The lieutenant was within touching distance of the bricks and timber piled up behind the gate. His comrades had surrounded him and were taking the Guards’ musket fire themselves. They were brave men, intent upon their purpose, and they had very nearly achieved it.
The Guards who had followed Macdonell into the south yard had had time to reload their muskets. On his order, they raised them and sent twenty bullets into French faces. They fell, all of them but the giant lieutenant, who had put down his axe to lift a length of timber from the barricade. He turned to face them, threw the timber to one side and defiantly picked up another. Macdonell charged at him, shoulder down, and knocked the timber from his grasp. The giant reached out for his attacker’s throat. Macdonell ducked down to pick up the axe, slashed at his knees and rose to bury it in his chest. Astonishingly, the man did not fall. His huge hands were on the axe handle when a musket fired. A hole appeared over his eye and he collapsed face down into the mud.
Macdonell stood for a moment to regain his breath. Harry put a hand on his arm. ‘Was that wise, James?’ he asked quietly. ‘We could have shot him.’
‘It was necessary, Harry. Some things just are.’ He filled his lungs and shouted over the cannon fire. ‘Clear the dead, wounded to the barn. Check muskets and flints.’
‘And what shall I do with this, Colonel?’ asked a voice behind him.
He turned. Sergeant Dawson was holding a boy of about twelve by the collar of his tunic. He was a drummer boy, the boy who had slipped in while the north gates were closing.
‘Tu es très brave, mon garçon,’ said Macdonell. ‘Mais pourquoi?’
The boy pointed to a dead Frenchman. ‘Mon père,’ he replied.
Macdonell nodded. ‘Ton père était brave aussi.’ And to Dawson, ‘Put him in the barn. Ask the orderlies to keep an eye on him.’
Dawson glanced at Macdonell’s sleeve. ‘Perhaps you should visit the barn yourself, Colonel.’
Macdonell looked down. His left sleeve was ripped and dripping blood. The sting he had felt must have been from a musket ball. He pulled back the sleeve. It was no more than a graze. ‘If you would fetch me a bandage, Sergeant, I will not trouble the surgeon.’
‘Very well, Colonel,’ replied Dawson doubtfully. When it came to surgeons, the colonel apparently did not care to take his own advice. ‘Come on now, boy, let’s get you out of the way.’ The boy, who was unlikely to speak a word of English, took the sergeant’s meaning and went off with him.
‘How are we faring, Harry?’ asked Macdonell. ‘Casualties? Have you counted?’
Harry nodded. ‘I have. Seventeen dead, two officers wounded. Colonel Dashwood’s shoulder is broken. And you, of course.’
‘A scratch. Get Colonel Dashwood to the chateau. He can wait there for the surgeon. And other casualties?’
‘About forty, half serious. The rest can hold a musket and near enough see a target.’
‘Perhaps Prince Jérôme will give us time to lick our wounds and prepare for his next visit. Have we enough water?’
‘No. The well is all but empty. There’s gin, but it scorches like fire down a raw throat.’
‘Then let us hope General Cooke takes pity on us and sends down a supply wagon loaded with water and bullets and powder. If he can, that is. Are the frogs in the sunken lane yet?’
‘I don’t know. They might be.’
The sound of the howitzer was unmistakeable. Instinctively, they both looked up. A shell passed over the trees and landed in the orchard. It had come not from the slope behind them but from the woods. Far from allowing them a rest, the Prince had called up his own howitzer battery.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
When their sighting shots had given their teams the range, the deadly howitzers began their bombardment on the orchard. Saltoun’s tired and miserable troops could do little but seek meagre shelter from the shards of burning metal exploding over their heads. If they ran for the garden, the French would be into the orchard instantly, so they crouched behind apple trees and in the hedge, while the shells rained down like lethal hailstones, killing and wounding and maiming. Macdonell saw ten men carried to the barn, most with terrible wounds to the head, and ten more killed instantly. The awful howitzers were doing their duty and he expected them at any moment to turn their attention to the farm. Yet they did not. It soon became clear why.
From around the woods to the south galloped a company of Dragoons and, at the same time, several companies of infantry emerged from the trees beyond the gate, outside which scores of French bodies had lain since their last attack. Prince Jérôme, it seemed, had decided that the defenders’ strength was sufficiently depleted and their ammunition low enough for another attempt to be made.
He was right. Saltoun’s troops were pinned down in the orchard, Wyndham’s were defending the garden and the barn was filling up with the wounded. The farm was under threat at both north and south gates and ammunition supplies were already dangerously low. Only the chateau itself was secure. At least until the French turned their heavy cannon on to it. Then its ancient walls would surely crumble and fall.
Macdonell ran to the garden, climbed on a wooden crate and peered over the south wall. The Dragoons had formed in line facing the wall, ready to charge the moment they saw a breach. The infantry were gathering behind them and on the edge of the trees beyond the gate. Drums sounded the advance, orders were shouted, and muskets raised. Under cover of their fire, French light troops dashed to the south walls of the garden and farm. Through loopholes and windows, the guards fired back, picking their targets and killing them with ease. So many fell that their bodies filled the clearing and obstructed the advance of those behind.
Yet they kept coming. For every man who died, two more ran out of the woods. They grabbed the burning hot barrels of muskets sticking out of loopholes, fired through the gaps and, still without ladders, climbed on each other’s backs to reach the top of the garden walls. In the clearing a mounted French colonel, impervious to the Guards’ fire, exhorted his troops forward. When his horse was shot from under him he walked briskly back to the trees and returned on another one.
By sheer force of numbers, the French would breach the walls and take Hougoumont. Jérôme’s divisions would sweep through and around the farm and up the slope to attack the Allied army’s right wing. At the same time, his brother, the great Buonaparte, would continue to blast the Allied centre and left wing with his heavy cannon before unleashing his fearsome cavalry. If Wellington’s right wing was exposed, Buonaparte’s army of tough professional soldiers would destroy the Allied ragbag of Dutch militia, Belgians, Germans and raw British recruits without pausing to draw breath. It would be slaughter. Buonaparte clearly thought so too. He would take Hougoumont whatever the cost.
A French face appeared over the wall. Macdonell smashed the hilt of his sword into it and heard bones snap. All along the wall and at every window, individual battles of life and death were being fought. An attacker fired at a defender’s head and saw him fall. A defender thrust his bayonet into an attacker’s stomach and heard the life sucked out of him. The attackers, exposed to fire from every vantage point behind the walls, were taking enormous losses. Their dead piled up like sacks of grain, their wounded — those who could — limped and crawled back to the woods, pursued by fire from the chateau and the tower. As many as ten Frenchmen were dying for each Guard. But on they came, more and more of them, heedless of the unceasing fire, climbing over their bloody dead, most not even reaching the walls, those that did dying there.