Whose Business Is to Die (36 page)

‘Present!’ Each man’s left hand slid upwards as he brought the musket down level, butt firmly into his shoulder and right hand on the trigger.

One of the men in the front rank gasped as a ball drove through his ribs. His musket clattered to the ground and he slumped forward.

‘Fire!’ Each redcoat pulled the trigger. None of the muskets failed to spark or to set off the main charge and a thick wall of smoke spread to cover their frontage and blot out the enemy. The men brought the firelocks down ready to prime and then right hands reached for cartridges. Williams noticed that all of the light bobs had pulled their pouches round to the front of their hip to make it easier to get at them.

A shell exploded behind them, close enough for Williams to feel the gust of hot air wash over him, blowing dirt and bits of powder smoke into his eyes. The smoke in front of the company was thinning, and he could see the French formed up, the men
in the first rank kneeling and two more behind. Then they fired, vanishing behind their own cloud. A redcoat’s head was flung back, a neat hole in his forehead. Another doubled up, shrieking, blood bright on his fingers as he pressed his hands around his groin. Behind him his rear rank man shuddered as first one and then two more balls struck him in the body.

‘Make ready!’ The companies were loaded again, but Williams noticed that the Light Company’s captain and one of his lieutenants were behind the end of the line and looking away to the south.

‘They are lancers,’ he heard the captain say as he rode over to them. ‘They must be Spanish.’

‘Then what are they doing there, sir?’ his subaltern asked.

Williams asked them what they had seen and then tried to find the distant figures moving away to the flank. It took a while, but he spotted the shape of a horseman just as the companies fired their second volley. The noise made Musket flick his ears back and pull away. Around them the evil, rotten-egg stench of powder was growing.

There was a cavalryman a good five hundred yards away where there was less smoke. It was too dark to see the details or colour of his uniform, but it was clear that he carried a slim lance.

‘He is Polish, in the French service,’ Williams told them. For the second time today he was surprised that scarcely anyone else had ever seen a French lancer.

‘Just one or two of them prowling about at the moment,’ the captain said, and Williams was not sure that the man was convinced. ‘Probably no more than outposts.’

‘Keep a good watch,’ Williams said. ‘The French have a whole regiment of them and plenty of others besides.’ Part of him wondered about ordering these companies to angle back and form a line facing any horsemen that tried to roll up the brigade.

A roundshot took a front rank man in the chest, tearing away his right arm and half his shoulder before ripping open the whole side of the stomach of the man behind him. The soldier standing next to him was knocked over by the severed arm. He stared at it, holding it up, and screamed.

‘Quiet!’ a sergeant shouted from his place behind the formation, and when the man kept on yelling he slapped him hard. ‘You’re not the poor bugger who is hurt. Get back in the ranks.’

‘Cease fire!’ the loud voice of Major General Stewart called. ‘Cease fire!’

Officers took up the call. The group of companies to their left fired a rolling volley, but then their captains yelled out to stop firing.

‘Prepare to advance. Fix bayonets!’

‘Fix bayonets!’ the captains repeated all along the Buffs’ staggered line. Men slid their right hands up to hold the musket nearer the middle, and the left reached back to grab the top of the bayonet. They drew the triangular blades, each eighteen inches long, slid them over the muzzles and then turned them to click into place.

A man was flung back, gasping for breath. His rear rank man managed to dodge out of the way, but looked down in horror at his mate stretched on the ground. Then he grinned.

‘You’re a lucky devil, Charlie.’

The man felt the great dent in the plate on his cross-belt where the ball had struck. He groaned as he pushed himself up, still struggling for breath.

‘Pick up your musket, you lazy bugger!’ a sergeant shouted, and then grinned.

‘Prepare to charge!’ Williams drew his sword. The redcoats held their muskets across their bodies. He could remember that moment, and how the weapon felt odd, the balance changed by adding the steel spike.

‘Forward march!’ The companies went forward into the smoke. Williams was on the end of the line and had to rein Musket in to stop the horse bounding ahead. A musket ball hummed through the air and took the top off his tall white plume. He could see the French again, in a rough line more than a hundred men strong and with the mass of the rest of the battalion behind. Some of the greatcoated figures fired, not in any order, but as
soon as they were able. One of the Light Company fell, hissing because there was a bullet in his calf, but the line kept on.

‘Charge!’ The general’s voice seemed to echo along the ridge.

‘Charge!’ Officers took up the shout and Williams found himself bellowing the order and finally giving Musket his head. The men were already dashing forward, the front rank lowering their bayonets to reach for the enemy. They cheered as they ran, throats already a little dry from biting off cartridges.

Some of the French were running. Others went back more slowly, still facing the enemy. A few stayed, and Williams saw an officer pulling men by the collar and trying to keep them in line. He wrestled with one of his soldiers and then the man broke free, and he left him, instead raising his sword. Williams was ahead of the line, carried on by his horse, and he steered Musket so that he would pass to the left of the man. The gelding responded, and he wondered how often the animal had done the same thing for the dragoon sergeant.

At the last minute Musket almost leapt forward, his stride longer, so that he surprised the officer, who cut too late. Williams thrust at the man, felt the tip of his blade grate on rib bone before sliding through the muscle, then he turned his wrist and let momentum pull the sword free. Musket reared as he reined him in, and he saw the officer fall, wounded, but still breathing. Next to him the redcoats reached the few Frenchmen to remain. Only one of the enemy made an effort to fight, clubbing a Light Company man with the butt of his musket and knocking him down. Another redcoat ran his bayonet into the Frenchman’s stomach, twisting it with savage glee. Two more greatcoated men were stabbed. The rest were told to drop their muskets and then were pushed to the rear.

Most of the French halted ten yards away, rallying on another company, and the charge stopped, its force for the moment spent. British and French soldiers alike began to reload.

Williams rode behind the rough line, searching for Colborne. As far as he could tell the 2/31st had yet to arrive or could not find room to deploy. The other two battalions were in the same
rough and scattered line as the Buffs. He was surprised to see small groups of Spanish skirmishers in some of the gaps in the redcoated line. They were eagerly loading and firing as rapidly as their allies, but it would do nothing to help them restore some sort of order.

Colborne was with Dunbar behind the 2/66th, their own battalion. As Williams rode up he saw the yellow-green Regimental Colour fall. It was raised again in a moment, but he saw a badly wounded young ensign being carried back and laid down behind the line. By the time he joined the colonel, the King’s Colour fell and another young officer was brought back to lie beside the first. Other men fell to musketry, and now and again a ball or shell scythed through the ranks.

Major General Stewart appeared just as Williams told them about the lancer he had seen.

‘No time for that,’ he declared. There was a graze on his cheek and the same burning excitement in his eyes. ‘Colonel Colborne, we need to charge again. Stay here and they will whittle us away, so we must drive them off. Tell the regiments to cease firing and I will lead them forward.’

Colborne nodded. ‘Captain Dunbar, kindly take command of the Sixty-sixth.’ Their commander, wounded three times but refusing to leave his post, had just been shot through the heart.

‘I shall go to the Forty-eighth,’ the general said, once again unable to resist playing a direct role. ‘When they charge, the others are to join them.’

‘Williams, come with me and we will tell the Buffs,’ Colborne said, and at least that would place them on the far right of the line should their fears prove grounded. ‘Come on!’ Colborne galloped along behind the brigade, his horse quickly more than a length ahead of his ADC.

They could hear shouting, officers taking up the cry and telling men to stop firing and prepare to charge. Williams did not see or hear the shell that burst just as it landed a couple of feet from Musket’s hind legs. The blast flung him and the horse to the side, and he struck the ground hard.

The world went black.

28

O
nce upon a time, Jean-Baptiste Dalmas had been a schoolmaster in a sleepy town where nothing much ever happened. Nearly all of his pupils were dull, unreasoning brutes, and so he flogged them and hoped that some little knowledge could be driven into their empty heads. Then a magistrate jealous of the favour shown by his wife to the tall schoolmaster had added Dalmas’ name to the following year’s list of conscripts. The army had saved him from boredom and given a purpose to his life. As he rose through the ranks he encountered many men as stupid as the children he had tried to teach, but others with that spark or talent and skill that reflected some of the dazzling genius of the Emperor. General La Tour-Maubourg was just such a man.

‘The Lancers of the Vistula and the Second Hussars are to advance and attack the English infantry,’ the general said to one of his ADCs. ‘Tenth Hussars to support.’

A Polish officer had come in with the report, and while Dalmas rode forward to confirm that the British really had committed so grave an error, orders went out for the light cavalry to prepare to advance. The six dragoon regiments would be more than enough to ward off the Allied cavalry on the far side of the valley, but the general wanted to make sure that there was enough power in his attack.

Dalmas coughed and the general smiled. As his name suggested the general was an aristocrat, one of those who had been willing to serve as an ordinary soldier and fight for the Revolution, and had since risen on merit. ‘Very well, Dalmas, you may take
command of the escort squadron. Leave a dozen troopers with me, but have the rest. See what you can do to help.’

As commander of the cavalry of the entire army, La Tour-Maubourg was entitled to the protection of a squadron of picked men drawn from the regiments under his command. He had selected sixty, all of them from the elite companies of the dragoons. Half wore bearskin caps like some of the grenadiers in the infantry, the rest a red plume in their helmets, and all had red epaulettes on their shoulders. They were all veterans, mainly big men, and if they were not cuirassiers then Dalmas knew that they were still a formidable force.

Dalmas drew his long sword and raised it in salute. ‘Thank you, sir.’

The lieutenant in charge of the escort was almost as tall as Dalmas and had a thick black beard. His voice sounded as smooth as a barrel rolling on cobblestones, and there was no doubt that he was a man the army and the Emperor had raised from the gutter to command. He looked pleased that they were to join the charge and angry that someone else had arrived to lead.

‘Do not worry, Gillet, you give the orders until I say otherwise,’ Dalmas said. ‘There will be plenty of English for us all.’

The beard parted in what was probably a grin. Dalmas led them forward, past the 10th Hussars in their sky-blue braided jackets. The regiment was formed in column of squadrons. Some way ahead of them was a similar column formed by the 2nd Hussars in their brown jackets and overalls. To the right and a little in advance, the lancers had two squadrons in line and two more a hundred yards behind them. Dalmas brought his small squadron level with the brown hussars. He could see the top of the knoll wreathed in smoke, and now and then glimpse the dark shapes of the Spanish up there. The redcoats were out of sight for the moment, hidden behind a fold in the ground, but he had seen them clearly when the general sent him to check the report. There were three or four battalions, their formations broken in their haste to attack the flank of V Corps’ leading division. None of the Spanish or English cavalry was near enough to shield their
open flank, and that meant that the English were very brave, very stupid, or badly led. Dalmas suspected that all three were true.

A trumpet sounded, warning the men to prepare to advance. All of the horses, Dalmas’ big black horse included, pricked up their ears at the familiar notes. The animal snorted, and even pawed its front hoof on the ground like a bull.

‘En avant! Promenez!
’ He heard the strongly accented shout of the lancers’ colonel, and listened as the order was repeated by his squadron commanders. The Poles would be able to see the enemy, for they were a little higher, and the others would follow their lead. All four squadrons walked their horses forward. Red and white pennants fluttered from the lances of the front rank, but the men in the second rank of each squadron carried a carbine as well as a sabre instead of the eight-foot spears. Their square-topped
czapka
hats were covered with dark oilskins to protect them from the weather, and today the Poles had buttoned their jackets to cover their yellow fronts. Had it not been for the swallow-tailed flags on each lance, their uniform would have been very plain.

‘Promenez!’
The hussar’s commander and his captains echoed the order.

‘Promenez!’
Gillet’s accent sounded more barbarous than that of the Polish officers, and Dalmas wondered where the man came from. He did not sound like an Alsatian, and his skin must have been quite swarthy before the sun of Andalusia dulled it even more.

It was getting dark, very dark indeed, and as they walked forward the rain grew heavier, blowing in on the strengthening breeze. The dragoons had rolled their cloaks and wore them over their left shoulders, just like the hussars, a protection against all but the strongest sword-cut. Dalmas had tied his to the blanket behind his saddle. He was sure that there must already be a little rust on his cuirass and a day like this would make it worse. Now the rain tapped against it just as it spattered on his helmet and those of the dragoons.