His best hope lay in marching at night, and God help any of his men or women who could not keep up, for they would face a terrible, slow death. Some would be burned alive, some flayed, some, but no, it did not bear thinking about.

It was not war as Gudin understood it, it was butchery, and what galled Gudin most was that the guerilleros were only doing to the French what the French had done to the Spaniards.

The infantry marched through the gate behind their Eagle. The women followed.

Gudin stayed to watch the sergeant light the fuses, then he spurred away from his doomed fort. He paused a half-mile up the road and turned to watch as the fire in the fuses reached the charges set in the fort's magazines.

The night blossomed red and a moment later the sound of the explosions punched through the damp darkness. Flames and smoke boiled above the fort's remains as the heavy guns were tumbled from their emplacements. Another failure, Gudin thought, watching the great fire rage.

"If my Eagle is lost, " Colonel Caillou said, "I shall blame you, Gudin."

"So pray that the British have no blocked the road, " Gudin answered. The fort was a dark mass of stone in which streaks of fire glowed bloody red.

"It's partisans I worry about, not the British, " Caillou sneered. "If the British are on the road, then General Picard will come from behind and they will be squeezed to death."

For that was the plan. General Picard was marching south from St. Jean Pied-de-Port. He would climb the French side of the Pyrenees to make sure the frontier pass was open for Gudin's men, and all Gudin needed to do was survive the forty kilometres of tortuous winter road that twisted up from Ochagavia to the pass where General Picard waited.

At a place of misery in the mountains, at a place called Irati.

SHARPE said, "It's not such a bad place." And it was true that in the fading evening light Irati was picturesque. It was a village of small stone houses, little more than huts, that lay in a sheltered valley at the junction of two high streams and clustered about a big tavern, the Casa Alta, that provided shelter for folks traveling the high pass. "Can't see why anyone would want to live here, though, " he added.