Sharpe's Waterloo

CHAPTER 9

In Brussels the gun-fire sounded like very distant thunder, sometimes fading to a barely perceptible rumble, but at other times swollen by a vagary of wind so that the distinct percussive shocks of each gun’s firing could be distinguished. Lucille, troubled by the sound, walked Nosey to the southern ramparts where she joined the crowd who listened to the far-off noise and speculated what it might mean. The majority hoped it signified Napoleon by nightfall, a torchlight parade and dancing. The Empire would be restored and safe, for surely the Austrians and Russians would not dare attack France if Britain and Prussia had been defeated?

The first news from the battlefield gave substance to those Imperial hopes. Belgian cavalrymen, their horses sweating and exhausted, brought tales of a shattering French victory. It had been more of a massacre than a battle, the horsemen said. British corpses were strewn across the landscape, Wellington had been killed, and the troops of the Emperor were even now advancing on Brussels with drums beating and Eagles flying.

Lucille noted that the guns were still firing, which seemed to cast doubt on the Belgian claims of victory, though some of the hundreds of English civilians still in Brussels were more ready to give the news credence. They ordered their servants to load the travelling boxes and trunks onto the coaches that had been standing ready since dawn. The coaches were whipped out of the city on the Ghent road; their passengers praying that they would reach the Channel ports before the Emperor’s scavenging and victorious horsemen cut the roads. Others of the English, more cautious, waited for official news.

Lucille, unwilling to flee with her child into an unknown future, walked beside one of the first carts of wounded that reached the city. A British infantry sergeant, his face bandaged and one arm crudely splinted, told her that the battle had not been lost when he left Quatre Bras. “It was hard work, ma’am, but it v/eren’t lost. And as long as Nosey’s alive it won’t be lost.”

Lucille went back to her child. She closed the window in the hope that the glass would obscure the sound of the cannons, but the noise drummed on, insistent and threatening. To the west the thunderheads were heaping into a sombre bank that cast an unnaturally dark shadow across the city.

Fiye streets away from Lucille, in the expensive suite of rooms that had been so thoroughly fumigated, Jane Sharpe vomited.

Afterwards, gasping for breath from the stomach-griping heaves, she went to the window, rested her forehead on the cool glass, and stared at the great ridge of cloud that blackened the western sky. Beneath her, in the hotel yard, a groom whistled as he carried two pails of water from the pump. A flock of pigeons circled, then fluttered down to the stable roof. Jane was aware of none of it, not even of the harsh percussive grumble of gun-fire. She closed her eyes, took a deep, tentative breath, then groaned.

She was pregnant.

She had suspected as much before she and Lord John had left England, but now she was certain. Her breasts were sore and her stomach sour. She ticked the months down on her fingers, reckoning that she would have a January child; a winter’s bastard. She swore softly.

She stepped away from the window and crossed to the dressing-table where last night’s candles still stood in their puddles of cold wax. She still felt sick. Her skin was prickly with sweat. She hated the thought of being pregnant, of being lumpish and awkward and gross. She rang for her maid, then sat heavily to stare into the looking-glass.

„Has Harris returned?“ Jane asked the maid.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Tell him I shall want him to take a message to his lordship.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Jane waved the maid out of the room, then drew a heavy sheet of creamy writing paper towards her. She dipped a quill in ink, sat for a moment in thought, then began to write. The guns fired on.

More troops were arriving at Quatre Bras; troops who had marched till their blistered feet were agony, but who now had to plunge straight into the humid, smoke’thickened air where, unit by unit, the Duke was building the force that would counter-attack the French and drive them back to Frasnes. More and more British guns crashed and jangled off the road and onto the crushed rye stalks. Fires were burning in the crops behind the French skirmishers as British howitzer shells exploded. The battle was not won yet, but the Duke was beginning to feel like a man who had escaped defeat. He knew his Guards Division was close, and there was even a rumour that the British cavalry might reach the crossroads before dark.

A small west wind was stirring the thick smoke. The British skirmishers, reinforced by newly arrived battalions of light infantry, were beginning to blunt the fire of the Voltigeurs. The French artillery was still taking its grievous toll of the infantry by the crossroads, but now the Duke could replace the men who fell. If Blücher held off the Emperor, and if Marshal Ney was thrown back from Quatre Bras, then in the morning the Prussian and British armies would combine and Napoleon would have lost.

The Duke opened his watch lid. It was half-past five of a summer’s evening. The battlefield was darkening, shadowed by the huge western clouds and shrouded by its pall of smoke, but plenty of daylight remained for the Duke’s counter-stroke. “Any news of the Guards?” he asked an aide.

It seemed that the Guards were being apprehended by the Prince of Orange who, as company after company of the elite troops arrived, was sending them north through the great wood to reinforce Saxe-Weimar’s men. The Duke, muttering that the Prince was a bloody little boy who should be sent back to his nursery, ordered that the Guards were not to be so dispersed in penny packets, but were to be held ready for his orders.

“Your Grace!” an aide called in warning. “Enemy cavalry!”

The Duke turned to stare southwards. Through the smoke he saw a mass of French cavalry spurring up from dead ground and heading slantwise across the field. They were a half-mile away, and well spread out in four long lines. Their loose formation made them a poor target for artillery, but the British gunners loaded with common shell and did their best. The explosions knocked down a few men and horses, but the vast mass of French cavalry trotted safely through the bursting patches of flame and smoke.

The Duke extended his telescope. “Where are they going?” He was puzzled. Surely his opponent had learned by now that cavalry could achieve nothing against the stalwart squares which had been reinforced with the newly arrived guns?

“Perhaps they’re testing Halkett’s men?” an aide suggested.

“Then they’re committing suicide!” The Duke had his glass trained on the front line of cavalry that was composed of the heavy Cuirassiers in their steel armour. Behind the Cuirassiers were the light horsemen with their lances and sabres. “They must be insane!” the Duke opined. “Halkett’s in square, isn’t he?”

Almost in unison the telescopes of the Duke’s staff officers swept to the right of the field, racing past the patches of smoke to focus on the four battalions of Halkett’s brigade which stood in front of the wood. The brigade was obscured by cannon smoke, but there were enough rifts in the dirty screen to show that something had gone terribly wrong. “Oh, Christ.” The voice spoke helplessly from the Duke’s entourage. There was a moment’s silence, and then again. “Oh, Christ.” “

“Sir?” Rebecque handed the Prince his telescope and pointed towards Gemioncourt farm. “There, sir.”

The Prince trained the heavy glass. Thousands of horsemen had appeared from the dead ground and now, in four long lines, swept either side of the farm. Dust spurted from the road as the horsemen crashed across. The enemy cavalry was trotting, but, even as the Prince watched, he saw them spur into a canter. The Cuirassiers had their heavy straight swords drawn. Long horsehair plumes tossed and waved from the steel brightness of their helmets. A Cuirassier was hit by a British roundshot and the Prince involuntarily jumped as, magnified in his lens, the steel clad horseman seemed to explode in blood and metal. The Lancers and Hussars, cantering behind, divided to pass the butcher’s mess left on the ground.

“They’re going for Halkett’s brigade, sir,” Rebecque warned.

“Then tell Halkett to form square!” The Prince’s voice was suddenly high-pitched, almost sobbing. “They’ve got to form square, Rebecque!” he shouted, spraying Rebecque with spittle. “Tell them to form square!”

“It’s too late, sir. It’s too late.” The French were already closer to the infantry brigade than any of the Prince’s staff. There was no time to send any orders. There was no time to do anything now, except watch.

“But they’ve got to form square!” the Prince screamed like a spoilt child.

Too late.

The French cavalry was led by Kellerman, brave Kellerman, hero of Marengo, and veteran of a thousand charges. In most of those charges he had led his men steadily forward, not going from the canter to the gallop till he was just a few yards from the enemy, for only by such discipline could he guarantee that his horsemen would crash in an unbroken line against the enemy.

But this evening he knew that every second’s delay would give the redcoats a chance to form square and that once they were in square his horsemen were beaten. A horse would not charge a formed square with its four ranks bristling with muskets spitting fire and bright with bayonets. The horses would swerve round the square, receiving yet more fire from its flanks, and Kellerman had already lost too many men to the British squares this day.

But these redcoats were in line. They could be attacked from their flank, from their front and from behind, and they must not be given time to change formation and thus Kellerman abandoned the discipline of a slow methodical advance and instead shouted at his trumpeters to sound the full charge. Damn the unbroken line hitting home together; instead Kellerman would release his killers to a bloody gallop and loose them to the slaughter.

“Charge!”

Now it was a race between Cuirassiers, Hussars and Lancers. The Cuirassiers raked their horse’s flanks and let their heavy horses run free. The Lancers dropped their points and screamed their war cries. The sound of the charge was like a thousand demented drummers as the hooves beat the earth and churned up a mass of blood and soil and straw that flecked the sky behind the four charging lines, which slowly unravelled as the faster horses raced ahead. A cannon-ball screamed between the horses, ploughed a furrow and disappeared southwards. A Lancer swerved round a dead skirmisher. The Lancer’s gloved hand was tight on his weapon’s grip which was made from cord lashed about the long ash staff. The lance’s blade was a smooth spike of polished steel, nine inches long and sharpened like a needle. A shell erupted harmlessly in front of the leading horsemen; the smoke of its explosion whipping back past the galloping killers. A red-plumed trumpeter played mad wild notes. Ahead, beyond the Cuirassiers, the redcoats seemed frozen in terror. This was a ride to death, to a triumph, to the glory of the best and most lethal cavalry in all the world.

“Charge!” Kellerman bellowed, the trumpeters echoed his call, and the French torrent surged on.

“Oh, God. Dear God!” Lieutenant-Colonel Joseph Ford gazed into the battlefield and saw nightmare. The rye was filled with horsemen and the evening light was glinting off hundreds of swords and breastplates and lance heads. Ford could hear the drumming sound of the earth being beaten by thousands of hooves, and all he could do was stare and wonder what in God’s name he was supposed to do about it. A small part of his brain knew he was supposed to make a decision, but he was paralysed.

“Cavalry!” d’Alembord shouted unnecessarily. His skirmishers were racing back to the battalion. D’Alembord, like any good skirmish officer, had abandoned his horse to fight with his men on foot, and now he was running like a flushed hare from the threat of hunters. He could scarcely believe the speed with which the enemy horsemen had erupted from the dead ground beyond the highway.

“We should form square?” Major Micklewhite, his horse next to Ford’s, suggested to the Colonel.

“Are they French?” Ford had nervously plucked offhis spectacles and was frenetically polishing their lens on his sash.

For a second Micklewhite could only gape at the Colonel. He wondered why on earth Ford should suppose that British cavalry might be charging the battalion. “Yes, sir. They’re French.” Major Micklewhite’s voice was edged with panic now. “Do we form square?”

Sharpe had ridden forward, taking position just behind d’Alem-bord’s men who were hastily ranking themselves on the left of the battalion’s line. At the right flank of the line, where the Grenadier Company was nearest to the French, an avalanche of cavalry was storming at the battalion’s open flank. More cavalryman were slanting in to the battalion’s front. To Sharpe’s left, beyond the 33rd, the 30th were already forming square, though the 33rd, like the Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers, seemed frozen in line.

“We should form square!” Major Vine, the battalion’s senior Major, shouted at Ford from the right of the line.

“Get out of here, Dally!” Sharpe called to d’Alembord, then raised his voice so all the men of the battalion could hear him. “Run! Back to the trees! Run!”

It was too late to form square. There was only one chance of living, and that was to gain the shelter of the wood.

The men, recognizing Sharpe’s voice, broke and fled. A few sergeants hesitated. Colonel Ford tried desperately to hook his spectacles into place. “Form square!” he called.

“Square!” Major Vine yelped at the closest companies. “Form square!”

“Run!” That was Harper, once Regimental Sergeant-Major of this battalion, and still the possessor of a pair of lungs that could jar a regiment from eight fields away. “Run, you buggers!”

The buggers ran.

“Move! Move! Move!” Sharpe galloped along the front of the line, slashing with the flat of his sword to hasten the redcoats back towards the tree line. “Run! Run!” He was racing straight towards the enemy’s charge. “Run!”

The men ran. The colour party, encumbered by the heavy squares of silk, were the slowest. One of the Ensigns lost a boot and began limping. Sharpe slammed his horse between the Sergeants whose long axe-bladed spontoons protected the flags and he grabbed a handful of silk with his left hand and speared his sword into the King’s colour on his right. “Run!” He spurred the horse, dragging the two flags behind him. The first refugees were already in the trees where Harper was shouting at them to take firing positions.

A sergeant screamed behind Sharpe as a Cuirassier stabbed a sword down, but the Sergeant’s long spontoon tripped the Frenchman’s horse that sprawled down into the path of a Lancer who was forced to rein in behind the thrashing beast. An Hussar galloped in from the left, aiming at the colours, but Major Mickle-white slashed from horseback and the Hussar had to parry. He drove Micklewhite’s light sword aside, then thrust with his sabre’s point to slice Micklewhite’s throat back to bone. The Ensign who had lost his boot was ridden over by a Cuirassier whose heavy horse smashed the boy’s spine with its hooves. A lance, thrown like a javelin, ripped the yellow silk of the regimental colour, then hung there to be dragged along the ground. Two more Lancers spurred forward, but their attack came close to the trees where Patrick Harper lurked with his seven-barrelled gun. His one shot emptied both saddles and th’e very noise of the huge weapon seemed to drive the other Frenchmen away in search of easier pickings.

Sharpe ducked his head, struck back with his heels, and his horse crashed through a patch of ferns and into the trees. He dropped the one colour and shook the other off his sword, then wrenched the horse savagely about in expectation of French horsemen close behind.

But the French had swerved away. They had caught a handful of the slower men and cut them down, and they had killed many of the mounted officers who had stayed behind to shelter the running redcoats, but now the French horsemen feared becoming entangled in the thick wood where the trees would blunt the force of their charge, and so they spurred on for easier prey. Behind them they left Major Micklewhite sprawled dead in a pool of his own blood. Captain Carline was dead, as were Captain Smith and three lieutenants, but the rest of the battalion was safe in the shelter of the wood.

The 33rd, next in line to the Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers, had also run to the wood while beyond them the 30th had formed a rough square that proved solid enough to stand like an island amidst the torrent of French cavalry that split either side of the redcoats. The cavalry ignored the men of the 30th because beyond their crude square the 69th had neither run nor formed squre, but was just standing in line with muskets levelled as the full might of Kellerman’s cavalry, cheated of its first three targets, thundered straight for them.

“Fire!” a major shouted.

The muskets crashed smoke. Ten Cuirassiers went down in a maelstrom of blood, steel and dying horses, but there were more Cuirassiers on either flank and a rage of Lancers and Hussars were storming in behind the armoured vanguard.

The Cuirassiers hit the open flank of the 69th. A man lunged up with a bayonet, then died as the sword split his skull. The heavy horses slammed into the red ranks that broke apart like rotten wood. The infantry were scattering, thus making themselves even more vulnerable to the enemy blades.- The French were in front, behind and chewing up the battalion’s flanks with slashing swords that dripped red with every grunting heave.

Then the Lancers struck into the shattered battalion and the redcoats screamed as the horsemen rode clean over the breaking line. The Frenchmen were shouting incoherently. A Lancer threw a corpse offhis spear point, then stabbed again. Some infantrymen had broken free and were running to the woods, but they were easily ridden down by Lancers and Hussars who galloped up behind, chose their spot, then stabbed or sliced or hacked or lunged. For the French it was no more difficult that hacking or lunging at the practice sacks of chaff with which they had been trained at their depots at home.

A knot of redcoats gathered round their battalion’s colours. There were sergeants with their long-shafted axes, officers with swords and men with bayonets. The French clawed and hacked at the defenders. Lancers rode full tilt at them, grunting as they drove their spears home. One lance struck home with such force that.the red and white flag beneath its long blade was buried in the victim’s body. A dismounted Cuirassier hacked at the colours’ defenders till he was shot in the face by an officer’s pistol. An Hussar’s horse reared up, hooves flailing, then lunged forward into the knot of men. Two officers went down under the slashing hooves. The Hussar cut down with his sabre. A bayonet raked his left thigh, but the Frenchman did not feel the wound. His horse bit a man, the sabre hissed again, then the Hussar dropped the blade so that it hung from his wrist by its leather strap and he grabbed the staff of one of the colours. The other colour had disappeared, but the Hussar had his gloved hand round the remaining staff. Two men drove bayonets at him. A spontoon wounded his horse, but the Hussar held on. A burly British sergeant tugged at the staff. A Lancer crashed his horse into the melee, trampling wounded and living alike, and lunged his weapon at the stubborn Sergeant. The lance point drove into the Sergeant’s back, but still the Englishman hung on, but then a Cuirassier, riding in from the far side, hacked his sword down through the man’s shako and into his skull. The Sergeant fell.

The Hussar tugged at the colour’s staff. A British major seized the colour’s silk and stabbed at the Hussar with a sword, but another Lancer came from the right and his blade caught the Major in his belly. The Major screamed, his sword dropped, and the colour came free. The Hussar was bleeding from a dozen wounds, his horse was staggering and bloody, but he managed to turn the beast and he held the British colour high above his head. The rest of the French cavalry was thundering past, charging at the crossroads where yet more infantry waited to be broken, but the Hussar had his triumph.

The 69th was destroyed. A few men had run to safety, and a few still lived in a pile of bodies so drenched and laced with blood that no cavalryman dreamed that any man could still be alive in the stinking heap, but the rest of the battalion had been broken and cut into ruin. Men had died at lance point, or been slashed open by sabres, or pierced by the long straight swords of the Cuirassiers. The battalion, which moments before had been rigid in its formal line, was now nothing but a scattered mess of bodies and blood. There were hundreds of bodies: dead, creeping, bleeding, vomiting, weeping. The cavalrymen left them, not out of pity, but because there seemed no one left to kill. It was as if a slaughterhouse had been upended on this corner of a Belgian field, leaving cuts of meat and spills of blood that steamed in the warm humid air.

The victorious cavalry charged on to the crossroads where the newly arrived artillery greeted them with double-shotted barrels, and the infantry battalions waited in square, and thus it was the Frenchmen’s turn to die. The infantry aimed at the horses, knowing that a dead horse was a. dismounted man who could be picked off afterwards. For a few moments the cavalry milled about in front of the guns and volley fire, but then Kellerman’s trumpeters called for the retreat and the French, their charge done, turned for home.

Slowly, the few survivors of the 69th crept from their shelter in the trees or pushed the dead away. One man, driven to near madness by the memory of the swords and by his brother’s blood that had near choked him as he lay beneath the corpse, knelt in the stubble and wept. A sergeant, holding his guts into his sabre-slashed belly, tried to walk to the rear, but fell again. “I’m all right, I’m all right,” he told a rescuer. Another sergeant, blinded by a Cuirassier and pierced in the belly by a lance, cursed. A lieutenant, his arm hanging by a shred of gristle, weaved as if drsunk as he staggered among the bodies.

Survivors pulled the bodies of the living and the dead away from the King’s colour. Next to it was the Major who had made the last despairing effort to save the regimental colour. He was dead, pierced deep through his stomach by a lance that was still embedded in his spine. The Major was wearing white silk stockings and gold-buckled dancing shoes, while stuck in his shako’s badge, and strangely untouched by any of the blood which had sheeted and soaked and drenched the pile, was an ostrich feather. A soldier plucked the grey feather loose, decided it was of no value, and tossed it away.

A quarter mile to the south a bleeding French Hussar on a wounded horse rode slowly back to his lines. In his right hand he carried the captured colour which he punched again and again at the smoke-skeined air, and with each triumphant punch he called aloud an incoherent shout of victory. His friends followed and applauded him.

From the trees Sharpe watched the Frenchman ride south. Sharpe had dismounted and was standing at the tree line with his loaded rifle. The Hussar was easily within range. Harper, with his own rifle, stood beside Sharpe, but neither man raised his gun. They had once come off a field of battle with an enemy colour, and now they must watch another man have his triumph.

“He’ll be an officer by nightfall,” Harper said.

“Bugger deserves it.”

Behind Sharpe the Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers were white-faced and scared. Even the veterans who had endured the worst of the Spanish battles stood silent and bitter. They were frightened, not of the enemy, but of their own officers’ incompetence. Colonel Ford would not go near Sharpe, but just sat his horse under the trees and wondered why his right hand was shaking like a leaf.

D’Alembord, his sword still drawn, walked up to the two Riflemen. He stared past them at the captured colour of the 69th, then shook his head. “I came to thank you. If you hadn’t given the order to run, we’d be dead. And I’ve just been made a major.”

“Congratulations.”

“I’m pleased too.” D’Alembord spoke with a bitter sarcasm. He had wanted promotion, indeed it was the prime reason he had stayed with the battalion, but he resented the sudden price of his majority.

“You’re alive, Peter,” Sharpe consoled his friend, “you’re alive.”

“The bloody man.” D’Alembord stared savagely towards Ford. “The bloody, bloody man. Why didn’t he form square?”

Then, to the north, a bugle sounded. Fresh troops were visible at the crossroads, a mass of men who marched forward to make a new line across the battlefield. The horse artillery was among the infantry and, to their left, there was an impressive nia.ss of horsemen. The British cavalry had at last arrived.

“I suppose we’ve won this battle!” D’Alembord slowly sheathed his sword.

“I suppose we have,” Sharpe said.

But it felt horribly like a defeat.

Drums sounded, bayonets were levelled, and the newly formed British line marched forward. The infantry trod across the scorched straw, over the smears of blood, and around the dead and the dying bodies of horses and men.

From the southern end of the wood, where Saxe-Weimar’s men had held through the day, the Guards division attacked the western farms. The French infantry fought back, but could not hold. In the centre the redcoats marched through the stream, recaptured Gemioncourt farm, and went on up the slope. At the far left of the battlefield the Rifles drove the French back to recapture the eastern farms.

Every inch of ground that Marshal Ney had taken during the afternoon was regained. The British line, supported by guns and cavalry, ground on like a behemoth. The French, suddenly outnumbered, were forced to retreat towards Frasnes. Quatre Bras had held and the road to the Prussians was still open. The battle between Napoleon and Blücher still sounded loud in the summer’s evening, but that too faded away as the shadows of the western clouds lengthened dark across the landscape.

Lord John Rossendale, riding behind the British light cavalry, stopped where a Cuirassier’s body was sprawled beside the road. The man’s guts had been flayed clean from his belly and now lay in a blue-red dribble across fifteen feet of the highway’s churned surface. Lord John wanted to vomit, but only choked. He gasped for breath and twisted his horse away. A dead British skirmisher lay in the trampled rye. his skull laid open by a bullet. Flies were thick on the exposed brains. Next to the dead man was a French Voltigeur, blood thick in his belly and lap. The man was alive, but shivering with the trauma of his wound. He stared up at Lord John and asked for water. Lord John felt faint with shock. He turned his horse and galloped towards the crossroads where his servants were preparing supper.

In the barns behind the crossroads the surgeons were at their grisly work with knives and saws and probes. The amputated arms, hands, and legs were tossed into the farmyard. Lanterns were hung from the barn beams to light the operations. A Highlander, his right calf shattered by a French cannon-ball, refused to bite the leather gag and made not a sound as a surgeon took his leg off at the knee.

Sharpe and Harper, knowing they were not welcome to stay near the brooding Lieutenant-Colonel Ford, walked their horses back down the flank of the wood, but stopped well short of the crossroads. “I suppose I’m out of work,” Sharpe said.

“The bugger’ll want you back in the morning.”

“Maybe.”

The two Riflemen tethered their horses in a clearing among the trees, then Sharpe walked out to the bloody patch of ground where the 69th had died. He picked up four discarded bayonets and took the leather bootlaces off two corpses. Back in the wood he made a fire with twigs and gunpowder. He stuck the bayonets into the ground at the four corners of the fire, then pulled the straps off the Cuirassier’s breastplate that Harper had scavenged earlier. He threaded the bootlaces into the holes at the shoulders and waist of the breastplate, then waited.

Harper had taken his own knife out to the battlefield. He found a dead horse and cut a thick bloody steak from its rump. Then, the steak dripping in his left hand, he crossed to one of the silent British guns and, ignoring its crew, stooped under the barrel to scrape away a handful of the gun’s axle grease.

Back in the wood Harper slapped the axle grease into the upturned breastplate, ripped the pelt off the steak, then dropped the meat into the cold grease. “I’ll water the horses while you cook.”

Sharpe nodded acknowledgement. He fed the fire with branches he had cut and split with his sword. In the morning, before the army marched to join Blücher, he would find a cavalry armourer to put an edge back on the blade. Then he wondered whether he would even be with the army next day. The Prince had dismissed him so he might as well ride back to Brussels and take Lucille to England.

Sharpe tied the breastplate to the four bayonets so that it hung like a steel hammock above the flames. By the time Harper brought the horses back from the stream the steak was sizzling and smoking in the bubbling grease.

Night was falling across the trampled rye. Nine thousand men had been killed or wounded in the fight for the crossroads, and some of the injured still moaned and cried in the darkness. Some bandsmen still searched for the wounded, but many would have to wait till the next day for rescue.

“Rain tomorrow.” Harper sniffed the air.

“Like as not.”

“It’s good to smell proper food again.” A dog ranged near the fire, but Harper drove it away by shying a clod of earth at it.

Sharpe burned the meat black, then carefully cut it in halves and speared one piece on his knife. “Yours.”

They held their meat on knife points, gnawed it down, and shared a canteen of wine that Harper had taken from a dead French Lancer. In the east the first stars pricked pale against a sky still misted by battle smoke. In the west it was darker, made so by the towering clouds. Men sang behind the crossroads while somewhere in The wood a flautist made a melancholy music. The trees sparkled with camp-fires, while to the south, and reflecting against the spreading clouds, a red glow showed where Marshal Ney’s troops made their bivouacs.

“Crapauds fought well today,” Harper said grudgingly.

Sharpe nodded, then shrugged. “They should have attacked with their infantry, though. They’d have won if they had.”

“I suppose we’ll be at it again tomorrow?”

“Unless the Prussians have beaten Boney and won the war for us.”

Sharpe fetched a flask of calvados from his saddlebag, took a swig and handed it to Harper. The flute music was plangent. He had once wanted to learn the flute, and had thought to make an attempt this last winter, but instead he had spent the evenings making an elaborate cradle from applewood. He had meant to decorate the cradle’s hood with carvings of wild flowers, but he had found their intricate curves too difficult to cut so had settled for the straight stark lines of piled drums and weapons. Lucille had been hugely amused by her baby’s martial cot.

“Shouldn’t you go and see the Prince?” Harper asked.

“Why the hell should I? Bugger the bastard.”

Harper chuckled. He sat with his back propped against his saddle and stared into the dark void where the battle had been fought. “It’s not the same, is it?”

“What isn’t?”

“It’s not like Spain.” He paused, thinking of the men who were not here, then named just one of those men. “Sweet William.”

Sharpe grunted. William Frederickson had once been a friend almost as close as Harper, but Frederickson had tilted a lance at Lucille, and lost, and had never forgiven Sharpe for that loss.

Harper, who disliked that the two officers were not on speaking terms, offered the flask to Sharpe. “We could have done with him here today.”

“That’s true.” Yet Frederickson was in a Canadian garrison, just one of the thousands of veterans who had been dispersed round the globe, which meant that the Emperor must be fought with too many raw battalions who had never stood in the battle line and who froze like rabbits when the cavalry threatened.

Far to the west a sheet of lightning flickered in the sky and thunder grumbled like a far sound of gunnery. “Rain tomorrow,” Harper said again.

Sharpe yawned. Tonight, at least, he was well fed and dry. He suddenly remembered that he was supposed to have been given Lord John’s promissory note, but it had not come. That was a problem best left for the morning, but for now he wrapped himself in the cloak that was Lucille’s gift and within a few minutes he was fast asleep.

And the Emperor’s campaign was forty-one hours old.