Sharpe 3-Book Collection 5: Sharpe's Company, Sharpe's Sword, Sharpe's Enemy by Bernard Cornwell

blood-spattered face. ‘Shut the bloody door!’
    Sharpe closed it, cutting off the view of severed limbs, the waiting bodies. He wanted a drink. Things were changing. Lawford under the knife, Crauford dying upstairs, the New Year mocking them. He stood in the hallway, in dark shadow, and remembered the gas lighting he had seen in London’s Pall Mall just two months ago. A wonder of the world, he had been told, but he did not think so. Gas lighting, steam power, and stupid men in offices with dirty spectacles and neat files, the new denizens of England that would tie up the world in pipes, conduits, paper, and above all order. Neatness above all. England did not want to know about the war. A hero was a week-long wonder, so long as he was not untidily scarred like the beggars in the streets of London. There were men with only half a face, covered in suppurating sores, rodent ulcers, men with empty eye sockets, torn mouths, ragged stumps who had cried out for a penny for an old soldier. He had watched them being moved on so they did not sully the pristine, hissing light in Pall Mall. Sharpe had fought beside some of them, watched them drop on a battlefield, but their country did not care. There were the military hospitals, of course, at Chelsea and Kilmainham, but it was the soldiers who paid for those, not the country. The country wanted the soldiers out of the way
    Sharpe wanted a drink.
    The door of the surgeon’s room banged open and Sharpe turned to see Lawford being carried on a canvas stretcher to the wide staircase. He hurried to the orderlies. ‘How is he?’
    ‘If the rot doesn’t get him, sir…’ The man left the sentence unfinished. His nose was dripping, but he could not wipe it because both hands were on the stretcher. He sniffed. ‘Friend of yours, sir?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Nothing you can do tonight, sir. Come back tomorrow. We’ll look after him.’ He jerked his head upwards. ‘Lieutenant Colonels and above are on the second floor, sir. Bleeding luxury. Not like those in the cellar.’ Sharpe could imagine it, had seen it often enough, the dank cellars where the wounded were crammed on verminous pallets, one part of the ‘ward’ always left as a death room where the hopeless could simply rot. He let them go, and turned away.
    Ciudad Rodrigo had fallen, the great fortress of the north, and the history books would record the fact and, for years to come, the victory would be remembered with pride. In just twelve days Wellington had surprised, surrounded, assaulted and taken a city. A victory. And no one would remember the names of the men who had died in the breach, who had struggled to silence the great, killing guns sunk in the wide wall. The English would celebrate. They liked victories, especially those far from home that fortified their sense of superiority over the French, but they did not want to know about this; the screams of the wounded, the thump of severed limbs, the slow drip of thick blood from the hallway ceiling.
    Sharpe pushed into the cold street and hunched down inside his collar against a sudden flurry of snow. There was no joy for him in this victory; only a sense of loss, of loneliness, and of some unfinished task he must perform in a breach. It could all wait.
    He went in search of drink.

CHAPTER 5

    It had begun to snow again, a thin sprinkling that flecked the greatcoats of the collapsed drunks in the street. It was cold. Sharpe knew he should find somewhere warm, somewhere to clean the big sword properly before the rust pits began, somewhere to sleep, but he wanted a drink first.
    The city was quieter. There were still shouts echoing down empty alleyways, an odd musket shot, and once, inexplicably, a muffled explosion. Sharpe did not care. He wanted drink to drive away the self-pity, the nagging thought that, without Lawford, he could be a Lieutenant again under the orders of a Captain ten years younger than himself, without experience, and his mood turned savage as he made