Still the horsemen came, the uniforms changing as the rear ranks of the charge followed in the bloody path of the Cuirassiers and Lancers. Carabiniers and Dragoons raced madly through the corridors of slaughter. The attacking streams divided and subdivided as they sought safer passages between the squares.
“Aim at the horses!” the Guards Major called to his men. “Aim at the horses!”
Harper had his rifle at his shoulder. He tracked a French officer’s horse, fired, and watched man and beast tumble down. A horse was an easier target to hit, and a wounded or dead horse removed a cavalryman just as effectively as shooting the man.
“Fire!” Another frontal volley. A horse reared in the smoke between two of the abandoned cannon. Its rider fell backwards and his helmet struck a gun-wheel with a sickening crack. A dying horse drummed the turf with its hooves. An unhorsed Cuirassier scrabbled at his buckles to remove the weight of his armour. Another Cuirassier, fallen on his back, jerked to twist his huge weight of steel out of the cloying mud. A musket bullet spurted mud beside the struggling man. “Leave those lobsters alone!” the Guards Major shouted. “They’re out of it! Go for the live ‘uns!”
Sharpe watched a cavalryman beating impotently at a captured gun with his sword. The French, like the British cavalry earlier, had brought no implements to disable the guns. A French Hussar officer fired a pistol at a flank of the Guards’ square and was hit by a full platoon’s volley in revenge.
“Cease fire! Front ranks reload!” The charge had streamed clear past these foremost squares; all except for a few timid horsemen who were reluctant to risk the fatal corridors and had therefore hung back at the ridge’s crest. The bravest and luckiest horsemen had already succeeded in riding clean right through the staggered squares, only to be faced by a line of British and Dutch cavalry. The French troopers, scattered and broken, knew they would be cut down by the waiting sabres, so turned to race back towards the safety of the valley. Like a great wave the cavalry had broken and divided about the squares, now it must ebb back before reforming. The smoke began to shred and clear, revealing that the other squares were unbroken. Dead men and horses littered the spaces between the squares. An unhorsed Lancer, reeling with concussion or weakness, staggered like a drunk towards the ridge crest.
“Present!” The Guards Colonel had seen that the French charge was now returning, and he would give the horsemen more fire as they tried to regain their own lines. The thunder of their hooves became louder, then the first frightened men appeared. “Fire!” A white Carabinier’s uniform seemed to turn instantly red. A horse collapsed, rolled and broke its rider’s leg. Another wounded man was clinging to the mane of his horse, his face white with terror as he desperately ran through the staggered walls of fire. The unhorsed Lancer was ridden over by his own men. He screamed as he fell and as the hooves pounded his flesh to jelly.
“Fire!” a Guards Lieutenant called.
The flood of horsemen flowed past, this time retreating, and Sharpe had a glimpse of a red-haired man in the gorgeous uniform of a Marshal of the Empire, his hat gone, screaming at his troops. Riderless horses had joined the fleeing mob. A few cavalrymen ran among the horses, some of them trying to grab the reins of a free horse.
“Fire!” A pigtailed Dragoon with a broken sword slumped over his horse’s neck, but somehow clung on. Sharpe could smell blood and leather and horse-sweat. The uniforms were flecked with mud. The horses’ eyes rolled white as they galloped and their breath pumped loud and harsh.
The horsemen went as they had come. As soon as the last Frenchmen had passed, the British gunners sprinted out of the squares to regain their undamaged guns. A few cannon had been left loaded with canister and the portfires touched the quills to send barrels of the killing musket-halls at the rumps of the fleeing cavalry. The ground between the squares was a slaughteryard where the dead and the dying lay among rye stalks hammered into the mud that was thick with hoofprints and horse dung.
“Sad, really.” The Guards Major offered Sharpe a pinch of snuff.
“Sad?”
“Wonderful looking horses!” The Major, who was clearly so popular with his men, proved to have a rather melancholy demeanour when he was no longer performing for them. “A damned pity to throw good horseflesh away, but what can one expect of a paltry gunner like Bonaparte? Do you care for snuff?”
“No. Thank you.”
“You should. It clears out the lungs.” The Major snapped his box shut, then vigorously sniffed the powder off his hand. Some of his Guardsmen had run forward to plunder the French corpses and the Major shouted at them to put the wounded horses out of their misery before they robbed the dead. A Cuirassier with a musket bullet in his thigh was dragged back into the square. A Guardsman picked up the wounded man’s glittering helmet with its long horsehair plume and, replacing his shako with the gaudy headgear, pranced along the square’s face in a grotesque parody of a barrack gate whore. His comrades cheered him.
“I suppose“, the Major smiled at the soldier’s mockery, ”that Monsewer’s damned guns will start up again?“
But instead it was the British guns on the crest that fired. The sound of the volley told Sharpe that the cannon had been double shotted and the frantic speed with which the crews reloaded was a warning that the cavalry were again approaching up the ridge’s front slope.
“My God! The bastards haven’t had enough!” the Major said incredulously, then cheered up as he realized he would have another chance to encourage his men. “Mademoiselle Frog is coming back for more, boys! You must have treated her well last time, so give her the same treatment again!”
The cavalry was indeed returning, and this time there were even more horsemen. Reinforcements must have been sent across the valley and it now seemed as though all the cavalry of France was to be hurled in one desperate charge at the British squares. The horsemen streamed over the ridge, and the guns by the squares gave them a greeting of canister before the gunners again ran with their precious implements to the square’s safety.
“Hold your fire!” The Guards Major peered through the cannons’ smoke. “Wait for it, lads! Wait for it! Fire!”
The muskets could not miss. The heavy balls thudded into men and horses, piercing breastplates and helmets, turning the majesty of plume and pelisse into screaming pain. There was also pain inside the squares, where those men wounded by the cannon-fire and not given time to retreat to the forest’s edge, still sheltered. The battalion officers rode between the wounded, shouting encouragement to each face of their square as the French horsemen flowed past.
The cavalry had returned full of resolve to charge home, but the horses could not be forced to charge the squares that were now given the further protection of makeshift bastions formed of dead and dying horses and men. The new attack flowed about the squares just like the first, except this time the attack went more slowly because the horses were tiring. Those horses that had lost their riders during the first charge dutifully attacked with the second, dumbly obedient to their herd instincts even though those instincts took them up into the storm of canister and musket-fire.