All in Scarlet Uniform (Napoleonic War 4) (42 page)

Williams ran up the last few yards. He could not believe he was unscathed, but there were Pringle, Dobson and the Spanish sergeant alongside him, and more men swarming up the slope with them, and MacAndrews was still at their head, urging his horse between the boulders and then cutting down with his sabre.

A Frenchman stood, swinging his musket round so that he could jab with the butt at the officer as he bounded up between two big stones. Williams dodged the blow and grabbed the man’s epaulette, jerking hard forward so that the voltigeur was flung back over the crest. Dobson and Rodriguez thrust with their bayonets at almost the same instant. Another French skirmisher came at Williams, this one with a bayonet fixed, and he only just recovered his balance in time to parry the attack, and then he swept his blade back in a wild slash, carving the air at eye level and making the voltigeur jump back. Williams kept going, and behind him more men spilled through the gap between the boulders.

The skirmisher lunged again, making him dodge to the side, and the movement worked the sling of his musket loose so that it rolled off his shoulder and the heavy weight hung off his left elbow. He slashed again, spinning into the backhanded cut, and the voltigeur had put too much weight into the thrust so that Williams’ sword gouged a deep furrow across the side of his face. The skirmisher screamed, dropping his musket, and left himself open as Rodriguez stabbed him in the belly. Another voltigeur appeared, wearing a brown jacket like the others, and Dobson’s musket flamed just beside Williams’ head, the noise hammering at his ears, as the Frenchman was flung back.

Over to their left a cannon fired, but to Williams the noise seemed less terrible than the musket let off just beside him. The canister burst soon after it left the barrel of the four-pounder, spreading a hail of musket-sized balls. Two redcoats and a greenjacket were knocked down, each struck by half a dozen bullets which made little mushrooms of blood fountain on their faces, chests and limbs. The slope was too steep for the gun to fire down at the British as they charged, and the men were hit before the cone from the canister had spread that widely.

The French were giving way. Rodriguez dropped to one knee, steadied himself and then fired, but Williams could not see whether he hit any of the retiring voltigeurs. A man in brown loomed out from behind the boulder on his right and the officer raised his sword to strike and only just managed to hold back the blow when he realised that it was one of the Portuguese light infantrymen. The man looked at him with a puzzled expression on his face, and then his high-fronted shako was knocked from his head by a bullet. He grinned, patting his head in relief, and then turned to fire down into the valley in front of them.

Men ran towards the French cannon, the green paint on its carriage faded by wind, sun and rain. The crew were already hooking the trails of the four-pounder back on to the low limber, not bothering to lift the barrel to its travelling position. One dropped, hit in the leg by the ball from an officer’s pistol, and another was clubbed to the ground by a corporal from the 52nd. The other gunners scrambled on to their horses – there were no seats on a French limber – and followed the four-pounder and its team as they fled, the wheels flinging up the soft sandy soil, half slipping their way down the slope.

‘Pour it into them, lads!’ MacAndrews rode along the top of the hill, his horse carefully picking its way through the rocks, and urged the men to fire down at the retreating enemy. The major was still in one piece and to Williams that seemed like a miracle, and yet it was surely a miracle that they had driven the French back with their wild charge and lost so few men.

A ball pinged noisily off the rock beside him and he ducked down. Dobson looked at him and shook his head in amusement, then bit the ball from another cartridge. Williams looked for Dalmas, but could not see him among the French who had reformed their skirmish line on the slope facing them. There was no sign of an armoured corpse either, so he guessed the Frenchman must have escaped. As he looked, he saw the body of a sergeant, sprawled in that ungainly sack-of-old-clothes fashion only ever made by the dead or the very deepest of sleeps. The man’s ginger hair was dark with blood and no one would sleep in such a place, so there could be no doubt that the man was dead. There were yellow facings on his red jacket.

‘Hargreaves,’ Dobson said, seeing the direction in which the officer was looking. The veteran pulled back the hammer to full cock and brought his firelock up to his shoulder, searching for a target.

Williams had not realised that MacAndrews’ men had formed part of the charge. Rodriguez said something to Dobson and the two men fired together, the Spaniard grunting in satisfaction. Faintly, Williams caught the sound of drums, which meant that the main columns of French infantry were catching up with their skirmishers. He doubted that the ragged bunch of men on top of the hill could resist a full attack. Then he looked behind and saw that the companies of the 52nd were already crossing the bridge, squeezing past the two tumbrels blocking the middle span.

A big man in the green of the 95th was talking to MacAndrews. The pair shook hands in satisfaction, and Williams recognised Lieutenant Colonel Beckwith and guessed that he had probably led his own charge up the hill at the same time as the major.

‘The Ninety-fifth will form the rearguard!’ MacAndrews shouted, walking his horse towards them. In the distance, Beckwith’s voice boomed out the same instruction. ‘Everyone else will come with me back across the bridge. Keep it slow, lads, there is no need to rush. We’ve shown these blackguards that they need to keep their distance!’

Men obeyed. They all felt the tiredness that so often followed a charge or a hard-fought combat and some swayed as they walked back down the slope. MacAndrews’ horse stumbled for the first time, and he lurched forward and almost lost his balance before the animal recovered. Men slipped on the soft sandy slope more than they had during the charge.

‘Hot work,’ Pringle said as he walked beside Williams, and then the stones gave way under his left boot and he lost his balance, falling and rolling for three or four yards.

‘Bugger,’ he said, sitting up. ‘Can anyone see my glasses?’

Williams, Dobson and Rodriguez stopped to look, but told the surprising number of other willing volunteers to keep going. Pringle was on all fours, but his eyesight was poor and he felt rather than looked for the spectacles. Already most of MacAndrews’ men were filing on to the road. There were shots from up above them, growing in intensity, and Williams guessed that the French were beginning to press forward again. Something crunched underfoot and with terrible certainty he knew that he had found the missing glasses. One lens was cracked, and the brass arms bent, although that could be remedied. Pringle put them on, shutting the eye behind the broken lens so that he could see.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘that’s quite ruined my battle.’

The 95th began to come back down the hill. On the bridge the Royal Horse Artillery lieutenant and his men had almost finished replacing the broken wheel.

‘Hold them back for a few minutes!’ he called. Williams and the others helped his men keep the horse team calm as Beckwith led most of his men across. A captain stayed with his company, the forty or so riflemen using the parapets for cover and firing back up the hill now reoccupied by the enemy. Bullets pecked the stonework and one hit a private in the foot. His comrades grinned as he hopped and angrily cursed the French, but then two of them took him back.

At last the repair was complete. The drivers urged the team onwards, gently at first to test the new wheel, but when it seemed solid they whipped them and hurried across, followed by the second cart. The little group of redcoats and the company of 95th ran after them. As Williams and the others came to the far bank, he saw a wall above them lined by Portuguese soldiers with their oddly shaped shakos. There were greenjackets crouched among the ruins of a house and several formed companies from the redcoats of the light infantry. More men waited as a chain of skirmishers, using all the boulders and folds in the ground for cover.

MacAndrews waited for them, Beckwith beside him again. ‘This way,’ he said. ‘They want us to get up to the top of the hill.’

‘You have more than played your part already,’ the colonel of the 95th added in his deep voice.

As they followed the road, Williams saw guns of the Chestnut Troop already deployed for action and waiting to pound the far side of the valley or sweep the bridge.

Twenty minutes later the French sent three companies of grenadiers across the bridge. Williams watched from high up on the slope and so did not see the details. He saw the smoke blossom all along the hillside beneath him, heard the cracks of rifles, the duller bangs of muskets and the deep-throated roar of six-pounders. The French fired as well, and the shape of the valley made the noise echo back and forth, but it was hard to pick out the British and Portuguese in their places of cover.

The grenadiers were in open view, with only the slight protection of the walls on either side of the bridge. They came on boldly, led by a couple of officers, one of them on horseback, and although a few men fell they were still running when they got halfway across the bridge. Then the attack withered. Williams saw the column shudder as if it were a single being, suddenly hit with great force. The mounted officer was down. The one on foot ran on, but only a handful came with him and soon they were pinned down, crawling for safety among the boulders below the western side of the bridge. Behind them blue-coated bodies piled in mounds on the flagstones.

‘
I
want that bridge.’ Marshal Ney flicked his gloves impatiently against his hip, startling his horse as he looked down into the valley. He calmed her almost as unthinkingly as he had startled her in the first place. ‘Full-strength attack this time, with two battalions of the Sixty-sixth.’ The colonel trotted away to prepare his columns. ‘I want as many guns as possible to support.’

‘Don’t think we will hit much, your grace,’ the battery commander said doubtfully.

‘Doesn’t matter. It may keep their heads down and it will perk up our lads.’

‘Your grace.’ The horse artilleryman rode a mule, and it took him a while to get the stubborn animal moving so that he could give the necessary orders.

Marshal Ney grinned with all the friendliness of a wolf. ‘Dalmas.’

The cuirassier officer clicked his heels as he stood to attention.

‘Lost another one, have you?’

‘Yes, your grace. Broke its legs coming down the slope.’

‘Better it than you.’

‘Yes, your grace.’ Dalmas had shot the beast. He had done this more than a few times before, because horses wore out, but even after all these years a part of him was always sad. The Emperor’s armies used up horses at a prodigious rate, and sometimes he wondered whether one day there would be no more remounts to replace them.

‘You’ve done well today. Nearly cut them off.’ Dalmas felt there was an emphasis on the ‘nearly’ and guessed what was going to happen. He did not offer any explanation or excuse. Winning was what counted, and although he had won a succession of little victories earlier on, the final failure was all that would matter.

Marshal Ney pointed across the valley. ‘I want to break them, Dalmas. Take their confidence now and they will not stand up to us again. Sixth Corps are the finest regiments at the Emperor’s command and with lads like these you can do anything.

‘You didn’t get their spy.’ Dalmas remembered that just a few hours ago the marshal had said he did not give a damn about spies. It did not surprise him. He would have done the same if he were a marshal of France. ‘So you need a victory Dalmas.’

The cuirassier felt that he might as well play the game. ‘Your grace, I ask permission to lead the attack on the bridge.’

Marshal Ney tried and failed to feign surprise. ‘That is good. I need my best man to do this.’ After almost two years Dalmas was still a temporary ADC, without the full pay and privileges of the permanent staff. ‘Lead the Sixty-sixth. You won’t need a horse for that! Take them over the bridge and drive the rosbifs off at the point of the bayonet.

‘It is simple, Dalmas.’ The marshal reached down to pat him on the shoulder. ‘Storm the bridge and you will be a major by the end of the day, and have your own regiment within two years. Who knows?’ Ney smiled again, taking his hand away and waving it in the air. ‘One day a general or even a marshal!’

Dalmas brought his bloodstained sword up in salute.

‘I can see I have chosen the right man. Take that bridge at any price and do it quickly.’

It took half an hour to form the regiment up on the approach road, where they were at least sheltered from the sporadic shots coming from the far bank. The companies were formed six abreast, for no more than that could fit on the bridge.

‘The cross of the legion to the first men over!’ General Ferey promised the men as he inspected them.

Dalmas hoped that luck was real and that he still had plenty of it. He had dispensed with his cuirass, but kept the helmet and had no choice but to wear his high cavalry boots. They were not designed for running, but there were too many corpses on the bridge to try to ride across. It did not matter. If he could keep his men going, then speed itself was not so important. An attack like this would succeed if the enemy believed that it was unstoppable. The British must crack, or this column would be mown down like grass before the scythe, just as in the first assault. They needed luck, and they needed the British to be so unnerved by being chased from one position to another and hustled over the river that they would break. Dalmas had seen it often enough in cavalry charges, had seen enemy lines slow, and then seem almost to shiver as horses began to turn. Press on then, and the enemy would flee and those who did not go fast enough would easily be chopped from their saddles.

He turned to look beside him. The grenadier companies were too badly mauled to head this fresh attack and so the men behind him were the fusiliers, who formed the bulk of any regiment. Almost all had the moustaches of veterans. They looked tough, confident men, and Dalmas suspected that if anyone could win this fight then it was these soldiers.