Sharpe's Waterloo Part 18

Redcoats scrambled forward, climbing over their own dead and wounded. A Lancer tried to pick up the colour with his weapon's point, but Christie hung on grimly. The two Hussars grunted as they chopped at him with their sabres. A musket shot killed one Frenchman, the other parried a bayonet thrust, then stabbed down at Christie a last time.

Another musket hammered and the Hussar was plucked out of his saddle like a puppet jerked on strings. A knot of red-coated officers and men surged over the p.r.o.ne Christie, driving the last enemy away. A Lancer had speared a corner of the flag and now jerked his lance up to tear a fragment of the yellow silk away, but even that trophy was denied the French. Three muskets flamed and the Lancer toppled backwards from his horse.

"Close up! Close up!" the Sergeants shouted. A crashing volley cleared a s.p.a.ce in front of the battalion. The air was thick with the foul powder smoke, rank with the stench of blood, and loud with the noise of screaming horses and men. A loose horse galloped wildly across the face of the line, streaming blood. A Lancer staggered away on foot and was dropped by a musket bullet. The French hors.e.m.e.n were turning and riding away, trying to escape the musket volleys.

Ensign Christie was alive, still with the colour gripped to his body that had been slashed with more than twenty sabre and lance wounds. His men made a litter of muskets and blankets and carried him back to the surgeons who had set up for business in the barn by the crossroads. The colour, its bright yellow silk slashed by steel and stained with Christie's blood, was raised again. The French cavalry, like an ebbing tide of blood, reformed a quarter mile away. The crossroads had held.

The Black Watch dragged the dead Lancers from inside their square and dumped the bodies as a kind of rampart to trip any more charging horses. Men reloaded their muskets. The wounded limped back to the surgeons. One man fell to his knees, vomited blood, then collapsed.

The French had come perilously close to breaking the British line apart. Some of the Hussars and Lancers, who had ridden to the rear of the red-coated battalions, had galloped along the road they were trying to capture, and had only retreated back through the intervals between the battalions because there were not enough -hors.e.m.e.n to hold the temporarily captured road. It now seemed to the French that one more effort would surely succeed, and that the red-coated infantry would break just like the Dutch-Belgian hors.e.m.e.n had broken. The trumpets screamed for that second effort which, to ensure success, was strengthened with eight hundred Cuira.s.siers; the grosfreres, big brothers, of the French army. The Cuira.s.siers wore steel breastplates, helmets and backplates, and rode the heaviest horses of all the French cavalry. A big brother, his armour and his horse weighed more than a ton. The grosfreres, their armoured steel reflecting the sun like silver fire, would lead the second charge and crush the infantry by sheer weight and terror.

But the infantry, expecting the charge, was ready. The musket volleys crashed smoke and flame, and punched their bullets clean through the armour plate. The Cuira.s.siers were tumbled down to the crushed rye as the musket volleys settled into their killing rhythm. Dying horses quivered on the compacted rye, while wounded Cuira.s.siers struggled to unburden themselves of helmets and armour before limping away. The Lancers and Hussars, seeing the slaughter of the armoured hors.e.m.e.n, did not press their own charge home.

"Cease fire! Reload!" the officers and sergeants called to the British squares. The regimental bands played on, while in the squares the colours hung heavy in the humid and smoke-stained air. The enemy cavalry, bloodied and beaten, pulled back to the stream. From the east came the sound of cannon, proof that the Prussians still fought their battle.

Then the French skirmishers crept forward and opened their galling fire again, and from beyond Gemioncourt the French twelve-pounder cannons opened fire on the British ranks. The enemy cavalry was still in sight, and not so very far off, and so the infantry was forced to stay in their squares as prime targets for the heavy French cannon.

It was time for the infantry to suffer.

On the roads leading to Quatre Bras from the west and north the hurrying British troops saw the growing canopy of smoke, and heard the incessant punch of the heavy guns. Carts were already travelling back to Brussels carrying wounded men who groaned in the afternoon heat while their blood dripped through the bottom-boards to stain the white road red. Other wounded men walked away from the battle, staggering in the sun towards their old bivouac areas. In Nivelles the townspeople huddled at their doors, listened to the noise of battle, and stared wide-eyed at the foully wounded soldiers who limped past. Some unwounded Belgian soldiers spread the news that the British were already beaten and that the Emperor was already on his way to Brussels.

The clouds thickened in the west, climbing ever higher and darker.

Twelve miles to the north of Quatre Bras, in the orchard of a farm called Hougoumont which, in turn, was close to the small village of Waterloo, some men were busy thinning the apple crop. They plucked the unripe fruit and tossed it into baskets, thus ensuring that the remaining apples would grow big and juicy. The discarded fruit would be fed to the pigs that lived in the yard of the chateau of Hougoumont.

It was a hot day, and as the men worked they could hear the percussive thumping of the guns to the south. From the top of their ladders they could see the growing cloud of dirty smoke that climbed over the battlefield. They chuckled at the sight, relieved that it was not they who were being shot at, nor their homes being invaded by soldiers, and not their land being ridden ragged by cavalry.

The chateau windows were open and white curtains stirred in the small breeze that offered a slight measure of relief from the stifling heat. A plump woman came to one of the upstairs windows where she rested her arms on the sill and stared at the strange conical smoke canopy that grew in the far southern sky. On the main highway that ran through the valley east of the chateau she could see a stream of soldiers marching south. The men,wore red, and even at this distance she could see they were hurrying. "Better them than us, eh, ma'am?" one of the apple pickers shouted.

"Better them than us," the woman agreed, then crossed herself.

"We'll get rain tomorrow," one of the men remarked, but the others took no notice. They were too busy picking apples. Tomorrow, if it did not rain, they were supposed to finish the haymaking down in the valley's bottom, and there was a flock of sheep to be sheared as well, while the day after tomorrow, thank the good Lord, they would have a day off because it was Sunday.

More British troops arrived at Quatre Bras, but they had to be sent to the flanks which were under increasing pressure from the French. Sharpe, after sc.r.a.ping home in front of the French cavalry, had been sent through the wood to find Prince Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar. The Prince, a dour tough man, had been holding his position, but his ammunition was running low and his men were being killed by the ever-present skirmishers. Newly arrived British infantry were sent to support him, while yet more redcoats were sent to help the Rifles on the left flank who were also under heavy attack from a brigade of French infantry.

"Why don't they attack our centre with infantry?" Doggett asked Sharpe, who had rejoined Harper behind the crossroads.

"Because they're being led by a cavalryman." An Hussar prisoner had revealed that it was Marshal Ney who led the French troops at Quatre Bras. Ney was called 'the bravest of the brave', a red-haired cavalryman who would have ridden through the pits of h.e.l.l without a murmur, but who had yet to launch an infantry attack against the battered defenders at the crossroads.

"You have to understand something about cavalrymen, Mr Doggett," Harper explained. "They look very fine, so they do, and they usually take all the credit for any victory, but the only brains they've got are the ones they keep in their horses' heads."

Doggett blushed. "I wanted to be a cavalryman, but my father insisted I joined the Guards."

"Don't worry," Harper said cheerfully, "the Guards aren't our brightest lads either. G.o.d save Ireland, but just look at those poor boys."

The poor boys were the Highlanders beyond the crossroads who could only stand and be slaughtered by the French guns. They were in square, which made them a tempting target for the French artillerymen, and they dared not relinquish the formation for fear of the French cavalry that watched them like hawks. The Scotsmen could only stand while the roundshot slammed into the files, and each shot that struck home killed two or three men, sometimes more. Once Harper saw a roundshot strike the flanking face of a square and ten men went down in a single b.l.o.o.d.y smear. The British artillery at the crossroads was being saved for any French infantry attack, though once in a while a gun would try to hit a French cannon. Such counter-battery fire was almost always wasted, but as the infantry's suffering dragged on the Duke ordered more of it simply to help the morale of the redcoats.

"Why don't we do something?" Doggett asked plaintively.

"What's to do?" Harper asked. "The b.l.o.o.d.y Belgians won't fight, so we haven't got any cavalry. It's called being an infantryman, Mr Doggett. Your job is to stand there and get slaughtered."

"Patrick?" Sharpe had been staring up the Nivelles road. "Do you see what I see?"

Harper twisted in his saddle. "b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l, sir, you're right!" A further brigade of British infantry was arriving, and among the troops was the Prince of Wales's Own Volunteers. Sharpe and Harper spurred towards their old battalion.

Sharpe stood his horse beside the road and took off his hat as the leading company came abreast. It was his old company, the light, led by Peter d'Alembord. The men's faces were pale with dust, through which the rivulets of sweat had driven dark trails. Daniel Hagman raised a cheer as Sharpe tossed them a full canteen of water. D'Alembord, his white dancing breeches stained from the wax with which his saddle had been polished, reined in beside the two Riflemen and looked dubiously towards the smear of smoke that marked the battlefield. "How is it?"

"It's stiff work, Peter," Sharpe admitted.

"Is Boney here?" It was the same question that nearly every newly arriving officer had asked, as though the presence of the Emperor would dignify the day's death and dismemberment.

"Not so far as we know." Sharpe saw that his answer disappointed d'Alembord.

The brigade halted while Sir Colin Halkett, its commander, discovered where his four battalions were wanted. Lieutenant-Colonel Ford and his two Majors, Vine and Micklewhite, walked their horses up the road until they came close to where Sharpe, d'Alembord and Harper chatted. Ford, myopically peering towards the cannon smoke, realized too late that he had come close to Sharpe, whose presence made him feel so uncomfortable and inadequate, but he put a brave face on the chance meeting. "It sounds brisk, Sharpe, does it not?"

"It's certainly hard work, Ford," Sharpe said mildly.

No one seemed to be able to find anything else to say. Ford smiled with a general benignity which he thought fitting to a colonel, while Major Vine scowled at the men of the Prince of Wales's Own Volunteers who had slumped on the roadside, and Major Micklewhite pretended to be enthralled by the enamel picture on the lid of his snuffbox. A sudden explosion was loud enough to penetrate the half-deaf ears of Major Vine who twisted round to see that a British gun limber, crammed with ready ammunition, had been struck by a French sh.e.l.l and was now spewing a thick skein of smoke and flames into the sky.

Colonel Ford had jumped at the sudden violence of the explosion, and now he gazed through his thick spectacles at the rest of the battlefield, which appeared as a threatening blur of trampled corn, blood, smoke, and the lumped bodies of the dead. Cannon-b.a.l.l.s were ploughing through the slurry of rye and soil, spewing gouts of earth before bouncing into the b.l.o.o.d.y lines of Highlanders. "Dear G.o.d," Ford said with rather more feeling than he had intended.

"Watch out for their skirmishers," Sharpe advised drily. "They seem to have more of the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds than usual."

"More?" The tone to Ford's voice betrayed the Colonel's fear of taking his battalion into the cauldron beyond the crossroads.

"You might like to think about deploying an extra company as skirmishers," Sharpe, well aware of Ford's uncertainty, offered the advice as forcefully as he could without sounding patronizing, "but warn the lads to keep an eye open for the cavalry. They're never very far away." Sharpe pointed across the highway to where the stream fed a small lake behind Gemioncourt farm. "There's a fold in the ground over there and it's swarming with the evil b.u.g.g.e.rs."

"Quite so, quite so." Ford took off his spectacles, cleaned them on the ta.s.selled end of his red sash, then hooked the earpieces back into place. He stared through the newly cleaned gla.s.s but could see neither a fold in the ground nor any cavalry. He wondered whether Sharpe was deliberately trying to frighten him, and so, to show that he was quite equal to the prospect of fighting, Ford straightened his shoulders and turned his horse away. Vine and Micklewhite, like obedient hounds, followed their Colonel.

"He won't take a blind bit of notice," d'Alembord sighed.

"Then you watch out for the cavalry, Peter. They're in something of a murderous b.l.o.o.d.y mood. There's about three thousand of the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds: Hussars, Lancers, and the Heavies."

"You do cheer me up, Sharpe, you really do." D'Alembord superst.i.tiously touched the breast pocket which bulged with his fiancee's letters. "Have you had your note from that b.l.o.o.d.y man yet?"

It took Sharpe a second or two to realize that d'Alembord was talking about Lord John Rossendale. He shook his head. "Not yet."

"Oh, G.o.d. I suppose that means we'll have to arrange a duel in the morning?"

"No. I'll just find the b.u.g.g.e.r and cut his b.a.l.l.s off."

"Oh, splendid!" d'Alembord said in mock seriousness. "That should satisfy everyone's honour."

Orders came back to the battalion. The newly arrived brigade was to take up positions in the wedge of field in front of Saxe-Weimar's wood, from where their musket-fire could rake across the flank of any French attack down the road. Sir Thomas Picton's staff brought the orders which insisted that the four battalions were to form square in the rye.

Sharpe shook d'Alembord's hand. "Watch those skirmishers, Peter!" He waved to Captain Harry Price who had once been his Lieutenant. "It's hot work, Harry!"

"I'm thinking of resigning, sir." Harry Price, too poor to own a horse, was sweating from the exertions of his long day's march. "My father always wanted me to take holy orders, and I'm beginning to think I rejected his views too quickly. Good G.o.d, it's Mr Harper!"