Sharpe's Waterloo (39 page)

‘You've done enough for one day!' The Scots Grey's Colonel offered Sergeant Ewart a salute. ‘Take it to the rear!'

Ewart, holding the Eagle high, and punching it at the sky to show the gods what he had achieved, cantered back towards the British ridge. He passed a Highland infantry regiment that cheered him hoarse.

The other horsemen drove on. The field was wet with blood and rain, and treacherous underfoot with the fallen dead and pitiful with the wounded, yet still the horses streamed their ribbons of steel and bone into the fleeing, panicked Frenchmen. A drum was splintered by a horse's hooves. The drummer boy, just twelve years old, was dead. Another boy, screaming in terror, was ridden down by a white horse that broke his skull with the blow of a hoof. Some of the French infantry just ran to the charging British infantry and threw themselves onto the redcoats' mercy. The British infantry, checked by the slaughter in their path, stopped their charge and gathered in the terrified prisoners.

The cavalry knew no such mercy. They had dreamed of such a field, filled with a broken enemy to be broken further. Captain Clark of the Royals took the second Eagle, hacking its defenders apart with his sword, snatching the trophy, defending it, then carrying it clear of the pathetic French survivors who, hearing their death in the big hooves, still tried to run, but there was nowhere to run as the Irish and Scots and English horsemen ravaged about the valley. Even the horses were trained to kill. They bit, they lashed with their hooves, they fought like the crazed men who rode them.

Lord John at last learned how to kill. He learned the joy of losing all restraint, of absolute power, of riding into shattered men who turned, screamed, then disappeared behind as his sword thumped home. He found himself picking a target, and stalking the man even if it meant ignoring closer Frenchmen, then choosing the manner of his victim's death. One he skewered through the neck, almost losing his sword because it pierced so far. He practised the lunge, learning to control the heavy point of the blade. He soaked the steel in blood, spraying droplets into the air after each victory, then lowering the point for more. He saw a fat French officer clumsily running away, and Lord John spurred through the closest Frenchmen, stood in his stirrups, and slashed down with the sword. He felt the skull crumple like a giant boiled egg and he laughed aloud to think of such a comparison at such a moment. The laugh sounded more like a demonic screech, a fit accompaniment to the screams of the other death-drunk troopers about him. He wheeled, sliced a Frenchman in the face, and spurred on. He saw Christopher Manvell parry a desperate bayonet lunge then stab down. A knot of Inniskillings thundered past Lord John, their horses sheeted with enemy blood and their voices ululating a paean to massacre. A drunk trooper of the Scots Grey was ahead of Lord John, hacking and hacking at a French sergeant who twitched on the ground in a pool of spreading blood. The Scotsman's face was a mask of laughing blood.

‘On to Paris!' a Major of the Life Guards shouted.

‘The guns! Kill the bastard gunners!'

‘To Paris! On to Paris!'

The charge had done its job magnificently. It had finished the battalion of Cuirassiers, then destroyed the best part of a French corps of infantry. The charge had filled a valley with bodies and blood, it had taken two Eagles, but these were the British cavalry, the worst led in all the world, and now they thought themselves immortal. They had swamped their souls with the glory of war, so now they would make their names immortal in the halls of war. The bugles screamed the call to rally and the Earl of Uxbridge shouted at the troopers nearest him to withdraw and reform behind the ridge, but other officers, and other buglers, wanted more blood. They were the cavalry. On to Paris!

So the spurs slashed back, the red swords lifted high, and the charge swept on.

 

The battlefield had a new smell now. Blood, fresh and cloying, mingled its odour with the acrid stench of burnt powder. The British guns fell silent, their barrels hot and smoking, their muzzles blackened. There were no more targets, for the French attack, one minute so overwhelming, had been broken into blood and bones and weeping men. The surviving French infantry, many with hideous slash wounds from the heavy swords, wandered in a daze about the crushed corn. The German Riflemen who had retreated from La Haye Sainte's garden and orchard ran back to their positions, while the 95th Rifles re-occupied the sandpit.

Close to the sandpit a Cuirassier crawled from underneath his dead horse. He stared at the Riflemen, then slowly unbuckled his heavy armour and let it fall. He gave the Greenjackets one last scared look, then limped back towards La Belle Alliance. The Rifles let him go.

The Prince of Orange, the death of his Hanoverians forgotten, clapped his hands with delight as the British heavy cavalry turned south to complete their charge. ‘Aren't they fine, Rebecque? Aren't they simply fine?'

The Duke, further along the ridge, also watched the horsemen swerve south in disarray. He looked momentarily sickened, then turned and ordered his infantry back to the shelter of the ridge's reverse slope. French prisoners, stripped of their packs, pouches and weapons, filed towards the forest as the Duke spurred back towards the elm tree.

Sharpe and Harper had found a park of four-wheeled ammunition wagons at the edge of the forest, all under the guard of a plump officer of the quartermaster's staff who refused to release any of the wagons without proper authority.

‘What is proper authority?' Sharpe asked.

‘A warrant signed by a competent officer, naturally. If you will now excuse me? I'm not exactly underemployed today.' The Captain offered Sharpe a simpering smile and turned away.

Sharpe drew his pistol and put a bullet into the ground between the Captain's heels.

The Captain turned, white-faced and shaking.

‘I need one wagon of musket cartridge,' Sharpe said in his most patient voice.

‘I need authorization, I'm accountable to-'

Sharpe pushed the pistol into his belt. ‘Patrick, just shoot the fat bugger.'

Harper unslung his seven-barrelled volley gun, cocked and aimed it, but the Captain was already running away. Sharpe spurred after him, caught the man's collar, and dragged his face up to the saddle. ‘I'm a competent officer, and if I don't get the ammunition I want in the next five seconds I shall competently ram a nine-pounder up your back passage and spread you clear across Brussels. Do you understand me?'

‘Yes, sir.'

‘So which wagon do we take?'

‘Any one you wish, sir, please.'

‘Order a driver to follow us. We want musket ammunition, not rifle ammunition. Do you understand that?'

‘Yes, sir.'

‘Thank you.' Sharpe dropped the man. ‘You're very kind.'

The French skirmishers were still sniping at the château's walls, and more enemy infantry were massing in the woods for another assault on Hougoumont as the wagon thundered down the rough track and past the haystack at the gate. The French had turned a battery of howitzers on the farm, and some of their shells had set fire to the farmhouse roof, but Colonel MacDonnell was remarkably sanguine. ‘They can't burn stone walls, can they?' A shell crashed onto the stable roof, bounced in a shower of broken slates and landed on the yard's cobbles. Its fuse hissed smoke for a second, then the shell exploded harmlessly, but the sight of the bursting powder acted as a spur to the Guardsmen who were unloading the cartridge boxes from the newly arrived wagon. MacDonnell, turning to go back into the farmhouse, stopped and cocked his head. ‘Unless I miss my guess, which I rather doubt, our cavalry are earning their pay for a change?'

Sharpe listened. Through the crack of musketry and the boom of heavy guns, the ten trumpet notes of a cavalry charge sounded thin and clear. ‘I think you're right.'

‘Let's hope they know which side they're fighting for,' MacDonnell said drily then, with a wave of thanks, he went back to the house.

Sharpe and Harper followed the empty wagon back to the ridge where they turned eastwards towards the line's centre. They passed what was left of Captain Witherspoon who had been killed when a common shell had skimmed the ridge and exploded in his belly. His watch, miraculously unbroken, had fallen into a nettle patch where, unseen and hidden, it ticked on. The hands of the watch now showed twenty-seven minutes past two on the afternoon in which the Prussians were supposed to arrive, and had not come.

 

Lord John galloped clear of the broken French infantry. Ahead and around him were knots of other horsemen; all galloping across the valley to assault the main French battle line on the southern ridge.

The British charge had been scattered by the fighting among the infantry, so now the horsemen galloped in small groups like a field split apart by a long run after a fox. The troopers were still crazed by victory, confident that nothing could stand against their long and bloody swords.

A hedge of holly, broken and trampled by the advance of the French columns, barred Lord John's path. His horse soared over it, stumbled on the plough ridges beyond, then caught its footing and galloped on. Three men of the Inniskillings charged to his left and Lord John veered towards them, seeking company. An explosion of smoke and earth gouted to his right, then was snatched behind as he galloped on. A ragged line of Scots Greys were just ahead, their horses' flanks sheeted with blood and sweat. Lord John looked for Christopher Manvell, or any other of his friends, but saw none. Not that it mattered, for today he felt that every trooper was his friend.

All across the western half of the valley the cavalry charged. Their big horses were blowing hard, and the ground was soaked and heavy, but the horses were strong and willing. The men had stopped screaming with blood-lust, so the sound of the charge had now become the thrash of the hooves, the creak of saddles, and the rasp of breath.

The French gunners on the southern ridge loaded their twelve-pounders with canister. They spiked the charge bags and pushed the quills into the vents.

The horses thundered across the valley floor. They were closing on each other now, drawn together by the need for companionship and the realization of danger.

The French gunners gave their gun-trails a last adjustment. The gunners crouched with the next round ready in their arms. The officers judged the distance, then shouted the order:
‘Tirez!'

A blast of canister scoured down the forward slope. Two of the Scots Greys ahead of Lord John tumbled in blood and muddy confusion. He galloped between the two men, watching the smoke of the guns roll towards him. A riderless horse with flapping stirrups raced up on his right side. One of the Irish riders on Lord John's left had been hit by canister in his right arm. He put the reins between his teeth and took his sword into his left hand.

The guns fired again; another thunder of smoke in which the sudden flames stabbed, and out of which another blast of canister tore huge gaps in the charging line, but still hundreds of men stayed in their saddles. A Life Guard's dying horse crashed into a Scots Grey and both men and their horses ploughed screaming into the field. An officer behind jumped the dying mess and shouted the mad challenge that had begun the insane charge: ‘To Paris!'

The voice seemed to release a thousand others. The screams began again, the screams of men too frightened to recognize their fear, too exhilarated to believe in death, and too close to the guns to turn back.

The leading horses cleared the gun smoke to see the French artillerymen running desperately for the safety of the infantry behind. The swords began their work again. A gunner swung his heavy rammer at a Life Guard, missed, and died with a sword blade rammed down his open mouth.

The infantry, two hundred yards behind the guns, and protected by a thick hedge, had formed square. The horsemen, on tired horses that wanted to draw breath, swerved away from the threat of the close-packed muskets. They sought other targets, galloping in a useless mêlée between the abandoned guns and the infantry's invulnerable squares. Some of the horses slowed to a walk. No one had thought to bring the hammers and soft copper nails that were needed to spike the captured guns, so the worst they could do was slash their swords at the Emperor's wreathed initial that was embossed on each gun barrel. Some of the French gunners had been too slow to escape and had taken refuge under their weapons, or between the wheels of the limbers, and those men at least could be hunted down. Horsemen leaned clumsily from their saddles to lunge at men who crouched and dodged under the gun axles.

More British horsemen arrived, thudding up through the cannon smoke to find the guns captured, the gunners dead or dying, and a mass of cavalry wheeling impotent among the limbers. They had charged to glory, and reached nowhere. The French infantry barred the promised road to Paris, and now that infantry began firing volleys that, even at two hundred yards, found targets.

‘Time to go home, I think.' A Scots Grey captain, his sword bloody to the hilt, walked his horse past Lord John whose tired horse cropped at a patch of grass behind a gun. Lord John was staring at the nearest infantry and wondering when the charge would resume.

‘Go home?' Lord John asked in surprise, but the Scotsman had already spurred northwards towards the British ridge and safety.

‘Withdraw!' another officer shouted. A Scottish trooper, his horse killed by a musket-ball, ran among the guns to find a riderless horse that he managed to corner and mount. He wrenched the beast's head towards the valley and spurred hard for safety.

Lord John looked back to the enemy infantry again, and this time a shredding wind thinned the veil of smoke and he saw the whole French army spread in front of him. He felt an eruption of fear and pulled on his reins. His horse, tired and heaving for breath, turned reluctantly. The British charge was over.