Night was falling across the trampled rye. Nine thousand men had been killed or wounded in the fight for the crossroads, and some of the injured still moaned and cried in the darkness. Some bandsmen still searched for the wounded, but many would have to wait till the next day for rescue.
“Rain tomorrow.” Harper sniffed the air.
“Like as not.”
“It’s good to smell proper food again.” A dog ranged near the fire, but Harper drove it away by shying a clod of earth at it.
Sharpe burned the meat black, then carefully cut it in halves and speared one piece on his knife. “Yours.”
They held their meat on knife points, gnawed it down, and shared a canteen of wine that Harper had taken from a dead French Lancer. In the east the first stars pricked pale against a sky still misted by battle smoke. In the west it was darker, made so by the towering clouds. Men sang behind the crossroads while somewhere in The wood a flautist made a melancholy music. The trees sparkled with camp-fires, while to the south, and reflecting against the spreading clouds, a red glow showed where Marshal Ney’s troops made their bivouacs.
“Crapauds fought well today,” Harper said grudgingly.
Sharpe nodded, then shrugged. “They should have attacked with their infantry, though. They’d have won if they had.”
“I suppose we’ll be at it again tomorrow?”
“Unless the Prussians have beaten Boney and won the war for us.”
Sharpe fetched a flask of calvados from his saddlebag, took a swig and handed it to Harper. The flute music was plangent. He had once wanted to learn the flute, and had thought to make an attempt this last winter, but instead he had spent the evenings making an elaborate cradle from applewood. He had meant to decorate the cradle’s hood with carvings of wild flowers, but he had found their intricate curves too difficult to cut so had settled for the straight stark lines of piled drums and weapons. Lucille had been hugely amused by her baby’s martial cot.
“Shouldn’t you go and see the Prince?” Harper asked.
“Why the hell should I? Bugger the bastard.”
Harper chuckled. He sat with his back propped against his saddle and stared into the dark void where the battle had been fought. “It’s not the same, is it?”
“What isn’t?”
“It’s not like Spain.” He paused, thinking of the men who were not here, then named just one of those men. “Sweet William.”
Sharpe grunted. William Frederickson had once been a friend almost as close as Harper, but Frederickson had tilted a lance at Lucille, and lost, and had never forgiven Sharpe for that loss.
Harper, who disliked that the two officers were not on speaking terms, offered the flask to Sharpe. “We could have done with him here today.”
“That’s true.” Yet Frederickson was in a Canadian garrison, just one of the thousands of veterans who had been dispersed round the globe, which meant that the Emperor must be fought with too many raw battalions who had never stood in the battle line and who froze like rabbits when the cavalry threatened.
Far to the west a sheet of lightning flickered in the sky and thunder grumbled like a far sound of gunnery. “Rain tomorrow,” Harper said again.
Sharpe yawned. Tonight, at least, he was well fed and dry. He suddenly remembered that he was supposed to have been given Lord John’s promissory note, but it had not come. That was a problem best left for the morning, but for now he wrapped himself in the cloak that was Lucille’s gift and within a few minutes he was fast asleep.
And the Emperor’s campaign was forty-one hours old.
CHAPTER 10
More battalions, cavalry squadrons and gun batteries arrived at the crossroads throughout the short night until, at dawn, the Duke’s army was at last almost wholly assembled. In the first sepulchral light the newcomers stared dully at the small shapes which lay in the mist that shrouded the hollows of the battlefield. Bugles roused the bivouacs, while the wounded, left all night in the rye, called pitifully for help. The night sentries were called in and a new picquet line set to face the French camp-fires at Frasnes. The British camp-fires were revived with new kindling and a scattering of gunpowder. Men fished in their ammunition pouches for handfuls of tea leaves that were contributed to the common pots. Officers, socially visiting between the battalions, spread the cheerful news that Marshal Blucher had repulsed Bonaparte’s attack, so now it seemed certain that the French would retreat in the face of a united Prussian-British army.
“We’ll be in France next week!” an infantry captain assured his men.
“Paris by July, lads,” a sergeant forecast. “Just think of all those girls.”
The Duke of Wellington, who had slept in an inn three miles from Quatre Bras, returned to the crossroads at first light. The Highlanders of the gand made him a fire and served him tea. He cupped the tin mug in both hands and stared southwards towards Marshal Ney’s positions, but the French troops were silent and unmoving beneath the heavy cloud cover that had spread from the west during the short hours of darkness. One of the Duke’s stafFofficers, heavily protected by a troop of King’s German Legion cavalry, was sent eastwards to learn the morning’s news from Marshal Blucher.
Officers used French Cuirassiers’ upturned breastplates as shaving bowls; the senior officers having the privilege of the water when it was hot and the Lieutenants and Ensigns being forced to wait till the water was cold and congealed. The infantrymen who had fought the previous day boiled yet more water to clean their fouled musket barrels. Cavalry troopers queued to have their swords or sabres ground to a killing edge on the treadled stones, while the gunners filled the shot-cases of their field carriages with ready ammunition. There was an air of cheerfulness about the crossroads; the feeling that the army had survived an ordeal the previous day, but that now, and thanks largely to the victory of the Prussians, it was on the verge of triumph. The only grumble was that in the desperate hurry to reach Quatre Bras the army had left its commissariat wagons far behind so that most of the battalions started their day hungry.
The battlefield was searched for bodies. The wounded who still lived were taken back to the surgeons, while the dead were collected for burial. Most of the dead officers had been buried the previous night, so now the diggers would look after as many rank and file as they could. Sharpe and Harper, waking in the overcast dawn, found themselves just a few yards away from a work party that was scratching a wide and shallow trench in which the slaughtered men of the 69th would be interred. The waiting bodies lay in such natural poses that they almost seemed to be asleep. Captain Harry Price of the Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers found the two Riflemen drinking their morning tea just as the first corpses were being dragged towards the inadequate grave. “Any tea for a gallant officer?” Price begged.
Harper cheerfully scooped another mug of stewed tea out of the breastplate kettle. The dead, who had been stripped of their uniforms, stank already. It was only an hour after dawn yet the day threatened to be humid and sticky and the grave diggers were sweating as they hacked at the soil. “They’ll have to dig deeper than that,” Harper commented as he handed Price the tin mug.
Price sipped the tea, then grimaced at its sour aftertaste of axle grease. “Do you remember the chaos we made trying to burn those poor buggers at Fuentes de Onoro?”
Sharpe laughed. The ground at Fuentes de Onoro had been too shallow and rocky to make graves, so he had ordered his dead cremated, but even after tearing down a whole wooden barn and lifting the rafters off six small houses to use as fuel, the bodies had refused to burn.
“They were good days,” Price said wistfully. He squinted up at the sky. “It’ll pour with bloody rain soon.” The clouds were low and extraordinarily dark, as though their looming heaviness had trapped the vestiges of night. “A rotten day for a battle,” Price said gloomily.
“Is there going to be a battle?” Harper asked.
“That’s what the Brigade Major told our gallant Colonel.” Price told Sharpe and Harper the dawn news of
