Sharpe's Waterloo (45 page)

The Emperor had stirred himself, and now the British would learn just how he could fight.

 

All along the British line the flail of the cannon-fire struck and killed. The British battalions were ordered to lie down, but the French gunners had the range to perfection now and their roundshot skimmed the ridge to plough bloody furrows through the prone ranks. British guns were shattered; their barrels blasted off carriages and their wheels splintered. Shells exploded on the ridge to add their burden of smoke to the thickening air. Burning ammunition wagons added their stench to the sour smell of blood.

This was how an emperor fought. He would kill and kill and kill with his guns, and when the British were screaming to be released from the torrent of death he would send their quietus in the hands of his immortals.

The air quivered with the impact of the guns. Sharpe, abandoning his mare into Harper's care, walked forward from the Prince of Wales's Own Volunteers as far as the ridge's crest where the percussion of the heavy French artillery was like a succession of physical punches in the belly. The roundshot plucked at the thick skeins of smoke, grazed the ridge to fleck the sky with mud, then screamed and whined and hummed and crashed home behind him. In twenty-two years Sharpe had never known a cannonade like it, nor had he ever breathed air so heated and thickened by smoke and flame that to stand at the valley's rim was like facing the open door of some gigantic and red-hot kiln. The rye crop on the crest, where it had not been obliterated into quagmire, had been trampled to the consistency of the woven mats he remembered from India.

A shell traced its trail of smoke over his head. A roundshot ricocheted up from the ridge a dozen yards to his left. To his right, where the cavalry had advanced to their vain attacks, the slope was a horror of dead horses and men. A yellow dog dragged a length of gut from a corpse, though whether it was of man or beast Sharpe could not tell.

Beyond the slaughtered cavalry Sharpe could see the smoke illuminated by the flaring glow made by the burning château of Hougoumont. He could see nothing in the smoke to his left. Behind Sharpe the red-coated battalions had been deployed into line again, but all were lying flat so that for a strange moment he had the impression that he was the only man left alive on all the battlefield.

Then, in the valley's smoke in front of him, he saw more live men; thousands of live men, skirmishers, Frenchmen, a swarm of Voltigeurs running forward in loose order and Sharpe knew that added to the ordeal of cannon-fire the battalions must now endure an onslaught of musketry. He turned and shouted a warning. ‘Skirmishers!'

The British light companies ran forward to take their places on the forward slope, but they were horribly outnumbered. Peter d'Alembord persuaded Ford to release a second company, and sent Harry Price's men to face the Voltigeurs. Price had been a skirmisher himself once, and understood what was needed, but not all the skirmishers in Wellington's army could have defeated such an overwhelming number of French Voltigeurs. Behind the French skirmishers were the remnants of their cavalry who had been advanced to check any British cavalry charge that might threaten the loose formation of Voltigeurs.

Peter d‘Alembord had brought the two companies forward himself and, once they were deployed, he crossed to Sharpe's side. The two officers strolled half-way down the forward slope, then stopped to stare at the vast spread of enemy troops. ‘Not a very encouraging sight,' d'Alembord said quietly.

The first muskets spat, yet for every British shot, two or three French muskets replied. To Sharpe's left some Riflemen held up the French advance for a few moments, but the French overwhelmed them with musketry and the Greenjackets were forced back, leaving three men dead in the mud.

D‘Alembord's men were similarly suffering. ‘We're going to have to let them take the slope!' he said to Sharpe, instinctively seeking the Rifleman's approval.

‘You haven't much choice, Peter.' Sharpe was on one knee, his rifle at his shoulder. He fired at a French sergeant, but the muzzle smoke prevented him from seeing whether the bullet hit. He began to reload. A hundred yards to his right a line of Frenchmen was already near the ridge's crest. Peter d'Alembord's two companies were temporarily holding the skirmishers in their front, but they would soon be outflanked, and even as Sharpe rammed his next bullet home he saw a rush of blue-uniformed men force back a section of Harry Price's company. Bullets were hissing and thrumming near Sharpe, presumably attracted by the sight of the two officers so close together.

Sharpe, his rifle reloaded, ran a few paces to his right, dropped to his knee, and looked for an enemy officer.

D‘Alembord gave the smallest gasp. ‘Oh, God!'

‘What is it?'

‘Jesus Christ!' The blasphemy was uttered more in anger than in pain. D‘Alembord had been hit, and the force of the blow had knocked him backwards, but he had somehow kept his footing even though the bullet had struck his right thigh. Now he staggered with his right hand clamped over the wound. Blood was seeping through his fingers. ‘It's all right,' he said to Sharpe, ‘it doesn't hurt.' He tried to take a pace forward, and almost fell. ‘It's all right.' His face had gone pale with shock.

‘Here!' Sharpe put an arm under d'Alembord's shoulder and half carried him and half walked him up the slope.

D‘Alembord was hissing with every step. ‘I'll be all right. Leave me!'

‘Shut up, Dally!'

Harper saw them as they crossed the ridge's crest and galloped forward with Sharpe's horse. ‘Take him back to the surgeons!' Sharpe called up to the Irishman, then gave d‘Alembord a mighty heave that swung him painfully into the empty saddle. ‘Wrap your sash round the wound!' Sharpe told d'Alembord, then slapped the mare's rump to speed her out of range of the skirmishers' fire.

Sharpe turned back to the heated, choking air in the valley. The French were pressing everywhere. More frightening still, a column of enemy troops was marching towards La Haye Sainte, but that was not Sharpe's business. His business was the enemy immediately in front and, reduced to being a Rifleman again, he knelt and searched for an officer or sergeant. He saw a man with a scabbard not a hundred yards away and fired. When the smoke cleared, the man was gone.

Harry Price backed nervously up the slope. ‘Where's Peter?'

‘He got one in the leg! It's not serious.'

‘This is bloody serious, sir! I've lost ten men, probably more.'

‘Pull back. What's the name of the new light company man?'

‘Matthew Jefferson.'

Sharpe cupped his hands. ‘Captain Jefferson! Pull back!'

Jefferson waved a hand in reply, then ordered Huckfield to sound the whistle that recalled the skirmishers. The redcoats ran back to the crest, dropped again, and fired a last feeble volley at the French Voltigeurs. A shell exploded behind the crest, showering Jefferson with earth. A roundshot crashed past Sharpe, its sound like a sudden overwhelming wind. Musket-balls whip-cracked too close. Sharpe waited till Harry Price's company was safely past him, then shouted at Price to run.

They ran back together, but Price tumbled, then gasped as the breath was knocked out of him by his fall. Sharpe twisted back to help him, but it was only a pair of ridiculous spurs that had tripped the younger man. ‘Take the damn things off, Harry!'

‘I like them.' Price stumbled on. To their right and left other battalions were reluctantly climbing to their feet, then forming lines of four ranks. They could not fight off skirmishers lying down, nor did they dare risk a charge of the French cavalry that had reached the bottom of the slope, and a four rank line offered more protection against horsemen than a two rank formation. It also meant that every cannon-ball that hit could take as many as four men with it.

But there was nothing to be done, except suffer.

The French skirmishers, thick along the crest of the ridge, raked the battalions with musket-fire. The surviving British cannons hammered canister at the Voltigeurs, but their scattered formation saved the French from heavy casualties. The enemy Voltigeurs now ruled the ridge's crest, while the British skirmishers, overwhelmed by the French mass, could only form on their battalions. Every few moments, when the enemy skirmishers became too insistent or advanced too far, a battalion would charge forward and drive them back. A single battalion volley also had the effect of clearing the enemy skirmishers off the crest, but they always returned, their losses made up from reinforcements despatched from the valley.

Cavalry could scour the Voltigeurs away, but the Duke had lost his heavy cavalry and was keeping his best remaining horsemen, the Germans and British light cavalry, to cover his retreat if disaster struck. He still had a Dutch cavalry brigade and the Prince of Orange was ordered to bring it forward. They came, curb chains jingling and sabres drawn. ‘They're just to clear the ridge face!' the Duke's aide ordered. ‘No damned heroics. Just gallop along the face and sabre the skirmishers!'

But the Dutch horsemen refused to charge. They sat lumpen in their saddles, their doughy faces stubborn and sullen. They stared blankly at the churning strike of shot and shell and no words would persuade them to spur into the quagmire of mud, fire and iron. The Prince, told of their cowardice, pretended not to hear. Instead he just stared at the farm of La Haye Sainte that was now besieged by an overwhelming throng of French infantry. The Britiish cannons on the crest by the elm tree were pouring roundshot into the French ranks, and a battery of howitzers was lobbing shrapnel into the valley, but the French infantry seemed to soak up the punishment as they edged ever closer to the beleaguered farm. La Haye Sainte's orchard was already captured, and the French had brought cannon down the road to pour shot after shot into the besieged farm buildings.

The Prince knew that the centre of the Duke's line would be open to disastrous attack if the farm fell. Suddenly he knew he must save the farm. The glory of the idea blossomed in his mind. Fulfilment of the idea would utterly obliterate any shameful memory of the Red Germans, or of the sullen Dutch cavalry. The Prince saw his chance of glory and renown. He would rescue the farm, hold the line's centre, and win the battle. ‘Rebecque!'

 

In the eastern half of the valley, in the dangerous re-entrant from where the Dutch-Belgians had fled at the first approach of the French, the First Battalion of the 27th Regiment of the Line now stood in square and suffered. They were the Inniskillings, and their only shelter was the screen of smoke that the French gunners created before their own cannon, but the enemy artillery had the Inniskillings' range and, even though fired blind, roundshot after roundshot crashed into the Irish ranks. Their Colonel ordered another issue of rum and the Sergeants doggedly closed the thinning ranks, but there was nothing else anyone could do except stand and die, and that the Irish did.

They might have deployed out of square, but the Emperor made sure his cavalry was always threatening and so the Irish were forced to stay in their vulnerable square like a great fat target for the gunners and the Voltigeurs who infested the eastern half of the valley as thickly as they swarmed in the west.

Some of those Voltigeurs, fearful that a French victory and pursuit might take them away from the rich plunder of the battlefield, took care to enrich themselves before the British line shattered. The dead and injured of the British heavy cavalry littered the valley floor and, though the pockets of many of the casualties had been hastily searched already, the Voltigeurs had the luxury of time in which they could slit the uniform seams or tear out the greasy helmet liners where men liked to hide their precious gold coins. Some of the French skirmishers carried pliers which they used to extract fine white teeth that Parisian dentists would buy to make into dentures.

One fortunate Frenchman found a cavalryman's body that sported a fine pair of brown-topped, silk-tasselled boots. He first took the spurs off the heels, then tugged at the right boot. The body jerked, cried aloud, and a horrid face in which the eyes were nothing but crusts of blood stared wildly and blindly towards the Frenchman.

‘You frightened me!' the Voltigeur chided the wounded man cheerfully.

‘For God's sake, kill me.' Lord John Rossendale, half-crazed with pain, spoke in English.

‘You just stay still,' the Voltigeur said in French, then dragged off his lordship's expensive boots. He noted that the Englishman's breeches were made of the finest whipcord and though the right thigh had been slashed by a blade the breeches would doubtless mend well, and so the Voltigeur undid the waist buttons and dragged the breeches free. Lord John, his broken thigh grating with each tug, screamed foully.

‘Noisy bugger!' The Voltigeur rolled the breeches into a ball that he thrust inside his jacket. Then, fearing that Lord John's scream might have attracted the untimely attraction of his Sergeant, the Frenchman ostentatiously loaded his musket and, pretending to be merely doing his job, used Lord John as a rest for the barrel that he aimed towards the beleaguered Inniskillings. ‘Mind the bang!' the Voltigeur said happily, then fired.

‘Kill me! Please!' Lord John spoke in French. ‘Please!'

‘I'm not going to kill you!' the Voltigeur protested. ‘I can't do that. It wouldn't be right! I won't even take your teeth!' He gave his lordship's shoulder a sympathetic pat, then went to find more plunder.

And Lord John, lost in a universe of unjust pain, moaned.