Major Vine was shot through his left eye by a skirmisher. He gave a last bad-tempered grunt, fell from his saddle, and lay stone-dead beside Lieutenant-Colonel Ford’s horse. The Colonel whimpered, then stared down at the fallen Major whose face now appeared to have one vast red Cyclopean eye. ‘Major Vine?’ Ford asked nervously.
The dead man did not move.
Ford tried to remember Vine’s Christian name. ‘Edwin?’ He tried, or perhaps it was Edward? ‘Edward?’ But Edwin Vine lay quite still. A fly settled next to the fresh pool of blood that had been his left eye.
‘Major Vine!’ Ford snapped as though a direct order would resurrect the dead.
‘He’s a gonner, sir,’ a sergeant from the colour party offered helpfully, then, seeing his Colonel’s incomprehension, made a more formal report. ‘The Major’s dead, sir.’
Ford smiled a polite response and stifled an urge to scream. He did not know it, but a quarter of the men who had marched with him to battle were now either dead or injured. RSM McInerney had been disembowelled by a roundshot that had killed two other men and torn the arm off another. Daniel Hagman was bleeding to death with a bullet in his lungs. His breath bubbled with blood as he tried to speak. Sharpe knelt beside him and held his hand. ‘I’m sorry, Dan.’ Sharpe had known Hagman the longest of all the men in the light company. The old poacher was a good soldier, shrewd, humorous and loyal. ‘I’ll get you to the surgeons, Dan.’
‘Bugger them surgeons, Mr Sharpe,’ Hagman said, then said nothing more. Sharpe shouted at two of the bandsmen to carry him back to the surgeons, but Hagman was dead. Sergeant Huckfield lost the small finger of his left hand to a musket ball. He stared in outrage at the wound, then, refusing to leave the battalion, sliced once with his knife then asked Captain Jefferson to wrap a strip of cloth round the bleeding stump. Private Clayton was shaking with fear, but somehow managed to stand steady and look straight into the eyes of the French skirmishers who still roamed the ridge crest with apparent impunity. Next to him Charlie Weller was trying to remember childhood’s prayers, but, though childhood was not very far in his past, the prayers would not come. ‘Oh, God,’ he said instead.
‘God’s no bloody help,’ Clayton said, then ducked as a skirmisher’s bullet almost knocked the crown off his shako.
‘Stand still there!’ Sergeant Huckfield shouted.
Clayton pulled his shako straight and muttered a few curses at the Sergeant. ‘We should be bloody attacking,’ he said after he had exhausted his opinion of Huckfield’s mother.
‘In time we will.’ Charlie Weller still had a robust faith in victory.
Another musket bullet went within inches of Clayton’s head. He shivered helplessly. ‘If I’m a dead ’un, Charlie, you’ll look after Sally, won’t you?’ Clayton’s wife, Sally, was by far the prettiest wife in the battalion. ‘She likes you, she does,’ Clayton explained his apparent generosity.
‘You’re going to be all right.’ Charlie Weller, despite the hiss and crash of bullet and shell, felt a frisson of excitement at the thought of Sally. ,
‘Sweet God, I’ve had enough of this!’ Clayton looked round to see what officers still lived. ‘Bloody hell! Major Vine’s a dead ’un! Good riddance to the bastard.’
‘Look to your front, Private Clayton!’ Sergeant Huckfield touched the New Testament in his top pocket, and prayed that the damned French skirmishers would soon run out of ammunition.
Colonel Joseph Ford almost vomited as he tried to wipe away the globules of Major Vine’s brains that smeared his breeches. Ford was feeling horribly alone; one major was dead, the other was wounded and gone to the surgeons, and all around him his precious battalion was being chewed to pieces by the guns and the skirmishers. He took off his spectacles and rubbed frantically at the lens, only to discover that his sash was thickly smeared with scraps of Major Vine’s brains. Ford gasped for horrified breath and knew he was going to vomit helplessly.
‘It’s nothing to do with me!’ a harsh voice suddenly spoke from beside Ford’s horse, ‘but I’d suggest a fifty-pace advance, give the bastards one good volley, then retire.’
Ford, his impulse to vomit checked by the voice, frantically pulled on the smudged eyeglasses and found himself staring into the sardonic face of Lieutenant-Colonel Sharpe. Ford tried to say something in reply, but no sound came.
‘With your permission, sir?’ Sharpe asked punctiliously.
Ford, too frightened to open his mouth, just nodded.
‘South Essex!’ Sharpe’s thunderous voice startled the nearest men. It did not matter that he had inadvertently used the battalion’s old name, they knew who they were and who, at last, was giving them direction in the middle of horror. ‘Front rank! Fix bayonets!’
‘Thank Christ for bloody Sharpie,’ Clayton said fervently, then half crouched to hold his musket between his knees as he pulled out his bayonet and slotted it onto his musket.
Sharpe thrust between the files of Number Five Company, placing himself in the very centre of the battalion’s front rank. “Talion will advance fifty paces! At the double! By the right! March!’ As the men started forward, Sharpe drew his long sword. ‘Come on, you buggers! Cheer! Let the bastards know you’re coming to kill them! Cheer!’
The battalion ran forward, bayonets outstretched. And they cheered. They knew Sharpe, they had followed him into battle before, and they liked to hear that voice shouting commands. They trusted him. He gave them confidence and victory. They cheered even louder as the mass of startled skirmishers on the ridge’s crest upped and fled from their sudden advance. Sharpe had run ahead of them to stand with his drawn sword on the very lip of the crest.
‘Halt!’ Sharpe’s voice, trained as a sergeant, instantly silenced and stopped the shrunken battalion. Ahead of them the French Voltiguers were dropping into new firing positions.
Sharpe turned to face the battalion. ‘Front rank kneel! Aim at the buggers! Don’t throw away this volley! Find your man and kill the bastard! Aim for their bellies!’ He pushed his way between two men of the kneeling front rank then turned to look at the French. He saw a Voltigeur’s musket pointing directly at him and he knew that the Frenchman was taking careful aim. He also knew he could not duck or dodge, but just had to trust in the French musket’s inaccuracy. ‘Aim!’ he shouted. The Frenchman fired and Sharpe felt the wind of the ball on his check like a sudden hot blow. ‘Fire!’
The massive volley crashed down the slope. Perhaps twenty Frenchmen died, and twice as many were wounded. ‘Light company! Stay where you are and reload! Front rank, stand! No one told you to run!’ Sharpe remained on the crest. Behind him a man was lying dead, struck in the head by the bullet intended for Sharpe. ‘Light company! Chain formation, quick now!’
The battalion’s skirmishers spread along the crest. Their new Captain, Jefferson, jiggled impatiently, wanting to be away from this exposed ridge where the roundshot slashed and thudded, but Sharpe was determined that the Company’s volley would have an effect. The men finished reloading their muskets, then knelt. The surviving French skirmishers were creeping forward again, filling the gaps torn by the battalion volley. ‘Wait for the order!’ Sharpe called to his old Company. ‘Find your targets! Clayton!’
‘Sir?’
‘There’s an officer on your right. A tall bugger with a red moustache. I want him dead or I’ll blame you for it! Company!’ He paused a second. ‘Fire!’
The smaller volley did more damage, though whether the moustached officer was shot, Sharpe could not tell. He shouted at the men to retire to battalion. The manoeuvre had gained a few moments’ respite, nothing more, but it was better to hit back than simply endure the galling punishment of the enemy skirmishers.
Sharpe lingered at the crest a few more seconds. It was not bravado, but rather curiosity because, five hundred paces to his left, he could just see two red-coated infantry battalions of the King’s German Legion advancing in column. They marched towards La Haye Sainte with their colours flying, presumably to dri
ve away the French infantry who clustered about the farm.
He would have liked to have watched longer, but the enemy was creeping back towards the crest, and so Sharpe turned and walked back to the battalion. ‘Thank you for the privilege, Colonel!’ he shouted to Ford.
Ford said nothing. He was in no mood to appreciate Sharpe’s tact, instead he felt slighted and diminished by the Rifleman’s competence. Ford knew that he should have given the orders, and that he should have taken the battalion forward, but his bowels had turned to water and his mind was a haze of fear and confusion. He had fought briefly in southern France, but he had never seen a horror like this; a battlefield where men were dying by the minute, where his battalion shrank as the files closed over the gaps left by the dead, and where it seemed that every man must die before the field’s appetite for blood was slaked. Ford snatched off his fouled spectacles and scrubbed their lenses on a corner of his saddle-cloth. The white smoke and cannon’s glare melded into a smear of horror before his eyes. He wished it would end, he just wished it would end. He no longer cared if it ended in victory or defeat, he just wanted it to end.
But the Emperor had only just started to fight.
The Duke of Wellington no longer troubled himself about the Prince of Orange. At the battle’s commencement, when some niceties of polite usage persisted, the Duke had taken care to inform the Prince of any orders involving those troops nominally under the Prince’s command, but now in the desperate moments of pure survival the Duke simply ignored the Young Frog.
Which did not mean that the Prince considered himself redundant. On the contrary, he saw his own genius as the allies’ sole hope of victory and was prepared to use the last shreds of his authority to achieve it. Which meant La Haye Sainte must be saved, and to save it the Prince ordered the remnants of the 2nd Infantry Brigade of the King’s German Legion to attack the besieging French.
Colonel Christian Ompteda, the brigade commander, formed his two battalions into close column of companies, ordered them to fix bayonets, and then to advance into the suffocating mix of heated air and bitter smoke that filled the valley. The German objective was the field to the west of La Haye Sainte where the French skirmishers were pressing close and thick on the beleaguered farm.
The Germans reached the crest and were about to march down on the French when the Prince of Orange galloped to intercept them. ‘In line!’ the Prince shouted. ‘In line! You must overlap them! I insist you advance in line!’
Colonel Ompteda, his battalions halted on the very edge of the valley and under fire from the French guns, protested that there were enemy cavalry patrolling the valley floor. The Prince turned sarcastic eyes towards the smoke. ‘I see no cavalry.’
‘Your Highness, I must insist that - ’
‘You cannot insist! You will form line! Damn you!’ The Prince was ebullient, feeding off the crash and hammer of the guns. He felt himself born to this heated chaos of battle. He did not give a fig that Ompteda was a man who had spent a lifetime soldiering; the Prince had the passionate certainty of his convictions and not even his experiences with Halkett’s brigade at Quartre Bras nor the massacre of the Red Germans would sway him. ‘I order you into line! Or do you wish me to appoint another brigade commander?’ he shouted into the Colonel’s face.
Ompteda, in whom obedience was deeply ingrained, reluctantly deployed his two battalions into line. The Prince, scornful of Ompteda’s timidity and certain that he had just given the orders necessary to bring glowing victory, watched triumphantly as the German bayonets marched into the valley.
Fifty paces from the edge of the skirmishers, Ompteda ordered his men to charge.
The Germans ran forward, their bayonets bright in the gloom under the smoke. The French infantry, taken utterly by surprise, fled from the appalling threat of the seventeen-inch blades. The German colours swirled forward into the musket smoke left by the skirmishers.
‘There!’ The Prince, happy on his hill, exulted in the success.
‘Let me congratulate Your Highness,’ Winckler, one of the Prince’s Dutch aides, smirked at his master’s side.
Lieutenant Simon Doggett, who was a few yards to the Prince’s right, stared beyond the infantry and could have sworn he saw a file of cavalry trotting across the valley. Or at least he was sure he saw the glint of helmets and the swirl of horsehair plumes in a rift of the smoke. ‘Sir? There’s cavalry out there, sir!’
The Prince turned furiously on the Lieutenant. ‘That’s all you British ever see! Cavalry! You’re nervous, Doggett. If you can’t endure the rigours of battle, you shouldn’t be a soldier. Isn’t that right, Winckler?’
‘Entirely right, Your Highness.’
Rebecque listened to the conversation and said nothing. He just stared into the shifting white scrims where the muskets crackled like burning thorns.
‘You see!’ The Prince made a great play of peering into the valley, shading his eyes and gaping like a village idiot. ‘No horses! Lieutenant Doggett? Where are your gee-gees?’
Simon Doggett was no longer certain that he had seen any cavalry, for the valley was thick with smoke and he feared that nervousness had played tricks with his perception, but he stubbornly held his ground. ‘I’m fairly sure I saw them, sir, in the smoke. They were Cuirassiers, off to the right there.’
But the Prince had taken enough from pusillanimous Englishmen. ‘Get rid of the boy, Rebecque! Just get rid of him. Send him back to his nursemaid.’ The Prince’s horse shied sideways as a cannon-ball slashed close past. ‘There!’ The Prince cried triumphantly as the smoke drifted aside to reveal that the KGL infantry had scoured the last Frenchmen away from the farm’s western walls. ‘You see? No cavalry! Boldness wins!’
‘Your Highness’s boldness wins,’ Winckler hastened to correct his master.
A trumpet interrupted the Prince’s next words. The trumpet call sounded from the valley, from inside the smoke where the Prince had insisted no cavalry lurked, but out of which, like avenging furies, the troop of Cuirassiers now led the charge.
Rebecque groaned. In almost the exact same place as the Hanoverians had been slaughtered, the KGL now suffered. The cavalry, a mixture of Cuirassiers, Lancers and Dragoons who had survived the slaughter of the horsemen among the British squares, now struck the flank of Ompteda’s right-hand battalion. To Rebecque it seemed that the red-coated infantry simply disappeared beneath the swarm of mounted killers. To the French horsemen this was a blessed moment of revenge on the infantry who had made them bleed and suffer earlier in the day.
The Prince just stared. He had gone pale, but he made no move to help the men he had just doomed. His mouth opened slackly and his fingers twitched on his reins.
The Germans stood no chance. The horsemen sabred and stabbed from the open flank. The men of the right-hand KGL battalion broke into hopeless flight and were run down by the horses. The left-hand battalion formed a rally square to protect its colour, but the right-hand battalion was destroyed. The Prince turned away as a French swordsman captured a KGL colour and hefted it aloft in a gesture of triumph. Colonel Ompteda died trying to save the flag. The French infantry ran to add their bayonets to the horsemen’s blades. The German survivors, pitifully few, inched in their rough square back towards the ridge. They too might have been doomed, but some of their own cavalry streamed down from the elm tree to drive the enemy back.
A French cavalry trumpeter sounded a derisive flurry as the remnants of the King’s German Legion limped back up the slope. A Cuirassier brandished the captured colour, taunting the suffering British ridge with this foretaste of French victory.
The Prince did not look at the Germans nor at the exultant French. Instead he stared imperiously towards the east. ‘It isn’t my fault if men won’t fight properly!’
None of the staff answered. Not even Winckler was minded to soften the disaster with flattery.
‘We gave the garrison a breathing space, did we not?’ The Prince gestured at La Haye Sainte that was once more rin
ged with smoke, but again no one answered and the Prince, who believed he deserved loyalty from his military family, turned furiously on his staff. ‘The Germans should have formed square! It wasn’t my fault!’ He looked from man to man, demanding agreement, but only Simon Doggett was brave enough to meet the Prince’s petulant and bulging eyes.
‘You’re nothing but a silk stocking full of shit,’ Doggett said very clearly, and utterly astonished himself by so repeating Patrick Harper’s scornful verdict on the Prince.
There was an appalled silence. The Prince gaped. Rebecque, not quite sure whether he had heard correctly, opened his mouth to protest, but could not find adequate words.
Doggett knew he had just seconds to keep the initiative. He tugged at his horse’s reins. ‘You’re a bloody murderer!’ he said to the Prince, then slashed back his spurs and galloped away. In a few seconds the smoke hid him.
The Prince stared after him. Rebecque hastened to assure His Highness that Doggett’s wits had clearly been loosened by the stress of battle. The Prince nodded acceptance of the facile explanation, then turned furiously on his staff again. ‘I’m surrounded by incompetents! That bloody man should have formed square! Is it my fault if a damned German doesn’t know his job?’ The Prince’s indignation and anger spilled out in furious passion. ‘Is it my fault that the French are winning? Is it?’
And in that, at least, the Prince spoke true. The French, at last, were winning the battle.
CHAPTER 19
French victory became a virtual certainty when La Haye Sainte fell. The farm’s German defenders ran out of rifle ammunition and the French attackers tore down the barricaded doors and flooded into the farm buildings. For a time they were held off by bayonets and swords as the defenders fought furiously in the corridors and stables. The Germans made barricades of their own and the French dead, then rammed their sword-bayonets over the piled bodies, and for a time it seemed as if their steel and fury might yet hold the farm, but then the French musket volleys tore into the Riflemen and the French musket wadding set fire to the stable straw, and the defenders, choking and decimated, were forced out.