Sharpe's Waterloo

CHAPTER 10

More battalions, cavalry squadrons and gun batteries arrived at the crossroads throughout the short night until, at dawn, the Duke’s army was at last almost wholly assembled. In the first sepulchral light the newcomers stared dully at the small shapes which lay in the mist that shrouded the hollows of the battlefield. Bugles roused the bivouacs, while the wounded, left all night in the rye, called pitifully for help. The night sentries were called in and a new picquet line set to face the French camp-fires at Frasnes. The British camp-fires were revived with new kindling and a scattering of gunpowder. Men fished in their ammunition pouches for handfuls of tea leaves that were contributed to the common pots. Officers, socially visiting between the battalions, spread the cheerful news that Marshal Blücher had repulsed Bonaparte’s attack, so now it seemed certain that the French would retreat in the face of a united Prussian-British army.

“We’ll be in France next week!” an infantry captain assured his men.

“Paris by July, lads,” a sergeant forecast. “Just think of all those girls.”

The Duke of Wellington, who had slept in an inn three miles from Quatre Bras, returned to the crossroads at first light. The Highlanders of the gand made him a fire and served him tea. He cupped the tin mug in both hands and stared southwards towards Marshal Ney’s positions, but the French troops were silent and unmoving beneath the heavy cloud cover that had spread from the west during the short hours of darkness. One of the Duke’s stafFofficers, heavily protected by a troop of King’s German Legion cavalry, was sent eastwards to learn the morning’s news from Marshal Blücher.

Officers used French Cuirassiers’ upturned breastplates as shaving bowls; the senior officers having the privilege of the water when it was hot and the Lieutenants and Ensigns being forced to wait till the water was cold and congealed. The infantrymen who had fought the previous day boiled yet more water to clean their fouled musket barrels. Cavalry troopers queued to have their swords or sabres ground to a killing edge on the treadled stones, while the gunners filled the shot-cases of their field carriages with ready ammunition. There was an air of cheerfulness about the crossroads; the feeling that the army had survived an ordeal the previous day, but that now, and thanks largely to the victory of the Prussians, it was on the verge of triumph. The only grumble was that in the desperate hurry to reach Quatre Bras the army had left its commissariat wagons far behind so that most of the battalions started their day hungry.

The battlefield was searched for bodies. The wounded who still lived were taken back to the surgeons, while the dead were collected for burial. Most of the dead officers had been buried the previous night, so now the diggers would look after as many rank and file as they could. Sharpe and Harper, waking in the overcast dawn, found themselves just a few yards away from a work party that was scratching a wide and shallow trench in which the slaughtered men of the 69th would be interred. The waiting bodies lay in such natural poses that they almost seemed to be asleep. Captain Harry Price of the Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers found the two Riflemen drinking their morning tea just as the first corpses were being dragged towards the inadequate grave. “Any tea for a gallant officer?” Price begged.

Harper cheerfully scooped another mug of stewed tea out of the breastplate kettle. The dead, who had been stripped of their uniforms, stank already. It was only an hour after dawn yet the day threatened to be humid and sticky and the grave diggers were sweating as they hacked at the soil. “They’ll have to dig deeper than that,” Harper commented as he handed Price the tin mug.

Price sipped the tea, then grimaced at its sour aftertaste of axle grease. “Do you remember the chaos we made trying to burn those poor buggers at Fuentes de Onoro?”

Sharpe laughed. The ground at Fuentes de Onoro had been too shallow and rocky to make graves, so he had ordered his dead cremated, but even after tearing down a whole wooden barn and lifting the rafters off six small houses to use as fuel, the bodies had refused to burn.

“They were good days,” Price said wistfully. He squinted up at the sky. “It’ll pour with bloody rain soon.” The clouds were low and extraordinarily dark, as though their looming heaviness had trapped the vestiges of night. “A rotten day for a battle,” Price said gloomily.

“Is there going to be a battle?” Harper asked.

“That’s what the Brigade Major told our gallant Colonel.” Price told Sharpe and Harper the dawn news of Prussian victory, and how the French were supposed to be retreating and how the army would be pursuing the French who were expected to make one last stand before yielding the frontier to the Emperor’s enemies.

“How are our lads feeling about yesterday?” Harper asked Price, and Sharpe noticed how, to the Irishman, the battalion was still ‘our lads’.

“They’re pleased that Mr d’Alembord’s a major, but he’s not exactly overjoyed.”

“Why not?” Sharpe asked.

“He says he’s going to die. He’s got a what do you call it? A premonition. He says it’s because he’s going to be married.”

“What’s that got to do with it?”

Price shrugged as if to demonstrate that he was no expert on superstitions. “He says it’s because he’s happy. He reckons that the happiest die first and only the miserable buggers live for ever.”

“You should have been dead long ago,” Harper commented.

“Thank you, Sergeant,” Harry Price grinned. He was a carefree, careless and casual man, much liked by his men, but averse to too much effort. He had served as Sharpe’s Lieutenant at one time, and had been perpetually in debt, frequently drunk, yet ever cheerful. Now he drained the vestiges of his tea. “I’m supposed to be reporting to brigade to discover just when we march off.” He shuddered with sudden distaste. “That was a bloody horrible mug of tea.”

“It had a bit of dead horse in it,” Harper explained helpfully.

“God damn Irish cooking. I suppose I’d better go and do my duty.” Price gave Harper the mug back and ambled on with a cheerful good morning to the burial party.

“And what are we going to do?” Harper asked Sharpe.

“Use the rest of the tea as shaving water, then bugger off.” Sharpe had no wish to stay with the army. The Prince had relieved him of his duties and, if the rumours were true, the French invasion had been thwarted by Blücher’s Prussians. The rest of the war would be a pursuit through the fortress belt of northern France until the Emperor surrendered. Sharpe decided he might as well sit it out in Brussels, then go back to his apple trees in Normandy. “I suppose I never will get to fight the Emperor.” He spoke wistfully, feeling oddly let down. Yesterday’s battle had been an unsatisfactory way to gain victory, but Sharpe was an old enough soldier to take victory whichever way it came. “Is there more tea?”

A troop of King’s German Legion cavalry trotted southwards, presumably going to the picquet line to watch for the beginnings of the enemy’s withdrawal. Some Guardsmen were singing in the wood behind Sharpe, while other redcoats moved slowly across the trampled rye collecting discarded weapons. A few mounted officers rode among the debris of battle, either looking for keepsakes or friends. Among the horsemen, and looking very lost, was Lieutenant Simon Doggett who seemed to be searching the wood’s edge. Sharpe had an impulse to move back into the shelter of the trees, but lazily stayed where he was, then wished he had obeyed the impulse when Doggett, catching sight of his green jacket, spurred past the Ggth’s mass grave. “Good morning, sir.” Doggett offered Sharpe a very formal salute.

Sharpe returned the salute by raising his mug of tea. “Morning, Doggett. Bloody horrible morning, too.”

“The Baron would like to see you, sir.” Doggett sounded deeply uncomfortable as though he was still embarrassed by his memory of Sharpe’s altercation with the Prince. Sharpe may have been right to protest the Prince’s order, but a Prince was still a Prince, and the habit of respectful obedience was deeply ingrained in Doggett.

“I’m here if Rebecque wants me,” Sharpe said stubbornly.

“He’s waiting just beyond the crossroads, sir. Please, sir.”

Sharpe refused to hurry. He finished his tea, shaved carefully, then buckled on his sword and slung his rifle. Only then did he walk back to the crossroads where the Baron Rebecque waited for him.

The Dutchman smiled a greeting at Sharpe, then gestured up the high road as if suggesting that the two of them might care to take a morning stroll. The fields on either side of the road were thick with the men who had reached Quatre Bras during the night and who were now readying themselves to pursue the beaten French. “It rather looks like rain, doesn’t it?” Rebecque observed mildly.

“It’s going to rain like the very devil,” Sharpe glanced up at the bellying dark clouds. “It won’t be any kind of a day for musketry.”

Rebecque stared at the grass verge rather than at the clouds or at the tall Rifleman who walked beside him. “You were right,” he said at last.

Sharpe shrugged, but said nothing.

“And the Prince knows you were right, and he feels badly.”

“So tell the little bastard to apologize. Not to me, but to the widows of the 69th.”

Rebecque smiled at Sharpe’s vehemence. “One is generally disappointed if one expects royalty to make apologies. He’s young, very headstrong, but he’s a good man underneath. He has the impatience of youth; the conviction that bold action will bring immediate success. Yesterday he was wrong, but who can say that tomorrow he won’t be right? Anyway, he needs the advice of people he respects, arid he respects you.” Rebecque, suffering from the day’s first attack of hay fever, blew his nose into a huge red handkerchief. “And he’s very upset that you’re angry with him.”

“What the hell does he expect after he dismisses me?”

Rebecque waved the handkerchief as though to suggest that the dismissal was a nonsense. “You’re not just a staff officer, Sharpe, you’re a courtier as well. You have to treat him gently.”

“What the hell does that mean, Rebecque?” Sharpe had stopped to challenge the mild Dutchman with a hostile stare. “That I’m to let him slaughter a brigade of British troops just because he’s got a crown on his damned head?”

“No, Sharpe.” Rebecque kept remarkably calm in the face of Sharpe’s truculence. “It means that when he gives you an idiotic order, you say, ”Yes, sir. At once, sir,“ and you ride away and you waste as much time as you can, and when you get back and he demands to know why the order hasn’t been obeyed, you say you’ll attend to it at once and you ride away again and waste even more time. It’s called tact.”

“Bugger tact,” Sharpe said angrily, though he suspected Rebecque was right.

“Yesterday you should have told him that the brigade was going to obey his order and would deploy into line just as soon as there was any enemy movement in front of them. That way he’d have felt his orders were being obeyed.”

“So it’s my fault they died?” Sharpe protested angrily.

“Of course it isn’t. Oh, damn!” Rebecque sneezed violently. “I’m just asking you to deal with him tactfully. He wants you! He needs you! Why do you think he specifically requested that you should be on his staff?”

“I’ve often wondered,” Sharpe said bitterly.

“Because you’re famous in this army. You’re a soldier’s soldier. If the Prince has you beside him then he reflects some of your fame and valour.”

“You mean I’m like one of those decorations he dangles round his skinny neck?”

Rebecque nodded. “Yes, Sharpe, that is exactly what you are. And that’s why he needs you now. He made a mistake, the whole army knows he made a mistake, but it’s important that we continue to show confidence in him.” Rebecque looked up into Sharpe’s face. “So, please, make your peace with him.”

“I don’t even like him,” Sharpe said bitterly.

Rebecque sighed. “I do. And he does want to be liked. You’ll find him much easier if you flatter him. But if you cross him, or make him feel foolish, he’ll just become petulant.” Rebecque offered a ghost of a smile. “And royalty is very good at being petulant. It is, perhaps, its major talent.”

Sharpe waited while a cart of wounded rumbled noisily past, then looked into Rebecque’s eyes. “So now you want me to apologize to the little bastard?”

“I’m astonished how swiftly you learn our courtly ways,” Rebecque smiled. “No. I shall apologize for you. I shall say that you deeply regret having caused his Highness any perturbation and wish only to be at his side as an adviser and friend.”

Sharpe began to laugh. “It’s a bloody odd world, Rebecque.”

“So you’ll report for duty?”

Sharpe wondered just how much duty would be left in the war now that the Emperor was beaten, but he nodded his acceptance anyway. “I need the money, Rebecque. Of course I’ll report back.”

Rebecque seemed relieved. He offered his snuffbox to Sharpe, who refused the offer. Rebecque, as though he was not sneezing enough already, put a pinch of the powder on his left hand, sniffed it vigorously, sneezed three times, then wiped his eyes with his handkerchief. A file of shirt-sleeved cavalry troopers walked past with canvas buckets of water for their horses.

“So where is the Prince?” Sharpe asked. He supposed the bullet would have to be bitten and he would need to face the bloody boy.

Rebecque gestured northwards, suggesting that the Young Frog was many miles up the road. “I’m keeping him well out of harm’s way. It would be politically disastrous if he was taken prisoner today.”

Sharpe stared with surprise at the kindly middle-aged Dutchman. “What does that mean? Wasn’t there the same danger yesterday?”

“Yesterday,” Rebecque said mildly, “we weren’t retreating. Any minute now, Sharpe, and this whole army could be surrounded and fighting for its very existence.”

“Its existence? I thought we were pursuing the bloody French today!”

It was Rebecque’s turn to look surprised. “Didn’t you know? Blücher got beaten. His army wasn’t destroyed, thank God, but they took a thrashing and have been forced to retreat.” Rebecque sounded very calm as he delivered the appalling news. “It seems that their Chief of Staff preferred us to think that they had won. That way, our army stayed here as a temptation for Napoleon. He might prefer to attack us, you see, and let the Prussians escape. It’s really quite a clever Prussian ploy, when you think about it, but likely to be damned uncomfortable for us.”

“The Prussians are retreating?” Sharpe sounded disbelieving.

“They went late last night, which means we’re stranded here on our own. Marshal Ney is still in front of us and at any minute the rest of the French army will attack our left flank.”

Sharpe instinctively looked to the east, but nothing moved in the cloud shadowed landscape of woods and fields. He tried to understand this new reality. Yesterday’s victory at Quatre Bras was all for nothing, because Napoleon had kicked the two doors wide apart and the allies were separated. The Prussians had fled in the night and the British had been left isolated to face the full power of the Emperor’s whole army.

“So very soon,” Rebecque continued placidly, “we’re going to retreat. The Duke’s not making too much fuss, because he doesn’t want to start any panic. There’s only this one road we can use, you see, and once the rain starts it’s likely to be difficult going.”

Sharpe remembered Wellington leaning over the map in the Duke of Richmond’s dressing-room. “Are we going to Waterloo?” he asked Rebecque.

The Dutchman seemed surprised that Sharpe had even heard of the village, but nodded. “We’re going just to the south of Waterloo, to a place called Mont-St-Jean. We march there today, make a stand there tomorrow, and pray that the Prussians will rescue us.”

“Rescue?” Sharpe bridled at the word.

“Of course.” Rebecque, as ever, was imperturbable. “Blücher has promised that if we make a stand he’ll march to our aid. That’s so long as the French don’t stop him, of course, and undoubtedly they’ll be trying. Yesterday we failed to reach him, so we can only pray that tomorrow he doesn’t repay the compliment. We certainly can’t beat Napoleon on our own, so if Blücher lets us down we’re all beaten.” Rebecque smiled at his catalogue of bad news. “All in all, Sharpe, things are not good. Are you sure you still wish to serve on His Highness’s staff?”

“I told you, I need the money.”

“Of course, we may never reach Mont-St-Jean today. The Emperor must realize that he has us at his mercy, so I’ve no doubt he’s hurrying to attack us even now. Might I suggest that you serve as the Prince’s personal picquet on the retreat? If it looks as though the Emperor will break through and destroy us, send word to me. I’d rather His Royal Highness wasn’t taken prisoner because it would be politically very embarrassing. Keep young Doggett as a messenger. Did you have any breakfast?”

“Some tea.”

“I’ve got some bread and cold beef in my saddlebag.” Rebecque turned back towards the crossroads and offered to shake Sharpe’s hand. The knack of being right, Sharpe, is not to show it. It embarrasses the incompetent who rule over us.“

Sharpe smiled and took the offered hand. “Then thank God for the Duke of Wellington.”

“Even he may not be good enough for this predicament. We shall see.” Rebecque walked back to his horse and used a stone wall by the crossroads as a mounting block. He settled himself in the saddle. “Send word if disaster threatens, otherwise, do your best to keep dry.” He handed the food down to Sharpe, then clicked his tongue and rode northwards.

Sharpe turned to stare east and south. Somewhere under the lowering clouds was the man he had fought against for most of his life, yet had never once seen. The Emperor of France, conqueror of the world, was coming to fight the British at last.

The rain, like the French, held off.

The news of the Prussian defeat spread swiftly. Optimism turned to resignation, then to nervousness as the army realized how precarious was its position. The whole might of the French army was about to be concentrated on Quatre Bras and there was no hope of any help from the Prussians.

The retreat began. One by one the battalions of infantry were despatched towards the crossroads at Mont-St-Jean which lay twelve miles to the north. The men who waited their turn grew increasingly tense; every battalion which escaped north was one battalion less to face the expected French onslaught, which left the rearguard ever more likely to be outnumbered and overwhelmed. Marshal Ney’s troops were still just to the south, and the Emperor was presumably hurrying from the east, yet battalion after British battalion slipped away unmolested as the morning passed without any French attack.

The Duke of Wellington pretended insouciance. For a time he sat on the trampled rye reading a newspaper, and even lay down and slept with its pages over his face. He still slept as the outermost picquets were pulled back, yielding the stream and Gemioncourt farm to the French if they cared to advance. Strangely the French did not move and their camp-fires still burned to drift placid smoke up to the darkening clouds.

By midday those clouds were as looming and threatening as the monsoon skies of India. The windless air was curiously still and heavy, presaging disaster. The last infantry battalions edged towards the road that led northwards out of the unsprung French trap. The horse artillery who, together with the cavalry, would form the British rearguard nervously watched the enemy-held ground, but still no French troops marched from Frasnes or appeared in the east. The only sign of the enemy was their smoke.

“They always used to do that,” Harper commented. The Irishman, with Sharpe and Doggett, waited at the edge of the wood by the half-covered grave of the 69th.

“Do what?” Doggett asked.

“Take a morning off after a battle and cook themselves a meal.”

“Let’s hope it’s a big meal,” Doggett grinned.

The Guards were the last of the British infantry to march north, leaving only the horse gunners, the cavalry and the staff at the crossroads. That rearguard waited long after the Guards had left, giving the slower infantry a good chance to march well clear of Quatre Bras. Still the French hesitated, and still the rain did not come. The first of the British cavalry trotted north and Sharpe saw the Duke of Wellington at last pull himself into his saddle. “Time for us to go too,” Sharpe said.

A vagary of the storm-threatening clouds caused a rent somewhere in the churning sky and a leprous shaft of sunlight, yellow and misted, slanted down to shine on the highway beside Gemioncourt farm.

“Dear God!” Doggett was staring at the curiously bright patch of land beneath the sky’s unnatural blackness.

In which sunlit patch were Lancers.

There were suddenly thousands of Lancers. Lancers in green coats and Lancers in scarlet coats. The farmland had sprouted a thicket of flag-hung spear points that were touched gold by the errant shaft of sunlight.

“Let’s get the hell out of here!” Sharpe settled himself into his saddle.

“No, sir! Look! Look!” An excited Doggett was standing in his stirrups, pointing south. Sharpe turned back, saw nothing, so pulled his telescope from his saddlebag.

The lens slid past the foreshortened Lancers, back through the dust which their hooves were kicking up from the rye fields, and back up the white highway to where, outlined against the sun brightened crops and illuminated by the wash of errant light, was a single horseman. The man was darkly dressed, mounted on a grey horse, and wearing a cocked hat sideways across his scalp. He was slumped in his saddle, as though he rode unwillingly.

“It’s him!” Doggett spoke almost reverently.

“My God.” Sharpe’s voice was awed. There, in his glass, was the small plump man who had dominated Europe for the past ten years, a man Sharpe had never seen, but whose form and face and posture were familiar from a thousand engravings and a thousand statues. Sharpe handed the glass to Harper who stared at the far Emperor.

“It’s Bonaparte!” Doggett sounded as excited as though he saw his own monarch riding towards him.

“It is bloody time to get out of here,” Harper said.

The Lancers climbed the shallow slope from the ford and, in greeting, every waiting British gun was fired.

The cannons crashed back violently. The gun wheels jarred up while the ground quivered with dust. Smoke jetted twenty yards in front of each cannon muzzle while, above the trampled crops, the shell fuses left small white smoke trails that arced towards the line of advancing cavalry. There was a pause, then it seemed as though the Lancers plunged into a maelstrom of exploding shells. Smoke and flame billowed as horses screamed. Sharpe saw a lance cartwheeling above a boiling mass of smoke.

Then, as if to show that man was puny, a sudden wind howled from the north-west. The wind erupted so abruptly that Sharpe half twisted in the saddle, fearing an exploding shell behind him, and as he turned there was a booming discharge of thunder that sounded like the end of time itself. The rift in the clouds closed as though a vast door had slammed in heaven, and the reverberation of the door was the horrendous thunder that hammered down at the earth in a deafening cascade. A spear of lightning sliced blue-white into the far woods, and then the rain came.

In an instant the whole battlefield was blotted from sight. It was a cloudburst, a torrent, a seething pelting storm that slashed down to soak the fields and flood the ditches and hiss where it hit the hot barrels of the cannons. Sharpe had to shout to make himself heard over the downpour. “Let’s go! Come on!”

Within seconds the field had been churned into a morass. The rain was even heavier than the great sky-shaking storms Sharpe had seen in India. As he led his companions out from the trees’ shelter he had to duck his head against the maniacal force of the wind-whipped torrents that soaked his uniform in seconds. The horses struggled against the gale of rain, their hooves sticking in the glutinous mess of mud and straw. The rainwater sluiced off the fields with its load of precious soil, uncovering the white swollen bodies of the barely buried dead.

Thunder cracked in the sky; a battle of Gods that drowned the man-made sounds of war. The vast explosions rumbled from west to east, rebounded, split the clouds with multiple forks of lightning, and deluged the crouching earth. Sharpe led Harper and Doggett onto the Nivelles road that was now a writhing river of water-carried mud. He could see a troop of cloaked cavalry to his left, and a gun team hitching their weapon to its limber on his right, but any object more than thirty yards away was utterly obscured by the silver shafts of rain that crashed down like shrapnel. Behind Sharpe a gun fired, its sound drowned by the greater violence of the storm.

Sharpe turned onto the main highway. The paved surface was firmer; a causeway out of disaster. The hooves of those cavalry horses who struggled northwards in the flanking fields were clubbed with earth; proof that no gun would escape unless it reached the road.

“Move! Move! Move!” Gunners whipped their horses up from the fields onto the road that was swimming with a chalky white effluent. The horses strained, seemingly sensing their masters‘ panic caused by the near presence of enemy lancers. Men glanced behind into the storm-blotted landscape, then whipped at the gun teams till at last the horse artillery was clear of Quatre Bras and galloping northwards with blood dripping from the horses’ whipped flanks and water spraying silver off the gun wheels. Sharpe, Harper and Doggett raced with them.

Miraculously no gun was lost. The mad charge was checked at the village of Genappe where the road narrowed as it twisted between the thatched cottages. The delay gave the French pursuit a chance to catch the rearmost guns, but a regiment of British Dragoons turned and charged the Lancers. More French cavalry spurred forward and it took an assault by the heavy Life Guards, the sovereign’s own escort, to drive the Frenchmen away. The Life Guards, scarlet coated and wearing black and gold Grecian cockscomb helmets, hammered at the enemy with their ungainly heavy swords. The sheer weight of the heavy cavalry drove the lighter French horsemen back, giving the guns time to thread the narrow village street.

North of Genappe the French pursuit seemed to lose its ferocity. The rain also slackened, though it was still heavy. Every mile or so the British guns would stop, unlimber, fire a few rounds at their pursuers, then gallop on. The French were never far behind, but did not press home. The British cavalry, Dragoons and Life Guards, hovered on the flanks. Every few moments, when a French squadron trotted close, the British would advance, but each time the French declined to fight. Sharpe was amused to see that if a Life Guardsman tumbled from a slipping horse the man would remount, then hide his soiled uniform in the rear rank of his troop, just as if he was on parade in Hyde Park.

The French managed to bring up some of their own light eight-pounder cannons that opened fire with roundshot. The small cannon-balls fountained a slurry of mud and water wherever they landed. The mud was saving the retreat, not only soaking up the power of the French roundshot, but forcing the French cavalry to stay close to the high road. If the land had been dry the quick light enemy horse could have raced far round the British flanks to come slashing in with lance and sabre on the struggling column, but the mud and rain held them back.

Another weapon came to the British aid. A sudden crashing hiss made Sharpe twist round to see a rocket being fired. He had fought with rockets in Spain, but familiarity did not blunt his fascination with the odd weapon and he watched enthralled as the ungainly missile hurled itself forward on its pillar of flame that scorched the long stick that gave the rocket its balance. Doggett, who had never seen the new and mysterious weapon, was impressed, but Harper shook his head scornfully. “They’re guaranteed to miss every time, Mr Doggett. You just watch.”

The first rocket arched in fire across the damp valley to leave a serpentine trail of smoke. The missile fell towards the French guns, then the fuse inside its head exploded and a rain of red-hot shrapnel crashed down to slaughter every man in a French gun crew.

“Good God Almighty,” Harper said in astonished wonder, “the bloody thing worked!”

Encouraged by their success, the rocket artillery fired a whole barrage. Twelve rockets were fired from twelve metal troughs angled upwards on short legs. The rockets’ fuses were lit, then the rocketmen ran for cover. The missiles began to spew flames and smoke. For a few seconds they quivered in their firing troughs, then one by one they shot up into the wet air. They wobbled at first, then their acceleration hurled them on. Two streaked straight up into the clouds and disappeared, three dived into the wet meadow where their rocket flames seared the wet grass as the missiles circled crazily, five went vaguely towards the French but dived to earth long before they did any damage, and two circled back towards the British cavalry who stared for a second, then scattered in panic.

“That’s more like it,” Harper said happily. “That’s how they always used to be, isn’t that so, Mr Sharpe?”

But Sharpe was neither listening, nor watching the barrage. Instead he was staring across the highway to where a group of horsemen had scattered frantically away from the rogue rocket’s threat. Lord John Rossendale had been among the small group, but, in his effort to find safety, was now separated from his friends.

“I’ll join you up the road,” Sharpe said to Harper.

“Sir?” Harper was startled, but Sharpe had already twisted his horse away. And gone.

Lord John Rossendale could not remember being so wet, elated, frightened, or confused. Nothing made sense to him. He expected a battle — and the retreat seemed like a battle to him — to be something orderly and well managed. Officers should give loud confident orders which the men would smartly obey and to which the enemy would dutifully yield, but instead he was surrounded by disorder. Strangely the actors in that disorder seemed to understand what needed to be done. He watched a battery of horse artillery unlimber and go into action. No orders were given that Rossendale could hear, but the men knew exactly what to do, did it with cheerful efficiency, then limbered up to continue their mad careering gallop through the rain. Once, standing his horse in the pelting flood, Lord John had been shocked to hear a voice yelling at him to bloody well move his arse and Lord John had skipped his horse smartly aside only to see that it was a mere sergeant who had shouted. A second later a gun slewed in a spray of mud to occupy the very place where Lord John’s horse had been standing. Ten seconds later the gun fired, appalling Lord John with its sound and the violence of its recoil. In Hyde Park, which was the only place Lord John had ever seen cannons fired before, the polished guns made a decorous bang and, because there was no missile packed down onto the charge, such guns hardly moved at all, but this weapon, dirty, muddy and blackened, seemed to explode in noise and flame. Its wheels lifted clear out of the mud as its trail was driven back like a plough before the tons of metal and wood crashed down and its mud-covered crew ran forward to serve the smoking beast with sponges and rammers.

Yet, curiously, the violence of the discharge seemed very disproportionate to the gun’s effect. Lord John watched the missile’s strike and there would be a gout of mud, perhaps an explosion if the gun had fired shell, but so little destruction. Once he had seen a Lancer fall from his horse, but within seconds the man had been on his feet and another Frenchman had quickly rescued the frightened horse.

At Genappe Lord John had been close enough to see the Life Guards charge and he had even spurred forward to join them. He had watched a sword snap a lance shaft like a twig. He had seen a Lancer’s skull crushed by a blade. He had watched a Life Guard twisting like a fish on the point of a lance. He had heard the grunt of a man making a killing lunge, and heard the hiss of air from a wounded trooper’s lungs. He had smelt the sweet thickness of blood and the acrid drift of pistol smoke in the soaking air. Blood from a dying horse spewed onto the road to be instantly diluted by rain. By the time Lord John had drawn his sword and touched his spurs to his horse’s flanks, the French had pulled back leaving a dozen dead and twice as many wounded. It had all been so quick and so confusing, but an acquaintance of Lord John’s, a Captain Kelly whom Lord John had often met when he was on royal duty, gave his lordship a happy confident smile. “Bagged a brace of them!”

“Well done, Ned.”

“Once you’re past the lance point it’s a bit like killing rabbits.” Captain Kelly began wiping the blood off his blade. “Too easy, really.”

Lord John tried to imagine slipping past a lance point and found it hard. After the skirmish, riding through the village street, he had seen the fear on the faces of the civilians and he had felt very superior to such muddy drab creatures. Later, north of Genappe, when the French did not pursue so closely, he noticed how nervous both sets of cavalry were of each other. A lot of threats were made, and men would ride belligerently forward as if to provoke the other side, but if there was no clear advantage to be gained for either force, the two sides would disengage without a battle. It was all very odd.

Strangest of all were the rockets. Lord John had heard much of the rocket corps, for they were a pet project of his former master, the Prince Regent, but this was the first time he had seen them fired. The first missile was wonderfully accurate and so lethal that every French gun crew within a hundred yards had fled in panic, but the next salvo was laughable. One rocket had seemed to threaten the group of Lord Uxbridge’s staff officers and they had whooped gleefully as they scattered away from its hissing shell.

Lord John spurred his horse too hard and it almost bolted with him. He managed to curb the mare after a hundred yards and turned to see the rocket buried in the mud with its stick burning merrily above it. The buried powder charge exploded harmlessly.

Then, looking towards the road to find his friends, he saw Sharpe coming towards him instead.

For a second Lord John knew he must stand and fight. The next second he realized he would be dead if he did.

And so he turned and fled.

Lord John’s servants were somewhere ahead with the cavalry’s baggage. Harris, the coachman, who had ridden from Brussels with a letter from Jane, had also ridden ahead to find that night’s quarters. Christopher Manvell and Lord John’s other friends had disappeared in the panic engendered by the rogue rocket. Lord John was suddenly alone in the pelting rain with his one dreadful enemy spurring towards him.

He gave his horse its head. It was a good horse, five years old and trained on the hunting field. It had stamina and speed, and was certainly a faster horse than Sharpe rode, and Lord John had learned on the hunting field how best to ride treacherous country. He must have stretched his lead by an extra hundred yards in the first half mile. There were ironic cheers from the road where the retreating gunners supposed the two officers to be racing.

Lord John was oblivious to the cheers and the rain; indeed to everything but his predicament. He was cursing himself; he should have ridden towards his companions and sheltered under their protection, but instead, in a blind panic, he was racing ever further away from help. He dared not look behind. His horse thundered along a field margin, raced over soaking rows of newly scythed hay, then galloped down a gentle incline towards a hedge, beyond which, and across one more field, a long dark copse of trees offered a concealed path back to the road.

His horse almost baulked at the hedge, not because of the height of the blackthorn, but because the approach to the obstacle was inches deep in mud. Lord John savagely rowelled the beast, and somehow it lumbered and scraped its way over the thorns. It landed heavily, splashing thick mud that soaked Lord John’s red coat. He spurred-the horse again, forcing it to struggle up from the sticky ground. The pasture was firmer going, but even here the earth was spongy from rain.

He reached the trees safely and, looking back from their shelter, saw that Sharpe had yet to negotiate the deep mud at the hedge. Lord John felt safe. He ducked into the thick and leafy copse which proved a perfect hiding place. The road, along which the guns crashed and jangled, was no more than a quarter-mile away and Lord John would be hidden under the wood’s leafy, dripping cover right to the road’s verge. There he could wait until his friends offered him support. Sharpe, he was certain, would try nothing violent in front of witnesses.

Lord John slowed his blown horse to a walk, letting it pick a twisting path between oak and beech. The rain spattered on the uppermost leaves and dripped miserably from the lower. A scrabbling sound to his right made him whip round in sudden alarm, but it was only a red squirrel racing along an oak branch. He sagged in the saddle, feeling despair.

He despaired because of honour. Honour was the simple code of the gentleman. Honour said a man did not run from an enemy, honour said a man did not flirt with the temptations of murder, and honour said a man did not show fear. Honour was the thin line that protected the privileged from disgrace, and Lord John, slouched in his wet saddle in a damp wood under a thunderous sky, knew he had run his honour ragged. Jane, in her letter, had threatened to leave him if he fulfilled his promise to return Sharpe’s money. How long, she had asked, would Lord John allow Sharpe to persecute her happiness? If Lord John could not settle Sharpe, then she would find a man who would. She had underlined the word ‘man’ three times.

He stopped his horse. He could hear the gun wheels ahead of him, and closer, apparently on a ride that must have pierced the wood parallel to the road, the sound of hooves as a troop of cavalry splashed northwards.

Another voice nagged at Lord John. He could not bear it if another man was to take Jane. Jealousy racked him. He had persuaded himself that her sudden desperation to marry him was a measure of Jane’s passionate love, and to think of that passion being expended for another man’s happiness was more than he could endure.

A curb chain clinked. Lord John looked up to see his enemy in front of him. Sharpe must have guessed Lord John would double back under the cover of the trees, and so had ridden slantwise to where the wood met the road, then turned eastwards. Now, just twenty paces off, he sat his horse and stared at Lord John.

Lord John felt oddly calm. A few moments before his nerves had been jangled by a squirrel, but now that his enemy had come, and now that he knew what had to be done, he surprised himself by his calmness.

Neither man spoke. There was nothing to say.

Lord John licked the rainwater from his lips. If he drew his sword then he knew the green-jacketed killer would be on him like a fury, so he kept his hand well away from the silver-wrapped hilt of his sword, and instead, not caring for honour, he drew the long-barrelled pistol that was holstered on his saddle. It was a beautiful gun, a gift from Jane, with a percussion cap instead of a flint. Its elegantly curved pistol-hilt was of chased walnut and its long rifled barrel was blued and gilded. The rifling gave the weapon a deadly accuracy, while the expensive percussion cap made it proof against the worst downpour of rain. He drew back the hammer, exposing the small copper wafer in which the gunpowder was packed. When that wafer was struck a lance of flame would pierce through the touchhole to spark themain charge.

He raised the gun. His right hand shook slightly. Sharpe had made no move to defend himself, neither by flight nor by drawing a weapon of his own. Rainwater beaded the gun’s barrel. Its blade foresight wavered. Lord John tried to remember his tuition. He must not be tense. He should take a deep breath, let half the air out of his lungs, momentarily hold his breath and, at the same instant, squeeze the trigger gently.

Sharpe urged his horse forward.

The sudden movement disconcerted Lord John, and the gun shook in his hand as he tried to follow Sharpe’s advance. Sharpe seemed utterly oblivious of the pistol’s threat, as though he had not even seen the weapon.

Lord John stared into his enemy’s eyes. He knew he should pull the trigger, but he was suddenly paralysed by fear. He could hear voices not very far off in the wood and he felt a dreadful fear that the murder might be witnessed, and Lord John knew it would be murder, and he knew the only mercy shown to him as a lord would be that he would be publicly hanged with a rope made of silk instead of a rope made from hemp. He wanted to pull the trigger, but his finger would not move, and all the time the hooves of Sharpe’s horse slurred through the thick wet leaf mould until the Rifleman was so close to Lord John that the two men could have shaken hands without even leaning from their saddles. Sharpe had not once taken his eyes from Lord John’s eyes even though the pistol was now just inches from his face.

Very slowly, Sharpe raised his right hand and pushed the pistol away. The movement seemed to startle Lord John from his trance, and he tried to pull the weapon back, but Sharpe had gripped the barrel firmly and now twisted it from Lord John’s nerveless fingers. Lord John, expecting death, shivered.

Sharpe made the gun safe by lowering the hammer onto the percussion cap. Then, holding the barrel in his right hand and the curved stock in his left, he began levering the weapon apart. It took all his strength, but suddenly the wooden stock split away from the barrel pins and, when the trigger assembly had been wrenched loose, Sharpe was holding the gun in two useless halves which, still without a word, he dropped into Rossendale’s lap. The expensive barrel slid down to thump on the leaves, while the torn walnut stock lodged by his lordship’s topboot.

Lord John quivered and shook his head as Sharpe reached towards him, but the Rifleman just took hold of Lord John’s sword hilt then, quite slowly, scraped the polished and engraved blade free. Sharpe looked up, thrust the narrow blade into the fork of a branch, and snapped the precious sword with one brutally violent jerk. Nine inches of steel was left with the handle, the rest of the blade slid down to the ground.

“You’re not worth fighting.” Sharpe still held the broken sword hilt.

“I-„

“Shut your bloody mouth.”

„I-„

Sharpe’s left hand slapped hard across Lord John’s face. “I’ll tell you when to speak,” Sharpe said, “and it isn’t now. You listen. I don’t care about Jane. She’s your whore now. But I’ve got a farm in Normandy and it needs new apple trees and the barn needs a new roof, and the bloody Emperor took all our horses and cattle for his Goddamned army, and the taxes in France are bloody evil, and you’ve got my money. So where is it?”

Lord John seemed unable to speak. His eyes were wet, perhaps from the rain or else from the shame of this meeting under the trees.

“Has the whore spent it all?” Sharpe asked.

“Not all,” Lord John managed to say.

“Then how much is left?”

Lord John did not know, because Jane would not tell him, but he guessed that there might be five thousand pounds left. He stammered out the figure, fearing that Sharpe would be angered when he realized how much Jane had squandered.

Sharpe did not seem to care. Five hundred pounds was a fortune that would have restored Lucille’s chateau. “Give me a note now,” he told Lord John.

Lord John seriously doubted whether a promissory note with his signature had the legal force to produce the money, but if it satisfied Sharpe then Lord John was happy to write a thousand such notes. He snatched open the gilded flap of his sabretache and took out a leather-bound notebook and a pencil. He scribbled the words fast, the pencil’s point tearing the paper where the rainwater dripped from his helmet’s visor onto the page. He ripped the page out and handed it wordlessly to his tormentor.

Sharpe glanced at the words, then folded the paper. “Where I come from,” he said in a conversational tone, “men still sell their wives. Have you ever seen it done?”

Lord John shook his head warily.

“Because the poor can’t afford a divorce, you see,” Sharpe continued, “but if everyone agrees, then the woman can be sold. It has to be done in the market place. You put a rope round her neck, lead her there, and offer her to the highest bidder. The price and the buyer are always fixed in advance, of course, but making it an auction adds a bit of spice. I suppose you prinked up aristocratic bastards don’t do that to your women?”

Lord John shook his head. “We don’t,” he managed to say. He was beginning to realize that Sharpe was not going to hurt him, and the realization was calming his nerves.

“I’m not a prinked up bastard,” Sharpe said. “I’m the real thing, m’y lord. I’m a whore’s bastard out of a gutter, so I’m allowed to sell my wife. She’s yours. I’ve got your money,” Sharpe pushed the promissory note into his pocket, “so all you need is this.” He fumbled in a saddlebag then drew out the scruffy piece of rope that was Nosey’s usual leash. He tossed the dirty scrap of sisal across Lord John’s saddle. “Put the noose round her neck and tell her that you bought her. Among the people I come from, my lord, such a divorce is as good as an act of Parliament. The lawyers and the Church don’t reckon it is, but who gives a turd about what those greedy bastards think? She’s yours now. You’ve bought her, so you can marry her, and I won’t interfere. Do you understand me?”

Lord John tentatively touched the rope. He knew he was being mocked. The poor might sell their wives, but no respectable man would ever so contract into a woman’s second marriage. “I understand you,” he said bitterly.

“But if I don’t get the money, my lord, I’ll come back for you.”

“I understand.”

Sharpe still held the broken sword. He held it hilt first towards Lord John. “Go away, my lord.”

Rossendale took the truncated blade, stared one more time into the dark eyes, then spurred his horse forward. He fled from the trees, the rope still trailing from his saddle, and burst onto the road where the last of the guns were rolling northwards.

Sharpe waited a few moments. He swore silently to himself, for there had been no joy in humiliating the weak. But at least he considered he had made a good bargain. A new roof for the chateau in return for a faithless wife. He patted the pocket where the note was folded, then turned his horse. He was still somewhat shaken for, until he had actually taken the pistol from Lord John, Sharpe had not realized that it was a rainproof percussion weapon. Otherwise he would never have ridden so slowly to its black muzzle.

Harper waited for Sharpe on the high road. He had seen a shaken Lord John Rossendale burst from the trees, now, with a bemused Doggett beside him, the Irishman watched Sharpe urge his horse up to the paved surface. “So what happened?” Harper asked.

“He pissed himself, then bought the bitch.”

Harper laughed. Doggett did not like to ask for any explanation. Behind them a gun fired a shell at the threatening Lancers, making Sharpe glance south at the pursuing French.

“Come on.” Sharpe lifted his face to the cleansing rain, then spurred his horse northwards.

Just twelve miles south of Brussels the highway to Charleroi and France became the wide main street of the village of Waterloo. South of the village the road threaded the forest of Soignes where the villagers grazed their pigs and chopped their firewood.

Two miles south of the village the trees gave way to a wide expanse of farmland which lay about the hamlet and crossroads of Mont-St-Jean. A half-mile further south still and the highway crossed a shallow, flat-topped ridge which lay east and west. At the crest of the ridge a solitary elm tree grew beside the highroad, which then descended into a wide and shallow valley that was filled with fields of rye, barley, oats and hay. The road crossed the valley before rising to another low ridge which lay three-quarters of a mile to the south. The crest of the southern ridge was marked by a white painted tavern called La Belle Alliance.

If an army took up a position on the northern ridge that was marked by the lone elm tree, and if an opposing army was to assemble around the tavern, then the gentle valley between would become a battlefield.

Between the elm tree and the tavern the road ran straight as a ramrod. A traveller riding the road would probably see nothing very remarkable in the valley other than the richness of its crops and the solidity of its farmhouses. It was evidently a good place to be a farmer.

In the centre of the valley, hard by the road itself, was a farm called La Haye Sainte. It was a prosperous place with a courtyard bounded by stone barns and a stout wall. To the east, three-quarters of a mile down the valley, was a huddle of cottages about a farm called Papelotte, while to the west there was another large farm with a walled courtyard and an extensive orchard which lay just north of a patch of rough woodland. That western farm was called the chateau of Hougoumont.

If a man wished to defend the northern ridge against an attack from the south, the chateau of Hougoumont might serve as a bastion on his right flank. La Haye Sainte would stand as a bulwark in the front and centre of his lines, while Papelotte would guard the left-hand edge of his defences.

All three farmsteads stood in the valley in front of the northern ridge, and as the ridge itself was the position where a soldier would make his stand, so the three farms in the valley would serve like breakwaters standing proud of a beach. If an assault was to come across the valley the attackers would be driven away from the stone-walled farms and compressed into the spaces between where they would be fired on from in front and from either side.

There was worse news still for an attacker. If a man was to gaze north from La Belle Alliance he would be blind to what lay behind the ridge where the elm tree grew. In the far distance, if the battle smoke permitted, he might see rising pastureland leading to the forest of Soignes, but he would see nothing of the dead ground behind the ridge, and would not know that a hidden farm lane ran east and west behind the crest that would allow his enemy to shift reinforcements swiftly to wherever the ridge was threatened most,

But perhaps that blindness did not matter if the attacker was the Emperor of the French, for Napoleon Bonaparte was a man in love with war, a man accustomed to glory, a man confident of victory, and the leader of over a hundred thousand veterans who had already defeated the Prussians and sent the British reeling back from Quatre Bras. Besides, the ridge where the elm tree grew was not steep. A man could stroll up its face without feeling any strain in his legs or any shortening of his breath, and the Emperor knew that his enemy had few good troops to defend that gentle slope. Indeed the Emperor knew much about his enemy for all day long the Belgian deserters had flocked to his colours and told their tales of panic and flight. Some of the Emperor’s Generals who had been defeated by Wellington in Spain advised caution, but the Emperor would have none of their cavils. The Englishman, he said, was a mere Sepoy General, nothing but a man who had learned his trade against the undisciplined and ill-armed tribal hordes of India, while the Emperor was Europe’s master of war, blooded and hardened by battles against the finest troops of a continent. Napoleon did not care where Wellington chose to make his stand; he would beat him anyway, then march triumphant into Brussels.

The Duke of Wellington chose to make his stand on the ridge where the solitary elm tree grew.

And there, in the rain, his army waited.

The rain slackened, but did not end. As the last of the retreating British infantry passed La Belle Alliance they could see the great swathes of water sweeping west from the trees about Hougoumont. Not that they cared. They just slogged on, each man carrying his pack, haversacks, pouches, canteen, billhook, musket and bayonet; seventy pounds of baggage for each man. Some of the troops had marched most of the previous night and now they had marched all Saturday through the piercing, chilling rain. Their shoulders were chafed bloody by the wet straps of the heavy packs. Only their ammunition, wrapped in oiled paper and deep in rainproof cartouches, was dry. They had long outstripped their supply wagons, so, apart from whatever food any man might have hoarded, they went hungry.

The supply wagons, which had never reached Quatre Bras, were still struggling on flooded minor roads to reach the crossroads at Mont-St-Jean. The wagons carried spare ammunition, spare weapons, spare flints, and barrels of salt beef, barrels of twice-baked bread, barrels of rum, and crates with the officers’ crystal glasses and silver cutlery that added a touch of luxury to the battalions’ crude bivouacs. The army’s women walked with the supply wagons, trudging through the cold mud to where their men waited to fight.

Those men waited behind the ridge where the elm tree grew. The Quartermasters marked bivouac areas for the various battalions in the soaking fields. Fatigue parties took axes and billhooks back to the forest to cut firewood. Provbsts stood guard in Mont-St-Jean, for the Duke was particular that his men did not steal from the local populace, but, despite the precaution, every chicken in the hamlet was soon gone. Men made fires, sacrificing cartridges to ignite the damp wood. No one tried to make shelters, for there was not enough timber immediately available and the rain would have soaked through anything but the most elaborate huts of wood and turf. The red dye from the infantrys’ coats ran to stain their grey trousers, though gradually, as they settled into their muddy homes, all the mens’ uniforms turned to a glutinous and filthy brown.

The cavalry straggled in later in the afternoon. Staff officers directed the troopers to their bivouacs behind the infantry. The horses were pegged out in long lines, while their riders used forage scythes to gather fodder and others carried collapsible canvas buckets to the water pumps in Mont-St-Jean. The farriers, who carried a supply of nails and horseshoes in their saddlebags, began inspecting the hooves of the tired beasts.

The gunners placed their cannons just behind the ridge’s summit so that, while most of the guns were hidden from an approaching enemy, the barrels still had a clear shot down the gentle slope. In the centre of the ridge, close to where the elm grew beside the high road, the guns were concealed behind hedges.

The artillery park was placed at the forest’s edge, well back from the guns, and the infantry sourly noted how the gunners were provided with tents, for the artillery alone of all the army had kept their wagons close. No gun could fire long without its supplies, and a battery of six cannon needed a spare wheel wagon, a forage cart, two general supply wagons, eight ammunition wagons, ninety-two horses and seventy mules. Thus the land between the ridge and the forest was soon crammed with a mass of men and horses. Smoke from the bivouac fires smeared the rainy air. The ditches and furrows overflowed with water running off the fields in which the army must sleep.

Some officers walked forward to stare southwards across the wide valley. They watched the last of the British cavalry and guns come home, then the high road was left empty. The farmers, together with their families, labourers, and livestock, had long fled from the three farms in the valley’s bottom. Nothing moved there now except for the rain that sheeted and hissed across the road. The British gunners, standing beside their loaded cannon, waited for targets.

In the early evening the rain paused, though the wind was still damp and cold. Some of the infantry tried to dry out their sopping uniforms by stripping themselves naked and holding the heavy wool coats over the struggling fires.

Then a single cannon fired from the ridge.

Some of the naked men ran to the crest to see that a nine-pounder had slammed a cannon-ball into a troop of French Cuirassiers who had been crossing the valley floor. The gunshot had stopped the advance of the armoured horsemen. One horse was kicking and bleeding in the hay, while its rider lay motionless. A mass of other enemy horsemen was assembling on the far crest about La Belle Alliance. Four enemy guns were being deployed close to the inn. For a few moments the tiny figures of the French gunners could be seen tending to their weapons, then the crews ran aside and the four guns fired towards the lingering smoke of the British nine-pounder’s discharge.

Every gun on the British ridge replied. The massive salvo sounded like a billow — of rolling thunder. Smoke jetted from the crest and roundshot screamed across the valley to thump in muddy splashes among the enemy cavalry. Staff officers galloped along the British crest screaming at the gunners to hold their fire, but the damage had already been done. The French staff officers, gazing from the tavern, saw that they were not faced by a handful of retreating guns, but by the artillery of a whole army. They could even tell, from the smoke, just where that army had placed its guns.

So now the Emperor knew that the British retreat was over, and that the Sepoy General had chosen his battlefield.

At a crossroads among farmland where the hay was nearly all cut and the rye was growing tall and the orchards were heavy with fruit, and where three bastions stood like fortresses proud of a ridge that next day the French must capture, and the British must hold. At a place called Waterloo.