The Duke snapped his glass shut and looked at his watch. Nine o‘clock. ‘Baggage to the rear,’ he said to no one in particular, but two of his aides turned their horses away to carry the order down the line.
The battalions shrugged off their packs which were piled onto the carts that had brought up the extra ammunition. The men were ordered to keep nothing but their weapons, cartridges and canteens. The carts struggled through fetlock-deep mud to carry the baggage back to the forest’s edge where it joined the carriages of the military commissioners and the artillery wagons and the portable forges and the farriers’ carts, and where the supernumeraries of battle - the shoeing smiths, the wheelwrights, the commissary officers, the clerks, the drivers, the harness makers and the soldiers’ wives - would wait for the day’s decision.
On the northern slope of the ridge the Duke’s infantry waited in columns of companies. The leading battalions were far enough advanced for the men of the forward companies to see over the crest to where a faint and watery glimmer of sunlight shone on the enemy ground. That southern ridge was empty, all but for a few horsemen.
Then, suddenly and gloriously, an army began to show.
The veterans in the Duke’s army had seen an enemy prepare for battle, but never like this. Before, in Spain, the enemy would come as a threat, as a smear of dark uniforms advancing across sunlit ground, but here the Emperor paraded his army as though this day was a holiday and the British redcoats were spectators of his gorgeous display. The French did not advance to battle; instead they spread themselves in an arrogant panoply of overwhelming power.
Infantry, cavalry and gunners appeared. They marched or rode as though they were on the Champ de Mars in Paris. They were not in their combat uniforms, but dressed for the forecourt of a palace. Their coats glistened with gold and silver lace. There were plumes of scarlet, silver, yellow, red, green and white. There were helmets of brass and of steel; helmets trimmed with leopard’s fur or rimmed with sable. There were Cuirassiers, Lancers, Dragoons, Carabiniers, and Hussars. Gunners with dark blue pelisses edged with silver fur ordered their weapons slewed to face the enemy. Trumpeters challenged the valley, their instruments trailing banners of embroidered gold. The red and white Polish swallow-tailed flags of the Lancers made a thicket of colour, while guidons, standards, banners, pennants and gilded Eagles studded the watery sky.
And still they came; regiment after regiment, troop after troop, battery after battery; the might of a resurrected Empire displayed in a massive show of incipient violence. Grecian helmets trailed plumes of horsehair, officers wore sashes thick with gold thread, and the élite of the infantry’s elite wore black bearskins. Those were the men of the Imperial Guard, Napoleon’s beloved anciens, each man with a powdered pigtail, gold ear-rings, and the moustache of a veteran. In front of the Emperor’s Guard his jeunes filles, his guns, stood wheel to wheel.
Sharpe, watching from the ridge above Hougoumont, stared in utter disbelief. After half an hour the enemy was still filing onto the ridge, the new battalions concealing the first, and those new battalions in turn being hidden by yet more troops who poured from the high road to wheel left or right. The bands were playing while officers with gold and lace-trimmed saddle-cloths galloped bravely in front of the display. It was a sight not seen on a battlefield for a hundred years; a formal display of a glorious threat, overwhelming and dazzling and filling the southern landscape with guns and sabres and lances and swords and muskets.
The British gunners gazed at their targets and knew there was not enough ammunition in all Europe to kill such a horde. The infantry watched the thousands of enemy cavalry who would try and break them as they had broken a brigade at Quatre Bras. The Dutch-Belgian troops just watched the whole vast array and knew that no army in all the world could beat such glory into gore.
‘God save Ireland.’ Even Harper, who had seen most of what war had to offer, was overwhelmed by the sight.
‘God quicken the bloody Prussians,’ Sharpe said. The sound of the French bands came clear across the valley; a cacophony of tunes among which, at intervals, the raucous defiance of the Marseillaise sounded distinct. ‘They’re trying to make the Belgians run away,’ Sharpe guessed, and he twisted in his saddle to stare at the nearest Belgian regiment and saw the fear on their young faces. This was not their fight. They thought of themselves as French, and wished the Emperor was back as their lord, but fate had brought them to this sea of mud to be dazzled by a master of war.
From one end of the far ridge to the other, across two miles of farmland, the French army paraded. The Emperor’s guns seemed wheel to wheel; Sharpe tried to number the enemy’s artillery and lost count at over two hundred barrels. He did not even attempt to number the enemy’s men, for they filled the ridge and hid each other and still they marched from the high road to fill the far fields. The might of France had come to a damp valley, there to obliterate its oldest enemy.
The enemy’s drums and bands faded as a cheer billowed from the line’s centre. A small man on a grey horse had appeared. He wore the undress uniform of a colonel of the Imperial Guard’s chasseurs àcheval; a green coat faced with red over a white waistcoat and white breeches. The man wore a grey overcoat loose on his shoulders like a cloak. His bicorne hat had no cockades. His Imperial Majesty, the Emperor of France, galloped along the face of his army and was greeted by the cheers of men who knew they were on the brink of victory.
The Duke of Wellington had long turned scornfully away from the display. ‘Tell the men to lie down.’
The British and Dutch obeyed. Men lying flat in the long grass of the ridge’s plateau could not see the overwhelming enemy, nor were they visible to the enemy’s gunners.
The Duke rode along the right of his line. He did not gallop like his opponent, but trotted sedately. No one cheered the Duke. His gunners, posted on the ridge’s crest, watched the Emperor. One gunner captain, his weapon loaded, squinted along its crude sights then called out to the Duke that in a moment the Emperor would gallop directly into the gun’s line. ‘Permission to fire, Your Grace?’
‘It is not the business of army commanders to fire on each other. Save your ammunition.’ The Duke rode on, not even deigning to look towards his opponent.
The Duke and his entourage passed near Sharpe, then angled towards the troops who guarded the open flank beyond Hougoumont. The closest battalion was Dutch-Belgian and the troops, seeing the knot of horsemen come down from the ridge, opened fire. The musket bullets fluttered near the Duke, but did not hit any of his party. The Duke swerved away as the Dutch officers shouted at their men to cease their fire. The Duke, grim-faced, rode back towards the elm tree that would be his command post.
A shower of rain briefly obscured the valley as the French redeployed themselves for battle. The great display was evidently over for most of the enemy troops now retreated from the ridge’s crest. The French gunners could be seen charging their barrels with powder and shot.
‘What’s the time?’ Sharpe asked a nearby gunner officer who commanded a battery of howitzers.
‘Just on half-past eleven.’
If the Prussians came at one in the afternoon? Sharpe tried to guess how long the British could sustain their defence against the onslaught of the huge force he had just watched parade. One and a half hours? It seemed unlikely.
The French, perhaps certain that they had plenty of time in which to do their work, were in no hurry to begin. More guns were manhandled into their battle line, yet none opened fire. Sharpe gazed eastwards to see if any Prussian cavalry scouts had yet appeared beyond the valley’s edge, but nothing moved there. He wished he had a watch so he could see the progress of the minutes that must be bringing the Prussians closer. ‘The time?’ he apologetically asked the gunner officer again.
The gunner obligingly clicked open the lid of his watch. ‘A quarter of twelve.’
Behind the howitzers the nearest British redcoats sat or lay on the wet turf. Some smoked their clay pipes. Their canteens were
filled with rum or gin, and their pouches with dry cartridges. The wind was dying. The clouds still stretched across the sky, but they must have been thinning for Sharpe saw yet more gauzy floods of sunlight patching the distant fields with gold. The day was warming, though Sharpe’s clothes were still clammy and uncomfortable. The minutes passed. The gunner officer fidgeted with his watch, obsessively opening and closing the silver lid. No one spoke. It was almost as if the whole army held its breath. Patrick Harper was watching a pair of skylarks who tumbled in the lower veil of clouds.
Then a French gun fired.
The barrel of the gun was cold, so the shot did not carry the full distance to the British ridge. Instead the roundshot slammed into the valley, scattering rye, then bounced in a flurry of wet soil to bury itself just below the elm tree. The smoke of the gun drifted grey along the French ridge.
A second gun fired. Its roundshot similarly bounded harmlessly through the empty fields. The Duke opened his watch lid to see the time.
There was a pause equal to that which had separated the first two shots, then a third French gun fired. Its ball screamed towards the exposed Dutch-Belgian troops beyond the sandpit, but fell short and ploughed into a patch of soft ground that stopped the missile dead.
The three shots were the Emperor’s signal.
To let loose hell.
CHAPTER 14
The Earl of Uxbridge, quite ready for the moment, had arranged for his servant to bring a tray of silver stirrup cups filled with sherry. As the first gun fired the Earl waved the servant forward and watched as the small cups were handed about to his staff.
The Earl waited for the second gun to fire, then, as though these horsemen were about to ride to hounds, he gravely raised his stirrup cup. ‘Today’s fox, gentlemen. Allow me to give you today’s fox.’
The horsemen drank. Lord John Rossendale had to curb the temptation to gulp the sherry down.
The third gun fired. The fox had broken cover, was running, and the blooding could begin.
Every gun on the French ridge opened fire.
The salvo showed as a volcanic eruption of smoke that blurred the far crest with yellow-grey smoke. In the heart of the smoke were the stabbing flames.
Two heartbeats later the sound slammed across the valley; a thunderclap to tell Europe that the Emperor was at war.
The majority of the guns had been loaded with shell. The cold barrels dropped the missiles fractionally short and most plunged harmlessly into mud that either extinguished the burning fuse or soaked up the force of the explosion. A few, very few, ricocheted on the ridge’s forward slope to land a second time among the battalions sheltering beyond the crest. The explosions punched ragged blots of dark smoke and livid flame into the damp air.
The first men were dying, but not many, for a shell had to explode in the very heart of a company if it was to kill. Some shells were defused by quick-witted men who either pinched out the fire or knocked the smouldering fuse clean from the powder charge with a swift blow of a musket butt. The smoke from the French guns rolled down into the valley, then began to be fed as the guns which had reloaded the quickest fired again. The firing became ragged, but constant; jet after jet of smoke and flame pumped from the French-held ridge. The shots screamed higher as the gun barrels warmed. Some shells skimmed across the ridge top to explode far back at the forest’s edge while the best aimed shots bounced just below the British crest to plunge down among the men hidden behind. The shells made differing sounds, depending on their distance from the ear. Some hummed like childrens’ tops, some whirred like a bird’s wingbeat, while others rumbled like thunder. The sounds were already causing a trickle of Belgian troops to retreat towards the forest; one wounded man was an excuse for ten others to help him to safety.
One shell exploded close to the Earl of Uxbridge’s staff who, still bunched together after their toast to the day’s fox, split asunder like sheep attacked by a wolf. A small silver cup fell into the mud, but otherwise there was no damage other than to the young men’s dignity. They curbed their excited horses and watched as each new shot roiled and twitched the bank of smoke which thickened in front of the Emperor’s gun line.
On the British right, where the French guns were close to Hougoumont, the gunners were firing canister to scour the British skirmishers from the woods which lay south of the château. Some of the musket-balls hummed up onto the ridge where they pattered on the wet ground like hail.
A British nine-pounder fired a return shot, and earned a furious reprimand from a mounted staff officer. ‘Hold your damned fire! Hold your fire!’ The Duke was saving his guns the wear and tear of incessant firing that could blow out touchholes and even split barrels. He would need his guns when the enemy infantry or cavalry advanced.
A shell plunged down to smash an howitzer’s wheel before bouncing up to explode harmlessly behind the ridge. The gunners quickly brought up a spare wheel and repaired the gun. The French began to mix more solid roundshot with the shells and one of the iron balls took the head off a staff officer, leaving his bloody body momentarily upright in its saddle before the terrified horse bolted and the headless body toppled to be dragged along by the left stirrup. The corpse was finally shaken loose and a group of redcoats scuttled forward to rifle the dead man’s pockets.
A shell landed on the ridge top, bounced, then exploded twenty yards to Sharpe’s left. A piece of red-hot casing, trailing smoke, smacked harmlessly against his thigh. ‘Go back,’ Sharpe told Harper.
‘I’m all right here, so I am.’
‘You made your wife a promise! So bugger off!’
‘Save your breath!’ Harper stayed. The cannonade was heavy, but it was not overly dangerous. The French gunners were doubly hampered; first they were being blinded by their own smoke, and secondly their enemy was crouching behind the protection of the low ridge, and so most of their shells were exploding harmlessly if they exploded at all. Too many fuses were being extinguished by mud, yet the artillery was making a deal of noise, enough to terrify the Belgian troops who crouched under the sounds of hissing shells and banging explosions and thundering guns.
Sharpe moved to his right, going to a vantage point from where he could see the empty countryside on the army’s right flank. The move took Harper and himself away from the worst of the cannonade and to where another British staff officer was evidently posted on the same duty as Sharpe; to watch for a French outflanking march. The man, who was in the blue coat and fur Kolbak of the Hussars, nodded civilly to Sharpe, then consulted a notebook. ‘I made it ten of midday, did you?’
‘Ten of midday?’ Sharpe asked.
‘When Bonaparte opened fire. It’s good to be accurate about these things.’
‘Is it?’
‘The Peer likes to be specific. I’m one of his family by the way.’ By which the pleasant-faced young man meant he was one of the Duke’s aides. ‘My name is Witherspoon.’
‘Sharpe. And this is my friend Mr Harper from Ireland.’
Captain Witherspoon nodded genially at Harper, then cocked an eye at the clouds. ‘I suspect it might well clear up. I detected a quite definite rise in the mercury this morning. I’m honoured to make your acquaintance, Sharpe! You’re with the Young Frog, are you not?’
‘Yes, I am.’
‘Is he good for anything at all?’
Sharpe smiled at Captain Witherspoon’s disingenuous tone. ‘Not that I know of.’
The cavalryman laughed. ‘I was at Eton with him. He wasn’t any good there either, though he had a mighty fine opinion of himself. I remember him as being eternally dirty! But he liked the girls, and had a prolific fondness for wine.’
‘What’s the time now?’ Sharpe asked in apparently rude disregard of Witherspoon’s gossip.
Witherspoon hauled his watch from his fob and clicked open the lid. ‘Four minutes after midday, save a few seconds.’
‘You’d best write down that the French are advancing, then.’
‘They’re doing what? Oh,
my soul! So they are! Thank you, my dear fellow! Good Lord, they advance, indeed they do!’ He dashed a note into his book.
French skirmishers were swarming towards Hougoumont. They came in a loose mass of men; running, firing, running again. They were mostly among the trees, which gave cover from the foot of their ridge right up to the walls of the château, but some had overlapped onto the open flank where newly cut hay lay in sopping rows among the stubble. The skirmishers of the red-coated Coldstream Guards were falling back fast, evidently ordered not to make a fight of it among the trees. With the redcoats were some Dutch and German troops, the Germans armed with long-barrelled hunting rifles. Sharpe saw at least two of the blue-coated Dutch-Belgian troops running towards the enemy, presumably seeking shelter.
The Guards skirmishers scrambled back into the farm buildings or into the walled garden and orchard that lay alongside the château. The French skirmishers had advanced to the very edge of the wood and were hidden from Sharpe by the loom of the château’s buildings. ‘I’m going down there,’ he told Harper, pointing to the field where a handful of the French skirmishers sheltered behind the rows of wet hay.
‘I’ll come with you,’ Harper said obstinately.
‘Take care!’ Captain Witherspoon called after the two Riflemen.
Sharpe cantered his horse down the farm track, past a haystack that stood outside the château’s rear gates, and then into the open field to the west. The few French skirmishers who had been sheltering behind the cut hay had gone back to the wood, evidently scoured from the field by muskets fired from loopholes hacked in Hougoumont’s barns. Sharpe was only a hundred yards from the fight, but he was as safe from it as if he had been on the moon. The French had only one object, and that was to capture the buildings from where they could rake the British-held ridge behind with close-range cannon-fire. They had taken the woods, and now the mass of blue-coated infantry readied themselves for the final rush at the sprawling farm. Some of the French used axes to chop big holes in the hedge that bordered the wood. More French battalions filed into the trees until the woods were filled with enemy infantry waiting for the bugle, which would throw the attack forward.