The survivors of the Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers charged with all the fury of bitter men who had taken hell all day and who now faced the pristine, untouched favourites of an Emperor who had been sheltered from death till this moment. They charged with bloodied and powder-stained faces, and they screamed like furies as they carried their long blades forward.
The flank of the column tried to retreat from the charge, but the Frenchmen only pressed against the ranks behind that still tried to advance to the drumbeat. The sound of the drums was menacing, yet even the men sheltered in the very heart of the column knew that something was wrong. Their left flank was dying from the Brunswicker volleys, the Duke had rallied the redcoats in their front, and now Sharpe’s men struck home on the right.
Sharpe slashed back with his heels, the horse leaped forward, and his sword crashed down like an axe. The blade drove a long splinter from a parrying musket, then hacked down again to thump through a bearskin and drive a Frenchman to his knees. The horse screamed and reared as a bayonet stabbed its chest, but then the redcoats swarmed past Sharpe to carry their blades at the enemy. The Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers had a score to settle, and so they ripped into the Emperor’s immortals with a savagery that only men atoning for a moment’s cowardice could show.
Sharpe’s horse was wounded, but not fatally. It screamed with fear or pain as he crashed a musket aside with his sword then lunged at the Frenchman’s face. The man recoiled from the blade, then went down beneath the bayonets of two snarling redcoats who thrust hard to force their blades through the Frenchman’s heavy blue greatcoat. The enemy were sweating and edging back. The column was so closely packed that the French had no space to use their weapons properly. Sharpe’s men were keening as they killed, crooning a foul music as they lunged and stabbed and gouged and fought across the dead. Sharpe’s horse half stumbled on a corpse and he flailed with the sword to find his balance. The ridge stank of blood and sweat and powder smoke. A vast crash announced that Harper had fired his volley gun point blank into the ranks of the Guard, and now the Irishman threw himself into the space his bullets had made. He widened the space by stabbing with his sword-bayonet, each vicious thrust accompanied by a Gaelic war-cry.
Lieutenant Doggett, still on horseback, shouted at the files to give way then crashed his horse hard into the French ranks and stabbed down with his slim sword. He was screaming madly, covering his terror with a sound mad enough for a smoking field of blood. Ahead of Sharpe an Eagle swayed over the bearskin hats. He slashed his sword towards it, but the French ranks were so close that he could not force a path towards the trophy. He swore at a man as he killed him, then drove the sword into a moustached, sun-tanned face and twisted the steel to flense the man’s cheek away. ‘The Eagle! The Eagle!’ Sharpe screamed, then cursed the men who barred his way. Beneath and beside Sharpe the bayonets stabbed and twisted, but suddenly the enemy’s gilded standard vanished, plucked backwards from the ridge top as the Emperor’s Guard began their retreat. The drums had fallen silent and the immortal undefeated Guard were running away.
They ran. One moment they had been trying to fight, the next they were shouting that the day was lost and they were scrambling backwards from the bloody bayonets with panic and fear on their moustached faces, and the redcoats, panting and bloodied like hounds at their kill, watched in silence as the enemy élite fled. The Guard had been defeated by a remnant of red-coated killers who had sprung from the mud to maul an emperor’s glory.
‘Don’t give them a chance to stand!’ A commanding voice rose clear among the smoke and chaos. The Duke, cantering his horse behind the victorious battalions, was staring intently at the fleeing French. ‘Don’t let them stand! Go forward now! See them off our land!’ Typically there was an edge of impatience in the Duke’s voice as though his men, having performed the miracle of defeating the Imperial Guard, had disappointed him by not yet converting that defeat into rout. Yet, equally typically, the Duke’s eye had missed nothing and he was not graceless at this moment of salvation. ‘Mr Sharpe! I am beholden to you! That is your battalion now! So take it forward!’
“Talion!’ Sharpe had no time to savour his reward. Instead he had to straighten his line to face the valley where the French were still massed, and from where their next attack would surely come. ‘Light company stand firm! Right flank forward! March!’
The battalion wheeled left to face the enemy again. They had to negotiate the bodies of the French dead and dying. A man called for his mother, wailing foully until the slice of a bayonet stilled his voice. A wounded horse, its rump a mess of blood and torn flesh, galloped across the slope in front ofSharpe. “Talion will advance!’ The Sergeants and Corporals echoed Sharpe’s order. Sharpe could not tell if any officers were left, though he saw Simon Doggett was still alive and he heard Patrick Harper’s voice, and then the smoke cleared from the ridge’s crest and Sharpe advanced his men to the very edge of the valley and, amazingly, miraculously, they saw that there would be no more French attacks for the enemy had not just retreated, but had been broken.
The battle was won and across the whole smoke-wreathed battlefield the enemy infantry was running. The Guard, the immortal undefeated Guard had been beaten, and if the Guard could lose, then no Frenchman thought himself safe and so panic had seized a whole army. There were plenty of French troops left, more than enough to overwhelm the British ridge, but those troops had seen the Imperial Guard running away, and the panic had spread, and so a whole army now ran for safety. A few staff officers galloped among the French and tried to rally them, but victory had been collapsed to nightmare by a few seconds of volley fire and steel, and so the French ran, all but for a few brave men who tried to stand firm in the valley’s floor.
The Earl of Uxbridge, who had lost the Duke his cavalry just as Marshal Ney had lost the Emperor his, reined in beside Wellington who was staring hard at those few enemy who still showed defiance. ‘Oh damn it!’ the Duke said in wonderment. ‘In for a penny, in for a pound!’ The Duke took off his hat with its four cockades. The sun miraculously found a shaft of clear air between the cloud and smoke and slanted its golden light on the Duke as he brandished the hat forward. He thrust the hat forward again, signalling the whole British line to advance. This time they were not just to clear the French from the ridge, but from the whole battlefield. They had defended their ground all day, but now they could attack the enemy’s ground. ‘Go on!’ the Duke called. ‘Go on! They won’t stand! Go on!’
And so they went. The battered survivors in their shattered ranks went forward at last. Somewhere a piper began his wild Scots music as the redcoats marched in a ragged line down to the valley floor to drive a beaten enemy to final ruin. A few last guns fired from the French ridge as a loser’s defiance at the hour of defeat.
One of the cannon-balls crashed past the Duke and struck the Earl’s right knee. ‘My God! I’ve lost my leg!’
‘Have you, by God?’ The Duke galloped forward to where his infantry marched down to the valley floor. ‘Go on! They won’t stand now! Go on!’
Dazed men marched down a slope they had defended all day. Slowly, incredulously, the fact of victory was born in them. They had won, by God, they had won, and to their left, in the east, the sky flickered with new gun-fire and the setting sun shone on dark-uniformed troops who were swarming up the flank of the far French ridge. The Prussians had come at last.
A British regiment of light cavalry, saved to cover the retreat, now trotted forward to exploit the victory. ‘Eighteenth!’ their Colonel shouted. ‘Follow me!’
‘To hell!’
The trumpet sounded the ten dizzying notes. The horsemen careered down the slope, splitting the French survivors, sabring the last gunners who had stayed at their weapons, and then they saw a reserve battalion of the Guard formed into square on the enemy ridge. The square was edging backwards; attempting to escape the rout in good order and so be ready to fight for the Emperor another day.
The British sabres broke
the square. The horsemen did what all the cavalry of France had failed to do, they broke a square. They died in their scores to do it, but nothing would stop them now. This was victory. This was better than victory, this was revenge, and so the rum-soaked horsemen hacked their sabres down at the bearskins and forced their horses across the dead to cut the living into bloody ribbons with their blades. The Prussians were marching from the left, the British were advancing across the valley, and the Emperor fled into the dusk as his Eagles fell.
The Inniskillings alone did not advance. Those who were not dead were wounded, for the Irishmen had held the weak spot in the Duke’s thin line, and they had held it to the end. They had died in their ranks, they had never stopped fighting, and now they had won. Their dead lay in a perfect square and their colours still flew in the shredding smoke as their last living soldiers stared across a valley stinking with blood and palled by fire, a valley plucked from hell; a battlefield.
EPILOGUE
The wounded lay beneath a smoky moon while the living, exhausted, slept.
It was a warm night. A small west wind slowly took the stench of powder away, though the smell of blood would linger in the soil for weeks. Plunderers crept into the darkness. To the Belgian poor every scrap of litter was worth money; whether it was a Cuirassier’s bullet-punctured breastplate, a broken sword, a pair of boots, a trooper’s saddle, a bayonet, or even a strip of cloth. They stripped the dead naked, and killed the wounded to get their uniforms. Injured horses neighed pitifully as they waited for death in a field which rustled with thieves and murderers. A few fires flickered among the carnage. More than forty thousand men lay dead or wounded in the valley, and the survivors could not cope.
Lord John Rossendale still lay in the valley where he drifted in and out of consciousness. The pain had lessened in the night, but so had his lucidity. He dreamed. At times he was even happy in his dreams, but then hands began pulling at his chest and he moaned and tried to ward off the grasping fingers that were causing him such pain. A woman told him to lie still, but Lord John jerked as the pain stabbed and shrieked at him. The woman, a villager from Waterloo, was trying to drag Lord John’s coat from his body. Her child, an eight-year-old girl, kept watch for the few sentries who tried to stop the plundering.
Lord John thought the woman was Jane. He was blind so he did not know it was still the heart of a dark night; instead he thought it was morning and that Jane had found him and he began to sob for joy as he reached up to hold her hand. The woman cursed Lord John for making her life so difficult, but she was not unprepared for such unco-operative victims. She carried a ten-inch knife that she used to slaughter the pigs she raised in her back yard. ‘Lie still!’ she told Lord John in French.
‘Jane!’ he cried desperately, and the woman feared that his noise would bring the sentries so she sawed the knife quick and hard across his moon-whitened throat. Blood jetted black. He choked, jerked once like a landed fish, then was still.
The woman took Lord John’s coat with its precious epaulettes, but left his shirt because it was too drenched in blood. In a pocket of the coat she found a ragged length of dirty rope that she used to bind up her bundle of plundered clothing. Beyond the southern ridge a vixen howled at the sky that was suffused with the smoke of the victors’ camp-fires.
The Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers slept on the ridge they had defended. Peter d’Alembord’s leg had been taken off, so he might yet live. Private Clayton was dead; killed by the Imperial Guard at the very moment of victory. Charlie Weller lived, as did Colonel Ford, though the Colonel had been sent back to Brussels and whether he wanted to stay alive any longer was another matter. Harry Price was the next most senior living officer, so Sharpe had made him into a Major and given Simon Doggett a Captaincy, though he had warned both men that the promotions might not stand up to the scrutiny of the civil servants in Whitehall. Men might fight and bleed and write a chapter of history for Britain, but still the evil-minded soft-bummed bastards of Whitehall would have the last say.
Sharpe slept for an hour, then woke to sit beside a fire that he had made from fragments of lance shafts and the broken spokes from a shattered gun wheel. The first light came early; a sickly grey that dispersed the plunderers and brought the black-winged carrion birds to feast on the dead. The air was already humid, promising a day of stifling heat. In the west the fires of the Prussian bivouacs made thin skeins across the wash of high cloud. Somewhere behind the ridge a bugle called the Rouse and other buglers took up the call that seemed to be echoed by the crowing of cockerels from distant villages.
‘Orders, sir?’ Harry Price looked red-eyed, as though he had been crying, though it was probably just tiredness.
Sharpe felt tired and emptied, so it took an immense effort to think of even the simplest tasks. ‘I want a proper butcher’s list, Harry.’ That was the list of the dead and wounded. ‘Give Sergeant Huckfield a work party to salvage muskets, and see what other equipment you can filch.’ The aftermath of battle was a prime time to stock the battalion’s equipment needs. ‘We need some food. Remind me who’s guarding the prisoners?’
‘Sergeant Ryan.’
‘Tell him to march the buggers back to brigade. If they don’t want them, then turn them loose without any boots or belts.’
‘We’re going to need more sergeants,’ Harry Price warned.
‘I’ll think about it.’ Sharpe turned to stare at the newly stripped bodies of the dead which lay so white among the charred stalks of rye. ‘And start digging a grave, Harry. A big one.’
‘Yes, sir.’
A soldier brought Sharpe a scorching mug of tea that he drank as he gazed into the valley. Smoke still drifted from the remains of the chateau of Hougoumont and from the farm of La Haye Sainte. The chateau had been burnt right out, leaving nothing but blackened roof beams above a scorched stone shell, while the corridors of La Haye Sainte were still choked with dead. At the foot of the slope beneath Sharpe a horse that had survived the night without its back legs sat on its gory haunches and whinnied pathetically for help.
The first soldiers went down from the ridge. Some went to bury the dead while others searched for loot. A man found a French sword knot, its gilt braid beautiful and intricate, and kept it as a gift for his girl. Another man picked a silver-handled shaving brush from a stiff pool of congealed blood. Flies buzzed above the dead. A redcoat carefully collected a pack of playing cards that had been strewn around the body of a French skirmisher. The pages of a blood-stained book riffled in the small wind. Pistol shots sounded flat as men put horses out of their long misery. A group of cavalry officers, their uniforms oddly bright in the dull dawn, cantered down from the ridge to search the slew of bodies that marked the ride of the British horse from glory to defeat.
The first civilians arrived from Brussels. They parked their carriages near the elm tree and walked in horrified silence into the valley where the working parties searched for the wounded. Crows were ripping at the white-skinned dead. A woman found her husband and vomited. A local priest, come to minister to the injured French, reeled hopelessly towards the road with a hand clapped to his mouth.
Simon Doggett’s work party came back to the battalion with two tubs of salt beef, a sack of bread, and a barrel of rum. He proudly told Sharpe that he had stolen the food from the cavalry. ‘So what happens now?’ Doggett asked.
Sharpe found it hard to think. It was as if the battle had deadened his senses. ‘We’ll go to Paris, I suppose.’ He could not imagine the Emperor recovering from this defeat.
‘Paris?’ Doggett sounded surprised, as though he had not realized till this moment just what Wellington’s army had achieved in this valley that stank of smoke and blood. ‘You really think we’ll go to Paris?’ he asked excitedly.
But Sharpe did not reply. Instead he was watching a horseman pick his way up the face of the ridge and across the long dark scars of earth that had been gouged by the French cannonade. He recognized Captain Christopher Manvell and walked to
meet him. ‘Morning.’ Sharpe’s greeting was curt.
Manvell touched a gloved hand to his hat. ‘Good morning, sir. I was hoping to find you.’ He seemed embarrassed and turned to look at Sharpe’s men who, muddied and tired, stared malevolently back at the elegant cavalryman. ‘He’s dead,’ Manvell said without any more effort at politeness.
‘Rossendale?’
‘Yes. He’s dead.’ Manvell’s face showed sadness as he looked back to Sharpe. ‘I thought you should know, sir.’
‘Why would I need to know?’ Sharpe asked brutally.
Manvell seemed nonplussed, but then shrugged. ‘I believe he gave you a note? I’m afraid it’s worthless, sir. He didn’t have a penny of his own money. And then there’s—’ Manvell stopped suddenly.
‘There’s what?’ Sharpe pressured him.
‘There’s Mrs Sharpe, sir.’ Manvell summoned the courage to say the words. ‘Someone will have to tell her.’
Sharpe gave a harsh brief laugh. ‘Not me, Captain. She’s a Goddamned whore, and she can rot in hell for all I care. Good day to you, Captain.’
‘Good day, sir.’ Manvell watched Sharpe walk away, then turned his horse towards the road where, unknown to Sharpe, Jane waited in her carriage for news. Manvell sighed, and went to break her heart.
Sharpe went back to the dying fire, took the promissory note from his pocket, and tore it into shreds. There would be no easy way of putting a new roof on the château after all. He scattered the paper scraps to the breeze, then turned towards his men. ‘Mr Price!’