Major Sharpe thanked him. He offered him tea.

Two hours later, when General Preston arrived with his five Battalions, puzzled because he had heard no musketry ahead of him, he found fifteen hundred French prisoners, three captured guns, and four wagons of supplies. The French muskets were piled on the roadway. The plunder they had brought from their garrisoned village was in the packs of Sharpe’s men. Not one of the South Essex, nor one of Frederickson’s Riflemen, was even wounded. The French had lost seven men, with another twenty-one wounded.

‘Congratulations, Sharpe!’

‘Thank you, sir.’

Officer after officer offered him congratulations. He shook them off. He explained that the French really had no choice, they could not have broken his position without guns, yet still the congratulations came until, shy with embarrassment, he walked back to the bridge.

He crossed the seething water and found the South Essex’s Quartermaster, a plump officer named Collip who had accompanied the half battalion on its night-time march.

Sharpe backed Collip into a cleft of the rocks. Sharpe’s face was grim as death. ‘You’re a lucky man, Mr Collip.’

‘Yes, sir.’ Collip looked terrified. He had joined the South Essex only two months before.

‘Tell me why you’re a lucky man, Mr Collip?’

Collip swallowed nervously. ‘There’ll be no punishment, sir?’

‘There never would have been any punishment, Mr Collip.’

‘No, sir?’

‘Because it was my fault. I believed you when you said you could take the baggage off my hands. I was wrong. What are you?’

‘Very sorry, sir.’

In the night Sharpe and his Captains had gone ahead with Frederickson’s Riflemen. He had gone ahead to show them the path they must take, and he had left Collip, with the Lieutenants, to bring the men on. He had gone back and discovered Collip at the edge of a deep ravine that had been crossed with harsh difficulty. Sharpe had led the Riflemen over, climbing down one steep bank, wading an ice-cold stream that was waist deep with the water of this wet spring, then scrambling up the far bank with dripping, freezing clothes.