'Sir?

'You heard. Sharpe, while he commanded the Battalion, could at least give it the best Regimental Sergeant Major it would ever have. The new Colonel would be in no position to change the appointment. Sharpe turned away. 'Lieutenant Andrews!

'Sir? The Lieutenant was leading a morose party of men who staggered under the weight of small boulders.

'Put them on the graves! The stones would stop animals scrabbling down to the shallowly buried flesh.

'All the graves, sir?

'Just ours. Sharpe did not care if the foxes and ravens gorged themselves on rotting French flesh, but his own men could lie in peace for whatever it was worth. 'Sergeant Major?

'Sir? Harper was half grinning, half unsure whether a grin was acceptable at this moment. 'Yes, sir?

'We'll need a god-damned cart for our wounded. Ask a mounted officer to fetch one from the baggage. Then perhaps we can get on with this damned march.

'Yes, sir.

That night rain fell on the pass where the South Essex had stood and suffered, and where their dead lay, and from which place the living had long gone. The night's rain washed the scanty soil from the French dead who had not been buried but just covered with soil. The teeming water exposed white, hard flesh, and in the morning the scavengers came for the carrion. The pass had no name.

Pasajes was a port on the northern coast of Spain, close to where the shoreline bent north to France. It was a deep passage cleft in the rocks, leading to a safe, sheltered harbour that was crammed with shipping from Britain. The stores that fed Wellington's army came to Pasajes now, no longer going to Lisbon to be carried by ox-carts over the mountains. At Pasajes the army gathered the stores that would let it invade France, but the South Essex who, even before the fight in the nameless pass had been considered too shrunken by war to take its place in the battle-line, had been ordered to Pasajes instead. Their job, until their reinforcements arrived, was to guard the wharves and warehouses against thieves. They were fighting soldiers, and they had become Charlies, watchmen.