Beyond the glacis was a ditch, hidden from Sharpe, that would be stone-faced and wide and, beyond the ditch, the modern walls that masked, in their turn, the old mediaeval wall. The guns had pierced both walls, old and new, and turned them into a stretch of rubble, but the defenders would have prepared horrid traps to guard the gap.

It was nine years since Sharpe had been part of a besieging force, yet he could remember clearly the fierceness of the fight as the British had climbed the hill to Gawilghur and plunged into the maze of walls and ditches that the Indians had defended with ferocious bravery. Ciudad Rodrigo should, he knew, be more difficult; not because the men who defended this town were better soldiers, but because, like Badajoz, it was defended with the science of modern engineering. There was something horridly precise about the defences, with their false walls and ravelins, their mathematically sited bastions and hidden cannons, and only passion, anger, or screaming desperation would force the science to yield to the bayonets. The desperation would not subside quickly. Sharpe knew that once the attackers broke through the breach, their blood raised to a desperate pitch, the men would be ungovernable in the town's streets. It had always been so. If a fortress did not surrender, if its defenders forced the attackers to shed their blood in an assault, then old custom, soldiers' custom, dictated that all inside the fortress belonged to the attackers' vengeance. Ciudad Rodrigo's only hope lay in a short, easy fight.

Bells rang the Angelus in the town. The Catholics in the Company, all Irish, made sketchy crosses and scrambled to their feet as Lieutenant-Colonel the Honorable William Lawford, the South Essex's Commanding Officer, came into sight. He waved the men down, grinned at the sight of the snoring Price, nodded amicably to Harper, and came and stood beside Sharpe. 'All well?