Sharpe 3-Book Collection 7: Sharpe's Revenge, Sharpe's Waterloo, Sharpe's Devil (65 page)

Sharpe had ridden forward, taking position just behind d’Alembord’s men who were hastily ranking themselves on the left of the battalion’s line. At the right flank of the line, where the Grenadier Company was nearest to the French, an avalanche of cavalry was storming at the battalion’s open flank. More cavalryman were slanting in to the battalion’s front. To Sharpe’s left, beyond the 33rd, the 30th were already forming square, though the 33rd, like the Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers, seemed frozen in line.

‘We should form square!’ Major Vine, the battalion’s senior Major, shouted at Ford from the right of the line.

‘Get out of here, Dally!’ Sharpe called to d‘Alembord, then raised his voice so all the men of the battalion could hear him. ‘Run! Back to the trees! Run!’

It was too late to form square. There was only one chance of living, and that was to gain the shelter of the wood.

The men, recognizing Sharpe’s voice, broke and fled. A few sergeants hesitated. Colonel Ford tried desperately to hook his spectacles into place. ‘Form square!’ he called.

‘Square!’ Major Vine yelped at the closest companies. ‘Form square!’

‘Run!’ That was Harper, once Regimental Sergeant-Major of this battalion, and still the possessor of a pair of lungs that could jar a regiment from eight fields away. ‘Run, you buggers!’

The buggers ran.

‘Move! Move! Move!’ Sharpe galloped along the front of the line, slashing with the flat of his sword to hasten the redcoats back towards the tree line. ‘Run! Run!’ He was racing straight towards the enemy’s charge. ‘Run!’

The men ran. The colour party, encumbered by the heavy squares of silk, were the slowest. One of the Ensigns lost a boot and began limping. Sharpe slammed his horse between the Sergeants whose long axe-bladed spontoons protected the flags and he grabbed a handful of silk with his left hand and speared his sword into the King’s colour on his right. ‘Run!’ He spurred the horse, dragging the two flags behind him. The first refugees were already in the trees where Harper was shouting at them to take firing positions.

A sergeant screamed behind Sharpe as a Cuirassier stabbed a sword down, but the Sergeant’s long spontoon tripped the Frenchman’s horse that sprawled down into the path of a Lancer who was forced to rein in behind the thrashing beast. An Hussar galloped in from the left, aiming at the colours, but Major Micklewhite slashed from horseback and the Hussar had to parry. He drove Micklewhite’s light sword aside, then thrust with his sabre’s point to slice Micklewhite’s throat back to bone. The Ensign who had lost his boot was ridden over by a Cuirassier whose heavy horse smashed the boy’s spine with its hooves. A lance, thrown like a javelin, ripped the yellow silk of the regimental colour, then hung there to be dragged along the ground. Two more Lancers spurred forward, but their attack came close to the trees where Patrick Harper lurked with his seven-barrelled gun. His one shot emptied both saddles and the very noise of the huge weapon seemed to drive the other Frenchmen away in search of easier pickings.

Sharpe ducked his head, struck back with his heels, and his horse crashed through a patch of ferns and into the trees. He dropped the one colour and shook the other off his sword, then wrenched the horse savagely about in expectation of French horsemen close behind.

But the French had swerved away. They had caught a handful of the slower men and cut them down, and they had killed many of the mounted officers who had stayed behind to shelter the running redcoats, but now the French horsemen feared becoming entangled in the thick wood where the trees would blunt the force of their charge, and so they spurred on for easier prey. Behind them they left Major Micklewhite sprawled dead in a pool of his own blood. Captain Carline was dead, as were Captain Smith and three lieutenants, but the rest of the battalion was safe in the shelter of the wood.

The 33rd, next in line to the Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers, had also run to the wood while beyond them the 30th had formed a rough square that proved solid enough to stand like an island amidst the torrent of French cavalry that split either side of the redcoats. The cavalry ignored the men of the 30th because beyond their crude square the 69th had neither run nor formed squre, but was just standing in line with muskets levelled as the full might of Kellerman’s cavalry, cheated of its first three targets, thundered straight for them.

‘Fire!’ a major shouted.

The muskets crashed smoke. Ten Cuirassiers went down in a maelstrom of blood, steel and dying horses, but there were more Cuirassiers on either flank and a rage of Lancers and Hussars were storming in behind the armoured vanguard.

The Cuirassiers hit the open flank of the 69th. A man lunged up with a bayonet, then died as the sword split his skull. The heavy horses slammed into the red ranks that broke apart like rotten wood. The infantry were scattering, thus making themselves even more vulnerable to the enemy blades. The French were in front, behind and chewing up the battalion’s flanks with slashing swords that dripped red with every grunting heave.

Then the Lancers struck into the shattered battalion and the redcoats screamed as the horsemen rode clean over the breaking line. The Frenchmen were shouting incoherently. A Lancer threw a corpse off his spear point, then stabbed again. Some infantrymen had broken free and were running to the woods, but they were easily ridden down by Lancers and Hussars who galloped up behind, chose their spot, then stabbed or sliced or hacked or lunged. For the French it was no more difficult that hacking or lunging at the practice sacks of chaff with which they had been trained at their depots at home.

A knot of redcoats gathered round their battalion’s colours. There were sergeants with their long-shafted axes, officers with swords and men with bayonets. The French clawed and hacked at the defenders. Lancers rode full tilt at them, grunting as they drove their spears home. One lance struck home with such force that the red and white flag beneath its long blade was buried in the victim’s body. A dismounted Cuirassier hacked at the colours’ defenders till he was shot in the face by an officer’s pistol. An Hussar’s horse reared up, hooves flailing, then lunged forward into the knot of men. Two officers went down under the slashing hooves. The Hussar cut down with his sabre. A bayonet raked his left thigh, but the Frenchman did not feel the wound. His horse bit a man, the sabre hissed again, then the Hussar dropped the blade so that it hung from his wrist by its leather strap and he grabbed the staff of one of the colours. The other colour had disappeared, but the Hussar had his gloved hand round the remaining staff. Two men drove bayonets at him. A spontoon wounded his horse, but the Hussar held on. A burly British sergeant tugged at the staff. A Lancer crashed his horse into the mêlée, trampling wounded and living alike, and lunged his weapon at the stubborn Sergeant. The lance point drove into the Sergeant’s back, but still the Englishman hung on, but then a Cuirassier, riding in from the far side, hacked his sword down through the man’s shako and into his skull. The Sergeant fell.

The Hussar tugged at the colour’s staff. A British major seized the colour’s silk and stabbed at the Hussar with a sword, but another Lancer came from the right and his blade caught the Major in his belly. The Major screamed, his sword dropped, and the colour came free. The Hussar was bleeding from a dozen wounds, his horse was staggering and bloody, but he managed to turn the beast and he held the British colour high above his head. The rest of the French cavalry was thundering past, charging at the crossroads where yet more infantry waited to be broken, but the Hussar had his triumph.

The 69th was destroyed. A few men had run to safety, and a few still lived in a pile of bodies so drenched and laced with blood that no cavalryman dreamed that any man could still be alive in the stinking heap, but the rest of the battalion had been broken and cut into ruin. Men had died at lance point, or been slashed open by sabres, or pierced by the long straight swords of the Cuirassiers. The battalion, which moments before had been rigid in its formal line, was now nothing but a scattered mess of bodies and blood. There were hundreds of bodies: dead, creeping, bleeding, vomiting, weeping. The cavalrymen left them, not out of pity, but because there seemed no one left to kill. It was as if a slaughterhouse had been upended on this corner of a Belgian field, leaving cuts of meat and spills of blood that steamed in the warm humid air.

The victorious cavalry charged on to the crossroads where the newly arrived artillery greeted them with double-shotted barrels, and the infantry battalions waited in square, and thus it was the Frenchmen’s turn to die. The infantry aimed at the horses, knowing that a dead horse was a dismounted man who could be picked off afterwards. For a few moments the cavalry milled about in front of the guns and volley fire, but then Kellerman’s trumpeters called for the retreat and the French, their charge done, turned for home.

Slowly, the few survivors of the 69th crept from their shelter in the trees or pushed the dead away. One man, driven to near madness by the memory of the swords and by his brother’s blood that had near choked him as he lay beneath the corpse, knelt in the stubble and wept. A sergeant, holding his guts into his sabre-slashed belly, tried to walk to the rear, but fell again. ‘I’m all right, I’m all right,’ he told a rescuer. Another sergeant, blinded by a Cuirassier and pierced in the belly by a lance, cursed. A lieutenant, his arm hanging by a shred of gristle, weaved as if drunk as he staggered among the bodies.

Survivors pulled the bodies of the living and the dead away from the King’s colour. Next to it was the Major who had made the last despairing effort to save the regimental colour. He was dead, pierced deep through his stomach by a lance that was still embedded in his spine. The Major was wearing white silk stockings and gold-buckled dancing shoes, while stuck in his shako’s badge, and strangely untouched by any of the blood which had sheeted and soaked and drenched the pile, was an ostrich feather. A soldier plucked the grey feather loose, decided it was of no value, and tossed it away.

A quarter mile to the south a bleeding French Hussar on a wounded horse rode slowly back to his lines. In his right hand he carried the captured colour which he punched again and again at the smoke-skeined air, and with each triumphant punch he called aloud an incoherent shout of victory. His friends followed and applauded him.

From the trees Sharpe watched the Frenchman ride south. Sharpe had dismounted and was standing at the tree line with his loaded rifle. The Hussar was easily within range. Harper, with his own rifle, stood beside Sharpe, but neither man raised his gun. They had once come off a field of battle with an enemy colour, and now they must watch another man have his triumph.

‘He’ll be an officer by nightfall,’ Harper said.

‘Bugger deserves it.’

Behind Sharpe the Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers were white-faced and scared. Even the veterans who had endured the worst of the Spanish battles stood silent and bitter. They were frightened, not of the enemy, but of their own officers’ incompetence. Colonel Ford would not go near Sharpe, but just sat his horse under the trees and wondered why his right hand was shaking like a leaf.

D‘Alembord, his sword still drawn, walked up to the two Riflemen. He stared past them at the captured colour of the 69th, then shook his head. ‘I came to thank you. If you hadn’t given the order to run, we’d be dead. And I’ve just been made a major.’

‘Congratulations.’

‘I’m pleased too.’ D’Alembord spoke with a bitter sarcasm. He had wanted promotion, indeed it was the prime reason he had stayed with the battalion, but he resented the sudden price of his majority.

‘You’re alive, Peter,’ Sharpe consoled his friend, ‘you’re alive.’

‘The bloody man.’ D‘Alembord stared savagely towards Ford. ‘The bloody, bloody man. Why didn’t he form square?’

Then, to the north, a bugle sounded. Fresh troops were visible at the crossroads, a mass of men who marched forward to make a new line across the battlefield. The horse artillery was among the infantry and, to their left, there was an impressive mass of horsemen. The British cavalry had at last arrived.

‘I suppose we’ve won this battle!’ D’Alembord slowly sheathed his sword.

‘I suppose we have,’ Sharpe said.

But it felt horribly like a defeat.

Drums sounded, bayonets were levelled, and the newly formed British line marched forward. The infantry trod across the scorched straw, over the smears of blood, and around the dead and the dying bodies of horses and men.

From the southern end of the wood, where Saxe-Weimar’s men had held through the day, the Guards division attacked the western farms. The French infantry fought back, but could not hold. In the centre the redcoats marched through the stream, recaptured Gemioncourt farm, and went on up the slope. At the far left of the battlefield the Rifles drove the French back to recapture the eastern farms.