“Go on! Leave me!” His voice was scarcely more than a whisper.

Rifleman Harper jumped down the slope and plucked Murray into his huge arms. The Captain sighed a terrible moan of pain as he was lifted. Below him the French were scrambling uphill, eager to complete their victory by taking these last Riflemen prisoner.

“Follow me!” The Lieutenant led the small group into the clouds. The French fired again, and the bullets flickered past, but the Riflemen were lost in the whiteness now. For the moment, at least, they were safe.

The Lieutenant found a hollow among the rocks that offered some shelter from the cold. The wounded were laid there while picquets were set to guard its perimeter. Murray had gone as white as cartridge paper. “I didn’t think they could beat us, Dick.”

“I don’t understand where they came from.” The Lieutenant’s scarred face, Murray thought, made him look like an execution. “They didn’t get past us. They couldn’t!”

“They must have done.” Murray sighed, then gestured to Rifleman Harper who, with a gentleness that seemed odd in a man so big, first unstrapped the Captain’s sword belt, then unpeeled his clothes from the wound. It was clear that Harper knew his business, and so the Lieutenant went to peer down the fogged hillside for a sight of the enemy. He could neither see nor hear anything. The Dragoons evidently thought the band of survivors too small to worry about. The fifty Riflemen had become the flotsam of war, mere splinters hacked from a sinking endeavour, and if the French had known that the fugitives were led by a Quartermaster, they might have been even more contemptuous.

But the Quartermaster had first fought the French fifteen years before, and he had been fighting ever since. The stranded Riflemen might call him the new Lieutenant, and they might invest the word ‘new’ with all the scorn of old soldiers, but that was because they did not know their man. They thought of him as nothing more than a jumped-up Sergeant, and they were wrong. He was a soldier, and his name was Richard Sharpe.