Seven Men of Gascony
Page 36
Gabriel took out his knife and cut away the upper half of the breeches. Picking up his musket, he slashed at its leather sling, twisting it into a tourniquet with the knot facing inwards a hand’s breadth above the wound. There was only a ramrod to complete the appliance and he turned Jean onto his side, slipping the ramrod under the sling and twisting until the steady pumping subsided as the tourniquet bit into the flesh. He tucked the end of the ramrod into Jean’s boot and then set to work on his shirt, tearing off strips of the coarse material and bandaging swiftly. That done, he remembered something else and, after groping in the pocket of Jean’s greatcoat, found the brandy flask and held it to the sergeant’s mouth. Jean swallowed twice, jerked back his head and coughed, speaking for the first time since they had left the farmyard.
“You’re left behind, Gabriel.”
The younger man glanced round and saw that the fighting had ceased on the plateau. The red square was still in position, and over on the left he caught a glimpse of a similar formation, three-parts shrouded in smoke. Looking behind, he saw the remains of the French assault column pouring down the incline towards La Haye Sainte, with a brigade of the King’s German Legion in hot pursuit. From the edge of the emplacement Gabriel could see the greater part of the battlefield. Facing right, on the lower slopes of the incline, the upper storey of Hougomont was visible, its garden and farm buildings wreathed in smoke, an unholy din still rising from beneath the pall. Hougomont continued to hold out against Reille’s frantic assaults. On the opposite side of the valley were masses of French troops, mustering for a fresh attack, while to the left, higher up the incline, La Haye Sainte could be seen burning furiously. In the field behind the farm squadrons of cuirassiers were cutting down the men of the German Legion that had just put their own column to flight. The entire valley was dotted with casualties, red and blue about equally divided, with here and there the green of a French lancer or the silver grey of a hussar. Riderless horses were everywhere, wandering aimlessly among the dead or standing patiently beside their former riders. Over the whole valley hung an immense cloud of smoke, drifting lazily towards the north-west. Apart from the minor scrimmage behind La Haye Sainte there was no sign of a battle. All the fighting about Hougomont remained invisible, reaching the plateau only in the form of a confused roar. The sound reminded Gabriel of the crash of breakers on the Devon coast.
Jean said: “See if you can find my pipe.”
Gabriel found his pipe, filled and lit it and stuck it between Jean’s teeth. The sergeant puffed contentedly. The pain did not seem nearly so intense now that the tourniquet was beginning to numb the lower half of his leg.
“How’s it going?” he asked. From his position on the floor of the emplacement he could see nothing but sky.
Gabriel told him, gauging numbers, making guesses at probable movements.
“We’d better stay here awhile,” Jean said presently. “If the English gunners come back they won’t harm us; I never heard of the English mauling wounded. Maybe you’d better play wounded as well.”
Gabriel glanced at the field-piece just above his head and saw that it had been spiked.
Jean said: “They’re good troops, these Englishmen, but they deserve better allies. If Marshal Grouchy turns up before nightfall we’ll roll them up like a row of skittles.”
An eight-pounder screamed over their heads to pitch within a few paces of the square, causing an officer’s horse to rear violently. The ball ricochetted off to the rear.
A moment later a battery opened fire on the far side of the valley, then another, then a third, until the air immediately above them shuddered with the passage of the projectiles, bomb-shells and small-calibre balls mostly, as Gabriel could tell by the pitch of their whine.
They crouched in the trench, heads pressed down to the soil.
“That had to happen,” grumbled Jean. “Lie here and be murdered by our own artillery! How’s their range?”
Gabriel took a series of cautious peeps at the square. It was still in formation, but every now and again, as a ball tore a gap in the closely dressed ranks, the sides of the square billowed like a regiment of poppies in a soft breeze. The French range was excellent and improving all the time.
After about half an hour there was a lull. Jean twisted onto his side and peered across the plateau.
“They’re waiting for our cavalry, poor devils,” he said, “otherwise they wouldn’t keep square.”
Gabriel crawled across the pit and looked over the outer edge. Jean’s guess was correct; masses of French horsemen were moving down the opposite slope and heading for the plateau. The guns were silent whilst the squadrons moved from the French crest, but they opened up again immediately the mass of horsemen had dipped below the muzzles of the guns. Within five minutes more than two hundred guns were in action. Shot tore into the British ranks, while from time to time a ball fell short and struck the soft bank of the voltigeurs’ emplacement, sending a shower of earth and stones into the pit.
“I picked a lively place to get a ball in my leg,” grunted Jean, who, although curled in a grotesque position, went on puffing at his pipe.
Presently the cannonade ceased altogether and another sound replaced the thunder of the guns, a wild rippling cheer heard above the beat of five thousand hooves. The duet grew louder and louder until Gabriel could see Jean’s mouth opening and closing without being able to hear a syllable that the sergeant uttered.
Suddenly the first horsemen gained the plateau, and went racing past the abandoned gun. The next moment Jean and Gabriel cowered under the wheels while an avalanche of cavalry swept over them. Milhaud’s steel-clad cuirassiers, Lefebvre-Desnouette’s chasseurs, Piré’s and Jacquinot’s lancers, mounted grenadiers of the Imperial Guard, a sea of blue, red, yellow and green uniforms, shouting and screaming, at the enemy and one another, as they crouched over their horses’ necks, heading directly for the squares, pouring across the level ground like the vomit of a volcano, overturning everything in their way until they recoiled from the wall of bayonets jutting from the square or piled up under volleys discharged at point-blank range by men who seldom missed at a hundred paces.
For more than an hour the struggle continued, a contest of weight and speed against stolidity, of impotent sword and ill-aimed pistol against steady crackle of musketry, wave on wave of the finest cavalry in the world hurling itself upon the most dogged infantry in the world.
There was no danger now from French artillery, nor dared the reserve batteries of the British open fire. The small force of British cavalry did not ride out to try conclusions with the twelve thousand horsemen cavorting round the squares. Gabriel stood up in the emplacement, leaning against the gun, while Jean, lying on his side with his face towards the squares, forgot the pain of his wound in the grandeur of the spectacle. Rifts in the all-enveloping smoke showed them fleeting facets of the struggle, a redcoat dragged from his place by the sidelong thrust of a lance, an officer of the chasseurs towed round and round the square by his stirrup iron, the maddened horse overturning others in its frenzy, a wall of dead men and horses piling up at the corners of the square where the volleys were fired into close concentrations, wounded cavalrymen trying to crawl clear of the mêlée, and once a glimpse of Ney himself, astride a huge grey horse, endeavouring to rally the shattered squadrons on the edge of the plateau.
More than once during the struggle Gabriel contemplated lifting Jean on his shoulders and starting off down the decline in the direction of La Haye Sainte, but each time he was about to propose the move fresh squadrons of cavalry poured up the slope, barring the way of retreat. It would have been a matter of extreme difficulty to make his way back to the lines alone. Carrying a wounded man, the attempt would have been quite impossible. So they stayed where they were, in comparative safety, and watched the French cavalry batter itself to pieces against the squares.
Jean raged helplessly. “Why don’t they send infantry? In God’s name why don’t they send up the Guard?”
The last of the cavalry drew off, hustled from the plateau by thin squadrons of British dragoons, whose ranks had been decimated by the morning encounter in the valley. The squares shook themselves and cleared away the wounded. Blue-uniformed artillerymen ran towards the abandoned pieces on the crest, where some of the guns quickly opened up on the retreating French.
A British sergeant jumped into the emplacement, but after scanning the spiked touch-hole of the gun jumped out again without so much as a glance in their direction. Gabriel ate a few mouthfuls of bread and tried to coax Jean to eat. The sergeant shook his head sadly.
“It’s all over with us, unless Grouchy moves in,” he said. He settled lower in the pit, wincing, and Gabriel asked if his wound was giving pain.
“I’ve had worse,” he replied. “There’s nothing to a clean bullet wound. This one matches the hole they made in me in Spain. I’m unlucky against the British; the Austrians never left a bullet in me.”
There was activity now behind them. The squares were breaking up, deploying into line. Gabriel wondered if the moment had come for a general advance and glanced across at the distant villages on the French right. The puffs of smoke were still no nearer, but they seemed infinitely more numerous. The whole area between the two patches of woodland was shrouded in smoke. Over at Hougomont the air had cleared a little, while the fighting round the château seemed to have died down. The din was transferred to the opposite side of the valley.
All at once Gabriel stared at the French centre. Two teeming columns of infantrymen were moving down the hill into the valley. The setting sun rippled along the line of shouldered arms, but there was no wide sparkle as there had been when their cavalry flooded the slope. Two solid wedges of bearskins were in motion. The Old and Middle Guard were advancing to carry the plateau, moving obliquely across the valley, heading straight for the enemy’s centre, half-way between Hougomont and La Haye Sainte.
CHAPTER FOUR
The advance of the Guard in the early twilight of Waterloo was more than the final act in a battle or campaign; it was an iron door slamming on the epoch. Nobody was better aware of this than the pale, plump man standing on the knoll before La Belle Alliance. He knew as he gave the order he was asking the Guard to pass from actuality into legend.
There were men on the French side of the valley who looked upon the Guard’s advance as a final card that might, by some extraordinary chance, yet win the game. It was because of this that thousands of exhausted infantrymen with half as many cavalrymen on jaded, sweat-lathered horses took their places alongside the column and marched up the hill, not hopefully but steadfastly, buoyed up by the knowledge that the men in the bearskins and white gaiters had never been defeated, had never failed to sleep on the field of battle.
Nobody in the Imperial army grudged the Guard their right to stand to arms throughout a battle and then march forward at the final moment to gather the first fruits of victory. It was for this reason that the Guard existed; this was their place in the scheme of Imperial conquest. The fact that during the last decade the Guard’s share of fighting had been individual rather than collective excited no rancour in the line regiments. Neither did the guardsman’s special rate of pay, which was accepted as a privilege earned. For without the Guard the Empire could not exist. Ever since Consular days it had been the corner-stone of French strategy.
There were some staff officers around Napoleon that evening who would have held the Guard back in order to cover a retreat, but the Emperor, who had been strangely apathetic since the failure of the first assault, was alert enough now. He knew that there could be no retreat for an army engaged in this gigantic gamble. A retreat would have meant more battles, more campaigns, and, before the summer had passed, a dozen Continental armies would be over the frontier, driving him this way and that, forcing him south of Paris, playing last year’s game again for even higher stakes. It was then or never, but with the Prussians hammering at his flank, and unbroken British squares still on the plateau, the chance of decisive victory was so slim as to be no real chance at all.
It was because he saw this so clearly that he ordered up the Guard and watched, impassively, as the two massive columns marched over the brow of the hill and down into the valley of annihilation.
Along the crest of the plateau the British artillerymen gauged their range as the first of the columns began to mount the slope. The British held their fire without much anxiety. They had been doing this all day, alternately firing and retiring; even if the Guard gained the crest, contemptuous of losses, the gunners could always return to the squares and watch the infantry fight it out in the dusk.
The columns advanced deliberately, marching erect, their officers in the leading files, two solid wedges of white and blue winding across the valley like two lonely tribes of migratory automatons. They marched without hope, but without fear, the sons of pre-Revolutionary peasants who understood nothing but war, who acknowledged no loyalties but to the man who had created them, no family but the House of Bonaparte, no homes but the barracks, men who in twenty years’ campaigning had never once lost their nerve and who even now, under the point-blank discharge of many batteries, did not lose their dressing.
The English artillerymen knew that they were fighting for their lives, but they touched off their guns with reluctance. They had their own traditions, but nothing like this one.
At the first discharge the stragglers broke and ran, horse and foot pouring back into the valley, carrying their officers along with them. The Guard marched on, directly up to the muzzles of the guns lining the plateau.
They got within a few paces of the crest before melting away, raked by crossfire, by a hundred guns firing grape, canister and round shot, and ten thousand muskets, almost all in the hands of marksmen as good as the best of the French tirailleurs.
A dense column of sulphurous smoke rolled into the valley; with it went the tatters of the Guard, reeling, shattered, reduced by two-thirds, groping blindly in the smoke for a place to rally and form square against the tide that would now sweep down from the level ground the moment the redcoats had leisure to deploy.
Facing the Prussians at Planchenoit, the Young Guard still clung to the churchyard, dying among the grey headstones, until their battalions were reduced to one hundred and fifty men. Then, under irresistible pressure, a square moved slowly towards the Charleroi road, its commander, Count Lobau, shouting defiance at Thielmann’s Prussians, who hung on to the fringe of the square like dogs prancing at a tied bear. At the crossroads Count Lobau halted, while his veterans looked dully at the tide of fugitives streaming down the slopes, shouting to one another that all was lost—as indeed it was.
A madman stood on the low bank, steadying himself against the trunk of a scarred tree, waving the stump of a broken sword and screaming at the fugitives to rally, to stand firm, to join the Guard and hold open the road to the south. In the extremity of their despair some of the fugitives threw a passing glance at the madman standing there on the bank, his grey uniform in tatters, his epaulettes blasted away, his face black with powder, and an infantryman, hurrying past, shouted, “Long live Marshal Ney!” The crowd took up the cry, but nobody stopped. After the Guard had fallen back no one wanted to die with Ney, except the men in the square, who were keeping off the fugitives with their bayonets. The tide of men and horses surged past them like a spring torrent cleaving on a granite spur.
Gabriel came upon the square as he blundered along in the ditch, carrying Jean in his arms. The sergeant’s leg was the sourc
e of a hundred furious curses, for the ramrod kept it rigid and his protruding foot constantly came into collision with the press. Each time a man fought his way past, Jean snarled, drawing back his lips and twisting in Gabriel’s grip. Where the square stood in the centre of the highway there was a bottleneck; everyone who recoiled from the bayonets flung themselves at the banks and tried to pass the obstacle by way of the fields.
Gabriel, on the point of exhaustion, saw that he would have to put Jean down and wait until the crowd thinned. It could not be long in thinning, for the Prussians were already driving fugitives up the byroad from Planchenoit. He put Jean down into the ditch and unslung the sergeant’s musket, glancing automatically at the priming. While he was doing this somebody took a firm hold on the skirts of his greatcoat, and, turning round, he saw Jean drag himself to his feet and reach authoritatively for the musket. Gabriel tried to pull it away, but the sergeant began to shout, his high-pitched voice overtopping the uproar.
“Give it to me, it’s mine, damn you; you left yours on the plateau, didn’t you? Give it to me, conscript!”
He was beside himself with rage, his jaw muscles working convulsively. Gabriel gave him the musket and immediately received a push that sent him sprawling, face foremost, into the ditch. Men ran over him and he struggled to his knees dazed and half-stupefied by the pummelling of their boots. He saw that Jean had fought his way into the square and was standing facing him, his bayonet in line with the guardsmen on either side. Jean saw Gabriel, too, and shouted something, but this time his words were carried away on the uproar. As he regained his feet Gabriel caught a fleeting glimpse of the sergeant’s discoloured teeth before a fresh avalanche of fugitives lifted him and hurled him against the rigid bayonets at the corner of the square. His right hand, stretched out instinctively to break his fall, was transfixed on a point and he hung there a moment, his feet off the ground, the bayonet protruding from his knuckles, before another convulsive lurch of the crowd carried him past the square and out on the comparatively open ground beyond.