Sharpe's Waterloo

CHAPTER 7

At one in the morning, in the heart of the brief night, Lucille shivered in the courtyard of her Brussels lodging house. Two horses trampled nervously on the cobbles by the yard’s arched entrance. The only light came from a lantern which hung in the stable doorway. Her child slept upstairs.

“Take this.” Lucille thrust a bundle towards Sharpe. “It belonged to Xavier.”

Sharpe shook the bundle loose to reveal that it was a dark blue woollen cloak lined with scarlet silk, a luxury that had belonged to Lucille’s husband. “It’s beautiful.” He felt awkward, not certain that he was worthy of the gift. He folded the cloak over his arm, then touched Lucille’s cold cheek. „I’ll see you late tomorrow.“

“Maybe.” Lucille absently brushed at the dried blood on Sharpe’s threadbare jacket. “How can you tell?”

“One day to hold them,” he said lightly, “and one day to beat them.”

“Maybe,” she said again, then, looking up into his eyes, “and what if you lose?”

“Take a canal barge to Antwerp. I’ll find you there. If it’s really bad, make your way to Ostend and cross to England.”

Lucille’s despondency was caused by a fear of Sharpe’s death, not a British defeat, but she dared not articulate such a thought. She sensed a difference in her man; there was a remoteness in Sharpe this night which, though he tried to hide it, was very obvious to Lucille. She knew he had killed one of her countrymen the previous evening, and she supposed he was now preparing himself for all the others he would fight. She also detected a certain relief in Sharpe. Instead of wrestling with the imponderables of land and trees and drainage and crops, he was back where his skills gave him a harsh certainty. She glanced through the open gateway, her attention caught by the tramp of boots. A Scottish battalion was marching down the street, its pace dictated by the soft beat of a muffled drum, “Maybe I should go home,” she said almost despairingly, “to Normandy.”

Sharpe put his hands on her shoulders. “The quickest way home for both of us is to get rid of Napoleon.”

“So you say.” She rested her cheek on his jacket. “I love you.”

He awkwardly stroked her hair. “I love you.”

“I don’t know why you do.” She pulled away slightly. “I’m not beautiful like Jane.”

Sharpe traced a finger down Lucille’s long nose. “She has no beauty inside herself.”

Lucille scorned that compliment with a grimace, then gave Sharpe a warning look. “Her eyes are full of hate. Be careful.”

“There’s nothing she can do now, and her man didn’t dare face me in a duel.”

“Be careful, though,” Lucille insisted.

Sharpe bent and kissed her. “Till tomorrow night, my love. Nosey will look after you till then.” He let go of her shoulders and took a pace backwards. “Let’s be moving, Patrick!”

“Whenever you’re ready.” Harper, tactfully waiting just inside the stable door, appeared with his weapons and pack. He was wearing his old Rifleman’s uniform, less its sergeant’s stripes. He had insisted on accompanying Sharpe to Quatre Bras, not to fight, he said, but just for the chance of glimpsing the Emperor.

“You take care of yourself, Patrick!” Lucille called in English.

“You’ll not catch me anywhere near the fighting, ma’am. I’ve got too much sense for that, so I have.” He had all his old weapons about him, all of them lovingly cleaned and oiled and ready.

Lucille reached up and touched Sharpe’s cheek. “Go with God.”

“And with your love?”

“You know you have that.”

He hated such a parting. Words were hopeless. Sharpe suddenly feared the loss of Lucille and he thought how love made a man fearful and vulnerable. His throat felt thick, so he just turned away and took the reins that Harper held ready. He gripped the pommel, pushed his left boot into the cold stirrup iron, and heaved up into the Hussar saddle with its high spoon that offered support during long hours of riding. His sore thighs complained at being back on a horse. He fiddled his right boot into its stirrup, touched the rifle stock superstitiously, pushed the sword into a comfortable position, then rolled the cloak into a bundle that he jammed under the rifle holster’s strap. He looked for a last time at Lucille. “Kiss the child for me.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow night.” She forced a confident smile.

The dog whined a protest as Sharpe rode away. The Rifleman ducked under the arch, then waited as Harper closed the two heavy gates. The Irishman swung himself into the saddle, then followed Sharpe in the footsteps of the Highlanders.

Sharpe and Harper were going back to war.

In the same short darkness of that midsummer night Lord John Rossendale took a road leading west from Brussels towards a rendezvous with the Earl of Uxbridge and the British cavalry. Lord John did not ride his horse, but rather drove in a gleaming open cabriolet that he had brought from London. Harris, his coachman, was up on the driving box, while Lord John’s groom and valet were bringing on the saddle horses behind. Captain Christopher Manvell had ridden on ahead. Lord John had hoped that his friend would accompany him, but he sensed how much Manvell despised him for so easily surrendering to Sharpe’s threat.

Rossendale closed his eyes and silently cursed. He was in turmoil, trapped between honour and beauty. It was not Manvell’s displeasure that worried him, but Jane’s anger. She had lacerated Lord John for his cowardice. He remembered a time when Jane had feared a duel as much as he, but now she seemed more eager to protect her money than Lord John’s life.

“And you have no right to promise him any money!” Jane had reminded Lord John when they had regained the privacy of their hotel suite. “It is not your money, but mine!”

In truth, if the money belonged to anyone, it was the property of the Emperor’s brother, Joseph Bonaparte, erstwhile King of Spain and the Indies, who had lost his fortune with the battle of Vitoria. King Joseph had fled and the British had swarmed over his supply wagons where some men, Sharpe and Harper among them, had become rich. Sharpe had taken a royal fortune off the battlefield, and it was that fortune which Jane had stolen from him, and much of which she had already spent on a London house and on silks and on furniture and on jewels and on Lord John’s debts, and on silverware and gold plate and Chinese wallpaper and on lapdogs and satin and on the cabriolet in which Lord John now rode towards the cavalry and battle. It was that same fortune which, to save his life, Lord John had promised to return to Sharpe.

“You will not!” Jane had said after the shameful confrontation at the ball.

“You’d have me fight him?” Lord John had asked.

“If you were a man,” Jane had sneered, “you would not ask the question.”

Lord John, recognizing the horrid truth in her mockery, had wondered why love’s happiness was so easily soured. “I can fight him, if you insist.”

“I don’t insist!”

“I can fight him, though.” Lord John had sounded hopeless for he knew he would lose a duel against Sharpe.

Jane had suddenly staunched her anger and melted Lord John with a smile. “All I want“, she had said, ”is the chance to marry you. And once we are married the money will be yours by right. But we cannot marry until…’

She did not need to go on. Lord John knew that litany. They could not marry while Sharpe lived. Therefore Sharpe must die, and if he was not to be killed in a duel, then he must be taken care of in another way and, in the darkness as Lord John had said his farewells, Jane had urged him to the other way.

“Harris?” Lord John now called to his coachman.

“I can hear you, my lord!” Harris shouted from the cabriolet’s driving seat.

“Did you ever hear of officers being murdered in battle?”

Harris, who had been a cavalry trooper before a French cannon-ball had crushed his left foot at the battle of Corunna, laughed at the naivety of the question. “You hear about it all the time, my lord.” Harris paused for a few seconds while he negotiated the cabriolet over some deep ruts in the high road. “I remember a major who begged us not to kill him, my lord. He knew we couldn’t abide his ways, and he was sure one of us was going to take a hack at him, so he begged for the honour of being killed by the enemy instead.”

“Was he?”

“No. A mucky little devil called Shaughnessy shoved a sword into his back.” Harris laughed at the memory. “Clean old job he made of it, straight out of the drill book!”

“And no one saw?”

“No one who was going to make a malarkey out of it, my lord. Why should they? No one liked the Major. Not that you need worry, my lord.”

“I wasn’t concerned for myself, Harris.”

Harris plucked a bugle from the seat beside him and sounded a blaring note of warning. A battalion of infantry that was marching towards the cabriolet shuffled onto the grass verge. The men, their faces sallow in the small light of the cabriolet’s twin lamps, stared reproachfully at the wealthy officer whose carriage clipped by so smartly behind its matched pair of bays. The battalion’s officers, under the misapprehension that such an equipage must contain a senior officer, saluted.

Lord John said nothing more of murder. He knew he had behaved badly this night, that he should have faced Sharpe and accepted the challenge. He had lost face, he had lost honour, yet now he flirted with the thought of murder, which was beyond all honour, and he did it solely for a woman.

Lord John leaned his head back on the cabriolet’s folded leather hood. Some of his friends said he was bewitched, but if he was, it was a willing enthrallment. He remembered how fondly Jane had said farewell after her anger had abated, and the memory made him lift his hand to see, in the first creeping light of dawn, the small smear of rouge that still remained on his forefinger. He kissed it. Marriage, he thought, would solve everything. No more deception, no more circumspection, no more begging Jane for funds, and no more disdain from society for a golden girl who surely deserved the rewards of marriage. Jane’s happiness would take just one death; one death on a field of slaughter, one more corpse among the battalions of the dead.

And if it was done properly, no one need ever know.

And if, in the morning, Lord John withdrew his promise to repay the money and accepted the challenge of a duel, then the world would accept him as a man of brave honour. And if Sharpe was to die in battle before the duel could be fought, then the honour would be untarnished. Lord John had behaved badly this night, but he knew that all could be repaired, all won, and all made good, and all for a girl of winsome, heart-breaking beauty.

Behind Lord John the first beam of sunlight struck like a golden lance across the world’s rim. It was dawn in Belgium. Clouds still heaped in the west, but over the crossroads at Quatre Bras, and above a stream just north of Fleurus, the sky was clear as glass. Larks tumbled in song above the roads where three hundred and thirty-eight thousand men, in the armies of Prussia, Britain and France, converged on death.

“God save Ireland.” Harper reined in at Quatre Bras. In front of him, and smeared across the southern sky, was the smoke of thousands of camp-fires. The smoke betrayed an army encamped. The French troops were hidden by the folds of ground and by the woods and high crops, but the smoke was evidence enough that thousands of men had closed on Frasnes in the night to support the battalion of French skirmishers who had been baulked the previous evening.

Closer to Sharpe and Harper, around the crossroads of Quatre Bras, more men had gathered; all of them Dutch-Belgians of the Prince of Orange’s Corps. There was a smattering of musket-fire from far beyond the stream, evidence that the rival picquet lines of skirmishers were bidding each other a lethal good morning. The Baron Rebecque, waiting with a group of the Prince’s aides at the crossroads, seemed relieved to see Sharpe. “We’re concentrating the corps here, instead of at Nivelles.”

“Quite right, too!” Sharpe said fervently.

Rebecque unfolded a sketch map he had made. “The French are in Frasnes, and we’re holding all the farms beyond the stream. Except this one by the ford. We’ll only garrison that if we’re forced back to it.”

“I’d garrison it now,” Sharpe recommended,

“Not enough men.” Rebecque folded his map. “So far only eight thousand infantry have arrived, with sixteen guns and no cavalry.”

Sharpe cast a professional eye at the smoke of the French cooking fires. “They’ve got twenty thousand, Rebecque.”

“I was hoping you wouldn’t tell me that.” Rebecque, accepting Sharpe’s experienced estimate without question, smiled grimly.

“So if I can make a suggestion?”

My dear Sharpe, anything.“

“Tell our skirmishers to hold their fire. We don’t want to provoke the Crapauds into nastiness, do we?” There was no sense in inviting battle from a much stronger enemy; it was better to delay any fighting in the hope of more allied troops arriving to even the numbers who faced each other south of Frasnes.

The sky above Quatre Bras was dirtied by the camp-fires, but to the east the rising sun betrayed a much vaster quantity of rising woodsmoke. That larger smear in the sky showed where the Prussian army faced the main force of the French and where the day’s real battle would be fought. The French would be trying to defeat the Prussians before the British and Dutch could come to their aid, while the Prussians, to be certain of victory, needed Wellington’s troops to march from Quatre Bras and assault the Emperor’s left flank. But that rescue mission had been stopped dead by the presence of the twenty thousand Frenchmen encamped in Frasnes who had been sent by the Emperor to make sure that the allied armies did not combine. All that the French needed to do was take the crossroads at Quatre Bras. Sharpe reckoned it could not take the enemy longer than an hour to overrun the fragile line of Dutch-Belgian troops, and in one further hour they could have fortified the crossroads to make them impassable to the British.

The French were thus one hour from victory; just one hour from separating the allied armies, yet as the sun climbed higher and as the smoke of the dying fires thinned, the French made no move to advance on the crossroads. They did not even follow the retreating Dutch skirmishers, but seemed content to let the morning’s skirmish die to nothing. Sharpe looked to the north and west, searching for the tell-tale drifts of dust that would speak of reinforcements hurrying towards the threatened crossroads. No dust showed above the roads yet, evidence that the French had plenty of time to make their attack.

The Prince of Orange arrived three hours after dawn, excited at the prospect of action. “Morning, Sharpe! A bright one, isn’t it! Rebecque, all well?”

Rebecque attempted to tell the Prince how his troops were deployed, but the Prince was too restless merely to listen. “Show me, Rebecque, show me! Let’s go for a gallop. All of us!” He gestured to his whole staff who dutifully fell in behind Rebecque and the Prince as they spurred away from the crossroads,towards the south. The Prince waved happily at a party of soldiers who drew water from the stream, then twisted in his saddle to shout at Sharpe. “I expected to see you at the ball last night, Sharpe!”

“I arrived very late, sir.”

“Did you dance?”

“Regrettably not, sir.”

“Nor me. Duty called.” The Prince galloped past the deserted Gemioncourt farm, through a bivouacked Dutch brigade, and did not rein in till he had passed the forward Dutch picquets and could see clear down the paved highway into the village of Frasnes. There had to be some enemy skirmishers close by, yet the Prince blithely ignored their threat. His staffofficers waited a few yards to the rear as the young man stared towards the enemy encampment. “Sharpe?”

Sharpe walked his horse forward. “Sir?”

“How many of the devils are facing us, would you say?”

Very few enemy troops were actually in sight. A battery of guns stood at the edge of the village, some cavalry horses stood unsaddled in the street beyond, and a battalion of infantry was bivouacked in a field to the right of the guns, but otherwise the enemy was hidden, and so Sharpe stuck with his earlier estimate. “Twenty thousand, sir.”

The Prince nodded. “Just what I’d say. Splendid.” He smiled genially at Sharpe. “And just when are you going to appear in a Dutch uniform?”

Sharpe was taken aback. “Soon, sir.”

“Soon? I’ve been requesting that small courtesy for weeks! I want to see you in proper uniform today, Sharpe, today!“ The Prince shook an admonishing finger at the Rifleman then took out his telescope to stare at the battery of French guns. It was hard to see what calibre the cannon were for the air was already hot enough to shimmer and blur the details df the far guns. ”It’s going to be a hot day,“ the Prince complained. His yellowish skin glistened with sweat. He was in a blue uniform coat that was thickly encrusted with gold loops and edged with black astrakhan fur. At his hip hung a massively heavy sabre with an ivory hilt. The Prince’s vanity had made him dress for a winter’s campaign on what threatened to be the summer’s hottest day yet.

The sultry air pressed heavily on the men who guarded the farms that marked the perimeter of the Dutch position. If that perimeter was broken, there was still the Gemioncourt farm by the ford which could be an anchor to a defensive line, but once Gemioncourt was captured there was nothing between the French and the crossroads. Sharpe prayed that the French would go on waiting, and that the British troops who were marching desperately to reinforce the outnumbered defenders at Quatre Bras reached the crossroads in time.

By eight o’clock the French had still not attacked. At nine o’clock the Dutch troops still waited. Atten the Duke of Wellington reached the crossroads and, content that nothing yet threatened the Dutch troops, galloped eastwards to find the Prussians.

The morning inched onwards. It seemed impossible that the French still hesitated. At intervals an enemy horseman might appear at the edge of the village to gaze through a spyglass at the Dutch positions, but no attacks followed such reconnaissances, no skirmishers wormed their way through the fields, and no cannon crashed shell or roundshot at the fragile Dutch lines.

At midday the French still waited. The heat was now oppressive. The western clouds had thickened and the old wounds in Sharpe’s leg and shoulder began to ache; a sure prophecy of rain. He lunched with the Prince of Orange’s staff in the remains of an orchard behind the farm at the crossroads. Harper, of whose status none of the Dutch was quite certain, shared the princely cold chicken, hard-boiled eggs and red wine. The Prince, momentarily forgetting his orders for Sharpe to change into Dutch uniform, dominated the luncheon conversation as he eagerly expressed his wish that the French would attack before the Duke returned from his meeting with the Prussians, for then the Prince could defeat the enemy with only the help of his faithful Dutch troops. The Prince dreamed of a great Netherlands victory, with himself as its hero. He saw pliant girls offering him the laurels of victory before they fainted before his conquering feet. He could not wait to begin such a triumph, and prayed that the French would offer him the chance of glory before the arrival of any British reinforcements.

And in the early afternoon, and before the hurrying British reinforcements could reach the crossroads, the Prince’s wish was granted. An enemy cannon banged its signal.

And the French, at last, were advancing to battle.

“Was that a gun? I swear that was a gun. Would you say that was a gun, Vine?” Lieutenant-Colonel Joseph Ford, commanding officer of the Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers, twisted in his saddle and stared anxiously at his senior Major who, because he was deaf, had heard nothing. Major Vine, thus unable to confirm or deny the sound which had so alarmed his Colonel, merely offered a bad-tempered scowl as a reply, so Colonel Ford looked past him to seek the opinion of the Captain of his light company. “Was that a gun, d’Alembord? Would you say that was a gun?”

D’Alembord, his head aching with hangover, still wore his white dancing breeches and buckled shoes from the night before. He did not want to speak to anyone, let alone Ford, but he made an effort and confirmed that the Colonel had indeed heard a cannon’s report, but very far away and with its sound much muted by the humid air.

“We’re going to be late!” Ford worried.

Just at this moment d’Alembord did not care how late they would be. He just wanted to lie down somewhere very dark and very cool and very silent. He wished the Colonel would go away, but he knew Ford would keep pestering until he received some reassurance. “The brigade marched on time, sir,” he told the worried Ford, “and no one can expect more of us.”

“There’s another gun! D’you hear it, Vine? There! And another! ’Pon my soul, d’Alembord, but it’s begun, it’s begun indeed!“ Ford’s eyes, behind their small thick spectacles, betrayed excited alarm. Ford was a decent man, and a kind one, but he had a worrying nervousness that aggravated d’Alembord’s patience. The Colonel fretted about the opinions of senior officers, the diligence of his junior officers, and the loyalty of his non-commissioned officers. He worried about the spare ammunition, about the ability of the men to hear orders in battle, and about the morality of the wives who followed the marching column like a gypsy rabble. He agonized about losing his spectacles, for Ford was as short-sighted as a mole, and he worried about losing his battalion’s colours, and about losing his hair. He was ever anxious about the weather and, when he could think of nothing else to be anxious about, he became worried that he must have forgotten something important that should have been causing him worry.

The ever-anxious Ford had been appointed to replace Major Richard Sharpe as commanding officer of the battalion, which of itself was cause for the Colonel to worry, for Joseph Ford was keenly aware that the Rifleman had been a most competent and experienced soldier. Nor did it help Ford that many of his junior officers and a good third of his rankers had seen far more fighting then he had himself. Ford had been appointed to the battalion in the dying weeks of the last war, and he had only experienced a few skirmishes, yet now he must lead the Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers against the Emperor’s field army, a realization that naturally occasioned Ford constant trepidation. “But at least“, he comforted his officers, ”it’s a veteran battalion.“

“It is that, Colonel, it is that.” Major Vine, a small, strutting, dark-eyed, bad-tempered stoat of a man, always agreed with the Colonel when he managed to hear what the Colonel had actually said.

Ford, distrusting such easy agreement, would seek support for his views from the more experienced officers of the battalion, but those officers, such as Peter d’Alembord, doubted whether the Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers could truthfully be called a veteran battalion. A third of its men were new recruits who had seen no fighting, almost another third had seen as little as the Colonel, while only the rest, like d’Alembord, had actually faced a French army in open battle. Still, that experienced third was the battalion’s backbone; the men whose voices would stiffen the ranks and give the Colonel the victory he needed in his opening engagement. And that was all d’Alembord prayed for at this moment, that Ford would learn success fast and thus calm his worried fears.

D’Alembord also prayed for a swift and overwhelming victory for himself. He wanted to return to England where a bride and a house and a secure civilian future waited for him. His bride was called Anne Nickerson, the daughter of an Essex landowner whose reluctant consent to an army marriage had turned to wholehearted approval when Peter d’Alembord had put up his captaincy for sale.

Then, just as d’Alembord was about to sell his commission and retire to one of his prospective father-in-law’s farms, Napoleon had returned to France. Colonel Ford, worried that he was losing his veteran Captain of skirmishers, had begged d’Alembord to stay for the impending campaign and implicit in the Colonel’s plea was a promise that d’Alembord would receive the next vacant majority in the battalion. That enticement was sufficient. The captaincy would sell for fifteen hundred pounds which was a good enough fortune for any young man contemplating marriage, but a majority would fetch two thousand six hundred pounds, and so d’Alembord, with some misgivings, but reassured by the prospects of a fine marriage portion, had agreed to Ford’s request.

Now, ahead of d’Alembord, the gun-fire rumbled like dull thunder to remind him that the two thousand six hundred pounds must be earned the hard way. D’Alembord, contemplating how much happiness he now stood to lose, shivered with a premonition, then told himself that he had always feared the worst before every battle.

Joseph Ford, frightened because he was about to fight his first real battle, worried that either he or his men might not do their duty and, as ever when worry overwhelmed him, he snatched off his spectacles and polished their lenses on his sash. He believed that such a commonplace action expressed a careless insouciance, whereas it really betrayed his fretting nervousness.

Yet, this day as they marched towards the gun-fire, the men of the Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers were oblivious of their Colonel’s fears. They trudged on, breathing the dust of the dry summer road that had been shuffled up by the boots ahead, and they wondered if there would be an issue of rum before the fighting began, or whether they would be too late for the fighting and would instead be billeted in some soft Belgian village where the girls would flirt and the food would be plentiful.

“It’s sounding bad,” Private Charlie Weller spoke of the distant gun-fire, which did not really sound so very awful yet, but Weller was feeling a flicker of nervousness and wanted the relief of conversation.

“We’ve heard worse that that, Charlie,” Daniel Hagman, the oldest man in the light company, said, but he spoke tiredly, dutifully, unthinkingly. Hagman was a kind man, who recognized Charlie Weller’s apprehension, but the day was too hot, the sun too fierce, and the dust too parching for kindness to have much of a chance.

Major Vine curbed his horse to watch the ten companies march past. He snapped at the men to pick up their feet and straighten their shoulders. They took no notice. They did not like Vine, recognizing that the Major despised them as a lumpen, dull ugly mass, but the men themselves knew better; they were Wellington’s infaritry, the finest of the best, and they were marching east and south to where a pall of gun-smoke was forming like a dark cloud over a far crossroads and to where the guns cleared their throats to beckon men to battle.

The French attack began with a cannonade which punched billows of grey-black smoke into the hazing dancing air above the village of Frasnes. The Prince of Orange, unable to resist the lure of danger, galloped from the crossroads to be with those troops closest to the enemy, and the Prince’s staff, their luncheon brutally interrupted by the French gun-fire, hurried after him.

Sharpe was among the staff officers who trotted their horses down the Charleroi road, past the Gemioncourt farm by the ford, and so on up the shallow hill until they reached the infantry brigade which guarded against any frontal attack up the high road.

The French guns were firing at the flanks of the Prince’s position; aiming at the farmhouses to east and west. Nothing seemed to be moving on the road itself, though Sharpe supposed the French must have some skirmishers concealed in the fields of long rye.

“They’ll be coming straight up the middle, won’t they?”

Sharpe turned to see that Harper had joined him. “I thought you were staying well away from any danger?”

“What danger, for God’s sake? No one’s firing at us now.” Harper had rescued the cold carcass of a roast chicken from the Prince’s interrupted lunch, and now tossed Sharpe a leg. “They look bloody strange, don’t they?”

He was referring to the brigade of Dutch-Belgian infantry that was spread in four ranks either side of the road to block a direct attack from Frasnes. The strangeness lay in the metis’ uniforms which were the standard French infantry uniforms. Only the eagle badge on their shakos had been changed, replaced by a ‘W for King William of the Netherlands, but otherwise the Dutch-Belgians were dressed exactly like the men they were doubtless about to fight.

“You know what to do?” the Prince asked the brigade commander in his native French.

“If we can’t hold them, sir, we fall back on Gemioncourt.”

“Exactly!” The farm by the ford was the last bastion before the vital crossroads. Loopholes had already been made in the stone walls of Gemioncourt’s huge barns which, like the buildings of so many of the isolated farms in the low countries, were joined together and protected by a high stone wall, making the whole farm into a massively strong fortress.

“Something’s stirring, eh?” The Prince, reverting to English, was elated by an outburst of musket-fire which sounded from somewhere in front of the Dutch line. The musketry was not the huge eruptions of platoon fire, but rather the smaller sporadic snapping of skirmishers which betrayed that the French Voltigeurs were closing on the Dutch light troops, but both sets of skirmishers were well hidden from the Prince and his staff by the tall crops.

“Funny to hear that sound again, isn’t it?” Harper commented drily.

“Did you miss it?”

“Never thought I would,” the Irishman said sadly, “but I did.”

Sharpe remembered the familiar skill with which he had killed the French Lieutenant in this very rye field. “It’s the thing we’re good at, Patrick. Maybe we’re doomed to be soldiers forever?”

“You maybe, but not me. I’ve a tavern and a horse-thieving trade to keep me busy.” Harper frowned at the Belgians in their French uniforms. “Do you think these buggers will fight?”

“They’d bloody better,” Sharpe said grimly. The brigade, with its supporting artillery, was all that lay between the French and victory. The Dutch-Belgians certainly looked prepared to fight. They had trampled down the rye ahead of their line to make a killing ground some sixty yards deep and, judging by the sound of their musketry, the Dutch-Belgian skirmishers were fighting with a brisk energy.

The two wings of the Dutch-Belgian brigade stretched a half-mile on either side of the highway while, athwart the road itself, was a battery of six Dutch nine-pounder cannons. The gunners had parked their limbers and ammunition wagons in the field behind Sharpe. The guns were loaded, their portfires smoking gently in readiness for the French.

“Four-legged bastards, off to the right,” Harper said warningly, and Sharpe turned to see a troop of enemy cavalry trotting towards the Dutch right flank. The horsemen were green-coated Lancers with high helmets topped with forward sweeping black plumes. They were still a good distance off, at least a half-mile, and were not yet any threat to the Prince’s troops.

The Prince had positioned himself just behind the six guns of the Dutch battery. Rebecque, staying close to his master, gravely inspected one of the cannon almost as if he had never seen such an object before, then, suddenly afflicted by hay fever, he sneezed. The Prince muttered, “Bless you,” then stood in his stirrups to gaze at the Lancers through a telescope. The French cannons abruptly ceased fire. The only sounds now were the intermittent crackle of the skirmishers’ muskets and the ragged music of a Dutch band.

The Prince’s horse whinnied. Rebecque’s pawed at the trampled rye stalks. This was the silence before battle.

“Stand ready!” The Prince, unable to bear the quiet, spurred his horse towards the closest Belgian battalion. “You’ll see the enemy infantry soon!” he shouted at the men. “A few volleys will see them off, so stand firm!”

“The bloody gunners are just changing their aim,” Harper said scathingly after Sharpe had translated the Prince’s words.

“Probably,” Sharpe said. He patted his horse’s neck.

Rebecque suddenly sneezed again and, as if it had been a word of command, the French batteries resumed their cannonade. Harper had been right, they had merely been changing their aim, and now the French gunners concentrated their shots at the centre of the field. There were more enemy guns firing than before. Sharpe counted twenty-four gouts of smoke in the first salvo.

The French gunners were masked by the rye, but some of their balls struck home in the waiting Dutch battalions. One roundshot bounced cleanly between two of the Dutch guns and somehow missed every single horseman surrounding the Prince. The artillery Colonel asked for permission to return the fire, but the Prince ordered him to wait till the enemy infantry was in sight.

The French batteries fired another volley. Sharpe saw the blossoming smoke a fraction before the sound punched the air. More men were struck in the Dutch battalions, but most balls went overhead for the French gunners were firing a fraction too high. Sharpe saw one cannon-ball’s passage marked by the flickering of the rye stalks in a darkening line that shot at extraordinary speed across the field behind him. Another roundshot went close enough to Sharpe to sound like a sudden harsh whip-cracking wind. If the balls had been fired higher still the sound would have rumbled like a cask being rolled over floorboards.

“You should go back to the crossroads,” Sharpe told Harper.

“Aye, I will.” Harper did not move.

The Prince cantered towards the Dutch-Belgian battalions on the right-hand side of the road. He had drawn his massive sabre. He called for Rebecque to accompany him. The Baron, his eyes streaming with the hay fever, sneezed once more and the French guns magically ceased fire.

Men wounded by the cannon-fire were screaming and the band was playing, but it seemed like a rather ominous quiet.

Then the French drums began.

“I never thought I’d hear Old Trousers being played again,” Harper said wistfully. It was the sound of French infantry being drummed to the attack. A mass of drums was being beaten, but the drummers, like the approaching infantry, were hidden by the tall crop of rye. There was something curiously menacing in the repetitive drumbeats that seemed to come from nowhere.

Then Sharpe saw the far crops being trampled flat and he knew that each patch of collapsing rye betrayed the advance of a French column. He counted three formations directly to the front. Each column was a solid formation of men aimed like a battering ram at the Dutch line. A crash of musketry off to the right flank betrayed that the farms to the west were under attack, but here in the centre, where the road led enticingly to the crossroads, the enemy was still hidden. Hidden but not silent. The drums suddenly paused and the columns shouted their great war cry. “Vive I’Emper-eur!“ The sound of that cheer stopped the Dutch band cold. The musicians lowered their instruments and stared into the concealing field where the rye seemed to move as though an invisible giant’s footsteps crushed it down.

The French gunners opened fire again, this time using short-barrelled howitzers that fired shells in a high arc over the heads of their own columns, and which exploded in small dirty gouts of flame and smoke.

The first French skirmishers were appearing at the edge of the trampled area. The Dutch skirmishers had yielded the field, retreating to their battalions, so now the scattering of enemy Voltigeurs could kneel unmolested at the rye’s edge and fire at the waiting defenders. Men began to fall. Others screamed. Some died. The main enemy attack was still nothing but a sound of blended menace; a crashing noise in the rye, a thump of drums and a deep-throated cheer.

Rebecque galloped back towards the Dutch battery, shouting at its Colonel to open fire on the concealed columns, but the Colonel was staring at one of his officers who had been killed by a skirmisher’s bullet. The officer lay on the chalky road where his blood showed remarkably bright against the white dust. Other gunners were falling. A bullet clanged monstrously loud on a brass barrel and ricocheted up into the sky.

“Fire!” Rebecque shouted angrily at the gunners.

The artillery Colonel jerked round, stared at Rebecque for an instant, then bellowed his own orders, but instead of ordering a killing volley into the tall rye, he commanded his men to retreat. The drivers whipped the horse teams onto the road while the gun crews manhandled the weapons back to hook them on to their limbers. The huge ammunition wagons set off for the crossroads, their massive iron-rimmed wheels digging great gouges into the road’s surface. The gun teams began to follow, but two teams collided, their limber wheels locked, and there was a sudden tangle of cursing drivers, stalled cannon and frightened horses.

Sharpe had spurred forward. “Where are you going?” he shouted in French across the chaos.

“Back!” the gunner Colonel shouted over the noise of an exploding howitzer shell.

“Stop at the farm! Stop at Gemioncourt!” Sharpe knew the panic could not be controlled here, where the French columns filled the air with menace, but perhaps the sturdy walls of Gemioncourt would give these gunners some necessary reassurance.

“Back! Back the gun away!” The Colonel slashed with his riding crop as he tried to disentangle the trapped limbers. Another volley of French howitzer-fire miraculously missed the melee of gunners and horses which, stung by the shells’ threat, magically disentangled itself. The fleeing Dutch guns crashed up onto the road, their chains and buckets swinging. Those gunners who had no riding place on the guns or limbers were running down the verges in an undisciplined retreat.

“Stop at the farm!” Sharpe bellowed after the gunner Colonel.

An howitzer shell screamed down to smash the wheel of the last gun limber. For a second the shell lay with a smoking fuse amidst the wreckage of the wheel, then it crashed apart in a deafening explosion. One horse died instantly, its guts flung red and wet across the road. Another screaming beast collapsed on broken hind legs. The rest of the team, panicking, tried to gallop free and only slewed the broken limber round. A gunner fell off his seat on the ammunition box and was crushed by the limber’s scraping violence. He clawed at the broken wheel that first dragged him across, then pinned him to the road. The other gunners ignored him; instead they slashed at the traces with swords or knives, eventually freeing the four live horses which galloped wild-eyed towards Gemioncourt. The dying horse was mercifully shot by an officer who then took off after his men, abandoning the gun.

The man under the limber was also abandoned. He was left screaming in a terrible wailing sob that made the nearest infantry look nervously round. Harper rode up to the man and saw the broken wheel spokes impaled in his belly and groin. He took the rifle off his shoulder, aimed it, and shot once.

The French skirmishers cheered their victory over the panicked gun teams, then turned their muskets on the nearest Belgian battalions. The Prince of Orange was shouting at his men to stand fast, to wait, but the attrition of the skirmishers was fraying their nerves. They began to edge backwards.

“They’ll not stand!” Harper warned Sharpe.

“The buggers bloody well will.” Sharpe spurred towards the nearest Belgians, but before he could even get close to the battalion a French column burst out of the rye and the Belgians, without even firing a volley, turned and ran. One moment they were a formed battalion and the next they were a mob. Sharpe reined in. Two howitzer shells exploded a few paces from his horse, both blasts beginning small fires among the rye. The French were cheering. The Prince was hitting at the running men with the flat of his sabre, but they feared an emperor far more than they feared a prince and so they kept on running. The other battalions were infected by the panic and also fled. The French skirmishers turned their force on the Prince’s staff.

Rebecque, his eyes red and swollen from hay fever, reined his horse alongside Sharpe. “This isn’t a very impressive beginning, is it?”

“Get out of here, sir!” Sharpe could hear the hiss and whiplash of musket bullets all around them.

“Can you find out what’s happening to Saxe-Weimar?” Rebecque asked.

Sharpe nodded. “I will, sir! But you go! Now!” The first French skirmishers were running forward but, instead of tackling the staff officers who still lingered close to the Dutch position, they laid their hands on the abandoned gun, the first trophy of their attack.

A trumpet sounded behind the column and a Dutch aide shouted a warning of enemy cavalry. The Prince turned his horse and galloped north towards Gemioncourt and Quatre Bras. Rebecque galloped after the Prince, while Sharpe and Harper rode west. All along the centre of the position the Dutch had collapsed, leaving a great inviting hole into which the French could swarm, yet from the far right flank there still came the sound of reassuring volleys, proof that Saxe-Weimar’s men were defending staunchly.

Prince Bernhard’s battalions, which had held the crossroads the night before, now protected it again. They were retreating from the French attack, but they were not running. Instead they were marching backwards and pausing every few steps to fire steady and effective volleys at their French attackers. Those Frenchmen, Sharpe noticed, had deployed from column into a line that overlapped and outnumbered Saxe-Weimar’s brigade, yet the Nassauers were fighting well. Better still, instead of retreating back to the crossroads, they were going to the cover of the dark wood which ran like a bastion down the left flank of the French route to Quatre Bras. If the Prince could hold the wood, and the centre was somehow saved, there was still a chance.

It was a very slight chance, a mere wisp of straw snatched against an overwhelming disaster, for Sharpe could not see how any general, let alone a pimpled prince, could reform the broken troops of the centre and stop the French from sweeping forward to take the crossroads. And once the crossroads were taken, then no British troops could reach the Prussians and thus the armies would be irrevocably split and the Emperor would have won his campaign.

“We’re going back!” Sharpe shouted at Harper.

They turned their horses away from Saxe-Weimar’s men who were now edging the treeline with deadly musketry. Sharpe and Harper trotted northwards, staying a few hundred yards ahead of the advancing French. To their left was the long forbidding wood with its tangle of trees and stubborn defenders. In the centre was Gemioncourt farm which should have been a fortress to hold up the French, but was now empty because the Belgian guns and infantry had fled straight past the farm, thus yielding its strong walls and loopholed barns to the enemy. Far ahead of Sharpe was the crossroads itself where the dark mass of fugitives was milling in confusion, while to the right, and acting somewhat as another bastion, was a smaller wood and a handful of cottages.

“Look! Look!” Harper was standing in his stirrups, pointing and cheering at the smaller wood to the right. “God bless the bastards! Well done, lads!” For in that far wood, which protected the road that ran towards the Prussian army, were Riflemen. Greenjackets. The best of the Goddamn best. The British reinforcements had started to arrive.

But behind Sharpe and Harper the victorious French marched on, and between them and the crossroads there was nothing.