The sharp edge of the blade caught the Russian square across his face, and the steel bit cruelly into flesh and bone, obliterating the man’s nose and crushing his cheek bones. He fired his musket just as the sabre slash struck him, but the shock of the icy steel paring his flesh was enough to cause his shot to miss both William and River King, and as horse and rider galloped onwards the man fell backwards into the swampy mess of mud and sod, dropping his musket while screaming and clawing at his ruined mess of a face.
‘William! Will!’
William wheeled about at the sound of a familiar voice bellowing out his name through the waterfall-roar of battle noise and saw Michael charging through the fray towards him. His friend’s eyes were wild with the same battle-madness of which William was possessed, and his sabre blade was slick with the crimson of freshly spilled blood.
‘Mikey! By God, it’s you!’
Alongside Michael was a lieutenant of the 17th, a round-faced fellow in his late thirties named Peterson, who was whirling his sabre around his head and rallying the scattered and disarrayed British lancers to him.
‘To the centre-left, boys, to the centre-left!’ he cried in a hoarse shout. ‘There lies the enemy! We’ve broken through the whole Russian artillery, now let’s give their cavalry what for! Show the buggers what for, I say! Charge them! Charge them and break them! Break them! DEATH OR GLORY! DEATH! OR! GLORY!’
William steered River King to the left to join the pack of charging lancers, and through the billowing clouds of gunpowder smoke and mist he saw a sight that chilled him to the very marrow of his bones, while simultaneously stoking the fire of battle-fury with fresh gasoline: a line, as far as he could see, of Russian cavalry. The mass of enemy horsemen a made up a vast hedge that bristled with the cruel steel of hundreds of lances and sabres.
There was nothing to be done now but to charge along with the others, so charge he did, joining the thin stream of blue as it tumbled along its corpse-strewn course to crash into the full menace and might of the grey ocean of Russian cavalry ahead.
47
WILLIAM
Across the valley floor the lancers thundered, steaming with single-minded intent towards the mass of Russian cavalry, that vast grey and brown forest with its thorns of gleaming steel. Boosts of electrifying adrenalin and the red mist of battle-wrath continued to drive William on, pumping an almost superhuman strength into his limbs while giving him a razor-honed focus and numbing the pain of the wounds he had received.
As he galloped along with his fellow lancers, who were forming into an arrow-shaped wedge to smash into the waiting Russian cavalry, William noticed a corpse sprawled on the ground up ahead with an intact lance embedded vertically in it, so he sheathed his sword and plucked the lance out of the corpse as he sped past it. As soon as he gripped the bamboo of the lance haft in his blood-sticky fingers, a swell of new courage surged through him, due to the reach advantage that the lance offered over his sabre.
At the head of the wedge of lancers, Lieutenant Peterson held his sabre high above his head and cried out, his voice soaring above the noise of the stampede of hooves and the barrage of gunfire, ‘DEATH OR GLORY! DEATH! OR—’
It was at that exact moment that a rippling volley of shots rang out from the massed Russian cavalry. As the muzzle flares cracked their violence and lit up the expanse of the grey wall with a brief ripple of candescent fire, a handful of lancers cried out and toppled from their saddles, while many horses crashed to the ground as well, throwing their riders. Two shots struck the leader of the arrow-wedge, Lieutenant Peterson; one hit his horse in the head, right between the poor beast’s eyes, and one smashed through his own cranium. As the musket ball travelled onward it blew open a gruesome cavity in the back of his skull, from which blood, brains and splintered bone erupted.
The momentum of the horse and rider could not be stopped though, and they carried their combined mass of dying flesh like a half-ton cannonball into the midst of the Russians. This smashed open an unobstructed passage into the thick of the enemy position, and it was into this opportunistically hewn portal that the wedge of lancers poured, the British troops roaring and howling like rabid berserkers.
As soon as the lancers infiltrated their ranks, the Russians were thrown into a chaos of confusion and disarray: half of them began to attack the invading snake of British lancers, while the other half – consisting mostly of raw recruits and conscripted peasants who had no desire to fight whatsoever – turned tail and fled as fast as they could from the battle-crazed Britons.
As William saw the tip of the wedge cannoning into the Russian forces ahead, his vision again blurred at the edges while becoming crisp and magnified at the centre. He was positioned on the outermost edge of the formation, and his tunnel vision zoomed its focus onto a specific Russian cavalryman, who looked to be an officer. The officer’s detachment appeared to consist mostly of ill-disciplined conscripts who were jostling in a chaotic mass of screaming and colliding horses and flailing bodies, all entangled in a storm of writhing and shoving flesh and steel.
The officer, a tall and burly fellow mounted on a jet-black charger, was bellowing in a brassy voice and beating the fleeing conscripts about their heads and backs with the flat of his sabre, trying in his red-faced wrath to turn them around to fight the dam-break influx of blue-clad lancers. William steered River King in a sudden manoeuvre to the right, levelling his lance and tucking his body in low as he prepared for impact.
The Russian
