‘You can fight, Johnny! The more the merrier! We’ll take their horse, then break their infantry!’
The cream of the British cavalry would go to shatter the French attack. Lord John, his borrowed sword bright in his hand, rode to find his honour again. In battle.
CHAPTER 16
Almost two and a half thousand horsemen assembled just behind the ridge’s flat crest. Men pulled on gleaming helmets that were topped with long horsehair plumes. The Scots on their huge white horses wore Grenadier bearskins as memorials of the day they had captured the colour of Louis XIV’s household guards at Ramillies. They tightened their chin straps and made the usual small jokes of men facing battle. The air was rich with the smell of horse dung.
An officer raised a gloved hand, held it motionless for a second, then dropped it to point at where the gun smoke hung above the valley. A bugle sounded the advance as the long attack lines moved forward in a jingle of curb chains and creak of leather.
They were the heavy cavalry of Britain; the Sovereign’s Guard and the Union Brigade. They were the best-mounted cavalry in all the world, and the worst led.
They rode big strong horses reared on rich English and Irish grassland. The horses were fresh, unblooded and eager. The riders drew their swords and looped the weapons’ leather straps round their gauntletted wrists. Each sword blade was thirty-five inches of heavy steel that had been sharpened to a spear point. The bugle called the trot and the long plumes began to undulate behind the ranks. Some men took a last pull of rum from their canteens while others touched their lucky charms. A horse curled its lips to show long yellow teeth, another whinnied with excitement. A man spat a wad of tobacco, then wrapped his horse’s reins round his left wrist. The leading ranks of cavalry were at the crest and they could see, through the scrims of cannon smoke, that the valley was a killer’s playground; a wide field crammed with an unsuspecting enemy. Twenty thousand French infantry had crossed the valley and two and a half thousand cavalry would now charge at their exposed flank. The horsemen spurred into a canter, their plumes tossing wild in the smoky wind. Sabretaches and empty scabbards flapped at their sides. A guidon embroidered in gold thread led them down the slope. The troopers’ ranks were already ragged for each man only wanted to close on the enemy, while their officers, not wanting to be outrun, raced ahead as though they rode on a hunting field and feared to miss the kill.
Then, at last, the trumpeters sounded the full charge. The ten notes, rising in triplets, pierced to the final high and brilliant tone which threw the horsemen on. Damn caution. Damn the slow approach and the final steady charge that would bring the horses home as one cohesive mass. This was war! This was the hunting field with a human quarry, and glory did not wait for the last man to form line, and so the trumpet shivered the blood with its madman’s call. Charge home, and the devil bugger the hindmost.
They made a glorious charge of bright horse that slanted across the face of the ridge’s forward slope like a flood. Ahead of them were the Cuirassiers, and beyond the breast-plated enemy horsemen were the infantry who were neither in column nor in line. None of the French was expecting the attack.
The Cuirassiers’ horses were blown. They were still forming their lines after the slaughter of the Red Germans, and now they stood no chance. They were broken in an instant. Lord John, racing behind the Life Guards, heard the blacksmith sound of swords clashing on breastplates; he had a glimpse of unhorsed men, of horses thrown to the ground, then of a sword rising high and bloody. The Cuirassiers, hugely outnumbered, were obliterated in the time it took for a trooper on a galloping horse to hack down once. An Irish horseman screamed, not in pain, but from the sheer joy of killing. Another man was drunk on rum, his sword was wet with blood, and his horse bleeding from the spur wounds as he hurled it on to yet more slaughter.
A few British riders were down, their horses tripped by the broken Cuirassiers, but most of the charge simply flowed around the fallen horses and wounded Frenchmen. The horsemen could see the infantry milling like sheep brought to the wolfs den. A bugle, its notes wavering because they were being blown from a galloping horse, tore its bright challenge to glory.
Lord John was screaming as though drunk. He had never, in all his life, known excitement like this. The very earth seemed to shudder. All around him, bright in the day’s gloom, a torrent of men and horses flowed at full killing stretch. The horses, teeth bared, seemed to fly across the field. Mud churned up by the hooves ahead flecked and slapped his face. There was a wild music in the air, the sound of banging hoofbeats and shrill shouts, of horses’ lungs rasping like bellows, of screams fading behind and warning shouts sounding louder ahead, of the bugle hurling them on, of glory as vivid as the guidon banner that seemed to drive straight at the heart of the doomed French column.
Then the horsemen hit.
And the French, still half manoeuvring out of column, were helpless.
The big horses and their towering riders crashed home all along the column’s broken flank. Cavalry drove great wedges into the very centre of the French infantry. The swords slashed down, rose, then slashed again. Horses reared, lashing with their hooves to break skulls. The troopers, revelling in the slaughter, wheeled in the middle of the breaking column to break it yet further apart and thus make it easier to kill its constituent parts. They lashed the French with steel, and still more horsemen came to drive yet further lanes of death and horror into the shattered mass.
‘Fix bayonets!’ The redcoats on the ridge top fumbled at their scabbards, dragged the long blades free, then slotted the bayonets onto the hot smoking muzzles of the guns.
‘Forward!’
There was an hurrah along the ridge, then the redcoats ran to join the killing.
The French broke. No infantry could have stood. The French columns broke and fled, and that made the horsemens’ task even easier. It was no trouble to kill a running man and so the cavalrymen slaked themselves on killing and wanted even more. They were drunk on the slaughter, drenched in it, glorying in it. Some of the riders were properly drunk, soused in rum and lust, and killing like fiends. The bugles screamed at them, encouraged them until the sword blades were so thick with blood that the cavalry’s hands and wrists were sopping with it.
A Scots sergeant, six feet four inches tall and on a horse to match, took the first Eagle. He did it alone, riding his great warhorse deep into a thicket of desperate Frenchmen who were ready to die for their standard. They did die. Sergeant Ewart was strong enough to use the clumsy thirty-five-inch sword. He cut the first defender down through the head. A French sergeant, armed with one of the spears issued to protect the precious Eagles, drove its point at Ewart, but the Scotsman’s blade drove up through the Sergeant’s jaw. He wrenched the sword free, spurred his horse on, felt a musket-ball blaze past his face and hacked down at the man who had fired, breaking the man’s skull apart with the vicious blade. Ewart wheeled his horse, reached for the Eagle, snatched it, and his heels went back as he lifted the golden trophy high over his head. He was shouting so all the world would see what he had done, and his horse, as if it shared the triumph, rode across the path of dead with its bloody head high and its flanks sheeted scarlet.
‘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 infa
ntry 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 an
d 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.