They slept by vast fires that died in the night and yesterday, at dawn, four Portuguese sentries had been, discovered frozen, their greatcoats iced to the ground, dead by the river. Someone had tipped them in, breaking the Agueda's thin ice, because no one wanted to dig graves. The army had taken its fill of digging; for twelve days they had done nothing else; batteries, parallels, saps and trenches, and they never wanted to dig again. They wanted to fight. They wanted to carry their long bayonets up the glacis of Ciudad Rodrigo, to go into the breach, to kill the French, and take those fires and houses for themselves. They wanted to be warm.

Sharpe, Captain of the South Essex's Light Company, lay in the snow and stared through his telescope at the largest breach. He could not see much. Even from the hillside, five hundred yards from the town, the snow-covered slope of the glacis hid all but the top few feet of Ciudad Rodrigo's main wall. He could see that the British guns had done damage and knew that the stones and rubble must have cascaded into the hidden ditch to make a crude ramp, perhaps a hundred feet wide, up which the attackers must climb to get into the heart of the fortress town. He wished he could see beyond the breach to the alleyways at the foot of the shot-scarred church tower that was so close to the walls. The French would be busy there, building new defences, siting fresh cannon, so that when the attack burst over the rubbled mound of the breach it would be met with precisely planned horror, flame and grapeshot, death in the night.

Sharpe was afraid.

It was a strange knowledge, known to him alone, and he was ashamed of it. It was not certain that the attack would be on this day, but the army, with the instinct of men who know that the time has come, were confident that Wellington would order the assault this night.