Sharpe 3-Book Collection 7: Sharpe's Revenge, Sharpe's Waterloo, Sharpe's Devil (66 page)

Every inch of ground that Marshal Ney had taken during the afternoon was regained. The British line, supported by guns and cavalry, ground on like a behemoth. The French, suddenly outnumbered, were forced to retreat towards Frasnes. Quatre Bras had held and the road to the Prussians was still open. The battle between Napoleon and Blücher still sounded loud in the summer’s evening, but that too faded away as the shadows of the western clouds lengthened dark across the landscape.

Lord John Rossendale, riding behind the British light cavalry, stopped where a Cuirassier’s body was sprawled beside the road. The man’s guts had been flayed clean from his belly and now lay in a blue-red dribble across fifteen feet of the highway’s churned surface. Lord John wanted to vomit, but only choked. He gasped for breath and twisted his horse away. A dead British skirmisher lay in the trampled rye, his skull laid open by a bullet. Flies were thick on the exposed brains. Next to the dead man was a French Voltigeur, blood thick in his belly and lap. The man was alive, but shivering with the trauma of his wound. He stared up at Lord John and asked for water. Lord John felt faint with shock. He turned his horse and galloped towards the crossroads where his servants were preparing supper.

In the barns behind the crossroads the surgeons were at their grisly work with knives and saws and probes. The amputated arms, hands, and legs were tossed into the farmyard. Lanterns were hung from the barn beams to light the operations. A Highlander, his right calf shattered by a French cannon-ball, refused to bite the leather gag and made not a sound as a surgeon took his leg off at the knee.

Sharpe and Harper, knowing they were not welcome to stay near the brooding Lieutenant-Colonel Ford, walked their horses back down the flank of the wood, but stopped well short of the crossroads. ‘I suppose I’m out of work,’ Sharpe said.

‘The bugger’ll want you back in the morning.’

‘Maybe.’

The two Riflemen tethered their horses in a clearing among the trees, then Sharpe walked out to the bloody patch of ground where the 69th had died. He picked up four discarded bayonets and took the leather bootlaces off two corpses. Back in the wood he made a fire with twigs and gunpowder. He stuck the bayonets into the ground at the four corners of the fire, then pulled the straps off the Cuirassier’s breastplate that Harper had scavenged earlier. He threaded the bootlaces into the holes at the shoulders and waist of the breastplate, then waited.

Harper had taken his own knife out to the battlefield. He found a dead horse and cut a thick bloody steak from its rump. Then, the steak dripping in his left hand, he crossed to one of the silent British guns and, ignoring its crew, stooped under the barrel to scrape away a handful of the gun’s axle grease.

Back in the wood Harper slapped the axle grease into the upturned breastplate, ripped the pelt off the steak, then dropped the meat into the cold grease. ‘I’ll water the horses while you cook.’

Sharpe nodded acknowledgement. He fed the fire with branches he had cut and split with his sword. In the morning, before the army marched to join Blücher, he would find a cavalry armourer to put an edge back on the blade. Then he wondered whether he would even be with the army next day. The Prince had dismissed him so he might as well ride back to Brussels and take Lucille to England.

Sharpe tied the breastplate to the four bayonets so that it hung like a steel hammock above the flames. By the time Harper brought the horses back from the stream the steak was sizzling and smoking in the bubbling grease.

Night was falling across the trampled rye. Nine thousand men had been killed or wounded in the fight for the crossroads, and some of the injured still moaned and cried in the darkness. Some bandsmen still searched for the wounded, but many would have to wait till the next day for rescue.

‘Rain tomorrow.’ Harper sniffed the air.

‘Like as not.’

‘It’s good to smell proper food again.’ A dog ranged near the fire, but Harper drove it away by shying a clod of earth at it.

Sharpe burned the meat black, then carefully cut it in halves and speared one piece on his knife. ‘Yours.’

They held their meat on knife points, gnawed it down, and shared a canteen of wine that Harper had taken from a dead French Lancer. In the east the first stars pricked pale against a sky still misted by battle smoke. In the west it was darker, made so by the towering clouds. Men sang behind the crossroads while somewhere in the wood a flautist made a melancholy music. The trees sparkled with camp-fires, while to the south, and reflecting against the spreading clouds, a red glow showed where Marshal Ney’s troops made their bivouacs.

‘Crapauds fought well today,’ Harper said grudgingly.

Sharpe nodded, then shrugged. ‘They should have attacked with their infantry, though. They’d have won if they had.’

‘I suppose we’ll be at it again tomorrow?’

‘Unless the Prussians have beaten Boney and won the war for us.’

Sharpe fetched a flask of calvados from his saddlebag, took a swig and handed it to Harper. The flute music was plangent. He had once wanted to learn the flute, and had thought to make an attempt this last winter, but instead he had spent the evenings making an elaborate cradle from applewood. He had meant to decorate the cradle’s hood with carvings of wild flowers, but he had found their intricate curves too difficult to cut so had settled for the straight stark lines of piled drums and weapons. Lucille had been hugely amused by her baby’s martial cot.

‘Shouldn’t you go and see the Prince?’ Harper asked.

‘Why the hell should I? Bugger the bastard.’

Harper chuckled. He sat with his back propped against his saddle and stared into the dark void where the battle had been fought. ‘It’s not the same, is it?’

‘What isn’t?’

‘It’s not like Spain.’ He paused, thinking of the men who were not here, then named just one of those men. ‘Sweet William.’

Sharpe grunted. William Frederickson had once been a friend almost as close as Harper, but Frederickson had tilted a lance at Lucille, and lost, and had never forgiven Sharpe for that loss.

Harper, who disliked that the two officers were not on speaking terms, offered the flask to Sharpe. ‘We could have done with him here today.’

‘That’s true.’ Yet Frederickson was in a Canadian garrison, just one of the thousands of veterans who had been dispersed round the globe, which meant that the Emperor must be fought with too many raw battalions who had never stood in the battle line and who froze like rabbits when the cavalry threatened.

Far to the west a sheet of lightning flickered in the sky and thunder grumbled like a far sound of gunnery. ‘Rain tomorrow,’ Harper said again.

Sharpe yawned. Tonight, at least, he was well fed and dry. He suddenly remembered that he was supposed to have been given Lord John’s promissory note, but it had not come. That was a problem best left for the morning, but for now he wrapped himself in the cloak that was Lucille’s gift and within a few minutes he was fast asleep.

And the Emperor’s campaign was forty-one hours old.

More battalions, cavalry squadrons and gun batteries arrived at the crossroads throughout the short night until, at dawn, the Duke’s army was at last almost wholly assembled. In the first sepulchral light the newcomers stared dully at the small shapes which lay in the mist that shrouded the hollows of the battlefield. Bugles roused the bivouacs, while the wounded, left all night in the rye, called pitifully for help. The night sentries were called in and a new picquet line set to face the French camp-fires at Frasnes. The British camp-fires were revived with new kindling and a scattering of gunpowder. Men fished in their ammunition pouches for handfuls of tea leaves that were contributed to the common pots. Officers, socially visiting between the battalions, spread the cheerful news that Marshal Blücher had repulsed Bonaparte’s attack, so now it seemed certain that the French would retreat in the face of a united Prussian-British army.

‘We’ll be in France next week!’ an infantry captain assured his men.

‘Paris by July, lads,’ a sergeant forecast. ‘Just think of all those girls.’

The Duke of Wellington, who had slept in an inn three miles from Quatre Bras, returned to the crossroads at first light. The Highlanders of the 92nd made him a fire and served him tea. He cupped the tin mug in both hands and stared southwards towards Marshal Ney’s positions, but the French troops were silent and unmoving beneath the heavy cloud cover that had spread from the west during the short hours of darkness. One of the Duke’s staff officers, heavily protected by a troop of King’s German Legion cavalry, was sent eastwards to learn the morning’s news from Marshal Blücher.

Officers used French Cuirassiers’ upturned breastplates as shaving bowls; the senior officers having the privilege of the water when it was hot and the Lieutenants and Ensigns being forced to wait till the water was cold and congealed. The infantrymen who had fought the previous day boiled yet more water to clean their fouled musket barrels. Cavalry troopers queued to have their swords or sabres ground to a killing edge on the treadled stones, while the gunners filled the shot-cases of their field carriages with ready ammunition. There was an air of cheerfulness about the crossroads; the feeling that the army had survived an ordeal the previous day, but that now, and thanks largely to the victory of the Prussians, it was on the verge of triumph. The only grumble was that in the desperate hurry to reach Quatre Bras the army had left its commissariat wagons far behind so that most of the battalions started their day hungry.

The battlefield was searched for bodies. The wounded who still lived were taken back to the surgeons, while the dead were collected for burial. Most of the dead officers had been buried the previous night, so now the diggers would look after as many rank and file as they could. Sharpe and Harper, waking in the overcast dawn, found themselves just a few yards away from a work party that was scratching a wide and shallow trench in which the slaughtered men of the 69th would be interred. The waiting bodies lay in such natural poses that they almost seemed to be asleep. Captain Harry Price of the Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers found the two Riflemen drinking their morning tea just as the first corpses were being dragged towards the inadequate grave. ‘Any tea for a gallant officer?’ Price begged.

Harper cheerfully scooped another mug of stewed tea out of the breastplate kettle. The dead, who had been stripped of their uniforms, stank already. It was only an hour after dawn yet the day threatened to be humid and sticky and the grave diggers were sweating as they hacked at the soil. ‘They’ll have to dig deeper than that,’ Harper commented as he handed Price the tin mug.

Price sipped the tea, then grimaced at its sour aftertaste of axle grease. ‘Do you remember the chaos we made trying to burn those poor buggers at Fuentes de Oñoro?’

Sharpe laughed. The ground at Fuentes de Oñoro had been too shallow and rocky to make graves, so he had ordered his dead cremated, but even after tearing down a whole wooden barn and lifting the rafters off six small houses to use as fuel, the bodies had refused to burn.

‘They were good days,’ Price said wistfully. He squinted up at the sky. ‘It’ll pour with bloody rain soon.’ The clouds were low and extraordinarily dark, as though their looming heaviness had trapped the vestiges of night. ‘A rotten day for a battle,’ Price said gloomily.

‘Is there going to be a battle?’ Harper asked.

‘That’s what the Brigade Major told our gallant Colonel.’ Price told Sharpe and Harper the dawn news of Prussian victory, and how the French were supposed to be retreating and how the army would be pursuing the French who were expected to make one last stand before yielding the frontier to the Emperor’s enemies.

‘How are our lads feeling about yesterday?’ Harper asked Price, and Sharpe noticed how, to the Irishman, the battalion was still ‘our lads’.

‘They’re pleased that Mr d’Alembord’s a major, but he’s not exactly overjoyed.’

‘Why not?’ Sharpe asked.

‘He says he’s going to die. He’s got a what do you call it? A premonition. He says it’s because he’s going to be married.’

‘What’s that got to do with it?’

Price shrugged as if to demonstrate that he was no expert on superstitions. ‘He says it’s because he’s happy. He reckons that the happiest die first and only the miserable buggers live for ever.’

‘You should have been dead long ago,’ Harper commented.

‘Thank you, Sergeant,’ Harry Price grinned. He was a carefree, careless and casual man, much liked by his men, but averse to too much effort. He had served as Sharpe’s Lieutenant at one time, and had been perpetually in debt, frequently drunk, yet ever cheerful. Now he drained the vestiges of his tea. ‘I’m supposed to be reporting to brigade to discover just when we march off.’ He shuddered with sudden distaste. ‘That was a bloody horrible mug of tea.’

‘It had a bit of dead horse in it,’ Harper explained helpfully.

‘God damn Irish cooking. I suppose I’d better go and do my duty.’ Price gave Harper the mug back and ambled on with a cheerful good morning to the burial party.

‘And what are we going to do?’ Harper asked Sharpe.

‘Use the rest of the tea as shaving water, then bugger off.’ Sharpe had no wish to stay with the army. The Prince had relieved him of his duties and, if the rumours were true, the French invasion had been thwarted by Blücher’s Prussians. The rest of the war would be a pursuit through the fortress belt of northern France until the Emperor surrendered. Sharpe decided he might as well sit it out in Brussels, then go back to his apple trees in Normandy. ‘I suppose I never will get to fight the Emperor.’ He spoke wistfully, feeling oddly let down. Yesterday’s battle had been an unsatisfactory way to gain victory, but Sharpe was an old enough soldier to take victory whichever way it came. ‘Is there more tea?’