‘Stay here,’ Sharpe warned Harper, then kicked his heels back to follow the Prince who was eagerly ordering his own newly arrived cavalry into two ranks. The black-coated Brunswickers, some with bloodied sabres, reinforced the Dutch-Belgians who followed their Prince out into the wide expanse of field where the French skirmishers still raked the redcoats with musket-fire. The Prince had drawn his ivory-hilted sabre which he now waved above his head as a signal for the two lines to quicken into a trot.
The horses plunged into the smoking rye. The French skirmishers, rightly terrified of the curved blades, fled precipitately and the British infantry cheered as their tormentors were driven away.
Sharpe rode with Rebecque and the other staff officers between the two Dutch ranks, while the Prince cantered ahead of the horsemen. The Prince was happy. This was war! He had been cheered by the redcoats, proof that his heroism was appreciated. His horse curvetted prettily and the sun reflected off his sabre’s polished blade. The French skirmishers were running in terror from him, fleeing like game from the beaters, and in a moment he would order the full gallop and he imagined the thrill of breaking through the enemy lines, then sabring the gunners and pouncing on the French baggage. Europe would learn that a new military power had risen: William, Prince of Orange!
Still the swarm of French skirmishers retreated before the Prince. A few Frenchmen stopped to fire at their pursuers, but they dared not pause long for fear of the sabres and thus their wild shooting did no damage. The fleeing Frenchmen splashed through the stream and ran past Gemioncourt farm. There seemed to be no French columns ahead, just the inviting field of rye climbing to the low crest where the French gunners waited to be cut down by the Prince’s sabres. Lieutenant Doggett, riding next to Sharpe, nervously drew his sword. ‘I’ve never fought on horseback.’
‘Just concentrate on staying in the saddle, and try not to chop your horse’s ears off.’
‘Yes, sir.’ Doggett gave his horse’s ears a rather speculative look.
‘Don’t chop with your sword,’ Sharpe continued his last minute tuition, ‘but stab with it. And keep your horse moving! If you stand still in a mêlée, you’ll be dead.’
‘Yes, sir.’
The Prince seemed to have no fear, but trotted through the ford straight towards the French guns, which stood silent on the skyline. He was wondering why he had not thought to have had a huge banner of orange silk made; a banner that would follow him on a battlefield to terrify the enemy. He turned to look for Rebecque, intending to order the Chief of Staff to have just such a banner made, but instead he saw that the entire first rank of his horsemen had come to an ignominious halt at the far bank of the stream.
‘Come on!’ the Prince shouted at them. ‘Follow me!’
Not a man nor a horse moved, and the second rank of horsemen stopped a few paces behind the first.
The Prince turned back to his front and saw why. A brigade of French light cavalry had appeared beside the enemy guns. The enemy horsemen were Lancers and Hussars, gaudy in green, scarlet and blue, who now spread ahead of the cannons to make their own two lines of attack. The French standard bearers carried guidon flags, while each Lancer had a small red and white swallow-tailed flag attached just beneath his weapon’s slender blade. The French cavalry were outnumbered by the Prince’s force, but they still advanced with a jaunty confidence. It would be sabre against sabre and sabre against lance.
The French came to a halt two hundred yards from the immobile Dutch cavalry. The Lancers formed the front rank while the Hussars reined in fifty paces behind. For a few seconds the two bodies of cavalry just stared at each other, then the Prince raised his heavy sabre high over his head. ‘Charge!’
He shouted it in a fine loud voice. At the same instant he spurred forward and lowered his sabre’s point, but then realized that his men had not moved from the stream bank. The staff officers had dutifully begun to follow the Prince, but the Belgian horsemen had stayed obstinately still.
‘Charge!’ the Prince shouted again, but again no one moved. Some officers tried to urge their men forward, but those few who were forced ahead soon pulled aside and stopped again.
‘Bloody hell.’ Sharpe drew his sword, then looked at Simon Doggett. ‘In a few seconds, Lieutenant, this is going to be a Goddamned bloody shambles. Ride like hell for the crossroads when it starts. Don’t look back, don’t slow down, and don’t try and play games with Lancers.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Doggett glanced left and right, but the Belgians would not close on the Frenchmen. Just a year ago these Belgians had been a part of the French army, and they had no wish to kill their old comrades. Some of the Belgian horsemen pulled their horses’ heads round to demonstrate their unwillingness to charge.
The French horses snorted, tossed their heads and trampled the rye. The Lancers held their eight-foot-long weapons vertically so that the red and white flags made a brave show against the sky. Sharpe hated lances. He had been captured at lance point in India and still bore the scar on his chest. Some men preferred fighting lances to sabres, claiming that once the lance point was evaded, the Lancer was dead meat, but Sharpe had never felt easy facing the razor-sharp and narrow-bladed spears.
Then, with a deliberate slow menace, and apparently without any order being given, the whole front rank of the French cavalry swung their lance points down into the charge.
The sight of the blades dropping was enough for the Belgian horsemen. They wrenched their horses about, rammed back their spurs, and fled. The staff officers tried to rally the nearest horsemen, but it was hopeless.
Sharpe pulled Doggett’s bridle round. ‘Get out of here! Ride!’
The Prince had already fled. Rebecque was staring at the enemy through eyes made swollen and watery by hay fever. A French bugle sounded loud and mocking, starting the Lancers on their pursuit.
‘Come on, Sharpe!’ Rebecque shouted.
Sharpe had already turned his horse. He saw the Prince ahead of him, head down and galloping. He spurred his own horse, hearing the crash of the galloping enemy horses behind. The enemy’s trumpet calls filled the sky with threat.
It was a race. The quickest of the French horses swiftly overtook the slower Belgians. Lances were drawn back and thrust forward into unprotected backs. Men screamed, arched their spines, and fell. Hooves drummed up great chunks of soil. A Dutchman cut blindly at a Lancer and, to his own surprise, knocked the man backwards from his saddle. A bleeding horse limped. A Brunswicker tumbled from his saddle, scrambled to his feet, and was immediately cut down by an Hussar’s sabre. The Hussars were catching up with the slower Dutch-Belgian horsemen now and their sabres slashed into necks and laid open ribs. Blood slicked the rye straw. Hundreds of broken Dutch-Belgian horsemen streamed northwards towards the crossroads and the enemy rode among them, screaming to keep the panic bubbling, killing and slashing when they could.
The Duke of Wellington rode forward to stop the rout, but the Dutch-Belgian cavalry ignored him, parting about his staff in a flood of sweating horses and frightened men. The French were racing up behind and on the flanks.
‘Get back, sir!’ a staff officer shouted at the Duke who still swore and shouted at the panicked Belgians. All the Duke could see was a chaos of dust, burning rye, blood and frightened horsemen, until, clear in the panicked swirl, he suddenly saw the bright gleam of French helmets and lance blades. The Duke turned his horse and spurred hard. There was no escape on the road, for that was crowded with fugitives, so instead he galloped straight towards the solid ranks of the 92nd. There were Frenchmen to his left and right, trying to cut ahead of the Duke. Two Lancers were behind, rowelling their horses’ flanks bloody in an attempt to reach him. Copenhagen, the Duke’s horse named for one of his early victories, stretched out his neck. The Highlanders were in four standing ranks that bristled with bayonets. No horse would charge home into such a thickly packed formation, but the Duke was shouting at the Scotsmen, ‘Down! Down! Down!’
Four files o
f men dropped to the ground. Copenhagen gathered himself, jumped, and the Duke sailed safely over the sixteen crouching men.
‘Fire!’ a Highlander officer shouted, and a volley of musketry slashed into the French pursuers. The two Lancers died instantly, their horses flailing bloodily along the ground almost to the feet of the front rank. ‘Reload!’ The officer who shouted the fire orders had been one of the men dancing above the crossed swords in the Duchess’s ballroom the night before. ‘Fire!’ An Hussar’s face disappeared in blood as his wounded horse reared. Man and beast fell screaming into the path of a galloping Lancer. The Lancer’s horse tumbled, legs breaking, while its rider sprawled unhurt. The lance, driven deep into the soil, quivered. ‘Reload!’ the Scots officer shouted.
A mixture of French and Dutch-Belgian cavalry galloped at the infantry line. The Belgians, desperate for safety, spurred through the gaps between the battalions and the French horsemen rode with them. The redcoats suddenly realized that there were enemy horsemen in their rear.
The Black Watch was ordered to form square. The wings of the battalion curved backwards and inwards, but the enemy Lancers were already behind the line and spurring into the space between the wings. They saw the Scottish colours and rammed their lances forward at the men who protected the great silk banners. Two Scottish officers faced them on horseback. One Lancer went down under a claymore’s strike, his skull split down to his coat collar. Colonel Macara was shouting at his flanks to close and, by sheer brute strength, the two ends of the line forced themselves inwards to make a crude square. A dozen enemy Lancers were trapped inside the formation. One lunged at the Colonel, but Macara knocked the lance aside then rammed his claymore forward. ‘Platoon, fire!’ he shouted while his sword was still killing the Lancer. Other Lancers were being dragged from their saddles by vengeful Scottish soldiers who stabbed down with bayonets. Outside the square the horsemen veered away from the platoon volleys, while inside the square the trapped Lancers were butchered. The colours were safe, and the pipes had never stopped playing.
The neighbouring battalion, the East Essex, stayed in their line. They, like the Scots, had been in four ranks, but their Colonel simply turned his rear rank about and opened fire front and rear, killing Dutch-Belgians and French horsemen indiscriminately. One band of determined French cavalry spurred hard from the rear in a furious attempt to capture the battalion’s colours. The spears chopped down two British sergeants, a sabre slashed a redcoat aside, then a Lancer rammed his long blade into the eye of the Ensign carrying the regimental flag. Ensign Christie fell, but he held tight to the big yellow silk banner as he collapsed. Two Hussars attacked the fallen Christie, leaning down from their saddles to hack at the sixteen-year-old with their sabres.
Redcoats scrambled forward, climbing over their own dead and wounded. A Lancer tried to pick up the colour with his weapon’s point, but Christie hung on grimly. The two Hussars grunted as they chopped at him with their sabres. A musket shot killed one Frenchman, the other parried a bayonet thrust, then stabbed down at Christie a last time.
Another musket hammered and the Hussar was plucked out of his saddle like a puppet jerked on strings. A knot of red-coated officers and men surged over the prone Christie, driving the last enemy away. A Lancer had speared a corner of the flag and now jerked his lance up to tear a fragment of the yellow silk away, but even that trophy was denied the French. Three muskets flamed and the Lancer toppled backwards from his horse.
‘Close up! Close up!’ the Sergeants shouted. A crashing volley cleared a space in front of the battalion. The air was thick with the foul powder smoke, rank with the stench of blood, and loud with the noise of screaming horses and men. A loose horse galloped wildly across the face of the line, streaming blood. A Lancer staggered away on foot and was dropped by a musket bullet. The French horsemen were turning and riding away, trying to escape the musket volleys.
Ensign Christie was alive, still with the colour gripped to his body that had been slashed with more than twenty sabre and lance wounds. His men made a litter of muskets and blankets and carried him back to the surgeons who had set up for business in the barn by the crossroads. The colour, its bright yellow silk slashed by steel and stained with Christie’s blood, was raised again. The French cavalry, like an ebbing tide of blood, reformed a quarter mile away. The crossroads had held.
The Black Watch dragged the dead Lancers from inside their square and dumped the bodies as a kind of rampart to trip any more charging horses. Men reloaded their muskets. The wounded limped back to the surgeons. One man fell to his knees, vomited blood, then collapsed.
The French had come perilously close to breaking the British line apart. Some of the Hussars and Lancers, who had ridden to the rear of the red-coated battalions, had galloped along the road they were trying to capture, and had only retreated back through the intervals between the battalions because there were not enough horsemen to hold the temporarily captured road. It now seemed to the French that one more effort would surely succeed, and that the red-coated infantry would break just like the Dutch-Belgian horsemen had broken. The trumpets screamed for that second effort which, to ensure success, was strengthened with eight hundred Cuirassiers; the gros frères, big brothers, of the French army. The Cuirassiers wore steel breastplates, helmets and backplates, and rode the heaviest horses of all the French cavalry. A big brother, his armour and his horse weighed more than a ton. The gros frères, their armoured steel reflecting the sun like silver fire, would lead the second charge and crush the infantry by sheer weight and terror.
But the infantry, expecting the charge, was ready. The musket volleys crashed smoke and flame, and punched their bullets clean through the armour plate. The Cuirassiers were tumbled down to the crushed rye as the musket volleys settled into their killing rhythm. Dying horses quivered on the compacted rye, while wounded Cuirassiers struggled to unburden themselves of helmets and armour before limping away. The Lancers and Hussars, seeing the slaughter of the armoured horsemen, did not press their own charge home.
‘Cease fire! Reload!’ the officers and sergeants called to the British squares. The regimental bands played on, while in the squares the colours hung heavy in the humid and smoke-stained air. The enemy cavalry, bloodied and beaten, pulled back to the stream. From the east came the sound of cannon, proof that the Prussians still fought their battle.
Then the French skirmishers crept forward and opened their galling fire again, and from beyond Gemioncourt the French twelve-pounder cannons opened fire on the British ranks. The enemy cavalry was still in sight, and not so very far off, and so the infantry was forced to stay in their squares as prime targets for the heavy French cannon.
It was time for the infantry to suffer.
On the roads leading to Quatre Bras from the west and north the hurrying British troops saw the growing canopy of smoke, and heard the incessant punch of the heavy guns. Carts were already travelling back to Brussels carrying wounded men who groaned in the afternoon heat while their blood dripped through the bottom-boards to stain the white road red. Other wounded men walked away from the battle, staggering in the sun towards their old bivouac areas. In Nivelles the townspeople huddled at their doors, listened to the noise of battle, and stared wide-eyed at the foully wounded soldiers who limped past. Some unwounded Belgian soldiers spread the news that the British were already beaten and that the Emperor was already on his way to Brussels.
The clouds thickened in the west, climbing ever higher and darker.
Twelve miles to the north of Quatre Bras, in the orchard of a farm called Hougoumont which, in turn, was close to the small village of Waterloo, some men were busy thinning the apple crop. They plucked the unripe fruit and tossed it into baskets, thus ensuring that the remaining apples would grow big and juicy. The discarded fruit would be fed to the pigs that lived in the yard of the château of Hougoumont.
It was a hot day, and as the men worked they could hear the percussive thumping of the guns to the south. From the top
of their ladders they could see the growing cloud of dirty smoke that climbed over the battlefield. They chuckled at the sight, relieved that it was not they who were being shot at, nor their homes being invaded by soldiers, and not their land being ridden ragged by cavalry.
The château windows were open and white curtains stirred in the small breeze that offered a slight measure of relief from the stifling heat. A plump woman came to one of the upstairs windows where she rested her arms on the sill and stared at the strange conical smoke canopy that grew in the far southern sky. On the main highway that ran through the valley east of the château she could see a stream of soldiers marching south. The men wore red, and even at this distance she could see they were hurrying. ‘Better them than us, eh, ma’am?’ one of the apple pickers shouted.
‘Better them than us,’ the woman agreed, then crossed herself.
‘We’ll get rain tomorrow,’ one of the men remarked, but the others took no notice. They were too busy picking apples. Tomorrow, if it did not rain, they were supposed to finish the haymaking down in the valley’s bottom, and there was a flock of sheep to be sheared as well, while the day after tomorrow, thank the good Lord, they would have a day off because it was Sunday.
More British troops arrived at Quatre Bras, but they had to be sent to the flanks which were under increasing pressure from the French. Sharpe, after scraping home in front of the French cavalry, had been sent through the wood to find Prince Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar. The Prince, a dour tough man, had been holding his position, but his ammunition was running low and his men were being killed by the ever-present skirmishers. Newly arrived British infantry were sent to support him, while yet more redcoats were sent to help the Rifles on the left flank who were also under heavy attack from a brigade of French infantry.