“What someone should have done at his bloody birth. I’m going to strangle the bugger.”
Harper put a hand on Sharpe’s arm. “Listen — „
Sharpe threw the hand off and turned a furious face on his friend. “I’m going, Patrick. Don’t stop me!”
“I don’t give a bugger if you kill him.” Harper was just as angry. “But I’ll be damned if you hang for it.”
“Damn the bloody rope.” Sharpe walked on, carrying his rifle in his right hand.
The ridge’s centre was more thickly smothered with smoke than its flanks. The muzzle blast of the two cannon that the French had placed in La Haye Sainte’s kitchen garden carried almost to the ridge’s summit, and every shot pumped a filthy stinking fog to blanket the slope. The French were firing canister, punching a massive weight of musket-balls into the heart of the British defences. The British gunners, exposed on the skyline as they tried to return the fire, had been killed or wounded, allowing the enemy skirmishers to creep ever closer to the bullet-scarred elm tree from which every leaf and most of the bark had been blasted away.
Those staff officers who still lived, and they were not many, had sensibly retreated from the ravaged tree and now stood their horses well back from the ridge’s summit. Sharpe could not see the Duke, but he found the Prince in his fur-edged uniform. The Prince was two hundred paces off, close to the highway and surrounded by his Dutch staff. It was a long shot for a rifle loaded with common cartridge instead of the extra-fine powder, and it would be a tricky shot because of the men who crowded close to the Prince.
“Not here!” Harper insisted.
A shattered gun limber and two dead horses lay not far away and Sharpe crouched in the wreckage to see whether it gave him the cover he needed.
“You’ll never hit the bastard from this distance,” Harper said. “They don’t call him Slender Billy for nothing.”
“I will if God’s on my side.”
“I wouldn’t rely on God today.” The Irishman stared about the ridge top, seeking an idea, then saw a file of green-jacketed Riflemen running towards the valley. The Prince had spurred his horse to follow the Riflemen, thus taking himself closer to the embattled crest of the ridge.
“Where are those lads going?” Harper asked.
Sharpe saw the Greenjackets, and understood. The Duke must have gathered the remnants of his Riflemen and ordered them to stop the French guns firing from La Haye Sainte. It was a desperate throw, but Riflemen alone might succeed in silencing the murderous guns. Fifty Greenjackets were preparing to charge over the crest, and the Prince, who had never lacked bravery, could not resist going forward to watch their fight.
Sharpe suddenly upped and ran towards the Riflemen who had stopped just short of the crest and now crouched in a group as they fixed their long, brass-handled sword-bayonets onto their rifle muzzles. “You’re not coming,” he shouted at Harper who had begun to follow him.
“And how will you stop me?”
“You bloody deserve to die.” Sharpe dropped at the back of the squad of Riflemen, all of whose faces were blackened by the powder scraps exploded from their rifles’ pans. Their commanding officer was Major Warren Dunnett whose face showed understandable resentment when he recognized Sharpe. “Are you taking over?” he asked stiffly.
“It would be a great honour to serve under your command once again, Dunnett.” Sharpe could be very tactful when he wished.
Dunnett, pleased with the compliment, smiled grimly. “We make‘ this very quick!” he spoke to his fifty men. “Use the blades to clear the slope, then make your shots count! Once you’ve fired, tap reload and hold off the Voltigeurs. You understand?” The men nodded, and Dunnett waited. He waited so long that Sharpe wondered whether Dunnett had lost his nerve, but instead it seemed that there was another identical group of Riflemen who were attacking from the far side of the highway and Dunnett’s men merely waited for their signal so that the two groups crossed the ridge crest at the same moment.
Sharpe looked behind him. The Prince was fifty yards away, but staring over the Riflemens’ heads towards La Haye Sainte. Sharpe, to lessen his chances of being recognized, smeared mud on his scarred face and shoved his tricorne hat into his belt.
From somewhere beyond the high-road a bugle called the familiar running triplets of the order to open fire. “That’s the signal, my boys! Let’s go!” Dunnett had waited six years to avenge himself on the French and now, his sabre drawn, he led the Riflemen over the crest.
The appearance of the Rifles was so sudden that the closest French skirmishers were trapped. The sword-bayonets rammed down, were kicked free, then carried on. Dunnett shouted an incoherent challenge and slashed madly with his sabre, not striking anyone, but hissing the blade so fiercely through the smoky air that the French scrambled to escape such an apparent maniac. The fifty Riflemen on the far side of the road attacked with the same sudden and vicious desperation, driving the panicked Voltigeurs down the long slope. The mad charge stopped a hundred yards short of La Haye Sainte as the Riflemen abandoned the pursuit of the French to take up their firing positions. First, before aiming, they undipped their sword-bayonets so that the heavy blades would not unbalance their rifles.
Each man had loaded carefully. They had cleaned their rifle barrels by the old expedient of pissing down the barrels, sluicing the caked powder deposits loose, then pouring out the fouled liquid. Then, when the barrels had dried, and using the extra-fine powder they carried in their horns, the Riflemen had charged their rifles. They had wrapped their bullets in a scrap of greased leather that not only helped the bullet grip the spiralling lands in the barrel, but, when the weapon was fired, expanded to block any of the exploding gas escaping past the bullet through the barrel’s grooves. It took over a minute to load a rifle so meticulously, but the resultant shot would be as accurate as any weapon in the world.
Now, in the brief space and time they had won, the Riflemen aimed at the gunners who were visible above the hedge of La Haye Sainte’s kitchen garden. The range was a hundred yards; a simple rifle shot, but misted by the drifting smoke. The gunners in the garden were too busy serving their guns to be aware of the threat.
Dunnett did not hurry his men. He must have been tempted to urge them to fire quickly, for the French skirmishers were regrouping at the foot of the slope, but instead he trusted his men and they did not disappoint him.
The first rifles crashed their brass butts into shoulders bruised raw by a day’s fighting. White smoke spurted across the slope. The French skirmishers began firing uphill and two Greenjackets lurched backwards. Other Riflemen still took careful aim. A gunner stared over his rammer at the slope and a bullet took him in his open mouth. A French artillery officer spun backwards, half clambered up, then began crawling under his gun’s trail. More rifles fired. The officer slumped flat. A handful of gunners fled to the farmhouse where they crowded and obstructed each other in the narrow door, and where they were struck by a flail of rifle-fire. Those Greenjackets who had already fired reloaded, not with the fine powder and wrapped bullet, but by tap loading with a normal cartridge. Then they turned their weapons on the skirmishers.
“Withdraw!” Dunnett, the executions neatly carried out, shouted at his men.
“Got the bastard!” Harper shouted.
“Where?”
“Look at the tree, then left thirty yards!“
Sharpe was downhill of Harper. “Kneel down. Aim your rifle at the farm.”
Harper, bemused, obeyed. He braced his left leg forward, knelt on his right knee, and aimed his rifle at the kitchen garden which seemed to be filled with dead artillerymen. The first Riflemen were already running uphill. “Hurry, for Christ’s sake!” Harper muttered.