Sharpe's Waterloo (31 page)

‘Yes, sir.'

The Prince went back to his chair and slowly sat down as though the cares of Europe were pressing on his spindly shoulders. ‘I want you to station yourself on the right flank tomorrow, Sharpe. You're going to be my eyes. The moment you see any French outflanking movement, you're to inform me.'

‘Of course, sir.'

‘Very good. Very good.' The Prince smiled to show that all was forgiven, then looked at Rebecque. ‘You have a spare Dutch uniform, Rebecque?'

‘Of course, Your Highness.'

‘Provide it to Colonel Sharpe, if you will. And you'll wear it tomorrow, Sharpe, do you hear me?'

‘Very clearly, sir.'

‘Till the morning, then.' The Prince nodded a good-night to both men. ‘And Rebecque? Send my seamstress in, will you?'

Rebecque dutifully ushered Paulette into the Prince's room, then took Sharpe down the small landing to his own bedroom where he offered Sharpe a choice of uniforms from a tin travelling trunk.

‘Keep them,' Sharpe said.

‘My dear Sharpe -'

‘I've fought the damned French for ten years in this jacket, Rebecque.' Sharpe's interruption was bitter. ‘I wasn't bloody studying how to fight out of bloody books at bloody Eton, I was killing the bastards. I began killing Frenchmen when that little bastard was still wetting his breeches.' In his frustration and anger Sharpe slammed his fist against the wall, breaking the plaster and laths to leave a ragged hole. ‘Why the hell does he still want me on his staff anyway? Hasn't he got enough people to cut up his food?'

Rebecque gave a long-suffering sigh. ‘You have a reputation, Sharpe, and the Prince needs it. He knows he made a mistake. The whole army knows. Do you think Halkett hasn't complained bitterly to the Duke? So the Prince needs men to see that you are on his side, that you support him, even that you respect him! That's why he wants you in his uniform. After all, you're not on attachment from a British regiment, like Harry or Simon, but you're his personal choice! Now, please, just take a coat and wear it tomorrow.'

‘I'm fighting in Rifle green, Rebecque, or I'm not fighting at all. And what the hell am I doing out on the right flank?'

‘You're staying out of his way, Sharpe. You're there so you can't make any trouble. Or would you rather spend the battle tied to His Highness's coat-tails?'

Sharpe smiled. ‘No, sir.'

‘At least we agree on something. Not that the Prince can do too much damage tomorrow. Wellington's broken up the corps, so his Highness doesn't have a real command, though I imagine he'll find something to do. He usually does.' Rebecque sounded wistful, but then he smiled. ‘Have you eaten?'

‘No, sir.'

‘You look all in.' Rebecque, evidently realizing that the Englishman would not yield on the battle of the uniform, closed the travelling trunk. ‘Come on, I'll find you some food.'

The clock in the hallway struck eleven. Sharpe, knowing that he must be at the ridge before dawn, left orders that he was to be called at half-past two, then carried Rebecque's gift of bread and cold lamb out to the stables where Harper had sequestered a patch of comparatively dry straw for a bed.

‘So how was His Highness?' the Irishman asked.

‘As full of shit as an egg's got meat.'

Harper laughed. ‘And tomorrow?'

‘God knows, Patrick. I suppose tomorrow we meet the Emperor.'

‘There's a thought for you.'

‘But you're to stay out of trouble, Patrick.'

‘I will!' Harper said indignantly, as though Sharpe's nagging reminded him of his wife's.

‘You didn't stay clear yesterday.'

‘Yesterday! None of the bastards got near me yesterday! But I'll stay out of harm's way tomorrow, never you mind.'

They fell silent. Sharpe pulled the damp cloak over his wet uniform and listened to the rain smash down on the yard's cobbles. He thought of Peter d‘Alembord's awful fears and remembered his own terror at Toulouse and he wondered why this battle was not affecting him in the same way. That very thought raised its own fears; that such a lack of dread was in itself a harbinger of disaster, yet, in the darkness and listening to the horses move heavily behind his bed, Sharpe could not feel any horror of the next day. He was curious about fighting the Emperor, and he was as apprehensive as any man, yet he was not suffering the gut-loosening terror that racked d'Alembord.

He listened to the rain, wondering how the next day would end. Tomorrow night, he thought, he would either be in full retreat to the coast, or else a prisoner, or perhaps even marching southwards to pursue a defeated enemy. He remembered the victory at Vitoria that had broken the French in Spain, and how he and Harper had ridden after the battle into the field of gold and jewels. That had been an answer to the soldier's prayer; God send a rich enemy and no surgeon's knife.

Lucille would be worrying for news. Sharpe closed his eyes, trying to sleep, but sleep would not come. His shoulder and leg ached foully. Harper was already sleeping, snoring loud by the door. Under the stableyard's archway the sentry stamped his feet. The smoke of his clay pipe came fragrant to the stable, helping to fend off the stench of the wet dungheap piled at the back of the yard. Upstairs, in the Prince's room, a candle was blown out, plunging the house into darkness. Lightning flickered silent over the rooftops where the rain crashed and bounced and poured from the tiles.

On the twin ridges, three miles to the south, two armies tried to sleep in the downpour. They wrapped themselves in greatcoats for a little warmth, but the comfort was illusory for the rain had long soaked into their last stitches of clothing. Most of the fires had died and what small fuel might have fed them was being hoarded to heat the water for the morning's drink of tea.

Few men really slept, though many pretended. Some sat in the small hedges, clutching their misery close through the hours of darkness. The picquets on the forward slopes of the ridges shivered, while on the reverse slopes, where the crops had already been trampled into quagmire, men lay in furrows that had become torrents of water. A few men, abjuring sleep, sat on their packs and talked softly. Some British horses, their pickets loosened from the wet ground, broke free and, scared by the ice-blue streaks of far lightning, galloped madly through the bivouacs. Men cursed and ran from the threat of the panicked hooves, then the horses crashed out into the wide valley which was dark and empty under the thrashing rainstorm.

In the three farms forward of the British ridge the garrisons slept under the shelter of solid roofs. Sentries peered from the farm windows at the storm. A few men, eager for superstitions that would tell what the future held, remembered the tradition of British victories following great thunderstorms. The outnumbered men at Agincourt, faced by a vast and mighty French army, had similarly crouched like beasts beneath a storm that had crashed across the night sky before their dawn of battle, and now a new generation of old enemies listened to the thunder rack and thrash across a night sky that was split asunder by the demonic shafts of searing light.

The British picquets shivered. The French army was camped by the southern ridge, yet the enemy's fires had long been extinguished and the only lights in the enemy's line were two dim yellow smears which marked the candle-lit windows of the tavern. Even those lights were dulled and sometimes hidden by the sheer volume of rain. It seemed to the picquets that the rain would never stop. It was a deluge fit for a world's ending; a rain that hammered and swept before the wind to drench the fields and slop through the plough furrows and drown the ditches and crush the crops and flood the farm tracks. It was a madness of wind and water, beating through the darkness to bring misery to a field which, because it lay between two ridges, was marked for yet more misery in the morning.

It stopped raining during the night.

At four in the morning the dawn revealed a valley mist which was stirred by a gusting damp wind. The mist was swiftly thickened by the smoke of the new morning fires. Shivering men picked themselves out of the mud like corpses coming to shuddering life. The long day had begun. It was a northern midsummer's day and the sun would not set for another seventeen hours.

Men on both sides of the shallow valley untied the rags which had been fastened round their musket locks, and took the corks out of the guns' muzzles. The sentries scraped out the grey damp slush which had been the priming in their pans and tried to empty the main charge with a fresh pinch of priming. All they achieved was a flash in the pan, evidence that the powder in the barrel was damp. They could either drill the bullet out, or else keep squibbing the gun with fresh priming till enough of the powder inside the touchhole dried to catch the fire. One by one the squibbed muskets banged, their sound echoing forlornly across the shallow valley.

The staff and general officers in Waterloo rose long before the dawn. Their grooms saddled horses, then, like men riding to their business, the officers took the southern road through the dark and dripping forest.

Sharpe and Harper were among the first to leave. The Prince was not even out of his bed when Sharpe wearily hauled himself into his saddle and shoved his rifle into its bucket holster. He was wearing his green Rifleman's jacket beneath Lucille's cloak and riding the mare which had recovered from her long day's reconnaissance about Charleroi. His clothes were clammy and his thighs sore from the long days in the saddle. The wind whipped droplets of water from the roofs and trees as he and Harper turned south into the village street. ‘You'll keep your promise today?' Sharpe asked Harper.

‘You're as bad as Isabella! God save Ireland, but if I wanted someone else to be my conscience I'd have found a wife out here to nag me.'

Sharpe grinned. ‘I'm the one who'll have to give her the news of your death, so are you going to keep your promise?'

‘I'm not planning on being a dead man just yet, so I'll keep my promise.' Harper was nevertheless dressed and equipped for a fight. He wore his Rifleman's jacket and had his seven-barrelled gun on one shoulder and his rifle on the other. Both men had left their packs at the Prince's billet, and neither man had shaved. They rode to battle looking like brigands.

As they neared Mont-St-Jean they heard a sound like the sucking of a great sea on a shelving beach. It was the sound of thousands of men talking, the sound of damp twigs burning, the noise of squibbed muskets popping, and the sound of the wind rustling in the stiff damp stalks of rye. It was also a strangely ominous sound. The air smelt of wet grass and dank smoke, but at least the clouds of the previous day had thinned enough so that the sun was visible as a pale pewter glow beyond a cloudy vapour that was being thickened by the smoke of the camp-fires.

There was one ritual for Sharpe to perform. Before riding on to the ridge's crest he found a cavalry armourer close to the forest's edge and handed down his big sword. ‘Make it into a razor,' he ordered.

The armourer treadled his wheel, then kissed the blade onto the stone so that sparks flowed like crushed diamonds from the steel. Some of the nicks in the sword's fore edge were so deep that successive sharpenings had failed to obliterate them. Sharpe, watching the sparks, could not even remember which enemies had driven those nicks so far into the steel. The armourer turned the blade to sharpen the point. British cavalrymen were taught to cut and slash rather than lunge, but wisdom said that the point always beat the edge. The armourer honed the top few inches of the backblade, then stropped the work on his thick leather apron.

‘Good as new, sir.'

Sharpe gave the man a shilling, then carefully slid the sharpened sword into its scabbard. With any luck, he thought, he would not even need to draw the weapon this day.

The two Riflemen rode on through the encampment. The battalions' supply wagons had not arrived so it would be a hungry day, though not a dry one, for the quartermasters had evidently arranged for rum to be fetched from the depot at Brussels. Men cheered as the barrels were rolled through the mud. Equally to the day's purpose were the wagons of extra musket ammunition that were being hauled laboriously across the soaking ground.

A drummer boy tightened the damp skin of his drum and gave it an exploratory tap. Next to him a bugler shook the rain out of his instrument. Neither boy was more than twelve years old. They grinned as Harper spoke to them in Gaelic, and the drummer boy offered a reply in the same language. They were Irish lads from the 27th, the Inniskillings. ‘They look good, don't they?' Harper gestured proudly at his coutrymen who, in truth, looked more like mud-smeared devils, but, like all the Irish battalions, they could fight like demons.

‘They look good,' Sharpe agreed fervently.

They reined in at the highest point of the ridge, where the elm tree stood beside the cutting in which the highway ran north and south. Just to Sharpe's left a battery of five nine-pounder guns and one howitzer was being prepared for the day. The charges for the ready ammunition lay on canvas sheets close to the guns; each charge a grey fabric bag containing enough powder to propel a roundshot or shell. Near the charges were the projectiles, either roundshot or shells, which were strapped to wooden sabots that crushed down onto the fabric bags inside the gun barrels. Gunners were filling canisters, which were nothing but tubular tins crammed with musket-balls. When fired the thin tin canisters split apart to scatter the musket-balls like giant blasts of duckshot. Beside the guns were the tools of the artillerymen's trade: drag-chains, relievers, rammers, sponges, buckets, searchers, rammers, wormhooks, portfires and handspikes. The guns looked grimly reassuring until Sharpe remembered that the French guns would look just as businesslike and were probably present on the field in even greater numbers.