The battle in the woods came closer. Men were spilling back out from the plantation, scattering towards the gates into the farm complex, or around it entirely, hurrying back towards the main lines. It went on and on.
“Oh fuck,” Jamie murmured over and over. “Oh, fuck.”
“Shut up,” Quire said eventually, softly, “or I’ll fuck you myself.”
And then it was the French, streaming out from under the trees in their dark jackets, shouting, running across the narrow stretch of open ground beneath the walls. The Foot Guards spat fire and musket balls at them, flames and smoke churning along the top of the wall as volley after volley went out, laying down men like so many windblown trees. Quire fired once, twice, thrice. Jamie never rose from his crouch. The wave of the attack broke on those rocks of lead and fire.
A pause. A space between furies. Men laughed. A few dared to imagine they had already faced the worst, and would be spared now. Somewhere, someone was crying, but Quire did not look to see who it was, or why. You did not seek out such sights.
From that moment, that quiet interlude, the day raced down into the darkness. Across a great stretch of land eastward from Hougoumont, titanic battle ranged. Armies tore at one another, charged and counter-charged. War swallowed up that one piece of the world and carried it off, for a span of time, to its own place where all else was in abeyance and nothing of any consequence existed save the clash of wills and of bodies and of flesh and steel.
At Hougoumont, the French came, again and again. They flooded up to the walls and the gates, lapping at them, clawing at them. Quire fell into the calm emptiness of battle. The inner silence in which thought gave way to ritual. Fire, reload, fire. Over and over, over and over. Breathing always the smoke and grit and dust.
Musket balls and splinters of stone blasted off the wall, filling the air like hornets. Ducking down, reloading, Quire listened to them chattering above his head. Many of the others were firing blind, raising only their guns above their protective bulwark and loosing off shots wildly. That served little purpose. It needed a man to lift his head up there, into the place where the shot was whining and the stone chips flying and the smoke boiling. Some would not do it, and Quire did not begrudge them that.
He did not begrudge Jamie Boswell his fearful paralysis, either. The youth stayed hunkered down, murmuring to himself, wincing now and again. He could never have seen anything like this before, and it seemed only sense to Quire that a man caught up for the first time in such a tempest should choose not to die on behalf of distant folk in their parliaments and palaces.
Not all those present agreed, though. Sergeant Walker was striding along the line of the wall, all bile and bellows. He was a bastard of a man, in Quire’s judgement, but then he had come to feel that way about almost all save the common mass of the soldiery.
“Get up, that man,” Walker howled at Jamie as he went by. “Piss yourself later, boy. King doesn’t pay you to hide.”
“Oh, Christ,” muttered Jamie, and started to rise, but Quire laid a hand on his arm and pushed him down.
Walker had passed on, turning his vitriol upon some other victim.
“You stay put, if that’s what you fancy,” Quire told Jamie. “Sergeant doesn’t get to decide whether the King pays you enough to die for him. You do that for yourself, lad.”
He surged up, got an elbow set on the parapet. He was looking out over a great mass of men, pressed up right to the base of the wall. Hundreds of them, all pushing forwards; some climbing already on the backs of their comrades, or hoisted up by the strength of their arms, scrabbling for handholds to haul themselves over into the gardens.
Quire took measured aim at the nearest of them and fired. Scraps of the man’s uniform were blown off his shoulder and he fell back amongst the throng. Quire spun his musket about in his hands and used the butt to batter at another Frenchman as he tried to get astride the wall.
It was instants from then: snatched moments of consciousness, of awareness, pulled from the frenzy of carnage; offered to Quire as all that would be left of the long, bloody day by way of memory. The few minutes of ethereal quiet that came upon them now and again, unexpectedly. Wilson Dunbar running along the line of defenders, a heavy bucket full of paper cartridges packed with ball and powder in each hand, shouting: “Get your cartridges while you can, boys! Plenty for all!”
And Jamie twisting and shouting at the stocky little soldier’s disappearing back: “Impervious Dunbar! Stay here, stay with us. Give us a bit of your luck.”
The French coming again, more fiercely than ever. Sounds of chaos rising up from the farm buildings, so that everyone thought for a time they were fallen. But no; the struggle there receded, that around the gardens thickened. Quire stabbing a man in the face with his bayonet.
The gardens themselves, ruined, churned to bare earth and debris. The little low hedges, cut in straight lines, trampled by the soldiers running back and forth. The wounded lying there, on what had been flower beds, crying or wailing or dying silently while they waited for someone to take them to the barn where the surgeons were.
Sergeant Walker returning, standing there and screaming at Jamie Boswell, stabbing a rigid, accusing finger at him.
“You will get on your feet, boy, and kill some fucking Frenchmen, or I’ll see you flogged. You mark my words, I will.”
Quire would have turned about and told Walker where to go, but a Frenchman had reached up and had hold of the barrel of his musket, trying to pull it out of his grasp. Quire struggled to twist it into line with the man’s chest.
Jamie Boswell rose at his side, then, and clumsily thrust his own gun over the top of the wall. He fired, punching a ball harmlessly into the earth at the foot of the wall. The surprise and noise of it was enough to loosen the Frenchman’s grip on Quire’s musket. He pulled it free, and shot the retreating figure in the back.
“Reload,” he shouted at Jamie.
Then half of Jamie’s head was suddenly gone, flicked away like a leaf in the wind, leaving Quire a glimpse of bone and brain. Gore splattered his face. Jamie fell in the heavy, limp way a dead man did. For a moment Quire could taste him on his lips, but he wiped his mouth and his eyes clean. He stared down at the young man’s ruined visage. And vomited, heaving up a thin gruel. Something he had never done before, even when faced with worse horrors.
The insistent rhythm of the slaughter carried him numbly on. Scores of corpses piled up outside the walls, flotsam strewn along a shore after a storm. Quire drifted through it now, his mind detached from his body, which mechanically followed the habits the years had taught it. He saw both the seething mass of the French advancing once more, in futile, dogged determination, and Sergeant Walker, retracing his steps, his ire cutting through the raging cacophony.
Quire lifted his musket and set it to his shoulder, and was distantly surprised to find himself hesitating, the barrel of the gun turning away from the disordered ranks of the host assailing Hougoumont, turning towards Walker. He was puzzled by that, and wondered what he meant to do.
A ball hit his musket, close by his face, blowing it apart in his hands. He felt a punch in his left arm as the ricochet went in. A spray of hot powder, wood splinters, across his face like stinging sparks.
Quire staggered back off the firing platform, falling on the lawn. He got to his feet, grasped at the men closest to him, going from one to the next, shouting, “I need a gun, I need a gun.”
They all pushed him away, caught up in their own struggles, their own dance with death, until one looked down at him and grimaced.
“Good Christ, Quire, your arm. Look at your arm!”
Quire looked, and saw the way it was limply trembling, the blood all over the sleeve of his red tunic.
“Get to the barn, Quire. Get that seen to.”
The barn: an island of suffering, yet more peaceful than the storm raging outside its thick walls. The injured lying all about on pallets. The few men there to attend upon them running from one to another, fraught exhaustion and strain engraved upon their faces, the blood of others staining their shirts. Quire fell back on to a straw-leaking mattress, and stared up into the roof beams, listening to the thunder that came deep and low through the stone.
And last, later and last amongst all the frail memories left to him of that day: Quire came to his senses, not knowing for how long he had drifted. He woke to fire. Fire in the roof of the barn, racing along the struts, dropping
