Sharpe's Waterloo

CHAPTER 17

“There.” Rebecque pointed at the bodies which lay in the grass east of La Haye Sainte. They were scattered in a fan shape, like men killed as they spread out from a single point of attack. At the centre of the fan, where men had bunched together in desperate defence, the bodies were in heaps. Sharpe glowered while Harper, a few paces behind the Prince’s staff, crossed himself at the horrid sight.

“They were Hanoverians. Good troops, all of them.” Rebecque spoke bleakly, then sneezed. The drying weather was bringing back his hay fever.

“What happened?” Sharpe asked.

“He advanced them in line, of course.” Rebecque did not look at Sharpe as he spoke.

“There were cavalry?”

“Of course. I tried to stop him, but he won’t listen. He thinks he’s the next Alexander the Great. He wants me to have an orange banner made that a man will carry behind him at all times…‘ Rebecque’s voice tailed away.

“God damn him.”

“He’s only twenty-three, Sharpe, he’s a young man and he means very well.” Rebecque, fearing that his previous words might be construed as disloyal, found excuses for the Prince.

“He’s a Goddamned butcher,” Sharpe said icily. “A butcher with pimples.”

“He’s a prince,” Rebecque said in uncomfortable reproof. “You should remember that, Sharpe.”

“At best, Rebecque, he might make a half-decent lieutenant, and I even doubt that.”

Rebecque did not respond. He just turned away and stared through tearful eyes at the western half of the valley that was a mangled ruin of dead infantry, dead cavalrymen and dead horses beneath the skeins of cannon smoke. He sneezed again, then cursed the hay fever.

“Rebecque! Did you see it? Wasn’t it glorious?” The Prince spurred his horse from the knot of men who marked Wellington’s position at the elm tree. “We should have been there, Rebecque! My God, but the only place for honour is in the cavalry!”

“Yes, sir.“ Rebecque, still unnaturally subdued, did his best to match his monarch’s high spirits.

“They took two Eagles! Two Eagles!” The Prince clapped his hands. “Two! They’ve brought one to show the Duke. Have you ever seen one close up, Rebecque? They’re not gold at all, just tricked out to look like gold. They’re just a shabby French trick, nothing else!” The Prince noticed Sharpe’s presence for the first time and generously included the Englishman in his excitement. “You should go and take a look, Sharpe. It’s not every day you see an Eagle!”

“Sergeant Harper and I once captured an Eagle,” Sharpe’s voice was filled with an unmistakable loathing. “It was five years ago when you were still at school.”

The Prince’s happy face changed as though someone had just struck him. Rebecque, startled by Sharpe’s egregious rudeness, tried to drive his horse between the Rifleman and the Prince, but the Prince would have none of his Chief of Staff’s tact. “What the hell are you doing here?” he asked Sharpe instead. “I told you to stay in Hougoumont.”

“They don’t need me there.”

“Sir!” The Prince shouted the word, demanding that Sharpe use the honorific. The other staff officers, Doggett among them, backed away from the royal anger.

“They don’t need me there,” Sharpe said stubbornly, then he could no longer resist his dislike and derision of the Prince. “The men at Hougoumont are proper soldiers. They don’t need me to teach them how to unbutton their breeches before they piss.”

“Sharpe!” Rebecque yelped helplessly.

“So what happened to them?” Sharpe pointed at the Red Germans but looked at the Prince.

“Rebecque! Arrest him!” the Prince screamed at his Chief of Staff. “Arrest him! And his man. What the hell are you doing here anyway?” The question was screamed at Harper, who gazed placidly back at the Prince without bothering to offer any answer.

“Sir — „Rebecque knew he had neither the authority nor the cause to make any arrests, but the Prince did not want to listen to any reasoned explanations.

“Arrest him!”

Sharpe raised two fingers into the Prince’s face, added the appropriate words, and turned his horse away.

The Prince screamed at the Riflemen to come back, but suddenly the French cannons, which had paused while the British cavalry were being slaughtered in the valley, opened fire again, and it seemed to Sharpe as though every gun on the French ridge fired at the same instant, making a clap of doom fit to mark the world’s ending and even sufficient to divert a prince’s outrage.

The shells and roundshot raged at the British ridge. Explosions and fountains of earth shook the whole line. The noise was suddenly deafening; a melding of cannon-fire into one long thunderous roll that hammered at the sky. The Prince’s staff instinctively ducked. A gunner officer, not ten paces from where Sharpe was cantering away from the Prince, disappeared in an explosion of blood as a twelve-pound ball struck him clean in the belly. One of his guns, struck full on the muzzle, bucked backwards into the deep wheel ruts made by its own recoil. The French were serving their guns with a frenetic and desperate speed.

Which could only mean one thing.

Another assault was coming.

It was two minutes past three, and the Prussians had not come.

Belgian soldiers, fugitives from the battle, streamed into Brussels. This was not their war; they had no allegiance to a Dutch Stadt-holder made King of the French-speaking province of Belgium, nor did they have any love for the British infantry that had jeered their departure.

Once in the city they were besieged for news. The battle was lost, the Belgians said. Everywhere the French were victorious. The streams in the forest of Soignes were running with English blood.

Lucille, walking through the streets in search of news, heard the tales of dead men strewn across a forest floor. She listened to accounts of vengeful French cavalry hunting down the last survivors, but she could still hear the gun-fire and she reasoned that the cannons would not be firing if the battle had already been won.

She called on her acquaintance, the Dowager Countess of Mauberges, who lived in the fragile gentility of a small house behind the rue Montagne du Pare. The ladies drank coffee. The Countess’s house backed onto the kitchen yard of Brussels’ most fashionable hotel. “The hotel kitchens are already cooking tonight’s dinner,” the Countess confided in Lucille.

“Life must go on,” Lucille said piously. She supposed that the Countess was obliquely apologizing for the smell of cooking grease that permeated the dusty parlour. Above Lucille’s head the crystal drops of a candelabra shivered to the guns’ sound.

“No! You mistake me! They’re cooking the celebratory dinner, my dear!” The Countess was elated. “They say the Emperor is very fond of roast chicken, so that is what they are cooking! Myself, I prefer duck, but I shall eat chicken tonight most gladly. It’s being served with bread sauce, I believe, or so the servants tell me. They gossip with the hotel staff, you see.” She sounded rather ashamed of betraying that she listened to servants’ gossip, but nevertheless the cooking was an augury of French victory so the Dowager Countess could not keep the good news to herself.

“They’re cooking for the Emperor?” Lucille sounded dubious.

“Of course! He’ll want a victory dinner, will he not? It will be just like old times! All the captured Generals being forced to eat with him, and that nasty little Prince slobbering over his food! I shall enjoy that sight, indeed I shall. You’ll come, will you not?”

“I doubt I shall be invited.”

“There will be no time to send invitations! But of course you must come, all the nobility will be there. You shall have dinner with the Emperor tonight and you shall watch his victory parade tomorrow.” The Countess sighed. “It will all be so enjoyable!”

Upstairs in the hotel the windows shivered under the impact of the gun-fire. Jane Sharpe lay in bed, the curtains closed and her eyes shut. She felt sick.

She listened to the guns, praying that one small part of their appalling violence would free her by killing Sharpe. She prayed passionately, nagging God, beseeching him, weeping at him. She did not ask for much. She only wanted to be married, and titled, and mother of Lord John’s heir. She thought life was so very unfair. She had taken every precaution, yet still she was pregnant, so now, as the guns echoed, she prayed for a death. She must marry Lord John, or else he might marry elsewhere and she would be left a whore, and her child a whoreson. That child felt sour in her belly. She turned on her side in the darkened room, cursed the kitchen smells that made her want to vomit, and wept.

The guns fired on, and Brussels waited.

Peter d’Alembord was resigned to death. The day’s only miracle so far was that his death had not yet come.

It seemed certain to come now for a sudden torrent of metal was being poured at the ridge. The French guns were in fury, and the soil about d’Alembord was being churned to ragged turmoil by roundshot and shell. His horse had been killed in the bombardment that had opened the battle, so now d’Alembord was forced to stand quite still while the air hummed and quivered and shook with the passage of the missiles, and as the ground thumped and trembled and spewed up great gobs of mud and stone.

He stood in front of the battalion, which in turn was a few hundred paces to the right of the elm tree. Not that the tree could be seen any more, for gun smoke had settled over the British ridge to hide anything more than a hundred yards away. D’Alembord had earlier watched the attacks on Hougoumont, then seen the Hanoverians march to their deaths, but the great cavalry charge had been hidden from him by the smoke of the cannons firing from the British centre. He wished he could see more of the battle, for at least that would be a diversion while he waited for death. He had accepted that he would die, and he was determined that he would do it with as much grace as he could muster.

Which was why he had gone to the front of the battalion to stand in the place of greatest danger at the crest of the ridge. He could have stayed with the colour party where Colonel Ford fretted and continually polished his eyeglasses with his officer’s sash, or he could have taken his proper post at the rear right flank of the Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers, but instead d’Alembord had gone a few paces ahead of the company officers and now stood, quite still, staring into the cannon smoke across the valley. Behind him the men were lying flat, but no officer could thus take shelter. An officer’s job was to set an example. An officer’s duty was to stand still; to show insouciance. The time would come when the men would have to stand up in the face of the French fire, and therefore the officers must set an example of absolute stoicism. That was an infantry officer’s prime task in battle; to set an example, and it did not matter if his belly was churning with fear, or that his breath sometimes came with a whimper, or that his brain was cringing with terror; he must still show utter calmness.

If an officer had to move under fire, then it had to be done very slowly and deliberately, with the air of a man distractedly taking a meditative stroll in the country. Captain Harry Price so moved, though his deliberate gait was somewhat spoilt when his new spurs caught in a tangle of crushed rye and almost tipped him arse over heels. He caught his balance, tried to show dignity by plucking at his new pelisse, then stood at ease alongside Peter d’Alembord. “A bit of heat in the day now, Peter, wouldn’t you say?”

D’Alembord had to control his breathing, but managed a creditable response. ”It’s definitely become warmer, Harry.“

Price paused, evidently seeking some observation that would keep the conversation going. “If the clouds cleared away, it might become a rare old day!”

“Indeed, yes.”

“Good cricketing weather, even.”

D’Alembord looked sideways at his friend, wondering for a second whether Harry Price had gone quite mad, then he saw a muscle quivering in Harry’s cheek and he realized that Price was just trying to hide his own fear.

Price grinned suddenly. “Speaking of cricket, is our brave Colonel happy?”

“He’s not saying very much. He’s just polishing those damned spectacles of his.”

Harry Price dropped his voice as though, in the maelstrom of shells and roundshot, he might yet be overheard. “I put some butter on the tails of his sash this morning.”

“You did what?”

“Buttered his sash,” Price said gleefully. He looked warily upwards as a shell made a curious fluttering noise overhead, then relaxed as the missile exploded far to the rear. “I did it this morning, while he was shaving. I only used a spot of butter, for one doesn’t wish to be obvious. It isn’t the first time I’ve buttered his eyeglasses, either. I did it the last time he insisted we play cricket. Why do you think he couldn’t see the ball?”

D’Alembord wondered how anyone could play such a schoolboy trick on a morning of battle, then, after a pause, he spoke with a sudden passion. “I do hate bloody cricket.”

Price, who liked the game, was offended. “That’s not very English of you.”

“I’m not English. My ancestry is French, which is probably why I find cricket such a bloody tedious game!” D’Alembord feared that he was betraying a note of hysteria.

“There are more tedious games than cricket.” Price spoke very earnestly.

“You really believe so?”

A cannon-ball slammed into Number Four Company. It killed two men and wounded two others so badly that they would die before they could reach the surgeons. One of the two men screamed in a tremulous, nerve-scraping voice until Regimental Sergeant Major Mclnerney shouted for the wounded man to be quiet, then ordered that the dead men be thrown forward to where the corpses were being stacked into a crude barricade. A shell exploded in midair, drowning the RSM’s voice. Harry Price looked up at the drifting billow of smoke left by the shell’s explosion. “One of the Crapaud batteries is cutting its fuses a bit brief, wouldn’t you say?”

“You claim there’s a more tedious game than cricket?” D’Alembord did not want to think about fuses or shells.

Price nodded. “Have you ever seen men play golf?”

D’Alembord shook his head. Off to his left he could see French skirmishers advancing among the Hanoverian dead towards La Haye Sainte. The distinctive sound of rifle-fire betrayed that the farm’s garrison had seen the danger, then the French muskets began to add their own smoke to the battle’s fog. “I’ve never seen golf being played,” d’Alembord said. The effort of controlling his fear made his voice sound very stilted, like a man rehearsing a strange language. “It’s a Scottish game, isn’t it?”

“It’s a bloody weird Scottish game.” Price blinked and swallowed as a roundshot went foully close, fanning both men with the wind of its passing. “You hit a small ball with a bent stick until you get it near a rabbit hole. Then you tap it into the hole, fish it out, and hit it towards another hole.”

D’Alembord looked at his friend who was keeping a very straight face. “You’re inventing this, Harry. You’re making it up just to make me feel better.”

Harry Price shook his head. “God’s honour, Peter. I might not have mastered the finer points of the game, but I saw a man with a beard playing it near Troon.”

D’Alembord started to laugh. He did not quite know why it was so funny, but something about Harry’s solemnity made him laugh. For a few seconds his laughter rang loud across the battalion, then a shell cracked apart with what seemed unusual violence, and Sergeant Huckfield was shouting at his men to stay down. D’Alembord turned and saw three of his old light company men had been turned into blood-stained rag dolls. “What were you doing in Troon, for God’s sake?”

“I have a widowed aunt who lives there, the childless relict of a lawyer. Her will is not yet decided and the lawyer’s fortune was far from despicable. I went to persuade her that I am a godly, sober and deserving heir.”

D’Alembord grinned. “She doesn’t know you’re a lazy, drunken rogue, Harry?”

“I read her the psalms every night,” Price said with a very fragile dignity.

A thudding of hooves turned d’Alembord round to see a staff officer galloping along the ridge crest. The man slowed his horse as he neared the two officers. “You’re to pull back! One hundred yards, no more!“ The man spurred on and shouted the order over the prone battalion to Colonel Ford. ”One hundred yards, Colonel! Back one hundred yards! Lie down there!“

D’Alembord faced the battalion. Far in the rear a shell had exploded an ammunition wagon that now burned to send a plume of boiling smoke up to the low clouds. Colonel Ford was standing in his stirrups, shouting his orders over the din of shells and guns. The Sergeants rousted the men to their feet and ordered them to pace back from the crest. The men, glad to be retreating from the cannonade, went at the double, leaving their bloodied dead behind.

“We walk, I think.” D’Alembord heard a shakiness in his voice, and tried again. “We definitely walk, Harry. We don’t run.”

“I can’t run in these spurs.” Price admitted. “I suppose the thing about spurs is that you need a horse to go with them.”

The small retreat took the leading companies away from the lip of the ridge onto the hidden reverse slope, yet even so, and even lying flat in the trampled corn, the shells and roundshot still found their marks. The wounded limped to the rear, going to the forest’s edge where the surgeons waited. Some men, unable to walk, were carried by the bandsmen. A few shrunken bands still played, but their music was overwhelmed by the hammering of the massive bombardment. More ammunition wagons were struck, their fire and smoke thickening until the forest’s edge looked like a giant crucible in which the flames spat and flared. Frightened horses, cut from the traces of the burning wagons, galloped in panic through the wounded who limped and crawled to the surgeons.

On the southern ridge the French general officers sought vantage points from where their guns’ smoke did not obscure the view and from where they could search the British lines for clues to the effectiveness of their bombardment.

They saw the turmoil of burning ammunition. They saw the wounded limping back; so many wounded that it looked like a retreat. Then, quite suddenly, they saw the battalions that had lined the crest pull back from the crest and disappear.

French infantry still assaulted Hougoumont, and more men had just been sent to capture the awkward bastion of La Haye Sainte, but perhaps neither attack would need to be successful, for it was clear that the vaunted British infantry was beaten. The Goddamns were retreating. Their ranks had been shredded by the Emperor’s jeune files, and the redcoats were fleeing. The Emperor had been right; the British would not stand against a real assault. The guns still fired, but the ridge seemed empty, and the French smelt glory in the powder smoke.

Marshal Ney, bravest of the brave, had been ordered by the Emperor to finish the British quickly. He gazed through his telescope at the enemy ridge and saw a shining chance of swift victory. He slammed his spyglass shut, turned in his saddle, and beckoned to his cavalry commanders.

It was half-past three, and the Prussians had not come.

Sharpe and Harper had instinctively returned to the ridge above Hougoumont where Captain Witherspoon’s body lay. It was the place their battle had started, and where they felt a curious sense of safety. The French bombardment was concentrating on the ground to their left, leaving the slope above the beleaguered chateau in relative peace.

They reined in close to Witherspoon’s disembowelled corpse. A glossy crow noisily protested their arrival, then went back to its feeding. “There goes my colonel’s pay,” Sharpe said after staring in silence at the shifting smoke above the valley.

Harper was frowning at the corpse, wondering if it was that of the pleasant young Captain who had been so friendly at the beginning of the battle.

“Worth it, though, just to tell that poxy little Dutch bastard one home truth,” Sharpe continued. He was staring at Hougoumont. The roof of the chateau was burning fiercely, spewing sparks high and thick into the smoky sky. The western end of the house had already been reduced to bare walls and blackened beams, though, judging from the amount of musket smoke which ringed the chateau, the conflagration had not diminished the defenders’ resistance. The French attacks still broke to nothing on the chateau’s walls and musketry.

“So what do you want to do?” Sharpe asked Harper.

“We can go, you mean?” Harper sounded vaguely surprised.

“There’s nothing to keep us here, is there?”

“I suppose not,” Harper agreed, though neither man moved. To the left of the chateau the valley was still oddly unscarred by the battle. The only French attack on the main British line had come in the east, not here in the west, and the only scars in the patchy field of wheat and rye were black marks where some shells had fallen short and scorched the damp and rain-beaten crops. French infantry was thick about Hougoumont, and a mass of men were closing on La Haye Sainte, yet between those bastions the valley lay empty beneath the screaming passage of the French bombardment.

“So where the hell are the bloody Prussians?” Harper asked irritably.

“God knows. Gone to a different war, perhaps?”

Harper turned to stare at the British infantry who lay patient and unmoving beneath the flail of the French guns. “So where will you go?” he asked Sharpe. i

“Fetch Lucille and go back to England, I suppose.” Lucille would have to wait to go home and, Sharpe thought, the wait could prove a very long one for if this battle was lost the Austrians and Russians might make peace with Napoleon and it could take years to forge another alliance against France. Even if today’s battle was won it could still take months for the allies to destroy what remained of the Emperor’s armies.

“You could wait in Ireland?” Harper suggested.

“Aye, I’d like that.” Sharpe took a piece of hard cheese from his saddlebag and tossed a lump of it to Harper.

A shell bounced off the ridge nearby and whirled its fuse crazily in the air to leave a mad spiral of smoke. The shell landed, spun in a mud bowl for a second, then simply died. Harper watched it warily, waiting for the explosion that did not come, then he looked back to the French-held ridge. “It seems a shame to leave right now.” Harper had come to Belgium because the British army and its war against an Emperor had been his whole adult life and he could not relinquish either the institution or its purpose. He might be a civilian, but he thought of himself as a soldier still, and he cared desperately that this day saw victory.

“You want to stay here, then?” Sharpe asked, as though he himself did not much care either way.

Harper did not answer. He was still staring across the valley, staring through the scrims of smoke, and as he stared his eyes grew wide as gun muzzles. “God save Ireland!” His voice was full of astonishment. “Christ in his cups, but will you just look at that?”

Sharpe looked and, like Harper, his eyes widened in amazement.

All the damned cavalry in all the damned world seemed to be spilling down the far side of the gentle valley. Regiment after regiment of French horse was threading the spaces between the enemy’s artillery batteries to form up in the undisturbed fields of rye and wheat. The sun was breaking through the shredding clouds to glint on the breastplates and the high-crested helmets of the Cuirassiers. Behind the Cuirassiers were Lancers, and behind them were even more horsemen. Every cavalry uniform in the Empire was there: Dragoons, Carabiniers, Hussars, Chasseurs, all forming their long lines of attack behind the Lancers and Cuirassiers.

Sharpe trained his telescope on the far ridge. He could see no infantry. There had to be infantry. He searched the smoke clouds, but still found none. A charge by horse alone? And where were the French gunners? The cavalry, after all, would force the British infantry to form squares which made wonderful targets for gunners and infantrymen, but the cavalry could not hope to destroy the squares by itself. Or did the French believe this battle already won? Had the Emperor reckoned that no troops, so battered by gun-fire, would stand against his prized cavalry? “There’s no infantry!” Sharpe said to Harper, then turned to shout a warning of cavalry to the nearest British battalion, but their officers had already seen the threat and all along the British line the battalions were climbing to theirTeet and forming squares.

While on the far side of the valley the Cuirassiers drew their swords. The sun rippled down the long line of steel. Behind them the red and white flags of the Lancers pricked the smoke scrims. Harper was entranced by the sight. It was like something from a saga, a legend of old battles come to flesh and steel. Half a battlefield was filled with the glory of cavalry; with plumes and crests and leopard skins and flags and blades.

Brigade officers were galloping among the newly formed British squares, ordering some battalions further back so that the unwieldy formations were staggered like a draught board. Now the flank of one square could not fire on the face of another, and wide spaces were left between the battalions so that the enemy horse could flow freely between the squares. Batteries of the Royal Horse Artillery placed their cannon in the wide spaces and loaded with roundshot. They would have preferred to have double-shotted their cannon, but the lighter guns of the horse artillery would not survive the extra strain. The gunners’ horse teams were taken far behind the squares to where British and Dutch light cavalry waited to tackle any French horsemen who survived the passage through the wicked maze of men, muskets and cannon-fire.

The French gun-fire was undiminished and, because the British were now standing in square, the shells and roundshot which streaked across the ridge’s rim were finding targets. Sharpe watched a cannon-ball strike savagely down one side of a square of Highlanders. At least ten men fell, perhaps more. Another ball struck the face of the square, driving a bloody hole that was instantly filled as the files shuffled together.

“The buggers are coming!” Harper warned.

The Cuirassiers walked their heavy horses forward. Behind them were the Red Lancers in their square czapka headgear and the Horse Grenadiers in their tall black bearskins. Further back were the Carabiniers in their dazzling white uniforms, and squadrons of green Dragoons and troops of plumed Hussars. The horsemen covered the far slope, obliterating the dull wet crops with a gorgeous tapestry of shifting colours, nodding plumes, sun-brightened helmets and gold-fringed flags. It was a sight Sharpe had never seen before, not in all his years of soldiering. Even the mounted hordes in India had not matched the splendour of this sight. This was the massed cavalry of an empire assembled on one battlefield. Sharpe tried to count them, but there were just too many men and horses flowing through the filmy drifts of gun smoke. The sun glittered from thousands of drawn swords, raised lances, polished armour, and curved sabres.

The cavalry advanced at a walk. This was how cavalry should attack; not in some madcap rush to glory, but with a steady slow approach that was gradually quickened until, at the last moment, the heavy horses with their steel-clad riders should crash home as one unit. If a horse was shot in its last few galloping strides, then man and horse could slide as dead meat to crumple a square’s face. Sharpe had seen it happen; he had ridden behind the Germans at Garcia Hernandez and watched as a dead horse and dying rider smashed in blood and terror through the face of a French square. All the French were dead at that moment as the following horsemen streamed through the gap to gut the square from its inside outwards.

Yet, if the square was steady and shot at the right time, it should not happen. Each side of a square was formed of four ranks. The two front ranks knelt, their bayonet-tipped muskets driven hard into the ground to make a hedge of steel. The two ranks behind stood with muskets levelled. Once the front two ranks had fired, they did not reload but just held their bayonets hard and steady. The rear ranks could load and fire, load and fire, and the attacking horses, unwilling to charge such an obstacle, would swerve away from the face of the square to be raked by the fire of the square’s flanks.

Yet one dead horse, slithering in mud and blood, could break that theory. And when one square broke its men would run for shelter to another square, fighting their way inside, and the horsemen would ride with them, letting the panicked infantry break the second square’s ranks apart. Then the butchery could continue.

“The daft bugger misjudged!” Harper said with undisguised glee.

The French cavalry commander had formed his attack into a succession of long lines, but too long, for the flanks were approaching the fields of fire from Hougoumont and La Haye Sainte. Those bulwarks that lay like breakwaters ahead of the British line were being besieged by infantry, but their defenders had muskets and rifles enough to fire on the tempting target of the cavalry which was thus forced to contract its line. The wings of the cavalry trotted inwards, thickening the centre of the attack, but also compressing it so that as the horsemen began to climb the British ridge they looked more like a column of horsemen than a charging line. The compression became worse as the horsemen neared the crest and squeezed yet further inwards from the threat of the flanking batteries. The horses were so tightly packed that some were lifted clean off the muddy ground and carried along by their neighbours. The air was filled with the chink of curb chains, the slap of scabbards on leather, the thump of hooves, and the whipping sound of lance pennants napping.

The British cannons drowned the cavalry’s noise. The first volley came from the nine-pounder batteries on the ridge’s crest. The guns smashed roundshot deep into the compressed formation. The second volley was double shotted and Sharpe, in the deafening echo of the guns’ reports, heard the clatter of the musket-balls striking the Cuirassiers’ breastplates. The gunners reloaded frantically, ramming a last charge of canister down the hot barrels as the French trumpets threw the attack into a canter.

“Fire!” A last volley was fired from the threatened guns. Sharpe had a tangled impression of horsemen flailing inwards from the canisters’ strike, then he and Harper turned their horses and raced for the safety of the nearest square. Staff officers who had been positioned on the crest were similarly galloping to safety,

Sharpe and Harper thudded through an opening in a square of Guardsmen that immediately closed ranks behind the two Riflemen. Thirty yards in front of the square a battery of horse artillery waited for the enemy.

The French horsemen were close, but still hidden by the fall of the forward slope, and there followed one of the odd moments of apparent battlefield silence. The French gunners, fearful of hitting their own cavalry, had ceased fire, while the closest British gunners had yet to be given their target. It was not a true silence, for the enemy infantry still snarled and fired around Hougoumont and La Haye Sainte, and the guns in the eastern part of the valley still fired, while closer, much closer, there was the thunderous shaking of uncountable hooves, yet the absence of the murderous enemy bombardment made the moment seem very like silence. There was even a palpable relief that the shells and round-shot had stopped their slaughter. Men drew breath as thqy waited and watched the empty crest which was topped with dirty smoke.

Somewhere beyond the smoke a trumpet screamed.

“Hold your fire when you first see Monsewer!” A mounted Guards major walked his horse behind the face of the square where Sharpe and Harper had taken refuge. “Let the bastards get close enough to smell your farts before you kill them! Take that smile off your face, Guardsman Proctor. You’re not here to enjoy yourself, but to die for your King, for your country, and above all for me!”

Harper, liking the Guards officer’s style, grinned as broadly as any of the Guardsmen. The Major winked at Sharpe, then continued his harangue. “Don’t waste your powder! And remember you are Guardsmen, which is almost like being gentlemen, so you will behave with good manners! Permit the little darlings to lift their skirts before you give them your balls!”

And suddenly the little darlings were there as the ridge filled with a horde of horses. One moment the skyline was empty, then the world was dominated by cavalry and the sky was pierced by the last fine notes which hurled the Cuirassiers into their gallop.

The close support artillery, exposed in the spaces between the squares, opened fire. The guns slammed back on their trails, spewing mud from their bucking wheels.

Sharpe saw a cannon-ball split the mass of horsemen apart as though an invisible cleaver had chopped through the formation. The gunners were clearing the gun’s barrel, ramming a canister onto a powder charge, and hurling themselves away from the coming recoil.

“Fire!” This time a blast of canister flailed a dozen tight-packed horses to the ground, then the artillerymen were abandoning their cannon to seek safety inside the squares. The gunners carried their rammers and portfires with them.

The Cuirassiers could not be stopped by cannon-fire. They flowed round their dead and dying and threw themselves at the squares in a desperate, brave charge. They had believed themselves to be pursuing a broken and fleeing enemy, and their General had promised that the only obstacles between them and the whores of Brussels were a few demoralized Goddamn fugitives, yet now the horsemen discovered they had ridden to a bitter trap. The squares had been hidden behind the crest, the enemy was not broken and running, but instead standing and waiting to fight.

Yet these were the Emperor’s Cuirassiers, his ‘big brothers’, and glory would be theirs if they broke these squares. High above each British battalion hung the colours that, if captured, would give a man eternal fame in an empire’s heaven, and so the horsemen screamed a challenge and lowered the points of their heavy swords.

“Number One and Two Companies!” The Guards Major eschewed his jesting as the enemy came close. “Wait for my word!” He paused. Sharpe could hear the horses’ breathing, see the distorted Cuirassiers’ faces beneath their steel visors, then, at last, the Major shouted, “Fire!”

The forward face of the square disappeared in white smoke. Musket flames stabbed bright and somewhere a horse squealed in awful, gut-wrenching pain. The two front ranks, not bothering to reload, rammed their musket butts into the ground so that their bayonets made a savage hedge of sharpened steel. The rear two ranks reloaded with the speed of men whose lives depended on their musketry.

There was a pause of a heartbeat while the Guardsmen wondered whether a dead horse would slide in hoof-flailing horror to smash their square’s southern face, then, beyond the fringes of the smoke, the horsemen appeared. They had swerved apart, dividing into streams either side of the square. The horses would not crash home, instead the survivors had veered away to gallop between the squares.

“Fire!” That was an officer on the flank of the Guards square. A Cuirassier’s horse was hit in the chest to pump obscenely bright blood as its legs crumpled. The rider, mouth wide open in silent terror, was thrown over its head. Another Cuirassier was being dragged by his stirrup in a spray of blood.

“Fire!” The front face of the square volleyed again, and this time the bullets threw back four Red Lancers. The Lancers had been following the Cuirassiers and seeking the safety of the open ground between the squares, which was not safe at all, but a killing ground that led to the volley fire of yet more squares. The horsemen had been beguiled into the maze of death, yet they were brave men and they still dreamed of carrying the Emperor to victory on their lance points. “Thrust home! Thrust!” Sharpe heard a Lancer officer shout at his men, then saw a group of the red-uniformed horsemen swerve towards the square with their weapons held low. “Thrust hard!”

“Fire!” The Guards Major snapped the command, a blast of smoke blotted out the charging Lancers so that the only evidence of their existence was a terrible high-pitched scream of either man or horse, and as the smoke cleared Sharpe saw only the butchered horses and a man crawling away, and a lance shaft quivering with its point buried in the mud and a horse shaking as it tried to stand.

“Platoon fire!” the Guards Colonel called.

“Aim for the horses!” A sergeant strolled behind the square’s face. “Aim for the horses!”

“Number One Platoon!” another major shouted. “Fire!”

Now the platoons in the faces of the square fired one after another so that the blasts of smoke and flame seemed to be driven like the hand of a clock. Each volley thickened the smoke about the square’s faces so that the compass of the battle shrank to the few yards visible through the choking white cloud. The other squares were invisible, hidden behind their own banks of fog. Sharpe could hear their volleys, and hear a piper playing some skirling weird music somewhere to the west. The stream of horsemen galloped through the smoke, and sometimes a brave man would hurl himself at the Guards’ square in a suicidal attempt to force victory out of stalemate. A Lancer tried to ride obliquely at a square’s flank, but a corporal shot him down three paces before his blade would have struck home. Two young Guards Lieutenants competed with their pistols, wagering a month’s pay on who could kill more Frenchmen. A sergeant spotted a Guardsman surreptitiously discarding part of the powder from his cartridge to lessen the pain of the musket’s recoil and the Sergeant struck the man with his cane and promised him real punishment when the battle was over.

Still the horsemen came, the uniforms changing as the rear ranks of the charge followed in the bloody path of the Cuirassiers and Lancers. Carabiniers and Dragoons raced madly through the corridors of slaughter. The attacking streams divided and subdivided as they sought safer passages between the squares.

“Aim at the horses!” the Guards Major called to his men. “Aim at the horses!”

Harper had his rifle at his shoulder. He tracked a French officer’s horse, fired, and watched man and beast tumble down. A horse was an easier target to hit, and a wounded or dead horse removed a cavalryman just as effectively as shooting the man.

“Fire!” Another frontal volley. A horse reared in the smoke between two of the abandoned cannon. Its rider fell backwards and his helmet struck a gun-wheel with a sickening crack. A dying horse drummed the turf with its hooves. An unhorsed Cuirassier scrabbled at his buckles to remove the weight of his armour. Another Cuirassier, fallen on his back, jerked to twist his huge weight of steel out of the cloying mud. A musket bullet spurted mud beside the struggling man. “Leave those lobsters alone!” the Guards Major shouted. “They’re out of it! Go for the live ‘uns!”

Sharpe watched a cavalryman beating impotently at a captured gun with his sword. The French, like the British cavalry earlier, had brought no implements to disable the guns. A French Hussar officer fired a pistol at a flank of the Guards’ square and was hit by a full platoon’s volley in revenge.

“Cease fire! Front ranks reload!” The charge had streamed clear past these foremost squares; all except for a few timid horsemen who were reluctant to risk the fatal corridors and had therefore hung back at the ridge’s crest. The bravest and luckiest horsemen had already succeeded in riding clean right through the staggered squares, only to be faced by a line of British and Dutch cavalry. The French troopers, scattered and broken, knew they would be cut down by the waiting sabres, so turned to race back towards the safety of the valley. Like a great wave the cavalry had broken and divided about the squares, now it must ebb back before reforming. The smoke began to shred and clear, revealing that the other squares were unbroken. Dead men and horses littered the spaces between the squares. An unhorsed Lancer, reeling with concussion or weakness, staggered like a drunk towards the ridge crest.

“Present!” The Guards Colonel had seen that the French charge was now returning, and he would give the horsemen more fire as they tried to regain their own lines. The thunder of their hooves became louder, then the first frightened men appeared. “Fire!” A white Carabinier’s uniform seemed to turn instantly red. A horse collapsed, rolled and broke its rider’s leg. Another wounded man was clinging to the mane of his horse, his face white with terror as he desperately ran through the staggered walls of fire. The unhorsed Lancer was ridden over by his own men. He screamed as he fell and as the hooves pounded his flesh to jelly.

“Fire!” a Guards Lieutenant called.

The flood of horsemen flowed past, this time retreating, and Sharpe had a glimpse of a red-haired man in the gorgeous uniform of a Marshal of the Empire, his hat gone, screaming at his troops. Riderless horses had joined the fleeing mob. A few cavalrymen ran among the horses, some of them trying to grab the reins of a free horse.

“Fire!” A pigtailed Dragoon with a broken sword slumped over his horse’s neck, but somehow clung on. Sharpe could smell blood and leather and horse-sweat. The uniforms were flecked with mud. The horses’ eyes rolled white as they galloped and their breath pumped loud and harsh.

The horsemen went as they had come. As soon as the last Frenchmen had passed, the British gunners sprinted out of the squares to regain their undamaged guns. A few cannon had been left loaded with canister and the portfires touched the quills to send barrels of the killing musket-halls at the rumps of the fleeing cavalry. The ground between the squares was a slaughteryard where the dead and the dying lay among rye stalks hammered into the mud that was thick with hoofprints and horse dung.

“Sad, really.” The Guards Major offered Sharpe a pinch of snuff.

“Sad?”

“Wonderful looking horses!” The Major, who was clearly so popular with his men, proved to have a rather melancholy demeanour when he was no longer performing for them. “A damned pity to throw good horseflesh away, but what can one expect of a paltry gunner like Bonaparte? Do you care for snuff?”

“No. Thank you.”

“You should. It clears out the lungs.” The Major snapped his box shut, then vigorously sniffed the powder off his hand. Some of his Guardsmen had run forward to plunder the French corpses and the Major shouted at them to put the wounded horses out of their misery before they robbed the dead. A Cuirassier with a musket bullet in his thigh was dragged back into the square. A Guardsman picked up the wounded man’s glittering helmet with its long horsehair plume and, replacing his shako with the gaudy headgear, pranced along the square’s face in a grotesque parody of a barrack gate whore. His comrades cheered him.

“I suppose“, the Major smiled at the soldier’s mockery, ”that Monsewer’s damned guns will start up again?“

But instead it was the British guns on the crest that fired. The sound of the volley told Sharpe that the cannon had been double shotted and the frantic speed with which the crews reloaded was a warning that the cavalry were again approaching up the ridge’s front slope.

“My God! The bastards haven’t had enough!” the Major said incredulously, then cheered up as he realized he would have another chance to encourage his men. “Mademoiselle Frog is coming back for more, boys! You must have treated her well last time, so give her the same treatment again!”

The cavalry was indeed returning, and this time there were even more horsemen. Reinforcements must have been sent across the valley and it now seemed as though all the cavalry of France was to be hurled in one desperate charge at the British squares. The horsemen streamed over the ridge, and the guns by the squares gave them a greeting of canister before the gunners again ran with their precious implements to the square’s safety.

“Hold your fire!” The Guards Major peered through the cannons’ smoke. “Wait for it, lads! Wait for it! Fire!”

The muskets could not miss. The heavy balls thudded into men and horses, piercing breastplates and helmets, turning the majesty of plume and pelisse into screaming pain. There was also pain inside the squares, where those men wounded by the cannon-fire and not given time to retreat to the forest’s edge, still sheltered. The battalion officers rode between the wounded, shouting encouragement to each face of their square as the French horsemen flowed past.

The cavalry had returned full of resolve to charge home, but the horses could not be forced to charge the squares that were now given the further protection of makeshift bastions formed of dead and dying horses and men. The new attack flowed about the squares just like the first, except this time the attack went more slowly because the horses were tiring. Those horses that had lost their riders during the first charge dutifully attacked with the second, dumbly obedient to their herd instincts even though those instincts took them up into the storm of canister and musket-fire.

Once again some Frenchmen pierced through the whole depth of arrayed squares, but only to discover the screen of waiting cavalry. This time, instead of risking the return journey through the alleys of musket-fire, some Cuirassiers swerved to their left to find another route back to the valley. They discovered a lane which ran behind the ridge and spurred along it, aiming for the open flank. The lane dropped into a deep cutting, its banks too steep and wet for any horse to climb, and at the cutting’s end was a barricade of felled trees put there to check any French attempt to attack in the other direction. The horsemen reined in and shouted at the men behind to turn back and find another way around the sunken lane.

Then British infantry appeared at the top of the embankments. These redcoats were fresh, posted to guard against a flank attack that had not happened, and now they found a helpless enemy under their muskets. They opened fire. Volley after volley plunged down into the steep-sided cutting. They fired without pity, firing until not a man nor horse was left whole, and only then did the infantry clamber down through their smoke to the heaps of stirring, crying, whimpering horror. They did not go to help their victims, but to plunder them.

The second charge died as the first had died, but the French were brave, and led by the bravest of the brave, and so they returned. The guns fired a last volley before the charge reached the squares, and this time a vagary of the shifting smoke let Sharpe see a group of charging horsemen blown apart like crops struck by a monstrous scythe. The gunners ran to safety with their rammers as the horses were spurred again at the squares’ faces. Again the muskets threw them back, and again the cavalry swerved away. It was sheer madness. Sharpe, not even bothering to unsling his rifle, watched in disbelief. The French were slaughtering their own cavalry, hurling them again and again at the unbroken squares of infantry.

Again the cavalry retreated, allowing the British gunners to reoccupy their undamaged batteries. Some French skirmishers had climbed the ridge either side of the cavalry’s path, but there were not enough Voltigeurs to trouble the squares. Some French gunners opened fire in the pause between cavalry charges and their rounds did more damage than all the horsemen had achieved. The gunners were forced to stop their cannonade as the stubborn cavalry wheeled back to charge the squares again. Between each charge a few redcoats were allowed out of the squares to bring back plunder: an officer’s gilded sword, a handful of coins, a silver trumpet with a gorgeously embroidered banner. One sergeant unstrapped a dead Dragoon’s leopard-skin helmet, only to throw it down with disgust when he saw the leopard skin was merely dyed cloth. Another man laughed to find a small and bedraggled bunch of faded violets stuck in the buttonhole of a dead Dragoon General whose white moustache was splashed with blood.

Sharpe and Harper used one of the pauses between the French charges to canter out from the Guards’ square. It was partly curiosity which drove them. Other staff officers similarly rode between the formations and past the heaps of French dead to discover how other battalions were faring. Sharpe and Harper sought their old battalion and finally spotted the yellow regimental colour of the Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers above the lingering musket smoke. The colour bore the badge of a chained eagle to commemorate the trophy that Sharpe and Harper had captured at Talavera. The redcoats cheered as the two Riflemen trotted out of the misting smoke and into the square’s embrace.

“You don’t mind if we shelter here, do you?” Sharpe politely asked Ford.

Ford was clearly nervous of Sharpe’s motives in seeking out his old battalion, but he could hardly refuse his hospitality and so nodded his reluctant consent. The Colonel nervously plucked off his glasses and scrubbed at their lenses with his sash. For some reason the spectacles seemed misted and he wondered if it was some strange effect caused by the thickness of powder smoke. Major Vine glared at the Riflemen, fearing that Sharpe had again come to take command as he had at Quatre Bras.

Peter d’Alembord, dismounted, was still unwounded. He smiled at Sharpe. “I don’t mind this malarkey! They can try this nonsense all day and night!”

The French tried the nonsense again, and again achieved nothing. They had been lured to the attack by the mistaken apprehension of a British withdrawal, yet, though they had learned their mistake, they seemed incapable of abandoning the suicidal attacks. Again and again they attacked, and again and again the muskets flamed and smoked and the tired horses fell screaming and quivering. Close to Sharpe, between the Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers and a square of the King’s German Legion, a French Hussar officer struggled to unbuckle his expensive saddle. Both squares left him undisturbed. The girth of the saddle was trapped by the horse’s dead weight, but at last the officer tugged it free and the Germans gave him an ironic cheer. The Frenchmen trudged away with his burden. Two riderless horses trotted down the rear face of Ford’s square, but none of his men could be bothered to retrieve the trophies, even though a reward was offered for captured horses. A wounded Cuirassier, divested of his armour, limped southwards. “Hey! Frenchie! Get yourself a horse, you silly bugger!” Private Clayton shouted at him.

“Why are the bloody fools persisting?” Harry Price asked Sharpe.

“Pride.” Sharpe did not even have to think about his answer. These were the horsemen of France and they would not limp back to their own lines to confess failure. Sharpe remembered moments like this from his own experience; at Badajoz the French had filled a stone-faced ditch with British dead, yet still the infantry had attacked the breach. In the end that obstinate pride had brought victory, but these blown horses with their tired riders were now incapable of breaking a square.

Sharpe edged his horse close behind his old light company. Weller was still alive, so was Dan Hagman and Clayton. “How is it, lads?”

Their mouths were dry from biting into the cartridges, their lips were flecked with unburned powder, and sweat had carved clean rivulets down their faces which were blackened by the smoke and smuts from the powder exploding in their musket pans. Their fingernails were bleeding from dragging back the heavy flints, yet they grinned and gave an ironic cheer when Sharpe handed down a canteen of rum from his saddle. Colour Sergeant Huckfield had a pocket of spare flints which he doled out to those men whose old ones had been chipped away by repeated firing.

“I know how the gentry feel now,” Dan Hagman said to Sharpe.

“How come, Dan?”

“When all the game is driven towards them, and all the rich buggers have to do is aim and fire? It’s just like that, innit? Not that I mind. Silly buggers can line up all day to be shot so far as I care.” Because so long as the French cavalry were around the squares, so long the dreaded French artillery could not fire at the redcoats.

The horsemen came again, though by now men and beasts were too tired and too wary to charge home. A mass of enemy cavalry walked their horses to within sixty yards of the Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers and stopped beside a battery of abandoned guns. The horses were sweating and their ribs heaving, yet the cavalry had still not given up hope of breaking the infantry. If brute force would not work, then subtlety might, and every few minutes a group of the cavalry would spur forward in an attempt to provoke a volley from the square’s face. If such feint attacks could empty the deadly muskets there was a chance that the remaining horsemen could hack their way through the unloaded ranks with their heavy swords. Lancers, with their long and deadly reach, could easily break a square from a standing horse, but not if the muskets were loaded.

But the battalion was too canny to take the bait. Instead they jeered insults at the French. Some of the horsemen trotted away to find another square, hoping their discipline would be poorer. The great cavalry assault had reached stalemate. The cavalry, too proud to retreat, were unable to charge, and so they stood their horses just out of effective volley range and tried to bluff the infantry into firing. Hundreds of Frenchmen were dead or dying, yet thousands remained in the saddle, enough to keep alive the desperate hope of victory. Sometimes an officer managed to spur a group into a full-blooded charge and the muskets would spit their flames again, more horses would go down again, and then the stalemate resumed.

“Hold your fire! Hold it!” d’Alembord was suddenly shouting at the square’s rear face. “Open ranks!”

Three horsemen had spurred across the field and now took shelter among the Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers. Sharpe, turning in his saddle, saw the Duke of Wellington nodding a curt greeting at Ford who frantically began polishing his lenses. Sharpe looked back to the front where the horsemen still stood threateningly, but did not charge. Two of the Lancers, frustrated and embittered by the stalemate, threw their lances like javelins, but the missiles fell harmlessly short of the front rank. The redcoats jeeringly invited the horsemen to come and get their toys back. 1 Another Lancer jabbed his lance point at a cannon’s blackened vent, and achieved nothing.

“Wasting their time.” The Duke’s voice sounded just behind Sharpe.

Sharpe turned to see that the Duke was talking to him. “Yes, sir.”

The Duke’s face betrayed neither hope for his army’s survival, nor despair for its defeat. He had lost most of his cavalry to a foolish charge, many of his allies had run away, and he was left with scarce half the men he had paraded at the day’s beginning, but he looked calm, even detached. He offered Sharpe the ghost of a smile; an acknowledgement of how many battlefields the two men had shared across the years. A more perceptive man than Sharpe might have read some message in the Duke’s seeking the companionship of a veteran soldier, but Sharpe merely felt his usual awkwardness when he was in the company of his old commanding officer. “So what do you make of the man?” the Duke asked.

“The man‘ was clearly the Emperor. ”I’m disappointed,“ Sharpe answered shortly.

The reply amused the Duke. “He might please you yet. He’s throwing bits and pieces at us to see what we’re made of, but doubtless he’ll put a real attack together sooner or later.” The Duke looked at the closest enemy horsemen, a mix of Cuirassiers, Hussars and Lancers. “Fine-looking devils, aren’t they?”

“They are, sir.”

The Duke suddenly astonished Sharpe by giving his great whoop of a laugh; ‘I was in another square over there and a major was telling his men to make faces at the rogues! “Pull faces,” he shouted!

Can you believe it? Pull faces! We shall have to add that order to the drillbook.“ He laughed again, then shot a look at Sharpe. ”Is Orange keeping you busy?“

“He’s dismissed me, sir.”

The Duke stared disapprovingly for a heartbeat, then gave another neighing laugh which made the nearest redcoats look round in astonishment at their Commander-in-Chief. “I always thought he was a fool to pick you. I told him you were an independent-minded rogue, but he wouldn’t listen. At his age they always think they know best.” The Duke looked back to the French horsemen who still showed no inclination to close on the square. “If those rascals don’t intend to charge, I might make a run for it.”

“Your Grace?” Sharpe could not.resist a question as the Duke turned his horse away. “The Prussians, sir?”

“Their cavalry picquets are in sight.” The Duke spoke very calmly, as though he had not been racked all day by fears of a Prussian betrayal. “I fear it will be some time before their infantry can close on us, but at least their picquets are in sight. We just need to hold fast.” The Duke raised his voice so that the whole square could hear his confidence. “We just have to hold fast now! I thank you for your hospitality, Ford!”

He galloped from the rear of the square, followed by the two staff officers who had managed to keep up with his progress. Some of the French horsemen spurred after the Duke, but gave up the chase when it was clear that his horse was a far better animal.

“Ware right! Present!” That was d’Alembord, warning of the approach of another mass of enemy cavalry who were making a final and hopeless attempt to justify the slaughtered men and horses who lay in bloody heaps about the stubborn squares.

The muskets flamed again, the ramrods clattered in hot barrels, and the volleys flickered red in the smoke. Somewhere a dying Hussar cried his woman’s name aloud. A horse limped towards home, dragging a rear leg dripping with blood. The horse’s saddlecloth was decorated with an Imperial ‘N’ embroidered in blue and golden threads. Beside the horse, and howling with pain though apparently unwounded, a dog loped southwards to seek its master among the retreating French cavalry. A Cuirassier, his face bitter with failure, slammed his sword down onto a British cannon’s barrel. The steel rang like a hammer’s blow on an anvil, but achieved nothing. The Cuirassier wrenched his horse around and spurred southwards.,

The French cavalry had been beaten and, like a last exhausted wave that had failed to breach a sea wall, the horsemen ebbed back into the valley. They went slowly, bloodied and muddied, a golden horde turned into a defeated mob.

And the Emperor’s guns, this day’s best killers for the French, began to kill again.