there to obliterate its oldest enemy.
The enemy’s drums and bands faded as a cheer billowed from the line’s centre. A small man on a grey horse had appeared. He wore the undress uniform of a colonel of the Imperial Guard’s chasseurs a cheval; a green coat faced with red over a white waistcoat and white breeches. The man wore a grey overcoat loose on his shoulders like a cloak. His bicorne hat had ho cockades. His Imperial Majesty, the Emperor of France, galloped along the face of his army and was greeted by the cheers of men who knew they were on the brink of victory.
The Duke of Wellington had long turned scornfully away from the display. “Tell the men to lie down.”
The British and Dutch obeyed. Men lying flat in the long grass of the ridge’s plateau could not see the overwhelming enemy, nor were they visible to the enemy’s gunners.
The Duke rode along the right of his line. He did not gallop like his opponent, but trotted sedately. No one cheered the Duke. His gunners, posted on the ridge’s crest, watched the Emperor. One gunner captain, his weapon loaded, squinted along its crude sights then called out to the Duke that in a moment the Emperor would gallop directly into the gun’s line. “Permission to fire, Your Grace?”
“It is not the business of army commanders to fire on each other. Save your ammunition.” The Duke rode on, not even deigning to look towards his opponent.
The Duke and his entourage passed near Sharpe, then angled towards the troops who guarded the open flank beyond Hougou-mont. The closest battalion was Dutch-Belgian and the troops, seeing the knot of horsemen come down from the ridge, opened fire. The musket bullets fluttered near the Duke, but did not hit any of his party. The Duke swerved away as the Dutch officers shouted at their men to cease their fire. The Duke, grim- faced, rode back towards the elm tree that would be his command post.
A shower of rain briefly obscured the valley as the French redeployed themselves for battle. The great display was evidently over for most of the enemy troops now retreated from the ridge’s crest. The French gunners could be seen charging their barrels with powder and shot.
“What’s the time?” Sharpe asked a nearby gunner officer who commanded a battery of howitzers.
“Just on half-past eleven.”
If the Prussians came at one in the afternoon? Sharpe tried to guess how long the British could sustain their defence against the onslaught of the huge force he had just watched parade. One and a half hours? It seemed unlikely.
The French, perhaps certain that they had plenty of time in which to do their work, were in no hurry to begin. More guns were manhandled into their battle line, yet none opened fire. Sharpe gazed eastwards to see if any Prussian cavalry scouts had yet appeared beyond the valley’s edge, but nothing moved there. He wished he had a watch so he could see the progress of the minutes that must be bringing the Prussians closer. “The time?” he apologetically asked the gunner officer again.
The gunner obligingly clicked open the lid of his watch. “A quarter of twelve.”
Behind the howitzers the nearest British redcoats sat or lay on the wet turf. Some smoked their clay pipes. Their canteens were filled with rum or gin, and their pouches with dry cartridges. The wind was dying. The clouds still stretched across the sky, but they must have been thinning for Sharpe saw yet more gauzy floods of sunlight patching the distant fields with gold. The day was warming, though Sharpe’s clothes were still clammy and uncomfortable. The minutes passed. The gunner officer fidgeted with his watch, obsessively opening and closing the silver lid. No one spoke. It was almost as if the whole army held its breath. Patrick Harper was watching a pair of skylarks who tumbled in the lower veil of clouds.
Then a French gun fired.
The barrel of the gun was cold, so the shot did not carry the full distance to the British ridge. Instead the roundshot slammed into the valley, scattering rye, then bounced in a flurry of wet soil to bury itself just below the elm tree. The smoke of the gun drifted grey along the French ridge.
A second gun fired. Its roundshot similarly bounded harmlessly through the empty fields. The Duke opened his watch lid to see the time.
There was a pause equal to that which had separated the first two shots, then a third French gun fired. Its ball screamed towards the exposed Dutch-Belgian troops beyond the sandpit, but fell short and ploughed into a patch of soft ground that stopped the missile dead.
The three shots were the Emperor’s signal.
To let loose hell.
CHAPTER 14
The Earl of Uxbridge, quite ready for the moment, had arranged for his servant to bring a tray of silver stirrup cups filled with sherry. As the first gun fired the Earl waved the servant forward and watched as the small cups were handed about to his staff.
The Earl waited for the second gun to fire, then, as though these horsemen were about to ride to hounds, he gravely raised his stirrup cup. “Today’s fox, gentlemen. Allow me to give you today’s fox.”
The horsemen drank. Lord John Rossendale had to curb the temptation to gulp the sherry down.
The third gun fired. The fox had broken cover, was running, and the blooding could begin.
Every gun on the French ridge opened fire.
The salvo showed as a volcanic eruption of smoke that blurred the far crest with yellow-grey smoke. In the heart of the smoke were the stabbing flames.
Two heartbeats later the sound slammed across the valley; a thunderclap to tell Europe that the Emperor was at war.
The majority of the guns had been loaded with shell. The cold barrels dropped the missiles fractionally short and most plunged harmlessly into mud that either extinguished the burning fuse or soaked up the force of the explosion. A few, very few, ricocheted on the ridge’s forward slope to land a second time among the battalions sheltering beyond the crest. The explosions punched ragged blots of dark smoke and livid flame into the damp air.
The first men were dying, but not many, for a shell had to explode in the very heart of a company if it was to kill. Some shells were defused by quick-witted men who either pinched out the fire or knocked the smouldering fuse clean from the powder charge with a swift blow of a musket butt. The smoke from the French guns rolled down into the valley, then began to be fed as the guns which had reloaded the quickest fired again. The firing became ragged, but constant; jet after jet of smoke and flame pumped from the French-held ridge. The shots screamed higher as the gun barrels warmed. Some shells skimmed across the ridge top to explode far back at the forest’s edge while the best aimed shots bounced just below the British crest to plunge down among the men hidden behind. The shells made differing sounds, depending on their distance from the ear. Some hummed like childrens’ tops, some whirred like a bird’s wingbeat, while others rumbled like thunder. The sounds were already causing a trickle of Belgian troops to retreat towards the forest; one wounded man was an excuse for ten others to help him to safety.
One shell exploded close to the Earl of Uxbridge’s staff who, still bunched together after their toast to the day’s fox, split asunder like sheep attacked by a wolf. A small silver cup fell into the mud, but otherwise there was no damage other than to the young men’s dignity. They curbed their excited horses and watched as each new shot roiled and twitched the bank of smoke which thickened in front of the Emperor’s gun line.
On the British right, where the French guns were close to Hougoumont, the gunners were firing canister to scour the British skirmishers from the woods which lay south of the chateau. Some of the musket-balls hummed up onto the ridge where they pattered on the wet ground like hail.
A British nine-pounder fired a return shot, and earned a furious reprimand from a mounted staff officer. “Hold your damned fire! Hold your fire!” The Duke was saving his guns the wear and tear of incessant firing that could blow out touchholes and even split barrels. He would need his guns when the enemy infantry or cavalry advanced.
A shell plunged down to smash an howitzer’s wheel before bouncing up to explode harmlessly behind the ridge. The gunners quickly brought up a spare wheel and repaired the gun. The French began to mix more solid
