Sharpe's Waterloo (36 page)

The huge Lieutenant with the axe saw the Coldstreamer Colonel and shouted at his men to make way. He drove a path through them, the axe glittering above the press of men, then Sharpe saw the axe crash down. The Colonel had stepped safely back, now he lunged. The Lieutenant brushed the sword thrust aside with his free hand as though the blade was no more dangerous than a riding crop. He grunted as he began a backswing with the axe calculated to split the Colonel up from the groin to the breastbone, then gasped as a pain exploded behind his knee. Sharpe had rammed his sword forward to hamstring the Frenchman's leg, now he kicked at the crippling wound to topple the huge man sideways. The Lieutenant's scarred face snarled as he tried to swing the huge axe round at his new attacker, but Sharpe was slicing the sword forward again, this time to split the grimacing face into a bloody and broken mask. The Colonel's sword lunged, taking the Lieutenant in the ribs. Still the Frenchman would not give up. The axe rang on the ground as he dragged the blade forward, then two Guardsmen pushed past the Colonel to stab their bayonets hard down. The huge body jerked for a few seconds, then was still.

The last French intruders were being hunted down. A sergeant was bayoneted on the dungheap, while a corporal, backed against the barn wall and screaming for quarter, received two bayonets in his belly instead.

The yard was foul with blood, crushed apples and corpses. Only the French drummer boy, a wee nipper hardly out of his cradle, had been spared from the massacre. A huge Guardsman stood by the boy, protecting him.

‘I don't know who you are, but thank you.'

Sharpe turned to see it was the Coldstream Colonel who had spoken. ‘Sharpe,' he introduced himself. ‘The Young Frog's staff.'

‘MacDonnell.' The Colonel was wiping the blood off a very expensive sword blade with an embroidered linen handkerchief.

‘Will you forgive me?' He ran back towards the house from where the sound of musketry was louder than ever.

Sharpe wiped the mess off his own sword, then looked at Harper whose face was speckled with blood. ‘I thought you'd promised to stay out of the fighting?'

‘I forgot.' Harper grinned, threw down the French musket and retrieved his own weapons. ‘I'll say one thing. The Guards may be pretty-boy soldiers, but the buggers can fight when they have to.'

‘So can the French.'

‘Their tails are up, that's for sure.' Harper breathed a belated sigh of relief. ‘And how the hell did the Guards close that gate?'

‘God only knows.'

‘He must be on our side today.' Harper crossed himself. ‘God knows, but that was desperate.'

The second French attack on the château, so close to success in the courtyard, now rolled with an equal menace around the orchard. The howitzers opened fire from the ridge again, but this time the French attack was on a wider front, and a horde of men broke through the orchard's hedges and harried the defenders back towards the walled garden. Some of the Guardsmen, too slow to climb the brick wall, were bayoneted at its foot, but then the relentless musketry erupted from the loopholes and from the wall's coping and the French attack stalled again about the garden's margin.

More men of the Coldstream Guards advanced down from the ridge. They attacked in column, their muskets armed with bayonets, and they drove up through the orchard's northern hedge to scour the French away from the garden wall. The woods to the south were still thick with French infantry, but the Guards lined the broken and torn hedge and opened a killing volley fire that blew great holes in the French lines. No troops fired faster than the British, and now, for the first time that day, the French suffered under the flaying volleys of platoon fire. The Guards reloaded with grim speed, propping their ramrods against the hedge before levelling the heavy muskets and blasting at the smoke-obscured enemy. Each platoon fired a second after its neighbour so that the hedge rolled with flames and the woods echoed with volley after volley.

Gradually the French broke away; more and more men fleeing from the remorseless musketry. ‘Cease fire!' a Guards officer shouted in the orchard. The space in front of the woods was thick with the dead and wounded. The French had been hurling men against stone and flames, and suffering for it, but the Guards could see yet more men being formed in the far woods, presumably for yet another assault.

In the walled garden the only civilian left in Hougoumont was almost in tears. He was the château's gardener and he had been running from bed to bed, trying to save his precious plants from the boots of the Guardsmen. Despite his efforts the garden was a shambles. Espaliered pears had been ripped from the wall and rosebuds had been trampled. The gardener made a pathetically small pile of plants he had somehow rescued, then flinched as he watched a French corpse being dragged by its heels through the remains of an asparagus bed.

The second French assault had failed. Colonel MacDonnell, his face still smeared with blood, found Sharpe in the courtyard when the last musket shot had faded to silence. ‘You could be useful to me,' he spoke diffidently, not wanting to encroach on another man's authority.

‘I'll do whatever I can.'

‘More ammunition? Can you find a wagon of the stuff and have it sent down?'

‘With pleasure.' Sharpe was glad to have a proper job to do.

MacDonnell looked around the courtyard and grimaced at the remnants of the massacre. ‘I think we can hold here, so long as we've got powder. Oh good! She's alive.' He had spotted the cat carrying the last of her kittens across the slaughteryard. The captured French drummer boy, his face stained with tears, held one hand over his mouth as he stared wide-eyed at the bodies which were being searched for plunder by the victorious Guardsmen. The boy's instrument was lying smashed beside the chapel door, though he still had his drumsticks stuffed into his belt. ‘Cheer up, lad!' MacDonnell spoke to the boy in colloquial and genial French. ‘We gave up eating captured drummer boys last year.'

The boy burst into tears again. A big Coldstreamer sergeant with a Welsh accent barked at his men to start clearing the enemy bodies away. ‘Pile the buggers by the wall there. Look lively now!'

Sharpe and Harper retrieved their horses which had miraculously survived the fighting in the courtyard unhurt. The gate was swung open and the Riflemen rode to find the cartridges that would hold the château firm.

While on the far ridge the Emperor was turning his eyes away from Hougoumont. He was looking towards the British left, to the enticing and empty gentle slope east of the high road. He assumed that the Sepoy General would already have sent his reserves to help the beleaguered garrison at Hougoumont, so now the master of war would launch a thunderbolt on the British left. Marshal d'Erlon's corps, unblooded so far in the brief campaign, could now have the honour of winning it. And when the corps had smashed through the British line, the Emperor would unleash his cavalry, fresh and eager, to harry the fleeing enemy into offal.

It was half-past one. The day was becoming warmer, even hot, so that the thick woollen uniforms were at last drying out. The clouds were thinning and errant patches of sun illuminated the smoke which drifted across the valley from the French guns, but in the eastern fields, where the Prussians were supposed to be arriving, the intermittent sunlight shone on nothing. Gneisenau had done his work well, and the British were alone.

The French gun-fire suddenly ceased. The smoke from the hot gun muzzles drifted in dirty skeining clumps above the rye and wheat. Muskets still fired at Hougoumont, and the howitzers crashed their shells over the château to explode in the wood beyond, but without the French cannon-fire something that seemed very like silence filled the battlefield with foreboding.

Then a slight wind rippled the crops in the valley and swirled the smoke away from the French crest to reveal that men in blue coats, their white crossbelts bright, were marching down the far slope. The first French infantry were advancing to attack the British ridge. They came in four great columns accompanied by eight-pounder galloper guns drawn by horse teams.

Each column was two hundred men broad; four wide phalanxes that marched stolidly down the slope of the French ridge to leave crushed paths of rye or wheat in their trail. A loose mass of skirmishers ran ahead of each formation. The thousands of trampling boots were given their rhythm by the drummers hidden deep inside each column; the drummer boys were beating the
pas de charge,
the old heartbeat of the French Empire that had driven the Emperor's infantry beyond the Vistula and down to the plains beyond Madrid. The massed drums sent a shiver through the valley. The veterans on the British ridge had heard it before, but for most of Wellington's men it was a new and sinister sound.

The four columns crossed the eastern half of the valley. The column which attacked in the valley's centre advanced up the high road and threatened to envelop the farm of La Haye Sainte. A watery sun gleamed faintly on the fixed bayonets of the column's front rank. The Riflemen in the sandpit opposite the farm were dropping the first French skirmishers who had spread out across the rye fields. Behind the skirmishers the boots of the column trampled the crop, then the drummers paused in unison to let the whole column shout its battle cry,
‘Vive l'Empereur!'

On the ridge above the farm a British gunner officer gave the elevating screw of his nine-pounder a last half twist. The fabric bag of gunpowder was crushed in the breech by its roundshot. A stiff quill stood proud of the touchhole. The quill, which was filled with a finely mealed gunpowder, had been rammed hard down into the fabric bag so that the fire would flash deep down into the charge. The gun was pointing downhill, so the roundshot had to be restrained from rolling out of the barrel by a grommet wad; a circle of rope that had been rammed hard up against the shot. When the gun was fired the rope would be annihilated in the explosion. The officer, satisfied that the roundshot would plunge murderously into the approaching French column, stepped well back. The firer stood with his smoking portfire by the gun's right wheel, while the other six men of the crew waited for the orders to reload.

Red-coated and green-jacketed skirmishers ran over the top of the British ridge, then down the long slope where they spread into the skirmishing chain. Riflemen crouched in the rye and dragged back their weapons' flints. The job of the British skirmishers was to hold the French Voltigeurs away from the vulnerable gun crews. Whistles sounded as the light company officers dispersed their men. The Voltigeurs were wading through the half-crushed crops like men struggling through waist-deep water.

A bugle ordered the men in green jackets to open fire. The Baker rifle, with its seven grooves twisting a quarter turn in the barrel, had both a longer range and a deadlier accuracy than the smooth-bore musket. The Emperor had refused to arm his Voltigeurs with rifles, claiming that the far quicker rate of musket-fire more than compensated for the loss of range and accuracy, but his officers now paid for that decision, for they were the Riflemen's target. ‘Kill the officers!' the Greenjacket Sergeants ordered their men. ‘Don't waste your powder! Find their officers and kill the scum!' The first French officers were falling, flung backwards by the force of the spinning balls.

‘Run! Run!' a French officer shouted at his men and the Voltigeurs sprinted forward to shorten the range and overwhelm the Riflemen with the threat of their bayonets.

The redcoats opened fire. The muskets made a heavier coughing sound than the sharper crack of the rifles. The French were firing now; so many muskets crashing on both sides that the skirmish sounded as though a horde of small boys were dragging sticks along park railings. Patches of white smoke drifted and coalesced above the slope. This was the private war of the light infantryman; a bitter war fought in the shrinking gap between the columns and the waiting British guns.

A Rifleman fired, and immediately ran back behind his partner who advanced at a crouch, loaded rifle ready to protect his partner who laboriously rammed the bullet down past the tight-gripping grooves of the rifle's barrel.

‘Watch left, Jimmy!' a sergeant shouted in warning. ‘There's a Jack Pudding and I want the bastard dead!'

Before the French officer could be killed a group of his blue-coated skirmishers dashed forward with bayonets fixed to their muskets.

‘Back, lads! back!' The Rifles, so slow to reload, were vulnerable to such determined rushes, but they fell back through the crouching figures of a redcoat light company who suddenly rose out of the rye and fired a blast of musketry that threw down a half-dozen of the Frenchmen. A ragged answering volley splintered the thigh of a red-coated lieutenant who swore, fell, and watched in disbelief as his blood soaked his white breeches. Two of his men seized the shoulders of his coat and unceremoniously dragged the Lieutenant back up the slope towards the surgeons.

All across the valley the skirmishers fought, but the French Voltigeurs far outnumbered their opponents and slowly, bitterly, the redcoats and Riflemen retreated. Behind them, beyond the crest of the ridge, the rest of the British infantry waited. They were lying flat, hidden both from the light French guns and from the mass of the four advancing columns. The hidden British battalions were in two ranks; a perilously thin formation that would soon have to stand and face the crashing impact of the advancing columns.

Those columns began to step over the dead and dying skirmishers. The drummer boys, deep in the heart of each column, drove their sticks down as if their youthful fervour could drive this vast assault clear on to Brussels itself.

This was the old way of war, the Emperor's way, the attack in column that relied on sheer weight to smash through the enemy's battle line. Yet the French were not fools, and enough of them had fought against British muskets to know that the old way had never worked against the red-coated lines. The British were just too fast with their guns, and every fast musket in a British line could fire at the attacking column, whereas only the men in the first two ranks of the French formation could return the fire, so every time the British had met the columns, the British had won. The British line looked so very frail, but it overlapped the column and drowned it in fire. Against the troops of other nations the column worked beautifully, but the British had learned to pour a destructive blast of musketry that turned the columns into butchers' messes.