Sharpe's Waterloo Part 51

They marched. It was only seconds since they had been retreating and their ranks had been shaking loose into chaos, but now, given leadership, they went towards the conquering Guard. Sharpe stood his horse still to let the battalion divide either side of him, and only then did he walk forward, a horseman advancing in the centre of the marching battalion. He saw that a Brunswick infantry battalion was raking the far flank of the French column, but the fire was not sufficent to stop the Guard, only to deflect it towards the Prince of Wales's Own Volunteers. There were still no troops facing the column's head, while the rear ranks of the great formation were clumsily spreading outwards to form a musket line that was designed to drown the ridge's shaken defenders with volley fire. Behind the Guard a swarm of cavalry and lesser infantry was pressing up the lower slope, ready to turn a British defeat into rout and slaughter.

"Grenadier Company! Halt! "Talion will wheel to the right! Right wheel!" Sharpe was taking a risk that his men would understand and obey the difficult order in the noise and heat and fear. It would have been simpler just to halt the battalion and to fire obliquely at the French column, but such a compromise would have stranded the left half of the battalion a long way from the enemy. Yet if the battalion wheeled in good order they would sweep round like a swinging gate to face the enemy's unfolding flank. The Grenadier company, on the right of the line, stayed still as the remaining companies hinged on them. "At the double!" Sergeant Huckfield hurried the light company who had the furthest to go.

The wheeling line was ragged, but that did not matter. They were carrying their muskets to face the French, and Sharpe felt the exultation of handling a battalion in battle. He could see apprehension on the face of the mounted French officer who understood exactly what horror was about to be unleashed on his men.

"Halt!" Sharpe stopped the swinging battalion fifty paces from the column's flank. The whole battle was now reduced to a few dirty paces of smoke-fogged air. "Present!" The battalion's heavy muskets came up. Sharpe waited a heartbeat. He saw the Guards' mouths open to chant their litany of praise for the Emperor, but before they could make a sound, Sharpe at last gave the order. "Fire!"

He heard the old sound, the blessed sound, the splintering crash of a battalion's muskets spitting bullets, and he saw the deploying wing of the column jerk as the bullets struck home. A few Frenchmen fired back, but they were still marching and their muskets were unbalanced by the fixed bayonets and so their fire went wild.

The mounted officer was down, his horse thrashing on the ground as he crawled away. Harper was shouting at the battalion to reload. Simon Doggett, still on horseback, was firing a pistol over the battalion's head. Ramrods rattled in musket barrels as the. men desperately thrust bullets down onto powder.

Sharpe's battalion threatened the Imperial Guard's right, while on their left flank the Brunswickers fired another volley, but directly in front of the column was nothing but a broken ma.s.s of redcoats. The British cavalry closed on the frightened men, but, before the sabres could be used on the redcoats, the Duke was suddenly among them, and somehow the redcoats were stopped and turned by his confident voice. Staff officers rode among the fugitives, order was shaken out of their chaos, muskets were levelled, and a ragged volley sheeted flames at the column's head. The Guard, a.s.sailed on three sides, halted and shrank away from the musketry.

Sharpe watched the central ranks of the column pushing against the motionless men ahead. "Fire!" Sharpe gave the French right flank another bellyful of bullets. The column was still trying to advance, and the rearmost ranks were swinging obliquely out to form the musket line, and Sharpe sensed that the whole fate of this battle hung on the next few seconds. If the French could be made to move forward over their own dead then they could flood the ridge with their revenge and the fragile British line would shatter. Yet if this column could be driven backwards then the British line would earn a respite in which night or the Prussians might s.n.a.t.c.h survival from defeat.

"Forward! Forward! Forward!" a French voice shouted huge and desperately in the column's centre. The drums were still beating their message of victory. 'Vive I'Empereur!"

"Forward! Forward for the Emperor!"

"Fix bayonets!" Sharpe shouted in response.

The battalion, already reloading, dropped their half-torn cartridges and clawed their bayonets free. They slotted the blades on to blackened muzzles. The French drums sounded desperately close. Sharpe spurred ahead of the battalion. His horse was nervous and slick with sweat, and his long sword was still stained with the blood he had drawn in the yard at Hougoumont. He saw the

French column push over the bodies of the men his last volley had killed, and he wondered whether he had enough bayonets to break these confident Frenchmen apart, but there was only one way to. discover that answer and Sharpe suddenly felt the old excitement of battle, and the mad joy of it, and he raised his long bloodied blade high and ordered his battalion forward. "Charge!"

The survivors of the Prince of Wales's Own Volunteers charged with all the fury of bitter men who had taken h.e.l.l all day and who now faced the pristine, untouched favourites of an Emperor who had been sheltered from death till this moment. They charged with bloodied and powder-stained faces, and they screamed like furies as they carried their long blades forward.

The flank of the column tried to retreat from the charge, but the Frenchmen only pressed against the ranks behind that still tried to advance to the drumbeat. The sound of the drums was menacing, yet even the men sheltered in the very heart of the column knew that something was wrong. Their left flank was dying from the Brunswicker volleys, the Duke had rallied the redcoats in their front, and now Sharpe's men struck home on the right.

Sharpe slashed back with his heels, the horse leaped forward, and his sword crashed down like an axe. The blade drove a long splinter from a parrying musket, then hacked down again to thump through a bearskin and drive a Frenchman to his knees. The horse screamed and reared as a bayonet stabbed its chest, but then the redcoats swarmed past Sharpe to carry their blades at the enemy. The Prince of Wales's Own Volunteers had a score to settle, and so they ripped into the Emperor's immortals with a savagery that only men atoning for a moment's cowardice could show.

Sharpe's horse was wounded, but not fatally. It screamed with fear or pain as he crashed a musket aside with his sword then lunged at the Frenchman's face. The man recoiled from the blade, then went down beneath the bayonets of two snarling redcoats who thrust hard to force their blades through the Frenchman's heavy blue greatcoat. The enemy were sweating and edging back. The column was so closely packed that the French had no s.p.a.ce to use their weapons properly. Sharpe's men were keening as they killed, crooning a foul music as they lunged and stabbed and gouged and fought across the dead. Sharpe's horse half stumbled on a corpse and he flailed with the sword to find his balance. The ridge stank of blood and sweat and powder smoke. A vast crash, announced that Harper had fired his volley gun point blank into the ranks of the Guard, and now the Irishman threw himself into the s.p.a.ce his bullets had made. He widened the s.p.a.ce by stabbing with his sword-bayonet, each vicious thrust accompanied by a Gaelic war-cry.

Lieutenant Doggett, still on horseback, shouted at the files to give way then crashed his horse hard into the French ranks and stabbed down with his slim sword. He was screaming madly, covering his terror with a sound mad enough for a smoking field of blood. Ahead of Sharpe an Eagle swayed over the bearskin hats. He slashed his sword towards it, but the French ranks were so close that he could not force a path towards the trophy. He swore at a man as he killed him, then drove the sword into a moustached, sun-tanned face and twisted the steel to flense the man's cheek away. "The Eagle! The Eagle!" Sharpe screamed, then cursed the men who barred his way. Beneath and beside Sharpe the bayonets stabbed and twisted, but suddenly the enemy's gilded standard vanished, plucked backwards from the ridge top as the Emperor's Guard began their retreat. The drums had fallen silent and the immortal undefeated Guard were running away.

They ran. One moment they had been trying to fight, the next they were shouting that the day was lost and they were scrambling backwards from the b.l.o.o.d.y bayonets with panic and fear on their moustached faces, and the redcoats, panting and bloodied like hounds at their kill, watched in silence as the enemy elite fled. The Guard had been defeated by a remnant of red-coated killers who had sprung from the mud to maul an emperor's glory.

"Don't give them a chance to stand!" A commanding voice rose clear among the smoke and chaos. The Duke, cantering his horse behind the victorious battalions, was staring intently at the fleeing French. "Don't let them stand! Go forward now! See them off our land!" Typically there was an edge of impatience in the Duke's voice as though his men, having performed the miracle of defeating the Imperial Guard, had disappointed him by not yet converting that defeat into rout. Yet, equally typically, the Duke's eye had missed nothing and he was not graceless at this moment of salvation. "Mr Sharpe! I am beholden to you! That is your battalion now! So take it forward!"

" Talion!" Sharpe had no time to savour his reward. Instead he had to straighten his line to face the valley where the French were still ma.s.sed, and from where their next attack would surely come. "Light company stand firm! Right flank forward! March!"

The battalion wheeled left to face the enemy again. They had to negotiate the bodies of the French dead and dying. A man called for his mother, wailing foully until the slice of a bayonet stilled his voice. A wounded horse, its rump a mess of blood and torn flesh, galloped across the slope in front of Sharpe."

"Talion will advance!" The Sergeants and Corporals echoed Sharpe's order. Sharpe could not tell if any officers were left, though he saw Simon Doggett was still alive and he heard Patrick Harper's voice, and then the smoke cleared from the ridge's crest and Sharpe advanced his men to the very edge of the valley and, amazingly, miraculously, they saw that there would be no more French attacks for the enemy had not just retreated, but had been broken.

The battle was won and across the whole smoke-wreathed battlefield the enemy infantry was running. The Guard, the immortal undefeated Guard had been beaten, and if the Guard could lose, then no Frenchman thought himself safe and so panic had seized a whole army. There were plenty of French troops left, more than enough to overwhelm the British ridge, but those troops had seen the Imperial Guard running away, and the panic had spread, and so a whole army now ran for safety. A few staff officers galloped among the French and tried to rally them, but victory had been collapsed to nightmare by a few seconds of volley fire and steel, and so the French ran, all but for a few brave men who tried to stand firm in the valley's floor.

The Earl of Uxbridge, who had lost the Duke his cavalry just as Marshal Ney had lost the Emperor his, reined in beside Wellington who was staring hard at those few enemy who still showed defiance. "Oh d.a.m.n it!" the Duke said in wonderment. "In for a penny, in for a pound!" The Duke took off his hat with its four c.o.c.kades. The sun miraculously found a shaft of clear air between the cloud and smoke and slanted its golden light on the Duke as he brandished the hat forward. He thrust the hat forward again, signalling the whole British line to advance. This time they were not just to clear the French from the ridge, but from the whole battlefield. They had defended their ground all day, but now they could attack the enemy's ground. "Go on!" the Duke called. "Go on! They won't stand! Go on!"

And so they went. The battered survivors in their shattered ranks went forward at last. Somewhere a piper began his wild Scots music as the redcoats marched in a ragged line down to the valley floor to drive a beaten enemy to final ruin. A few last guns fired from the French ridge as a loser's defiance at the hour of defeat.

One of the cannon-b.a.l.l.s crashed past the Duke and struck the Earl's right knee. "My G.o.d! I've lost my leg!"

"Have you, by G.o.d?" The Duke galloped forward to where his infantry marched down to the valley floor. "Go on! They won't stand now! Go on!"

Dazed men marched down a slope they had defended all day. Slowly, incredulously, the fact of victory was born in them. They had won, by G.o.d, they had won, and to their left, in the east, the sky flickered with new gun-fire and the setting sun shone on dark-uniformed troops who were swarming up the flank of the far French ridge. The Prussians had come at last.

A British regiment of light cavalry, saved to cover the retreat, now trotted forward to exploit the victory. "Eighteenth!" their Colonel shouted. "Follow me!"

"To h.e.l.l!"

The trumpet sounded the ten dizzying notes. The hors.e.m.e.n careered down the slope, splitting the French survivors, sabring the last gunners who had stayed at their weapons, and then they saw a reserve battalion of the Guard formed into square on the enemy ridge. The square was edging backwards; attempting to escape the rout in good order and so be ready to fight for the Emperor another day.

The British sabres broke the square. The hors.e.m.e.n did what all the cavalry of France had failed to do, they broke a square. They died in their scores to do it, but nothing would stop them now. This was victory. This was better than victory, this was revenge, and so the rum-soaked hors.e.m.e.n hacked their sabres down at the bearskins and forced their horses across the dead to cut the living into b.l.o.o.d.y ribbons with their blades. The Prussians were marching from the left, the British were advancing across the valley, and the Emperor fled into the dusk as his Eagles fell.

The Inniskillings alone did not advance. Those who were not dead were wounded, for the Irishmen had held the weak spot in the Duke's thin line, and they had held it to the end. They had died in their ranks, they had never stopped fighting, and now they had won. Their dead lay in a perfect square and their colours still flew in the shredding smoke as their last living soldiers stared across a valley stinking with blood and palled by fire, a valley plucked from h.e.l.l; a battlefield.

EPILOGUE.

The wounded lay beneath a smoky moon while the living, exhausted, slept.

It was a warm night. A small west wind slowly took the stench of powder away, though the smell of blood would linger in the soil for weeks. Plunderers crept into the darkness. To the Belgian poor every sc.r.a.p of litter was worth money; whether it was a Cuira.s.sier's bullet-punctured breastplate, a broken sword, a pair of boots, a trooper's saddle, a bayonet, or even a strip of cloth. They stripped the dead naked, and killed the wounded to get their uniforms. Injured horses neighed pitifully as they waited for death in a field which rustled with thieves and murderers. A few fires flickered among the carnage. More than forty thousand men lay dead or wounded in the valley, and the survivors could not cope.

Lord John Rossendale still lay in the valley where he drifted in and out of consciousness. The pain had lessened in the night, but so had his lucidity. He dreamed. At times he was even happy in his dreams, but then hands began pulling at his chest and he moaned and tried to ward off the grasping fingers that were causing him such pain. A woman told him to lie still, but Lord John jerked as the pain stabbed and shrieked at him. The woman, a villager from Waterloo, was trying to drag Lord John's coat from his body. Her child, an eight-year-old girl, kept watch for the few sentries who tried to stop the plundering.

Lord John thought the woman was Jane. He was blind so he did not know it was still the heart of a dark night; instead he thought it was morning and that Jane had found him and he began to sob for joy as he reached up to hold her hand. The woman cursed Lord John for making her life so difficult, but she was not unprepared for such unco-operative victims. She carried a ten-inch knife that she used to slaughter the pigs she raised in her back yard. "Lie still!" she told Lord John in French.

"Jane!" he cried desperately, and the woman feared that his noise would bring the sentries so she sawed the knife quick and hard across his moon-whitened throat. Blood jetted black. He choked, jerked once like a landed fish, then was still.

The woman took Lord John's coat with its precious epaulettes, but left his shirt because it was too drenched in blood. In a pocket of the coat she found a ragged length of dirty rope that she used to bind up her bundle of plundered clothing. Beyond the southern ridge a vixen howled at the sky that was suffused with the smoke of the victors'camp-fires.

The Prince of Wales's Own Volunteers slept on the ridge they had defended. Peter d'Alembord's leg had been taken off, so he might yet live. Private Clayton was dead; killed by the Imperial Guard at the very moment of victory. Charlie Weller lived, as did Colonel Ford, though the Colonel had been sent back to Brussels and whether he wanted to stay alive any longer was another matter. Harry Price was the next most senior living officer, so Sharpe had made him into a Major and given Simon Doggett a Captaincy, though he had warned both men that the promotions might not stand up to the scrutiny of the civil servants in Whitehall. Men might fight and bleed and write a chapter of history for Britain, but still the evil-minded soft-b.u.mmed b.a.s.t.a.r.ds of Whitehall would have the last say.

Sharpe slept for an hour, then woke to sit beside a fire that he had made from fragments of lance shafts and the broken spokes from a shattered gun wheel. The first light came early; a sickly grey that dispersed the plunderers and brought the black-winged carrion birds to feast on the dead. The air was already humid, promising a day of stifling heat. In the west the fires of the Prussian bivouacs made thin skeins across the wash of high cloud. Somewhere behind the ridge a bugle called the Rouse and other buglers took up the call that seemed to be echoed by the crowing of c.o.c.kerels from distant villages.

"Orders, sir?" Harry Price looked red-eyed, as though he had been crying, though it was probably just tiredness.

Sharpe felt tired and emptied, so it took an immense effort to think of even the simplest tasks. "I want a proper butcher's list, Harry." That was the list of the dead and wounded. "Give Sergeant Huckfield a work party to salvage muskets, and see what other equipment you can filch." The aftermath of battle was a prime time to stock the battalion's equipment needs. "We need some food. Remind me who's guarding the prisoners?"

"Sergeant Ryan."

"Tell him to march the b.u.g.g.e.rs back to brigade. If they don't want them, then turn them loose without any boots or belts."

"We're going to need more sergeants," Harry Price warned.

"I'll think about it." Sharpe turned to stare at the newly stripped bodies of the dead which lay so white among the charred stalks of rye. "And start digging a grave, Harry. A big one."