“I don’t know who you are, but thank you.”
Sharpe turned to see it was the Coldstream Colonel who had spoken. “Sharpe,” he introduced himself. “The Young Frog’s staff.”
“MacDonnell.” The Colonel was wiping the blood off a very expensive sword blade with an embroidered linen handkerchief. “Will you forgive me?” He ran back towards the house from where the sound of musketry was louder than ever.
Sharpe wiped the mess off his own sword, then looked at Harper whose face was speckled with blood. “I thought you’d promised to stay out of the fighting?”
“I forgot.” Harper grinned, threw down the French musket and retrieved his own weapons. „I’ll say one thing. The Guards may be pretty-boy soldiers, but the buggers can fight when they have to.“
“So can the French.”
“Their tails are up, that’s for sure.” Harper breathed a belated sigh of relief. “And how the hell did the Guards close that gate?”
“God only knows.”
“He must be on our side today.” Harper crossed himself. “God knows, but that was desperate.”
The second French attack on the chateau, so close to success in the courtyard, now rolled with an equal menace around the orchard. The howitzers opened fire from the ridge again, but this time the French attack was on a wider front, and a horde of men broke through the orchard’s hedges and harried the defenders back towards the walled garden. Some of the Guardsmen, too slow to climb the brick wall, were bayoneted at its foot, but then the relentless musketry erupted from the loopholes and from the wall’s coping and the French attack stalled again about the garden’s margin.
More men of the Goldstream Guards advanced down from the ridge. They attacked in column, their muskets armed with bayonets, and they drove up through the orchard’s northern hedge to scour the French away from the garden wall. The woods to the south were still thick with French infantry, but the Guards lined the broken and torn hedge and opened a killing volley fire that blew great holes in the French lines. No troops fired faster than the British, and now, for the first time that day, the French suffered under the flaying volleys of platoon fire. The Guards reloaded with grim speed, propping their ramrods against the hedge before levelling the heavy muskets and blasting at the smoke-obscured enemy. Each platoon fired a second after its neighbour so that the hedge rolled with flames and the woods echoed with volley after volley.
Gradually the French broke away; more and more men fleeing from the remorseless musketry. “Cease fire!” a Guards officer shouted in the orchard. The space in front of the woods was thick with the dead and wounded. The French had been hurling men against stone and flames, and suffering for it, but the Guards could see yet more men being formed in the far woods, presumably for yet another assault.
In the walled garden the only civilian left in Hougoumont was almost in tears. He was the chateau’s gardener and he had been running from bed to bed, trying to save his precious plants from the boots of the Guardsmen. Despite his efforts the garden was a shambles. Espaliered pears had been ripped from the wall and rosebuds had been trampled. The gardener made a pathetically small pile of plants he had somehow rescued, then flinched as he watched a French corpse being dragged by its heels through the remains of an asparagus bed.
The second French assault had failed. Colonel MacDonnell, his face still smeared with blood, found Sharpe in the courtyard when the last musket shot had faded to silence. “You could be useful to me,” he spoke diffidently, not wanting to encroach on another man’s authority.
“I’ll do whatever I can.”
“More ammunition? Can you find a wagon of the stuff and have it sent down?”
“With pleasure.” Sharpe was glad to have a proper job to do.
MacDpnneli looked around the courtyard and grimaced at the remnants of the massacre. “I think we can hold here, so long as we’ve got powder. Oh good! She’s alive.” He had spotted the cat carrying the last of her kittens across the slaughteryard. The captured French drummer boy, his face stained with tears, held one hand over his mouth as he stared wide-eyed at the bodies which were being searched for plunder by the victorious Guardsmen. The boy’s instrument was lying smashed beside the chapel door, though he still had his drumsticks stuffed into his belt. “Cheer up, lad!” MacDonnell spoke to the boy in colloquial and genial French. “We gave up eating captured drummer boys last year.”
The boy burst into tears again. A big Coldstreamer sergeant with a Welsh accent barked at his men to start clearing the enemy bodies away. “Pile the buggers by the wall there. Look lively now!”
Sharpe and Harper retrieved their horses which had miraculously survived the fighting in the courtyard unhurt. The gate was swung open and the Riflemen rode to find the cartridges that would hold the chateau firm.
While on the far ridge the Emperor was turning his eyes away from Hougoumont. He was looking towards the British left, to the enticing and empty gentle slope east of the high road. He assumed that the Sepoy General would already have sent his reserves to help the beleaguered garrison at Hougoumont, so now the master of war would launch a thunderbolt on the British left. Marshal d’Erlon’s corps, unblooded so far in the brief campaign, could now have the honour of winning it. And when the corps had smashed through the British line, the Emperor would unleash his cavalry, fresh and eager, to harry the fleeing enemy into offal.
It was half-past one. The day was becoming warmer, even hot, so that the thick woollen uniforms were at last drying out. The clouds were thinning and errant patches of sun illuminated the smoke which drifted across the valley from the French guns, but in the eastern fields, where the Prussians were supposed to be arriving, the intermittent sunlight shone on nothing. Gneisenau had done his work well, and the British were alone.
CHAPTER 15
The French gun-fire suddenly ceased. The smoke from the hot gun muzzles drifted in dirty skeining clumps above the rye and wheat. Muskets still fired at Hougoumont, and the howitzers crashed their shells over the chateau to explode in the wood beyond, but without the French cannon-fire something that seemed very like silence filled the battlefield with foreboding.
Then a slight wind rippled the crops in the valley and swirled the smoke away from the French crest to reveal that men in blue coats, their white crossbelts bright, were marching down the far slope. The first French infantry were advancing to attack the British ridge. They came in four great columns accompanied by eight- pounder galloper guns drawn by horse teams.
Each column was two hundred men broad; four wide phalanxes that marched stolidly down the slope of the French ridge to leave crushed paths of rye or wheat in their trail. A loose mass of skirmishers ran ahead of each formation. The thousands of trampling boots were given their rhythm by the drummers hidden deep inside each column; the drummer boys were beating the pas de charge, the old heartbeat of the French Empire that had driven the Emperor’s infantry beyond the Vistula and down to the plains beyond Madrid. The massed drums sent a shiver through the valley. The veterans on the British ridge had heard it before, but for most of Wellington’s men it was a new and sinister sound,
The four columns crossed the eastern half of the valley. The column which attacked in the valley’s centre advanced up the high road and threatened to envelop the farm of La Haye Sainte. A watery sun gleamed faintly on the fixed bayonets of the column’s front rank. The Riflemen in the sandpit opposite the farm were dropping the first French skirmishers who had spread out across the rye fields. Behind the skirmishers the boots of the column trampled the crop, then the drummers paused in unison to let the whole column shout its battle cry, “ Vive I’Empereur!“
On the ridge above the farm a British gunner officer gave the elevating screw of his nine-pounder a last half twist. The fabric bag of gunpowder was crushed in the breech by its roundshot. A stiff quill stood proud of the touchhole. The quill, which was filled with a finely mealed gunpowder, had been rammed hard down into the fabric bag so that the fire would flash deep down into the charge. The gun was pointing downhill, so the roundshot had to be restrained from rolling out of the barrel by a grommet wad; a circle of rope that had been rammed hard up against the shot. When the gun was fired the rope would be annihilated in the explosion. The officer, satisfied
