Sharpe's Waterloo (40 page)

The French charge was about to begin. Their cavalry rode out from the right of their line. They were all fresh horsemen; Lancers and Hussars, the light cavalry of France whose officers knew their grim business to perfection.

They did not charge the mass of broken British horse on the ridge, instead they cantered into the valley to cut off the troopers' retreat.

The British, riding back from the undamaged guns, cleared the smoke and saw the waiting enemy. ‘Shit!' A Life Guard raked back with his spurs and his horse lumbered into an unwilling canter. It was a race that the heavy British cavalry was doomed to lose. In ones and twos, in scattered groups, in panic, they fled northwards to the far crest where their own infantry waited.

The French trumpets sounded.

The Red Lancers led the charge. Some were Poles, still faithful to the Emperor, but most were Dutch-Belgians, fighting for the flag they loved, and now they lowered their swallow-tailed pennants and flung their fresh horses at the panicked British.

‘Run! Run!' The panic among the British was absolute now. Men forgot the glory and sought only the far shelter, but they were too late.

The Lancers crashed into the flank of the fleeing mass. The lances, held rigid against the body by the pressure of the Lancers' right elbows, drove home. Men fell screaming from horses. The Lancers rode over their victims, tugged the blades free, then brought them forward as they spurred after other fugitives. Behind the Lancers came Hussars with sabres so that any man who escaped the lance was cut down by the curved blades.

Lord John saw the slaughter to his right, but his horse was still running free. A riderless horse galloped past him and his own horse seemed to match its stride. The holly hedge was a hundred yards in front of him. He could see British light cavalry coming from the ridge, riding to rescue the remnants of the heavy brigade.

‘Go on!' He slashed back with his sword as though it was a whip. A Scots Grey was over the hedge. A Lancer chased the man, lunged, but the Scot swerved, backswung, and the Lancer reeled bloodily away. Lord John looked behind and saw two of the red devils pursuing him. He savaged his horse with his spurs. Fear was in his throat like a sour vomit. There was to be no glory, no captured Eagle, no radiant moment of heroism that would make his name famous; there was just a desperate scramble for life across a muddy field.

Then, from his right, he saw a slew of the Red Lancers charging at him. Their horses' teeth were bared yellow, while the riders seemed to leer at him above the bright wickedness of their spears. Lord John was pissing himself with fear, but he knew he must not give up. If he could just charge through their line and jump the hedge, they might abandon their pursuit.

He screamed in defiance, gripped his sword rigid at the end of his right arm, and touched the reins to swerve his horse to the right. The sudden change of direction threw the Lancers off their own intercepting course. They had to wheel slightly, their lances wavered, and Lord John was suddenly crashing through them. His sword, held at arm's length, parried a lance to splinter a great shard of bright wood from the shaft. He was past the lance points! The realization made him shout in triumph. His horse cannoned off a smaller French horse, but kept its footing. Two Hussars were in front of him. One of the two lunged at Lord John, but the Englishman was swifter and his sword rammed hard into the Frenchman's belly. The blade was gripped by the contracting muscles of the dying man, but Lord John somehow ripped it free of the suction and swept it across his body to slice down at the second Hussar who parried desperately wrenched his horse away.

Lord John's fear was turning to exultation. He had learned to fight. He had killed. He had survived. He had beaten his pursuers. He held his bloodied borrowed sword high like a trophy. Last night he had lied about his prowess, yet today the lies had come true; he had been tested in combat, and he had rung true. Happiness welled and seethed in Lord John as his horse crashed through the holly hedge and he saw only the long empty slope in front of him. That slope meant freedom, not just from his pursuers, but from the fear that had dogged him all his life. He suddenly knew just how frightened he had been, not just of Sharpe, but of Jane's anger. Then damn her! She would learn that her anger could no longer frighten Lord John, for he had conquered fear by riding to the enemy's gun line and coming home. He shouted his triumph just as a riderless grey horse galloped across his front.

Lord John's shout turned to alarm as his horse baulked and swerved. The horse staggered into a patch of deep mud and, as it tried to find its balance, stopped dead.

Lord John screamed at the horse to move. He sliced the spurs savagely back.

The horse tried to pull its hooves out of the glutinous mud. It lurched forward, but with painful slowness, and the first of the two Lancers who still pursued Lord John caught up with his lordship.

The first lance point went into the small of Lord John's back.

He arched his spine, screaming. He dropped his sword as his hands groped behind to find the blade that twisted like a flesh hook in his belly. The second Lancer grunted as he lunged. His spear struck Lord John in the ribs, but glanced off the bone to slice into his right arm.

Lord John was screaming and falling. The surviving Hussar, whose friend Lord John had killed, rode in on the Englishman's left and gave his lordship a vicious backswing of his sabre which, like many of the French weapons, had only a sharpened point to encourage the trooper to lunge and not slash. The blunt steel edge thudded into Lord John's face, breaking the bridge of his nose and bludgeoning his eyes to instant blindness. His left foot slid from the stirrup, his right, trapped by the iron, dragged him through the mud as his horse struggled free. The lance was ripped out of his back. He fell onto his belly, screaming and crying as his stirrup leather broke. He tried to turn over to face his tormentors and he scrabbled for the sword that was still hanging from its wrist strap, but another lance thrust ripped down into his right leg, this blade thrust with all the weight of man and horse, and Lord John's thighbone snapped. The lance point broke off in the wound. Lord John wanted to plead with his attackers, but the only sound he could make was a babbling and childlike cry of terror. His fingers fluttered uselessly as though to ward off any more blades.

The three French horsemen stood round the twitching, bleeding Englishman.

‘He's finished,' one of the Lancers said, then slid out of his saddle and knelt beside the Englishman. He unsheathed a knife and cut at the straps of Lord John's sabretache that clinked with coins. He tossed the pouch up to his companion, then slit open the Englishman's pockets, starting with his breeches. ‘The dirty
bougre
pissed himself, see?' The Lancer spoke with a Belgian accent.

‘Rich as a pig in shit, this one. Here!' He had found more coins in the pockets of Lord John's breeches. The Lancer ripped away Lord John's silk stock and tore at his shirt. Lord John tried to speak, but the Lancer slapped his face. ‘Quiet, shitface!' Under Lord John's shirt he found a golden chain with a golden locket. He snapped the chain with one jerk of his hand, clicked the locket lid open with his bloody thumb, and whistled when he saw the golden-haired beauty whose picture lay inside. ‘Have a look at that piece of meat! Last time he'll screw her, eh? She'll have to find someone else to warm her up.' He tossed the locket to his companion, pulled the watch from Lord John's fob, then rolled the wounded man onto his belly to get at the pockets in his coat's tail. He found a folding spyglass that he shoved into his own pockets. The Hussar who had blinded Lord John was searching the Englishman's saddlebags, but now shouted a warning that the enemy's light cavalry was getting dangerously close.

The Lancer stood, put his right boot on Lord John's back and used his lordship as a makeshift mounting block. He and his companion wheeled away. So far it had been a good day; the two Belgians had set out on their charge with the idea of hunting down a richly dressed officer and, by finding Lord John, they had taken at least a year's pay in plunder. The Hussar took Lord John's horse.

Lord John slowly, slowly twisted his burning, bleeding, blinded eyes from the mud. He wanted to cry, but his eyes were like bars of fire that annealed his tears. He moaned. The glory had turned obscene, to an agony that filled his whole universe. The pain burned and racked at his back and leg. The pain tore and filled him. He screamed, but he could not move, he cried but no help came. It was over, all the honour and the excitement and all the gold-bright future, all reduced to a bleeding blind horror face down in the mud.

The survivors of the British charge came home slowly. There were not many. A few riderless horses formed ranks with the survivors as the rolls were taken. One regiment had charged with three hundred and fifty troopers, of whom only twenty one came home. The rest were dead, or dying, or prisoners. The British heavy cavalry had broken a whole French corps, and themselves with it.

Steam rose from the wet fields. The day was hot now.

The Prussians had not come.

‘There.' Rebecque pointed at the bodies which lay in the grass east of La Haye Sainte. They were scattered in a fan shape, like men killed as they spread out from a single point of attack. At the centre of the fan, where men had bunched together in desperate defence, the bodies were in heaps. Sharpe glowered while Harper, a few paces behind the Prince's staff, crossed himself at the horrid sight.

‘They were Hanoverians. Good troops, all of them.' Rebecque spoke bleakly, then sneezed. The drying weather was bringing back his hay fever.

‘What happened?' Sharpe asked.

‘He advanced them in line, of course.' Rebecque did not look at Sharpe as he spoke.

‘There were cavalry?'

‘Of course. I tried to stop him, but he won't listen. He thinks he's the next Alexander the Great. He wants me to have an orange banner made that a man will carry behind him at all times...' Rebecque's voice tailed away.

‘God damn him.'

‘He's only twenty-three, Sharpe, he's a young man and he means very well.' Rebecque, fearing that his previous words might be construed as disloyal, found excuses for the Prince.

‘He's a Goddamned butcher,' Sharpe said icily. ‘A butcher with pimples.'

‘He's a prince,' Rebecque said in uncomfortable reproof. ‘You should remember that, Sharpe.'

‘At best, Rebecque, he might make a half-decent lieutenant, and I even doubt that.'

Rebecque did not respond. He just turned away and stared through tearful eyes at the western half of the valley that was a mangled ruin of dead infantry, dead cavalrymen and dead horses beneath the skeins of cannon smoke. He sneezed again, then cursed the hay fever.

‘Rebecque! Did you see it? Wasn't it glorious?' The Prince spurred his horse from the knot of men who marked Wellington's position at the elm tree. ‘We should have been there, Rebecque! My God, but the only place for honour is in the cavalry!'

‘Yes, sir.' Rebecque, still unnaturally subdued, did his best to match his monarch's high spirits.

‘They took two Eagles! Two Eagles!' The Prince clapped his hands. ‘Two! They've brought one to show the Duke. Have you ever seen one close up, Rebecque? They're not gold at all, just tricked out to look like gold. They're just a shabby French trick, nothing else!' The Prince noticed Sharpe's presence for the first time and generously included the Englishman in his excitement. ‘You should go and take a look, Sharpe. It's not every day you see an Eagle!'

‘Sergeant Harper and I once captured an Eagle,' Sharpe's voice was filled with an unmistakable loathing. ‘It was five years ago when you were still at school.'

The Prince's happy face changed as though someone had just struck him. Rebecque, startled by Sharpe's egregious rudeness, tried to drive his horse between the Rifleman and the Prince, but the Prince would have none of his Chief of Staff's tact. ‘What the hell are you doing here?' he asked Sharpe instead. ‘I told you to stay in Hougoumont.'

‘They don't need me there.'

‘Sir!' The Prince shouted the word, demanding that Sharpe use the honorific. The other staff officers, Doggett among them, backed away from the royal anger.

‘They don't need me there,' Sharpe said stubbornly, then he could no longer resist his dislike and derision of the Prince. ‘The men at Hougoumont are proper soldiers. They don't need me to teach them how to unbutton their breeches before they piss.'

‘Sharpe!' Rebecque yelped helplessly.

‘So what happened to them?' Sharpe pointed at the Red Germans but looked at the Prince.

‘Rebecque! Arrest him!' the Prince screamed at his Chief of Staff. ‘Arrest him! And his man. What the hell are you doing here anyway?' The question was screamed at Harper, who gazed placidly back at the Prince without bothering to offer any answer.

‘Sir - ' Rebecque knew he had neither the authority nor the cause to make any arrests, but the Prince did not want to listen to any reasoned explanations.

‘Arrest him!'

Sharpe raised two fingers into the Prince's face, added the appropriate words, and turned his horse away.

The Prince screamed at the Riflemen to come back, but suddenly the French cannons, which had paused while the British cavalry were being slaughtered in the valley, opened fire again, and it seemed to Sharpe as though every gun on the French ridge fired at the same instant, making a clap of doom fit to mark the world's ending and even sufficient to divert a prince's outrage.

The shells and roundshot raged at the British ridge. Explosions and fountains of earth shook the whole line. The noise was suddenly deafening; a melding of cannon-fire into one long thunderous roll that hammered at the sky. The Prince's staff instinctively ducked. A gunner officer, not ten paces from where Sharpe was cantering away from the Prince, disappeared in an explosion of blood as a twelve-pound ball struck him clean in the belly. One of his guns, struck full on the muzzle, bucked backwards into the deep wheel ruts made by its own recoil. The French were serving their guns with a frenetic and desperate speed.