Sharpe's Waterloo Part 46

Ford, too frightened to open his mouth, just nodded.

"South Ess.e.x!" Sharpe's thunderous voice startled the nearest men. It did not matter that he had inadvertently used the battalion's old name, they knew who they were and who, at last, was giving them direction in the middle of horror. "Front rank! Fix bayonets!"

"Thank Christ for b.l.o.o.d.y Sharpie," Clayton said fervently, then half crouched to hold his musket between his knees as he pulled out his bayonet and slotted it onto his musket.

Sharpe thrust between the files of Number Five Company, placing himself in the very centre of the battalion's front rank. "Talion will advance fifty paces! At the double! By the right! March!" As the men started forward, Sharpe drew his long sword. "Come on, you b.u.g.g.e.rs! Cheer! Let the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds know you're coming to kill them! Cheer!"

The battalion ran forward, bayonets outstretched. And they cheered. They knew Sharpe, they had followed him into battle before, and they liked to hear that voice shouting commands. They trusted him. He gave them confidence and victory. They cheered even louder as the ma.s.s of startled skirmishers on the ridge's crest upped and fled from their sudden advance. Sharpe had run ahead of them to stand with his drawn sword on the very lip of the crest.

"Halt!" Sharpe's voice, trained as a sergeant, instantly silenced and stopped the shrunken battalion. Ahead of them the French Voltiguers were dropping into new firing positions.

Sharpe turned to face the battalion. "Front rank kneel! Aim at the b.u.g.g.e.rs! Don't throw away this volley! Find your man and kill the b.a.s.t.a.r.d! Aim for their bellies!" He pushed his way between two men of the kneeling front rank then turned to look at the French. He saw a Voltigeur's musket pointing directly at him and he knew that the Frenchman was taking careful aim. He also knew he could not duck or dodge, but just had to trust in the French musket's inaccuracy. "Aim!" he shouted. The Frenchman fired and Sharpe felt the wind of the ball on his check like a sudden hot blow. "Fire!"

The ma.s.sive volley crashed down the slope. Perhaps twenty Frenchmen died, and twice as many were wounded. "Light company! Stay where you are and reload! Front rank, stand! No one told you to run!" Sharpe remained on the crest. Behind him a man was lying dead, struck in the head by the bullet intended for Sharpe. "Light company! Chain formation, quick now!"

The battalion's skirmishers spread along the crest. Their new Captain, Jefferson, jiggled impatiently, wanting to be away from this exposed ridge where the roundshot slashed and thudded, but Sharpe was determined that the Company's volley would have an effect. The men finished reloading their muskets, then knelt. The surviving French skirmishers were creeping forward again, filling the gaps torn by the battalion volley. "Wait for the order!" Sharpe called to his old Company. "Find your targets! Clayton!"

"Sir?"

"There's an officer on your right. A tall b.u.g.g.e.r with a red moustache. I want him dead or I'll blame you for it! Company!" He paused a second. "Fire!"

The smaller volley did more damage, though whether the moustached officer was shot, Sharpe could not tell. He shouted at the men to retire to battalion. The manoeuvre had gained a few moments' respite, nothing more, but it was better to hit back than simply endure the galling punishment of the enemy skirmishers.

Sharpe lingered at the crest a few more seconds. It was not bravado, but rather curiosity because, five hundred paces to his left, he could just see two red-coated infantry battalions of the King's German Legion advancing in column. They marched towards La Haye Sainte with their colours flying, presumably to drive away the French infantry who cl.u.s.tered about the farm.

He would have liked to have watched longer, but the enemy was creeping back towards the crest, and so Sharpe turned and walked back to the battalion. "Thank you for the privilege, Colonel!" he shouted to Ford.

Ford said nothing. He was in no mood to appreciate Sharpe's tact, instead he felt slighted and diminished by the Rifleman's competence. Ford knew that he should have given the orders, and that he should have taken the battalion forward, but his bowels had turned to water and his mind was a haze of fear and confusion. He had fought briefly in southern France, but he had never seen a horror like this; a battlefield where men were dying by the minute, where his battalion shrank as the files closed over the gaps left by the dead, and where it seemed that every man must die before the field's appet.i.te for blood was slaked. Ford s.n.a.t.c.hed off his fouled spectacles and scrubbed their lenses on a corner of his saddle-cloth. The white smoke and cannon's glare melded into a smear of horror before his eyes. He wished it would end, he just wished it would end. He no longer cared if it ended in victory or defeat, he just wanted it to end.

But the Emperor had only just started to fight.

The Duke of Wellington no longer troubled himself about the Prince of Orange. At the battle's commencement, when some niceties of polite usage persisted, the Duke had taken care to inform the Prince of any orders involving those troops nominally under the Prince's command, but now in the desperate moments of pure survival the Duke simply ignored the Young Frog.

Which did not mean that the Prince considered himself redundant. On the contrary, he saw his own genius as the allies' sole hope of victory and was prepared to use the last shreds of his authority to achieve it. Which meant La Haye Sainte must be saved, and to save it the Prince ordered the remnants of the and Infantry Brigade of the King's German Legion to attack the besieging French.

Colonel Christian Ompteda, the brigade commander, formed his two battalions into close column of companies, ordered them to fix bayonets, and then to advance into the suffocating mix of heated air and bitter smoke that filled the valley. The German objective was the field to the west of La Haye Sainte where the French skirmishers were pressing close and thick on the beleaguered farm.

The Germans reached the crest and were about to march down on the French when the Prince of Orange galloped to intercept them. "In line!" the Prince shouted. "In line! You must overlap them! I insist you advance in line!"

Colonel Ompteda, his battalions halted on the very edge of the valley and under fire from the French guns, protested that there were enemy cavalry patrolling the valley floor. The Prince turned sarcastic eyes towards the smoke. "I see no cavalry."

"Your Highness, I must insist that - ,

,You cannot insist! You will form line! d.a.m.n you!" The Prince was ebullient, feeding off the crash and hammer of the guns. He felt himself born to this heated chaos of battle. He did not give a fig that Ompteda was a man who had spent a lifetime soldiering; the Prince had the pa.s.sionate certainty of his convictions and not even his experiences with Halkett's brigade at Quartre Bras nor the ma.s.sacre of the Red Germans would sway him. "I order you into line! Or do you wish me to appoint another brigade commander?" he shouted into the Colonel's face.

Ompteda, in whom obedience was deeply ingrained, reluctantly deployed his two battalions into line. The Prince, scornful of Ompteda's timidity and certain that he had just given the orders necessary to bring glowing victory, watched triumphantly as the German bayonets marched into the valley.

Fifty paces from the edge of the skirmishers, Ompteda ordered his men to charge.

The Germans ran forward, their bayonets bright in the gloom under the smoke. The French infantry, taken utterly by surprise, fled from the appalling threat of the seventeen-inch blades. The German colours swirled forward into the musket smoke left by the skirmishers.

"There!" The Prince, happy on his hill, exulted in the success.

"Let me congratulate Your Highness," Winckler, one of the Prince's Dutch aides, smirked at his master's side.

Lieutenant Simon Doggett, who was a few yards to the Prince's right, stared beyond the infantry and could have sworn he saw a file of cavalry trotting across the valley. Or at least he was sure he saw the glint of helmets and the swirl of horsehair plumes in a rift of the smoke. "Sir? There's cavalry out there, sir!"

The Prince turned furiously on the Lieutenant. "That's all you British ever see! Cavalry! You're nervous, Doggett. If you can't endure the rigours of battle, you shouldn't be a soldier. Isn't that right, Winckler?"

"Entirely right. Your Highness."

Rebecque listened to the conversation and said nothing. He just stared into the shifting white scrims where the muskets crackled like burning thorns.

"You see!" The Prince made a great play of peering into the valley, shading his eyes and gaping like a village idiot. "No horses! Lieutenant Doggett? Where are your gee-gees?"

Simon Doggett was no longer certain that he had seen any cavalry, for the valley was thick with smoke and he feared that nervousness had played tricks with his perception, but he stubbornly held his ground. "I'm fairly sure I saw them, sir, in the smoke. They were Cuira.s.siers, off to the right there."

But the Prince had taken enough from pusillanimous Englishmen. "Get rid of the boy, Rebecque! Just get rid of him. Send him back to his nursemaid." The Prince's horse shied sideways as.a cannon-ball slashed close past. "There!" The Prince cried triumphantly as the smoke drifted aside to reveal that the KGL infantry had scoured the last Frenchmen away from the farm's western walls. "You see? No cavalry! Boldness wins!"

"Your Highness's boldness wins," Winckler hastened to correct his master.

A trumpet interrupted the Prince's next words. The trumpet call sounded from the valley, from inside the smoke where the Prince had insisted no cavalry lurked, but out of which, like avenging furies, the troop of Cuira.s.siers now led the charge.

Rebecque groaned. In almost the exact same place as the Hanoverians had been slaughtered, the KGL now suffered. The cavalry, a mixture of Cuira.s.siers, Lancers and Dragoons who had survived the slaughter of the hors.e.m.e.n among the British squares, now struck the flank of Ompteda's right-hand battalion. To Rebecque it seemed that the red-coated infantry simply disappeared beneath the swarm of mounted killers. To the French hors.e.m.e.n this was a blessed moment of revenge on the infantry who had made them bleed and suffer earlier in the day.

The Prince just stared. He had gone pale, but he made no move to help the men he had just doomed. His mouth opened slackly and his fingers twitched on his reins.

The Germans stood no chance. The hors.e.m.e.n sabred and stabbed from the open flank. The men of the right-hand KGL battalion broke into hopeless flight and were run down by the horses. The left-hand battalion formed a rally square to protect its colour, but the right-hand battalion was destroyed. The Prince turned away as a French swordsman captured a KGL colour and hefted it aloft in a gesture of triumph. Colonel Ompteda died trying to save the flag. The French infantry ran to add their bayonets to the hors.e.m.e.n's blades. The German survivors, pitifully few, inched in their rough square back towards the ridge. They too might have been doomed, but, some of their own cavalry streamed down from the elm tree to drive the enemy back.

A French cavalry trumpeter sounded a derisive flurry as the remnants of the King's German Legion limped back up the slope. A Cuira.s.sier brandished the captured colour, taunting the suffering British ridge with this foretaste of French victory.

The Prince did not look at the Germans nor at the exultant French. Instead he stared imperiously towards the east. "It isn't my fault if men won't fight properly!"

None of the staff answered. Not even Winckler was minded to soften the disaster with flattery.

"We gave the garrison a breathing s.p.a.ce, did we not?" The Prince gestured at La Haye Sainte that was once more ringed with smoke, but again no one answered and the Prince, who believed he deserved loyalty from his military family, turned furiously on his staff. "The Germans should have formed square! It wasn't my fault!" He looked from man to man, demanding agreement, but only Simon Doggett was brave enough to meet the Prince's petulant and bulging eyes.

"You're nothing but a silk stocking full of s.h.i.t," Doggett said very clearly, and utterly astonished himself by so repeating Patrick Harper's scornful verdict on the Prince.

There was an appalled silence. The Prince gaped. Rebecque, not quite sure whether he had heard correctly, opened his mouth to protest, but could not find adequate words.

Doggett knew he had just seconds to keep the initiative. He tugged at his horse's reins. "You're a b.l.o.o.d.y murderer!" he said to the Prince, then slashed back his spurs and galloped away. In a few seconds the smoke hid him.

The Prince stared after him. Rebecque hastened to a.s.sure His Highness that Doggett's wits had clearly been loosened by the stress of battle. The Prince nodded acceptance of the facile explanation, then turned furiously on his staff again. "I'm surrounded by incompetents! That b.l.o.o.d.y man should have formed square! Is it my fault if a d.a.m.ned German doesn't know his job?" The Prince's indignation and anger spilled out in furious pa.s.sion. "Is it my fault that the French are winning? Is it?"

And in that, at least, the Prince spoke true. The French, at last, were winning the battle.