Read Sharpe 12 - Sharpe's Battle for Free Online Page A

"And the French just let that happen? King
    Joseph just watched half the royal guard march away?" Joseph was Bonaparte's brother and had been elevated to the throne of Spain, though it was taking three hundred thousand French bayonets to keep him there.
    “A fifth of the royal guard, my Lord,” Hogan gently corrected the General.
    “And yes, that's exactly what Lord Kiely says. Kiely, of course, being their comandante.”
    “Kiely?”
    “Irish peer, my Lord.”
    “Damn it, Hogan, I know the Irish peerage. Kiely. Earl of Kiely. An exile, right? And his mother, I remember, gave money to Tone back in the nineties.”
    Wolfe Tone had been an Irish patriot who had tried to raise money and men in
    Europe and America to lead a rebellion against the British in his native
    Ireland. The rebellion had flared into open war in 1798 when Tone had invaded
    Donegal with a small French army that had been roundly defeated and Tone himself had committed suicide in his Dublin prison rather than hang from a
    British rope. “I don't suppose Kiely's any better than his mother,” Wellington said grimly, “and she's a witch who should have been smothered at birth. Is his Lordship to be trusted, Hogan?”
    “So far as I hear, my Lord, he's a drunk and a wastrel,” Hogan said. “He was given command of the Real Companïa Irlandesa because he's the only Irish aristocrat in Madrid and because his mother had influence over the King. She's dead now, God rest her soul.” He watched a soldier try to fork up the spilt
    French officer's intestines with his bayonet. The guts kept slipping off the blade and finally a sergeant yelled at the man to either pick the offal up with his bare hands or else leave it for the crows.
    “What has this Irish guard been doing since Ferdinand left Madrid?” Wellington asked.
    “Living on sufferance, my Lord. Guarding the Escorial, polishing their boots, staying out of trouble, breeding, whoring, drinking and saluting the French.”
    “But not fighting the French.”
    “Indeed not.” Hogan paused. “It's all too convenient, my Lord,” he went on.
    "The Real Companïa Irlandesa is permitted to leave Madrid, permitted to take ship, and permitted to come to us, and meanwhile a letter is smuggled out of
    France saying the company is a gift to you from His imprisoned Majesty. I smell Frog paws all over it, my Lord."
    “So we tell these damn guards to go away?”
    “I doubt we can. In London the Prince Regent will doubtless be flattered by the gesture and the Foreign Office, you may depend, will consider any slight offered to the Real Companïa Irlandesa to be an insult to our Spanish allies, which means, my Lord, that we are stuck with the bastards.”
    “Are they good for anything?”
    “I'm sure they'll be decorative,” Hogan allowed dubiously.
    “And decoration costs money,” Wellington said. “I suppose the King of Spain did not think to send his guard's pay chest?”
    “No, my Lord.”
    “Which means I'm paying them?” Wellington inquired dangerously, and, when
    Hogan's only answer was a seraphic smile, the General swore. “God damn their eyes! I'm supposed to pay the bastards? While they stab me in the back? Is that what they're here for, Hogan?”
    “I wouldn't know, my Lord. But I suspect as much.”
    A gust of laughter sounded from a fatigue party that had just discovered some intimate drawings concealed in a dead Frenchman's coat tails. Wellington winced at the noise and edged his horse further away from the raucous group.
    Some crows fought over a pile of offal that had once been a French skirmisher.
    The General stared at the unpleasant sight, then grimaced. “So what do you know about this Irish guard, Hogan?”
    "They're mostly Spanish these days, my Lord, though even the Spanish-born guards have to be descended from Irish exiles. Most of the guardsmen are recruited from the three Irish regiments in Spanish service, but a handful, I imagine, will be deserters from our own army. I'd