Sharpe's Waterloo

CHAPTER 11

“Not a day for cricket, eh, Sharpe?” Lieutenant-Colonel Ford shouted the jocular greeting, though his expression was hardly welcoming. The Colonel, with Major Vine beside him, crouched in the thin shelter of a straggly hedge, which they had reinforced against the wet and gusting wind with three broken umbrellas.

Sharpe supposed the greeting expressed forgiveness for his usurpation of command the previous day. Sharpe had brusquely ordered the battalion to run while Ford had still been deliberating what to do, but it seemed the Colonel had no desire to make an issue of the afiair. Vine, huddled in the roots of the hedge, scowled with dark unfriendly eyes at the Rifleman.

“I was taking some food to my old company. You don’t mind, Ford?” Sharpe still had the cold beef and bread that Rebecque had given him that morning. He did not need Ford’s permission to visit the Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteer’s bivouac, but it seemed polite to ask, especially on a day during which Rebecque had lectured him about the need for tact. Sharpe had sent Lieutenant Doggett on to the village of Waterloo where the Generals had their quarters, but Sharpe had no wish to join the Prince yet. He preferred the company of his old battalion.

Sharpe and Harper found the men of their old light company squatted about some miserable fires made from damp straw and green twigs collected from the hedge. Major d’Alembord was collecting letters from those few men who could write and who wanted to leaVe a message for their families should anything happen to them the next day.

It had begun to rain again. The men were cold and miserable, though the veterans of the war in Spain pretended that this was a paradise compared to the ordeals they had suffered in their earlier campaigns. The new men, not wanting to appear less tough than the veterans, kept silent.

The veterans of the company made space for Sharpe and Harper near a fire and Sharpe noted how these experienced soldiers were assembled around one blaze and the newcomers about the other feebler campfires. It was as if the old soldiers drew together as an elite against which the newcomers would have to measure themselves, yet even the veterans were betraying a nervousness this rainy night. Sharpe confirmed to them that the Prussians had been beaten, but he promised that Marshal Blücher’s army was withdrawing on roads parallel to the British retreat and that the Marshal had promised to march at first light to Wellington’s aid,

“Where are the Prussians exactly, sir?” Colour Sergeant Major Huckfield wanted to know.

“Over there.” Sharpe pointed to the left flank. The Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers were on the right side of the British position, almost midway between the elm tree and the track which led down to Hougoumont.

“How far away are they, sir?” Huckfield, an intelligent and earnest man, persisted.

Sharpe shrugged. “Not far.” In truth he did not know where the Prussians were bivouacked, nor was he even certain that Marshal Blucher would march to help this bedraggled army in the morning, but Sharpe knew he must give these men some shred of hope. The newcomers to the battalion were edging closer to the veterans’ fire to listen to the Rifleman. “All that matters,” he said loudly, “is that the Prussians will be here and fighting in the morning.”

“If this rain doesn’t stop we’ll need the bloody navy here, not the bloody Prussians.” Private Clayton looked up at the darkening clouds. The rain was steady and hard, drumming on the black shako tops of the shivering men and running down the old furrows to puddle at the field’s bottom where a troop of officers’ horses were unhappily picketed.

“This rain will bugger up their harvest.” Charlie Weller, who was allowed to bivouac with the veterans because they liked him, plucked a head of soaking wet rye and shook his head sadly. “It’ll all be black and rotten in a week’s time.”

“But it’ll be well dunged next year, though. Corn always grows better on dead flesh.” Hagman, the oldest man in the company, grinned. “We saw that in Spain, ain’t that right, Mr Sharpe? We saw oats growing taller than a horse where a battle had been fought. The roots was sucking up all that blood and belly, they was.”

“They don’t always bury them, though, do they? You remember that place in Spain? Where all the skulls were?” Clayton frowned as he tried to remember the battlefield over which the battalion had marched some weeks after a fight.

“Sally-Manker,” Harper offered helpfully.

“That was the place! There were skulls as thick as bluebottles in cowshit!” Clayton spoke loudly to impress the new recruits who were listening avidly to the conversation, nor did he drop his voice as a blue-coated battalion of Dutch-Belgian infantry marched close by towards their bivouac. “I hope those yellow bastards aren’t next to us tomorrow,” Clayton said malevolently.

There were growls of agreement. The officers and men of the Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers might be divided between the experienced and the inexperienced, but they were united in their hatred of all outsiders, unless those outsiders had proved themselves as tough, resourceful and uncomplaining as the redcoats. To these men the battalion was their life, their family and probably their death as well. Properly led they would fight for their battalion with a feral and terrifying ferocity, though ill-led, as Sharpe well knew, they could fall apart like a rusted musket. The thought made Sharpe glance towards Colonel Ford.

Clayton still stared with loathing at the Dutch-Belgians. “I’ll wager those buggers won’t go hungry tonight. Bastards can’t fight, but they look plump enough. No shortage of bloody food there!”

Daniel Hagman suddenly laughed aloud. “You remember that ripe ham we sold to the Portuguese? That was you, Mr Sharpe!”

“No, it wasn’t,” Sharpe said.

The veterans jeered knowingly and affectionately.

“It was you!” Clayton, a clever and cheeky rogue, pointed an accusing finger at Sharpe, then told the story for the benefit of the newcomers. “There were these Portuguese boys, right? It was after some scrap or other and the bastards were hungry as hell, so Mr Sharpe here chopped the bums off some French dead and smoked them over a fire, and then sold them to the Portuguese as joints of ham.”

The newcomers grinned nervously towards the grim-faced officer who seemed oddly embarrassed by the tale.

“The Portuguese never complained.” Harper justified the barbarity.

“Did you really do that?” d’Alembord asked Sharpe very quietly.

“Christ, no. It was some other Riflemen. The Portuguese had eaten their pet dog, so they decided to get even with them.” Sharpe was surprised that the story was now ascribed to him, but he had noticed how men liked to attach outrageous stories to his exploits and it was hopeless to deny the more exotic feats.

“We could do with some of them Portuguese tomorrow.” Daniel Hagman lit his pipe with a glowing twig from the fire. “They were proper little fighters, they were.” The admiration was genuine and earned muttered agreement from the veterans.

“But we’ll be all right tomorrow, won’t we, Mr Sharpe?” Charlie Weller asked with undisguised anxiety.

“You’ll be all right, lads. Just remember. Kill their officers first, aim at the bellies of the infantry and at the horses of the cavalry.” The answer was given for the benefit of the men at the outer reaches of Sharpe’s audience; the men who had not fought before and who needed simple rules to keep them confident in the chaos of battle.

Weller put a finger into the can of water and found it still lukewarm. He took a twist of dry kindling that he had stored deep in his clothes and put it onto the flames. Sharpe hoped the boy would survive, for Weller was different from the other men. He was a country boy who had joined the army out of a sense of patriotism and adventure. Those motives had helped make him a good soldier, though no better than most of the men who had taken the King’s shilling for altogether less honourable motives. Clayton was a thief, and probably would have been hanged if he had not donned the red coat, but his sly cunning made him a good skirmisher. Most of the other men around the fire were drunkards and criminals. They were the leavings of Britain, the unwanted men, the scum of the earth, but in battle they were as stubborn as mules. To Sharpe’s mind they were gutter fighters, and he would not have wanted them any other way. They were not impressive to look at; small, scarred, gap-toothed and dirty, but tomorrow they would show an emperor how a redcoat could fight, though tonight their main concern was when the rum ration would reach them.

“The quartermaster has promised it by midnight,” d’Alembord told the company.

“Bastard wagon drivers,” Clayton said. “Bastards are probably tucked up in bed.”

Sharpe and Harper stayed another half-hour and left the company discussing the chances of finding the French brothel among the enemy baggage. All British soldiers were convinced that the French travelled with such a brothel; a magical institution that they had never quite succeeded in capturing, but which occupied in their mythology the status of a golden prize of war.

“They seem well enough,” Sharpe said to d’Alembord. The two officers were walking towards the ridge top while Harper went to fetch the horses.

“They are well enough,” d’Alembord confirmed. He was still in his dancing clothes which were now stained and ragged. His proper uniform was lost with the missing baggage. One of his dancing shoes had somehow lost its buckle and was only held in place by a piece of string knotted round d’Alembord’s instep. “They’re good lads,” he said warmly.

“And you, Dally?”

Peter d’Alembord smiled ruefully. “I can’t shake off a rather ominous dread. Silly, I know, but there it is.”

“I felt that way before Toulouse,” Sharpe confessed. “It was bad. I lived, though.”

D’Alembord, who would not have admitted his fears to anyone but a very close friend, walked a few paces in silence. “I can’t help thinking about the wheat on the roads. Have you noticed that wherever our supply wagons go the grain falls off and sprouts? It grows for a season, then just dies. It seerns to me that’s rather a good image of soldiering. We pass by, we leave a trace, and then we die.”

Sharpe stared aghast at his friend. “My God, but you have got it bad!”

“My Huguenot ancestry, I fear. I am bedevilled by a Calvinist guilt that I’m wasting my life. I tell myself that I’m here to help punish the French, but in truth it was the chance of a majority that kept me in uniform. I need the money, you see, but that seems a despicable motive now. I’ve behaved badly, don’t you see? And consequently I have a conviction that I’ll become nothing but dung for a Belgian rye field.”

Sharpe shook his head. “I’m only here for the money too, you silly bugger.” They had reached the ridge top and could see the twisting trails of French cooking fires rising beyond the southern crest. “You’re going to live, Dally.”

“So I keep telling myself, then I become convinced of the opposite.” D’Alembord paused before revealing the true depths of his dread. “For tuppence I’d ride away tonight and hide. I’ve been thinking of it all day.”

“It happens to us all.” Sharpe remembered his own terror before the battle at Toulouse. “The fear goes when the fighting starts, Dally. You know that.”

“I’m not the only one, either.” D’Alembord ignored Sharpe’s encouragement. “GSM Huckfield has suddenly taken to reading his Bible. If I didn’t like him so much I’d accuse him of being a damned Methodist. He tells me he’s marked to die in this campaign, though he adds that he doesn’t mind because his soul is square with God. Major Vine says the same thing.” D’Alembord shot a poisonous glance towards the hedge where Ford and his senior Major crouched against the rain. “They asked me whether I thought we should have divine service tomorrow morning. I told them it was a bloody ridiculous notion, but I’ve no doubt they’ll find some idiot chaplain to mumble inanities at us. Have you noticed how we’re getting so very pious? We weren’t pious in Spain, but suddenly there’s a streak of moral righteousness infecting senior officers. I’ll say my prayers in the morning, but I won’t need to make a display of it.” He began scraping the mud from his fragile shoes against a tuft of grass, then abandoned the cleaning job as hopeless. “I apologize, Sharpe. I shouldn’t burden you with this.”

“It’s not a burden.”

“I was unconcerned till yesterday,” d’Alembord went on as though Sharpe had not spoken. “But those horsemen completely unnerved me. I was shaking like a child when they attacked us. Then there’s the Colonel, of course. I have no faith in Ford at all. And there’s Anne, I feel I don’t deserve her and that any man who is as fortunate as is bound to be punished for it.”

“Love makes us vulnerable,” Sharpe admitted.

“Doesn’t it just?” d’Alembord said warmly. “But virtue should give us confidence.”

“Virtue?” Sharpe wondered just what moral claims his friend was making for himself.

“The virtue of our cause,” d’Alembord explained as though it was the most natural thing in the world. “The French have got to be beaten.”

Sharpe smiled. “They’re doubtless saying the same of us.”

D’Alembord was silent for a few seconds, then spoke in a sudden and impassioned rush. “I don’t count Lucille, of course, and you mustn’t think I do, but it is a filthily evil nation, Sharpe. I cannot forget what they did to my family or to our co-religionists. And think of their revolution! All those poor dead innocent people. And Bonaparte’s no better. He just attacks and attacks, then steals from the countries he conquers, and all the time he talks of virtue and law and the glories of French civilization. Their virtue is all hypocrisy, their law applies only to benefit themselves, and their civilization is blood on the cobblestones.”

Sharpe had never suspected that such animosity lay beneath his friend’s elegant languor. “So it isn’t just the majority, Peter?”

D’Alembord seemed embarrassed to have betrayed such feelings. “I’m sorry, I truly am. You must think me very rude. I heartily like Lucille, you know I do. I exaggerate, of course. It is not the French who are essentially evil, but their government.” He stopped abruptly, evidently stifling yet more anti-French venom;

Sharpe smiled. “Where Lucille and I live they will tell you that France is blessed by God but cursed with Paris. They perceive Paris as an evil place inhabited by the most loathsome and grasping people.”

“It sounds like London.” D’Alembord smiled wanly. “You won’t tell Lucille my thoughts? I would not like to offend her.”

“Of course I won’t tell her.”

“And perhaps you will do me one more favour?”

“With pleasure,”

D’Alembord took a creased and damp letter from his pocket. “If I do become rye dung tomorrow, perhaps you’ll deliver this to Anne? And tell her I didn’t suffer? No tales of surgeon’s knives, Sharpe, and no descriptions of nasty wounds, just a clean bullet in the forehead will do for my end, however nasty the truth will probably be.”

“I won’t need to deliver it, but I’ll keep it for you.” Sharpe pushed the letter into a pocket, then turned as a spatter of musket fire sounded from the right of the line, about the chateau of Hougoumont.

A scatter of French infantry were running back from the orchard where British musket flames sparked bright in the dusk. Sharpe could see redcoats going forward among the trees south of the farm. The French must have sent a battalion to discover whether the farmstead was garrisoned, or else the enemy was merely foraging for firewood, but, whatever their mission, the blue-coated infantry had run into a savage firefight. More redcoats ran from the farm to take their bayonets into the woodland.

“What angers me“, d’Alembord was taking no notice of the sudden skirmish, ”is not knowing how it will all end. If I die tomorrow, I’ll never know, will I?“

Sharpe shook his head in scornful dismissal of his friend’s fears. “By summer’s end, my friend, you and I will sit in a conquered Paris and drink wine. We probably won’t even remember a day’s fighting in Belgium! And you’ll go home and marry your Anne and be happy ever after.”

D’Alembord laughed at the prophecy. “And you, Sharpe, what happens to you? Do you go back to Normandy?”

“Yes.”

“And the local people won’t mind that you fought against France?”

“I don’t know.” That worry was never far from Sharpe’s thoughts, nor indeed, from Lucille’s. “But I’d like to go back,” Sharpe went on. “I’m happy there. I’m planning to make some calvados this year. The chateau used to make a lot, but it hasn’t produced any for twenty or more years. The local doctor wants to help us. He’s a good fellow.” Sharpe suddenly thought of his meeting with Lord John and of the promissory note that, if it was honoured, would make so many things possible in Lucille’s chateau. “I met bloody Rossendale today. I took the promissory note off him direct. I hope you don’t mind.”

“Of course not,” d’Alembord said.

“Oddly enough,” Sharpe said, “I rather liked him. I don’t know why. I think I felt sorry for him.”

“ ”Love your enemies“,” d’Alembord quoted mockingly,“ ”bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you“? I told you we were getting more pious, even you.”

“But we’ll still slaughter the bloody French tomorrow.” Sharpe smiled and held out his hand. “You’ll be safe, Peter. TOmorrow night we’ll laugh at these fears.”

They shook hands on the promise.

The musket-fire at Hougoumont died away as the French yielded possession of the woodland to the British. A roll of thunder sounded in the west and a spear of lightning glittered brief and stark on the horizon. Then the rain began to pelt down hard again.

The armies had gathered, and now waited for morning.

The lintel of every house in Waterloo’s street bore a chalked inscription, put there by the Quartermaster-General’s department to identify which general and staff officers would be billeted inside. The inn opposite the church bore the chalked words ‘His Grace the Duke of Wellington’, while three doors away a two storey house was inscribed ‘The Earl of Oxbridge’. Another substantially built house was marked ‘His Royal Highness the Prince William of Orange’. Thatched cottages with dungheaps hard under their windows were this night to be the homes for marquesses or earls, yet such men counted themselves fortunate to be sheltered at all, and not to be enduring the numbing cold misery of the rain that thrashed the ridge.

In the Earl of Uxbridge’s house the staff officers crammed themselves about a table to share the Earl’s supper of boiled beef and beans. It was an early supper, for the whole staff was on notice to rise long before dawn. In the centre of the table, propped against the single candelabra, was Lord John Rossendale’s broken sword. One of the staff officers had discovered the snapped blade after Lord John had tried to throw it away and had demanded to know just how the weapon had been broken. The truth was too painful, and so Lord John had invented a rather more flattering account.

“It was after the rocket explosion,” he explained to the assembled staff at supper. “The damned horse bolted on me.”

“You should learn to ride, John.”

Lord John waited for the laughter to subside. “Damn thing ran me into a wood off to one side of the road, and damn me if there weren’t three Lancers lurking there.”

“Green or red?” The Earl of Uxbridge, just returned from a conference with the Duke of Wellington, had taken his place at the head of the supper table.

“The green ones, Harry.” That bit was easy for Lord John to invent, for he had watched the green-coated Lancers running from the attack of the Life Guards. “I shot one with the pistol, but had to throw it down to draw my sword. Damn shame, really, because it was an expensive gun.”

“A Mortimer percussion pistol, with a rifled barrel.” Christopher Manvell confirmed the value of the lost pistol. “A damn shame to lose it, John.”

Lord John shrugged as though to suggest the loss was nothing really. “The second fellow charged me, I got past his point and gave him the sword in the belly, then the third one damn nearly skewered me.” He gave a modest smile. “Thought I was dead, to be honest. I slashed at the fellow, but he was damned fast. He drew a sabre and had a good hack at me, I parried, and that’s when my sword broke. Then, damn me, if the fellow didn’t just turn tail and run!”

The assembled officers stared at the broken sword which lay like a trophy on the supper table.

“The trick of it‘, Lord John said, ”is to get past the lance point. Once you’re past the spike it’s a bit like killing rabbits. Too easy, really.“

“So long as your sword doesn’t break?” Christopher Manvell asked drily.

“There is that, yes.”

The Earl frowned. “So if the fellow ran away, why didn’t you pick up the pistol, Johnny? You said it was expensive.”

“I could hear more of the scoundrels among the trees. I thought I’d better give them a run.” Lord John gave a small disarming smile. “To tell you the truth, Harry, I was frightened! Whatever, I whipped my damn horse and ran like the devil!”

Christopher Manvell, who had seemed somewhat less impressed by Lord John’s ordeal than the other officers about the table, at least confirmed the story’s ending. “He came back to the road white as a sheet.”

“You did well, Johnny, damned well.” The Earl of Uxbridge spoke gruffly. “You killed a brace of the buggers, eh? Damn good.” There was a spatter of applause, then Christopher Manvell asked the Earl what news he had gleaned from his conference with the Duke of Wellington.

The truth was that the Earl had gleaned nothing at all. He was second in command to the Duke and had thought that appointment entitled him to know just what the Duke planned for the next day, but his enquiry had met with a very dusty answer indeed. The Duke had said his plans depended entirely on Napoleon, and as Napbleon had not yet confided in the Duke, the Duke could not yet confide in the Earl, and so good-night.

“I think we’ll just let the bugger attack us, then see him off, eh?” the Earl said lazily, as though the events of the next day were really not very significant at all.

“But the Prussians are coming?” Manvell insisted.

“I think we can do the business without a few damned Germans, don’t you?” The Earl pushed a box of cigars into the table’s centre. “But one thing’s certain, gentlemen. No doubt our cavalry will make England proud!”

“Bravo!” A drunken staff officer pounded the table.

After supper Christopher Manvell found Lord John standing in the open front porch from where he was staring into the wet dusk. “I wish I’d been there to help you against those Lancers,” Manvell said.

For a few seconds it seemed that Lord John would not reply at all, then he just shrugged the subject away. “Harry seems very sanguine about our chances tomorrow.”

Manvell blew a stream of cigar smoke into the drizzle. “It’s strange, Johnny. I saw you come out of the wood, then not a moment later I saw Colonel Sharpe in the same place. You were lucky not to meet him.”

Again Lord John was silent for a few seconds, then spoke in a rush of quiet bitterness. “Of course I met him. And of course there were no bloody Lancers. What was I supposed to do? Admit to Harry and everyone else that I was humiliated by a Rifleman?”

“I’m sorry.” Manvell was embarrassed by the tortured admission he had provoked from his friend.

“I gave him his damned note. Not that it will do me any good. Jane won’t give me the money unless I marry her, but Sharpe doesn’t know that.” Lord John laughed suddenly. “He gave me a length of rope and told me it was a peasant divorce. He says I’m free to marry her.”

Manvell smiled, but said nothing. The gutters either side of the paved high road were gurgling and flooding. Across the street a sentry ran cursing through the puddles to open a gate for a mounted officer. An orderly hung a lantern outside the stable entrance of the house where the Prince of Orange was billeted.

“It’s a matter of honour.” Lord John was staring into the darkening street.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Tomorrow“, Lord John said, ”has become a rather desperate matter of honour.“ He was very slightly drunk, and his voice held a hint of hysteria. ”I never realized before today how very simple battle is. There’s no compromise, is there? It’s victory or defeat, and nothing in between, while real life is so damned complicated. Perhaps that’s why the best soldiers are such very simple souls.“ He turned in the porch to stare at his friend. ”You see, if I want to keep the woman then I have to kill a man, and I don’t have the nerve to face him. And he’s done nothing to deserve death! It is his money! But if I do the honest thing to the man, then I lose the woman, and I don’t think I can live with that loss — „

“I’m sure you can — „Christopher Manvell interrupted and, in his turn, was cut off.

“No!” Lord John did not even wish to discuss Jane. He frowned in puzzlement at his friend. “Do you think lost honour can be retrieved on a battlefield?”

“I’m sure it’s the very best place to retrieve it.” Manvell felt a surge of pity for his friend. He had never realized till this moment just how Lord John’s honour had been trampled and destroyed.

“So tomorrow’s become rather important to me,” Lord John said. “Because tomorrow I can take my honour back by fighting well.” He smiled as if to soften the overdramatic words. “But to do it I’ll need a sword, and my spare blade is in Brussels. I suppose you don’t have one you could lend me?”

“With pleasure.”

Lord John stared into the drenching twilight. “I wish it was over. The rain, I mean,” he added hurriedly.

“I think it’s slackening.”

Lightning flickered in the west, followed a few seconds later by thunder that crashed across the far sky like the passage of a cannon-ball. Laughter and singing sounded from a house further up the street, temporarily drowning the ominous and repetitive scraping noise of a stone putting an edge onto a sword. A dog howled in protest at the thunder and a horse whinnied from the stables behind the Earl of Uxbridge’s billet.

Lord John turned back into the house. He could retrieve his honour and he could retrieve Jane by becoming a hero. Tomorrow.