“Too high!” said the sergeant-major. “Lower, there, number seven.”
The charging horsemen were only thirty yards away; Hornblower saw the leading men, their cloaks flying from their shoulders, leaning along their horses’ necks with their sabre pointed forward at the full stretch of their arms.
“Fire!” said the deep voice.
In reply came a single sharp explosion as every musket went off at once. The smoke swirled round the square and disappeared. Where Hornblower had been looking, there were now a score of horses and men on the ground, some struggling in agony, some lying still. The cavalry regiment split like a torrent encountering a rock and hurtled harmlessly past the other faces of the square.
“Well enough,” said Edrington.
The deep voice was intoning again; like marionettes all on the same string the company that had fired now reloaded, every man biting out his bullet at the same instant, every man ramming home his charge, every man spitting his bullet into his musket barrel with the same instantaneous inclination of head. Edrington looked keenly at the cavalry collecting together in a disorderly mob down the valley.
“The 43rd will advance!” he ordered.
With solemn ritual the square opened up again into two columns and continued its interrupted march. The detached company came marching up to join them from out of a ring of dead men and horses. Someone raised a cheer.
“Silence in the ranks!” bellowed the sergeant-major. “Sergeant, take that man’s name.”
But Hornblower noticed how the sergeant-major was eyeing keenly the distance between the columns; it had to be maintained exactly so that a company wheeling back filled it to make the square.
“Here they come again,” said Edrington.
The cavalry were forming for a new charge, but the square was ready for them. Now the horses were blown and the men were less enthusiastic. It was not a solid wall of horses that came down on them, but isolated groups, rushing first at one face and then at another, and pulling up or swerving aside as they reached the line of bayonets. The attacks were too feeble to meet with company volleys; at the word of command sections here and there gave fire to the more determined groups. Hornblower saw one man — an officer, judging by his gold lace — rein up before the bayonets and pull out a pistol. Before he could discharge it, half a dozen muskets went off together; the officer’s face became a horrible bloody mask, and he and his horse fell together to the ground. Then all at once the cavalry wheeled off, like starlings over a field, and the march could be resumed.
“No discipline about these Frogs, not on either side,” said Edrington.
The march was headed for the sea, for the blessed shelter of the Indefatigable, but it seemed to Hornblower as if the pace was intolerably slow. The men were marching at the parade step, with agonizing deliberation, while all round them and far ahead of them the fugitive emigres poured in a broad stream towards safety. Looking back, Hornblower saw the fields full of marching columns — hurrying swarms, rather — of Revolutionary infantry in hot pursuit of them.
“Once let men run, and you can’t do anything else with them,” commented Edrington, following Hornblower’s gaze.
Shouts and shots over to the flank caught their attention. Trotting over the fields, leaping wildly at the bumps, came a cart drawn by a lean horse. Someone in a seaman’s frock and trousers was holding the reins; other seamen were visible over the sides firing muskets at the horsemen hovering about them. It was Bracegirdle with his dung cart; he might have lost his guns but he had saved his men. The pursuers dropped away as the cart neared the columns; Bracegirdle, standing up in the cart, caught sight of Hornblower on his horse and waved to him excitedly.
“Boadicea and her chariot!” he yelled.
“I’ll thank you, sir!” shouted Edrington with lungs of brass, “to go on and prepare for our embarkation.”
“Aye aye, sir!”
The lean horse trotted on with the cart lurching after it and the grinning seamen clinging on to the sides. At the flank appeared a swarm of infantry, a mad, gesticulating crowd, half running to cut off the 43rd’s retreat. Edrington swept his glance round the fields.
“The 43rd will form line!” he shouted.
Like some ponderous machine, well oiled, the half battalion fronted towards the swarm; the columns became lines, each man moving into his position like bricks laid on a wall.
“The 43rd will advance!”
The scarlet line swept forward, slowly, inexorably. The swarm hastened to meet it, officers to the front waving their swords and calling on their men to follow.
“Make ready!”
Every musket came down together, the priming pans clicked.
“Present!”
Up came the muskets, and the swarm hesitated before that fearful menace. Individuals tried to get back into the crowd to cover themselves from the volley with the bodies of their comrades.
“Fire!”
A crashing volley; Hornblower, looking over the heads of the British infantry from his point of vantage on horseback, saw the whole face of the swarm go down in swathes. Still the red line moved forward, at each deliberate step a shouted order brought a machine-like response as the men reloaded; five hundred mouths spat in five hundred bullets, five hundred right arms raised five hundred ramrods at once. When the muskets came to the present the red line was at the swathe of dead and wounded, for the swarm had withdrawn before the advance, and shrank back still further at the threat of the volley. The volley was fired; the advance went on. Another volley; another advance. Now the swarm was shredding away. Now men were running from it. Now every man had turned tail and fled from that frightful musketry. The hillside was as black with fugitives as it had been when the emigres were fleeing.
“Halt!”
The advance ceased; the line became a double column, and the retreat began again.
“Very creditable,” remarked Edrington.
Hornblower’s horse was trying jerkily to pick its way over a carpet of dead and wounded, and he was so busy keeping his seat, and his brain was in such a whirl, that he did not immediately realize that they had topped the last rise, so that before them lay the glittering waters of the estuary. The strip of muddy beach was packed solid with emigres. There were the ships riding at anchor, and there, blessed sight, were the boats swarming towards the shore. It was high time, for already the boldest of the Revolutionary infantry were hovering round the columns, taking long shots into them. Here and there a man fell.
“Close up!” snapped the sergeants, and the files marched on stolidly, leaving the wounded and dead behind them.
The adjutant’s horse suddenly snorted and plunged, and then fell first to its knees, and, kicking, to its side, while the freckle-faced adjutant freed his feet from the stirrups and flung himself out of the saddle just in time to escape being pinned underneath.
“Are you hit, Stanley?” asked Edrington.
“No, my lord. All safe and sound,” said the adjutant, brushing at his scarlet coat.
“You won’t have to foot it far,” said Edrington. “No need to throw out skirmishers to drive those fellows off. This is where we must make our stand.”
He looked about him, at the fishermen’s cottages above the beach, the panic-stricken emigres at the water’s edge, and the masses of Revolutionary infantry coming up in pursuit, leaving small enough time for preparation. Some of the redcoats poured into the cottages, appearing a moment later at the windows; it was fortunate that the fishing hamlet guarded one flank of the gap down to the beach while the other was guarded by a steep and inaccessible headland on whose summit a small block of redcoats established themselves. In the gap between the two points the remaining four companies formed a long line just sheltered by the crest of the beach.