‘So very soon,’ Rebecque continued placidly, ‘we’re going to retreat. The Duke’s not making too much fuss, because he doesn’t want to start any panic. There’s only this one road we can use, you see, and once the rain starts it’s likely to be difficult going.’
Sharpe remembered Wellington leaning over the map in the Duke of Richmond’s dressing-room. ‘Are we going to Waterloo?’ he asked Rebecque.
The Dutchman seemed surprised that Sharpe had even heard of the village, but nodded. ‘We’re going just to the south of Waterloo, to a place called Mont-St-Jean. We march there today, make a stand there tomorrow, and pray that the Prussians will rescue us.’
‘Rescue?’ Sharpe bridled at the word.
‘Of course.’ Rebecque, as ever, was imperturbable. ‘Blücher has promised that if we make a stand he’ll march to our aid. That’s so long as the French don’t stop him, of course, and undoubtedly they’ll be trying. Yesterday we failed to reach him, so we can only pray that tomorrow he doesn’t repay the compliment. We certainly can’t beat Napoleon on our own, so if Blücher lets us down we’re all beaten.’ Rebecque smiled at his catalogue of bad news. ‘All in all, Sharpe, things are not good. Are you sure you still wish to serve on His Highness’s staff?’
‘I told you, I need the money.’
‘Of course, we may never reach Mont-St-Jean today. The Emperor must realize that he has us at his mercy, so I’ve no doubt he’s hurrying to attack us even now. Might I suggest that you serve as the Prince’s personal picquet on the retreat? If it looks as though the Emperor will break through and destroy us, send word to me. I’d rather His Royal Highness wasn’t taken prisoner because it would be politically very embarrassing. Keep young Doggett as a messenger. Did you have any breakfast?’
‘Some tea.’
‘I’ve got some bread and cold beef in my saddlebag.’ Rebecque turned back towards the crossroads and offered to shake Sharpe’s hand. ‘The knack of being right, Sharpe, is not to show it. It embarrasses the incompetent who rule over us.’
Sharpe smiled and took the offered hand. ‘Then thank God for the Duke of Wellington.’
‘Even he may not be good enough for this predicament. We shall see.’ Rebecque walked back to his horse and used a stone wall by the crossroads as a mounting block. He settled himself in the saddle. ‘Send word if disaster threatens, otherwise, do your best to keep dry.’ He handed the food down to Sharpe, then clicked his tongue and rode northwards.
Sharpe turned to stare east and south. Somewhere under the lowering clouds was the man he had fought against for most of his life, yet had never once seen. The Emperor of France, conqueror of the world, was coming to fight the British at last.
The rain, like the French, held off.
The news of the Prussian defeat spread swiftly. Optimism turned to resignation, then to nervousness as the army realized how precarious was its position. The whole might of the French army was about to be concentrated on Quatre Bras and there was no hope of any help from the Prussians.
The retreat began. One by one the battalions of infantry were despatched towards the crossroads at Mont-St-Jean which lay twelve miles to the north. The men who waited their turn grew increasingly tense; every battalion which escaped north was one battalion less to face the expected French onslaught, which left the rearguard ever more likely to be outnumbered and overwhelmed. Marshal Ney’s troops were still just to the south, and the Emperor was presumably hurrying from the east, yet battalion after British battalion slipped away unmolested as the morning passed without any French attack.
The Duke of Wellington pretended insouciance. For a time he sat on the trampled rye reading a newspaper, and even lay down and slept with its pages over his face. He still slept as the outermost picquets were pulled back, yielding the stream and Gemioncourt farm to the French if they cared to advance. Strangely the French did not move and their camp-fires still burned to drift placid smoke up to the darkening clouds.
By midday those clouds were as looming and threatening as the monsoon skies of India. The windless air was curiously still and heavy, presaging disaster. The last infantry battalions edged towards the road that led northwards out of the unsprung French trap. The horse artillery who, together with the cavalry, would form the British rearguard nervously watched the enemy-held ground, but still no French troops marched from Frasnes or appeared in the east. The only sign of the enemy was their smoke.
‘They always used to do that,’ Harper commented. The Irishman, with Sharpe and Doggett, waited at the edge of the wood by the half-covered grave of the 69th.
‘Do what?’ Doggett asked.
‘Take a morning off after a battle and cook themselves a meal.’
‘Let’s hope it’s a big meal,’ Doggett grinned.
The Guards were the last of the British infantry to march north, leaving only the horse gunners, the cavalry and the staff at the crossroads. That rearguard waited long after the Guards had left, giving the slower infantry a good chance to march well clear of Quatre Bras. Still the French hesitated, and still the rain did not come. The first of the British cavalry trotted north and Sharpe saw the Duke of Wellington at last pull himself into his saddle.
‘Time for us to go too,’ Sharpe said.
A vagary of the storm-threatening clouds caused a rent somewhere in the churning sky and a leprous shaft of sunlight, yellow and misted, slanted down to shine on the highway beside Gemioncourt farm.
‘Dear God!’ Doggett was staring at the curiously bright patch of land beneath the sky’s unnatural blackness.
In which sunlit patch were Lancers.
There were suddenly thousands of Lancers. Lancers in green coats and Lancers in scarlet coats. The farmland had sprouted a thicket of flag-hung spear points that were touched gold by the errant shaft of sunlight.
‘Let’s get the hell out of here!’ Sharpe settled himself into his saddle.
‘No, sir! Look! Look!’ An excited Doggett was standing in his stirrups, pointing south. Sharpe turned back, saw nothing, so pulled his telescope from his saddlebag.
The lens slid past the foreshortened Lancers, back through the dust which their hooves were kicking up from the rye fields, and back up the white highway to where, outlined against the sun brightened crops and illuminated by the wash of errant light, was a single horseman. The man was darkly dressed, mounted on a grey horse, and wearing a cocked hat sideways across his scalp. He was slumped in his saddle, as though he rode unwillingly.
‘It’s him!’ Doggett spoke almost reverently.
‘My God.’ Sharpe’s voice was awed. There, in his glass, was the small plump man who had dominated Europe for the past ten years, a man Sharpe had never seen, but whose form and face and posture were familiar from a thousand engravings and a thousand statues. Sharpe handed the glass to Harper who stared at the far Emperor.
‘It’s Bonaparte!’ Doggett sounded as excited as though he saw his own monarch riding towards him.
‘It is bloody time to get out of here,’ Harper said.
The Lancers climbed the shallow slope from the ford and, in greeting, every waiting British gun was fired.
The cannons crashed back violently. The gun wheels jarred up while the ground quivered with dust. Smoke jetted twenty yards in front of each cannon muzzle while, above the trampled crops, the shell fuses left small white smoke trails that arced towards the line of advancing cavalry. There was a pause, then it seemed as though the Lancers plunged into a maelstrom of exploding shells. Smoke and flame billowed as horses screamed. Sharpe saw a lance cartwheeling above a boiling mass of smoke.
Then, as if to show that man was puny, a sudden wind howled from the north-west. The wind erupted so abruptly that Sharpe half twisted in the saddle, fearing an exploding shell behind him, and as he turned there was a booming discharge of thunder that sounded like the end of time itself. The rift in the clouds closed as though a vast door had slammed in heaven, and the reverberation of the door was the horrendous thunder that h
ammered down at the earth in a deafening cascade. A spear of lightning sliced blue-white into the far woods, and then the rain came.
In an instant the whole battlefield was blotted from sight. It was a cloudburst, a torrent, a seething pelting storm that slashed down to soak the fields and flood the ditches and hiss where it hit the hot barrels of the cannons. Sharpe had to shout to make himself heard over the downpour. ‘Let’s go! Come on!’
Within seconds the field had been churned into a morass. The rain was even heavier than the great sky-shaking storms Sharpe had seen in India. As he led his companions out from the trees’ shelter he had to duck his head against the maniacal force of the wind-whipped torrents that soaked his uniform in seconds. The horses struggled against the gale of rain, their hooves sticking in the glutinous mess of mud and straw. The rainwater sluiced off the fields with its load of precious soil, uncovering the white swollen bodies of the barely buried dead.
Thunder cracked in the sky; a battle of Gods that drowned the man-made sounds of war. The vast explosions rumbled from west to east, rebounded, split the clouds with multiple forks of lightning, and deluged the crouching earth. Sharpe led Harper and Doggett onto the Nivelles road that was now a writhing river of water-carried mud. He could see a troop of cloaked cavalry to his left, and a gun team hitching their weapon to its limber on his right, but any object more than thirty yards away was utterly obscured by the silver shafts of rain that crashed down like shrapnel. Behind Sharpe a gun fired, its sound drowned by the greater violence of the storm.
Sharpe turned onto the main highway. The paved surface was firmer; a causeway out of disaster. The hooves of those cavalry horses who struggled northwards in the flanking fields were clubbed with earth; proof that no gun would escape unless it reached the road.
‘Move! Move! Move!’ Gunners whipped their horses up from the fields onto the road that was swimming with a chalky white effluent. The horses strained, seemingly sensing their masters’ panic caused by the near presence of enemy lancers. Men glanced behind into the storm-blotted landscape, then whipped at the gun teams till at last the horse artillery was clear of Quatre Bras and galloping northwards with blood dripping from the horses’ whipped flanks and water spraying silver off the gun wheels. Sharpe, Harper and Doggett raced with them.
Miraculously no gun was lost. The mad charge was checked at the village of Genappe where the road narrowed as it twisted between the thatched cottages. The delay gave the French pursuit a chance to catch the rearmost guns, but a regiment of British Dragoons turned and charged the Lancers. More French cavalry spurred forward and it took an assault by the heavy Life Guards, the sovereign’s own escort, to drive the Frenchmen away. The Life Guards, scarlet coated and wearing black and gold Grecian cockscomb helmets, hammered at the enemy with their ungainly heavy swords. The sheer weight of the heavy cavalry drove the lighter French horsemen back, giving the guns time to thread the narrow village street.
North of Genappe the French pursuit seemed to lose its ferocity. The rain also slackened, though it was still heavy. Every mile or so the British guns would stop, unlimber, fire a few rounds at their pursuers, then gallop on. The French were never far behind, but did not press home. The British cavalry, Dragoons and Life Guards, hovered on the flanks. Every few moments, when a French squadron trotted close, the British would advance, but each time the French declined to fight. Sharpe was amused to see that if a Life Guardsman tumbled from a slipping horse the man would remount, then hide his soiled uniform in the rear rank of his troop, just as if he was on parade in Hyde Park.
The French managed to bring up some of their own light eight-pounder cannons that opened fire with roundshot. The small cannon-balls fountained a slurry of mud and water wherever they landed. The mud was saving the retreat, not only soaking up the power of the French roundshot, but forcing the French cavalry to stay close to the high road. If the land had been dry the quick light enemy horse could have raced far round the British flanks to come slashing in with lance and sabre on the struggling column, but the mud and rain held them back.
Another weapon came to the British aid. A sudden crashing hiss made Sharpe twist round to see a rocket being fired. He had fought with rockets in Spain, but familiarity did not blunt his fascination with the odd weapon and he watched enthralled as the ungainly missile hurled itself forward on its pillar of flame that scorched the long stick that gave the rocket its balance. Doggett, who had never seen the new and mysterious weapon, was impressed, but Harper shook his head scornfully. ‘They’re guaranteed to miss every time, Mr Doggett. You just watch.’
The first rocket arched in fire across the damp valley to leave a serpentine trail of smoke. The missile fell towards the French guns, then the fuse inside its head exploded and a rain of red-hot shrapnel crashed down to slaughter every man in a French gun crew.
‘Good God Almighty,’ Harper said in astonished wonder, ‘the bloody thing worked!’
Encouraged by their success, the rocket artillery fired a whole barrage. Twelve rockets were fired from twelve metal troughs angled upwards on short legs. The rockets’ fuses were lit, then the rocketmen ran for cover. The missiles began to spew flames and smoke. For a few seconds they quivered in their firing troughs, then one by one they shot up into the wet air. They wobbled at first, then their acceleration hurled them on. Two streaked straight up into the clouds and disappeared, three dived into the wet meadow where their rocket flames seared the wet grass as the missiles circled crazily, five went vaguely towards the French but dived to earth long before they did any damage, and two circled back towards the British cavalry who stared for a second, then scattered in panic.
‘That’s more like it,’ Harper said happily. ‘That’s how they always used to be, isn’t that so, Mr Sharpe?’
But Sharpe was neither listening, nor watching the barrage. Instead he was staring across the highway to where a group of horsemen had scattered frantically away from the rogue rocket’s threat. Lord John Rossendale had been among the small group, but, in his effort to find safety, was now separated from his friends.
‘I’ll join you up the road,’ Sharpe said to Harper.
‘Sir?’ Harper was startled, but Sharpe had already twisted his horse away. And gone.
Lord John Rossendale could not remember being so wet, elated, frightened, or confused. Nothing made sense to him. He expected a battle—and the retreat seemed like a battle to him—to be something orderly and well managed. Officers should give loud confident orders which the men would smartly obey and to which the enemy would dutifully yield, but instead he was surrounded by disorder. Strangely the actors in that disorder seemed to understand what needed to be done. He watched a battery of horse artillery unlimber and go into action. No orders were given that Rossendale could hear, but the men knew exactly what to do, did it with cheerful efficiency, then limbered up to continue their mad careering gallop through the rain. Once, standing his horse in the pelting flood, Lord John had been shocked to hear a voice yelling at him to bloody well move his arse and Lord John had skipped his horse smartly aside only to see that it was a mere sergeant who had shouted. A second later a gun slewed in a spray of mud to occupy the very place where Lord John’s horse had been standing. Ten seconds later the gun fired, appalling Lord John with its sound and the violence of its recoil. In Hyde Park, which was the only place Lord John had ever seen cannons fired before, the polished guns made a decorous bang and, because there was no missile packed down onto the charge, such guns hardly moved at all, but this weapon, dirty, muddy and blackened, seemed to explode in noise and flame. Its wheels lifted clear out of the mud as its trail was driven back like a plough before the tons of metal and wood crashed down and its mud-covered crew ran forward to serve the smoking beast with sponges and rammers.
Yet, curiously, the violence of the discharge seemed very disproportionate to the gun’s effect. Lord John watched the missile’s strike and there would be a gout of mud, perhaps an explosion if the gun had fired shell, but s
o little destruction. Once he had seen a Lancer fall from his horse, but within seconds the man had been on his feet and another Frenchman had quickly rescued the frightened horse.
At Genappe Lord John had been close enough to see the Life Guards charge and he had even spurred forward to join them. He had watched a sword snap a lance shaft like a twig. He had seen a Lancer’s skull crushed by a blade. He had watched a Life Guard twisting like a fish on the point of a lance. He had heard the grunt of a man making a killing lunge, and heard the hiss of air from a wounded trooper’s lungs. He had smelt the sweet thickness of blood and the acrid drift of pistol smoke in the soaking air. Blood from a dying horse spewed onto the road to be instantly diluted by rain. By the time Lord John had drawn his sword and touched his spurs to his horse’s flanks, the French had pulled back leaving a dozen dead and twice as many wounded. It had all been so quick and so confusing, but an acquaintance of Lord John‘s, a Captain Kelly whom Lord John had often met when he was on royal duty, gave his lordship a happy confident smile. ‘Bagged a brace of them!’
‘Well done, Ned.’
‘Once you’re past the lance point it’s a bit like killing rabbits.’ Captain Kelly began wiping the blood off his blade. ‘Too easy, really.’
Lord John tried to imagine slipping past a lance point and found it hard. After the skirmish, riding through the village street, he had seen the fear on the faces of the civilians and he had felt very superior to such muddy drab creatures. Later, north of Genappe, when the French did not pursue so closely, he noticed how nervous both sets of cavalry were of each other. A lot of threats were made, and men would ride belligerently forward as if to provoke the other side, but if there was no clear advantage to be gained for either force, the two sides would disengage without a battle. It was all very odd.
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