Sharpe's Waterloo

CHAPTER 14

The Earl of Uxbridge, quite ready for the moment, had arranged for his servant to bring a tray of silver stirrup cups filled with sherry. As the first gun fired the Earl waved the servant forward and watched as the small cups were handed about to his staff.

The Earl waited for the second gun to fire, then, as though these horsemen were about to ride to hounds, he gravely raised his stirrup cup. “Today’s fox, gentlemen. Allow me to give you today’s fox.”

The horsemen drank. Lord John Rossendale had to curb the temptation to gulp the sherry down.

The third gun fired. The fox had broken cover, was running, and the blooding could begin.

Every gun on the French ridge opened fire.

The salvo showed as a volcanic eruption of smoke that blurred the far crest with yellow-grey smoke. In the heart of the smoke were the stabbing flames.

Two heartbeats later the sound slammed across the valley; a thunderclap to tell Europe that the Emperor was at war.

The majority of the guns had been loaded with shell. The cold barrels dropped the missiles fractionally short and most plunged harmlessly into mud that either extinguished the burning fuse or soaked up the force of the explosion. A few, very few, ricocheted on the ridge’s forward slope to land a second time among the battalions sheltering beyond the crest. The explosions punched ragged blots of dark smoke and livid flame into the damp air.

The first men were dying, but not many, for a shell had to explode in the very heart of a company if it was to kill. Some shells were defused by quick-witted men who either pinched out the fire or knocked the smouldering fuse clean from the powder charge with a swift blow of a musket butt. The smoke from the French guns rolled down into the valley, then began to be fed as the guns which had reloaded the quickest fired again. The firing became ragged, but constant; jet after jet of smoke and flame pumped from the French-held ridge. The shots screamed higher as the gun barrels warmed. Some shells skimmed across the ridge top to explode far back at the forest’s edge while the best aimed shots bounced just below the British crest to plunge down among the men hidden behind. The shells made differing sounds, depending on their distance from the ear. Some hummed like childrens’ tops, some whirred like a bird’s wingbeat, while others rumbled like thunder. The sounds were already causing a trickle of Belgian troops to retreat towards the forest; one wounded man was an excuse for ten others to help him to safety.

One shell exploded close to the Earl of Uxbridge’s staff who, still bunched together after their toast to the day’s fox, split asunder like sheep attacked by a wolf. A small silver cup fell into the mud, but otherwise there was no damage other than to the young men’s dignity. They curbed their excited horses and watched as each new shot roiled and twitched the bank of smoke which thickened in front of the Emperor’s gun line.

On the British right, where the French guns were close to Hougoumont, the gunners were firing canister to scour the British skirmishers from the woods which lay south of the chateau. Some of the musket-balls hummed up onto the ridge where they pattered on the wet ground like hail.

A British nine-pounder fired a return shot, and earned a furious reprimand from a mounted staff officer. “Hold your damned fire! Hold your fire!” The Duke was saving his guns the wear and tear of incessant firing that could blow out touchholes and even split barrels. He would need his guns when the enemy infantry or cavalry advanced.

A shell plunged down to smash an howitzer’s wheel before bouncing up to explode harmlessly behind the ridge. The gunners quickly brought up a spare wheel and repaired the gun. The French began to mix more solid roundshot with the shells and one of the iron balls took the head off a staff officer, leaving his bloody body momentarily upright in its saddle before the terrified horse bolted and the headless body toppled to be dragged along by the left stirrup. The corpse was finally shaken loose and a group of redcoats scuttled forward to rifle the dead man’s pockets.

A shell landed on the ridge top, bounced, then exploded twenty yards to Sharpe’s left. A piece of red-hot casing, trailing smoke, smacked harmlessly against his thigh. “Go back,” Sharpe told Harper.

“I’m all right here, so I am.”

“You made your wife a promise! So bugger off!”

“Save your breath!” Harper stayed. The cannonade was heavy, but it was not overly dangerous. The French gunners were doubly hampered; first they were being blinded by their own smoke, and secondly their enemy was crouching behind the protection of the low ridge, and so most of their shells were exploding harmlessly if they exploded at all. Too many fuses were being extinguished by mud, yet the artillery was making a deal of noise, enough to terrify the Belgian troops who crouched under the sounds of hissing shells and banging explosions and thundering guns.

Sharpe moved to his right, going to a vantage point from where he could see the empty countryside on the army’s right flank. The move took Harper and himself away from the worst of the cannonade and to where another British staff officer was evidently posted on the same duty as Sharpe; to watch for a French outflanking march. The man, who was in the blue coat and fur Kolbak of the Hussars, nodded civilly to Sharpe, then consulted a notebook. “I made it ten of midday, did you?”

“Ten of midday?” Sharpe asked.

“When Bonaparte opened fire. It’s good to be accurate about these things.”

“Is it?”

“The Peer likes to be specific. I’m one of his family by the way.” By which the pleasant-faced young man meant he was one of the Duke’s aides. “My name is Witherspoon.”

“Sharpe. And this is my friend Mr Harper from Ireland.”

Captain Witherspoon nodded genially at Harper, then cocked an eye at the clouds. “I suspect it might well clear up. I detected a quite definite rise in the mercury this morning. I’m honoured to make your acquaintance, Sharpe! You’re with the Young Frog, are you not?“

“Yes, I am.”

“Is he good for anything at all?”

Sharpe smiled at Captain Witherspoon’s disingenuous tone. “Not that I know of.”

The cavalryman laughed. “I was at Eton with him. He wasn’t any good there either, though he had a mighty fine opinion of himself. I remember him as being eternally dirty! But he liked the girls, and had a prolific fondness for wine.”

“What’s the time now?” Sharpe asked in apparently rude disregard of Witherspoon’s gossip.

Witherspoon hauled his watch from his fob and clicked open the lid. “Four minutes after midday, save a few seconds.”

“You’d best write down that the French are advancing, then.”

“They’re doing what? Oh, my soul! So they are! Thank you, my dear fellow! Good Lord, they advance, indeed they do!” He dashed a note into his book.

French skirmishers were swarming towards Hougoumont. They came in a loose mass of men; running, firing, running again. They were mostly among the trees, which gave cover from the foot of their ridge right up to the walls of the chateau, but some had overlapped onto the open flank where newly cut hay lay in sopping rows among the stubble. The skirmishers of the red-coated Cold-stream Guards were falling back fast, evidently ordered not to make a fight of it among the trees. With the redcoats were some Dutch and German troops, the Germans armed with long-barrelled hunting rifles. Sharpe saw at least two of the blue-coated Dutch-Belgian troops running towards the enemy, presumably seeking shelter.

The Guards skirmishers scrambled back into-the farm buildings or into the walled garden and orchard that lay alongside the chateau. The French skirmishers had advanced to the very edge of the wood and were hidden from Sharpe by the loom of the chateau’s buildings. “I’m going down there,” he told Harper, pointing to the field where a handful of the French skirmishers sheltered behind the rows of wet hay.

“I’ll come with you,” Harper said obstinately.

“Take care!” Captain Witherspoon called after the two Riflemen.

Sharpe cantered his horse down the farm track, past a haystack that stood outside the chateau’s rear gates, and then into the open field to the west. The few French skirmishers who had been sheltering behind the cut hay had gone back to the wood, evidently scoured from the field by muskets fired from loopholes hacked in Hougoumont’s barns. Sharpe was only a hundred yards from the fight, but he was as safe from it as if he had been on the moon. The French had only one object, and that was to capture the buildings from where they could rake the British-held ridge behind with close-range cannon-fire. They had taken the woods, and now the mass of blue-coated infantry readied themselves for the final rush at the sprawling farm. Some of the French used axes to chop big holes in the hedge that bordered the wood. More French battalions filed into the trees until the woods were filled with enemy infantry waiting for the bugle, which would throw the attack forward.

The bugle sounded; the French cheered, and the great mass rushed at the gaps in the hedge.

The defenders opened fire.

The Guards were behind ditches and hedges, safe behind walls, or firing from the windows in the chateau’s upper floors. A blast of musketry crashed down on the French attack, and every musket fired was immediately replaced by another loaded weapon that fired and in turn was replaced at the loophole or firing step. The crackle of the muskets was incessant, drowning the cannon-fire from the ridge beyond. Smoke filled the space south of the chateau’s walls; smoke that was twitched and torn by new musket blasts that glowed red and sudden inside the acrid cloud. Somehow enough Frenchmen survived the musket volleys to reach the-chateau’s walls where they clawed to drag the British muskets clean out of the loopholes. Instead the muskets fired, hurling attackers back into the faces of the men who advanced behind.

There seemed more hope of capturing the kitchen garden that was protected by a wall only a few inches taller than a man. Some of the French held their muskets over their heads to fire blindly down across the wall’s coping. Others fired through the British loopholes, while the bravest tried to climb the wall and some even straddled it to stab down with their long bayonets.

Yet the Guards knew how to defend. For every French musket fired into a loophole a dozen British shots replied, while those brave Frenchmen who gained the wall’s top were either shot back or else pulled over to be bayoneted among the broken pea plants or in the trampled rose beds. Outside the garden the foot of the wall became treacherous with the bodies of the dead and dying French. Inside the garden files of men queued to take their turn at the loopholes, so that the musket-fire never slackened and the heavy lead balls smashed into the mass of Frenchmen who still ran forward from the trees to be baulked by the wall. Bugles and shouts urged them on.

The chateau’s orchard, beyond the garden, had no walls, but only a thick blackthorn hedge. The Guards fired through and over the hedge, but the French brought up pioneers’ axes and defended each axeman with a group of muskets, and it seemed that the Emperor’s men would have to win here by sheer weight of numbers. The axes crashed at the thick thorn trunks, ripping and shredding and tugging the obstacle away. A redcoat lunged his bayonet at an axeman, lunged too far, and was dragged screaming over the thorns to be ripped by a dozen bayonets.

Then a shell exploded above the French.

Sharpe looked up. High in the sky was a tangle of arcing smoke trails, evidence that the howitzers on the ridge were firing Britain’s secret weapon: the spherical case shell invented by Major-General Shrapnel. The shell was a five-and-a-half-inch sphere packed with musket-balls and a powder explosive that, if its fuse was cut to a precise length, would explode lethally in the air above its target. The difficulty lay in cutting the fuses which were affected by humidity as well as by the exact length of the shell’s flight, yet these fuses had been cut by a genius for the salvoes were murderously precise. Common shell burst into a few big fragments, but spherical case showered a killing rain of thin casing and musket-balls, and now caseshot after caseshot was crashing apart above the French infantry and the musket-balls and jagged iron fragments were slashing down to cut swathes of bloody flesh in the French attackers.

“That is pretty work! Ton my soul, but that’s very well done!” Captain Witherspoon had followed Sharpe and Harper to their vantage point and now applauded the skill of the gunners who were dropping the spherical case exactly in the right place; none falling short on the Guards, but all arcing onto the French attackers.

The musket-fire still hammered from the chateau’s walls. The French were faltering now, assailed from above and from their front. Some edged backwards, seeking the shelter of the trees, but the howitzers seemed to anticipate the move and the shrapnel blasts moved away from the chateau to flense the oaks in the wood of their leaves and branches. Each shell cracked apart with a sharper bang than common shell. In Spain Sharpe had noticed how the spherical case caused more wounds then deaths, but the sight of wounded men streaming back through the trees would shake the confidence of the French troops advancing in support of the first attack.

British skirmishers ran from the chateau’s northern flank into the field where Sharpe and Harper watched. The skirmishers ran south and added their fire from the corner of the farm buildings. The French were retreating fast now, going deep into the woods to escape the explosions and musketry.

“Opening honours to the Duke, wouldn’t you say?” Witherspoon was scribbling his comments in his notebook.

“It’ll be a very long day,” Sharpe warned.

“Not too long, I’m sure. Good old Blücher’s coming. He must be here soon. Did you hear about the poor fellow’s ordeal?”

“No.” Nor was Sharpe much interested, but Witherspoon was a friendly fellow and it would have been churlish not to have listened.

“Seems he was unhorsed and ridden over by the French cavalry at Ligny. He was lucky to survive at all, and the old boy must be seventy if he’s a day! Anyway, he rubbed himself with a liniment of garlic and rhubarb and now he’s on his way here. God speed his smelly march, I say.”

“Amen to that,” Sharpe said.»

The howitzer-fire ceased, one last shell leaving a wavering trail of smoke from its burning fuse that crashed the charge apart inside the wood. The French attack had failed, leaving the space between the wood and chateau sifted with smoke above a sprawl of blue-coated bodies. Some of those bodies cried for help. The failed attack had left an overpowering smell of rotten eggs, which was the familiar stench of exploded gunpowder. The smell of blood would follow, mingling with the sweeter scent of crushed grasses and crops.

British skirmishers advanced into the wood again, preparing to challenge the next attack‘. Beyond the chateau, in the wide valley that was now hidden from Sharpe, the noise of the French cannonade rumbled and cracked. Sharpe, his ears tuned to the familiar sounds of a battlefield, could tell that nothing there had changed. In battle, once the smoke had shrouded the field, the ears were often more useful than the eyes.

“I do believe“, Witherspoon said, ”that we should be departing hence.“ He gestured right, to where a battery of French eight-pounder guns was being dragged into the upper end of the hayfield. Other French troops, skirmishers, were filing from the woods into the rows of cut hay. Clearly these troops were destined for the chateau’s next ordeal, and just as clearly it was time to yield the hayfield to them.

Sharpe, Harper and Witherspoon trotted briskly out of the hayfield and up the earthen track to the ridge top. The battery of five-and-a-half-inch howitzers that had caused such damage to the French skirmishers stood with their stubby and blackened barrels elevated steeply upwards. Sharpe congratulated the battery’s commander, the same man who had fidgeted with his watch waiting for the battle to begin and who was now clearly pleased by the Rifleman’s compliment. A few more scraps of French shell casing smoked in the damp crops, and a few more infantry casualties caused by the shells were being helped back to the regimental surgeons, but otherwise there was no new threat to the ridge. It seemed as if the Emperor was content to keep up his cannonade on the main British line while his infantry struggled to capture the bastion of Hougoumont.

Reinforcements from the and Guards Brigade were posted to the ridge close behind the chateau. The Guardsmen were a part of the Prince of Orange’s dispersed corps and the Prince could not resist galloping forward to watch the battalions deploy in column of companies. They looked a brave sight as they advanced beneath their huge colours and with their bands playing. The Prince returned their salutes and called out his best wishes for a brave day. The Young Frog was in high spirits, elated by the music of the fifes and drums that mingled with the fizzing sound of French shell-fuses and the crash of their explosions. His gloom of the previous night seemed to have been dissipated by battle. He spoke cheerfully with the commander of the Guards, then saw Sharpe waiting higher on the ridge. “What are you doing there?” he shouted.

“Obeying your orders, sir. Watching the right flank.”

“I think we can abandon that idea, Sharpe!” The Prince’s tone implied utter scorn for anyone who seriously believed the French might attempt a flanking march. “It’s going to be a straightforward mill. You can tell that from their gun placements. From now on it will be toes on the scratch and heavy thumping!” The Prince feinted a punch at Sharpe to illustrate his prize-fighting metaphor, then pointed at the chateau. “I want you in Hougoumont.”

“To do what, sir?” Sharpe had ridden close to the Prince whose horse skittered sideways as a shell exploded higher up the slope.

„To report to me, of course. I’ll need to know when to send the reserves in.“

Sharpe had assumed that the chateau’s defenders were quite capable of deciding that for themselves, but he recalled Rebecque’s lecture on the need for tact, so just nodded. “Very good, sir.”

The Prince suddenly looked past Sharpe. “Witherspoon! Is that really you? My dear Witherspoon! We haven’t met since Eton! I thought you were destined for the Church, not the army! Or are you a vicar in disguise today? Isn’t this a splendid day? Such good sport!”

Sharpe left the happy reunion behind as he spurred towards the chateau. Harper, despite his sworn promise that he would not expose himself to danger, followed. The two Riflemen could hear the splintering crackle of musketry from the woods beyond the chateau, evidence that a new attack was gathering force. They galloped past the huge haystack that was built close to the northern entrance and Sharpe shouted at the defenders to open the gates. A startled Coldstreamer sergeant poked his head over the farmyard wall, saw the two men galloping towards him, and hastily shouted for the huge double gates to be unbarred. Once inside the farmyard Sharpe slid out of his saddle and unsheathed his rifle. Harper took the reins of both horses and tied them to a metal ring embedded in the stable wall.

A Coldstreamer captain, alarmed by the Rifleman’s sudden arrival, ran from the farmhouse to greet Sharpe. “You bring orders?”

“Ignore us.”

“Gladly!” The Captain ran back to the house which faced towards the woods where the French infantry was massing for their next rush.

A French roundshot crashed into the farmhouse roof, showering slates and splinters into the yard. Sharpe looked up at the damaged rafters and grimaced. “God knows what we’re doing here.”

“You’re keeping the wee boy happy, sir.” Harper looked at the nearest defenders. “My God, but we’re in high and mighty company, so we are. I’ve never fought with the Coldstreamers before. I’d better polish my boots.”

“You’d better stay out of bloody trouble.” Sharpe rammed the charge down his rifle barrel, then slotted the ramrod back into place. The cobbled yard was long and thin, surrounded by sturdy farm buildings amongst which was a small chapel where the wounded from the first attack were being tended. A dungheap was piled against the chapel’s wall, while barrels of unripe apples lay beside a pigsty that had lost its inhabitants, presumably to the Coldstreamers’ cooking pots. A cat, clearly sensing that the troubled times could only get worse, was carrying her kittens one by one from a huge barn to the main house. Three bandaged Guardsmen sat outside the chapel. The only other Guardsmen in sight were a lieutenant and his squad of men who were evidently the garrison’s reserve, and thus ready to reinforce any part of the chateau’s perimeter that was dangerously threatened by the imminent French attack.

“It’s a grand place, so it is.” Harper looked approvingly round the farm buildings. Men had started to fire from the upper rooms of the farmhouse, while a volley of musketry sounded loud from the walled garden beyond the barn. The noise of the fighting forced

Harper to raise his voice. “They must own a lot of land to fill all these barns!”

“It’s good land, too!” Sharpe agreed.

Muskets crashed close behind them, coming from the stables which formed the western defences. Sharpe ran into the stables to see Guardsmen taking their turns at the loopholes. Other men were awkwardly perched on the roof beams, firing through holes they had made in the slates. Smoke from the muskets was thick among the empty stalls.

Sharpe climbed onto a manger, then hauled himself to a vacant beam where he punched a hole in the slates. French skirmishers were flooding past the stables, running through the hayfield from where he and Harper had watched the first attack. He levelled his rifle through his makeshift loophole, tracked a man carrying an officer’s sword, led him by a few inches, then fired.

The rifle’s smoke prevented him seeing whether he had done any damage. He ducked as a deafening crash announced the strike of an eight-pound cannon-ball that splintered viciously through the stable rafters and struck two Guardsmen down in gouts of blood. Another cannon-ball smacked against the stable’s outer wall, ringing like a sledgehammer but doing no damage to the thick masonry. Sharpe, too cramped in the roof space to reload his rifle, shouted for Harper to give him his.

There was no answer.

Sharpe twisted round. Harper was standing at the stable entrance, staring towards the northern gate through which he and Sharpe had entered the chateau.

“Patrick! Give me your rifle!”

Still Harper did not reply. Instead, and without taking his eyes off the gate, he unslung his seven-barrelled gun.

Sharpe dropped from the beam and ran to the stable door.

The northern gates were juddering. The French had somehow reached the rear of Hougoumont and were straining and heaving at the two gates which were held shut by wooden locking bar slotted into twin iron brackets. The gates were old and rickety, and every heave creaked them further apart. A French musket fired through the crack between the gates, then an axe-blade appeared in the gap. The axe chopped down with massive force, biting into the exposed locking bar. A Coldstreamer lieutenant was leading the garrison reserve towards the gate, but before the squad could reach the danger point, the axe struck again and this time with such brute force that the bar splintered and one end jumped clear out of its bracket so that the double gates scraped back and a flood of screaming Frenchmen charged into the courtyard. The charge was led by a huge lieutenant who was even taller than Harper. It was the huge Lieutenant who was carrying the massive pioneers’ axe that had broken through the gate.

“Fire!” the Coldstreamer Lieutenant shouted, then was swamped by the surge of Frenchmen who swept over his men. Bayonets sliced down and came back red. The axe scythed wickedly to splay open a guardsman’s ribs.

Harper levelled the volley gun and fired at the mass of men. Sharpe dropped his empty rifle and drew his sword. Coldstreamers were running from the house, the barn and the stables. Muskets flared and crashed. A Frenchman went down under an officer’s sword, then the officer was driven screaming to the cobbles by two French bayonets. Yet more of the blue-coated skirmishers were running through the wide open gates.

Sharpe could see no way of retrieving order from the chaos. It was simply a time to fight. The French, half confused by the unfamiliar surroundings and by the scattered defenders, searched for ways into the farm buildings. Two. of them ran to the chapel where the wounded tried to trip them. The French raised their bayonets to finish the three bandaged men, then turned as they heard a more threatening challenge behind them. Sharpe had charged the two men, his sword swinging in a wild sweep. The taller of the two Frenchmen, a sergeant, stepped back from the swing and jabbed hard forward with his blade. Sharpe’s momentum took him past the threat, he half tripped on a wounded Guardsman’s broken leg, cannoned off the chapel wall, and lunged with the sword. The Guardsman was screaming in sudden pain, but the sword had ripped a wound in the French Sergeant’s belly. The other Frenchman came to his Sergeant’s aid, then seemed to fly backwards as a rifle bullet struck his throat. Harper had discarded his volley gun, and now reversed the rifle and slammed the brass butt into the Sergeant’s face. The huge French officer with the axe was by the stable wall, slashing and cutting down at the redcoats. Someone had split a barrel of half-ripe apples that were being trampled underfoot by the savagely fighting men. A group of French infantry ran towards the main house, but a volley from its rear windows cut them down. Sharpe’s mare, terrified of the noise, reared up and lashed with her hooves.

“Bugger this!” Harper picked up one of the French muskets and lunged with its bayonet to finish the Sergeant. The yard was a chaos of shouting men, but beyond the wild-faced French attackers Sharpe could see a disciplined group of Guardsmen struggling to close the huge gates. God alone knew how the small group of Coldstreamers had reached the gates, but they had and, with the strength of desperation, they were now forcing the two heavy doors shut against a renewed rush of enemy infantry. By a miracle none of the Frenchmen already inside the chateau’s yard saw what was happening behind them. A Coldstreamer sergeant had retrieved the broken bar and dropped it into the brackets as, at last, the doors were rammed shut. Most of the Guardsmen pushing on the gates had been officers who now turned with drawn swords to take the intruders from the rear.

“Now kill the bastards!” A voice with a Scots accent shouted the command. “Kill them all!”

A French drummer boy ran screaming past Sharpe. A French corporal followed, saw the Rifleman, and turned to fire his musket. The flint fell on an empty pan. The man’s eyes widened with fear, Sharpe lunged, the man tried to pull the blade from his ribs, but Sharpe drove it forwards, twisting it, forcing the man down to the cobbles where he kicked the sword free before slamming the blade back into the Frenchman’s throat. The armourer who had honed Sharpe’s blade had done a good job, for the weapon was wickedly sharp, and it needed to be for none of the men who clawed and stabbed and struggled in the courtyard had been given time to reload their muskets, so this fight would now have to be done with steel alone. The importance of Hougoumont gave the fight an extra and brutal bitterness, for every man knew that whoever held the chateau held the western flank of the battlefield. The Coldstreamers fought to rescue a battle, while the French under their giant Lieutenant fought for immortal glory.

But their prospect of glory was fading. The closing of the gate had cut the French off from aid, so now, trapped on the yard’s cobbles, they retreated into a rally square about the huge Lieutenant who stood with a bloody axe above the bodies of four Guardsmen. Outside the chateau, and giving the fight the desperation of urgency, volleys of French musket-fire witnessed that the building’s perimeter was again under heavy assault.

“Finish them off!” a British officer ordered. The Guardsmen in the yard were desperately needed to defend the chateau’s outer walls so there would be no time now for delicacies like trying to persuade the huge Lieutenant to surrender.

Guardsmen tore into the group of Frenchmen. A redcoat went down beneath a French bayonet, then the Coldstreamers seemed to swarm over the blue-coated enemy. An elegant officer lunged with his sword, kicked a Frenchman in the crutch, then lunged again. The yard echoed with the clang and scrape of blades, the scuff of boots on cobbles, and the screams of men slashed or pierced by blades. Patrick Harper, mindless of the promise made to his wife, shouted a Gaelic war cry as he stabbed his captured bayonet forward in the short savage lunges of a professional soldier. One of the Guards’ officers in the front rank of the fight was a colonel; the expensive gold lace of his uniform was sheeted with blood as he stamped his foot forward to lunge his sword with a clinical exactitude.

The huge Lieutenant with the axe saw the Coldstreamer Colonel and shouted at his men to make way. He drove a path through them, the axe glittering above the press of men, then Sharpe saw the axe crash down. The Colonel had stepped safely back, now he lunged. The Lieutenant brushed the sword thrust aside with his free hand as though the blade was no more dangerous than a riding crop. He grunted as he began a backswing with the axe calculated to split the Colonel up from the groin to the breastbone, then gasped as a pain exploded behind his knee. Sharpe had rammed his sword forward to hamstring the Frenchman’s leg, now he kicked at the crippling wound to topple the huge man sideways. The Lieutenant’s scarred face snarled as he tried to swing the huge axe round at his new attacker, but Sharpe was slicing the sword forward again, this time to split the grimacing face into a bloody and broken mask. The Colonel’s sword lunged, taking the Lieutenant in the ribs. Still the Frenchman would not give up. The axe rang on the ground as he dragged the blade forward, then two Guardsmen pushed past the Colonel to stab their bayonets hard down. The huge body jerked for a few seconds, then was still.

The last French intruders were being hunted down. A sergeant was bayoneted on the dungheap, while a corporal, backed against the barn wall and screaming for quarter, received two bayonets in his belly instead.

The yard was foul with blood, crushed apples and corpses. Only the French drummer boy, a wee nipper-hardly out of his cradle, had been spared from the massacre. A huge Guardsman stood by the boy, protecting him.

“I don’t know who you are, but thank you.”

Sharpe turned to see it was the Coldstream Colonel who had spoken. “Sharpe,” he introduced himself. “The Young Frog’s staff.”

“MacDonnell.” The Colonel was wiping the blood off a very expensive sword blade with an embroidered linen handkerchief. “Will you forgive me?” He ran back towards the house from where the sound of musketry was louder than ever.

Sharpe wiped the mess off his own sword, then looked at Harper whose face was speckled with blood. “I thought you’d promised to stay out of the fighting?”

“I forgot.” Harper grinned, threw down the French musket and retrieved his own weapons. „I’ll say one thing. The Guards may be pretty-boy soldiers, but the buggers can fight when they have to.“

“So can the French.”

“Their tails are up, that’s for sure.” Harper breathed a belated sigh of relief. “And how the hell did the Guards close that gate?”

“God only knows.”

“He must be on our side today.” Harper crossed himself. “God knows, but that was desperate.”

The second French attack on the chateau, so close to success in the courtyard, now rolled with an equal menace around the orchard. The howitzers opened fire from the ridge again, but this time the French attack was on a wider front, and a horde of men broke through the orchard’s hedges and harried the defenders back towards the walled garden. Some of the Guardsmen, too slow to climb the brick wall, were bayoneted at its foot, but then the relentless musketry erupted from the loopholes and from the wall’s coping and the French attack stalled again about the garden’s margin.

More men of the Goldstream Guards advanced down from the ridge. They attacked in column, their muskets armed with bayonets, and they drove up through the orchard’s northern hedge to scour the French away from the garden wall. The woods to the south were still thick with French infantry, but the Guards lined the broken and torn hedge and opened a killing volley fire that blew great holes in the French lines. No troops fired faster than the British, and now, for the first time that day, the French suffered under the flaying volleys of platoon fire. The Guards reloaded with grim speed, propping their ramrods against the hedge before levelling the heavy muskets and blasting at the smoke-obscured enemy. Each platoon fired a second after its neighbour so that the hedge rolled with flames and the woods echoed with volley after volley.

Gradually the French broke away; more and more men fleeing from the remorseless musketry. “Cease fire!” a Guards officer shouted in the orchard. The space in front of the woods was thick with the dead and wounded. The French had been hurling men against stone and flames, and suffering for it, but the Guards could see yet more men being formed in the far woods, presumably for yet another assault.

In the walled garden the only civilian left in Hougoumont was almost in tears. He was the chateau’s gardener and he had been running from bed to bed, trying to save his precious plants from the boots of the Guardsmen. Despite his efforts the garden was a shambles. Espaliered pears had been ripped from the wall and rosebuds had been trampled. The gardener made a pathetically small pile of plants he had somehow rescued, then flinched as he watched a French corpse being dragged by its heels through the remains of an asparagus bed.

The second French assault had failed. Colonel MacDonnell, his face still smeared with blood, found Sharpe in the courtyard when the last musket shot had faded to silence. “You could be useful to me,” he spoke diffidently, not wanting to encroach on another man’s authority.

“I’ll do whatever I can.”

“More ammunition? Can you find a wagon of the stuff and have it sent down?”

“With pleasure.” Sharpe was glad to have a proper job to do.

MacDpnneli looked around the courtyard and grimaced at the remnants of the massacre. “I think we can hold here, so long as we’ve got powder. Oh good! She’s alive.” He had spotted the cat carrying the last of her kittens across the slaughteryard. The captured French drummer boy, his face stained with tears, held one hand over his mouth as he stared wide-eyed at the bodies which were being searched for plunder by the victorious Guardsmen. The boy’s instrument was lying smashed beside the chapel door, though he still had his drumsticks stuffed into his belt. “Cheer up, lad!” MacDonnell spoke to the boy in colloquial and genial French. “We gave up eating captured drummer boys last year.”

The boy burst into tears again. A big Coldstreamer sergeant with a Welsh accent barked at his men to start clearing the enemy bodies away. “Pile the buggers by the wall there. Look lively now!”

Sharpe and Harper retrieved their horses which had miraculously survived the fighting in the courtyard unhurt. The gate was swung open and the Riflemen rode to find the cartridges that would hold the chateau firm.

While on the far ridge the Emperor was turning his eyes away from Hougoumont. He was looking towards the British left, to the enticing and empty gentle slope east of the high road. He assumed that the Sepoy General would already have sent his reserves to help the beleaguered garrison at Hougoumont, so now the master of war would launch a thunderbolt on the British left. Marshal d’Erlon’s corps, unblooded so far in the brief campaign, could now have the honour of winning it. And when the corps had smashed through the British line, the Emperor would unleash his cavalry, fresh and eager, to harry the fleeing enemy into offal.

It was half-past one. The day was becoming warmer, even hot, so that the thick woollen uniforms were at last drying out. The clouds were thinning and errant patches of sun illuminated the smoke which drifted across the valley from the French guns, but in the eastern fields, where the Prussians were supposed to be arriving, the intermittent sunlight shone on nothing. Gneisenau had done his work well, and the British were alone.