and so they ran to the forest and there, safe under its trees, waited for a French victory to restore Belgium to its proper throne.
The French drummers beat the pas de charge as the columns unfolded into the heavy musket line that would blast the ridge’s crest with fire.
“Stand up!” The order was British.
All along the ridge, like men springing full armed from the concealing earth, the redcoats stood. One moment the ridge had appeared empty, and the next it was crowned with a line of muskets.
“Present!”
The French, so very close to the ridge top, had stopped for a heartbeat as their enemy had appeared so suddenly from the earth, but the French officers, seeing how hugely they outnumbered the Goddamns, screamed at the men to advance.
“Fire!”
The first British volley crashed down the gentle slope. It was fired at just sixty paces and it slammed into the unfolding columns to crumple the front ranks back like lead soldiers swept down by a petulant child.
“Reload!”
Men bit bullets from the tip of waxed paper cartridges, poured the powder into their musket barrels, wadded the powder with the cartridge paper, spat the bullets after, then rammed down hard with their ramrods. “Fire by platoons!” a Major ordered. “Grenadier Company! Fire!”
The rolling volleys began, rippling along the hilltop in flame and smoke. The French fired back. Sir Thomas Picton roared an order and died as a bullet pierced his top hat and crashed into his skull. Highlanders and Irishmen and men from the shires bit the cartridges till their lips were black and their tongues sour with the salty taste of the gunpowder. They fired, scorching their cheeks with the flaming scraps spat from the musket locks.
“Close up! Close up!” The Sergeants dragged the dead and wounded back from the line, letting the men close in where the French bullets had struck.
A cannon fired, its canister splitting in bloody ruin among the deploying French, yet still the French came, more ranks advancing from the mist of smoke to thicken their bleeding dying line.
Redcoats scrabbled at their flints, tearing their fingernails as they cocked their weapons. The muskets kicked like mules. The French were still spreading into line, still advancing, and the drums were still driving them on. A French galloper gun opened fire, splaying a redcoat colour party into ruin. The French musket volleys were slow, but the Crapauds outnumbered the Goddamns and were clawing their bloody way towards the ridge’s crest and victory.
And then a trumpet called.
Lord John Rossendale, riding close to the Earl of Uxbridge, had watched the advance of the columns in sheer disbelief. He had heard of such attacks, and he had listened to men describe a French column, yet nothing had prepared Lord John for the way such an attack filled a landscape, or how its music made the skin crawl and stretched the nerves, or how irresistible such an assault seemed; as though each column was not made up of individual men, but instead was some ponderously articulated beast that crawled out of nightmare to ooze across the earth.
Yet, even as the columns filled him with dread, he marvelled at the calm of the men with whom he rode. The calmness, Lord John observed, came from the Duke, to whom men were irresistibly attracted as though his confidence would somehow communicate by proximity. The Duke watched the approaching columns with a keen eye, but still had time to laugh at some jest made by Alava, the Spanish commissioner. The only time Rossendale saw the Duke frown was when a brief shower of rain, gone almost as soon as it arrived, made him shake out his cloak and drape it round his shoulders. “I cannot bear a drenching, nor will I abide umbrellas,” he spoke to Alava in French.
“You could have a canopy held by four stout men?” Alava, an old and valued friend from the Duke’s Spanish battles, suggested. “Like some Mohammetan potentate?”
The Duke gave his odd horse-neigh of a laugh. “That would serve very well! I like that notion! A Mohammetan canopy, eh?”
“And a harem, why not?”
“Why not, indeed?” The Duke gently drummed his fingers on the small writing desk that was built onto the pommel of his saddle. To Lord John the gesture did not seem to be a nervous reaction, but rather to express the Duke’s impatience at the lumbering French columns. By now the enemy skirmishers were close enough to annoy the Duke’s party. Their bullets whiplashed and hummed about the horsemen. Two of the Duke’s aides were hit; one fatally just two paces to the Duke’s left. The Duke gave the dead man a glance, then frowned towards the French galloper guns. “They’ll never do a damn thing with those light cannon,” he complained, as though his enemy’s inefficiency offended him, then, switching into French, he asked Alava whether he did not agree that the French were deploying more skirmishers than usual.
“Definitely more,” Alava confirmed, but with no more excitement in his voice than if he was sharing a day’s rough shooting with the Duke.
The Dutch-Belgians ran, which caused a compression of the Duke’s lips, but then, knowing what could and could not be mended, he simply ordered a British battalion into the gap. He rode further to his left, cantering his horse behind the waiting redcoats. The Earl of Uxbridge and his staff followed. The Duke frowned again as the French columns began to unfold into line, but the unexpected manoeuvre did not seem to rattle him. “Now’s your time!” the Duke called to the nearest redcoat battalion.
The redcoats stood and the volleys began. Lord John, trailing with his master behind the Duke, saw how the French attempt to form line was never completed because of the destructive British fire. The French flanks would not wheel up the slope into the face of the musket volleys, so instead the whole enemy mass edged uphill in neither line nor column, but in a half-way formation instead. To Lord John’s untutored eye, and despite the momentary French confusion, it still looked like a frighteningly unequal battle; a mass of Frenchmen poised just beneath the thin and fragile line of redcoats. The mass was also still advancing. Its leading ranks were being bled and beaten by the flail of the British volleys, but still the French pressed uphill, stepping over their dead, and shouting their war cry. Worse, the Cuirassiers who had just destroyed the Red Germans now rode west of the high road to escape the cannon-fire and threatened to attack the thin British line.,
The Duke had seen it all, and understood it all. He turned to Uxbridge. “Your Heavies are ready, Uxbridge?”
“Indeed they are, Your Grace!”
It took Lord John a moment to understand the elegance of the Duke’s solution. The French were poised on the brink of a shattering success. Their columns were inching uphill, and in a moment they would be reinforced by the heavy cavalry that would fall on the redcoat flank like a torrent of steel. The Duke’s line would be shattered, the French infantry would pour through, then more cavalry would stream across the valley to finish the rout.
Except that the Duke’s counter-stroke was ready. Horse would oppose horse and the British heavy cavalry would be unleashed on the Emperor’s gros freres. The King’s Own Household troops: the Life Guards and King’s Dragoon Guards and Blues, together with the Union Brigade of the Royals, the Scots Greys and the Inniskilling Horse would save the army.
Lord John turned his own horse, drew his borrowed sword, and raced after the Earl of Uxbridge. “Harry.” You must let me come!“ This was the chance Lord John had prayed and waited for. He saw other staff officers, Christopher Manvell among them, hurrying to join their regiments. ”For God’s sake, Harry, let me fight!“ Lord John pleaded again.
“You can fight, Johnny! The more the merrier! We’ll take their horse, then break their infantry!”
The cream of the British cavalry would go to shatter the French attack. Lord John, his borrowed sword bright in his hand, rode to find his honour again. In battle.
CHAPTER 16
Almost two and a half thousand horsemen assembled just behind the ridge’s flat crest. Men pulled on gleaming helmets that were topped with long horsehair plumes. The Scots on their huge white horses wore
