Captain d’Alembord, stumbling through the mud and long grass with a mug of tea in his hand, shouted into the darkness for his Company. Sergeant Harper’s voice answered.

The Captain stood shivering by the small fire. ‘Thank God it’s not raining.’

‘Aye.’ Harper looked pleased.

‘The Colonel says it’s true.’

‘Might as well get it over with.’ The huge Sergeant was rolling up his blanket. The South Essex had marched without tents.

Captain d’Alembord, who had never fought in a real battle, was nervous. ‘They reckon they’re waiting over the hills.’

‘But not far away, eh?’ Harper laughed. ‘So there’ll be a fight, yes?’

‘So they say.’

‘With all the trimmings, sir. It’ll be a grand day for it, if it doesn’t rain.’

‘I’m sure we’ll acquit ourselves nobly, Sergeant.’

‘We always do, sir.’ Harper was strapping the blanket to his pack. ‘Farrell!’ The roar of Harper’s voice made d’Alembord jump.

‘Sarge?’ A plaintive voice sounded from the darkness.

‘Get up, you protestant bastard! We’ve got a battle to fight!’

Some men laughed, some men groaned. Harper grinned reassuringly at Captain d’Alembord. ‘The lads will be all right, sir, don’t you fret.’ Captain d’Alembord, quite understandably, was fretting whether he would be all right. He smiled.

‘Finish the tea, Sergeant?’

‘You’re a granthman, sir, so you are. I thank you.’ Harper tilted the mug and swallowed what was left in great gulps. ‘Would you be a betting man, sir?’

‘I am.’

‘I have a feeling we’ll be seeing an old friend today.’ The Sergeant said it comfortably, his voice utterly confident.

Captain d’Alembord, who had come to trust Sergeant Harper, sighed. He knew that the Irishman had never accepted Sharpe’s death and the Captain feared what would happen when it dawned on Harper that the Major was truly dead. There were stories that, before he met Sharpe, Harper had been the wildest man in the army and d’Alembord feared he would become so again. The officer chose his words carefully. This was the first time that Harper had spoken of Sharpe to him since the hanging, and d’Alembord did not want to be too savage in breaking the Irishman’s hopes.

‘What if you don’t see him, Sergeant?’

‘I’ve been thinking about it, so I have, sir.’ Harper thumped his shako into shape with a fist. Isabella was rolling her own blanket beside him. Harper smiled. ‘There’s no way Nosey would hang him, not after Sharpe saved his life, sir. And there’s no way the frogs can kill him, so he has to be alive. He’ll be back, sir, and if we’re in a fight, that’s where he’ll be. A pound says I’m right.’

‘D’Alembord grinned. ‘You haven’t got a pound.’

‘I will tonight, though. Farrell! You heathen bastard! Get up!’ Harper looked back to his officer. ‘A pound?’

‘You need your money, Harps. You’re getting married.’

‘Christ! Don’t talk about it.’ Harper sounded gloomy. ‘I’ll still lay the pound/sir.’

‘I accept.’

In the valley a trumpet sounded. In the darkness thousands of men prepared themselves. Behind them was a epic march through the hills, and beyond the next hill was Vitoria.

They marched before dawn, the columns splitting again, but all going eastwards, going towards the enemy. The columns twisted through the misted valleys, going towards Vitoria, going towards the treasure of an empire, and going to battle.

The rain, at last, had stopped, and the dawn of Monday, June 21st, 1813, brought a dazzling, blinding sun that lanced over the Pamplona valley, over the spires of Vitoria, and into the eyes of the few British horsemen who had climbed the hills to the west of the city.

They could see nothing of the French beneath them. The wide valley in which Vitoria stood was shrouded in mist, a mist that was thickened by the smoke of myriad camp-fires. The watching horsemen appeared to be alone in a wild, dazzling landscape.

The sky was brilliantly clear. The valleys were hidden by mist, and the east was filled with the searing glory of the rising sun, yet to north and south the British horsemen could see the successive ridges of the hills etched in startling clarity against a pale sky. After the days of rain and low cloud it seemed almost indecent to be fighting on such a day as this. Yet fight they must, for, by the will of Marshal Jourdan and General Wellington, one hundred and forty thousand men had come to this misted plain from which, like a strange island in a white sea, the spires of Vitoria’s cathedral jutted golden in the sun.

From the west, in the valleys that were mysterious with shredding mist and shadow, the British army marched. They were cold from the night and few men spoke or sang as they marched, waiting for the sun and the smell of powder to warm their spirits. In every Company the sibilant hiss of stone on steel could be heard. The sharpening stones were handed round and the men honed their bayonets as they marched and prayed they would not need to use them.

They had marched across the roof of Spain, coming from Portugal to this place where, like a knife put to a throat, they threatened the Great Road that was France’s lifeline in Spain. The men knew, because their officers had told them, that a battle was imminent. Some, who had stood in the battle-line before, tried not to think of what was to come while others, who had never before seen an enemy army, wondered if they would live to remember the sight. Some, remembering the long hard marches in the high inhospitable hills, feared defeat, for, if this army was broken today and forced to retreat, they would face days of being hunted in the high valleys by the long-bladed French horsemen.

Wellington, this day, commanded Spanish, Portuguese and British troops. With him, too, was the King’s German Legion. They marched towards the valley of Vitoria, and with them went their women and children who would wait at the field’s edge while their men fought. With the army, too, were sutlers and merchants, salesmen of patent medicines, friars and priests. There were whores, beggars, horse-thieves, and politicians, and, like a lumbering, ponderous beast, the whole great mass curled and heaved itself towards the valley, towards Vitoria and towards a fight.

The French were confident this day. Their enemies had an edge in numbers, it was true, but numbers were not all in warfare. The French had picked their battlefield, chosen where to stand, and they defended their chosen place with the greatest concentration of artillery that had ever been assembled in Spain.

To the north of their position was the River Zadorra, and to the south the Heights of Puebla, and the constriction of river and highland would force the British to a frontal attack in the valley that would bring them into the face of the great guns that, in this morning of drifting mist, looked like fearsome monsters in wait for jtheir victims.

The guns that gave the French such confidence were placed on a low north-south ridge called the Arinez Hill. The French high command, knowing that soldiers, above all humankind, are superstitious, had spread the story of the Arinez Hill, and the story, on this dawn of waiting, added to the French confidence. The hill was a place of ill-luck for the English.

Centuries before this dawn, on a day of searing heat, three hundred English knights, marauding for plunder, had been surrounded by a Spanish army on the Arinez Hill. The English had dared not take off their armour, for then they would have been meat for the Spanish crossbows, and so they fought, the day long, roasting like pigs, their tongues swelling with thirst, their eyes blinded with sweat, and time after time the Spanish came up the hill to be thrust down with the long, heavy swords or beaten back with the maces and clubs. The stolid clay of the hill was slick with blood and loud with the screams of horses and men.