling noise in his throat once more, then tapped his left palm with the silver-topped cane. 'The Royal Irish!' He said it slowly, with savage dislike. 'Then listen to me, soldier, this is not an Irish regiment. I'll have none of your d.a.m.ned insolence here, do you understand me?'

'Sir!'

'None of it!' Girdwood's voice was a harsh shriek that startled the other recruits whom he glared at, staring at them one by one as if, by the sheer force of his dark, harsh gaze, he could fill them with fear and respect.

He seemed to stare at them for a long, long time, saying nothing, but in his head the angry thoughts uncoiled. Peasants, he thought, nothing but peasants! Sc.u.m, filth. Horrid, stinking, foul, stupid, lax, undisciplined sc.u.m. Civilians!

His gaze came back to Harper's stolid, expressionless face. 'Who's the King of Ireland?'

'King George, sir!'

Girdwood's polished black moustache was level with the second b.u.t.ton of Harper's fatigue jacket. The Colonel glared up at the huge man. 'And what are the rebels?'

Harper paused. Sharpe, standing next to him, prayed that the Irishman would lie. Harper, if an accident of hunger and fate had not driven him into the British Army, would doubtless have been one of the rebels who had fought so hopelessly against the British in Ireland. Harper, who liked his job, and who fought the French as enthusiastically as any man, had never lost his love for Ireland, any more than had most of the Irishmen who made up a third of Wellington's army in Spain.

'Well?' Gird wood asked.

Harper chose dumb stupidity as his best tactic. 'Don't know, sir!'

'Sc.u.m! Pig-s.h.i.t! b.a.s.t.a.r.ds! Irish! That's what they are! Sergeant Lynch!'

'Sir!' The small Sergeant who had so effectively silenced Giles Marriott took one pace forward. He looked as if he could have been Girdwood's twin; they were two moustached, small, black-haired, manikins.

Girdwood pointed with his cane at Harper. 'You'll note this man, Sergeant Lynch?'

'I'll do that, sir!'

'I'll not have Irish tricks, by Christ I will not!'

'No, sir!'

Sharpe, who was feeling relief that the Colonel had not demanded that Harper repeat his litany against the Irish rebels, now saw that the Colonel was staring with apparent shock towards the end of the line of recruits. Girdwood raised his cane. It was shaking. 'Sergeant Lynch! Sergeant Lynch!'

Lynch turned. He too froze. When he spoke, in seemingly equal shock, his voice had a sudden touch of the Irish accent that he had worked so hard to lose. 'A dog, sir? One of the filth has a dog, sir!'

b.u.t.tons, sensing the sudden interest in him, wagged his muddy tail, ducked his head, and started forward to be petted by these new men who stared at him.

Girdwood stepped back. 'Get it away from me!' His voice betrayed true panic.

Sergeant Lynch darted forward. Charlie Weller stepped forward too, but a corporal tripped him just as Sergeant Lynch kicked the dog, a brutal, rib-breaking kick that forced a yelp out of the animal and lifted it into the air to fly, screaming as it went, a full five yards away. Charlie Weller, his face aghast, tried to stand up, but the corporal kicked him in the head, and kicked again to keep the boy down.

b.u.t.tons, his ribs broken, came whimpering and limping back towards his master. He flinched away from Sergeant Lynch, but the Sergeant stood over the dog, lifted his heel and smashed it down onto the dog's skull. b.u.t.tons shrieked again, the heel was forced slowly, grindingly down, and the recruits stood in horror as the dog slowly died.

It seemed to take a long time. No one spoke. The corporal pulled Weller upright, blood on the boy's face, and pushed him, too stunned to resist, back into the line.

Sergeant Lynch smiled as the small dog stopped moving and Lieutenant Colonel Girdwood breathed a sigh of relief. Girdwood hated dogs. They were undisciplined, messy, and savage. He had been bitten as a child, after throwing a half-brick at a mastiff, and the terror had never gone. 'Thank you, Sergeant!'

There was blood on Lynch's right boot. 'Only my duty, sir!'

The death of the dog had lifted Lieutenant Colonel Girdwood's spirits from the depression caused by hearing Harper's accent. Depression, for Lieutenant Colonel Girdwood had cause to hate Ireland. It was in that country, as a Captain, that he had been reprimanded by a Court of Enquiry held in Dublin Castle. Not just reprimanded, but dismissed from the Dublin garrison.

It had not been his fault! He had been ambushed! By G.o.d, 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.ds 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 pa.s.sed 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 a.s.sured 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 pa.s.sion 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 sc.r.a.pe 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 pallia.s.ses, 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 b.u.t.tocks 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 b.l.o.o.d.y mouth shut,' Harper told him.

'We're not animals. We're men.'

'No you're not. You're a b.l.o.o.d.y soldier now. Never look the b.u.g.g.e.r 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 b.l.o.o.d.y endure, that's all. It gets better, lad.'

'I'll kill him!' Weller, with all the pa.s.sion of his seventeen years, could not hold back the tears caused by b.u.t.tons' 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 const.i.tuted 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 G.o.dawful b.l.o.o.d.y 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?'

'b.l.o.o.d.y foul too, yes?' The corporal laughed. 'Christ knows why they sent us here. Chelmsford was all right, but the b.u.g.g.e.rs 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 Ess.e.x 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 b.u.g.g.e.rs 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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?'

'b.u.g.g.e.r Marriott, it's time we got the h.e.l.l 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d 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 Ess.e.x 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. 'G.o.d save the King!'

'Again, filth!'

'G.o.d 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 a.s.sured 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!'

'G.o.d 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.ds 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 a.s.sumed 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 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 pa.s.s, 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 Ess.e.x. 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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!'