Sharpe's Waterloo (10 page)

They passed a great dark wood that grew southwards from the road and, quite suddenly, the pale strip of the paved high road stretched stark across the landscape ahead. Sharpe instinctively reined in his horse as he stared at the small cluster of buildings that marked the crossroads called Quatre Bras.

Nothing moved at the crossroads, or nothing that threatened a soldier's life. There were no troops at the crossroads and the highway was empty, just a pale dusty strip between its vivid green verges. Sharpe tapped his heels to start his horse moving again.

Wisps of smoke revealed that the cottagers were cooking their evening meals at the hearths of the small hamlet which lay to the north of the crossroads. There was one large stone farmhouse, outside which a small dark-haired girl was playing with some kittens by an empty farm-cart. Three geese waddled across the road. Two old women, bonneted and shawled, sat tatting lace outside a thatched cottage. A pig rooted in an orchard, and milk cows lowed from the farmyard. One of the shawled women must have seen Sharpe and Doggett approaching for she suddenly called the small girl who ran nervously towards the thatched cottage. Beyond the tiny hamlet the smaller unpaved road climbed a shallow hill before disappearing eastwards in a stand of dark trees.

‘You understand the importance of this road?' Sharpe pointed at the smaller road on which he and Doggett travelled.

‘No, sir,' Doggett replied honestly.

‘It's the road that joins us and the Prussians. If the French cut it, we're on our own, so if we lose these crossroads, the Crapauds have won the damned campaign.' Sharpe spurred down to the crossroads, touched his hat to the old ladies who were staring with alarm at the two horsemen, then he turned to gaze down the long southwards road that led to Charleroi. The highway stretched pale and deserted in the evening sun, yet this was the very same road on which Sharpe had seen a French corps marching that morning. That sighting had been only twelve miles south of this crossroads, yet now there was no sign of any Frenchmen. Had they stopped? Had they retreated? Sharpe felt a sudden fear that he had raised a false alarm and the force he had seen had been nothing but a feint. Or maybe the French had marched past this crossroads and were already nearing Brussels? No. He dismissed that fear instantly, because there was no sign of an army's passing. The tall rye in the fields either side of the road was untrampled, and the road's crude paving of cobbles on impacted chalk and flint had no deep ruts like those made by the passage of heavy guns. So where the hell were the French?

‘Let's go and find the bastards,' Sharpe grunted, and once he had said it he marvelled at how easy it was to slip back into the old ways of speaking about the enemy. He had lived in Normandy for seven months, he had learned the French language and come to love the French countryside, yet now, just as if he had never met Lucille, he spoke of the French as a hated enemy. The strangeness of that thought suddenly made him miss the château. Lucille's home was very grandly called a château, though in truth it was nothing more than a large moated farm with a crenellated tower to remind passers-by that the building had once been a small fortress. Now the château was Sharpe's home, the first home he had ever truly known. The estates had been neglected in the war and Sharpe had begun the laborious task of repairing the years of neglect. At this time of the year, if Napoleon had not returned, Sharpe should have been thinning the apple crop, stripping away basketloads of the young fruit to give the remaining crop a better chance of ripening in the autumn, but instead he was riding a dusty road in Belgium and searching for an enemy that had mysteriously disappeared.

The road dropped gently down to a ford. To Sharpe's left the stream flowed into a lake, while ahead of him, beyond the shallow ford, a farm with an arched gateway stood on the left-hand side of the road. A woman stared suspiciously from the farm's arch at the two soldiers, then stepped back into the yard and slammed the heavy gate. Sharpe had stopped at the ford to let the horses drink. Bright blue dragonflies hovered and darted in the reeds. The evening was warm; a gentle quiet dusk in which the only sounds were the rippling water and the slight clatter of the rye stalks moving in the breeze. It seemed impossible that this might become a battlefield, and perhaps it would not, for Sharpe was already beginning to doubt what he had seen that same morning. Where the hell had the French gone?

He touched the horse's flanks, splashed through the ford and began to climb the gradual slope beyond. Dogs barked in the farmyard, and Nosey howled in reply till Sharpe snapped at him to be quiet. The familiar homely stink of a dungheap wafted across the highway. Sharpe rode slowly, as though hurrying might spoil the calm of this perfect summer's evening. The road was unhedged, running between wide strips of rank grass in which wood garlic, foxgloves, columbine and yellow archangel grew. Elder and blackthorn bushes offered patches of shade. A rabbit thumped the verge in alarm at the horsemans' approach, then scurried into the rye stalks. The evening was fragrant, warm and rich, lit by the great wash of gold light that flooded through the cloud chasms in the western skies.

Off to Sharpe's left, about a mile away, he could see the roofs of two more farmhouses, while to his right the wood gave way to rolling cornfields intersected by a farm track that twisted between the crops. Nothing untoward moved in the landscape. Had he come to the wrong crossroads? He had a sudden fear that this was not the Charleroi to Brussels road. He took out his map, which indeed suggested that he was riding on the main Brussels highway, but maps were notoriously inaccurate. He looked for a milestone, but none was in sight. He stopped again and listened, but could hear neither musketry nor the sounds of marching men. Had he imagined the enemy this morning? Or the musketry this afternoon? But Rebecque had heard the musketry too. So where were the French? Had they been swallowed into the warm fields?

The road bent slightly to the right. The rye was growing so tall that Sharpe could not see what lay around the bend. He loosened his rifle in its holster and called Nosey to heel. Simon Doggett, riding alongside Sharpe with the spare horse, seemed to share the Rifleman's nervousness. Both men were instinctively curbing their horses.

They edged round the road's bend. Ahead now was a road junction shaded by two big chestnut trees. The highway bent to the left, while a smaller track went off to the right. Far beyond the junction, and half-obscured by the tall rye, was a village. The map tallied with what Sharpe saw, so the village had to be Frasnes.

‘We'll go as far as the village,' Sharpe said.

‘Yes, sir.'

The sound of their voices broke the nervous spell and both men dug in their heels to make their horses trot. Sharpe had to duck under a low chestnut branch as he turned the next corner to see, five hundred yards ahead of him, the wide village street.

He stopped again. The street seemed empty. He pulled out the battered sea captain's telescope that he had bought in Caen to replace the expensive glass that he had lost after Toulouse. He trained the awkward heavy instrument on the village's single street.

Three men sat outside what must be the village inn. A woman in thick black skirts led a donkey laden with hay. Two children ran towards the church. The image of the church wavered, Sharpe checked the glass's tremor, then froze. ‘Jesus Christ!'

‘Sir?' Doggett asked in alarm.

‘We've got the bastards!' Sharpe's voice was filled with satisfaction.

The French had not disappeared, and he had not imagined them. They were in Frasnes. At the far end of the village street, just coming into sight and foreshortened by distance and the ancient lens, was a battalion of French infantry. They must have been singing for, though Sharpe could hear nothing, he could see their mouths opening and closing in unison. This battalion wore darker blue coats than most French infantry and had very dark blue trousers. ‘They're a battalion of Voltigeurs,' Sharpe told Doggett. ‘Light infantry. Skirmishers. So where the hell are their Dragoons?' He panned the telescope left and right, but no horsemen showed in the evening sunlight.

Doggett had taken out his own glass and was staring at the French. They were the first enemy troops he had ever seen and the sight of them had made him go pale. He could hear the beat of his bloodstream echoing fast in his ears. He had often imagined seeing the enemy for the first time, but it was strange how very commonplace and yet how exciting this baptism was. ‘How many of them are there?' he asked.

‘Six hundred?' Sharpe guessed. ‘And they're cocksure bastards to march without a cavalry screen.' The only horsemen he could see were ten mounted French officers, but he knew the cavalry and guns could not be far behind. No General pushed unsupported skirmishers too far ahead of the main force. He turned to Doggett. ‘Right! You go back to Quatre Bras. Wait there for Saxe-Weimar. Give him my compliments and tell him there's at least one battalion of French skirmishers coming his way. Suggest he advances as far as the stream and stops them there, but make it a tactful suggestion. Take Nosey and the spare horse, then wait for me at the crossroads. Understand?'

‘Yes, sir.' Doggett turned his own horse and awkwardly led the spare horse round in a circle. ‘What will you do, sir?'

‘I'll keep an eye on these bastards. If you hear shooting, don't worry. That's just me playing games. Give Nosey a good kicking if the bastard gives you any trouble.'

Doggett spurred away, followed by a reluctant Nosey, while Sharpe dismounted and led his horse back to the chestnut trees which grew at the road's fork. Just beyond the chestnuts, in the long grass of the verge, a heavy wooden brush harrow had been abandoned. Sharpe tied the horse's reins to the harrow's stout frame, then slid his rifle out of its saddle holster. He checked that the weapon was loaded, then that the flint was firmly seated in its leather-padded jaws.

He went back past the chestnuts, keeping in the shadows of the tall rye on the western side of the road. He ran steadily, getting ever closer to the village and to the approaching enemy. The French troops had not stopped in Frasnes, but were marching doggedly on towards Sharpe who supposed that their orders were to seize the crossroads at Quatre Bras before nightfall. If Saxe-Weimar could reach the crossroads first, and if his men would fight, the French would fail, but it would be a very close race.

Sharpe wanted to slow the French advance. Even a few minutes would help. He dropped in a shallow scrape by the roadside, half hidden by a hazel bush which had been invaded by pink dog roses. None of the approaching enemy seemed to have noticed him. He slid his rifle through the thick grass, then pushed his tricorne hat back so that its peak would not catch on the weapon's doghead.

He waited. The pistol in his belt dug into his belly. The grass of the road's verge was warm and dank. There had been rain earlier in the week and the soil under the thick vegetation was still damp. A ladybird crawled up a dry stalk, then stepped delicately across to the oiled and battered stock of the rifle. The enemy marched careless and unsuspecting. The shadows stretched long over the road. It was a summer's evening as beautiful as God had ever blessed on a wicked world.

A hare appeared on the opposite verge, quivered for a second, then ran swiftly up the road only to leap sideways out of the path of the approaching French infantry. The enemy was three hundred yards away now and marching in a column of four ranks. Sharpe could hear their strong singing. An officer rode ahead of the column on a grey horse. The officer had a red plume on his blue shako and a tall red collar on his unbuttoned blue coat. The red plume was nodding to the rhythm of the horse's steps. Sharpe aimed at the plume, suspecting that at this extreme range the bullet would drop to hit the horse.

He fired. Birds squawked and exploded out of the crops.

Smoke banged from the pan by Sharpe's right eye and the burning scraps of powder flayed back to his cheek. The rifle's heavy brass butt crashed back into his shoulder. He moved even before the singing stopped, rolling into the thick rye stalks where, without bothering to see what damage his shot had done, he began reloading. Prime the pan, close it, pour the cartridge powder down the smoking barrel, then ram in the cartridge's paper and the ball. He slid the ramrod out, jammed it down the long barrel, then pulled it free. No one had shot back. He rolled again into the shadow of the hazel bush where his foul-smelling powder smoke still lingered.

The column had stopped. The officer had dismounted from the grey horse which was skittering nervously at the road's edge. Birds wheeled overhead. The officer was unhurt, and none of the men seemed to have been hit. Perhaps the horse was wounded? Sharpe took the loaded pistol from his belt, cocked it, and laid it beside him. Then he aimed the rifle again, this time at one of the men in the front rank.

He fired. Within seconds he fired again, this time emptying the pistol towards the Frenchmen. The second shot would do no damage, but it might persuade the Frenchmen that there was a group of enemy in front of them. Sharpe rolled right again, this time plunging deeper into the rye stalks before reloading the rifle. He pushed the pistol into his belt.

French muskets banged. He heard the heavy lead balls flicking through the stalks of rye, though none went near him. Sharpe was loading fast, going through the drill he had first learned twenty-two years before. Another volley of musketry hammered from the French who were firing blind into the tall crops.

Sharpe did the same, simply aiming the rifle in the direction of the column, and pulling the trigger so that the bullet whipped off through the stalks. He tap-loaded the next cartridge, not bothering to use the cumbersome ramrod, but just slamming the rifle's butt hard on the ground in hope that the blow would jar the ball down to the loose charge. He fired again, and felt the lesser kick which told him the ball had only lodged half-way down the barrel. That bullet would be lucky to go a hundred yards, but that was not the point. The point was to fire fast to persuade the French that they had run into a strong picquet line.