Sharpe's Waterloo (47 page)

But the Emperor had only just started to fight.

 

The Duke of Wellington no longer troubled himself about the Prince of Orange. At the battle's commencement, when some niceties of polite usage persisted, the Duke had taken care to inform the Prince of any orders involving those troops nominally under the Prince's command, but now in the desperate moments of pure survival the Duke simply ignored the Young Frog.

Which did not mean that the Prince considered himself redundant. On the contrary, he saw his own genius as the allies' sole hope of victory and was prepared to use the last shreds of his authority to achieve it. Which meant La Haye Sainte must be saved, and to save it the Prince ordered the remnants of the 2nd Infantry Brigade of the King's German Legion to attack the besieging French.

Colonel Christian Ompteda, the brigade commander, formed his two battalions into close column of companies, ordered them to fix bayonets, and then to advance into the suffocating mix of heated air and bitter smoke that filled the valley. The German objective was the field to the west of La Haye Sainte where the French skirmishers were pressing close and thick on the beleaguered farm.

The Germans reached the crest and were about to march down on the French when the Prince of Orange galloped to intercept them. ‘In line!' the Prince shouted. ‘In line! You must overlap them! I insist you advance in line!'

Colonel Ompteda, his battalions halted on the very edge of the valley and under fire from the French guns, protested that there were enemy cavalry patrolling the valley floor. The Prince turned sarcastic eyes towards the smoke. ‘I see no cavalry.'

‘Your Highness, I must insist that - '

‘You cannot insist! You will form line! Damn you!' The Prince was ebullient, feeding off the crash and hammer of the guns. He felt himself born to this heated chaos of battle. He did not give a fig that Ompteda was a man who had spent a lifetime soldiering; the Prince had the passionate certainty of his convictions and not even his experiences with Halkett's brigade at Quartre Bras nor the massacre of the Red Germans would sway him. ‘I order you into line! Or do you wish me to appoint another brigade commander?' he shouted into the Colonel's face.

Ompteda, in whom obedience was deeply ingrained, reluctantly deployed his two battalions into line. The Prince, scornful of Ompteda's timidity and certain that he had just given the orders necessary to bring glowing victory, watched triumphantly as the German bayonets marched into the valley.

Fifty paces from the edge of the skirmishers, Ompteda ordered his men to charge.

The Germans ran forward, their bayonets bright in the gloom under the smoke. The French infantry, taken utterly by surprise, fled from the appalling threat of the seventeen-inch blades. The German colours swirled forward into the musket smoke left by the skirmishers.

‘There!' The Prince, happy on his hill, exulted in the success.

‘Let me congratulate Your Highness,' Winckler, one of the Prince's Dutch aides, smirked at his master's side.

Lieutenant Simon Doggett, who was a few yards to the Prince's right, stared beyond the infantry and could have sworn he saw a file of cavalry trotting across the valley. Or at least he was sure he saw the glint of helmets and the swirl of horsehair plumes in a rift of the smoke. ‘Sir? There's cavalry out there, sir!'

The Prince turned furiously on the Lieutenant. ‘That's all you British ever see! Cavalry! You're nervous, Doggett. If you can't endure the rigours of battle, you shouldn't be a soldier. Isn't that right, Winckler?'

‘Entirely right, Your Highness.'

Rebecque listened to the conversation and said nothing. He just stared into the shifting white scrims where the muskets crackled like burning thorns.

‘You see!' The Prince made a great play of peering into the valley, shading his eyes and gaping like a village idiot. ‘No horses! Lieutenant Doggett? Where are your gee-gees?'

Simon Doggett was no longer certain that he had seen any cavalry, for the valley was thick with smoke and he feared that nervousness had played tricks with his perception, but he stubbornly held his ground. ‘I'm fairly sure I saw them, sir, in the smoke. They were Cuirassiers, off to the right there.'

But the Prince had taken enough from pusillanimous Englishmen. ‘Get rid of the boy, Rebecque! Just get rid of him. Send him back to his nursemaid.' The Prince's horse shied sideways as a cannon-ball slashed close past. ‘There!' The Prince cried triumphantly as the smoke drifted aside to reveal that the KGL infantry had scoured the last Frenchmen away from the farm's western walls. ‘You see? No cavalry! Boldness wins!'

‘Your Highness's boldness wins,' Winckler hastened to correct his master.

A trumpet interrupted the Prince's next words. The trumpet call sounded from the valley, from inside the smoke where the Prince had insisted no cavalry lurked, but out of which, like avenging furies, the troop of Cuirassiers now led the charge.

Rebecque groaned. In almost the exact same place as the Hanoverians had been slaughtered, the KGL now suffered. The cavalry, a mixture of Cuirassiers, Lancers and Dragoons who had survived the slaughter of the horsemen among the British squares, now struck the flank of Ompteda's right-hand battalion. To Rebecque it seemed that the red-coated infantry simply disappeared beneath the swarm of mounted killers. To the French horsemen this was a blessed moment of revenge on the infantry who had made them bleed and suffer earlier in the day.

The Prince just stared. He had gone pale, but he made no move to help the men he had just doomed. His mouth opened slackly and his fingers twitched on his reins.

The Germans stood no chance. The horsemen sabred and stabbed from the open flank. The men of the right-hand KGL battalion broke into hopeless flight and were run down by the horses. The left-hand battalion formed a rally square to protect its colour, but the right-hand battalion was destroyed. The Prince turned away as a French swordsman captured a KGL colour and hefted it aloft in a gesture of triumph. Colonel Ompteda died trying to save the flag. The French infantry ran to add their bayonets to the horsemen's blades. The German survivors, pitifully few, inched in their rough square back towards the ridge. They too might have been doomed, but some of their own cavalry streamed down from the elm tree to drive the enemy back.

A French cavalry trumpeter sounded a derisive flurry as the remnants of the King's German Legion limped back up the slope. A Cuirassier brandished the captured colour, taunting the suffering British ridge with this foretaste of French victory.

The Prince did not look at the Germans nor at the exultant French. Instead he stared imperiously towards the east. ‘It isn't my fault if men won't fight properly!'

None of the staff answered. Not even Winckler was minded to soften the disaster with flattery.

‘We gave the garrison a breathing space, did we not?' The Prince gestured at La Haye Sainte that was once more ringed with smoke, but again no one answered and the Prince, who believed he deserved loyalty from his military family, turned furiously on his staff. ‘The Germans should have formed square! It wasn't my fault!' He looked from man to man, demanding agreement, but only Simon Doggett was brave enough to meet the Prince's petulant and bulging eyes.

‘You're nothing but a silk stocking full of shit,' Doggett said very clearly, and utterly astonished himself by so repeating Patrick Harper's scornful verdict on the Prince.

There was an appalled silence. The Prince gaped. Rebecque, not quite sure whether he had heard correctly, opened his mouth to protest, but could not find adequate words.

Doggett knew he had just seconds to keep the initiative. He tugged at his horse's reins. ‘You're a bloody murderer!' he said to the Prince, then slashed back his spurs and galloped away. In a few seconds the smoke hid him.

The Prince stared after him. Rebecque hastened to assure His Highness that Doggett's wits had clearly been loosened by the stress of battle. The Prince nodded acceptance of the facile explanation, then turned furiously on his staff again. ‘I'm surrounded by incompetents! That bloody man should have formed square! Is it my fault if a damned German doesn't know his job?' The Prince's indignation and anger spilled out in furious passion. ‘Is it my fault that the French are winning? Is it?'

And in that, at least, the Prince spoke true. The French, at last, were winning the battle.

French victory became a virtual certainty when La Haye Sainte fell. The farm's German defenders ran out of rifle ammunition and the French attackers tore down the barricaded doors and flooded into the farm buildings. For a time they were held off by bayonets and swords as the defenders fought furiously in the corridors and stables. The Germans made barricades of their own and the French dead, then rammed their sword-bayonets over the piled bodies, and for a time it seemed as if their steel and fury might yet hold the farm, but then the French musket volleys tore into the Riflemen and the French musket wadding set fire to the stable straw, and the defenders, choking and decimated, were forced out.

Those Riflemen who escaped from La Haye Sainte ran up the ridge's slope as the victorious French swarmed into the farm buildings. The Riflemen of the 95
^th
had long been driven from the adjacent sandpit, so now the centre bastion of the Duke's line was gone. The French brought cannon into the farm's kitchen garden and, at perilously short range, opened fire on the ridge. Voltigeurs, given a new territory to exploit, spread up the forward slope to open a killing fire on the troops nearest to the elm tree.

An immediate counter-attack could have recaptured the farm while the French hold on its buildings was still new and tenuous, but the Duke had no reserves left. Every man who could fight in the Duke's army was now committed to defend the ridge, while the rest of his troops had either fled, were wounded, or were dead. What was left of the Duke's army was a thin line of men stretched along a blood-soaked ridge. The line was two ranks deep, no more, and in places the ridge seemed empty where the battalions had been forced to shrink into four ranks as a precaution against the cavalry that still lurked in the smoke that drifted at the slope's foot.

The French were winning.

The Duke, hardly a man given to despair, muttered a prayer for the coming of either the Prussians or the night. But both, this day, came painfully slowly.

The first French attacks on the British ridge had failed, but now their gunners and their skirmishers were grinding down the British defence. Men died in ones and twos, but constantly. The already truncated battalions shrank as the surviving Sergeants ordered the files to close the gaps. Men who had started the day four files apart became neighbours, and still the gun-fire shredded the ranks and still the Voltigeurs fired from the smoke and still the Sergeants chanted the litany of a battalion's death, ‘Close up! Close up!'

Victory was a mere drumbeat away because the British line had been scraped thin as a drumskin.

The Emperor felt the glorious certainty of victory. His will now stretched clear across the battlefield. It was seven o'clock on a summer's evening, the sun was slanting steeply through the remnants of cloud and skeins of smoke, and the Emperor held the lives and deaths of all three armies in his hand. He had won. All he now needed to do was fend off the Prussians with his right hand, and annihilate the British with his left.

He had won. Yet he would wait a few moments before savouring the victory. He would let the guns in the newly captured La Haye Sainte finish their destruction of the British centre, and only then would he unleash his immortals.

To glory.

 

The bombardment ground on, but slower now for the French gun barrels were degrading from their constant fire. Some guns shot their vents, leaving a gaping hole where their touchholes had been, while others broke their carriages, and one twelve-pounder exploded as an air bubble in its cast barrel finally gave way. Yet more than enough French cannon remained in service to sustain the killing. The surviving British infantry was numbed and deafened by the fire. Less than half of Wellington's army was still capable of fighting. Their faces were blackened by battle and streaked white with sweat, while their eyes were reddened from the irritation of the powder residues that had sparked from their musket pans.

Yet, battered and bleeding, they clung to the ridge beneath the dwarfing pall of churning smoke that belched from the burning ammunition wagons. The French cannonade had long assumed an inhuman inevitability; as though the gunners had sprung free some malevolent force from within the earth itself; a force which now dispassionately ground the battlefield into blood and embers and ragged soil. No humans were visible on the French-held ridge; there was just the bank of smoke into which the guns flashed fire that was diffused into lurid flares that erupted bright, then slowly faded into gloom.

Sharpe, standing a few feet to one side of his old battalion, watched the ominous bursts of red light ignite and die, and each unnatural glow marked a few more seconds survived. The fear had come with inactivity, and each minute that Sharpe waited motionless on the ridge made him feel more vulnerable as though, skin by skin, his bravery was peeling away. Harper, crouching silent beside Sharpe, shivered as he stared wide-eyed at the strange inhuman fires that pulsed amidst the smoke.

This was unlike any battlefield that either man had known before. In Spain the fields had seemed to stretch away to infinity, but here the combat was held tight within the cockpit of the small valley above which the smoke made an unnatural early dusk. Beyond the battle's margin, out where the crops stood unharmed and no blood trickled in the plough furrows, the sunlight shone through ragged clouds on peaceful fields, but the valley itself was a piece of hell on earth, flickering with flame and belching smoke.