"There's more than 1, 000 men in the fort at Ochagavia, " Hogan told Sharpe, "and we don't want Boney to get those men back, Richard. You have to stop them."

"If they use the western road, sir."

"Which they probably won't, " Hogan said confidently, "but if they do, Richard, stop them. Kill me some Frogs for Christmas. That's why you joined the Army, isn't it? To kill Frogs. So go and do it. I want you out of here in an hour."

In truth, Sharpe had not joined the Army to kill Frogs. He had joined because he was hungry and on the run from the constables. And once a man had taken the shilling and pulled on the King's coat, he was reckoned safe from the law. And so Private Richard Sharpe had joined the 33rd, fought with them in Flanders and India. And at Assaye, a bloody battlefield between two rivers where a small British army had trounced a vast Indian horde, he had become an officer.

That was almost ten years ago and he had spent a good many of those years fighting the French in Portugal and Spain. Only now he fought in a dark green coat, for he was a Rifleman, though by an accident of war, he now found himself commanding a battalion of redcoats. They had once been called the South Essex, but now they were the Prince of Wales's Own Volunteers, though on this dank, grey morning they were anything but willing. They were comfortable in their Spanish billets, they liked the local girls, and none was of a mind to go soldiering in a cold Spanish winter.

Sharpe ignored their displeasure. Men did not join the Army to be comfortable, but to fight. They marched on the hour, 422 men swinging east out of the town and down into the valley.

It had begun to rain heavily, filling the small ditches that edged the fields and flooding the furrows left in the road by the big guns. No one else in the Army was moving, just Sharpe's regiment that was going to plug a gap in the high mountains to stop the Frogs escaping.

Not that Sharpe believed he would fight this Christmas. Even Hogan was not certain the French would march, and if they did, they would probably choose the other road, the main road, so all Sharpe expected was a long march and a cold Christmas.

But King George wanted him to be at Irati, so to Irati he would go. And God help the Frogs if they went as well.

Colonel Jean Gudin watched as the tricolor was lowered. The fort at Ochagavia, that he had commanded for four years, was being abandoned and it hurt. It was another failure, and his life had been nothing but failure.

Even the fort at Ochagavia was a failure for, as far as Gudin could see, it guarded nothing. True, it dominated a road in the mountains, but the road had never been used to bring supplies from France and so it had never been haunted by the dreaded partisans who harried all the other French garrisons in Spain.

Time and again, Gudin had pointed this out to his superiors, but somewhere in Paris there was a pin representing the garrison of Ochagavia stuck into a map of Spain and no one had been willing to surrender the pinprick until now, when some bureaucrat had suddenly remembered the fort's existence and realised it held 1, 000 good men who were needed to defend the homeland.

Those men now made ready for their escape. Three hundred were Gudin's garrison and the others were fugitives who had taken refuge in Ochagavia after the disaster at Vitoria. Some of those refugees were Dragoons, but most were infantrymen from the 75th Regiment who paraded in the fort's courtyard beneath their Eagle and under the eye of their irascible chef de battalion, Colonel Caillou. Behind the 75th, clustered around two horse-drawn wagons, was a crowd of women and children.

"The women, " Caillou rode his horse to Gudin's side. "I thought we agreed to abandon the women."

"I didn't agree, " Gudin said curtly.

Caillou snorted, then glared at the shivering women. They were the wives and girlfriends of Ochagavia's garrison and, between them, had almost as many children, some no more than babes in arms. "They're Spaniards! " he snapped.

"Not all of them, " Gudin said. "Some are French."

"But French or Spanish, they will slow us down, " Caillou insisted. "The essence of success, Gudin, is to march fast. Audacity! Speed! There lies safety. We cannot take women and children."

"If they stay, " Gudin said, "they will be killed."

'That's war, Gudin, that's war! " Caillou declared. "In war, the weak die."

"We are soldiers of France, " Gudin said stiffly, "and we do not leave women and children to die. They march with us."

Gudin knew that all of them, soldiers, women and children alike, might die because of that decision, but he could abandon these Spanish women who had found themselves French husbands and given birth to half-French babies. If they were left, the partisans would find them, they would be called traitors, they would be tortured and they would die. No, Gudin thought, he could not just leave them.

"And Maria is pregnant, " he added, nodding towards an ammunition cart on which a woman lay swathed in grey army blankets.

"I don't care if she's the Virgin Mary! " Caillou exploded. "We cannot afford to take women and children! " Caillou saw that his words were having no effect on the grey-haired Colonel Gudin, and the older man's stubbornness inflamed Caillou. "My God, Gudin, no wonder they call you a failure!»

"You go too far, " Gudin said. He outranked Caillou, but only by virtue of having been a colonel longer than the infantryman.

"I go too far?" Caillou spat in derision. "But at least I care more for France than for a pack of sniveling women. If you lose my Eagle, Gudin, " he pointed to the tricolor beneath its statuette of the Eagle, "I'll see you face a firing squad."

Gudin did not bother to reply, but just walked his horse towards the gate. He felt an immense sadness. Caillou was right, he thought, he was a failure.

It had all begun in India, 13 years before, when Seringapatam had fallen, and since then, nothing had gone right. He had not received one promotion in all those years, but had gone from one misfortune to the next until now he was the commander of a useless fort in a bleak landscape. And if he could escape? That would be a victory, especially if he could take Caillou's precious Eagle safe across the Pyrenees, but was even an Eagle worth the life of so many women and children?

He smiled down at his Sergeant. "You can open the gate. And once we've left, sergeant, light the fuses."

"The women, sir?" the sergeant asked anxiously. "They are coming?"

"They're coming, Pierre."

The Dragoons left first. It was dusk. Gudin planned to march all night in the hope that by dawn he would have left any partisans far behind. Until then, he had hardly been worried by the fearsome Spanish guerilleros, but those savage men had few French enemies left in Spain and were closing on the remaining enemy fortresses like vultures scenting death.

Gudin had spread a rumor that he intended to march his garrison to join the beleaguered French troops in Pamplona, and he hoped that might keep the partisans away from the road that led northwards, but he doubted the rumor would work.

His best hope lay in marching at night, and God help any of his men or women who could not keep up, for they would face a terrible, slow death. Some would be burned alive, some flayed, some, but no, it did not bear thinking about.

It was not war as Gudin understood it, it was butchery, and what galled Gudin most was that the guerilleros were only doing to the French what the French had done to the Spaniards.

The infantry marched through the gate behind their Eagle. The women followed.

Gudin stayed to watch the sergeant light the fuses, then he spurred away from his doomed fort. He paused a half-mile up the road and turned to watch as the fire in the fuses reached the charges set in the fort's magazines.