‘So what do you want to do?’ Sharpe asked Harper.
‘We can go, you mean?’ Harper sounded vaguely surprised.
‘There’s nothing to keep us here, is there?’
‘I suppose not,’ Harper agreed, though neither man moved. To the left of the château the valley was still oddly unscarred by the battle. The only French attack on the main British line had come in the east, not here in the west, and the only scars in the patchy field of wheat and rye were black marks where some shells had fallen short and scorched the damp and rain-beaten crops. French infantry was thick about Hougoumont, and a mass of men were closing on La Haye Sainte, yet between those bastions the valley lay empty beneath the screaming passage of the French bombardment.
‘So where the hell are the bloody Prussians?’ Harper asked irritably.
‘God knows. Gone to a different war, perhaps?’
Harper turned to stare at the British infantry who lay patient and unmoving beneath the flail of the French guns. ‘So where will you go?’ he asked Sharpe.
‘Fetch Lucille and go back to England, I suppose.’ Lucille would have to wait to go home and, Sharpe thought, the wait could prove a very long one for if this battle was lost the Austrians and Russians might make peace with Napoleon and it could take years to forge another alliance against France. Even if today’s battle was won it could still take months for the allies to destroy what remained of the Emperor’s armies.
‘You could wait in Ireland?’ Harper suggested.
‘Aye, I’d like that.’ Sharpe took a piece of hard cheese from his saddlebag and tossed a lump of it to Harper.
A shell bounced off the ridge nearby and whirled its fuse crazily in the air to leave a mad spiral of smoke. The shell landed, spun in a mud bowl for a second, then simply died. Harper watched it warily, waiting for the explosion that did not come, then he looked back to the French-held ridge. ‘It seems a shame to leave right now.’ Harper had come to Belgium because the British army and its war against an Emperor had been his whole adult life and he could not relinquish either the institution or its purpose. He might be a civilian, but he thought of himself as a soldier still, and he cared desperately that this day saw victory.
‘You want to stay here, then?’ Sharpe asked, as though he himself did not much care either way.
Harper did not answer. He was still staring across the valley, staring through the scrims of smoke, and as he stared his eyes grew wide as gun muzzles. ‘God save Ireland!’ His voice was full of astonishment. ‘Christ in his cups, but will you just look at that?’
Sharpe looked and, like Harper, his eyes widened in amazement.
All the damned cavalry in all the damned world seemed to be spilling down the far side of the gentle valley. Regiment after regiment of French horse was threading the spaces between the enemy’s artillery batteries to form up in the undisturbed fields of rye and wheat. The sun was breaking through the shredding clouds to glint on the breastplates and the high-crested helmets of the Cuirassiers. Behind the Cuirassiers were Lancers, and behind them were even more horsemen. Every cavalry uniform in the Empire was there: Dragoons, Carabiniers, Hussars, Chasseurs, all forming their long lines of attack behind the Lancers and Cuirassiers.
Sharpe trained his telescope on the far ridge. He could see no infantry. There had to be infantry. He searched the smoke clouds, but still found none. A charge by horse alone? And where were the French gunners? The cavalry, after all, would force the British infantry to form squares which made wonderful targets for gunners and infantrymen, but the cavalry could not hope to destroy the squares by itself. Or did the French believe this battle already won? Had the Emperor reckoned that no troops, so battered by gun-fire, would stand against his prized cavalry? ‘There’s no infantry!’ Sharpe said to Harper, then turned to shout a warning of cavalry to the nearest British battalion, but their officers had already seen the threat and all along the British line the battalions were climbing to their feet and forming squares.
While on the far side of the valley the Cuirassiers drew their swords. The sun rippled down the long line of steel. Behind them the red and white flags of the Lancers pricked the smoke scrims. Harper was entranced by the sight. It was like something from a saga, a legend of old battles come to flesh and steel. Half a battlefield was filled with the glory of cavalry; with plumes and crests and leopard skins and flags and blades.
Brigade officers were galloping among the newly formed British squares, ordering some battalions further back so that the unwieldy formations were staggered like a draught board. Now the flank of one square could not fire on the face of another, and wide spaces were left between the battalions so that the enemy horse could flow freely between the squares. Batteries of the Royal Horse Artillery placed their cannon in the wide spaces and loaded with roundshot. They would have preferred to have double-shotted their cannon, but the lighter guns of the horse artillery would not survive the extra strain. The gunners’ horse teams were taken far behind the squares to where British and Dutch light cavalry waited to tackle any French horsemen who survived the passage through the wicked maze of men, muskets and cannon-fire.
The French gun-fire was undiminished and, because the British were now standing in square, the shells and roundshot which streaked across the ridge’s rim were finding targets. Sharpe watched a cannon-ball strike savagely down one side of a square of Highlanders. At least ten men fell, perhaps more. Another ball struck the face of the square, driving a bloody hole that was instantly filled as the files shuffled together.
‘The buggers are coming!’ Harper warned.
The Cuirassiers walked their heavy horses forward. Behind them were the Red Lancers in their square czapka headgear and the Horse Grenadiers in their tall black bearskins. Further back were the Carabiniers in their dazzling white uniforms, and squadrons of green Dragoons and troops of plumed Hussars. The horsemen covered the far slope, obliterating the dull wet crops with a gorgeous tapestry of shifting colours, nodding plumes, sun-brightened helmets and gold-fringed flags. It was a sight Sharpe had never seen before, not in all his years of soldiering. Even the mounted hordes in India had not matched the splendour of this sight. This was the massed cavalry of an empire assembled on one battlefield. Sharpe tried to count them, but there were just too many men and horses flowing through the filmy drifts of gun smoke. The sun glittered from thousands of drawn swords, raised lances, polished armour, and curved sabres.
The cavalry advanced at a walk. This was how cavalry should attack; not in some madcap rush to glory, but with a steady slow approach that was gradually quickened until, at the last moment, the heavy horses with their steel-clad riders should crash home as one unit. If a horse was shot in its last few galloping strides, then man and horse could slide as dead meat to crumple a square’s face. Sharpe had seen it happen; he had ridden behind the Germans at Garçia Hernandez and watched as a dead horse and dying rider smashed in blood and terror through the face of a French square. All the French were dead at that moment as the following horsemen streamed through the gap to gut the square from its inside outwards.
Yet, if the square was steady and shot at the right time, it should not happen. Each side of a square was formed of four ranks. The two front ranks knelt, their bayonet-tipped muskets driven hard into the ground to make a hedge of steel. The two ranks behind stood with muskets levelled. Once the front two ranks had fired, they did not reload but just held their bayonets hard and steady. The rear ranks could load and fire, load and fire, and the attacking horses, unwilling to charge such an obstacle, would swerve away from the face of the square to be raked by the fire of the square’s flanks.
Yet one dead horse, slithering in mud and blood, could break that theory. And when one square broke its men would run for shelter to another square, fighting their way inside, and the horsemen would ride with them, letting the panicked infantry break the second square’s ranks apart. Then the butchery could continue.
‘The daft bugger misjudged!’ Harper
said with undisguised glee.
The French cavalry commander had formed his attack into a succession of long lines, but too long, for the flanks were approaching the fields of fire from Hougoumont and La Haye Sainte. Those bulwarks that lay like breakwaters ahead of the British line were being besieged by infantry, but their defenders had muskets and rifles enough to fire on the tempting target of the cavalry which was thus forced to contract its line. The wings of the cavalry trotted inwards, thickening the centre of the attack, but also compressing it so that as the horsemen began to climb the British ridge they looked more like a column of horsemen than a charging line. The compression became worse as the horsemen neared the crest and squeezed yet further inwards from the threat of the flanking batteries. The horses were so tightly packed that some were lifted clean off the muddy ground and carried along by their neighbours. The air was filled with the chink of curb chains, the slap of scabbards on leather, the thump of hooves, and the whipping sound of lance pennants flapping.
The British cannons drowned the cavalry’s noise. The first volley came from the nine-pounder batteries on the ridge’s crest. The guns smashed roundshot deep into the compressed formation. The second volley was double shotted and Sharpe, in the deafening echo of the guns’ reports, heard the clatter of the musket-balls striking the Cuirassiers’ breastplates. The gunners reloaded frantically, ramming a last charge of canister down the hot barrels as the French trumpets threw the attack into a canter.
‘Fire!’ A last volley was fired from the threatened guns. Sharpe had a tangled impression of horsemen flailing inwards from the canisters’ strike, then he and Harper turned their horses and raced for the safety of the nearest square. Staff officers who had been positioned on the crest were similarly galloping to safety.
Sharpe and Harper thudded through an opening in a square of Guardsmen that immediately closed ranks behind the two Riflemen. Thirty yards in front of the square a battery of horse artillery waited for the enemy.
The French horsemen were close, but still hidden by the fall of the forward slope, and there followed one of the odd moments of apparent battlefield silence. The French gunners, fearful of hitting their own cavalry, had ceased fire, while the closest British gunners had yet to be given their target. It was not a true silence, for the enemy infantry still snarled and fired around Hougoumont and La Haye Sainte, and the guns in the eastern part of the valley still fired, while closer, much closer, there was the thunderous shaking of uncountable hooves, yet the absence of the murderous enemy bombardment made the moment seem very like silence. There was even a palpable relief that the shells and roundshot had stopped their slaughter. Men drew breath as they waited and watched the empty crest which was topped with dirty smoke.
Somewhere beyond the smoke a trumpet screamed.
‘Hold your fire when you first see Monsewer!’ A mounted Guards major walked his horse behind the face of the square where Sharpe and Harper had taken refuge. ‘Let the bastards get close enough to smell your farts before you kill them! Take that smile off your face, Guardsman Proctor. You’re not here to enjoy yourself, but to die for your King, for your country, and above all for me!’
Harper, liking the Guards officer’s style, grinned as broadly as any of the Guardsmen. The Major winked at Sharpe, then continued his harangue. ‘Don’t waste your powder! And remember you are Guardsmen, which is almost like being gentlemen, so you will behave with good manners! Permit the little darlings to lift their skirts before you give them your balls!’
And suddenly the little darlings were there as the ridge filled with a horde of horses. One moment the skyline was empty, then the world was dominated by cavalry and the sky was pierced by the last fine notes which hurled the Cuirassiers into their gallop.
The close support artillery, exposed in the spaces between the squares, opened fire. The guns slammed back on their trails, spewing mud from their bucking wheels.
Sharpe saw a cannon-ball split the mass of horsemen apart as though an invisible cleaver had chopped through the formation. The gunners were clearing the gun’s barrel, ramming a canister onto a powder charge, and hurling themselves away from the coming recoil.
‘Fire!’ This time a blast of canister flailed a dozen tight-packed horses to the ground, then the artillerymen were abandoning their cannon to seek safety inside the squares. The gunners carried their rammers and portfires with them.
The Cuirassiers could not be stopped by cannon-fire. They flowed round their dead and dying and threw themselves at the squares in a desperate, brave charge. They had believed themselves to be pursuing a broken and fleeing enemy, and their General had promised that the only obstacles between them and the whores of Brussels were a few demoralized Goddamn fugitives, yet now the horsemen discovered they had ridden to a bitter trap. The squares had been hidden behind the crest, the enemy was not broken and running, but instead standing and waiting to fight.
Yet these were the Emperor’s Cuirassiers, his ‘big brothers’, and glory would be theirs if they broke these squares. High above each British battalion hung the colours that, if captured, would give a man eternal fame in an empire’s heaven, and so the horsemen screamed a challenge and lowered the points of their heavy swords.
‘Number One and Two Companies!’ The Guards Major eschewed his jesting as the enemy came close. ‘Wait for my word!’ He paused. Sharpe could hear the horses’ breathing, see the distorted Cuirassiers’ faces beneath their steel visors, then, at last, the Major shouted, ‘Fire!’
The forward face of the square disappeared in white smoke. Musket flames stabbed bright and somewhere a horse squealed in awful, gut-wrenching pain. The two front ranks, not bothering to reload, rammed their musket butts into the ground so that their bayonets made a savage hedge of sharpened steel. The rear two ranks reloaded with the speed of men whose lives depended on their musketry.
There was a pause of a heartbeat while the Guardsmen wondered whether a dead horse would slide in hoof-flailing horror to smash their square’s southern face, then, beyond the fringes of the smoke, the horsemen appeared. They had swerved apart, dividing into streams either side of the square. The horses would not crash home, instead the survivors had veered away to gallop between the squares.
‘Fire!’ That was an officer on the flank of the Guards square. A Cuirassier’s horse was hit in the chest to pump obscenely bright blood as its legs crumpled. The rider, mouth wide open in silent terror, was thrown over its head. Another Cuirassier was being dragged by his stirrup in a spray of blood.
‘Fire!’ The front face of the square volleyed again, and this time the bullets threw back four Red Lancers. The Lancers had been following the Cuirassiers and seeking the safety of the open ground between the squares, which was not safe at all, but a killing ground that led to the volley fire of yet more squares. The horsemen had been beguiled into the maze of death, yet they were brave men and they still dreamed of carrying the Emperor to victory on their lance points. ‘Thrust home! Thrust!’ Sharpe heard a Lancer officer shout at his men, then saw a group of the red-uniformed horsemen swerve towards the square with their weapons held low. ‘Thrust hard!’
‘Fire!’ The Guards Major snapped the command, a blast of smoke blotted out the charging Lancers so that the only evidence of their existence was a terrible high-pitched scream of either man or horse, and as the smoke cleared Sharpe saw only the butchered horses and a man crawling away, and a lance shaft quivering with its point buried in the mud and a horse shaking as it tried to stand.
‘Platoon fire!’ the Guards Colonel called.
‘Aim for the horses!’ A sergeant strolled behind the square’s face. ‘Aim for the horses!’
‘Number One Platoon!’ another major shouted. ‘Fire!’
Now the platoons in the faces of the square fired one after another so that the blasts of smoke and flame seemed to be driven like the hand of a clock. Each volley thickened the smoke about the square’s faces so that the compass of the battle shrank to the few yards visible
through the choking white cloud. The other squares were invisible, hidden behind their own banks of fog. Sharpe could hear their volleys, and hear a piper playing some skirling weird music somewhere to the west. The stream of horsemen galloped through the smoke, and sometimes a brave man would hurl himself at the Guards’ square in a suicidal attempt to force victory out of stalemate. A Lancer tried to ride obliquely at a square’s flank, but a corporal shot him down three paces before his blade would have struck home. Two young Guards Lieutenants competed with their pistols, wagering a month’s pay on who could kill more Frenchmen. A sergeant spotted a Guardsman surreptitiously discarding part of the powder from his cartridge to lessen the pain of the musket’s recoil and the Sergeant struck the man with his cane and promised him real punishment when the battle was over.
Still the horsemen came, the uniforms changing as the rear ranks of the charge followed in the bloody path of the Cuirassiers and Lancers. Carabiniers and Dragoons raced madly through the corridors of slaughter. The attacking streams divided and subdivided as they sought safer passages between the squares.
‘Aim at the horses!’ the Guards Major called to his men. ‘Aim at the horses!’
Harper had his rifle at his shoulder. He tracked a French officer’s horse, fired, and watched man and beast tumble down. A horse was an easier target to hit, and a wounded or dead horse removed a cavalryman just as effectively as shooting the man.
‘Fire!’ Another frontal volley. A horse reared in the smoke between two of the abandoned cannon. Its rider fell backwards and his helmet struck a gun-wheel with a sickening crack. A dying horse drummed the turf with its hooves. An unhorsed Cuirassier scrabbled at his buckles to remove the weight of his armour. Another Cuirassier, fallen on his back, jerked to twist his huge weight of steel out of the cloying mud. A musket bullet spurted mud beside the struggling man. ‘Leave those lobsters alone!’ the Guards Major shouted. ‘They’re out of it! Go for the live ‘uns!’
Sharpe's Waterloo Page 32
