Sharpe's Waterloo

CHAPTER 13

It stopped raining during the night.

At four in the morning the dawn revealed a valley mist which was stirred by a gusting damp wind. The mist was swiftly thickened by the smoke of the new morning fires. Shivering men picked themselves out of the mud like corpses coming to shuddering life. The long day had begun. It was a northern midsummer’s day and the sun would not set for another seventeen hours.

Men on both sides of the shallow valley untied the rags which had been fastened round their musket locks, and took the corks out of the guns’ muzzles. The sentries scraped out the grey damp slush which had been the priming in their pans and tried to empty the main charge with a fresh pinch of priming. All they achieved was a flash in the pan, evidence that the powder in the barrel was damp. They could either drill the bullet out, or else keep squibb-ing the gun with fresh priming till enough of the powder inside the touchhole dried to catch the fire. One by one the squibbed muskets banged, their sound echoing forlornly across the shallow valley.

The staff and general officers in Waterloo rose long before the dawn. Their grooms saddled horses, then, like men riding to their business, the officers took the southern road through the dark and dripping forest.

Sharpe and Harper were among the first to leave. The Prince was not even out of his bed when Sharpe wearily hauled himself into his saddle and shoved his rifle into its bucket holster. He was wearing his green Rifleman’s jacket beneath Lucille’s cloak and riding the mare which had recovered from her long day’s reconnaissance about Charleroi. His clothes were clammy and his thighs sore from the long days in the saddle. The wind whipped droplets of water from the roofs and trees as he and Harper turned south into the village street. “You’ll keep your promise today?” Sharpe asked Harper.

“You’re as bad as Isabella! God save Ireland, but if I wanted someone else to be my conscience I’d have found a wife out here to nag me.”

Sharpe grinned. “I’m the one who’ll have to give her the news of your death, so are you going to keep your promise?”

“I’m not planning on being a dead man just yet, so I’ll keep my promise.” Harper was nevertheless dressed and equipped for a fight. He wore his Rifleman’s jacket and had his seven-barrelled gun on one shoulder and his rifle on the other. Both men had left their packs at the Prince’s billet, and neither man had shaved. They rode to battle looking like brigands.

As they neared Mont-St-Jean they heard a sound like the sucking of a great sea on a shelving beach. It was the sound of thousands of men talking, the sound of damp twigs burning, the noise of squibbed muskets popping, and the sound of the wind rustling in the stiff damp stalks of rye. It was also a strangely ominous sound. The air smelt of wet grass and dank smoke, but at least the clouds of the previous day had thinned enough so that the sun was visible as a pale pewter glow beyond a cloudy vapour that was being thickened by the smoke of the camp-fires.

There was one ritual for Sharpe to perform. Before riding on to the ridge’s crest he found a cavalry armourer close to the forest’s edge and handed down his big sword. “Make it into a razor,” he ordered.

The armourer treadled his wheel, then kissed the blade onto the stone so that sparks flowed like crushed diamonds from the steel. Some of the nicks in the sword’s fore edge were so deep that successive sharpenings had failed to obliterate them. Sharpe, watching the sparks, could not even remember which enemies had driven those nicks so far into the steel. The armourer turned the blade to sharpen the point. British cavalrymen were taught to cut and slash rather than lunge, but wisdom said that the point always beat the edge. The armourer honed the top few inches of the backblade, then stropped the work on his thick leather apron. “Good as new, sir.”

Sharpe gave the man a shilling, then carefully slid the sharpened sword into its scabbard. With any luck, he thought, he would not even need to draw the weapon this day.

The two Riflemen rode on through the encampment. The battalions’ supply wagons had not arrived so it would be a hungry day, though not a dry one, for the quartermasters had evidently arranged for rum to be fetched from the depot at Brussels. Men cheered as the barrels were rolled through the mud. Equally to the day’s purpose were the wagons of extra musket ammunition that were being hauled laboriously across the soaking ground.

A drummer boy tightened the damp skin of his drum and gave it an exploratory tap. Next to him a bugler shook the rain out of his instrument. Neither boy was more than twelve years old. They grinned as Harper spoke to them in Gaelic, and the drummer boy offered a reply in the same language. They were Irish lads from the 29th, the Inniskillings. They look good, don’t they?“ Harper gestured proudly at his coutrymen who, in truth, looked more like mud-smeared devils, but, like all the Irish battalions, they could fight like demons.

“They look good,” Sharpe agreed fervently.

They reined in at the highest point of the ridge, where the elm tree stood beside the cutting in which the highway ran north and south. Just to Sharpe’s left a battery of five nine-pounder guns and one howitzer was being prepared for the day. The charges for the ready ammunition lay on canvas sheets close to the guns; each charge a grey fabric bag containing enough powder to propel a roundshot or shell. Near the charges were the projectiles, either roundshot or shells, which were strapped to wooden sabots that crushed down onto the fabric bags inside the gun barrels. Gunners were filling canisters, which were nothing but tubular tins crammed with musket-balls. When fired the thin tin canisters split apart to scatter the musket-balls like giant blasts of duckshot. Beside the guns were the tools of the artillerymen’s trade: drag-chains, relievers, rammers, sponges, buckets, searchers, rammers, wormhooks, portfires and handspikes. The guns looked grimly reassuring until Sharpe remembered that the French guns would look just as businesslike and were probably present on the field in even greater numbers.

The smoke of the enemy’s camp-fires lay like a low dirty mist over the southern horizon. Sharpe could see a knot of horsemen close to the inn, but otherwise the enemy was hidden. In the valley itself patches of the tall rye had been beaten flat by the night’s rain, leaving the fields looking as though they suffered from some strange and scabrous disease.

There were Riflemen positioned some two hundred paces down the road in the valley, just opposite the farm of La Haye Sainte. Sharpe and Harper trotted towards those Greenjackets, who were occupying a sandpit on the road’s left, while the farm on the right was garrisoned by men of the King’s German Legion.

“A bad night?” Sharpe asked a Greenjacket sergeant.

“We’ve known worse, sir. It’s Mr Sharpe, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Nice to know you’re here, sir. Cup of tea?”

“The usual smouch?”

“It never changes, sir.” Smouch was a cheap tea which was rumoured to be made from ash leaves steeped in sheep’s dung. It tasted even worse than its alleged recipe sounded, but any hot liquid was welcome on this damp cold morning. The Sergeant handed Sharpe and Harper a tin mug each, then stared through the dawn gloom at the enemy-held ridge. “I suppose Monsewer will start the ball early?”

Sharpe nodded. “I would if I was in his boots. He needs to beat us before the Prussians come.”

“So they are coming, sir?” The Sergeant’s tone betrayed that even these prime troops realized how precarious was the British predicament.

“They’re coming.” Sharpe had still not heard any official news of the Prussians, but Rebecque had been confident the night before that Blücher would march at dawn.

The Sergeant suddenly whipped round, proving he had eyes in the back of his head. “Not here, George Cullen, you filthy little bastard! Go and do it in the bloody field! We don’t want to be tripping over your dung all day! Move!”

A group of the Greenjackets’ officers had gathered about an empty artillery canister that they had filled with hot water for their morning shave. One of the men, a tall, cadaverous and grey-haired major, looked oddly familiar to Sharpe, but he could neither place the man’s face nor his name.

“That’s Major Dunnett,” the Sergeant told Sharpe. “He was only posted to this battalion last year, sir. Poor gentleman had the misfortune to be a prisoner for most of the last war.”

“I remember now.” Sharpe spurred the mare towards the group of officers and Dunnett, looking up, caught his eye and stared with apparent amazement. Then Dunnett shook the soap off his razor blade and walked to meet Sharpe. They had last met during the disastrous retreat to Corunna when Dunnett had been in charge of a half-battalion of Greenjackets and Lieutenant Sharpe had been his quartermaster. Dunnett had hated Sharpe with an unreasonable and ineradicable hatred. The last glimpse Sharpe had caught of his erstwhile commanding officer had been as French Dragoons captured Dunnett while Sharpe had scrambled to desperate safety with a group of Riflemen. Now, denied promotion by his five years in prison, Dunnett was still a Major while Sharpe, his old quartermaster, outranked him.

“Hello, Dunnett.” Sharpe curbed his horse.

“Lieutenant Sharpe, as I live and breathe.” Dunnett patted his face dry. “I heard that you’d survived and prospered, though I doubt you’re still a lieutenant? Or even a quartermaster?”

“A Dutch Lieutenant-Colonel, which I don’t think counts for very much. It’s good to see you again.”

“It’s good of you to say so.” Dunnett, evidently embarrassed by Sharpe’s compliment, looked away and caught sight of Harper who was still talking with the Sergeant. “Is that Rifleman Harper?” Dunnett asked incredulously.

“Ex-Rifleman Harper. He cheated his way out of the army, and now can’t resist coming back to see it fight a battle.”

“I thought he’d have died long ago. He was always a rogue.” Dunnett was painfully thin, with deep lines carved either side of his grey moustache. He looked back to Sharpe. “So were you, but I was wrong in my opinion of you.”

It was a handsome retraction. Sharpe tried to throw it off by saying how terrible the retreat to Corunna had been; an ordeal that had abraded mens’ tempers and manners till they were snarling at each other like rabid dogs. “It was a bad time,” he concluded.

“And today doesn’t promise to be much better. Is it true that Boney’s whole army is over there?”

“Most of it, anyway.” Sharpe assumed that Napoleon had sent some men to keep the Prussians busy, but the thickness of the camp-fires across the valley was evidence that most of the French army was now assembled in front of Wellington’s men.

“Damn the bastards however many they might be.” Dunnett buttoned his shirt and pulled on his green coat. “I won’t be taken a prisoner again.”

“Was it bad?”

“No, it was even civilized. We had the freedom of Verdun, but if you didn’t have money, that was a dubious privilege. I think I’d rather die than see that damned town again.” Dunnett turned and stared towards the empty slope of the French ridge where the only movement was the ripple of the wind moving the standing patches of damp rye. He stared for a few seconds, then turned back to Sharpe. “It’s oddly good to see you again. There aren’t many of that particular battalion still living. You heard they were at New Orleans?”

“Yes.”

“Butchered,” Dunnett said bitterly. “Why do they make fools into generals?”

Sharpe smiled. “I think you’ll find the Duke’s no fool.”

“So everyone tells me, and let’s hope it’s true. I want the chance of killing some Crapauds today. I’ve scores to settle with the bloody French.” Dunnett laughed as if to dilute the hatred he had betrayed, then offered his hand. “Allow me to wish you well of this day, Sharpe.”

Sharpe reached down and took his old enemy’s hand. “And you, Dunnett.” He thought how odd it was that men made peace before they went to war, and it seemed odder still as Dunnett, with apparent pride, introduced Sharpe to the other officers. These Riflemen were cruelly exposed, so far forward of the ridge, but so long as the Germans held the farm buildings then the Greenjackets were assured of their supporting fire. “Better here than over there.” A captain pointed towards the left flank where the British ridge was pierced and flattened by a shallow re-entrant and where a battalion of Dutch-Belgian troops was in full view of the enemy. The rest of Wellington’s infantry were concealed behind the ridge or sheltered behind thick farm walls, but the one Dutch-Belgian battalion was horribly exposed. Doubtless some troops had to be stationed to block the dangerous re-entrant, but, after Quatre Bras, it seemed futile to expect the Belgians to stand and fight.

“Perhaps the Duke wants the buggers to run away early? No point in feeding the scum if they won’t fight.” Five years of imprisonment had done nothing to dull Dunnett’s tongue.

Sharpe made his farewells, then he and Harper rode back towards the ridge. “Strange to meet Dunnett again,” Sharpe said, then he twisted to look at the empty French ridge as he thought of the men he knew in that far army. One or two of those men he counted as friends, yet today he would have to fight them.

Once at the crest of the ridge Sharpe and Harper turned west towards the British right flank which the Prince of Orange had judged to be vulnerable. Some battalions were already formed up behind the ridge’s crest. The Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers were paraded in a hollow square that faced inwards towards a chaplain who was trying to make himself heard above the sound of the wind and the buzz of other battalions’ voices. Sharpe saw d’Alembord’s head bowed, apparently in prayer, though more probably in reverie. Just beyond the Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers an infantry battalion of the King’s German Legion was singing a psalm. The Hanoverian voices were strong and full of emotion so that Sharpe had the sudden guilty impression that he eavesdropped upon a very private moment. “It’s Sunday, so it is,” Harper said with a note of surprise, then made the sign of the cross on his uniform jacket.

On the ridge’s crest a cheerful and rubicund gunner officer was riding from gun battery to gun battery. “You will not indulge in counter-battery fire. You will save your powder for the infantry and the cavalry! You will not fire at the enemy guns, but at their infantry and cavalry alone! Good morning, Freddy!” He raised his hat to a friend who evidently commanded one of the batteries. “Thank God it’s stopped raining, eh? Give my compliments to your lovely wife when you write home. You will not indulge in counter-battery fire, but you will save your powder…‘ His voice faded behind as Sharpe and Harper rode further west.

“I’ve never seen so many guns,” Harper commented. Every few yards there was another battery of nine-pounders while, behind the ridge, the lethal short-barrelled howitzers waited in reserve.

“You can bet your last ha’pence that Napoleon’s got more guns than us,” Sharpe said grimly.

“All the same, it’ll be bloody slaughter if the Crapauds march straight across the valley.”

“Maybe they won’t. The little Dutch boy thinks they might hook round this end of our line.” Sharpe spoke Dourly, though in truth the Prince’s fear was a genuine and intelligent concern, and Sharpe, suddenly fearing that the Emperor might already have marched and that the French might already be threatening to spring a surprise attack on the British right flank, spurred his mare forward.

He reined in on the ridge above the chateau of Hougoumont. From here he could see far to the south-west, but nothing stirred in the grey morning. A handful of cavalry picquets from the King’s German Legion sat untroubled in the fields, proof that the French had not marched. The chateau itself buzzed with noise as the Coldstream Guards, who formed its garrison, finished their preparations. Sharpe could hear the sound of pickaxes making yet more loopholes in the thick walls of the barns and house.

A knot of horsemen was galloping along the ridge’s crest. The horses’ hooves flung up great gobs of mud and water from the soaking ground. The leading horseman was the Prince of Orange who, seeing Sharpe, raised a hand in greeting and swerved towards the two Riflemen. The Prince was elegantly dressed in a gold-frogged coat that was trimmed with black fur. “You were up early, Sharpe!”

“Yes, sir.”

“Nothing moving on the flank?”

“Nothing, sir.”

The Prince suddenly spotted that Sharpe still wore his Rifle green under the cloak. He was clearly tempted to say something, but just as clearly feared an act of downright disobedience that would betray his own lack of princely authority, so instead he scowled and stared towards the vulnerable open flank where the German horsemen sat like statues in the waterlogged meadows. “The Emperor will come round this way. You can depend on it!”

“Indeed, sir,” Sharpe said.

“An attack around our right will cut us off from the North Sea and take the French away from the Prussians, Sharpe, that’s what it’ll do, and that’s why the Emperor will attack here. A child could work that out! It’s a waste of time putting guns on the ridge. They’ll all have to be moved to this flank and it’ll be a shambles when the orders are given. But at least we’ll be ready for the move!”

“Are the Prussians coming, sir?” Sharpe asked.

The Prince frowned as though he found the question aggravating. “They’re coming.” The answer was grudging. “Blücher says two of his corps will be here by midday and a third will be hard on their heels. The message came a few minutes ago.”

“Thank God,” Sharpe said fervently.

The Prince, already irritated by Sharpe’s refusal to wear Dutch uniform, was galled by the Rifleman’s evident relief. “I don’t think we need be too grateful, Colonel Sharpe. I trust we can beat those devils without a few Germans, isn’t that so, Rebecque?”

“Indeed, Your Highness.” Rebecque, his horse just behind that of the Prince, said tactfully.

“We can beat them so long as we hold this flank.” The Prince turned his horse towards the chateau. “So keep watch here, Sharpe! The future of Europe may depend on your vigilance!”

The Prince shouted the last fine words as he spurred down the farm track, which led off the ridge to the chateau. Rebecque waited a few seconds until his master’s entourage was out of earshot, then added a few cautionary words. “The roads are very heavy, so I wouldn’t expect the Prussians till early afternoon.”

“But at least they’re coming.”

“Oh, they’re coming, right enough. They’ve promised it. We wouldn’t be fighting here if they weren’t.” Rebecque smiled to acknowledge his bald contradiction of the Prince’s confidence. “May I wish you joy of the day, Sharpe?”

“And the same to you, sir.”

They shook hands, then Rebecque trotted after his master who had disappeared into Hougoumont’s big courtyard.

Patrick Harper glanced up at the sky to judge the time. “The Germans will be here by early afternoon, eh? Where will they come from?”

“From over there.” Sharpe pointed to the west, far beyond the elm tree and beyond the left flank of Wellington’s line. “And I’ll tell you something else, Patrick. You were right. It’s going to be bloody murder.” Sharpe turned to glower at the empty enemy ridge. “Napoleon’s not going to manoeuvre. He’s going to come straight for us like a battering ram.”

Harper was amused at Sharpe’s sudden grim certainty. “With the future of Europe at stake?”

Sharpe did not know why he was suddenly so certain, unless it was an inability to agree with anything the Prince of Orange believed. He attempted a more acceptable justification for his certainty. “Boney will want to get it done quickly, so why manoeuvre? And he’s never cared how many of his men die, so long as he wins. And he’s got enough men over there to hammer us bloody, so why shouldn’t he just march straight forward and have the damned business done?”

“Thank God for the Prussians then,” Harper said grimly.

“Thank God, indeed.”

Because the Prussians had promised, and were coming.

Marshal Prince Blucher, Commander of the Prussian army, had promised he would march to fight beside Wellington, but Blücher’s Chief of Staff, Gneisenau, did not trust the Englishman. Gneisenau was convinced that Wellington was a knave, a liar and a trickster who, at the first sniff of cannon-fire, would run for the Channel and abandon the Prussians to Napoleon’s vengeance.

Blucher had scorned Gneisenau’s fears and ordered his Chief of Staff to organize the march to Waterloo. Gneisenau would not directly disobey any order, but he was a clever enough man to make sure that his method of obedience was tantamount to disobedience.

He therefore commanded that General Friedrich Wilhelm von Billow’s Fourth Corps should lead the advance on Waterloo. Of all the Prussian corps the Fourth was the furthest away from the British. Making the Fourth march first would inflict a long delay on the fulfilment of Blucher’s promise, but Gneisenau, fearing that von Billow might show a soldier’s haste in marching to the expected sound of the guns, further ordered the thirty thousand men of the Fourth Corps to march by a particular road that not only led through the narrow streets of Wavre, but also crossed a peculiarly narrow and inconvenient bridge. The Fourth Corps was also commanded to march through the cantonments of Lieutenant-General Pirch’s Third Corps, which was instructed to leave its guns and heavy supply wagons parked on the road. Once von Billow’s thirty thousand men had edged past those obstructions, Pirch was permitted to begin his own march in von Billow’s footsteps. Lieutenant-General Zieten’s Second Corps, which was only twelve miles from Waterloo and the closest of all the Prussian Corps to the British, was firmly ordered to stay in its cantonments until the Fourth and Third had passed it by, and then the Second was to take a circuitous northerly route that would still further delay its arrival on the battlefield.

It needed a masterful piece of staff work to create such chaos, but Gneisenau was a master and, proving that fortune will often favour the competent, an extra delay was imposed when a burning house blocked a street in Wavre so that von Billow’s men were stalled almost before their march had begun. The soldiers just grounded their muskets and waited.

Somewhere to the south a French Corps was blundering about in search of the Prussian army, but Gneisenau was not worried by that threat. All that mattered was that the precious Prussian army should not be sucked into the huge defeat that the Emperor was about to inflict on the British, and Gneisenau, confident that his skill had averted such a disaster, ordered his breakfast.

A single horseman rode to the solitary elm tree. The horseman wore a blue civilian coat over white buckskin breeches and tall black boots. About his neck was a white cravat, while on his cocked hat were four cockades, one each for England, Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands. A blue cloak was rolled on the pommel of his saddle. His staff closed in behind as His Grace the Duke of Wellington stared through a spyglass at the tavern called La Belle Alliance. The military commissioners of Austria, Spain, Russia and Prussia attended the Duke, and like him trained their telescopes at the far ridge. Some civilians had also ridden from Brussels to observe the fighting and they too crowded in behind the Duke.

The Duke snapped his glass shut and looked at his watch. Nine o’clock. “Baggage to the rear,” he said to no one in particular, but two of his aides turned their horses away to carry the order down the line.

The battalions shrugged off their packs which were piled onto the carts that had brought up the extra ammunition. The men were ordered to keep nothing but their weapons, cartridges and canteens. The carts struggled through fetlock-deep mud to carry the baggage back to the forest’s edge where it joined the carriages of the military commissioners and the artillery wagons and the portable forges and the farriers’ carts,“ and where the supernumeraries of battle — the shoeing smiths, the wheelwrights, the commissary officers, the clerks, the drivers, the harness makers and the soldiers’ wives — would wait for the day’s decision.

On the northern slope of the ridge the Duke’s infantry waited in columns of companies. The leading battalions were far enough advanced for the men of the forward companies to see over the crest to where a faint and watery glimmer of sunlight shone on the enemy ground. That southern ridge was empty, all but for a few horsemen.

Then, suddenly and gloriously, an army began to show.

The veterans in the Duke’s army had seen an enemy prepare for battle, but never like this. Before, in Spain, the enemy would come as a threat, as a smear of dark uniforms advancing across sunlit ground, but here the Emperor paraded his army as though this day was a holiday and the British redcoats were spectators of his gorgeous display. The French did not advance to battle; instead they spread themselves in an arrogant panoply of overwhelming power.

Infantry, cavalry and gunners appeared. They marched or rode as though they were on the Champ de Mars in Paris. They were not in their combat uniforms, but dressed for the forecourt of a palace. Their coats glistened with gold and silver lace. There were plumes of scarlet, silver, yellow, red, green and white. There were helmets of brass and of steel; helmets trimmed with leopard’s fur or rimmed with sable. There were Cuirassiers, Lancers, Dragoons, Carabiniers, and Hussars. Gunners with dark blue pelisses edged with silver fur ordered their weapons slewed to face the enemy. Trumpeters challenged the valley, their instruments trailing banners of embroidered gold. The-red and white Polish swallow-tailed flags of the Lancers made a thicket of colour, while guidons, standards, banners, pennants and gilded Eagles studded the watery sky.

And still they came; regiment after regiment, troop after troop, battery after battery; the might of a resurrected Empire displayed in a massive show of incipient violence. Grecian helmets trailed plumes of horsehair, officers wore sashes thick with gold thread, and the elite of the infantry’s elite wore black bearskins. Those were the men of the Imperial Guard, Napoleon’s beloved antiens, each man with a powdered pigtail, gold ear-rings, and the moustache of a veteran. In front of the Emperor’s Guard hisjeunes flies, his guns, stood wheel to wheel.

Sharpe, watching from the ridge above Hougoumont, stared in utter disbelief. After half an hour the enemy was still filing onto the ridge, the new battalions concealing the first, and those new battalions in turn being hidden by yet more troops who poured from the high road to wheel left or right. The bands were playing while officers with gold and lace-trimmed saddle-cloths galloped bravely in front of the display. It was a sight not seen on a battlefield for a hundred years; a formal display of a glorious threat, overwhelming and dazzling and filling the southern landscape with guns and sabres and lances and swords and muskets.

The British gunners gazed at their targets and knew there was not enough ammunition in all Europe to kill such a horde. The infantry watched the thousands of enemy cavalry who would try and break them as they had broken a brigade at Quatre Bras. The Dutch-Belgian troops just watched the whole vast array and knew that no army in all the world could beat such glory into gore.

“God save Ireland.” Even Harper, who had seen most of what war had to offer, was overwhelmed by the sight.

“God quicken the bloody Prussians,” Sharpe said. The sound of the French bands came clear across the valley; a cacophony of tunes among which, at intervals, the raucous defiance of the Marseillaise sounded distinct. “They’re trying to make the Belgians run away,” Sharpe guessed, and he twisted in his saddle to stare at the nearest Belgian regiment and saw the fear on their young faces. This was not their fight. They thought of themselves as French, and wished the Emperor was back as their lord, but fate had brought them to this sea of mud to be dazzled by a master of war.

From one end of the far ridge to the other, across two miles of farmland, the French army paraded. The Emperor’s guns seemed wheel to wheel; Sharpe tried to number the enemy’s artillery and lost count at over two hundred barrels. He did not even attempt to number the enemy’s men, for they filled the ridge and hid each other and still they marched from the high road to fill the far fields. The might of France had come to a damp valley, there to obliterate its oldest enemy.

The enemy’s drums and bands faded as a cheer billowed from the line’s centre. A small man on a grey horse had appeared. He wore the undress uniform of a colonel of the Imperial Guard’s chasseurs a cheval; a green coat faced with red over a white waistcoat and white breeches. The man wore a grey overcoat loose on his shoulders like a cloak. His bicorne hat had ho cockades. His Imperial Majesty, the Emperor of France, galloped along the face of his army and was greeted by the cheers of men who knew they were on the brink of victory.

The Duke of Wellington had long turned scornfully away from the display. “Tell the men to lie down.”

The British and Dutch obeyed. Men lying flat in the long grass of the ridge’s plateau could not see the overwhelming enemy, nor were they visible to the enemy’s gunners.

The Duke rode along the right of his line. He did not gallop like his opponent, but trotted sedately. No one cheered the Duke. His gunners, posted on the ridge’s crest, watched the Emperor. One gunner captain, his weapon loaded, squinted along its crude sights then called out to the Duke that in a moment the Emperor would gallop directly into the gun’s line. “Permission to fire, Your Grace?”

“It is not the business of army commanders to fire on each other. Save your ammunition.” The Duke rode on, not even deigning to look towards his opponent.

The Duke and his entourage passed near Sharpe, then angled towards the troops who guarded the open flank beyond Hougou-mont. The closest battalion was Dutch-Belgian and the troops, seeing the knot of horsemen come down from the ridge, opened fire. The musket bullets fluttered near the Duke, but did not hit any of his party. The Duke swerved away as the Dutch officers shouted at their men to cease their fire. The Duke, grim-faced, rode back towards the elm tree that would be his command post.

A shower of rain briefly obscured the valley as the French redeployed themselves for battle. The great display was evidently over for most of the enemy troops now retreated from the ridge’s crest. The French gunners could be seen charging their barrels with powder and shot.

“What’s the time?” Sharpe asked a nearby gunner officer who commanded a battery of howitzers.

“Just on half-past eleven.”

If the Prussians came at one in the afternoon? Sharpe tried to guess how long the British could sustain their defence against the onslaught of the huge force he had just watched parade. One and a half hours? It seemed unlikely.

The French, perhaps certain that they had plenty of time in which to do their work, were in no hurry to begin. More guns were manhandled into their battle line, yet none opened fire. Sharpe gazed eastwards to see if any Prussian cavalry scouts had yet appeared beyond the valley’s edge, but nothing moved there. He wished he had a watch so he could see the progress of the minutes that must be bringing the Prussians closer. “The time?” he apologetically asked the gunner officer again.

The gunner obligingly clicked open the lid of his watch. “A quarter of twelve.”

Behind the howitzers the nearest British redcoats sat or lay on the wet turf. Some smoked their clay pipes. Their canteens were filled with rum or gin, and their pouches with dry cartridges. The wind was dying. The clouds still stretched across the sky, but they must have been thinning for Sharpe saw yet more gauzy floods of sunlight patching the distant fields with gold. The day was warming, though Sharpe’s clothes were still clammy and uncomfortable. The minutes passed. The gunner officer fidgeted with his watch, obsessively opening and closing the silver lid. No one spoke. It was almost as if the whole army held its breath. Patrick Harper was watching a pair of skylarks who tumbled in the lower veil of clouds.

Then a French gun fired.

The barrel of the gun was cold, so the shot did not carry the full distance to the British ridge. Instead the roundshot slammed into the valley, scattering rye, then bounced in a flurry of wet soil to bury itself just below the elm tree. The smoke of the gun drifted grey along the French ridge.

A second gun fired. Its roundshot similarly bounded harmlessly through the empty fields. The Duke opened his watch lid to see the time.

There was a pause equal to that which had separated the first two shots, then a third French gun fired. Its ball screamed towards the exposed Dutch-Belgian troops beyond the sandpit, but fell short and ploughed into a patch of soft ground that stopped the missile dead.

The three shots were the Emperor’s signal.

To let loose hell.