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files!”
    “Sir?” Harper was puzzled.
    “You heard me, Sergeant! Four files! Smartly, now.”
    Harper shouted the men into line. The French infantry who had come from the city were

only a hundred paces behind now, too far for an accurate musket shot though one Frenchman

did try and his ball cracked into the whitewashed wall of a cottage beside the road. The

sound seemed to irritate Sharpe. “On the double now!” he snapped. “Advance!”
    They trotted down the road toward the newly erected barricade which was two hundred

paces ahead. The river slid gray and swirling to their right while on their left was a field

dotted with the remnants of last year’s haystacks which were small and pointed so that they

looked like bedraggled witches’ hats. A hobbled cow with a broken horn watched them pass.

Some fugitives, despairing of passing the dragoons’ roadblock, had settled in the field to

await their fate.
    “Sir?” Harper managed to catch up with Sharpe, who was a dozen paces ahead of his men.
    “Sergeant?”
    It was always “Sergeant,” Harper noted, when things were grim, never “Patrick” or “Pat.”

“What are we doing, sir?”
    “We’re charging that barricade, Sergeant.”
    “They’ll fillet our guts, if you’ll pardon me saying so, sir. The buggers will turn us

inside out.”
    “I know that,” Sharpe said, “and you know that. But do they know that?”
    Harper stared at the dragoons who were leveling their carbines across the keels of the

upturned skiffs. The carbine, like a musket and unlike a rifle, was smoothbore and thus

inaccurate, which meant the dragoons would wait until the last moment to unleash their

volley, and that volley promised to be heavy for still more of the green-coated enemy were

squeezing onto the road behind the barricade and aiming their weapons. “I think they do

know that, sir,” Harper observed.
    Sharpe agreed, though he would not say so. He had ordered his men to fix swords because the

sight of fixed bayonets was more frightening than the threat of rifles alone, but the

dragoons did not seem to be worried by the menace of the steel blades. They were crowding

together so that every carbine could join the opening volley and Sharpe knew he would have

to surrender, but he was unwilling to do it without a single shot being fired. He

quickened his pace, reckoning that one of the dragoons would fire at him too soon and that

one shot would be Sharpe’s signal to halt, throw down his sword and so save his men’s lives. The

decision hurt, but it was the only option he had unless God sent a miracle.
    “Sir?” Harper struggled to keep up with Sharpe. “They’ll kill you!”
    “Get back, Sergeant,” Sharpe said, “that’s an order.” He wanted the dragoons to fire at

him, not at his men.
    “They’ll bloody kill you!” Harper said.
    “Maybe they’ll turn and run,” Sharpe called back.
    “God save Ireland,” Harper said, “and why would they do that?”
    “Because God wears a green jacket,” Sharpe snarled, “of course.”
    And just then the French turned and ran.

CHAPTER 2
    Sharpe had always been lucky. Maybe not in the greater things of life, certainly not in the

nature of his birth to a Cat Lane whore who had died without giving her only son a single

caress, nor in the manner of his upbringing in a London orphanage that cared not a jot for

the children within its grim walls, but in the smaller things, in those moments when success

and failure had been a bullet’s width apart, he had been lucky. It had been good fortune that

took him to the tunnel where the Tippoo Sultan was trapped, and even better fortune that had

decapitated an orderly at Assaye so that Richard Sharpe was riding behind Sir Arthur

Wellesley when that General’s horse was killed by a pike thrust and Sir Arthur was thrown down

among the enemy. All luck, outrageous luck sometimes, but even Sharpe doubted his good

fortune when