The ever-anxious Ford had been appointed to replace Major Richard Sharpe as commanding officer of the battalion, which of itself was cause for the Colonel to worry, for Joseph Ford was keenly aware that the Rifleman had been a most competent and experienced soldier. Nor did it help Ford that many of his junior officers and a good third of his rankers had seen far more fighting then he had himself. Ford had been appointed to the battalion in the dying weeks of the last war, and he had only experienced a few skirmishes, yet now he must lead the Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers against the Emperor’s field army, a realization that naturally occasioned Ford constant trepidation. “But at least“, he comforted his officers, ”it’s a veteran battalion.“
“It is that, Colonel, it is that.” Major Vine, a small, strutting, dark-eyed, bad-tempered stoat of a man, always agreed with the Colonel when he managed to hear what the Colonel had actually said.
Ford, distrusting such easy agreement, would seek support for his views from the more experienced officers of the battalion, but those officers, such as Peter d’Alembord, doubted whether the Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers could truthfully be called a veteran battalion. A third of its men were new recruits who had seen no fighting, almost another third had seen as little as the Colonel, while only the rest, like d’Alembord, had actually faced a French army in open battle. Still, that experienced third was the battalion’s backbone; the men whose voices would stiffen the ranks and give the Colonel the victory he needed in his opening engagement. And that was all d’Alembord prayed for at this moment, that Ford would learn success fast and thus calm his worried fears.
D’Alembord also prayed for a swift and overwhelming victory for himself. He wanted to return to England where a bride and a house and a secure civilian future waited for him. His bride was called Anne Nickerson, the daughter of an Essex landowner whose reluctant consent to an army marriage had turned to wholehearted approval when Peter d’Alembord had put up his captaincy for sale.
Then, just as d’Alembord was about to sell his commission and retire to one of his prospective father-in- law’s farms, Napoleon had returned to France. Colonel Ford, worried that he was losing his veteran Captain of skirmishers, had begged d’Alembord to stay for the impending campaign and implicit in the Colonel’s plea was a promise that d’Alembord would receive the next vacant majority in the battalion. That enticement was sufficient. The captaincy would sell for fifteen hundred pounds which was a good enough fortune for any young man contemplating marriage, but a majority would fetch two thousand six hundred pounds, and so d’Alembord, with some misgivings, but reassured by the prospects of a fine marriage portion, had agreed to Ford’s request.
Now, ahead of d’Alembord, the gun-fire rumbled like dull thunder to remind him that the two thousand six hundred pounds must be earned the hard way. D’Alembord, contemplating how much happiness he now stood to lose, shivered with a premonition, then told himself that he had always feared the worst before every battle.
Joseph Ford, frightened because he was about to fight his first real battle, worried that either he or his men might not do their duty and, as ever when worry overwhelmed him, he snatched off his spectacles and polished their lenses on his sash. He believed that such a commonplace action expressed a careless insouciance, whereas it really betrayed his fretting nervousness.
Yet, this day as they marched towards the gun-fire, the men of the Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers were oblivious of their Colonel’s fears. They trudged on, breathing the dust of the dry summer road that had been shuffled up by the boots ahead, and they wondered if there would be an issue of rum before the fighting began, or whether they would be too late for the fighting and would instead be billeted in some soft Belgian village where the girls would flirt and the food would be plentiful.
“It’s sounding bad,” Private Charlie Weller spoke of the distant gun-fire, which did not really sound so very awful yet, but Weller was feeling a flicker of nervousness and wanted the relief of conversation.
“We’ve heard worse that that, Charlie,” Daniel Hagman, the oldest man in the light company, said, but he spoke tiredly, dutifully, unthinkingly. Hagman was a kind man, who recognized Charlie Weller’s apprehension, but the day was too hot, the sun too fierce, and the dust too parching for kindness to have much of a chance.
Major Vine curbed his horse to watch the ten companies march past. He snapped at the men to pick up their feet and straighten their shoulders. They took no notice. They did not like Vine, recognizing that the Major despised them as a lumpen, dull ugly mass, but the men themselves knew better; they were Wellington’s infaritry, the finest of the best, and they were marching east and south to where a pall of gun-smoke was forming like a dark cloud over a far crossroads and to where the guns cleared their throats to beckon men to battle.
The French attack began with a cannonade which punched billows of grey-black smoke into the hazing dancing air above the village of Frasnes. The Prince of Orange, unable to resist the lure of danger, galloped from the crossroads to be with those troops closest to the enemy, and the Prince’s staff, their luncheon brutally interrupted by the French gun-fire, hurried after him.
Sharpe was among the staff officers who trotted their horses down the Charleroi road, past the Gemioncourt farm by the ford, and so on up the shallow hill until they reached the infantry brigade which guarded against any frontal attack up the high road.
The French guns were firing at the flanks of the Prince’s position; aiming at the farmhouses to east and west. Nothing seemed to be moving on the road itself, though Sharpe supposed the French must have some skirmishers concealed in the fields of long rye.
“They’ll be coming straight up the middle, won’t they?”
Sharpe turned to see that Harper had joined him. “I thought you were staying well away from any danger?”
“What danger, for God’s sake? No one’s firing at us now.” Harper had rescued the cold carcass of a roast chicken from the Prince’s interrupted lunch, and now tossed Sharpe a leg. “They look bloody strange, don’t they?”
He was referring to the brigade of Dutch-Belgian infantry that was spread in four ranks either side of the road to block a direct attack from Frasnes. The strangeness lay in the metis’ uniforms which were the standard French infantry uniforms. Only the eagle badge on their shakos had been changed, replaced by a ‘W for King William of the Netherlands, but otherwise the Dutch-Belgians were dressed exactly like the men they were doubtless about to fight.
“You know what to do?” the Prince asked the brigade commander in his native French.
“If we can’t hold them, sir, we fall back on Gemioncourt.”
“Exactly!” The farm by the ford was the last bastion before the vital crossroads. Loopholes had already been made in the stone walls of Gemioncourt’s huge barns which, like the buildings of so many of the isolated farms in the low countries, were joined together and protected by a high stone wall, making the whole farm into a massively strong fortress.
“Something’s stirring, eh?” The Prince, reverting to English, was elated by an outburst of musket-fire which sounded from somewhere in front of the Dutch line. The musketry was not the huge eruptions of platoon fire, but rather the smaller sporadic snapping of skirmishers which betrayed that the French Voltigeurs were closing on the Dutch light troops, but both sets of skirmishers were well hidden from the Prince and his staff by the tall crops.
“Funny to hear that sound again, isn’t it?” Harper commented drily.
“Did you miss it?”
“Never thought I would,” the Irishman said sadly, “but I did.”
Sharpe remembered the familiar skill with which he had killed the French Lieutenant in this very rye field. “It’s the thing we’re good at, Patrick. Maybe we’re doomed to be soldiers forever?”
“You maybe, but not me. I’ve a tavern and a horse-thieving trade to keep me busy.” Harper frowned at the Belgians in their French uniforms. “Do you think these buggers will fight?”
“They’d bloody better,” Sharpe said grimly. The brigade, with its supporting artillery, was all that lay between the French and victory. The Dutch-Belgians certainly looked prepared to fight. They had trampled down the rye ahead of their line to make a killing ground some sixty yards deep and, judging by the sound of their musketry, the Dutch-Belgian skirmishers were fighting with a brisk energy.
The two wings of the Dutch-Belgian brigade stretched a half-mile on either side of the highway while, athwart the road itself, was a battery of six Dutch nine-pounder cannons. The gunners had parked their limbers and ammunition wagons in the field behind Sharpe. The guns were loaded, their portfires smoking gently in readiness for the French.
“Four-legged bastards, off to the right,” Harper said warningly, and Sharpe turned to see a troop of enemy cavalry trotting towards the Dutch right flank. The horsemen were green-coated Lancers with high helmets topped with forward sweeping black plumes. They were still a good distance off, at least a half-mile, and were not yet any
