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 deafen^ ed 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.
Neither Sharpe nor Harper spoke much. No one was speaking much in the British line any more. Sometimes a sergeant ordered the files to close, but the orders were unnecessary now. Each man was simply enduring as-best he could.
The French skirmishers were falling back as their ammunition became exhausted. That, at least, gave some relief, and let the British battalions lie down on the crushed mud and straw. The Voltigeurs did not retire all the way to their own ridge, but waited on the valley floor for a fresh supply of cartridges to be brought forward. Only in the British centre; in front of the newly captured
La Haye Sainte, were newly committed skirmishers advancing up the slope beneath the raking canister fire of the two eight-pounder guns that the French had placed in the farm’s kitchen garden.
Peter d’Alembord, insisting that he was well, had returned to Colonel Ford’s side. He still rode Sharpe’s horse that he now stood beneath the battalion’s colours, which had been torn to yellow shreds by the skirmishers’ bullets. Colonel Ford’s ears were so dulled by the incessant percussion of the guns that he could hardly hear the small remarks d’Alembord made. Not that Ford cared. He was clutching his horse’s reins as though they were his last hold on sanity.
A single horsemen rode slowly in the emptiness behind the British battalions. His horse picked a slow path through the broken gun carriages and past the rows of red-coated dead. Shell fragments smoked on the scorched and trampled crops. The horseman was Simon Doggett who now sought his own battalion of Guardsmen, but as he rode westwards he saw the two Riflemen crouching close to the ridge’s crest. Doggett turned his horse towards the Greenjackets and reined in close behind them.
“He did it again, sir. He damn well did it again,“ Doggett’s outraged indignation made him sound very young, ”so I told him he was a silk stocking full of shit.“
Sharpe turned. For a second he blinked in surprise as though he did not recognize Doggett, then he seemed to snap out of the trance induced by the numbing gun-fire. “You did what?”
Doggett was embarrassed. “I told him he was a silk stocking full of shit.”
Harper laughed softly. A shell whimpered overhead to explode far in the rear. A roundshot followed to strike the ridge in front of Sharpe and spew up a shower of wet earth. Doggett’s horse jerked its face away from the spattering mud.
“He killed them,” Doggett said in pathetic explanation.
“He killed who?” Harper asked.
“The KGL. There were two battalions, all that was left of a brigade, and he put them in line and sent them to where the cavalry were waiting.”
“Again?” Sharpe sounded incredulous.
“They died, sir.” Doggett could not forget the sight of the swords and sabres rising and falling. He had watched one German running from the slaughter; the man had already lost his right arm to a sabre’s slice, yet it had seemed that the man would still escape, but a Cuirassier had spurred after him and chopped down with his heavy blade and Doggett could have sworn that the dying man threw one hateful look up the slope to where his real killer was. “I’m sorry, sir. There’s no point in telling you. I tried to stop him, but he told me to go away.”
Sharpe did not respond, except to unsling his rifle and probe a finger into its pan to discover whether the weapon was still primed.
Doggett wanted Sharpe to share his anger at the Prince’s callous behaviour. “Sir!” he pleaded. Then, when there was still no reply, he spoke more self-pityingly. “I’ve ruined my career, haven’t I?”
Sharpe looked up at the young man. “At least we can mend that, Doggett. Just wait here.”
Sharpe, without another word, began walking towards the centre of the British line while Harper took Doggett’s bridle and turned his horse away from the valley. “There are still a few skirmishers who wouldn’t mind making you into a notch on their muskets,” the Irishman explained to Doggett. “Did you really call the skinny bastard a silk stocking filled with shit?”
“Yes.” Doggett was watching Sharpe walk away.
“To his face?” Harper insisted.
“Indeed, yes.”
“You’re a grand man, Mr Doggett! I’m proud of you.” Harper released Doggett’s horse a few paces behind the colour party of the Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers. “Now just wait here, sir. The Colonel and I won’t be long.”
“Where are you going?” Doggett shouted after the Irishman.
“Not far!” Harper called back, then he followed Sharpe into a drifting bank of powder smoke and disappeared.
Sharpe was half-way to the elm tree when Harper caught him. “What are you doing?” the Irishman asked.
“I’m sick of the royal bastard. How many more men will he kill?”
“So what are you doing?” Harper insisted.