The Edinburgh Dead

Nr Waterloo, Belgium, 1815

A rattle of shots greeted the dawn. It had rained heavily in the night, and they wanted to be sure that their powder had not been spoiled. Doubts dispelled, each man reloaded his gun and settled in to wait for the day’s bloody business to begin.

Adam Quire was twenty-five years old, and had known two things in his life: the farm in the Scottish Borders where he grew up, and war. A war that had been fought and won once already. Uncounted thousands had died on the battlefields of Europe to curb the imperial ambitions of Napoleon Bonaparte, but now the Corsican who would be emperor was returned, escaped from his imprisonment and leading his doting soldiers into battle again. So the men who had thought their task done—and Quire had spent the better part of six years fighting his way through the Iberian peninsula to earn his small claim upon that victory—were summoned once more to give of their flesh and their blood. To make another offering to the ravenous martial gods of the age.

These times, on the cusp of battle, had always seemed distinctively strange to Adam Quire. The certainty that horrors were shortly to be released should have engendered fear, but he often felt a kind of morbid eagerness. An awful storm awaited, just over the horizon of the next minute or the next hour, and until it broke there was no way to see beyond it. The sooner it broke, therefore, the better.

Today, though, there was fear as well, settled deep into Quire’s bones. He was in the final year of his service in the Foot Guards, sated to the point of sickness with death. Tired, in the very depths of his spirit, of watching men die upon the whims of the great and the powerful, for reasons that seemed ever more unclear. He had thought himself done with it, but instead Napoleon had come back, and now there was no future to reach for, save this one day and its inevitable savageries.

He was not the only one possessed of dark premonitions. The red-jacketed soldier at his side was clumsily crossing himself.

“You’re no papist, Jamie,” Quire muttered. “Not last I heard. All that crossing’ll not serve you.”

“Who knows?” Jamie Boswell said indignantly. “I’ll take anything I can get today. It’s going to be a bad one. I can feel it in my bowels.”

“If you’re feeling it in there, that’s fear, not foresight. Don’t shit yourself, for Christ’s sake. There’ll be stink enough about here soon, without your adding to it.”

“Craigie’s at it already,” Jamie observed, nodding along the wall.

One of the men had broken away from his post and was squatting in a corner of the neat garden, his trousers round his ankles.

“Aye, well,” said Quire. “It takes everyone a wee bit different. You just think on keeping yourself alive, and making a few Frenchmen dead.”

Jamie Boswell was young, barely a year into his uniform. Quire liked him. He was soft, untarnished and straightforward, as Quire imagined he himself must have been when so freshly come to this cruel calling, though his memories of those first months were all but buried beneath the weight of what had happened since. As was the sense of any point or purpose to all the slaughter.

Quire looked out over the wall. The woods to the south, and the orchard to the east, were quiet. Beautiful, in fact. The trees were heavy with leaves, shifting slightly in the breeze like verdant clouds tethered to the ground. Here and there beneath the canopy of the woodland, Quire could see men moving. There were Hanoverians and Nassauers out there in the plantation, which pleased him considerably. They were decent soldiers, and more importantly they were between him and the French. Whatever pose he might strike for Jamie Boswell, Quire shared all the younger man’s instinctive trepidation. This day just begun had the feel of a bad one, without doubt.

As it turned out, the day meant to be a great deal worse than merely bad, but it was in no hurry to reveal the true extent of its horrors. The morning ground slowly and dully along, and nobody came to kill the men in the walled garden, or amongst the trees outside, or in the great complex of farm buildings.

It was a farm unlike anything Quire had known in Scotland: a manor—or château as the officers insisted upon calling it—known as Hougoumont, with barns and sheds and workers’ houses all laid out around two yards. And the great walled garden in which Quire and his fellows grew increasingly restive as uneventful hour followed uneventful hour. They warmed themselves about fires, and shared meagre rations of bread, and spoke little. A pall of unreality, an inexpressible feeling of the world being adrift in a formless void between consequential moments, settled over them.

But the storm did break, in time, and it did so with fearful wrath. It began with thunder, of the cruel sort made by men and their machinery of war. The boom of cannon rolled across the fields, like waves crashing on an unseen shore. It quietened the garrison of Hougoumont, each man looking up and out by instinct, searching for the telltale pall of smoke, or the black blurs of cannonballs in flight. But they were not the target of the barrage; not yet.

The Foot Guards, Quire amongst them, had spent the evening before digging out loopholes in the walls of the garden with their bayonets, and constructing crude firing platforms behind them from whatever material they could strip from the houses and outbuildings. They stood there now, peering out through the holes punched in the wall, leaning over the top of it, listening to the dull, endless peals of cannon, and knew they would not have long to wait.

The real killing started in the woodlands to their south. They could not see it, but its signs were clear. The rattle of musket fire amongst the trees; smoke boiling up through the canopy; shouting, and screaming, and the beating of feet upon the soft earth.

“They’ll hold them,” Jamie breathed.

He was crouched down behind the wall, hugging his musket to him. His voice was unsteady, trembling with that fretful blend of hope and fear that Quire had heard in so many others over the years.

“Maybe,” Quire muttered.

He stared out towards the trees. He could imagine what it was like in there, how foul it would be. Fighting close, seeing the eyes of the man who meant to kill you. Bayonet work. Muskets wielded as bone-breaking clubs. Too much of the fighting he had done all across Portugal and Spain had been like that: chaotic, hand-to-hand, merciless. He excelled at it, the savage business of killing, but the burden of it, the misery of it, had only grown over time. A pity, that a man should be so good at something he loathed.

The battle in the woods came closer. Men were spilling back out from the plantation, scattering towards the gates into the farm complex, or around it entirely, hurrying back towards the main lines. It went on and on.

“Oh fuck,” Jamie murmured over and over. “Oh, fuck.”

“Shut up,” Quire said eventually, softly, “or I’ll fuck you myself.”

And then it was the French, streaming out from under the trees in their dark jackets, shouting, running across the narrow stretch of open ground beneath the walls. The Foot Guards spat fire and musket balls at them, flames and smoke churning along the top of the wall as volley after volley went out, laying down men like so many windblown trees. Quire fired once, twice, thrice. Jamie never rose from his crouch. The wave of the attack broke on those rocks of lead and fire.

A pause. A space between furies. Men laughed. A few dared to imagine they had already faced the worst, and would be spared now. Somewhere, someone was crying, but Quire did not look to see who it was, or why. You did not seek out such sights.

From that moment, that quiet interlude, the day raced down into the darkness. Across a great stretch of land eastward from Hougoumont, titanic battle ranged. Armies tore at one another, charged and counter-charged. War swallowed up that one piece of the world and carried it off, for a span of time, to its own place where all else was in abeyance and nothing of any consequence existed save the clash of wills and of bodies and of flesh and steel.

At Hougoumont, the French came, again and again. They flooded up to the walls and the gates, lapping at them, clawing at them. Quire fell into the calm emptiness of battle. The inner silence in which thought gave way to ritual. Fire, reload, fire. Over and over, over and over. Breathing always the smoke and grit and dust.

Musket balls and splinters of stone blasted off the wall, filling the air like hornets. Ducking down, reloading, Quire listened to them chattering above his head. Many of the others were firing blind, raising only their guns above their protective bulwark and loosing off shots wildly. That served little purpose. It needed a man to lift his head up there, into the place where the shot was whining and the stone chips flying and the smoke boiling. Some would not do it, and Quire did not begrudge them that.

He did not begrudge Jamie Boswell his fearful paralysis, either. The youth stayed hunkered down, murmuring to himself, wincing now and again. He could never have seen anything like this before, and it seemed only sense to Quire that a man caught up for the first time in such a tempest should choose not to die on behalf of distant folk in their parliaments and palaces.

Not all those present agreed, though. Sergeant Walker was striding along the line of the wall, all bile and bellows. He was a bastard of a man, in Quire’s judgement, but then he had come to feel that way about almost all save the common mass of the soldiery.

“Get up, that man,” Walker howled at Jamie as he went by. “Piss yourself later, boy. King doesn’t pay you to hide.”

“Oh, Christ,” muttered Jamie, and started to rise, but Quire laid a hand on his arm and pushed him down.

Walker had passed on, turning his vitriol upon some other victim.

“You stay put, if that’s what you fancy,” Quire told Jamie. “Sergeant doesn’t get to decide whether the King pays you enough to die for him. You do that for yourself, lad.”

He surged up, got an elbow set on the parapet. He was looking out over a great mass of men, pressed up right to the base of the wall. Hundreds of them, all pushing forwards; some climbing already on the backs of their comrades, or hoisted up by the strength of their arms, scrabbling for handholds to haul themselves over into the gardens.

Quire took measured aim at the nearest of them and fired. Scraps of the man’s uniform were blown off his shoulder and he fell back amongst the throng. Quire spun his musket about in his hands and used the butt to batter at another Frenchman as he tried to get astride the wall.

It was instants from then: snatched moments of consciousness, of awareness, pulled from the frenzy of carnage; offered to Quire as all that would be left of the long, bloody day by way of memory. The few minutes of ethereal quiet that came upon them now and again, unexpectedly. Wilson Dunbar running along the line of defenders, a heavy bucket full of paper cartridges packed with ball and powder in each hand, shouting: “Get your cartridges while you can, boys! Plenty for all!”

And Jamie twisting and shouting at the stocky little soldier’s disappearing back: “Impervious Dunbar! Stay here, stay with us. Give us a bit of your luck.”

The French coming again, more fiercely than ever. Sounds of chaos rising up from the farm buildings, so that everyone thought for a time they were fallen. But no; the struggle there receded, that around the gardens thickened. Quire stabbing a man in the face with his bayonet.

The gardens themselves, ruined, churned to bare earth and debris. The little low hedges, cut in straight lines, trampled by the soldiers running back and forth. The wounded lying there, on what had been flower beds, crying or wailing or dying silently while they waited for someone to take them to the barn where the surgeons were.

Sergeant Walker returning, standing there and screaming at Jamie Boswell, stabbing a rigid, accusing finger at him.

“You will get on your feet, boy, and kill some fucking Frenchmen, or I’ll see you flogged. You mark my words, I will.”

Quire would have turned about and told Walker where to go, but a Frenchman had reached up and had hold of the barrel of his musket, trying to pull it out of his grasp. Quire struggled to twist it into line with the man’s chest.

Jamie Boswell rose at his side, then, and clumsily thrust his own gun over the top of the wall. He fired, punching a ball harmlessly into the earth at the foot of the wall. The surprise and noise of it was enough to loosen the Frenchman’s grip on Quire’s musket. He pulled it free, and shot the retreating figure in the back.

“Reload,” he shouted at Jamie.

Then half of Jamie’s head was suddenly gone, flicked away like a leaf in the wind, leaving Quire a glimpse of bone and brain. Gore splattered his face. Jamie fell in the heavy, limp way a dead man did. For a moment Quire could taste him on his lips, but he wiped his mouth and his eyes clean. He stared down at the young man’s ruined visage. And vomited, heaving up a thin gruel. Something he had never done before, even when faced with worse horrors.

The insistent rhythm of the slaughter carried him numbly on. Scores of corpses piled up outside the walls, flotsam strewn along a shore after a storm. Quire drifted through it now, his mind detached from his body, which mechanically followed the habits the years had taught it. He saw both the seething mass of the French advancing once more, in futile, dogged determination, and Sergeant Walker, retracing his steps, his ire cutting through the raging cacophony.

Quire lifted his musket and set it to his shoulder, and was distantly surprised to find himself hesitating, the barrel of the gun turning away from the disordered ranks of the host assailing Hougoumont, turning towards Walker. He was puzzled by that, and wondered what he meant to do.

A ball hit his musket, close by his face, blowing it apart in his hands. He felt a punch in his left arm as the ricochet went in. A spray of hot powder, wood splinters, across his face like stinging sparks.

Quire staggered back off the firing platform, falling on the lawn. He got to his feet, grasped at the men closest to him, going from one to the next, shouting, “I need a gun, I need a gun.”

They all pushed him away, caught up in their own struggles, their own dance with death, until one looked down at him and grimaced.

“Good Christ, Quire, your arm. Look at your arm!”

Quire looked, and saw the way it was limply trembling, the blood all over the sleeve of his red tunic.

“Get to the barn, Quire. Get that seen to.”

The barn: an island of suffering, yet more peaceful than the storm raging outside its thick walls. The injured lying all about on pallets. The few men there to attend upon them running from one to another, fraught exhaustion and strain engraved upon their faces, the blood of others staining their shirts. Quire fell back on to a straw-leaking mattress, and stared up into the roof beams, listening to the thunder that came deep and low through the stone.

And last, later and last amongst all the frail memories left to him of that day: Quire came to his senses, not knowing for how long he had drifted. He woke to fire. Fire in the roof of the barn, racing along the struts, dropping in great gouts of embers on to the men below. Smoke, not the grey powder stuff of battle, but thick, heavy, choking black smoke, filled the place, curling down the walls and writhing over the wailing injured.

“Get them out!” someone was shouting.

Men were running about at the fringes of Quire’s vision, and all the time he was lying there, staring up into the inferno above him, and feeling that it was he who floated, up above, looking down upon some terrible fire raging in the hull of a boat.

There was a sudden crashing descent: parts of the roof structure collapsing, falling down towards him in a roaring mass of flame and smoke. A huge blow struck the left side of his body, bringing searing heat that made him try to roll away. A burning roof beam pinned him, crushing his injured arm beneath its orange-hot weight. Screaming. Quire screaming, though it took him a moment or two to realise it was him.

Someone pulled at him. He did not know who. He could see nothing any more. Could feel nothing but the white, stultifying agony of his arm.