Sharpe's Waterloo (17 page)

Now, ahead of d‘Alembord, the gun-fire rumbled like dull thunder to remind him that the two thousand six hundred pounds must be earned the hard way. D'Alembord, contemplating how much happiness he now stood to lose, shivered with a premonition, then told himself that he had always feared the worst before every battle.

Joseph Ford, frightened because he was about to fight his first real battle, worried that either he or his men might not do their duty and, as ever when worry overwhelmed him, he snatched off his spectacles and polished their lenses on his sash. He believed that such a commonplace action expressed a careless insouciance, whereas it really betrayed his fretting nervousness.

Yet, this day as they marched towards the gun-fire, the men of the Prince of Wales's Own Volunteers were oblivious of their Colonel's fears. They trudged on, breathing the dust of the dry summer road that had been shuffled up by the boots ahead, and they wondered if there would be an issue of rum before the fighting began, or whether they would be too late for the fighting and would instead be billeted in some soft Belgian village where the girls would flirt and the food would be plentiful.

‘It's sounding bad,' Private Charlie Weller spoke of the distant gun-fire, which did not really sound so very awful yet, but Weller was feeling a flicker of nervousness and wanted the relief of conversation.

‘We've heard worse that that, Charlie,' Daniel Hagman, the oldest man in the light company, said, but he spoke tiredly, dutifully, unthinkingly. Hagman was a kind man, who recognized Charlie Weller's apprehension, but the day was too hot, the sun too fierce, and the dust too parching for kindness to have much of a chance.

Major Vine curbed his horse to watch the ten companies march past. He snapped at the men to pick up their feet and straighten their shoulders. They took no notice. They did not like Vine, recognizing that the Major despised them as a lumpen, dull ugly mass, but the men themselves knew better; they were Wellington's infantry, the finest of the best, and they were marching east and south to where a pall of gun-smoke was forming like a dark cloud over a far crossroads and to where the guns cleared their throats to beckon men to battle.

 

The French attack began with a cannonade which punched billows of grey-black smoke into the hazing dancing air above the village of Frasnes. The Prince of Orange, unable to resist the lure of danger, galloped from the crossroads to be with those troops closest to the enemy, and the Prince's staff, their luncheon brutally interrupted by the French gun-fire, hurried after him.

Sharpe was among the staff officers who trotted their horses down the Charleroi road, past the Gemioncourt farm by the ford, and so on up the shallow hill until they reached the infantry brigade which guarded against any frontal attack up the high road.

The French guns were firing at the flanks of the Prince's position; aiming at the farmhouses to east and west. Nothing seemed to be moving on the road itself, though Sharpe supposed the French must have some skirmishers concealed in the fields of long rye.

‘They'll be coming straight up the middle, won't they?'

Sharpe turned to see that Harper had joined him. ‘I thought you were staying well away from any danger?'

‘What danger, for God's sake? No one's firing at us now.' Harper had rescued the cold carcass of a roast chicken from the Prince's interrupted lunch, and now tossed Sharpe a leg. ‘They look bloody strange, don't they?'

He was referring to the brigade of Dutch-Belgian infantry that was spread in four ranks either side of the road to block a direct attack from Frasnes. The strangeness lay in the mens' uniforms which were the standard French infantry uniforms. Only the eagle badge on their shakos had been changed, replaced by a ‘W' for King William of the Netherlands, but otherwise the Dutch-Belgians were dressed exactly like the men they were doubtless about to fight.

‘You know what to do?' the Prince asked the brigade commander in his native French.

‘If we can't hold them, sir, we fall back on Gemioncourt.'

‘Exactly!' The farm by the ford was the last bastion before the vital crossroads. Loopholes had already been made in the stone walls of Gemioncourt's huge barns which, like the buildings of so many of the isolated farms in the low countries, were joined together and protected by a high stone wall, making the whole farm into a massively strong fortress.

‘Something's stirring, eh?' The Prince, reverting to English, was elated by an outburst of musket-fire which sounded from somewhere in front of the Dutch line. The musketry was not the huge eruptions of platoon fire, but rather the smaller sporadic snapping of skirmishers which betrayed that the French Voltigeurs were closing on the Dutch light troops, but both sets of skirmishers were well hidden from the Prince and his staff by the tall crops.

‘Funny to hear that sound again, isn't it?' Harper commented drily.

‘Did you miss it?'

‘Never thought I would,' the Irishman said sadly, ‘but I did.' Sharpe remembered the familiar skill with which he had killed the French Lieutenant in this very rye field. ‘It's the thing we're good at, Patrick. Maybe we're doomed to be soldiers forever?'

‘You maybe, but not me. I've a tavern and a horse-thieving trade to keep me busy.' Harper frowned at the Belgians in their French uniforms. ‘Do you think these buggers will fight?'

‘They'd bloody better,' Sharpe said grimly. The brigade, with its supporting artillery, was all that lay between the French and victory. The Dutch-Belgians certainly looked prepared to fight. They had trampled down the rye ahead of their line to make a killing ground some sixty yards deep and, judging by the sound of their musketry, the Dutch-Belgian skirmishers were fighting with a brisk energy.

The two wings of the Dutch-Belgian brigade stretched a half-mile on either side of the highway while, athwart the road itself, was a battery of six Dutch nine-pounder cannons. The gunners had parked their limbers and ammunition wagons in the field behind Sharpe. The guns were loaded, their portfires smoking gently in readiness for the French.

‘Four-legged bastards, off to the right,' Harper said warningly, and Sharpe turned to see a troop of enemy cavalry trotting towards the Dutch right flank. The horsemen were green-coated Lancers with high helmets topped with forward sweeping black plumes. They were still a good distance off, at least a half-mile, and were not yet any threat to the Prince's troops.

The Prince had positioned himself just behind the six guns of the Dutch battery. Rebecque, staying close to his master, gravely inspected one of the cannon almost as if he had never seen such an object before, then, suddenly afflicted by hay fever, he sneezed. The Prince muttered, ‘Bless you,' then stood in his stirrups to gaze at the Lancers through a telescope. The French cannons abruptly ceased fire. The only sounds now were the intermittent crackle of the skirmishers' muskets and the ragged music of a Dutch band. The Prince's horse whinnied. Rebecque's pawed at the trampled rye stalks. This was the silence before battle.

‘Stand ready!' The Prince, unable to bear the quiet, spurred his horse towards the closest Belgian battalion. ‘You'll see the enemy infantry soon!' he shouted at the men. ‘A few volleys will see them off, so stand firm!'

‘The bloody gunners are just changing their aim,' Harper said scathingly after Sharpe had translated the Prince's words.

‘Probably,' Sharpe said. He patted his horse's neck.

Rebecque suddenly sneezed again and, as if it had been a word of command, the French batteries resumed their cannonade. Harper had been right, they had merely been changing their aim, and now the French gunners concentrated their shots at the centre of the field. There were more enemy guns firing than before. Sharpe counted twenty-four gouts of smoke in the first salvo.

The French gunners were masked by the rye, but some of their balls struck home in the waiting Dutch battalions. One roundshot bounced cleanly between two of the Dutch guns and somehow missed every single horseman surrounding the Prince. The artillery Colonel asked for permission to return the fire, but the Prince ordered him to wait till the enemy infantry was in sight.

The French batteries fired another volley. Sharpe saw the blossoming smoke a fraction before the sound punched the air. More men were struck in the Dutch battalions, but most balls went overhead for the French gunners were firing a fraction too high. Sharpe saw one cannon-ball's passage marked by the flickering of the rye stalks in a darkening line that shot at extraordinary speed across the field behind him. Another roundshot went close enough to Sharpe to sound like a sudden harsh whip-cracking wind. If the balls had been fired higher still the sound would have rumbled like a cask being rolled over floorboards.

‘You should go back to the crossroads,' Sharpe told Harper.

‘Aye, I will.' Harper did not move.

The Prince cantered towards the Dutch-Belgian battalions on the right-hand side of the road. He had drawn his massive sabre. He called for Rebecque to accompany him. The Baron, his eyes streaming with the hay fever, sneezed once more and the French guns magically ceased fire.

Men wounded by the cannon-fire were screaming and the band was playing, but it seemed like a rather ominous quiet.

Then the French drums began.

‘I never thought I'd hear Old Trousers being played again,' Harper said wistfully. It was the sound of French infantry being drummed to the attack. A mass of drums was being beaten, but the drummers, like the approaching infantry, were hidden by the tall crop of rye. There was something curiously menacing in the repetitive drumbeats that seemed to come from nowhere.

Then Sharpe saw the far crops being trampled flat and he knew that each patch of collapsing rye betrayed the advance of a French column. He counted three formations directly to the front. Each column was a solid formation of men aimed like a battering ram at the Dutch line. A crash of musketry off to the right flank betrayed that the farms to the west were under attack, but here in the centre, where the road led enticingly to the crossroads, the enemy was still hidden. Hidden but not silent. The drums suddenly paused and the columns shouted their great war cry.
‘Vive l'Empereur!
' The sound of that cheer stopped the Dutch band cold. The musicians lowered their instruments and stared into the concealing field where the rye seemed to move as though an invisible giant's footsteps crushed it down.

The French gunners opened fire again, this time using short-barrelled howitzers that fired shells in a high arc over the heads of their own columns, and which exploded in small dirty gouts of flame and smoke.

The first French skirmishers were appearing at the edge of the trampled area. The Dutch skirmishers had yielded the field, retreating to their battalions, so now the scattering of enemy Voltigeurs could kneel unmolested at the rye's edge and fire at the waiting defenders. Men began to fall. Others screamed. Some died. The main enemy attack was still nothing but a sound of blended menace; a crashing noise in the rye, a thump of drums and a deep-throated cheer.

Rebecque galloped back towards the Dutch battery, shouting at its Colonel to open fire on the concealed columns, but the Colonel was staring at one of his officers who had been killed by a skirmisher's bullet. The officer lay on the chalky road where his blood showed remarkably bright against the white dust. Other gunners were falling. A bullet clanged monstrously loud on a brass barrel and ricocheted up into the sky.

‘Fire!' Rebecque shouted angrily at the gunners.

The artillery Colonel jerked round, stared at Rebecque for an instant, then bellowed his own orders, but instead of ordering a killing volley into the tall rye, he commanded his men to retreat. The drivers whipped the horse teams onto the road while the gun crews manhandled the weapons back to hook them on to their limbers. The huge ammunition wagons set off for the crossroads, their massive iron-rimmed wheels digging great gouges into the road's surface. The gun teams began to follow, but two teams collided, their limber wheels locked, and there was a sudden tangle of cursing drivers, stalled cannon and frightened horses.

Sharpe had spurred forward. ‘Where are you going?' he shouted in French across the chaos.

‘Back!' the gunner Colonel shouted over the noise of an exploding howitzer shell.

‘Stop at the farm! Stop at Gemioncourt!' Sharpe knew the panic could not be controlled here, where the French columns filled the air with menace, but perhaps the sturdy walls of Gemioncourt would give these gunners some necessary reassurance.

‘Back! Back the gun away!' The Colonel slashed with his riding crop as he tried to disentangle the trapped limbers. Another volley of French howitzer-fire miraculously missed the mêlée of gunners and horses which, stung by the shells' threat, magically disentangled itself. The fleeing Dutch guns crashed up onto the road, their chains and buckets swinging. Those gunners who had no riding place on the guns or limbers were running down the verges in an undisciplined retreat.

‘Stop at the farm!' Sharpe bellowed after the gunner Colonel.

An howitzer shell screamed down to smash the wheel of the last gun limber. For a second the shell lay with a smoking fuse amidst the wreckage of the wheel, then it crashed apart in a deafening explosion. One horse died instantly, its guts flung red and wet across the road. Another screaming beast collapsed on broken hind legs. The rest of the team, panicking, tried to gallop free and only slewed the broken limber round. A gunner fell off his seat on the ammunition box and was crushed by the limber's scraping violence. He clawed at the broken wheel that first dragged him across, then pinned him to the road. The other gunners ignored him; instead they slashed at the traces with swords or knives, eventually freeing the four live horses which galloped wild-eyed towards Gemioncourt. The dying horse was mercifully shot by an officer who then took off after his men, abandoning the gun.